The older man in the fire-engine red shirt and pressed white pants shuffled over to the gym mats and began growling commands.

“No, no, no! Don’t reach back — reach forward,” he told a 10-year-old girl with ropy braids.

Then came the next child.

“Don’t fall over like spaghetti,” he said, reaching out a hand to guide her into a forward roll.

There was no “I don’t want to do it that way,” no sulking, no words at all — and certainly no one daring to call the 90-year-old man “Jesse.” It’s always “Mr. White,” or “Yes, sir.”

It’s a reverence that has accompanied the now-retired Illinois secretary of state since at least 1959, when he assembled his first group of kids for a gym show in the field house at the Rockwell Gardens housing project on the Near West Side. At the time, White was an elementary school gym teacher and had yet to enter politics.

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