by Travis Hardin

I succeeded in finding enough information on the Web to lead me to send a letter to O. James White in December 2012. He telephoned me on 9 January 2013 and we had about a ten-minute talk. He had just returned from an educational seminar in southern California. He's a certified public accountant and has been a proprietor of his own CPA firm for 35 years. He was getting busy with his professional obligations, which included preparing income tax returns, so he asked me not to contact him again until sometime in April.

O.J., as his wife Patricia calls him, says he is the son of Ernest James White and the grandson of James Washington White. (My family said or assumed the middle name was William, so this is news.)

O.J. said he left home at 18 and later finished the University of California at Fresno, working in restaurants, grocery stores, and anywhere he could to support himself. Orville Ernest White (as he was then known) married Patricia L. Ebel on 25 August 1962 in Tulare County, California. Patricia graduated from Lindsay High School in 1959, and I assume O.J. graduated the same high school around that time also. Patricia graduated from California State University at Fresno in 1976.

O.J. and Patricia have two children: David and Melissa. David is about 50 and in business, his father says, and his father supports him with CPA services. David White was born 29 Oct 1963. David's wife is Lisa and their children are Gunner and Taylor Rose. David White is president of Trinity Fruit Sales, a wholesale fruit distributor in Fresno. Lisa R. White is co-president. 

Melissa White (born 13 Nov 1969) holds a J.D. degree and was formerly a prosecutor and an advisor to the Fresno Police Department, he says. Melissa White is now teaching law at Joaquin College of Law in Clovis, California, where she graduated in 1996. She is general counsel for Trinity Fruit Sales.

O.J.'s only sibling Marilyn Kaye White was born 19 July 1947. She married Dow Sampson, eight years her senior, in Reno, Nevada on 8 Aug 1979. She died about 2014 or 2015.

About his father Ernest, O.J. said he was a loner by choice. At first he characterized his father as a failure in business, then corrected that by saying he was successful in the trucking business but he overextended into another line of trucking and trusted others too much and after that the business was not a success. He said his father, being a loner, never once had a conversation with his (O.J.'s) children. O.J.'s father Ernest White died 8 June 1982 when his (O. J.'s) children were in their teens.

Ernest White's wife Hester Grimm survived to age 96 and was cared for by her son O.J. White and his wife Patricia and his family. Hester Grimm White's death notice was published in the Fresno Bee on March 20, 2012.

"We’re moving along, wrapping ourselves in gratefulness," O.J. said to me. He says practicing love and telling children and grandchildren they are loved is important to him. He feels he did not receive that assurance from his own father. He also is "all over my grandchildren" about the importance of trying and succeeding.

All the family pictures here are publicly available on Patricia White's Facebook.com page, and other Web sites. Vital statistics are publicly available from the State of California and through Ancestry.com. 

Contact information as of January 2013:

O. James and Patricia L. White
9090 N. Minnewawa Ave.
Clovis, California 93619 (Clovis and Fresno are adjacent and share a border.)
telephone (559) 322-9090
email: ojwcpa1@att.net

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 2017: I am please to report that James and Patricia White visited some of the White cousins in Alabama when they visited Tuscaloosa in September 2017 to see their alma mater, Fresno State, play football against the University of Alabama. The Alabama cousins meeting them were siblings Jerry and Travis Hardin and siblings Joan and David Dixon, all descendants of William Ausie White.