One more weekend with Mom and John – two in a row! – the result of two close-together interviews for a job with SalesForce.com, in San Francisco (yes, I know, I am very happily employed at Commission Junction down here in Santa Barbara. But come Spring/Summer of 2009, and Dana has graduated from Cate, Caren and I will no longer have a good reason to stay in this lovely but hard-to-find-work area. So I am being a bit pro-active, applying for work well ahead of the Spring/Summer deadline – better safe than sorry).

Anyway, this time I learned that my first home was 1009 Lombard Street (the curvy part). Below us lived Stuart and Betty Court. Mom used to make Len and me run around the house barefoot, because she didn’t want us making too much noise. We played in a vacant lot next door. Dad was away most of the time – WWII, right?

I spent the weekend with Mom and John, and devoted part of the time to a session with Mom, quizzing her on all sorts of details on her early life. Here is some of what I learned:

Mom’s mother was named Ruth Harbison (but we called her Jeep), and Jeep’s father was named John Butler Reynolds. He lived on Wyoming Avenue in Wilkes-Barre, PA. He used to hold mom and Monica on his lap and rub his beard on them: “it was awful – it hurt!”

When mom was around seven, she was given a pony by her stepfather, Shelby Tom Harbison. She named the pony Sparkie, after Spark Plug, the pony in the comic strip Barney Google & Snuffy Smith. She also had a dog Spot. Later, her mother’s mother, Gonny McKuen, gave her a horse cart, which she hitched up to Spark Plug and “I was able to go everywhere.” She rode Sparkie to Miss Lurie Collier’s school, which had about 15 students in all grades. Later she attended Hamilton School, “across the street from the College of Transylvania.”

Finally she attended Warrenton School outside Washington D.C., or “Warrenton School for country girls and cows”, as the girls called it. It was here that she was required to speak some French at every meal. One time she looked up the word for “full”, and when, during dinner, the headmistress asked if she wanted another helping, she responded with “Non merci, je suis plein.”

It was at Warrenton that the headmistress, Ms. Bouligny, let her show her horse; mom won, and “I got to keep the ribbon; Ms. Bouligny kept the cup.”

From Warrenton, mom went to the University of Kentucky, where she joined the Tri Delt sorority:
“By the light of the tri-delt moon
and the three stars above
Tri Delt girls sing sweet melodies
to the freshmen they love…”

Mom’s father, Sam Dyer (after whom I was named) died from tuberculosis when mom was very young (she has no memories of him). He spent his last days at the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium in Saranac Lake, New York. Mom repeated many times during our discussion “How very sad it must have been for Jeep to lose her husband so early in their marriage.” Jeep had met Sam Dyer at a Yale dance, which she attended with one of her brothers as her escort.

Sam Dyer went to the Hill School (in New York?) before going to Yale, where “he was the best athlete.” At Yale he was “a four-letter man” (although how he could earn four letters in only three sports seasons is hard to explain).

Jeep has a brother, Pierce B. Reynolds, whose daughter Monica was mom’s best friend; they used to spend every summer together in Kentucky, riding everywhere on their horses.