This will be the first of many of the chapters of my life. I hope that by the time I am finished that I will have enough material to publish for my children and grandchildren. These are very personal memories and I hope you enjoy them.
Part One, Just Me
When I was born, the earth shook. At least that is what I was told just about every year on my birthday by my Aunt June. I was also born on my Uncle Tom’s birthday. I was born on August 27, 1945 in O’Conner Hospital in San Jose, California. When I was about twelve years old the hospital was torn down and a big new Sears store was built there. After that my cousins would always say that I was born in the hardware department of Sears and Roebuck. My father, whom I was named after, was in the United States Army Air Corps and was deployed for World War II when I was born, and my mother was living with her sister, Aunt June in “the house on the hill” in Los Gatos, California. I went by that house many times when I was growing up. The house had a flight of stairs from the street to the porch and “Uncle Tom carried me up those stairs”. Maybe it was a big thing to my folks, but as I remember, it was only a few stairs and I weighed less than eight pounds.
Aunt June was right when she said the earth shook when I was born because immediately after I was born an earthquake struck the area. My mother was still on the delivery table and remembered the lights in the room swaying back and forth on their cables. I figure it was the earthquake that made me such a smart little kid. According to my mother I was a very smart little child. I was potty trained at six months. At least that is what she claimed right up until she died at age eighty two. As we sat around the dinner table all those the years in my home, my family would laugh when she told the story. Laughing, she would swear it was true. My kids would embellish the story and she would laugh and then swear again it was true. Of course no one believed it, but we always enjoyed the story. Funny thing is that in the years since her death, the story still gets told at family dinners and we all laugh just as much and miss Gigi at the same time. Sometimes tears flow…in laughter and in memory of Gigi.
My father was assigned to the Pacific Theater during the war. He was a flight navigator and his unit flew troops and materials in the region. His last assignment during the war was flying troops across the Burma Hump into Burma. Following the end of the war, President Truman implemented the Marshall Plan to rebuild Japan and strengthen the Chinese Government against the growing threat from the Chinese Communists. At the time, China was pacified and family members were allowed to join their husbands and fathers in China. My dad was stationed in Peking. So, in 1946, when I was about a year old, my mother and I boarded a ship and steamed across the Pacific to Shanghai, China. Of course, all I have of this is the stories I have been told and the home movies that I grew up seeing.
We stayed in China about two years before being evacuated as the Chinese Communists began taking over the country and the Government. My mother told of the harrowing trip from our home on the base in Peking to the port in Shanghai. It was a trip we made in the back of the staff car, laying on the floor so the revolutionists could not see us. Mom was very relieved when she and I were on board the ship and sailing back to San Francisco.
After returning to California and after my father was discharged from the Army, we moved to Oakland where my father went to work for Heinz Foods. He enjoyed working for Heinz and would roll over in his grave if he knew later the Democratic Presidential Candidate was married to the widow of the Heinz ketchup fortune! In Oakland, on August 22, 1948, my sister Evelyn was born.
I vaguely remember my mother coming home from the hospital with Evelyn and my being able to see her in the bassinet. I distinctly remember that she was dressed in white and that I thought she “looked dark” (her complexion).
Sometime after Evelyn was born, we moved to San Francisco. I get fuzzy here on the time line, but my father purchased a small neighborhood grocery store on Folsom Street; The Folsom Street Market, and my Dad became a grocer. We lived in a little two bedroom apartment behind the store and it is in that little place I have some of my earliest recollections. I remember my mother sending me into the store to get some milk. I got the milk and went up to the front counter and pretended to pay for the milk. My dad took my “money” and gave me change….a penny. I can remember that incident as if it had just happened recently, and not fifty six years or so ago. I related that memory to my mother some years ago and she confirmed the story.
My father was concerned about the neighborhood because of the low cost government housing that was being built right around us. I remember standing in front of the store with my dad and his being upset because of the high rises being built across the street. Years later I would come to know why he was so upset when my mother told me of the problems and their concern. One night after the store had closed (no 24 hour stuff then), some teenagers broke into the store. I remember my dad running out into the store with a stick, probably a baseball bat, and yelling, chasing the vandals off. It was shortly after that my Dad sold the store and we moved back to San Jose. I have not been in San Francisco for many years, but I remember in the sixties that my Uncle Lee, who worked in San Francisco, told me that Folsom Street where I lived as a young child was now one of the most crime ridden slums in the city. Taxi cabs would not go into that area after 6 PM.
When we moved to San Jose, we moved into a house next door to Aunt Jean and Uncle Chris, and my two cousins Kathy and Christine. They lived in what was out in the country on Stevens Creek Road and had a chicken farm. The house we rented was just across the driveway from their house. I have lots of memories there that I will relate somewhere else in these pages. Suffice it to say that Kathy and I were able to get into a lot of trouble and have lots of fun in those carefree days. You could never even find where the chicken farm is now because it is no longer in the country. Stevens Creek Road became Stevens Creek BLVD sometime in the late fifties or early sixties and today is one of the busiest business areas in the entire Santa Clara Valley.
We stayed in the house at the chicken farm for a few months and my parents purchased a new home on Monroe Street. We moved into our new home on my sixth birthday. The stories of Monroe Street will take volumes to tell, and I hope before I have finished I will have told all those stories. I lived in the Monroe Street house until just before I got married in 1968.
On November 10, 1955, my brother Henry James was born. He was born in the San Jose Hospital. He was a beautiful baby and a wonderful little boy, but was sick most of his short life. Having suffered from diabetes from age 2, and many other severe ailments the remainder of his life, he passed away in March 1964 after spending most of the last year of his life in the Stanford Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto, California. He is buried in the Santa Clara City Cemetery next to his grandmother, Della Mary Puckett. Over the many years since I left San Jose, whenever I have had occasion to return to visit or on business, I have taken the opportunity to visit his grave and leave flowers. Even though we were ten years apart in age, we were very close. I would go with my mother to the hospital as often as I could during those last months of his life and spent hours rubbing or softly tickling his very sore arms and legs. He never walked those last months, having to be moved in a wheel chair. We had visited with his the Sunday afternoon he died. We had come home and were getting ready to retire when we got a phone call from the hospital telling us that Henry had expired. I remember my mother dropped the phone and sank to the floor in great sobs. I took the phone and talked to the doctor and he told me what had happened. I was eighteen at the time and had to make arrangements for the funeral home to pick Henry up before sunrise. It has been more than forty years since his passing and I still think of him often. My mother never did get over his passing.
My sister, Evelyn, passed away at age thirty two in 1981, after losing a life long battle with diabetes, and later other complications related to that horrible disease. She was laid to rest in Chico, California, her home for many years. I have never been back to her grave because I have had no cause to return to Chico, but I hope to visit her one day before I die, if for no other reason than to put a final note in that Chapter of my life. I was always very close to Evelyn and miss her greatly.
When I was born, the earth shook. At least that is what I was told just about every year on my birthday by my Aunt June. I was also born on my Uncle Tom’s birthday. I was born on August 27, 1945 in O’Conner Hospital in San Jose, California. When I was about twelve years old the hospital was torn down and a big new Sears store was built there. After that my cousins would always say that I was born in the hardware department of Sears and Roebuck. My father, whom I was named after, was in the United States Army Air Corps and was deployed for World War II when I was born, and my mother was living with her sister, Aunt June in “the house on the hill” in Los Gatos, California. I went by that house many times when I was growing up. The house had a flight of stairs from the street to the porch and “Uncle Tom carried me up those stairs”. Maybe it was a big thing to my folks, but as I remember, it was only a few stairs and I weighed less than eight pounds.
Aunt June was right when she said the earth shook when I was born because immediately after I was born an earthquake struck the area. My mother was still on the delivery table and remembered the lights in the room swaying back and forth on their cables. I figure it was the earthquake that made me such a smart little kid. According to my mother I was a very smart little child. I was potty trained at six months. At least that is what she claimed right up until she died at age eighty two. As we sat around the dinner table all those the years in my home, my family would laugh when she told the story. Laughing, she would swear it was true. My kids would embellish the story and she would laugh and then swear again it was true. Of course no one believed it, but we always enjoyed the story. Funny thing is that in the years since her death, the story still gets told at family dinners and we all laugh just as much and miss Gigi at the same time. Sometimes tears flow…in laughter and in memory of Gigi.
My father was assigned to the Pacific Theater during the war. He was a flight navigator and his unit flew troops and materials in the region. His last assignment during the war was flying troops across the Burma Hump into Burma. Following the end of the war, President Truman implemented the Marshall Plan to rebuild Japan and strengthen the Chinese Government against the growing threat from the Chinese Communists. At the time, China was pacified and family members were allowed to join their husbands and fathers in China. My dad was stationed in Peking. So, in 1946, when I was about a year old, my mother and I boarded a ship and steamed across the Pacific to Shanghai, China. Of course, all I have of this is the stories I have been told and the home movies that I grew up seeing.
We stayed in China about two years before being evacuated as the Chinese Communists began taking over the country and the Government. My mother told of the harrowing trip from our home on the base in Peking to the port in Shanghai. It was a trip we made in the back of the staff car, laying on the floor so the revolutionists could not see us. Mom was very relieved when she and I were on board the ship and sailing back to San Francisco.
After returning to California and after my father was discharged from the Army, we moved to Oakland where my father went to work for Heinz Foods. He enjoyed working for Heinz and would roll over in his grave if he knew later the Democratic Presidential Candidate was married to the widow of the Heinz ketchup fortune! In Oakland, on August 22, 1948, my sister Evelyn was born.
I vaguely remember my mother coming home from the hospital with Evelyn and my being able to see her in the bassinet. I distinctly remember that she was dressed in white and that I thought she “looked dark” (her complexion).
Sometime after Evelyn was born, we moved to San Francisco. I get fuzzy here on the time line, but my father purchased a small neighborhood grocery store on Folsom Street; The Folsom Street Market, and my Dad became a grocer. We lived in a little two bedroom apartment behind the store and it is in that little place I have some of my earliest recollections. I remember my mother sending me into the store to get some milk. I got the milk and went up to the front counter and pretended to pay for the milk. My dad took my “money” and gave me change….a penny. I can remember that incident as if it had just happened recently, and not fifty six years or so ago. I related that memory to my mother some years ago and she confirmed the story.
My father was concerned about the neighborhood because of the low cost government housing that was being built right around us. I remember standing in front of the store with my dad and his being upset because of the high rises being built across the street. Years later I would come to know why he was so upset when my mother told me of the problems and their concern. One night after the store had closed (no 24 hour stuff then), some teenagers broke into the store. I remember my dad running out into the store with a stick, probably a baseball bat, and yelling, chasing the vandals off. It was shortly after that my Dad sold the store and we moved back to San Jose. I have not been in San Francisco for many years, but I remember in the sixties that my Uncle Lee, who worked in San Francisco, told me that Folsom Street where I lived as a young child was now one of the most crime ridden slums in the city. Taxi cabs would not go into that area after 6 PM.
When we moved to San Jose, we moved into a house next door to Aunt Jean and Uncle Chris, and my two cousins Kathy and Christine. They lived in what was out in the country on Stevens Creek Road and had a chicken farm. The house we rented was just across the driveway from their house. I have lots of memories there that I will relate somewhere else in these pages. Suffice it to say that Kathy and I were able to get into a lot of trouble and have lots of fun in those carefree days. You could never even find where the chicken farm is now because it is no longer in the country. Stevens Creek Road became Stevens Creek BLVD sometime in the late fifties or early sixties and today is one of the busiest business areas in the entire Santa Clara Valley.
We stayed in the house at the chicken farm for a few months and my parents purchased a new home on Monroe Street. We moved into our new home on my sixth birthday. The stories of Monroe Street will take volumes to tell, and I hope before I have finished I will have told all those stories. I lived in the Monroe Street house until just before I got married in 1968.
On November 10, 1955, my brother Henry James was born. He was born in the San Jose Hospital. He was a beautiful baby and a wonderful little boy, but was sick most of his short life. Having suffered from diabetes from age 2, and many other severe ailments the remainder of his life, he passed away in March 1964 after spending most of the last year of his life in the Stanford Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto, California. He is buried in the Santa Clara City Cemetery next to his grandmother, Della Mary Puckett. Over the many years since I left San Jose, whenever I have had occasion to return to visit or on business, I have taken the opportunity to visit his grave and leave flowers. Even though we were ten years apart in age, we were very close. I would go with my mother to the hospital as often as I could during those last months of his life and spent hours rubbing or softly tickling his very sore arms and legs. He never walked those last months, having to be moved in a wheel chair. We had visited with his the Sunday afternoon he died. We had come home and were getting ready to retire when we got a phone call from the hospital telling us that Henry had expired. I remember my mother dropped the phone and sank to the floor in great sobs. I took the phone and talked to the doctor and he told me what had happened. I was eighteen at the time and had to make arrangements for the funeral home to pick Henry up before sunrise. It has been more than forty years since his passing and I still think of him often. My mother never did get over his passing.
My sister, Evelyn, passed away at age thirty two in 1981, after losing a life long battle with diabetes, and later other complications related to that horrible disease. She was laid to rest in Chico, California, her home for many years. I have never been back to her grave because I have had no cause to return to Chico, but I hope to visit her one day before I die, if for no other reason than to put a final note in that Chapter of my life. I was always very close to Evelyn and miss her greatly.
2 Read My Post:
I cried.
Awesome! I hope you get them all written down because it would be awesome to retell these stories to my kids and their kids!
Love you,
Hilary
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