Friday, June 19, 2015

Father's Day Western Style

Yippee Ki Yay!
 Hot dogs roasting, games by the pool, a band and The Happy Trails girls dancing...this is how Dad's Day was celebrated today at H-W Senior Living, here in Westminster. Today the women served the men their meals...hot dogs with all the trimmings, baked beans, potato chips, cookies and beverages. A couple of the guys showed up with pistols, but nobody engaged in a gunfight. Congrtulations to Kim, our activities director, and to Johnny, Terre, Luz and Gary and the other musicians for designing and painting the bronco so we could all pose for our pictures!
El Rancho Grande

Is it The Cat in the Hat???

Luz, Johnny and Terre prepare a Spanish chorus

Note the pistol on Johnny's hip...no booing as he sang.
June wore turquoise to die for!


A Civil War era California senator dropped by!

Miss Maggie Malone from the Dance Hall

No needles in this haystack, but plenty of hayseeds!

Prizewinner Tom!

Monday, June 15, 2015

It Can Be Done...and Manual Arts Alums Did It!

Me in the Middle, Crashing the Class of '52 Photo Shoot

Nobody broke into a chorus of the Alma Mater at the All Alums Reunion at El Dorado Park in Long Beach this last Saturday, June 13. But plenty of the alums showed up in the purple and gray colors of the school. Tommy Toiler, our mascot, led the group in dancing most of the afternoon, as well. Besides dining on an assortment of barbecued meets, I also enjoyed watching alums' children testing their agility on the adjacent playground equipment. I also slipped away for a few reflective moments to wander over to the duck pond and recollect how my son used to feed the ancestors of these graceful birds decades ago when he was a boy.

If it hadn't been for Elizabeth Durley Lemons, I'd have been representing the Continentals, Manual Arts High School, S '54 all by myself Saturday at El Dorado Park in Long Beach. What's weird is that I didn't even graduate from Los Angeles' historic high school. Though I studied there for two and a half years, my family moved to Lynwood at Christmas break during my senior year, and I ended up graduating from another school. But Manual's always been close to my heart.

Living on West 59th Place, I'd gone the last few months of sixth grade to Budlong Elementary, and then on to John Muir Junior High and Manual. I'd been busy in high school, taking A Period Journalism, arriving at 7:15 at the campus print shop to put the Daily to bed, as features editor and then assistant editor. I'd been head attorney of Girls Court, in Tri-S and Pavlovettes. I'd been the B-12 class majorette on Senior Day, leading in the band on the football field when the Continentals announced their name and intention to shine.

Elizabeth Durley had been in the band that day, coached by the school's venerable music teacher, Mr. Farrar. So Elizabeth and I enjoyed poring through a yearbook together, brought by a grad from an earlier year.

The Class of '52 turned out mightily, thanks to the organizing efforts of Dan Beattie, perennial alumni chair of the class, who had gone back to Manual and taught phys ed and coached football there from '64 to '73. Dan kept busy all day greeting former students who squealed with glee, "Coach Beattie! Coach Beattie!" Dan also took all the photos on this blog.

Highlights for me:
Sandra Shields '52
Joann Beattie and Nace Benum '52
  • Hugging Nace Benum and Jerry Schwartz-Sands. I'd danced with both these men at Sabres parties back in the day. I'd even taken Dan to the Sadie Hawkins Dance in February 1952, though he didn't remember that particular evening.
  • Chatting about Manual's glory days as a football fortress with Dan's wife, Joann, and Esther Danho.
  • Reminiscing about my sister, Pat French, who had been at Manual with me for a year and a half before transferring to Washington High...and running into George Durgin '52, who produced photos of her taken at a Los Angeles City College party where he'd taken her as his date.
  • Finally meeting Myra Robinson, Class of '73 and master organizer of reunions for the past several years.
  • Connecting with Jerry Rea '53, brother of my classmate Connie. I had several photos of Connie and some of our mutual friends to share with Jerry.
  • Catching up on family news with Bob Lee '53, who had been married to a friend of mine, Jackie Cross.
    Elizabeth Durley Lemons


    Me with Dan Beattie


    Class of '52

    Jerry Rea '53 and Elizabeth Durley '54
Other alums in these photos include Wes Doe '53, Mary Alice Sleight '52, Don Churchward '56, Lou Colombano '52, Sheila Claire Dolan '51, Nace Benum '52, Ralph Orduno '53, George Shammus '52, Esther Danho '52, Tony Navarro '52, Dan Beattie '52, Rudy Lopez '55, Sandra Shields '52, Jerry Schwartz-Sands '52, Michael Treotola '42. (That last date is NOT a typo!)


Hanging out with Tommy Toiler...George Rhodes '52 (R)
Dan Beattie and '52 Classmates
Nobody went hungry!






Friday, June 5, 2015

Choosing a Final Resting Place

My parents, Roosevelt Memorial Park, Gardena
My second husband, Ken Wilson, died six years ago today. As he'd wanted, the Neptune Society took care of his cremation. For five years his ashes remained in a lime green box from India, above the computer desk in our country home living room, in the far northeast corner of Washington State. Ken had loved living there, and wanted his ashes buried on our property.

We'd joked about it...me, threatening to distribute them behind the barn. Ken, insisting that his remains needed to nourish the rose bushes growing along the side fence. But, he warned me, he didn't want me to put them in the ground until I'd sold the house. He knew that as I continued to age, I'd not be able to tend to the three-and-a-half acres and the four-bedroom, two-story house forever.
The Friday before Memorial Day
So when a prospective buyer emerged, my stepson, Rick, came up to help me clear out the shed and the garage. On the fifth anniversary of his dad's death, the two of us chose a spot where the ashes could be settled, right by the roses. We toasted Ken with a can of beer, and then went to the new sports bar in town to watch the NBA playoffs. I'd been watching those very playoffs the long night when Ken had died.
Grandma, between her two husbands, as she'd planned

Now I've moved back to Califonria. This past May I realized I hadn't been to see the graves of my family since Luella Burgess French, my her hadoptive mom, had died in January, 1987. She'd died on New Year's morning, after being in a come for some time. She'd had respiratory failure, after years of diminishing abilities related to what was likely Alzheimer's. At the Roosevelt Memorial Park that day I remembered helping her choose a cardigan to wear to her husband's funeral four years earlier. She'd already been vague, and had slipped on a sweater with a hole at the elbow, and misbuttoned it. I selected a more suitable one, and she changed. Though she seemed confused when we got to the funeral, she leaned over my father's coffin, murmuring, "Sweetheart, sweetheart."

My son, who lives right here in Orange County, hadn't realized that Grandma had this family plot. He hadn't been to the funerals for this side of the family, because of school, I recall. So he offered to go with me. While we were there we observed that there were few recent gravestones. Most, like my family, had dates in the '40s to the '80s. This, we realized, is because so many people these days, like Ken, choose cremation.

My grandmother bought the plots back in the 1930s. Grandpa Joe was buried there in 1939. The handwritten records book show she made the final payment on the plots in 1943. "A real layaway plan," my son had observed.

My first husband, Bob Elders, too, had been cremated. His ashes had been distributed near the Pacific Ocean, my son said. My birth father, Al Burgess, had been cremated and the Neptune Society scattered his ashes at sea, as he wished. Ken had no affinity for the sea. No, he wanted to be right there by his roses. And he is.

At the cemetery my son asked where I wanted my ashes to go. He's long known that I have asked for cremation. Since I'll be 78 this month, this question isn't premature on his part. I hadn't really thought about that, I realized. At one time, decades ago, I'd thought that the place that had brought me the most joy was Silver Creek Falls, near Scotts Mills, OR, where I used to splash as a child during the three post-WWII years my family had fled California. But I no longer have that strong a tie to those gorgeous waterfalls. I, too, am enamored of the Pacific. But I don't want to be scattered willy nilly over the waves. I'll have to think about it. It will, of course, be my final decision. That's a startling thought.
Grandpa Joe, who died when I was two.

My son, Steve, with his great-grandma's stone

Monday, June 1, 2015

Places I'll Remember



Biltmore Estate, springtime
Birthplace of Gone With the Wind, 979 Crescent Avenue NE, Atlanta, GA 30309

Though I'd gone to North Carolina last month to glean some hints from the instructors at the "Into the Fire" writers' retreat sponsored by Sun Magazine at Wildacres, I also wanted to take advantage of a rare trip to the south to do some sightseeing, as well. I started with two of Asheville's foremost tourist attractions, the incredibly beautiful Biltmore Estate and the light year's humbler former boardinghouse, Old Kentucky Home.
"Dixieland," from Look Homeward Angel

Since my Frequent Flyer return flight had to be booked via Atlanta, I took advantage of that detour to visit the Margaret Mitchell Musuem, located in the modest Crescent Avenue apartment where she lived with her second husband, and where she wrote Gone With the Wind.

Until a few years ago I had never heard of the Biltmore Estate, and I've since learned that several friends here in Southern California have not either. Even though George Washington Vanderbilt began construction on the house and its thousands of acres of property in 1889, and it's often compared to England's Highclere Castle, site of the PBS series, Downton Abbey, we West Coast folks often think of San Simeon, the Hearst Castle, as the epitome of luxurious surroundings. Biltmore Estate belongs to the Gilded Age, that era of rapid economic growth where some families became enormously wealthy.

The success of the Vanderbilt family began with Cornelius, with shipping and railroad empires. The Vanderbilts became one of the wealthiest families in American history. There's another Vanderbilt mansion from the 19th century that I'll someday visit, The Breakers, in Newport, Rhode Island.

In Look Homeward Angel, early 20th century novelist Thomas Wolfe called the boarding house his mother ran "Dixieland." If ever there was a roman a clef, this novel filled the bill. It caused such a stir in Asheville when it was published in 1929. None of the locals believed for one second that a fictional place called Altamont, Catawba, ever existed. They knew it was Asheville, and what's more they could identify nearly everybody in the book. Wolfe even received some death threats, and didn't go home for eight years. By then, the furor had died down, and some townspeople later lamented that no mention of them was made in Wolfe's later novels.

Here's Wolfe's description of what often is called the most famous boardinghouse in fiction:

"Dixieland. It was situated five minutes from the public square, on a pleasant sloping middleclass street of small homes and boarding-houses. Dixieland was a big cheaply constructed frame house of eighteen or twenty drafty high-ceilinged rooms: it had a rambling, unplanned, gabular appearance, and was painted a dirty yellow. It had a pleasant green front yard, not deep but wide, bordered by a row of young deep-bodied maples." —Thomas Wolfe, from Look Homeward, Angel (1929)

Wolfe's life was cut off early. He died in September, 1938, shortly before his 38th birthday. His legacy remains. Here's what Philip Roth has to say:

 “In 1949, when I was sixteen, I stumbled on Thomas Wolfe, who died at thirty-eight in 1938, and who made numerous adolescents aside from me devotees of literature for life.  In Wolfe, everything was heroically outsized, whether it was the voracious appetite for experience of Eugene Gant, the hero of his first two novels, or of George Webber, the hero of his last two. The hero's loneliness, his egocentrism, his sprawling consciousness gave rise to a tone of elegiac lyricism that was endlessly sustained by the raw yearning for an epic existence—for an epic American existence. And, in those postwar years, what imaginative young reader didn't yearn for that?” (Philip Roth)
In 1949, when I was sixteen, I stumbled on Thomas Wolfe, who died at thirty-eight in 1938, and who made numerous adolescents aside from me devotees of literature for life.  In Wolfe, everything was heroically outsized, whether it was the voracious appetite for experience of Eugene Gant, the hero of his first two novels, or of George Webber, the hero of his last two. The hero's loneliness, his egocentrism, his sprawling consciousness gave rise to a tone of elegiac lyricism that was endlessly sustained by the raw yearning for an epic existence--for an epic American existence. And, in those postwar years, what imaginative young reader didn't yearn for that? - See more at: http://www.centerforfiction.org/for-readers/the-book-that-made-me-a-reader-archives/the-writer-who-made-me-a-reader/#sthash.OAImPk03.dpuf
In 1949, when I was sixteen, I stumbled on Thomas Wolfe, who died at thirty-eight in 1938, and who made numerous adolescents aside from me devotees of literature for life.  In Wolfe, everything was heroically outsized, whether it was the voracious appetite for experience of Eugene Gant, the hero of his first two novels, or of George Webber, the hero of his last two. The hero's loneliness, his egocentrism, his sprawling consciousness gave rise to a tone of elegiac lyricism that was endlessly sustained by the raw yearning for an epic existence--for an epic American existence. And, in those postwar years, what imaginative young reader didn't yearn for that? - See more at: http://www.centerforfiction.org/for-readers/the-book-that-made-me-a-reader-archives/the-writer-who-made-me-a-reader/#sthash.OAImPk03.dpuf

In 1949, when I was sixteen, I stumbled on Thomas Wolfe, who died at thirty-eight in 1938, and who made numerous adolescents aside from me devotees of literature for life.  In Wolfe, everything was heroically outsized, whether it was the voracious appetite for experience of Eugene Gant, the hero of his first two novels, or of George Webber, the hero of his last two. The hero's loneliness, his egocentrism, his sprawling consciousness gave rise to a tone of elegiac lyricism that was endlessly sustained by the raw yearning for an epic existence--for an epic American existence. And, in those postwar years, what imaginative young reader didn't yearn for that? - See more at: http://www.centerforfiction.org/for-readers/the-book-that-made-me-a-reader-archives/the-writer-who-made-me-a-reader/#sthash.OAImPk03.dpuf

According to legend, Margaret Mitchell's second husband, John Marsh, encouraged her to write a book while she was recuperating from a long illness. He'd been bringing home stacks of library books to keep her amused, and then made the suggestion that she could better spend her time writing one herself about her hometown of Atlanta. So she did, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1937. I visited the actual apartment, a modest series of narrow rooms, with a bedroom/dining room combination, that also contains Margaret's original desk.

After the success of the novel and the subsequent blockbuster film, Mitchell devoted herself to supporting local charities, becoming penpals with servicemen, and providing medical scholarships for students at Morehouse College, an all-male historically black liberal arts college near Atlanta. She never wrote another novel. She, too, died young, killed crossing Peachtree Street on her way with her husband to a movie. She was 49.

For a poignant yet hilarious take on how Mitchell's novel influenced the direction his own writing took, here's a link to the preface Pat Conroy wrote for the 75th anniversary edition of Gone With the Wind. It's worth reading in its entirety, but here's his secret...Conroy's mom began reading the book to him as a bedtime story when he was only five years old! http://www.npr.org/2011/05/04/135990428/pat-conroy-marks-75-years-of-gone-with-the-wind

It's worth taking the time when visiting the Mitchell Museum to see the two-hour documentary on the making of the movie. Many Mitchell scholars claim that the fuss made over her book and the subsequent movie so overwhelmed her that she lacked the heart to tell another story.
Thomas Wolfe, 1937


Margaret Mitchell