Repair shop owner was ‘a beacon of light’
At age 90, Janie Foreman was still driving to work at Jackie’s Auto Clinic, an unassuming repair shop she owned on a dead-end street near Hildebrand and San Pedro.
Even during the pandemic, she was there to greet customers, pay the bills, do the weekly payroll. At lunchtime, she’d play dominoes and cribbage with her son Bruce Noble. Usually, she crushed him.
Old Spurs memorabilia, golf cartoons and drawings by a great-grandson named Liam hung from the walls. Security was handled by Mercedes, an aging Weimaraner that slept under her desk.
Attempts by Noble, 64, who ran the five-mechanic shop with his mother, to isolate and protect her from the coronavirus went nowhere.
“I didn’t want her in the shop,” he recalled. “She said, ‘Do you want me to die? Take away what I do, and with no
purpose, I don’t think I’ll last very long.’”
“My answer was, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, mother dear,’” he said.
Foreman died Nov. 8, six days after she was diagnosed with COVID-19. At the hospital, she refused a ventilator and was at peace to the end, her son said.
“It wasn’t about cancer, a heart attack or getting run over by a city bus. She believed that when your name was ‘on the page,’ meaning when Jesus called, you are going home,” he said.
Foreman, who loved playing the penny slots, got in one last junket to Oklahoma before her death.
“We went to Winstar (World Casino and Resort) about three and a half weeks before she got sick. She had a great trip,” he said.
“She was a patient gambler with a lot of stamina. She’d bet like 22 cents or 16 cents,” he said.
Born in Riverside, Calif., Foreman had three sons and outlived two husbands.
She was married to Ernest Noble, an Army combat veteran, when the family settled in San Antonio in the early 1960s. He died in 2011.
In 1989, her second husband, Jackie Foreman, opened the repair shop on West Norwood Court. At the time, she was working as an office manager for a funeral home.
She began working at the auto shop four years later, after Jackie died. At the time, her son Bruce, who was running the business, was about to throw in the towel.
“She said let me retire, and we’ll see if we can make a business out of it,” he recalled.
Together, they made a go of it, as attested to by longtime, faithful customers, among them a Spurs star from yesteryear.
“She was a true Texan, one of those old Texan ladies who did everything her way,” said Larry Kenon, 68, whose signed poster hangs in the office.
“She always had a hug for me and a warm welcome. It made my dealings there very comfortable. There was no fake about her. If she liked you, she liked you, and if she didn’t, I guess she’d let you know, too,” said Kenon, a Spurs forward from 1975 through 1980.
His daughter, Tatiana Mason, 40, met Foreman when she started to drive.
“She was the sweetest, kindest lady. She was the first person you saw when you went in and the last one you saw on the way out,” she said.
Mason recalled many long, pleasant visits with Foreman while waiting for a car to be fixed.
“It was fine for me to sit there for two or three hours, talking to her. We’d have a good time together, rather than me sitting there bored,” she said.
Ed Morgan, 75, a retired Anglican priest, has been taking his geriatric Suburbans to the shop for at least 15 years. Two of them have more than 400,000 miles on the odometer.
“I don’t take my cars anywhere else. She would put you at ease no matter what your car problem was. She was an institution there,” he said.
Ella Saine, 77, whose late husband, Denzil, was a customer for three decades, echoed these sentiments.
“If you came in with a bad spirit, you did not leave with a bad spirit. To me, she was a beacon of light and she treated everyone with respect,” she said.
Saine is pretty sure Foreman was sent to the express lane when she reached the Pearly Gates.
“Some people arrive there with a long portfolio and a presentation to justify to God why they should be in there. Knowing the way she lived, I’m sure God said to her, ‘You come to the front of the line. You don’t need to justify anything.’”