San Pedro Ward - Part 1

The San Pedro Ward chapel.  This has to be one of the coolest, most original chapels in all the church.  Originally, the wall with the windows was an outside wall but a new wing was added on that side and the windows became light boxes.  The large window at the back of the chapel went to the cry-room.  It was a great place to hang out when you didn't want to sit in the chapel itself.  Of course, you had to listen to all the babies up there that were crying.  I remember my first meeting in this chapel.  Well, sort of.  We were sitting near the back, in the center, and I went to sleep.  About two-thirds of the way back, in the center, was the row that we kids always called "death-row."  It was where all the old widows would sit together.  One of them was Sister Lambertson.  She was the one that my mom and dad would get to come and babysit us when they went out.  She eventually left death-row in the usual manner.

Our Home in Miraleste

2777 Calle Aventure, Miraleste, CA

This is the street in front of the house where I grew up.  My house is on the left with the pickup truck in the driveway.  One of the things I remember about this street was skate-boarding down it all the time.  The street was fairly steep and you could really get a good ride if you didn't fall down and get banged up instead. I had a lot of good times growing up in this neighborhood.  We moved into this house in 1963 and it looks pretty much the same except with a few landscaping changes.  One of the more unpleasurable memories, however, was doing the landscaping when we moved in.  The terra-forming was not easy because the dirt was just full of rocks and not just any old rocks but huge rocks; boulders.  I know that there was one in the corner of the yard over next to the house below us, that we never did find the edges of and weren't able to get out.  We used to have a tall palm tree in the front yard but it is now long gone.

At the bottom of the street there was this big field that we used to play in.  It is now a park but back then it was just a field with tall grass that you could hide in.  The view from the bottom of the street was pretty good but back then I don't think we much thought about the view.  Once I remember playing hide and seek in the grass.  I dove down into the grass and after a while I looked around and found half of a freshly killed jack-rabbit right next to me.  Today, before you enter the park, there is a sign that says "Watch out for rattle snakes."  Today it is grass.  I can't even imagine how close I must have been to any snakes when we were running through those fields.

From the front door of the house, you could look out over the house on the other side of the street and see Catalina Island but only on days where it was clear enough to see.  This area is known as one of the foggiest areas in the United States.  It is on a peninsula that juts out into the ocean and the conditions are just right for fog.  So, there were a lot of times that the view was obscured by fog or just haze that would sit on the ocean.  Once, when I was driving, the fog was so thick that I got disoriented and lost in an intersection (PV Drive East and Crest Road).  The intersection curves and I could only see as far as the front of the car so I was trying to judge how much it curved as I drove through it.  I made it but it was pretty scary.

Mom the Nurse

Mom was a nurse and spent a lot of time working in her profession. It looks like, in this photograph, that she is getting crowned for having achieved a certain level or something like that. I remember many evenings, sitting around the dinner table with Mom talking about all the different things she had done during the day while working as a nurse. She spent a lot of time working in the intensive care unit at San Pedro Peninsula Hospital. She also worked in the emergency room for a while and also in the cardiac care unit. I remember when she started working in the cardiac unit that she would come to me to learn the ekg patterns because I had picked up on them while working as a messenger at the hospital. I had extra time during my rounds and would stop there for a little bit and ask questions about the patterns.

For a while, it was kind of tough when Mom was put on the swing shift because she would be asleep when I got in the morning to go to school and then gone to work when I came home. I remember once that I hadn't seen her in about three weeks so just before going to school, I popped my head in her room just to make sure she was still there. Of course, either Nanny cooked our meals or I learned how to make my them myself.

I guess, because she had worked in the emergency room and seen a lot of things (like me when I was a paramedic), she was pretty calm about the little injuries that we would get. Once I fell down and cracked my head open on something and I was bleeding all over the place. Of course, I thought I was going to die but Mom just comes out and puts something over it and says to me, "come on, get in the car and we'll get it fixed." It was just like it was nothing. I've pretty much gotten to be the same way.

Mom worked as a nurse for as long as she could before the effects of her disease prevented her doing so. She was a good nurse and it seems like everyone at the hospital knew and liked her.

Mom and her cats

Mom loved her cats. We always had cats in the house. I think I remember hearing how when she was little that there were so many cats around the house that she got into trouble for it.

Siamese cats were her favorite and I have to admit that they are my favorite too. The only problem with siamese cats is that they are incredibly stupid when it comes to street smarts. It seems that we went through quite a few of them because they would get out at night and then get run over by a car. Every time one of them got out for the night, Mom would spend half the night fretting and worrying and calling for the cat. Of course there was always a lot of wailing and mourning every time that one of them got smashed. I've actually found that the best siamese cats are one's that aren't pure-bred but that have a little of plain old alley cat in them. You get the blue eyes and the constant talkiness of them but they can survive out on the street. I currently have one that doesn't look at all siamese but which has those traits.

Before I left home, Mom had her Siamese cat, Sam and we had a white mongrel, Tiger, another fluffy white cat, Tootsie which belonged to Steven.

The problem with so many cats, and especially with male cats, is that when there is more than one of them, they have an overwhelming need to mark their territory. Too often, you would wake up to the sound of one them spraying your door out in the hallway. Mom didn't seem to mind though because she loved her cats.

Mom

Elsie Elaine Hoey, 1930 - 1981: This photo was taken shortly before Mom passed away. She is holding my oldest child, Nicolas, on her lap while Nanny is holding Casey. Casey was born in May of 1980 and Mom passed away in July of 1981. I just realized that my memories of her are starting to get pretty thin. Mom had contracted ALS or Lou Gherig's Disease which progressively took away the use of her muscles until in July of 1981 she had to be hospitalized because her diaphragm was weakened to the point where she couldn't breath. Mom did not want to live on a respirator.

I am going to try and remember all that I can of her, for the next little while, and tell them. I have quite a few photographs of her from when she was very young up to when she passed away. Hopefully they will jog my memory.

Mom really loved her grandchildren. When she passed away, she had three of them. John's daughter, Tiffany, was the other. At the time of her passing, I was living in Utah. Several times, Mom and Dad made the trip up there to see us and I suspect that it was mainly because Mom wanted to see the grandchildren. Of course, this was no easy task for her because of her disease. She once showed up with this humongous stuffed animal for Nicolas. That is probably one of my regrets that we were living so far away at the time that she didn't get to see the kids that often before she left. Before she died, Dad was good enough to fly me down to Los Angeles to see her while she was in the hospital. I got to visit with her for about a half hour. She was heavily sedated so it was kind of a lucid visit. You could tell that on one hand she was ready to leave behind the troubles that the disease had given her but on the other hand she wasn't ready to leave children and grandchildren behind. I returned home after the visit and then we received a phone call a short while later that she had passed away.

Cowarts

This is my great-grandmother's family taken in 1899. My great-grandmother is standing in the back in the middle. She was the oldest of nine children born in 1879. She was the daughter of Samuel Rushing Cowart (b. 1855) who is sitting in the front, and of Margie Ann Camelia Rebecca Bush who is also sitting in the front though I'm not sure which one she is. There are three older women in the front and I'm not sure if she is the one on the right or in the middle. The oldest looking woman on the left is undoubtedly one of my great great great grandmothers, probably Mary Ann Breland who was born in 1817 and is Samuel Rushing Cowart's mother. This photo would have been taken in Bush, St Tammany, Louisiana where they lived. I do remember my great-grandmother, Zipporah (a.k.a. Pearl) Cowart though when I knew her, she was grandma Grosche with the "e" being pronounced as a long "a". Grosche was the name of her third husband.

When I was younger, we would visit her and my grandparents, in Bogalusa, Louisiana quite frequently. She lived in a house that had been built around 1917. It was a typical (I don't know why I am saying "was" because it is still there.) southern house that was built on top of piers so that you could crawl around beneath the house. It was painted white with a green roof and had a clapboard exterior. There was a fairly large yard with chicken coops and a large work shed (corrugated steel exterior) that my grandfather had built. The house was on a corner and had two driveways both of which were just gravel. There was also a large porch on the front of the house with a bench swing at one end of it.

Some of the things I remember, when we used to visit and that I liked to do, was catch frogs and look for colored rocks on the driveway. There used to be a zillion thumb sized tree frogs all over that yard. There were so many that it was hard not to step on one once in a while. I remember that on the driveway, there were always a bunch of flat ones that the car had smashed. They tell me that many years ago, however, they had been spraying pesticides and all the frogs "croaked." In some of my later trips back there, I didn't see frogs anymore. The driveway was covered with pea gravel and the rocks would usually be of all different colors so while the adults visited, I'd be outside looking for pretty colored rocks.

One other feature of the house was that there was a big fig tree in the front. When the figs were ripe, they would pick them and then bottle them in a heavy syrup. If I think real hard, I can still taste those bottled figs which were really yummy.

As for my great-grandmother, I can't really remember any coversations with her but I remember that she was older with gray hair and kind of portly. She always wore a long dress that seemed thread-bare that had a floral pattern on it and she wore glasses. When I look at her photographs, I see a woman who aged very quickly. Her first husband died when the youngest child was only four years old. I heard stories that she would rent out a room to boarders which means the kids (4) probably had to squeeze into a room by themselves. I have a photograph of her working in a factory where she looked pretty haggard. She did, however, live a long life. She passed away in 1971 at the age of 92 years old and I probably hadn't seen her since 1963 after we had moved to California.

La Gare d'Angouleme

Angouleme, 1973: We had gone to the train station in Angouleme to see one of the member families off. The family was moving to Canada so there was the majority of the Branch there to wish them well. One member's husband was a gendarme and he let me wear his kepi (hat) so I could get a photo. Of course, right at the moment of the photo one of the little kids that was leaving for Canada, decided to try and knock the hat off my head. Every time I go this this train station, now, I always remember this little incident.