Jerry W. Shiverdecker, 1948-2023

March 5, 1948 – June 13, 2023

Click here to see a recording of Jerry’s memorial celebration at the Union County Heritage Museum (June 19, 2023), with thanks to Kendall C. Stancil.

Despite having written so many obituaries over his long career in the news business, my father never got around to writing his own. A classic case of “the cobbler’s children have no shoes”. This leaves me, his daughter, with an impossible task: to sum up the life of a man who did so many things, lived so many places, and touched the lives of so many people. Maybe he didn’t believe himself equal to that final task, and so left it to me.

Jerry Wayne Shiverdecker, 75, rejoined the Universal Mind from his Northside New Albany home in the early hours of June 13, 2023, following an extended illness. His wife and daughter were at his side. A Celebration Reception in his honor will be held from 5 – 7 PM Monday, June 19, 2023, at the Union County Heritage Museum (114 Cleveland St.) in New Albany with remarks from his dear friends Steve Patterson and Brandon Presley at 6 PM.

Jerry was born on March 5, 1948, to George and Oleta Perkinson Shiverdecker in Fulton, MO. At Fulton High School, he was a star member of a highly successful debate team, which won’t come as a surprise to anyone who ever argued with him. On November 22, 1963, he participated in a debate tournament that was delayed due to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Around this time, Jerry discovered the writings of William Faulkner and made a pilgrimage to Mississippi to see the author’s “postage stamp of earth”. He was enchanted by Mississippi, a land where “nothing is as it appears on the surface”.

Though he didn’t finish college, Jerry was a lifelong learner and a voracious reader. Over the years, he amassed a personal library of around 4000 books, nearly all of which he’d read, some of them multiple times. He loved sharing the joy of reading with people of all ages and walks of life. Later in life, in an effort to downsize, he rehomed a lot of books by donating to small-town libraries and setting up jail libraries.

Jerry’s natural curiosity and sense of adventure led him to pursue a variety of occupations throughout his life. He spoke with great fondness of his time running radio stations on the south coast in the 70s and manufacturing heavy equipment at Danuser Machine Company  in Missouri in the 80s. But his first, greatest and longest-lasting passion was the news business, a profession he loved because there was something new every day. As a young man working for Panax News in Miami Beach, Florida, in the 70s, he was the youngest newspaper publisher in the United States.

It was while he was back in Missouri that Jerry met his match in Nan Loonan, a native of Mississippi, the state which had so long beguiled him. They married in 1983 and were together for 39 years until his death. Eventually, they moved back to Mississippi, first to Louisville in Winston County before finally settling in New Albany in 1999. Their daughter, Elizabeth, inherited her father’s love of adventure, history and politics. Elizabeth once gave Jerry a Father’s Day card inscribed “Proud to be just like you, but better looking”. When Jerry died 14 years later, that card was still in a frame overlooking his bedside.

Jerry will be remembered by all who knew him for his warm heart, generous spirit, booming voice, dirty mouth, and a laugh that could fill up any room. He never met a stranger and could happily talk to anyone about almost anything, be it music, politics, history or local gossip. Integrity was the trait he most prized in others and that he strived to exemplify himself. If he thought you were in the wrong, he would tell you, even if it pissed you off. You may not have always agreed with him, but you were never in doubt about where he stood. Any friend he made was a lifelong friend, and even most of his enemies ended up being his friends.

He was a consummate conversationalist, always ready with a pertinent, often funny, anecdote drawn either from history or from his own broad experience. The ultimate expression of Dad’s love of storytelling was his writing. He was an exuberant and prolific writer, penning many articles and stories for newspapers and the newsweb. Some of these were reports on local or state politics while others simply, but beautifully, captured a slice of life in the South. In addition to researching and writing a Shiverdecker family history, Sterling and Bess, he also wrote biographies for two close Mississippi friends, Bill Taylor of Taylor Machine Works and George Beckett of the CIA. For many years, he’d been working on a political novel, which, sadly, was unfinished when he passed.

Jerry had a phenomenal memory whether for dates and details of historical events or the stories of people he knew. Once he met you, he never forgot your name, where you were from or who your kinfolks were. Anything he didn’t know about you he would find out. As he got older, he fretted about his memory not being what it once was. Nan often told him, “Even if you do forget half of what you know, you’ll still be ahead of most people.”

Throughout his life, he was eager to keep up with new technology and was an early adopter of the internet. When we lived in Winston County in the 90s, our home was one of the first to have dial-up. With the advent of the internet, Jerry was one of the first to recognize that the newspaper business he loved would not survive if it did not evolve. In 2006, he spearheaded the creation of the New Albany News-Exchange, the first internet-based local news site in Mississippi not attached to an established newspaper. In 2008, the News-Exchange was sold to the Tupelo Daily Journal and eventually shuttered.

Undaunted, Jerry and Nan created NANewsweb.com (now known as NEMiss.News) in 2015. It was the first exclusively-online local news source in Mississippi. His family is determined to carry on with this important work and to keep serving the community Dad loved and believed in, and which has shown us so much love.

In addition to his wife and daughter, Jerry is survived by a niece, Renee Lasalle, and her son Gabe of Savannah, GA. He is also survived by a beloved aunt, Bonnie Shiverdecker, of Kansas City and a host of cousins in Missouri.

By marriage, he was a member of the tight-knit Loonan clan of Tupelo, MS. The late Loonan matriarch, Liz Johnstone Loonan, declared her son-in-law Jerry her designated ice cream dipper, as he was “the only one in this family besides me who knows what a proper serving of ice cream should look like”. Jerry will be greatly missed by his three sisters-in-law, Susan Scott, Robyn Gibson, and Kim Krauss; their husbands, Don Scott and Dale Gibson; and former husband Scott Krauss and his wife Amy (an honorary member of the Loonan clan); as well as numerous niblings and great-niblings.

He was preceded in death by: his father and mother; his sister Janette; his uncle Oather Perkinson and aunt Ruth Perkinson; all 12 of his Shiverdecker aunts and uncles and their spouses, with the exception of Bonnie; his beloved in-laws Bob and Liz Loonan.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in Jerry’s honor to the Union County Historical Society and Museum at 114 Cleveland St. New Albany, MS, 38652, or at https://ucheritagemuseum.com/support-the-museum/