If you wish me to share your thoughts regarding my mom, please e-mail them to me before Sunday, October 13th. The memorial service will be at 3:00pm in Irvine.
In His love, by His grace and for His glory,
George
My memories of Beverly go back more than half a century, when my family and her family were neighbors on the same block in Northridge. I lived at that house from April 1953 to December 1961. Her son George and I were best friends in those wonderful days, for the 1950s were perhaps the best time in the history of our country to be a kid. George and I were frequently in each other's homes during those years, playing sandlot baseball, collecting and trading baseball cards, reading comic books, dressing up as superheroes in costumes we made ourselves out of old bedsheets, being taken by our parents to special places on our birthdays, and under their careful supervision swimming on hot summer days. On the day we received our weekly allowances, we were driven to Frank's Liquor Store to purchase five-cent packs of baseball cards, each containing five cards and a generous stick of bubble gum. We played army in the black walnut orchard near our homes, and harvested pomegranates from untended trees in the nearby fields.
Beverly was a wonderful host, and a great 1950s mom to her family and her children's friends. I remember frequent overnights in each other's homes, sharing dinners (including barbecues), making breakfast after getting out of our sleeping bags after a sleepover, and dishing out ice cream on hot summer afternoons. We watched television shows like "Sky King" and "Supercar" and "The Adventures of Robin Hood"--black and white shows, of course.
Our mothers set the rules as we rode our bikes through our neighborhood, and occasionally cycled two miles west along shaded Rayen Street to Northridge's "downtown" on Reseda Boulevard. In those days, once we were out of sight we were also out of touch, for there were no mobile phones--but also in those days we could be gone for hours and never feel that we might be unsafe.
Our mothers took care of us when we dressed up for Halloween and went door-to-door through the neighborhood. The day after Halloween we would organize and compare and trade the mountains of candy we had acquired.
These were the days when we were children and our parents were young, days that made an indelible impression on our lives. They were days of innocence and hope, when our fathers provided for our families and our mothers made the homes in which our families lived. Our parents gave us our lives, and then shaped them as we grew. They gave us standards, standards they had learned in their own days of growing up, in the generation before ours that had known hardship and war--but to their children they gave an era of optimism and plenty. Rightly has their generation been called "The Greatest Generation" our country has ever produced.
I give thanks to God for the time in which we grew up as children, for our parents who set us on the track, and for Beverly in particularly, who was a vital part of my own growing-up years.
