Friday, October 10, 2008

My Mom


This past week was my mother and my birthdays.
So, here is a little tribute to my mother.
She was born back in the 30’s in lower part of California. In her teen years they moved to Los Angles area and she attended Garfield High.
My parents married soon after she graduated. My father being in the Navy at that time.
All four of us children were born at Montebello Hospital, near LA. We moved to Azusa. My parents lived in that home for about 30+ years and moved to retirement type housing. My father past away 7 years ago and it has been hard for my mother to live by herself and go on without him.
My mom has many talents. She is a great cook, made many of beautiful cakes, sews and has great artistic abilities.
No one is perfect, but I will tell of my good memories.
She drove many a time, us children and friends to the beach in the summer time. One of our many cars was an old 1949 Plymouth chocolate brown station wagon. We would pile into the wagon, oh about 14 of us or so, on the way to the beach, before the freeway was in. We would have to get out and push this car up over the hill and hurry to get back in and cruise down the hill. I enjoyed driving on Beach Blvd. and seeing all the cows and then stores, until finally there it was…. Huntington Beach. Most times when we went we would see some old friends and even some of my mother high school friends.
We also had an old ugly green Oldsmobile (I think it was 1958) and usually two of us would ride in the trunk and hold open the lid with our feet, so to have air, again as a bunch of us would pile in for another beach trip. One time we had to picked up my grandfather (my mother’s father) and we didn’t have good brakes, so my mom would just use the emergency brake and the car would stop, my grandfather was needless to say a bit shocked when she did that the first time and then got use to it.
On the old brown Plymouth, my brother and his friends would wax that station wagon and it shined like a chocolate dipped ice cream cone. In the passenger side of that car was a big enough hole to where we could put our foot out, so we would pretend to stop the car that way, like in the Flintstone cartoons. It was a miracle we never got hurt doing those things, and not having safety belts back then.
My mother could sew most anything. If something wasn’t working out, boy we couldn’t watch or be around when she was sewing. She made many outfits for me and most of my formals for all the high school dances that I went to. I can remember when I went into high school my brother asked my mom to make sure I had in-style clothes as he didn’t want a little sister without the hippest outfits. So back to the sewing table (which was our kitchen table) to cut and sew away. I wouldn’t say I was in style but I had good clothes. She did sew for all of us and made my brother some of the coolest hippy shirts and jams for summer you wish you had.
We had two of the coolest parties during our teen years. My parents put together a Halloween party and a Surfing Safari party, we were envied by our friends who came, they thought my parents to be cool or should I say ‘Groovy’.
My mother could make and decorate any kind of cake you wanted, at least that is what we all thought. I think it was my 13th birthday I wanted a doll cake and purple! She didn’t like purple, but my Granny asked my mom to do and she did. I had the prettiest doll cake, and of course it tasted great! She usually made what she thought was our favorite dinner for our birthdays, so every year I would get meat loaf and scalloped potatoes. I liked meat loaf, but it wasn’t my favorite.
Another great dish we all liked, especially our friends was rolled-up tacos. We would have contest on who could eat the most, I never won. But, my dad, brother and his friends could down a dozen or so. My mom made a lot of tacos back then.
During one of my high school years, we had a week-end evening paper route. We all worked together and folding 1000 papers then delivering them, (they were throw-away, meaning advertising type newspaper). We would stay up into the wee hours of the morning, so my mom cook up hamburgers, fries and bananas shakes. That was a lot of work, as it also included extra friends, this was usually done after delivering the papers. We finally got to bed around 3 a.m.
This is just a few of the good times. Most of the summers when my dad would have vacation time, we went camping up the coast line of California.
My parents were married for a little over 51 years, before my father passed. Here are a couple of their cute pictures.

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