FYI, I was able to get this working by setting {loadonce: true} when I initialize the grid. Seems like that should just duplicate the functionality of the loadComplete: function(){} mentioned in this tutorial: /jqgridwiki/doku.php?id=wiki:howto_grid_base#client_side_sorting_but_server_side_paging
But for some reason adding the loadonce:true did the trick for me. Go persistence!
Fantastic toolset by the way. Awesome work!
just for clarity
jQuery(“#gridID”).jqGrid({