INSPIRED • Wrongly convicted for 38 years
some time with his buddies. He never returned.
That was the beginning of a six-month mystery that turned up only a couple of clues until March 15, when a hiker discovered John’s abandoned snow-bound truck on a remote trail 6,500 feet up in the San Bernardino Mountains. When subsequent searches by law enforcement yielded no clues, Theresa Sturkie became frustrated and organized her own all-volunteer search operation.
Over the next two months, she led several groups with up to 50 volunteers to search the vicinity of where her husband’s truck had become stuck between some boulders near Fuller Ridge. Finally, in midmay, she and volunteer Cathy Tarr found one of John’s bloody socks 100 yards away from his truck in the direction of a trail that led down the mountain. Working with that evidence, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department launched a massive, multiagency search on the morning of July 1 and found his body — which had withered to bones and a few bits of mummified skin — just four hours later.
Sturkie and Tarr believe John made an impromptu solo camping trip to the mountains that weekend and became trapped when a snowstorm blew in. Without adequate clothing, food or gear and no cellphone signal, he stayed in his running truck until the gas ran out. Then he attempted to hike down to Interstate 10, but he missed a switchback in the snow, fell into a ravine and died of his injuries or hypothermia.
Sturkie said she and her family were relieved to finally bring his body home for burial on July 12. And with his death confirmed, they were able to collect on his insurance policy. But she remains frustrated with the Riverside Sheriff ’s Department for declaring that John died in late June, just three days before they found his remains. If it was officially confirmed that he passed away last January, she and her children would be entitled to back payments on his work and Social Security benefits, money they desperately need.
Because the work started by volunteers helped lead to John’s recovery, Sturkie now volunteers in searches for other men who went missing while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in recent years. She wants their families to find the closure that she and her four children now have. Sturkie said her kids and her faith are helping her get through their first holiday season without John.
“We are taking it easy and spending time together. I’m so grateful for finding John, the love and support of many and our wonderful children that John and I raised,” she said.
Shelby Jacobs
In 2019, Americans celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first landing on the moon by NASA’S Apollo 11 astronauts. One of the men who took them there is 84-year-old Oceanside resident Shelby Jacobs, a Rocketdyne and Rockwell engineer who helped build the spaceship’s Saturn V rockets.
Although Jacobs rose to an executivelevel program manager position in the space shuttle program before he retired in 1996, he is most famous for a project he worked on in his earliest days in the space program. Jacobs designed the camera system for the Saturn V rocket on the Apollo 6 spacecraft, which in 1968 famously captured footage of a section ring of the Saturn V rocket cleanly separating and spiraling slowly toward Earth.
Jacobs has always been proud to talk about his contributions to the space program, but in recent years he has used his celebrity to refocus the public’s attention on the hidden figures of the space program, like himself. During all 40 years of his career in L.A., Jacobs, who is black, faced nearconstant discrimination from his white colleagues and was never paid as well as other engineers doing the same work.
Jacobs grew up a poor preacher’s son in a black community near Santa Clarita, where his exceptional skills in math and science earned him a scholarship to study mechanical engineering at UCLA. In 1956, he was recruited to Rocketdyne, where he was one of just eight black engineers among 5,000 designing rockets for NASA’S Mercury, Atlas, Jupiter and Thor programs. In 1961, he moved to Rockwell to build rockets for the Apollo program. Rather than get angry at the constant discrimination, Jacobs decided to assimilate, challenge assumptions and win colleagues over with his affable, humble personality.
In 2009, he was recognized by NASA as an “Unsung Hero.” But it wasn’t until 2016, when he saw the film “Hidden Figures,” that he decided to speak up about the many other black unsung heroes who helped take man to the moon and beyond. And, he said this year, the fight is not over.
Jacobs and his wife, Elizabeth Portillojacobs, spent much of the past year traveling the country to attend and speak at Apollo 11 anniversary events. One highlight was the serendipity of finding a crossroads in Sedona, Ariz., of Shelby and Rodeo streets, which he said encapsulate his long career in L.A. Now he’s looking forward to a quiet 2020.
“This past year was really something special and beyond my wildest dreams,” he said.
James Hubbell
Designer/sculptor James Hubbell has been a “living legend” for more than a halfcentury, but the Santa Ysabel artist doesn’t like the world “legend” because it implies that all of his achievements are in the past.
In October, he celebrated his 88th birthday with the premiere of his first opera, “Queen Califia’s Pilgrimage,” at a grade school near the hilly 40-acre Santa Ysabel compound where he and his wife, Anne, raised their four sons and have lived for more than 50 years. Hubbell wrote the libretto for the mythical story of California’s early origins with a score by composer Bill Jones.
Also in October, “James Hubbell — Between Heaven and Earth,” a documentary on his life and work by filmmaker Marianne Gerdes, made its world premiere in New York City. And in November, Hubbell dedicated his latest art commission, “Currents,” a sea-inspired metal entry gate for the Ocean Discovery Institute Living Lab in City Heights.