Gary Duane Stefanelli

Gary Stefanelli, first of the two children -- and only son -- of Dorothy Arline Branson and Paul Armando Stefanelli, was born 1 May 1938 in Madera, Madera County, CA. He went on to be raised in the Madera/Fresno area and would spend virtually all of the first thirty years of his life there. When he was a small child -- probably even before Gary was old enough to attend elementary school -- his parents divorced. Custody went to his mother, who raised him and his younger sister, Donalee, as a single mom. Dorothy supported the household by working as a legal secretary.

Though the Branson clan was overwhelmingly of British Isles extraction, the same was not true of Gary due to his Italian heritage, a heritage that was imbued with immediacy because the immigration had occurred in the recent past -- less than a decade before his father’s birth. Consequently, despite the profound role his mother and her parents played in Gary’s upbringing, he tended to think of himself as Italian-American.

Gary attended Madera Union High School, where he was depended upon as a vital part of the swim team. He took first place at a number of meets from his freshman year to his senior year. His best category was the fifty-meter freestyle.

When Gary was twenty-one years old, he inadvertently fathered a child. This is something Gary never knew. He would ultimately go to his grave having never become aware of his son’s existence. The young lady Gary had been intimate with chose not to inform him of the pregnancy, much less involve Gary in the process of parenting. She gave birth to the baby in the summer of 1960. Though she was not yet in her twenties, she did not give the boy up for adoption, but brought him up herself. When the boy was two years old, the young woman married, and the boy acquired his stepfather’s last name. Until DNA testing done in the mid-2020s showed him otherwise, he assumed he was the biological progeny of the man who had helped raise him.

Meanwhile Gary went on to become a husband at age twenty-two, marrying Jeannette Sue “Jackie” Graves in Las Vegas, NV 7 April 1961. Jackie (photo at right), daughter of Harvey Hugh Graves and Beulah Mae Baker, had been born 14 August 1940. She was a native of Fresno and had been raised in the town, and was a graduate of Roosevelt High School.

Over the course of the 1960s Gary and Jackie became parents of three children. The last of the kids was born not long after the family moved to Fountain Valley, Orange County, CA. The relocation was prompted by Gary’s employment situation. He was a western wholesale sales representative for Ralston-Purina, which had its regional headquarters in Orange County. It was in Fountain Valley that Gary was struck by a massive heart attack and died 14 June 1974. He succumbed at the far-too-young age of thirty-six.

After Gary’s death, his widow and children came back to Fresno and settled there long-term. To this day the majority of his descendants still reside in the region. Jackie never remarried. She supported herself and her children with a career in banking management, working for many years for Bank of America, then with Bank of Fresno. This is a way of saying that Gary’s offspring experienced an upbringing similar to his own, i.e. they were raised by a single mom working at a desk job. Jeanette finished her career and was recently retired when she passed away 1 January 2007 in Fresno at the age of sixty-six -- another life cut too short, though not as severely as in Gary’s case. She was laid to rest at Arbor Vitae Cemetery in Madera 12 January 2007.

Descendants of Gary Duane Stefanelli

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