Jolene Bluejacket Worthington

Memorial services for Jolene Bluejacket Worthington, who for more than 40 years was an influential figure in Chicago’s culinary, pastry and commercial baking worlds, will be held at 3 pm on Wednesday, September 18, 2024 at Drake & Son Funeral Home, 5303 North Western Avenue, Chicago. She died August 9, 2024 after a long struggle with Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy.

Mrs. Worthington was a retired vice president for operations at Eli’s Finest Cheesecakes, a company she joined in 1984 as its first employee when it was a small start-up on Chicago’s Northwest side.

During her years at Eli’s, she concentrated on operations, product development, employee relations, and food sanitation. But she is best remembered for her keen eye in hiring talented, diverse and loyal employees.

Mrs. Worthington also was a contributing Food Section columnist for the Chicago Tribune. She wrote about the growing array of culinary tools and devices available to the adventurous home chef at a time when a wave of culinary awareness and sophistication swept across the nation.

Previous to joining Eli’s, she worked for Time-Life books as a food stylist and culinary consultant for their “Good Cooks” cookbook series. She also was a freelance writer for Cuisine magazine, where she concentrated on writing about pastry. Before coming to Chicago in 1978 she was a pastry chef at Detroit’s Money Tree, a well- known French restaurant there. Subsequently, she attended the Culinary Institute of America, completing a program in French pastry development.

In earlier careers, Mrs. Worthington was the advertising director for The Commons, a Massachussetts- based publication for New England educators. She also sold advertising for the Springfield Area Life & Times, a weekly newspaper in western Massachusetts. Earlier in her working career, she was the manager of Alpha Books, and Omega Books in her home town of Topeka, Kansas.

While living in Mexico City in the early 1970s, she worked as a researcher and interviewer for the Bank of Mexico, which was studying the financial planning and spending habits of English speaking residents and retirees in Mexico City, Guanajuato, and Cuernavaca.

In Chicago, Mrs. Worthington served on the boards of Slow Foods; the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago; was a long-standing member of Les Dames de Escoffier, an organization of culinary professionals, and was a member emerita of The Chicago Network, an organization of women executives. During her many years at Eli’s, she served as a mentor for culinary students and a board member at the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences. She lectured on creating premium cheesecake before the Culinary Institute of America, and on the history of cheesecake before the Culinary Historians of Chicago.

Mrs. Worthington, who was born in Coffeyville, Kansas, was a direct descendant of the Eighteenth Century Shawnee war chief Bluejacket, who fought in the Ohio wars against growing colonial encroachment. The Shawnee tribe later migrated west from Pennsylvania and Ohio to Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma.

She is survived by her husband Rogers Worthington, of Chicago; a sister, Sherrell Toman of Cathedral City, California, and two nieces, Shawn Bluejacket Roccamo, of Ashville, N.C., and Machelle (cq) Toman, of Cathedral City.

Credit card donations to support Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy research can be made by calling:

(617) 726-2200, or online at: Giving.MassGeneral.org. Be sure to direct your donation for the: Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy Research Fund #028184, and stipulate the donation is “in memorium of Jolene Worthington.”. Checks, should be made out to: MGH Research Fund #028284, and mailed to:

Mass. Gen’l.Hospital Development Office, 125 Nashua Street, Suite. 540, Boston, MA, 02114-1101.

On the ‘memo’ line, please note: “In memorium of Jolene Worthington.”