4.03 Letter from Liz

Lorna, abt 1995

My Sister Liz (Betty) ~ A letter from Liz (Betty) to Lorna Harrington, her childhood friend:
4-12-2003
Dear Lorna,
It is so great to connect with you. We have lived (more or less) in Fallbrook since 1985. Before that we lived in San Clemente, before that in Vista, before that in Huntington Beach and before that in Whittier which is where we married and three of our four children were born.

I am fairly close to my siblings, except for Claudia. We are also in good touch with the next generation, again except for Claudia’s children.

Gordon and his wife Marian live in Carmel and have been there since 1961. They owned a campground in Big Sur for many years. Their girls are lovely, both married with children.

Family and friends at Riverside Campground, Big Sur 1967

Carleen did not have a very happy life. Her husband died about five years ago (very unlamented) and she moved to Iowa and lives with her youngest daughter and her husband and two granddaughters.

Claudia

Claudia (much like my mother) made a lifetime of bad choices. She lives in San Diego with her oldest daughter. She was married until she was thirty to Bob, divorced and never married again. Her children are also pretty messed up.

Cathy, Jan 1973

Cathy was only married once, to Bob for about five years. She and I are very close. We talk many times each week. She has lived in Sonoma since 1973 and became a grandmother for the first time last month.

Liz, Dad & Marie, Sonoma

My dad moved to Santa Rosa when he retired from working in San Francisco. He died in 1986. My stepmother, Marie (85), still lives in their house there. She has two daughters and her oldest daughter was married to the older brother of my sister Cathy’s husband. 

Family gathering after Dad’s funeral, front yard on Fair Oaks in Santa Rosa, Sep 1986

Cathy had a family reunion last summer at her house in Sonoma and my stepmother came. We had four generations there.

Thelma Day, Liz and Tony, Sonoma reunion, 2002

Reunion with four generations, 2002 Sonoma

Re: childhood. Carleen was pretty much our mother and all of us (except Gordon) lived with her at one time or another. She had Cathy both as a small child and from the age of nine on. When our parents divorced in 1953 (after being apart for several years) Claudia stayed in Sonora for a year with the Davis family, Cathy … (letter stops here)

continued on 5-20-2003
Boy, am I the great correspondent! I will try and pick up where I stopped on April 12.

Cathy, I hope by now, has sent you latest draft of her life story. She is very excited to get someone’s take who was on the outside of the family as we all have our own way of filtering our growing up life.

Liz and Tony

I’ll start to catch you up with myself. Tony and I have been married for 45 years (same as you) and we have had our ups and downs. We have been rich and we have been broke. We have been together and we have been apart (once for eleven months). Our relationship has always been volatile. I see him as very bossy and he sees me as very stubborn and resistant to his ever ongoing good advice which starts as soon as I open my eyes.

He has been really struggling with his leukemia. The doctor hopes that by September he will have him in remission for two or three years. I am disgustingly healthy with only a few age related things. Glaucoma, plantar fascitis and some arthritis in my hands. We have lived here in Fallbrook since 1985. Our house is pretty neat. It was built by a wealthy family from Beverly Hills as their “ranch” in 1929. Actually it was begun in 1929 but not completed til 1931 as they lost everything (almost) in the crash and moved here. It was built on a quarter section but only has a bit over 10 acres left. It is not a big house but it has plenty of privacy. The original family lived here for three generations til they had to sell as (the daughter of the original builder) could no longer pay the property taxes. That happened to many people before Prop. 13. First she had to pay estate taxes and the state would raise the taxes as they saw fit, even as often as each year. So in 1972, she sold to the second owners. We bought it from them in 1985. In 1989, on my 50^thbirthday, the woman showed up at our door. She had moved from the house to a condo and had a lifetime accumulation of stuff, her parents’ and hers. She was quite eccentric and asked if we had seen or had any experiences with “the ghost”. I thought she meant the ghost was her husband as he committed suicide in 1968 by flying a rented plane into the mountain that the house faces. She said that was not so, that the ghost was her father who had died in the back bedroom in 1945. He had apparently been very active up to the time that we bought the house including all of her tenure there. She concluded that as he had given us no bad experiences, that he must approve of us. She had brought with her pictures of the house through the years with all the original furniture, much of which they had brought with them from their house in Beverly Hills. The upshot was she had most of the original furnishings which over a course of years I was able to buy some of it from her. This led to my first interest in antiques and in about 1995, Tony and I started going to auctions and I became an antique dealer.

Cath, Liz and Tony and their 37′ wooden Alaskan they sailed from the east to west coast

Tony and Liz, Europe

That was one of my favorite incarnations. I stopped in 2000 as Tony and I had bought another boat that we planned to go to Europe in. But I need to back up a minute. In 1986 (Dec), we had a very big business reversal. We lost everything, but managed to hang on to our house. We had to start all over again and Tony was doing consulting for a company that he had once been a part owner of. He started to develop a new branch to the business (it had been a supplier of ordnance) and he developed an air bag for cars. Now the airbag had been invented but the company made fuses and an explosive device for the airbags. He knew we could not compete in the United States but that the Europeans would be coming on line with mandating airbags also. So we moved to Wales in 1993 and lived in a small (Roman) town, Usk. We could not find a house to rent so we lived in a businessmans hotel there, he more than I as I would fly home often. Then in January of 1994 we moved to Germany and we lived in a medium sized town in Swabia, Schwabish-Gmund. In August of that year, Tony was diagnosed with leukemia and he stopped working entirely as we did not know how long he might have to live and what his quality of life would be. So then we antiqued like mad for a couple of years.

Tony and Liz

We are walking (for exercise) around Dana Point Harbor. Three months ago Tony had a serious relapse and has been on chemo since then. If Tony gets well, he intends to go to Europe next summer.

I’ll leave you here for now as I have to go pick up my granddaughter from school. I am actually going to mail this or it wont get out for another month.

Love, Elizabeth Duchi (formerly in another incarnation, Betty)

*****

To Lorna ~ A note from Liz’s son to Lorna:
January 25, 2018
Lorna, I wanted to let you know that in fact, yes, my mom did read, and was a big fan of, the Harry Potter books. I think that your comparison of her to Hermione Granger is an excellent one: intelligent, inquisitive – and loyal. I hope that your friendship with her was a source of strength during what must have been a difficult part of childhood, for both of you. My mom was shaped and molded by her experiences, both good and bad. We all are. However, she never used them as a crutch or an excuse. She knew and accepted that life was tough, and she was grateful for the opportunity she had to live it. Thank you, Tony

Lorna

To me from Lorna ~
Nov 28, 2018
Cathy, I wish that I had pictures of Betty and myself when we were best friends in grammar school, but I don’t think that my family even owned a camera in those years. Betty always had a great deal of courage and determination, and always ready for any new social situation. I wasn’t, but the two of us generally avoided others and headed for the field across from my home in Sonora, or further to the outskirts of our small town that we explored thoroughly. I wasn’t surprised that when grown, Betty married someone who also was outgoing, and aggressively determined to “get on” in the world, which would compensate for the things she missed out on when we were young. And not at all surprised at all of Betty’s successes in later life.

Betty and I met up again in our mid-teens in Sonora during a summer when we were both visiting there, and managed to have an afternoon together. We also wrote to each other after Betty married Tony and after I got back from Japan where my husband studied during 1960-1961. That was when she sent me the photograph of herself holding her first baby, and she was smiling out at the world for a change. It was in 1963 that we moved to Australia and my husband didn’t pack my address book, and I lost track of Betty again. It wasn’t until 2003 according to the date on her letter that we had a chance to reconnect. Lorna

© 2018. Catherine Sevenau.
All rights reserved.