Jean B. Bell

Jean B. Olney Bell and her identical twin sister, June, were born on January 19, 1929, in Lark, N.D., during a snowstorm. The doctor came to her family’s home on a motorcycle with a sidecar. While giving birth, Jean’s mother had to convince the doctor she felt two heads. He was very surprised to find a second baby! The two were seriously underweight, with Jean weighing in at only 3 ¾ pounds. Indeed, throughout her life, Jean was small in stature but large in spirit and strength.

The twins and their two older brothers grew up during the Great Depression in rural North Dakota. Jean recalled playing with her sister and pretending to be princesses by dressing in old curtains. The twins also cut paper dolls from catalogs and pretended they were teachers, which they later would become.

Jean recalled idyllic parts of her childhood including roaming through pastures and hills with her sister while collecting crocuses for her mother and prairie roses for her father. Sometimes they dared to check out the “hobo camps” down by the river of men made homeless and jobless by the Depression. Those men sometimes chopped wood for her family in exchange for food. Jean survived diphtheria as a child before the vaccine was in widespread use.

Jean and June were inseparable as twins and insisted on being in the same classroom every year in north Valley City, N.D. The two spent hours in the nearby public library, which fostered Jean’s lifelong love of books and reading.

Jean played the violin in junior high and was active in sports during high school. She was serious about her studies and was the salutatorian at her graduation from Valley City High School.

After high school, the family moved across the street from Valley City State Teachers College. She and June enrolled, attended through summers and graduated with a bachelor’s in education after just three years.

The summer following graduation, she met her husband-to-be while visiting her aunt and uncle in Lark, N.D. Their son Norman introduced Jean to his friend Arnold.

Jean and Arnold dated frequently for the next two years and were married in a small ceremony on Sunday, June 18, 1950, at the Congregational Church of Christ in Valley City. The couple drove several hours that night as Arnold had to report for work the next day in Grafton, N.D.

“We drove that night and I always felt that our whole life together was our honeymoon,” Jean wrote.

Their son Bobby was born the following year. Arnold graduated the same year and the family moved to McIntosh, S.D., where Arnold worked in soil conservation. Jean’s first teaching job was at a small country school in Lark, N.D., followed by teaching first and third grades for two years in McIntosh.

The young family moved to Bloomington in the summer of 1954, where Arnold started a new job for the California Citrus Experimental Station in Riverside, which later became part of UC Riverside. Arnold worked for 32 years in the nematology department at UCR. Nematodes or roundworms are parasitic and damage citrus trees.

Jean taught fourth and fifth grades at the Bloomington (later Colton) Unified School District for 32 years and retired in 1986.

In her spare time, Jean was an avid genealogist compiling bookcases full of her family’s ancestry information. A longtime member of the Colonial Dames of America, she traced many of her ancestors to the colonial period before the Revolutionary War.

Every summer, the family typically drove from Southern California to North Dakota to visit their families, sometimes camping along the way. In addition, Jean and Arnold loved to travel and camp in their fifth-wheel trailer.

During the Vietnam War, Bobby joined the Army and became a tank commander, defending the DMZ between North and South Korea. After leaving the service he pursued a variety of jobs but tragically died in a motorcycle accident in 1994 at age 43.

Arnold fell ill during the fall of 1998 and died just two weeks later. Jean moved to the Plymouth Village retirement community in Redlands in 2001. She started a new life there that continued for 23 years until her passing.

While at Plymouth Village, Jean made many friends, including her dear 103-year-old friend and fellow resident Ed Keller. Jean was a regular bridge player and aficionado who read many strategy books on the game.

“What I remember most was how Jean would get a gleam in her eye when excited,” said her niece, Lynn Johnson.

She was a devoted Christian who regularly read her Bible and dozens of books on Christianity.

Jean died at Redlands Community Hospital surrounded by family and following a brief illness.

Jean was preceded in death by her parents Gurina Olson and Jay Harrison Olney; her twin sister, June Sakshaug, in 2023; brothers Ward Vern Olney in 2002 and Roland Darrel Olney in 1994, husband Arnold Bell in 1998, and son Robert (Bobby) Bell in 1994.

She is survived by many loving nieces and nephews. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in memory of Jean Bell, payable to the HumanGood Community Foundation Fund, at 900 Salem Drive, Redlands CA 92373.

Family, friends and others are invited on Monday, June 10, to a visitation at 9:30 a.m., followed by a funeral service at 10:30 a.m. and graveside service at 11:30 a.m., at Green Acres Memorial Park and Mortuary in Bloomington. A memorial service also is scheduled on June 10 at 2:30 p.m. in the Plymouth Room at Plymouth Village Retirement Community.