Jenny McGill, 73, the former U.S. consular agent in Puerto Vallarta who achieved renown in retirement for penning a lively account of her experiences in the burgeoning Mexican tourist resort, passed away peacefully January 2 at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson after a brief battle with cancer.
Brought up near Ackerman, Mississippi, in the middle of the Tombigbee National Forest, the youngest of 15 children, McGill had always aspired to be a writer. As an honor student, she helped with the high school newspaper. As secretary for an insurance company, she wrote an in-house newsletter to boost the morale of door-to-door salesmen.
Later, McGill worked as a stewardess for American Airlines and as a government employee but didn’t find the kind of material to fulfill her story-telling potential until she moved with her husband, Howard to Puerto Vallarta in 1973, after frequenting the beach town for several years. McGill had met Howard in Dallas, Texas, and the couple married in 1959.
In 1982, McGill was appointed the U.S. consular agent in Vallarta, reporting to the U.S. Consulate General in Guadalajara. She stayed in the post for 14 years.
As she later related in her excellent book “Drama & Diplomacy in Sultry Puerto Vallarta,” McGill became the person Americans turned to in times of trouble. She dealt with time-share victims, sad mental cases without home addresses, old men under arrest and occasional next-of-kin who wanted to scatter ashes in the ocean.
She also hobnobbed with the rich and famous. She curtseyed to Queen Elizabeth II and chatted with Eleanor Roosevelt, even forging a friendship with film director and Vallarta legend John Huston, who encouraged her to keep notes of all her experiences.
The McGills retired to Talpa de Allende, 50 miles inland from Vallarta, in 1998, where she wrote “Drama & Diplomacy.” This nostalgic portrait of Puerto Vallarta as it will never be again became a big hit and went to two printings. The book is a “must-read” for anyone seeking a glimpse of the town of the 70s and 80s – sweaty, rainy, caught between civilization and chaos, mysterious, adventurous and full of possibilities.
In 2006, she began writing the column “At Home in Talpa de Allende” for www.mexconnect.com. At the time of her death, she was working on her second book, “The Woman in the Trunk,” about Paula Koch, wife of Albert Koch, a German miner who made his way to Talpa, probably in the 1870s and is buried in the town’s cemetery. Koch’s brother, the distinguished German physician and bacteriologist Dr. Robert Koch, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine (awarded in 1905).
A committed Christian, McGill loved gardening and never missed an opportunity to help young Mexicans in the area of the arts.
McGill is survived by her husband of more than 50 years. The couple had no children. Memorial services are pending.
Our thanks to Carol Wheeler, Marvin West and www.mexconnect.com for their help with this obituary.
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