By Ollie Mintz
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I met Mrs. Shine as a high school kid with more ambition than resources and a plan to attend Baylor University through Army ROTC. She believed in that plan before anyone else had a reason to. It was through her advocacy that I received the scholarship that made Baylor possible, and it was through her steady mentorship that I stayed the course long enough to commission as an officer in the Texas Army National Guard. I would not be an Army officer today without her. That is a plain fact, and I have said it often, but I want to say it now in public.
You could write the history of the last two decades of Central Texas by tracing her fingerprints. The families she helped put down roots in Harker Heights, Killeen, and every community in between, one home at a time, over a real estate career that shaped this region’s growth as much as any single person’s. The soldier families she quietly helped through hard seasons. The veterans she made sure were remembered, most visibly through her tireless work with Wreaths Across America at the Central Texas State Veterans Cemetery, where what began as a handful of wreaths grew, under her insistence, into a covering for every grave. The causes she funded. The young people she pulled forward, one at a time, because she thought they were worth pulling.
What made her extraordinary was not the scale of the work. It was the fact that she treated every person she met as if they were the whole point of the day. Soldiers, students, first-time homebuyers, waitresses, dignitaries, the volunteer setting up chairs before an event she was speaking at. Everyone got the same warmth, the same eye contact, the same sense that Jean Shine was genuinely glad to know them. In a public life full of performance, hers was the real thing.
Mrs. Shine, thank you. For the scholarship, for the phone calls, for the belief, and for the thousand small kindnesses I watched you extend to people who could do nothing for you in return. Central Texas is a better place because you lived here. I am a better man because you knew me.
Rest easy. We’ve got it from here.