Page 46 - People & Places In Time

Jamestown to Tulare County
day and wouldn’t I have been in a fix, if I had of bit it off!! Shut-up don’t talk back. Well Bot summertime is here again and lots of swimming is coming – so look-
out – I’m a “big girl” now – Just think I’ll be a junior - well I’ll tell you for sure in another week. Say Bot you can have all the gum I leave sticking under my seat in the Sophomore section in assembly. Here’s to you – everything keen!
Your friend Ann
After high school Mom attended College of The Sequoias, located on the same campus as Visalia High. When I attended COS, it had moved to its new and current site a mile away. Following graduation from here, she went up to the Uni- versity of San Francisco. Unfortunately, because of financial difficulties her father had with an investment in downtown Visalia, she had to return to Fresno State College to earn her teaching credential.
Mom’s first teaching job was in Waukena about ten miles south-west
of Tulare, where she had rented a room. She did not return to the ranch following graduation. I’m not sure if there was anything to this, except that her younger sister Corrine had left home to live in Dinuba with her Aunt Addie and her husband Mel- vin Jones. These are the questions for the living, and I didn’t ask.
With Mom living in Tulare and Dad in Exeter they must have been intro- duced by mutual friends. One of dads high school friends Beulah Coombs was see- ing Less Brown from Visalia . . . . I just can’t say for sure how things played out.
One of Dad’s pastimes was racing hydroplanes on Shaver Lake with friends from Visalia. Much of Mom and Dad’s time together before marriage was with other couples racing their boats at the lake among them were Less and Beulah.
As the 1930’s draw to a close Mom moves to a boarding house in Exeter to be closer to Bot Smith and to continue her teaching carrier. Joe Doctor was also a resident of this same house his writing figures prominantly in this book.
My time is drawing closer.
Emerald “Bot” Smith and Dolores Mitchell are married at Saint Johns Catho- lic Church in Fresno on June 15, 1941. The only photographs I have are of my grand- parents Smith with dad’s sisters. I’m sure they were married in Fresno in deference to Mom’s mother whose family was from Fresno and were Catholic. They were marriedbyhercousinMonsignorCulleton.Q Ihaveseennootherphotographsof the wedding. Was mom’s family there? I have no way of knowing.
30
From top left clockways ~ Dad and Mom in 1941 in his parents backyard be- fore leaving for the war. Earl and Ann (Chapman) Hayes before Earl left for Europe. Dad and his boat “The Eight Ball ” showing off at Shaver Lake.