Josephine Dunbar Snow

October 12, 1926 - December 15, 2022

Jo Dunbar Snow

“If you go to the dance, dance.”

October 12, 1926 – December 15, 2022

On Thursday December 15, completely engulfed by her children and grandchildren, Jo peacefully and elegantly moved along to the next adventure after the briefest of battles with old age.

Relentlessly positive, Jo made lifelong friends wherever she went...school, work, travels, the grocery store parking lot...She never met a stranger.

Josephine Marie Lococo was born in October 1926 to Sicilian immigrant parents, Giuseppe “Joe” Lococo and Grazia “Grace” Lococo (nee Ingrassia). “Babe” was a perpetually cheerful, extroverted, athletic, brilliant kid, and a voracious reader. She and older brother Tom played tennis and basketball...and danced...In fact, Tom – who was six years older -- would take little Jo along with him to jitterbug at school dances because the girls his age couldn’t dance like his kid sister.

Naturally, Jo excelled in her school work at St. Brigid’s where she also played basketball through high school. While the nuns appreciated her smarts and charm, during her 12 years at the school they never managed to get her to shut up in class.

Jo had scholarship offers to attend college but couldn’t see giving up the good money she was making at the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Region office. This is where Jo met war hero, John Reid, whom she married in 1947. Libbie and Amy came along, and Jo worked full time while raising the girls -- as a bookkeeper at California Maritime Academy, a major architecture firm, a Cadillac dealership, and a prominent neurosurgeon’s office.

All the while Jo was food editor and wrote a syndicated cooking column for six newspapers throughout Northern California. In 1968, Jo earned her real estate license and began working at the Kentfield office of Frank Howard Allen, becoming the first agent to sell homes totaling $1 million in combined value. Jo became a broker and then earned her CCIM in 1980.

After a divorce, Jo found love with Dr. Robert Dunbar for whom she’d worked for 10 years, and son Bill arrived in 1965. In 1975 Jo, Robert, Amy, & Bill moved to Modesto where Robert brought a good part of his neurosurgery practice and Jo opened a new Frank Howard Allen office, where she managed the residential and commercial operations. Jo and Robert loved Modesto and their rich life of friends, gourmet parties, tennis at Del Rio, and summers in Tahoe.

In 1980, as Jo was out on her daily run, she felt something was amiss and a few days later learned she had Stage IV ovarian cancer. Amy left college and moved with Jo to San Francisco for a year of treatment. When Jo was done with treatment and considered herself cured, Robert and her other doctors advised her to not return to work so she jumped back into tennis and hanging out in Tahoe with her many pals.

In September 1983 Robert died suddenly of a heart attack, and a few months later Jo moved in with her brother Johnny and his partner Don Baldwin in their apartment in San Francisco. Thus began an epic chapter of friends, travel, and tremendous professional success at Hill & Company, Frank Howard Allen, and Grubb and Ellis where she was hired at 65 as VP of Residential Real Estate.

Jo dated periodically but felt Robert was the love of her life and she would be fine with never having another relationship. In 1994 Jo’s pals Eileen & Chuck asked if she would be interested in going on a blind date with a very nice man they knew. Game for anything, Jo said, “Let’s do it!” She and Warren Snow fell deeply in love and married six months after the first date. Tahoe, Spain, France, Italy, New York, Hawaii, tennis, Boy Scout camps, grandkids, hikes, dominoes, spite-and-malice, entertaining...it was a remarkably rich marriage for six years before Warren died in November 2000. Jo deeply mourned Warren the rest of her life.

As she approached 80, Jo wrapped up her storied career in 2004 and moved back to Modesto where she could be a more constant presence for her grandkids. She rekindled old friendships and built countless new ones. Her days and nights were full of friends, travels, grandkids, gourmet and ‘down home’ meals, her daily single Manhattan, and her cookbooks...oh, her cookbooks...She would write and self-publish five of them – “Keepers” and its four sequels – the last one completed just a couple months before her passing.

Jo had three biological children, but son-in-law Dennis Lanigan, in her life for 56 years, was really just her fourth child. Nancy Dunbar arrived on the scene in 1988, so Jo had her third daughter. “Bammie” (aka “Jo-Jo the waitress”) was an especially doting and fun grandmother and great grandmother, to Eli Lanigan (and Irene), Quinn Lanigan (and Sheena), Geoff Coleman (and Lorraine), Elizabeth Leonard (and John), Caroline Cubre, Nick Cubre, Lauren Cubre, Robert Dunbar, Megan Dunbar and Jay Dunbar, great grandkids Abby Lanigan, Camryn Hoag, Emily Lanigan, Sybil Coleman, Graham Coleman, Grace Coleman, Madelyn Leonard, Catherine Leonard, Liam Lanigan, and Logan Lanigan.

In addition to her formal family, Jo leaves behind scores of friends, all of them dear to her...there was no better friend than Jo. If you knew her, you adored her. Or worshipped her. She was just plain brilliant. And beautiful...and clever and sensitive and direct and curious and generous and silly and unfailingly optimistic. Jo was everything. Jo would always say, “Life owes me nothing” because she recognized the fullness of her life of family, friends, loves, career, and adventure...and the opportunity she had to do big things. But Jo knew others aren’t so lucky and was particularly concerned about children. In lieu of flowers, Jo’s family urges everyone who knew her to do what they can for children, perhaps through Cricket’s Hope, Children’s Crisis Center, or Shriner’s Children’s Hospital in San Francisco.