It's sad to see a thing of beauty destroyed, especially when it's the house where you grew up. Designed by my father, our custom home in the Covina Hills was a source of pride for our family for 32 years, and to me - an adopted child - it was my ultimate sanctuary, my best of all possible worlds ( Read more... )

Today was my parents' 70th wedding anniversary. :-) They got married in Phoenix, Arizona, this day in 1951. Why they went to the trouble of going out of state to get hitched, I don't know, but Dad also married his first wife in Arizona, so maybe at the time it was a place to go for 'quickie' marriages? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Whatever the reason, it was the ( Read more... )

More family discoveries in old newspapers! When I was a year-and-a-half old, we were in a car accident in Charter Oak north of Covina. Of course me being that young, I don't remember it at all, but I do remember that just about every time Mom drove through that intersection, I'd get to hear the story about how this teenager ran the stop sign and ( Read more... )

So, I recently subscribed to this online newspaper archive for my Covina history project, and discovered scandal in my family's past. Turns out my father was involved in a fairly messy (and publicized!) divorce.


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26 September 1989

I had some time to kill before my train left for Manchester, so I got a map of Glasgow and tried to find the old hotel where Mother and I stayed over our very first night ever in Britain in 1967. More's Hotel was no more, however. A motorway had sliced its way through this section of town, and everything on India Street had been ( Read more... )

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An Easter gift for my Christian friends ( Read more... )

A different kind of Fathers Day tribute ( Read more... )

On the first of this month, I managed to fall in my front yard and crack one of my ribs. It's only the second bone I've broken in my whole lifetime, and just like the first one, what caused it was a split-second moment of misjudging the position of one of my limbs in 3-dimensional space, a misapplication of muscle force to correct that misjudgment ( Read more... )

It just doesn't seem possible that you've been gone so long, Mom. You've been in my thoughts every single day since.


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