Alice was born to Walter Robeson & Charlotte Catherine (De Forest) Galbraith in a rural area where she developed a life long love of horses. Her parents homesteaded near Lost Springs, Wyoming. She was given the middle name "Lucile" after Owen Meredith's popular 19th century book "Lucile." It was one of Grandma Lottie's favorite books.
As a child, she had Rheumatic fever, which is a complex disease that can develop when a strep infection goes untreated. I'm not sure of her age when it happened, but it's usually in children between 5 and 15 years old. She was young, not yet a teenager when she had Rheumatic fever. With that disease, when faced with an ongoing strep infection, the child's immune system can go into overdrive. Instead of targeting just the bacteria, it attacks the body's own tissues, as well. It often adversely affects the heart. She was left with a loud heart murmur due to a hole in her heart. Grandma Lottie assigned few chores to Alice after this happened. In those days, this was considered serious enough that it wasn't thought to be safe for her to learn to drive. Never having learned to drive made her world smaller. When she'd receive a letter from her good friend/relative Georgie Kunkle, her face would light up. Marian Thielbar was another close friend from her childhood. Unfortunately, she didn't have any close friends living nearby.
Alice lost her father in 1923 due to severe burns from a gas plant explosion and her brother Morris in 1927 to blood poisoning. She and her widowed mother lived for awhile with her maternal grandparents Augustus "Gus" & Matilda "Tillie" (Bruen) De Forest.
1930 Omaha, Douglas, Nebraska
Moses R. Galbraith 80 PA widower
Myra Galbraith 52 NE daughter
Charlotte Galbraith 52 NE daughter-in-law. widow, sales lady in dry goods
Alice L. Galbraith 19 WY, granddaughter, stenographer
Her childhood friend Marian Thielbar told me that she thought Alice looked like her grandmother Flora (Reynolds) Galbraith.
As a young woman, Alice loved to go dancing with her friends at a speakeasy. She learned typing and shorthand to work as a secretary. She met Vern on a blind date, then after dating for awhile on 17 March 1930 m. Vern O. Kelly in Sidney, IA. They were on a date when they decided to cross the state line to Iowa to be married by a Justice of the Peace.
They lived in Omaha, NE before moving to Monterey Park, CA where they rented, then to San Gabriel, CA where they bought a cute little white stucco house and raised two daughters. Alice loved her roses, which is why this cemetery was chosen. They moved to the Los Angeles area because Alice wanted to live in a warmer climate than Omaha. Vern had been managing a chain of gas stations in Omaha, but wasn't able to transfer to an equal position in California. He soon took a position as a letter carrier at the San Gabriel post office. Except for the many dog bites, he seemed to enjoy working as a letter carrier. We were never allowed to have a dog when growing up, but I was able to play with neighborhood dogs like Biff the boxer and Duke the collie. There was always at least one family cat.
My earliest memory of her was her happily hoeing one of her flowerbeds in the backyard. Besides her roses, the flowers she liked to grow included white alyssum, sweet peas in various colors, purple iris, and the plants in the front of the house included a bird of paradise, which had grown quite large by 2019, along with a banana tree. The bird of paradise was my Christmas gift to her one year when I was in college, sometime around 1965. She'd mentioned that she wished she had one.
I remember Mom telling me that the bird that we could often hear singing in the tall neighborhood trees was a turtle dove. I often heard it singing hoo-hrrooo, but never managed to see the turtle dove until I moved to another state.
She always said that her favorite color was red. It was never reflected very much in either her clothing or inside the house that I recall, but she did have a number of red roses in her rose garden.
She had an electric corn popper with a handle on top that one would turn as the corn was popping. On Sunday evenings, she liked to make a large ceramic mixing bowl of buttered popcorn for everyone to enjoy while watching TV. She and Vern would watch TV in the living room, while my sister Jean and I would take our popcorn with tea into the room we shared to either watch TV shows that we liked or play Samba, which was a three deck card game similar to Canasta, only a little more complicated. Jean had her own set of Samba cards and a score pad on a clip board that we used. Since I had to share my room, I learned to do my homework after school because the house was always too noisy in evenings to study.
Mom's favorite perfume was a classic named Evening in Paris. It's still being sold in 2022 and is described by one seller as having a fragrance that's a "blend of bergamot top notes, middle notes of Jasmine, Turkish rose, violet, iris, ylang-ylang, and a hint of peach and woody cedar, and base notes of sweet vanilla."
She enjoyed hearing bagpipes, as well as Pete Fountain's Dixieland music and songs like Shenandoah and Danny Boy. She also liked Al Hirt's music. She disliked hillbilly, country, and bluegrass music.
The photo in a cardboard frame was of her as a teenager. It was given to me by her childhood friend Marian Thielbar.
After I graduated from high school, I spent two years living at home while trying to decide on college. Mom began putting a beach towel in front of the TV to watch Richard Hittleman and learn his yoga exercises. I thought it looked like fun, so joined her in doing that. We had a good time learning to do the exercises together. Unfortunately, she didn't continue doing the yoga exercises alone after I started college. It probably would have helped with her mental and physical health as she grew older. After I married and moved to another state, she began having mobility problems. Jean and Dad had her go to a convalescent hospital for awhile. The convalescent hospital was enormously helpful with her physical therapy, but after she returned home either they hadn't given her a physical therapy program to continue with or she just wasn't doing it. I tried and tried to get Jean to ask the Dept. of Geriatrics at UCLA about a geriatrics specialist who could be treating her and Dad, but Jean wouldn't do it. She was taking them to a second rate M.D. in Monterey Park. Jean would say that they didn't want to see a geriatric specialist and that it was enormously difficult to get them to see any doctor. I also tried to get Jean to hire someone to come to the house to help her with their care, but she wouldn't do that either. It sounded like they had become paranoid and didn't want any strangers in the house. Jean gave herself a bout of pneumonia by caring for them alone. It was enormously difficult trying to help them all while living in another state.
Mom enjoyed watching horse races when they were on TV. For awhile, she had a framed portrait of Swaps on their living room wall.
On a sunny warm day in November of 1963, I was hanging laundry on the clothesline in the backyard when I glanced towards the house. Mom had left the house and walked towards me, then just as I looked she turned and headed back towards the house. I could tell by the way she was moving that she was crying. When I went in the house, I learned what was wrong. Pres. Kennedy had been assassinated. Although my parents were Republicans, Mom liked Pres. Kennedy.
Her favorite comedians were Imogene Coca and Phyllis Diller.
She once commented that she thought England's Prince Charles was "handsome."
The rose bushes that Mom treasured received excellent care from her daughter Jean Kelly until Jean fell victim to a classic handyman scam, as defined by the AARP, and left the property to her handyman Mario J. Carrion Sr. of Riverside, CA. In the classic handyman scam, the handyman chooses a senior, usually a woman, who's living alone far away from her family. He makes his victim believe that she's thought of as a member of his family and seeks to alienate her from her real family. As friends die and move away, the victim increasingly depends on the handyman for assistance. Mario got Jean's power of attorney, then coached her with drawing up a will that left most of her estate to him. He had Jean afraid to even talk to the social workers who would have been able to provide her with safe assistance with various problems in her later years .
As a child, she had Rheumatic fever, which is a complex disease that can develop when a strep infection goes untreated. I'm not sure of her age when it happened, but it's usually in children between 5 and 15 years old. She was young, not yet a teenager when she had Rheumatic fever. With that disease, when faced with an ongoing strep infection, the child's immune system can go into overdrive. Instead of targeting just the bacteria, it attacks the body's own tissues, as well. It often adversely affects the heart. She was left with a loud heart murmur due to a hole in her heart. Grandma Lottie assigned few chores to Alice after this happened. In those days, this was considered serious enough that it wasn't thought to be safe for her to learn to drive. Never having learned to drive made her world smaller. When she'd receive a letter from her good friend/relative Georgie Kunkle, her face would light up. Marian Thielbar was another close friend from her childhood. Unfortunately, she didn't have any close friends living nearby.
Alice lost her father in 1923 due to severe burns from a gas plant explosion and her brother Morris in 1927 to blood poisoning. She and her widowed mother lived for awhile with her maternal grandparents Augustus "Gus" & Matilda "Tillie" (Bruen) De Forest.
1930 Omaha, Douglas, Nebraska
Moses R. Galbraith 80 PA widower
Myra Galbraith 52 NE daughter
Charlotte Galbraith 52 NE daughter-in-law. widow, sales lady in dry goods
Alice L. Galbraith 19 WY, granddaughter, stenographer
Her childhood friend Marian Thielbar told me that she thought Alice looked like her grandmother Flora (Reynolds) Galbraith.
As a young woman, Alice loved to go dancing with her friends at a speakeasy. She learned typing and shorthand to work as a secretary. She met Vern on a blind date, then after dating for awhile on 17 March 1930 m. Vern O. Kelly in Sidney, IA. They were on a date when they decided to cross the state line to Iowa to be married by a Justice of the Peace.
They lived in Omaha, NE before moving to Monterey Park, CA where they rented, then to San Gabriel, CA where they bought a cute little white stucco house and raised two daughters. Alice loved her roses, which is why this cemetery was chosen. They moved to the Los Angeles area because Alice wanted to live in a warmer climate than Omaha. Vern had been managing a chain of gas stations in Omaha, but wasn't able to transfer to an equal position in California. He soon took a position as a letter carrier at the San Gabriel post office. Except for the many dog bites, he seemed to enjoy working as a letter carrier. We were never allowed to have a dog when growing up, but I was able to play with neighborhood dogs like Biff the boxer and Duke the collie. There was always at least one family cat.
My earliest memory of her was her happily hoeing one of her flowerbeds in the backyard. Besides her roses, the flowers she liked to grow included white alyssum, sweet peas in various colors, purple iris, and the plants in the front of the house included a bird of paradise, which had grown quite large by 2019, along with a banana tree. The bird of paradise was my Christmas gift to her one year when I was in college, sometime around 1965. She'd mentioned that she wished she had one.
I remember Mom telling me that the bird that we could often hear singing in the tall neighborhood trees was a turtle dove. I often heard it singing hoo-hrrooo, but never managed to see the turtle dove until I moved to another state.
She always said that her favorite color was red. It was never reflected very much in either her clothing or inside the house that I recall, but she did have a number of red roses in her rose garden.
She had an electric corn popper with a handle on top that one would turn as the corn was popping. On Sunday evenings, she liked to make a large ceramic mixing bowl of buttered popcorn for everyone to enjoy while watching TV. She and Vern would watch TV in the living room, while my sister Jean and I would take our popcorn with tea into the room we shared to either watch TV shows that we liked or play Samba, which was a three deck card game similar to Canasta, only a little more complicated. Jean had her own set of Samba cards and a score pad on a clip board that we used. Since I had to share my room, I learned to do my homework after school because the house was always too noisy in evenings to study.
Mom's favorite perfume was a classic named Evening in Paris. It's still being sold in 2022 and is described by one seller as having a fragrance that's a "blend of bergamot top notes, middle notes of Jasmine, Turkish rose, violet, iris, ylang-ylang, and a hint of peach and woody cedar, and base notes of sweet vanilla."
She enjoyed hearing bagpipes, as well as Pete Fountain's Dixieland music and songs like Shenandoah and Danny Boy. She also liked Al Hirt's music. She disliked hillbilly, country, and bluegrass music.
The photo in a cardboard frame was of her as a teenager. It was given to me by her childhood friend Marian Thielbar.
After I graduated from high school, I spent two years living at home while trying to decide on college. Mom began putting a beach towel in front of the TV to watch Richard Hittleman and learn his yoga exercises. I thought it looked like fun, so joined her in doing that. We had a good time learning to do the exercises together. Unfortunately, she didn't continue doing the yoga exercises alone after I started college. It probably would have helped with her mental and physical health as she grew older. After I married and moved to another state, she began having mobility problems. Jean and Dad had her go to a convalescent hospital for awhile. The convalescent hospital was enormously helpful with her physical therapy, but after she returned home either they hadn't given her a physical therapy program to continue with or she just wasn't doing it. I tried and tried to get Jean to ask the Dept. of Geriatrics at UCLA about a geriatrics specialist who could be treating her and Dad, but Jean wouldn't do it. She was taking them to a second rate M.D. in Monterey Park. Jean would say that they didn't want to see a geriatric specialist and that it was enormously difficult to get them to see any doctor. I also tried to get Jean to hire someone to come to the house to help her with their care, but she wouldn't do that either. It sounded like they had become paranoid and didn't want any strangers in the house. Jean gave herself a bout of pneumonia by caring for them alone. It was enormously difficult trying to help them all while living in another state.
Mom enjoyed watching horse races when they were on TV. For awhile, she had a framed portrait of Swaps on their living room wall.
On a sunny warm day in November of 1963, I was hanging laundry on the clothesline in the backyard when I glanced towards the house. Mom had left the house and walked towards me, then just as I looked she turned and headed back towards the house. I could tell by the way she was moving that she was crying. When I went in the house, I learned what was wrong. Pres. Kennedy had been assassinated. Although my parents were Republicans, Mom liked Pres. Kennedy.
Her favorite comedians were Imogene Coca and Phyllis Diller.
She once commented that she thought England's Prince Charles was "handsome."
The rose bushes that Mom treasured received excellent care from her daughter Jean Kelly until Jean fell victim to a classic handyman scam, as defined by the AARP, and left the property to her handyman Mario J. Carrion Sr. of Riverside, CA. In the classic handyman scam, the handyman chooses a senior, usually a woman, who's living alone far away from her family. He makes his victim believe that she's thought of as a member of his family and seeks to alienate her from her real family. As friends die and move away, the victim increasingly depends on the handyman for assistance. Mario got Jean's power of attorney, then coached her with drawing up a will that left most of her estate to him. He had Jean afraid to even talk to the social workers who would have been able to provide her with safe assistance with various problems in her later years .
Alice was born to Walter Robeson & Charlotte Catherine (De Forest) Galbraith in a rural area where she developed a life long love of horses. Her parents homesteaded near Lost Springs, Wyoming. She was given the middle name "Lucile" after Owen Meredith's popular 19th century book "Lucile." It was one of Grandma Lottie's favorite books.
As a child, she had Rheumatic fever, which is a complex disease that can develop when a strep infection goes untreated. I'm not sure of her age when it happened, but it's usually in children between 5 and 15 years old. She was young, not yet a teenager when she had Rheumatic fever. With that disease, when faced with an ongoing strep infection, the child's immune system can go into overdrive. Instead of targeting just the bacteria, it attacks the body's own tissues, as well. It often adversely affects the heart. She was left with a loud heart murmur due to a hole in her heart. Grandma Lottie assigned few chores to Alice after this happened. In those days, this was considered serious enough that it wasn't thought to be safe for her to learn to drive. Never having learned to drive made her world smaller. When she'd receive a letter from her good friend/relative Georgie Kunkle, her face would light up. Marian Thielbar was another close friend from her childhood. Unfortunately, she didn't have any close friends living nearby.
Alice lost her father in 1923 due to severe burns from a gas plant explosion and her brother Morris in 1927 to blood poisoning. She and her widowed mother lived for awhile with her maternal grandparents Augustus "Gus" & Matilda "Tillie" (Bruen) De Forest.
1930 Omaha, Douglas, Nebraska
Moses R. Galbraith 80 PA widower
Myra Galbraith 52 NE daughter
Charlotte Galbraith 52 NE daughter-in-law. widow, sales lady in dry goods
Alice L. Galbraith 19 WY, granddaughter, stenographer
Her childhood friend Marian Thielbar told me that she thought Alice looked like her grandmother Flora (Reynolds) Galbraith.
As a young woman, Alice loved to go dancing with her friends at a speakeasy. She learned typing and shorthand to work as a secretary. She met Vern on a blind date, then after dating for awhile on 17 March 1930 m. Vern O. Kelly in Sidney, IA. They were on a date when they decided to cross the state line to Iowa to be married by a Justice of the Peace.
They lived in Omaha, NE before moving to Monterey Park, CA where they rented, then to San Gabriel, CA where they bought a cute little white stucco house and raised two daughters. Alice loved her roses, which is why this cemetery was chosen. They moved to the Los Angeles area because Alice wanted to live in a warmer climate than Omaha. Vern had been managing a chain of gas stations in Omaha, but wasn't able to transfer to an equal position in California. He soon took a position as a letter carrier at the San Gabriel post office. Except for the many dog bites, he seemed to enjoy working as a letter carrier. We were never allowed to have a dog when growing up, but I was able to play with neighborhood dogs like Biff the boxer and Duke the collie. There was always at least one family cat.
My earliest memory of her was her happily hoeing one of her flowerbeds in the backyard. Besides her roses, the flowers she liked to grow included white alyssum, sweet peas in various colors, purple iris, and the plants in the front of the house included a bird of paradise, which had grown quite large by 2019, along with a banana tree. The bird of paradise was my Christmas gift to her one year when I was in college, sometime around 1965. She'd mentioned that she wished she had one.
I remember Mom telling me that the bird that we could often hear singing in the tall neighborhood trees was a turtle dove. I often heard it singing hoo-hrrooo, but never managed to see the turtle dove until I moved to another state.
She always said that her favorite color was red. It was never reflected very much in either her clothing or inside the house that I recall, but she did have a number of red roses in her rose garden.
She had an electric corn popper with a handle on top that one would turn as the corn was popping. On Sunday evenings, she liked to make a large ceramic mixing bowl of buttered popcorn for everyone to enjoy while watching TV. She and Vern would watch TV in the living room, while my sister Jean and I would take our popcorn with tea into the room we shared to either watch TV shows that we liked or play Samba, which was a three deck card game similar to Canasta, only a little more complicated. Jean had her own set of Samba cards and a score pad on a clip board that we used. Since I had to share my room, I learned to do my homework after school because the house was always too noisy in evenings to study.
Mom's favorite perfume was a classic named Evening in Paris. It's still being sold in 2022 and is described by one seller as having a fragrance that's a "blend of bergamot top notes, middle notes of Jasmine, Turkish rose, violet, iris, ylang-ylang, and a hint of peach and woody cedar, and base notes of sweet vanilla."
She enjoyed hearing bagpipes, as well as Pete Fountain's Dixieland music and songs like Shenandoah and Danny Boy. She also liked Al Hirt's music. She disliked hillbilly, country, and bluegrass music.
The photo in a cardboard frame was of her as a teenager. It was given to me by her childhood friend Marian Thielbar.
After I graduated from high school, I spent two years living at home while trying to decide on college. Mom began putting a beach towel in front of the TV to watch Richard Hittleman and learn his yoga exercises. I thought it looked like fun, so joined her in doing that. We had a good time learning to do the exercises together. Unfortunately, she didn't continue doing the yoga exercises alone after I started college. It probably would have helped with her mental and physical health as she grew older. After I married and moved to another state, she began having mobility problems. Jean and Dad had her go to a convalescent hospital for awhile. The convalescent hospital was enormously helpful with her physical therapy, but after she returned home either they hadn't given her a physical therapy program to continue with or she just wasn't doing it. I tried and tried to get Jean to ask the Dept. of Geriatrics at UCLA about a geriatrics specialist who could be treating her and Dad, but Jean wouldn't do it. She was taking them to a second rate M.D. in Monterey Park. Jean would say that they didn't want to see a geriatric specialist and that it was enormously difficult to get them to see any doctor. I also tried to get Jean to hire someone to come to the house to help her with their care, but she wouldn't do that either. It sounded like they had become paranoid and didn't want any strangers in the house. Jean gave herself a bout of pneumonia by caring for them alone. It was enormously difficult trying to help them all while living in another state.
Mom enjoyed watching horse races when they were on TV. For awhile, she had a framed portrait of Swaps on their living room wall.
On a sunny warm day in November of 1963, I was hanging laundry on the clothesline in the backyard when I glanced towards the house. Mom had left the house and walked towards me, then just as I looked she turned and headed back towards the house. I could tell by the way she was moving that she was crying. When I went in the house, I learned what was wrong. Pres. Kennedy had been assassinated. Although my parents were Republicans, Mom liked Pres. Kennedy.
Her favorite comedians were Imogene Coca and Phyllis Diller.
She once commented that she thought England's Prince Charles was "handsome."
The rose bushes that Mom treasured received excellent care from her daughter Jean Kelly until Jean fell victim to a classic handyman scam, as defined by the AARP, and left the property to her handyman Mario J. Carrion Sr. of Riverside, CA. In the classic handyman scam, the handyman chooses a senior, usually a woman, who's living alone far away from her family. He makes his victim believe that she's thought of as a member of his family and seeks to alienate her from her real family. As friends die and move away, the victim increasingly depends on the handyman for assistance. Mario got Jean's power of attorney, then coached her with drawing up a will that left most of her estate to him. He had Jean afraid to even talk to the social workers who would have been able to provide her with safe assistance with various problems in her later years .
As a child, she had Rheumatic fever, which is a complex disease that can develop when a strep infection goes untreated. I'm not sure of her age when it happened, but it's usually in children between 5 and 15 years old. She was young, not yet a teenager when she had Rheumatic fever. With that disease, when faced with an ongoing strep infection, the child's immune system can go into overdrive. Instead of targeting just the bacteria, it attacks the body's own tissues, as well. It often adversely affects the heart. She was left with a loud heart murmur due to a hole in her heart. Grandma Lottie assigned few chores to Alice after this happened. In those days, this was considered serious enough that it wasn't thought to be safe for her to learn to drive. Never having learned to drive made her world smaller. When she'd receive a letter from her good friend/relative Georgie Kunkle, her face would light up. Marian Thielbar was another close friend from her childhood. Unfortunately, she didn't have any close friends living nearby.
Alice lost her father in 1923 due to severe burns from a gas plant explosion and her brother Morris in 1927 to blood poisoning. She and her widowed mother lived for awhile with her maternal grandparents Augustus "Gus" & Matilda "Tillie" (Bruen) De Forest.
1930 Omaha, Douglas, Nebraska
Moses R. Galbraith 80 PA widower
Myra Galbraith 52 NE daughter
Charlotte Galbraith 52 NE daughter-in-law. widow, sales lady in dry goods
Alice L. Galbraith 19 WY, granddaughter, stenographer
Her childhood friend Marian Thielbar told me that she thought Alice looked like her grandmother Flora (Reynolds) Galbraith.
As a young woman, Alice loved to go dancing with her friends at a speakeasy. She learned typing and shorthand to work as a secretary. She met Vern on a blind date, then after dating for awhile on 17 March 1930 m. Vern O. Kelly in Sidney, IA. They were on a date when they decided to cross the state line to Iowa to be married by a Justice of the Peace.
They lived in Omaha, NE before moving to Monterey Park, CA where they rented, then to San Gabriel, CA where they bought a cute little white stucco house and raised two daughters. Alice loved her roses, which is why this cemetery was chosen. They moved to the Los Angeles area because Alice wanted to live in a warmer climate than Omaha. Vern had been managing a chain of gas stations in Omaha, but wasn't able to transfer to an equal position in California. He soon took a position as a letter carrier at the San Gabriel post office. Except for the many dog bites, he seemed to enjoy working as a letter carrier. We were never allowed to have a dog when growing up, but I was able to play with neighborhood dogs like Biff the boxer and Duke the collie. There was always at least one family cat.
My earliest memory of her was her happily hoeing one of her flowerbeds in the backyard. Besides her roses, the flowers she liked to grow included white alyssum, sweet peas in various colors, purple iris, and the plants in the front of the house included a bird of paradise, which had grown quite large by 2019, along with a banana tree. The bird of paradise was my Christmas gift to her one year when I was in college, sometime around 1965. She'd mentioned that she wished she had one.
I remember Mom telling me that the bird that we could often hear singing in the tall neighborhood trees was a turtle dove. I often heard it singing hoo-hrrooo, but never managed to see the turtle dove until I moved to another state.
She always said that her favorite color was red. It was never reflected very much in either her clothing or inside the house that I recall, but she did have a number of red roses in her rose garden.
She had an electric corn popper with a handle on top that one would turn as the corn was popping. On Sunday evenings, she liked to make a large ceramic mixing bowl of buttered popcorn for everyone to enjoy while watching TV. She and Vern would watch TV in the living room, while my sister Jean and I would take our popcorn with tea into the room we shared to either watch TV shows that we liked or play Samba, which was a three deck card game similar to Canasta, only a little more complicated. Jean had her own set of Samba cards and a score pad on a clip board that we used. Since I had to share my room, I learned to do my homework after school because the house was always too noisy in evenings to study.
Mom's favorite perfume was a classic named Evening in Paris. It's still being sold in 2022 and is described by one seller as having a fragrance that's a "blend of bergamot top notes, middle notes of Jasmine, Turkish rose, violet, iris, ylang-ylang, and a hint of peach and woody cedar, and base notes of sweet vanilla."
She enjoyed hearing bagpipes, as well as Pete Fountain's Dixieland music and songs like Shenandoah and Danny Boy. She also liked Al Hirt's music. She disliked hillbilly, country, and bluegrass music.
The photo in a cardboard frame was of her as a teenager. It was given to me by her childhood friend Marian Thielbar.
After I graduated from high school, I spent two years living at home while trying to decide on college. Mom began putting a beach towel in front of the TV to watch Richard Hittleman and learn his yoga exercises. I thought it looked like fun, so joined her in doing that. We had a good time learning to do the exercises together. Unfortunately, she didn't continue doing the yoga exercises alone after I started college. It probably would have helped with her mental and physical health as she grew older. After I married and moved to another state, she began having mobility problems. Jean and Dad had her go to a convalescent hospital for awhile. The convalescent hospital was enormously helpful with her physical therapy, but after she returned home either they hadn't given her a physical therapy program to continue with or she just wasn't doing it. I tried and tried to get Jean to ask the Dept. of Geriatrics at UCLA about a geriatrics specialist who could be treating her and Dad, but Jean wouldn't do it. She was taking them to a second rate M.D. in Monterey Park. Jean would say that they didn't want to see a geriatric specialist and that it was enormously difficult to get them to see any doctor. I also tried to get Jean to hire someone to come to the house to help her with their care, but she wouldn't do that either. It sounded like they had become paranoid and didn't want any strangers in the house. Jean gave herself a bout of pneumonia by caring for them alone. It was enormously difficult trying to help them all while living in another state.
Mom enjoyed watching horse races when they were on TV. For awhile, she had a framed portrait of Swaps on their living room wall.
On a sunny warm day in November of 1963, I was hanging laundry on the clothesline in the backyard when I glanced towards the house. Mom had left the house and walked towards me, then just as I looked she turned and headed back towards the house. I could tell by the way she was moving that she was crying. When I went in the house, I learned what was wrong. Pres. Kennedy had been assassinated. Although my parents were Republicans, Mom liked Pres. Kennedy.
Her favorite comedians were Imogene Coca and Phyllis Diller.
She once commented that she thought England's Prince Charles was "handsome."
The rose bushes that Mom treasured received excellent care from her daughter Jean Kelly until Jean fell victim to a classic handyman scam, as defined by the AARP, and left the property to her handyman Mario J. Carrion Sr. of Riverside, CA. In the classic handyman scam, the handyman chooses a senior, usually a woman, who's living alone far away from her family. He makes his victim believe that she's thought of as a member of his family and seeks to alienate her from her real family. As friends die and move away, the victim increasingly depends on the handyman for assistance. Mario got Jean's power of attorney, then coached her with drawing up a will that left most of her estate to him. He had Jean afraid to even talk to the social workers who would have been able to provide her with safe assistance with various problems in her later years .
Family Members
Parents
Siblings
Half Siblings
Children
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
Explore more
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
