Jenifer Primo Smith, 69, died peacefully at home on October 21, 2026, 13 months after being diagnosed with glioblastoma. She spent her final days surrounded by her husband of 47 years, Frank Smith; their daughters, Courtney Smith (and Sylvanus Shaw) of Brooklyn, New York and Carol Ann Smith (and Harrison Brooks) of Lubbock; her beloved grandchildren Evelyn and Joe Shaw; two siblings, Kim Ashcraft and Joe Primo; her loyal dog Rocky; and many dear friends who brought a steady stream of laughter, food, and light to her bedside.

Jenny was born to Carol Louise Owen and Robert Julius (“Bob”) Primo of Lubbock on November 9, 1956. Her mother was the eldest of the ten children of Elizabeth Lupton (“Big Red”) and Lewis Owen of Lubbock, and Jenny was the first of the next generation of their massive Irish Catholic West Texas family. Raised by schoolteachers in rural Pep, Texas, before moving to Lubbock, her Owen aunts and uncles somehow all looked like movie stars and were masters of tall-tale and joke-telling. They were radiant, and they loved each other immensely; when they gathered (which they did frequently), it always felt like the party of the decade, and no one wanted to be the first to leave.

Jenny counted herself truly blessed to be part of this family, and to have had Carol and Bob Primo for parents. They were steady, nurturing, hardworking, and truly good people, and they loved her unconditionally. She grew up with three younger siblings: Wade (1960–1979), Kim, and Joe Primo. Bob was an oil company geologist, and the family moved to Fort Worth for his work before settling in Alief, Texas (now part of Houston) during Jenifer’s high school years. She spent many wonderful vacations visiting her Primo family, including many dearly loved cousins, in Tyler, Texas. In 1975 she graduated from Alief High School. She often quipped that if we wanted to know what it was like, we should just watch Dazed and Confused. After high school, Jenny enrolled at Sam Houston State University, where she joined the Chi Omega sorority (and remained a member for over 50 years). She lived in the sorority house, and made many lifelong friends, including her beloved Room-O, Kathy (Moore) Sawyer. Jenny had so much fun at SHSU that she (and her parents) decided it would be a good idea if she transferred to Texas Tech to finish her degree.

So, in 1977, she moved in with her grandmother, Big Red (with whom she had a close lifelong bond), and enrolled at Tech, where she earned her BA in sociology and met the love of her life, “the Thunderbird Man,” Frank Wallace Smith. They married at St. Elizabeth’s Church in Lubbock on St. Patrick’s Day, 1979. Their wedding was modest, with a cake and a case of champagne at Big Red’s house for their reception, but their marriage was epic: they adored and cared for each other through thick and thin, and built a home filled with joy, laughter, and the many books, plants, and eclectic objects they collected over the years.

After graduation, Jenny worked at various jobs, then took time off to raise her two daughters (the job she said she loved the most). She fostered their independence and loved them fiercely. She was a generous volunteer, always signing up to be the class parent, the Girl Scout troop leader, or the carpool driver. During these years, she delighted in channeling her creativity in crafting elaborate costumes for her daughters, throwing them wonderful birthday parties, making scrapbooks and photo albums, and going all-out with decorations and food for holidays big and small.

When her daughters were grown, she worked for a decade at the South Plains Food Bank, where her proudest accomplishment was founding the GRUB Youth Program and Farm with David Weaver, Farmer Roy Riddle, and Debbie Cline, and she was ever-grateful to Sandy Garcia and Adam Mulsow for keeping it going. In 2011, she retired from the Food Bank and moved to San Angelo. This was an especially fun chapter of her life: living in her charming historic “house of dreams” in Santa Rita, making many dear new friends, walking her dogs by the Concho River, reading voraciously, and supporting local arts organizations. In the San Angelo years, she also became a grandmother, a role she loved and at which she excelled. She traveled to Brooklyn for extended visits many times each year, making herself a familiar fixture of the local playgrounds, park, library, and school bus stop.

When Jenny and Frank returned to Lubbock in 2017, she also returned to work at SPFB, first as a volunteer, then stepping back into her old role as Farm, Orchard, and Garden Director. She eventually became its Chief Operations Officer, a role she held during the stressful days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when she and the other “lovely essentials” worked tirelessly to make sure food got distributed to community members in need. She retired, for good, in 2024.

Jenny loved to feed people—both body and soul—and took immense joy in having a large crowd gathered around her dining table. She hosted big dinners any time her extended family was in town, almost always Tex-Mex, with loved ones crowded around the bar in her kitchen, eating chips and queso and laughing and telling stories into the wee hours. Over the years, there were many iterations of these gatherings, including an annual daylong Christmas fiesta, Saturday night extended family dinners after 5 o’clock mass in the 90s, Monday night dinners with a fun multigenerational friend group during her empty nest years, and weekly “Wednesday Winers” gatherings for dinner at Big Red’s house in the aughts.

Jenny’s life was rich with dear friends truly too numerous to name, with whom she shared countless laughs and tears over the decades. She was a founding member of the Noisy Boys Club (with Stephanie Rhode, Debra Castle, Priscilla Ross, and Teresa Heath). She and Melinda Green Harvey, her creative writing mentor and co-member of their two-woman writing workshop, wrote and traveled together. In her 50s, Jenny hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu with Teresa Heath and a little help from a horse named Jesuco. She had regular reunions with her Chi-O sisters, including Kathy Sawyer and Donna Caraway Wright. Her friends included close-knit groups in Austin, San Angelo, and her Alief High School classmates. She and Frank loved their annual visits to Puerto Vallarta to see their friend of half a century, Dale Friesen. Susan Horkey was a friend for decades, and a colleague, confidant, fashion advisor, and cheerleader whom Jenny loved dearly.

Jenifer enjoyed many things: live music (a love she shared with her daughters; in recent years she saw Brandi Carlile, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, The Mavericks, Amanda Shires, Lucinda Williams, Tanya Tucker, Turnpike Troubadours, Wilco, and many others); tending her beautiful backyard garden and feeding her friends and family with its harvest; exchanging handwritten letters with her granddaughter; watching CBS Sunday Morning while drinking coffee with Frank; listening to her grandson learn a Led Zeppelin song on his guitar; watching turkey vultures swoop over White River Lake; taking long walks in parks and on beaches (she logged many miles in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, Lubbock’s Leftwich Park, and on the Bolivar Peninsula, where she spent many happy summers); a simple sandwich made with the first perfect tomato of the summer; reading a good book from cover to cover in one sitting; long catch-up calls with her sister; doing New York Times word games (let the record reflect that she was still getting “Genius” in the Spelling Bee ten short days before entering hospice care); watching for flowers on her heirloom night-blooming cereus; and approaching vaguely familiar-looking people in the grocery store and, to her daughters’ horror, interrogating them about their various organizational affiliations until she was able to pin down where she knew them from. Her favorite thing in recent years was spending time with her grandchildren, whom she adored, and of whom she was so proud. She loved her life, and it was beautiful.

Jenifer was also a reader, writer, and perennial striver to better herself and the world around her. She was a frequent patron of Mahon Library, and at any given moment had a book or three in progress, frequently picking up a copy of whatever her grandchildren were reading in school so she could discuss it with them. She started each day (even during her busiest working years) with coffee and writing her “morning pages” in various journals. At the time of her diagnosis, she and Frank were completing training to become volunteer Court Appointed Special Advocates with CASA of the South Plains.

Jenifer is survived by the friends and relatives mentioned above, as well as her beloved older brother John Anthony Rafkind, many nieces, nephews, and cousins, three goddaughters, her “GRUB kids” (now young adults of whom she was so proud), and three granddogs.

A celebration of Jenifer’s life is scheduled for 2:00 pm, Saturday, November 14, 2026 at the LHUCA Ice House, 511 Avenue J in Lubbock. In her memory, please consider staying in bed all day to read a good book, or taking a trip to visit dear friends you haven’t seen in a while. For those wishing to make a charitable donation in her honor, she had a special fondness for Planned Parenthood (or any women’s reproductive rights group), public libraries, food justice organizations, and CASA.