Imagine actress Rosalind Russell, setting aside the audacious, adventurous life she portrayed in the 1958 smash hit film Auntie Mame, and serving instead on a county Grand Jury, and you’ll have the perfect picture of Jeane Hallin of Cedarpines Park.
Hallin, 71, is a free spirit. She’s also one of 19 San Bernardino County residents chosen to serve on the 2015-16 civil Grand Jury, and she’s the only representative from the San Bernardino Mountains.
“I thought the mountains were underrepresented,” Hallin said. “I was kind of concerned. I was curious about the Grand Jury.”
But her desire to serve, and to learn, could easily have fallen on deaf ears, because Hallin missed the deadline for submitting applications for appointment to the panel, whose main duties include studying the operations of various county departments, making recommendations to improve them, and investigating complaints against county personnel and programs.
“I was a month late in applying but they put it through anyway,” she said. She missed the cutoff, she added, because she was in Ethiopia at the time, visiting one of the countries on her bucket list, a ledger that has shortened considerably as the roster of nations she has toured, on every continent on planet Earth, has lengthened.
The Grand Jury selection process involves being interviewed by a panel of judges, Hallin said. “They were cute, young and sweet, and interested in my travels. They ask you a lot of questions about your life experiences and what you did for a living.”
Like Russell’s film character Mame Dennis, who flits from one pastime to another with seeming abandon, Hallin’s career has headed in many directions. Early on she taught school, including instructing in English, science , mathematics and tennis in Israel, from 1970 to 1973.
“I left when the war started,” she recalled.
Tennis held center stage in Hallin’s life for a time, and she taught it at kibbutzim in Israel and at Stevens College, a liberal arts institution for women in Columbia, Missouri.
At another point it was off to study law at Loma Linda University. “I passed the bar exam on my first try,” she said. “It’s not that difficult, just a bunch of stories from English law you have to remember.”
Hallin said she set up practice in San Bernardino, fresh out of law school. “I practiced just about everything,” she said, but mainly criminal defense, including representing police officers charged with a third drunk-driving offense.
Often she’d approach judges and tell them she was new and unfamiliar with handling herself in court. “They were very nice,” she said. “They’d object for me when I should have objected.”
Retired now, Hallin has become a world traveler. “I have this travel bug,” she said. “I think I was born with it,” and it keeps motivating her to scratch countries off her bucket list. So far she’s visited Israel, Ethiopia, Papua New Guinea, Thailand and its nearby islands, Peru, China, Ireland, Australia, Portugal, Spain, France and Sweden, the land of her ancestors—and those are just the ones she recalls.
In Papua New Guinea, she said, “they just walk around completely naked all the time,” while in Ethiopia, “they sleep on animal skins and keep cows in their houses. They make their own alcohol in front of you and offer you some.”
Hallin visited China in 2008 to take in the Summer Olympic Games, she said, and managed to wrangle tickets to watch basketball competition, though at first she was told no tickets were available.
Her interest in athletic competition comes naturally; her father, she said, was a track star in high school in Michigan. In addition to the China games, Hallin said she’s watched Olympic athletes perform at the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games and in Atlanta in 1996.
Her fascination with track and field has carried over into her own life as well. Hallin said she has competed extensively in Senior Olympics, participating in the pole vault, shot put, discus, triple jump and marathon, and has garnered “about 100 medals. I’ve medaled in everything I attempted, though not all of them are gold,” she said.
But time does take its toll. “I’m 71. I’ve slowed down some, I don’t pole vault quite as much” these days, she said.
One outdoor adventure she also tried was ziplining. About two years ago, she said, she built her own zipline on her property, to help her carry food to her llamas.
“We had a zipline when I taught special education to kids in Ohio,” she said. I thought I knew everything (about them).” But apparently there was a blank spot in her knowledge, because Hallin had a zipline mishap in which she suffered a broken neck and had to be airlifted for medical care.
Grand Jury service seems just the thing for Hallin at this stage of her life. “It’s a great group of people we work with, and we have a wonderful lawyer to give us advice,” she said of the county attorney who staffs the Grand Jury.
As for how her service will unfold, Hallin is waiting for developments. “I’m not sure what to expect. So far we’re looking at a lot of things. We had a complaint that just came in,” she said, but, given the confidential nature of Grand Jury service, she couldn’t talk about it, other than to say that “a lot of complaints are a little bit self-serving.”
Grand Jurors are prohibited from serving on consecutive one-year panels, but may reapply after a year off, and Hallin said she’s interested in reapplying. “We have some people who’ve been on the Grand Jury 10 or 15 times.” Her current colleagues “are the most intelligent people, from all types of experiences,” including airplane pilots, entrepreneurs and even a former air-traffic controller.
“Everybody should apply,” she said. “It’s a great thing.”
By Glenn Barr, Reporter
The Mountain News, August 27, 2015
Lake Arrowhead, CA
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