Eastern Connecticut said goodbye in 2017 to several beloved community leaders, including a prominent civil rights champion, a long-serving city emergency management director and a Holocaust survivor who continued speaking out against hatred right up until her death.
On July 11, Jacqueline “Jackie” Owens, the longest-serving president of the Norwich NAACP, died at age 86.
Owens, who remained an active community member even after her retirement after 30 years in the group’s top slot in 2016, grew up in the Midwest before settling in Eastern Connecticut and making her presence known.
Owens helped found and served as an adviser to the NAACP’s Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics, a year-long enrichment program for African-American high school students.
She had a hand in creating a host of annual Norwich events, including the NAACP’s annual Dr. Martin Luther King luncheon, the Juneteenth celebration and the Sweet Potato Festival.
She was a founding member of the greater Norwich Anti-Bullying Coalition and served as a member of the Salvation Army board of directors, assistant treasurer for the state conference of NAACP branches and as the NAACP Robertsine Duncan youth council adviser.
For her work, Kelly Middle School’s auditorium was named in her honor.
NAACP Norwich Branch President Dianne Daniels said her predecessor leaves behind a multifaceted legacy.
"It’s a combination of faith — she lived a faith-filled life — and love," Daniels said. "She had her arms around everyone in her circle. She leaves her inspiration, too. As a new president I use her as an example of how an organization should be run. She was never a person who sought the limelight and she pushed others to the forefront. She had a wide reach and a deep love of community."
Story of survival
On April 4, Colchester resident Henny Simon, a Holocaust survivor who spent years recounting her life story to whomever would listen, died after a car crash at age 91. As a teen, Simon was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps in Latvia and Poland. She had spoken just months before her death about the roots of hate.
“It starts with bullying,” Simon said. “You separate a person and make them a non-persona, and that’s when somebody becomes an outsider. That’s what happened in Germany under Hitler. Little by little we were separated from everyone else.”
Simon began recounting her experiences to audiences in 1986. Over the years, she spoke at several public venues, including schools, community centers, libraries and senior centers. A great-grandmother at the time of her death, Simon also wrote a book about her experiences, “Am I My Brother’s Keeper? The Story of a Holocaust Survivor.”
Despite the horrors she endured, Simon cultivated an aura of resilience.
“I’m a person whose motto is ‘never give up,’” she said in February. “If I didn’t have that motto I wouldn’t even be here.”
In any weather
Whenever heavy rains poured down on Norwich, it was pretty easy to find Gene Arters: Wherever water threatened to crest its banks in the city.
The veteran emergency management director died on Jan 23 at age 61. As part of his job, Arters served as the city’s main conduit of information to the public regarding hurricanes, winter storms and imminent flooding.
In March 2010, it was Arters who spearheaded operations to mitigate damage when the Yantic River overflowed its and banks and rose to nearly-record flood levels. In January 2010, Arters set up a mobile emergency operations center in Greeneville for Norwich residents to contact relatives in Haiti after a devastating earthquake struck the country.
Norwich Fire Chief Kenneth Scandariato, who worked closely with Arters since 2005, said Arters' gift was in bringing a previously disparate and piecemeal response system under one management umbrella.
"His imprint on the city was making emergency managment part of the fabric of Norwich's public safety system," he said. "Before, it was parochial and territorial. He brought it all together in a meaningful way when it was needed."