Time Travel

I took my mother to lunch yesterday. We'd talked about heading to Hope, but when I suggested Bayview, she sounded interested. She hadn't been down that way for a while. So, we drove in the back way from the road that takes off from HWY 95 just past Careywood.

I'm pretty sure it was the Captain's Table where we ate. The prices were right with old stand-by's like BLT's, chicken strips or turkey sandwiches for $5.25. We both selected BLT's. They weren't all fancied up---just the basic white bread toasted and plenty of bacon within.

Besides the old-time basic sandwiches, the setting seemed like a trip back in time. The Osprey, a rustic old paddlewheeler badly in need of a paint job sat in the water near shore just below our booth. Maybe that's why Mother talked about memories of Chicago when she was a small child. She always lets little historical snippets---we've never heard---drop out in these conversations.

Yesterday's revelation was that her mother, Lillie Short, worked as a hair dresser at Marshall Fields in Chicago, and that's how she met her husband Frank (my grandfather). Frank's sister, later my mother's Aunt Annie, was one of her customers.

She told Lillie about her brother and that she ought to meet him. Frank was an artist who had a yearning to find gold. They married, had two little girls, Virginia and June, and headed for the West.

I knew most of this, but the hairdresser stuff caught me offguard. My grandmother was also a writer, and Mother has told me she wrote two manuscripts. What a find those would be!

Sadly, Lillie Halter died when Mother was three. By that time, they lived in an area near Wallace, Idaho. Frank Halter and his two daughters then moved on to the remote Trinity River of Northern California. Mother started first grade at the tiny town of Burnt Ranch. A few days into her school year, a fancy car driven by a chauffeur and occupied by her rich aunt from Michigan showed up.

The aunt figured the back woods of California was no place for two little girls to grow up. So, Mother spent the rest of her education years living at Catholic boarding schools in Texas and Michigan. She always wanted to return to Burnt Ranch, so we did some time traveling last May when four of her six kids accompanied her on a nostalgic trip to the Trinity River valley.

Not much is left there that Mother recalls except the big stone-faced mountain that overlooked them. Nonetheless, she still clings to cherished and vivid childhood memories of time spent with her father.

I think it would have been fun to know Frank and Lillie Halter.