Jeanne Randorf: A Life in Full Bloom
By Stephanie Skinner
August 2025
Some people smile with their mouths, some with their eyes, and some people, like Jeanne, smile with their whole bodies. It’s the kind of radiance that comes not just from joy, but from a life fully lived.
Jeanne Randorf was born on Friday the 13th in July 1945, and to this day, some still call her “Jinx.” She grew up on the bungalow-lined streets of post-WWII Chicago—her family part of the working-class neighborhoods that would become central to that era's great white flight. Her father worked in a forge, later retraining as an inspector. Her mother, one of five daughters of Luxembourg immigrants, held fast to traditions like “… a girl should live with her parents until she’s married.” Jeanne had other ideas.
Jeanne Randorf. Photo: Stephanie Skinner
In 8th grade, she fell in love with French. She’d never left the country, but the language lit something in her. At Illinois State University tuition was $120 a semester—and free if you planned to teach! Jeanne got her teaching certificate. Junior year took her to Strasbourg, France, to live with an older couple and immerse herself fully. She graduated in 1966 and taught for a year in Skokie, IL, before taking part in Middlebury’s prestigious language program. There, she studied during the summer and returned to France again—this time amid the social upheaval of 1968, when strikes and student protests shuttered schools.
That same year, Jeanne moved to New York City for a boyfriend who eventually moved back to France. Jeanne, meanwhile, found a teaching job at the last all-girls middle school in Harlem—a fifth floor walk-up. “They were very kind to me,” she says of her students. After two years, she found a job in the travel industry—first as a bookkeeper under a temperamental boss who eventually went through a bankruptcy. She rented a $145/month studio in Park Slope, Brooklyn, before gentrification put an end to cheap rents.
One night, at a dance, Bob McMahon asked her the kind of question that would change everything: “Would you like to dance?” A precise man (he always ate on time) Bob had already graduated from Pratt as an architect. He brought to the relationship cats (Black Cat, Grey Cat, and Stray Cat, who became Posie – and we won’t delve any farther into Jeanne’s love and occasional “dislike” of one of her former felines …), and an Irish Setter. They moved in together at his family's cottage in Monterey in 1977 and started to build a life together.
In 1980, they bought the house in Otis, Massachusetts—rustic, unheated, and full of possibility. It took three years to make it livable, although they did still live there, and Jeanne motored on while pregnant and working on a T-shirt printing business she later sold. “The kitchen counter was on concrete blocks to save my back,” she recalls. Their daughter Emma was born in 1982, and son Alex in 1987. (She wasn’t allowed to name him Fritz.)
In 1991, Lee High School needed a French teacher. Jeanne, with some Spanish and a signature haircut that matched her colleague’s, which is how she knew she would get the job. Jeanne taught the kids from 7th to 12th grade. Many remember her! She retired in 2011, just as her life turned a corner again.
Bob, always idealistic—once building a bird garden when he read that songbirds were declining—fell ill. Jeanne got him into Dana Farber, drove him everywhere, did what needed doing. “You just do,” she says. He died at home, in hospice, in 2020 leaving behind a three-page list of chores (she has yet to complete…) and a home he’d spent 32 years refining with a personal aesthetic perfect for the Berkshires.
Today, Jeanne remains a presence in Otis—a woman of language, memory, and grit. I knew we’d connect when it became clear at the annual Otis Holiday Party that we might be the only two people in the room who had read Le Chanson de Roland, and that no amount of food conversation would drive her away. She joins committees, tries new things and has never lost her passion for travel.
And when she smiles, and gives you that mischievous side eye, she lights up the room.
