John Selmes Greenway, named for his father and his maternal grandfather, was born on the 11th of October 1924, in Santa Barbara, California. He weighed in at ten pounds and in looks he favored his father’s side of the family, with blond hair and eyes that remained blue. His parents, John Campbell and Isabella Selmes Ferguson Greenway, could not have been more proud. While they had only been married for a year, they had been in love for a much longer time. When Jack (as the baby was called) was born, his mother was thirty-eight and his father was an even more mature fifty-two years old. But both were quite active and were very pleased with their little son. A memorable picture of the infant with his father was taken with a bear carcass – a proud father with his hunting trophy and his human trophy.

When he was just fifteen months old, Jack lost his father who died during a routine operation to remove a gallstone. While he did have an older half-brother, Bob, and half-sister, Martha, he was so much younger than they were that his childhood resembled that of an only child more than that of a third child – Jack called his a “split-up family.”¹ His mother’s various interests – politics, architecture, and business, among others – meant that she was often away from him, but she lavished him with the love, attention, and care that she could no longer give his father. He remembered his relationship with his mother as an intimate one at times, “She was much more like a roommate than she was like a mother....”²

When his mother was elected to Congress, Jack went with her and they rented a house in Georgetown, D.C. Although he was supposed to attend the school during the day and meet his mother in the Capitol afterwards, he occasionally skipped his afternoon lessons to go skating in the park. He remembers waiting for his mother in the gallery where the House of Representatives met and skating with her up and down the halls of Congress. Before Isabella retired from Congress, Jack had been sent to Phillip’s Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where his father had been a student.

He attended Yale for a short period of time but World War Two intervened, causing him to join the Army Reserve Corps and, in 1943, after a “terrible introspective gloom,” he left school to train in cryptography.  Because his assignment was to the Aleutian Islands, he was out of harm’s way which made his mother happy.³ Following the war, Jack graduated from Yale,  earned his law degree from the University of Arizona, and made Tucson his home.  Although he inherited the Arizona Inn from his mother and was its director until his death, he did not involve himself too closely in its management.  Perhaps knowing that he and his half- siblings would also inherit the Dinsmore farm, Jack visited the property in 1946 and reported to his great-Aunt Sally on the condition of the land and fences.  He was never very interested in the farm, so he did not object when Martha Breasted offered to buy his portion and turn the place over to the Dinsmore Homestead Foundation to become a museum.

In the last years of his life, Jack suffered from emphysema.  He died on the 13th of September 1995, less than a year after the death of his half-sister, Martha. According to his own and his mother’s wishes, his father’s body was disinterred from its grave in Ajo, New Mexico and re-interred next to Isabella in the Dinsmore family graveyard. Jack’s ashes were then buried with his father.

¹ Interview with Jack Greenway by Kristie Miller, 28 July 1995.
² Ibid.
³ Kristie Miller, Isabella Greenway: An Enterprising Woman (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2004), 250.