Club’s Gymnasium Takes Honorable Name

Devoted to helping the community’s young people over the past 40 years, Mary and Harmon Jenson gave time and money to the Boys and Girls Club of La Habra-Brea.

To show its gratitude, the club this week named its newly renovated La Habra gymnasium after the couple.

Executive Director Dan Casey said the hours the Jensons contributed to the organization were countless and their monetary gifts probably topped half a million dollars.

“They kept us alive for many years,” said Casey, whose organization oversees clubhouses in La Habra and Brea and the La Habra Boxing Club.

Harmon Jenson, who died in 1995 at age 74, “was a unique individual who had a strong caring feeling for kids and for people who work with kids,” Casey said. “He did more than just help us. He always had a cheery hello. He would boost our egos, build our morale and light up everybody’s life. And Mary was always supportive behind the scenes.”

Mary Jenson, 76, still is a club volunteer and has been appointed to fill her late husband’s position on the club’s board of directors.

“We just think the club is doing a good thing,” Mary Jenson said this week. “It keeps the kids off the streets.”

Casey said the Jensons often held club fund-raising events in their home and made frequent cash contributions.

La Habra City Councilman Juan M. Garcia said that, when he was a youngster, he was among those invited regularly to the Jenson home to swim and eat hot dogs. “They are certainly the most generous people I’ve ever come across,” he said.