Lottie Jenvey's Love of Learning Continues On

Lottie Jenvey, 85, may have grown up on a small town in Montana and attended a one-room schoolhouse where most of her fellow students were her own relatives. But she has made the most of her life.

Her love for learning has led her in many different directions, from a degree in zoology to a lab technician to a photographer. 

A self-proclaimed quick-learner, she managed to always keep life interesting. After retirement, she picked up a camera and taught herself to use it. Her love of wildflowers has taken her on road trips all across the western states, where she has spent months in her van and spent nights in hostels.

As a distributor for Shaklee, she taught herself the computer skills needed to set up her own blog and website, and that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Mountain View Patch: Where do you live?

Lottie Jenvey: I live in Mountain View. I live in the Bailey Park area [near Bailey Park Shopping Center on Shoreline Boulevard].

Patch: Where did you grow up?

Jenvey: I spent my first 12 years in Montana on a ranch.

Patch: Could you describe the time you spent there?

Jenvey: Well, it was the only thing I knew then, so it was fine. I didn’t see many people. Most of the people I saw were my relatives. I started school at 6 and I had very fine teachers. I had a long day in school, 9 to 4. I had one teacher from the first to fourth grade in a one-room school that probably was responsible for my being a real student.

Patch: Do you have any siblings?

Jenvey: I have a brother and I had a sister who died at a young age in her 40s. She married a man in the military, and when she was in the hospital, I feel she had a problem with being very overweight. She had a surgery and she died of peritonitis, and it shouldn’t have happened.

Patch: What education did you receive?

Jenvey: I finished junior high and high school, and then I went on to junior college, which was right during the war [World War II]. I spent my junior year at UC Berkeley, and then I decided that I wanted to get away from home at the time when my parents were divorcing, and I went to the University of Texas. I spent my senior year there, and I graduated with a degree in zoology and a minor in physical sciences.

Patch: What did you do with your degree after graduation?

Jenvey: I didn’t do a lot with it. My father was pushing for me to go to medical school, but although I didn’t want to go to medical school, I didn’t really object to the course of study. I thought it sounded good. Somewhere along the way, I decided that it might be a good idea to get a teaching credential, and I did.

Teaching wasn’t exactly my thing. I enjoyed teaching physical education much more than teaching an academic subject. I taught high school level and junior high.

Because I was interested in medicine, I got a job in a hospital as a receptionist. I had a business background, because when I was in high school, I took a combination college prep for business. I was friends with these people in the laboratory who were teaching medical technology—the courses to get you so you could take the state boards. I had all the requirements to do that, so I took their classes and I took the state boards, and I was a medical technologist.

Patch: When you retired in 1991, what was your job at the time?

Jenvey: I worked for Silicon Valley Printed Circuits—all the things that went into making printed circuits they handled. That was the beginning of using a computer. I kept all the records and then turned them over to a CPA for her monthly reports. I handled the medical and dental insurance. I handled the telephone. It was a busy job. I worked 10 hours a day while I was there.

Patch: Do you have kids?

Jenvey: I have two grown children.

Patch: Are you married?

Jenvey: No. I divorced their father when they were 1 and 3 .... It took me a long time to decide that I had to get a divorce. When I realized that I could do a much better job of raising my kids without him, that’s when I made the move. He is now deceased. He died a couple of years ago.

Patch: Did you ever remarry?

Jenvey: No.

Patch: Do you have any grandkids?

Jenvey: My son had twins. I’m a grandma. Then they weren’t too old, and she was pregnant again. So they are all boys, and the last one was born in February. The twins were born the day after my birthday, and they were 2 years old this year.

My daughter has three kids. They are 11, 14 and 17. That’s two girls and a boy. The boy is the oldest, and he is looking forward to going to college now.

Patch: How long have you been a distributor for Shaklee?

Jenvey: I was a Shaklee user and Shaklee distributor more than 35 years ago. It would have been great if I could have developed it then. I liked the products then. I have never changed in my feelings about the products ... I had conflicts. At one place where I went for a meeting, I took a prospect. They took her away from me. It never worked out .... My Shaklee use for most of those years was with a couple who lived in Los Gatos, and I would just go down there and pick up my products. I never tried to be a distributor or to sell. I was principally a user then, and then I decided I wanted to [distribute].

This is when I ran into the problem on the Internet where this guy told me these people had cheated him. They were going to release me when I said I didn’t want to work with them, and at the very last minute, they decided not to release me, so that meant I had to sit out six months. I got my son to sign up for the six-month period, so I had a source of product.

Patch: What kind of products do they produce?

Jenvey: They have come out with really revolutionary products in the last four or five years. They have a patent pending [on] antioxidants. Resveratrol is an antioxidant that comes from grapes, and it has only been really discovered in the last 10 years or so. Shaklee has a patent pending on this product, and they say that you will get five to six more years out of your life, and your life will be much more devoid of a lot of the common diseases of older age.

This came out about 2½ years ago, which is when I started it, and I had been taking a cholesterol drug to lower my cholesterol for some time, but it didn’t do that. Three months after taking it (Resveratrol), my cholesterol was normal.

They don’t have just nutritional products. They have cleaning products and beauty products. You can get a water system to purify your water. They are out to see that you can live a healthy life.

Patch: What does it mean to be a distributor for Shaklee?

Jenvey: There are probably four or five pages of regulations, but what it means to me is the structure is that I am under somebody. I can buy the products and sell them, but with the Internet, I don’t have to deal with that. I don’t have to deal with storage. That’s what distributors used to have to do. I order once a month, and it’s on auto ship.

To be a distributor you handle the products, you teach people what they will do for them, you teach them about the opportunity that it offers, and you teach them what Shaklee stands for.

Patch: You have a blog and a website. Was it easy for you to transition into the use of computers for your business with Shaklee?

Jenvey: It was strange getting started. I did have help. I set the blog up myself, and Shaklee created the skeleton of the website. I looked at other people’s websites, and you can do a lot of different things, so I may still go in and change a lot. My blog is mostly health articles and book reviews on books about health and antioxidants.

Right now it doesn’t seem so difficult, but I know then it was.

Patch: Where does your drive for learning come from?

Jenvey: I think it started way back in that one-room schoolhouse in Montana. I placed on the honor roll in their test. I graduated from junior college with great distinction. At the University of Texas, I graduated in the top 8 percent. I have always been connected to learning something somewhere, and I learn pretty fast.

Patch: You also have an interest in photography. Where has that taken you?

Jenvey: I picked up an interest in photography and I joined several camera clubs. I got this really great interest in wildflowers, and I had a camera that I learned to use. I have maybe four or five hundred wildflower shots.

Patch: Do you sell your photography?

Jenvey: I have sold some. The places I sell them has been routinely has been through the plant sales of the Native Plant Society. A wildflower show that they have in the spring, and the city of Mountain View has a in the fall.

Patch: Where are some of the places you have gone to take your photographs?

Jenvey: I drove up to Alaska. I left in my van in May and I didn’t come back until August. I went by myself. It was better to be myself because that way I met a lot more people.

I sort of made a circle around the western states. I have been to Montana many times and Oregon, Utah, Arizona. I went back to the Midwest once, but I ran into a tornado and I had car problems. I decided that the Midwestern wildflowers weren’t as pretty as the western ones, and the ones that I decided to grow in my backyard and take photos of those.