Lea este artículo en español aquí.
The framed displays lining the walls of Jonean Chance’s home leave no doubt: she is a woman of extraordinary talent and accomplishments. Her latest distinction, at 81, is destined for a new frame in her kitchen, among others that hold the dozens of ribbons and awards she has received for her food entries at various fairs.
This new display will showcase her awards from the 2026 California State Fair: 15 First Place ribbons—one for each of Chance’s entries—along with two Best of Class, one Best of Division, and the pièce de résistance, an elaborate Best in Show medallion with a flowing ribbon for her dill pickles.
But we will get to those in a moment….
Born in Newcastle, Indiana, the Chance family moved to California when she was six years old, where her father, John Chance, got a job at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino.
“I had an uncle there,” she said. “He said, ‘You’ve got to move to California. The weather’s perfect.’ For whatever reason, my aunt Dorothy May was gone the next week. And we all followed her lead.”
There, her father worked on the Apollo moon missions including Apollo 8, the first to orbit the moon, Apollo 11, the first moon landing,and Skylab, the first manned space station. A display in Chance’s hallway commemorates his being an invited guest and honoree at the Apollo 17 launch.
Her father’s career in such a precise scientific discipline presages Chance’s own degree from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo as an architectural engineering major. It also gave her an inroad into her first career as a photographer when her Aggie roommates coaxed her to go with them to a rodeo in Arizona.
“Some of them were on the rodeo team,” she said, “and they found out that I took photography in high school. They said, ‘We want you to take pictures.’ I rented a camera, shot the rodeo, and they critiqued my pictures. That’s how I learned the where and when and the timing.”
The path to the kitchen leads through her living room, lined with framed photographs and memorabilia from a distant career, among them San Benito County Saddle Horse Show posters and a framed eight-page spread of her work published in the San Jose Mercury News’ West Magazine.
The craft of Chance’s work is readily apparent to anyone who ever shot a film camera, which exists in a world far distant from today’s technology. Even a base amateur can drop a 1 terabyte card into a digital camera and, shooting at 40 frames per second, easily score a portfolio of those perfectly timed shots.
Film requires a greater technique: each roll of film holds at most 36 exposures and had to be developed before anyone, including the photographer, knew if the shoot was a success or failure. No do-overs, no AI-assisted Photoshop to make up for imperfections.
“I worked as a photographer from 1966 to 1985,” Chance said. “If you go to the rodeo museum at Bolado Park, they have roll-out billboards and a good number of the black-and-white pictures on it are mine.”
Following in her father’s footsteps, she entered the aerospace and defense industry, working at McCormick Selph, now known as Teledyne—where she bombed out of her assigned job within a few days.
“I started out in production,” Chance said, “But I was no good at that. They knew that I went to Cal Poly as an engineer and had taken drafting in high school, so they said to see the head of engineering. He put me to work on the drafting board, and I did that for the rest of my career.”
It is another throwback to the family history: on one section of the wall of Chance’s kitchen not covered in county or state fair ribbons, she has a framed copy of U.S. Patent No. US722213A issued in 1903, her great-grandfather Carl I. Palmblad’s design for an electric coffee pot.
(It is placed next to a drawing of her own, for a shock-absorbing polyurethane shoehorse that was later used for several international patents.)
Chance’s mastery of canning and preserves can be traced back to her family as well, and from what she learned from grandmothers and aunts who she said were “very good cooks and they could bake.”
“We’re from the Midwest,” she said. “Growing up, we put up a lot of fruit and things from the vegetable garden to have through the winter time. When we moved to California, they continued to do that.”
Chance said she became interested in canning in the early 1970s, taking advantage of the bounty of Blenheim apricots produced in San Benito County.
“Living here with the apricots coming in,” she said, “you almost get the fruit for free. It’s everywhere, so I made the apricot jam just for myself and family and friends.”
She started canning seriously in 2019 and, after putting up some Driscoll strawberries, entered the county fair for the first time.
“I thought it was really good,” she said. “The family and friends love it, and my diabetic friends want the danged sugar even when I make sugarless jam for them. It piqued my interest again, so I entered that and dill pickles in the San Benito County Fair.”
Since then, she has entered the county fair every year (except for 2023, when she missed the deadline) and has placed with everything she has ever entered.
The dill pickles are her long suit, earning that Best of Show award along with First Place in Category, Best of Class and Best of Division, with cucumbers purchased at the Hollister Downtown Association Farmers Market.
For Chance, deciding on fair entries is as much a research project as it is relying on her tried-and-trues. Overhearing one county fair judge say that no one ever entered bread-and-butter pickles, she put those on her must-do list for the next year.
And, taking second place with her dill pickles rather than her expected first, she searched out what had beaten her: dill asparagus, which is in the same judging class.
“I was inspired,” she said. “So I did dill asparagus, but I added shallot, and it changed the whole flavor. It won Best in Show, and I decided to take that one to my first State Fair last year. And I won Best of Class there.”
That year, she also entered her dill pickles, strawberry jam, red pepper jelly and peach jam, all of which placed.
Inspired by her success last year, she decided to up her entries for 2026. But she had also paid attention to the other contestants, and her natural competitiveness set in.
“There was one woman who had been there before,” Chance said. “She was a winner, and she had 11 entries. I thought, ‘Okay, you know, I got to pick things up a little bit.’”
Chance credits two things to her continued success. The first is that she uses locally grown produce for everything she makes, often from her trees and the plants in her garden, like the five dried herbs she entered this year.
The other is her career as a mechanical engineer, which she said is responsible for her “tenacious” and “meticulous” approach to canning.
“You can’t be like a weatherman,” she said, “where if you miss, it’s like, ‘Oh, well….’ In engineering, it has to be perfect; there are liabilities and design criteria. If you miss, you won’t get the next contract. I’m a real stickler for doing everything exactly like it’s supposed to be done.”
This involves a lot of care, Chance said. The jars, rings and lid have to match. If there is a ding in the seal, points are lost. The headspace for the pickles has to be half an inch from the top; for jams and jellies, it’s a quarter of an inch. Herbs must be dried in a dehydrator. And on and on.
The entries also need very detailed labels. Besides a list of every ingredient, which allows the judges to guard against them trying something they are allergic to, the entries also have to include information about the canning process, such as the elevation of her kitchen and the length of time in the water bath to ensure sanitary preparation.
Any deviation from the standards results in lost points, though a perfect 100% is occasionally achieved.
“I’ve gotten 100% more than once,” she said, “which is nice. “But last year, they took points off my dill asparagus because there was a ding on the top ring. Kind of unfair, but they need everything to be perfect in order to eliminate some of the entries, you know.”
It is a costly hobby—when you add up the purchase prices of the produce, jars and seals, not to mention the trip up to Sacramento, the $150 she was awarded in combined winnings barely covered the entry fee. But for Chase, the adventure and the wall full of ribbons make it worthwhile.
There is one award at the fair, however, that has eluded her and may have set Chase a new challenge that might be out of her grasp: the coveted Golden Bear statuette.
“It is the top prize,” she said. “I had between 50 and 60 points with my 15 entries. The woman who won it had 56 entries, and it was her third Golden Bear trophy. I don’t know if I’ll go for it again; I can’t even think of 56 entries.”
Jonean Chase’s 19 awards from the California State Fair:
- Apricot Jam: First Place
- Bread And Butter Pickles: First Place
- Chocolate Mint Jelly: First Place
- Cinnamon Peach Vanilla Extract: First Place
- Dill Asparagus With Shallots: First Place
- Dill Pickles: First Place, Best of Class, Best of Division, and Best of Show
- Dried Berggarten Sage: First Place
- Dried Italian Oregano: First Place
- Dried Mammoth Dill: First Place and Best of Class
- Dried Sweet Marjoram: First Place
- Dried Tuscan Blue Rosemary: First Place
- Honey Peach Jam: First Place
- Red Pepper Jelly Tabasco Sauce: First Place
- Strawberry Jam: First Place
Recommendations for future Eat, Drink, Savor articles can be emailed to roberteliason@benitolink.com.
BenitoLink thanks our underwriters, Hollister Super and Windmill Market, for helping expand the Eat, Drink, Savor series and for giving our readers the stories that interest them. Hollister Super (two stores in Hollister) and Windmill Market (in San Juan Bautista) support reporting on the inspired and creative people behind the many delicious food and drink products made in San Benito County. All editorial decisions are made by BenitoLink.
We need your help. Support local, nonprofit news! BenitoLink is a nonprofit news website that reports on San Benito County. Our team is committed to this community and providing essential, accurate information to our fellow residents. Producing local news is expensive, and community support keeps the news flowing. Please consider supporting BenitoLink, San Benito County’s public service nonprofit news.
You must be logged in to post a comment.