In Loving Memory, Buttafleye Ministry Remembers Wilson Roosevelt Jerman. The White House Butler who served 11 US presidents passed away in 2020 (Read more below).
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Wilson Roosevelt Jerman
Jerman got his first job in the White House in 1957 when he started as a cleaner. He was promoted to butler while President John F. Kennedy (1917 – 1963) was in office. President Kennedy's wife and then First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis promoted him.
He went on to serve as a butler for nine more presidents, forming particularly close relationships with President George H.W. Bush (1924 – 2018) and his family, which continued when President George W. Bush followed in his father’s footsteps.
After working full-time in the White House since 1957, Jerman moved to part-time status in 2003, continuing there until his retirement in 2012. First Lady Michelle Obama included a photo of Jerman in her 2018 memoir, “Becoming.”
Upon his retirement in 2012, former President Barack Obama honoured him with a series of plaques, one that represented each of the presidents he had served.
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Jerman was born in Seaboard, North Carolina in 1929, the son of a farm worker. He dropped out of school at the age of 12 to work on a farm. In 1955, he moved to Washington, D.C. and worked as a caterer before being hired as a cleaner by the White House in 1957 during the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Jerman was promoted to butler under John F. Kennedy; Jackie Kennedy gave Jerman two signed paintings that he hung in his home. He continued as a butler in the White House until his retirement in 1993 during the Bill Clinton administration. He returned to the White House in 2003 in the George W. Bush administration. He worked as a maitre d' and elevator operator for Barack Obama before his final retirement in 2012.
To commemorate his 50-plus years of service in the White House, President Obama presented him with a series of plaques depicting all 11 presidents he served. First Lady Michelle Obama included a picture of her and the president in an elevator with Jerman in her best-selling memoir, Becoming.
Jerman was married twice and had 5 children. His first wife, Gladys, died in 1966; Lyndon B. Johnson asked his personal physician to treat her before she died. His second wife, Helen, died in the 1990s.
Jerman died at the age of 91 on May 16, 2020 from complications due to COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Virginia.
“Mr. Jerman was a lovely man,” former President George W. Bush and Laura Bush said in a statement. “He was the first person we saw at the White House when we left the residence in the morning, and the last person we saw when we returned at night.”
Wilson Roosevelt Jerman was born on Jan. 21, 1929, in Seaboard, N.C., to Theodore Roosevelt Jerman, a farmworker, and Alice Plum. As a child, he had no shoes and walked six miles to school, Ms. Garrett said. At 12, he dropped out of school to work on a farm.
Mr. Jerman moved to Washington in 1955 and catered parties in Georgetown before being hired at the White House. He was intensely proud of his job, his granddaughter said, and he went to work every day perfectly groomed, with freshly polished shoes and suspenders.
“He never judged, he never complained, ever, because he went through so many tribulations,” she said. “Anything you needed — he was that person.”
Like many longtime White House staff members, Mr. Jerman scrupulously guarded the privacy of first families.
“I’d say, ‘I work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,’ and 99 percent of the people don’t know where that is,” he said in an interview published in the “The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House.”
Stephen W. Rochon was in charge of the White House residence from 2007 to 2011, when Mr. Jerman worked as an elevator operator for presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He called Mr. Jerman “the most gentle-natured person that I knew.”
“He tried not to converse that much with the presidents unless they asked him something,” Mr. Rochon said on Wednesday. “His job was to get them up and down to the different floors. But they couldn’t resist because he was so nice. They couldn’t resist engaging with him and conversing with him.”
Mr. Jerman worked at the White House from 1957 to 1993, and then again from 2003 to 2012, when he retired under Mr. Obama.
“With his kindness and care, Wilson Jerman helped make the White House a home for decades of first families, including ours,” Michelle Obama, the former first lady, said in a statement.
Mr. Jerman is survived by four children, Joyce Garrett, Angela Davis, Linda Taylor and Christopher Jerman, as well as 12 grandchildren, Ms. Garrett said. A fifth child, Dennis Jerman, died in 2011.
Jerman, who was one of the White House's longest-serving employees, had served the US Presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Barack Obama.