August 10th is my mother's birthday.Born Nancy May Nalle in St. Louis, Missouri, Mom had three kids: me and my sisters Laura and Georgia. Raised in the Midwest during the Great Depression, Mom's parents were childhood sweethearts who lived the American dream, moving on up from rural south-east Missouri through the social and economic expansions of the mid-20th century. Nancy attended William Woods College, graduating around the time that Winston Churchill gave his famous "Iron Curtain" speech there in Fulton, Missouri. She fell in love with Frank Sinatra, studied English and American literature, learned French, and fell in love with a handsome, bright young Purdue graduate from San Jose, California - our dad, Hargan Matthews.
Mom and Dad met in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1947 or so, where United Airlines based it's pilot and stewardess training facility. Mom was living in Salt Lake City at the time, rooming with a couple of other United stewardesses. Supposedly my father dropped the surprise of their engagement to his parents at one or two o'clock in their morning as their train made a stop in Salt Lake en route to Chicago. (I also heard from Mom that her own parents weren't all that thrilled with the engagement either.)
But, as was the habit in those days, they made the best of things. Dad got his MBA at Harvard, where Mom lost their first child - a sad, sad beginning to the marriage - then they moved here to the San Francisco Bay Area, where Dad found work at San Francisco Municipal Airport, as it was known then. (I was conceived around that time, in a little red house my father's older brother built for himself in Menlo Park, while attending Stanford Medical School, as it was then known.)
I was born in 1951, at U.S. Marin Corps Base Camp Pendleton, and shortly after Dad went with the Air Force - drafted? volunteered? I don't know - to fight the war in Korea; Mom and I moved in with her folks, and her younger brother, in Indianapolis. When Dad returned, he was sent - or did he volunteer? - to a NATO base north of Paris, France, near Laon. But Mom refused to live in France on an American military base, and knowing French well enough to converse, found us an apartment dans un petit village, Nouvion-le-Comte. (Hence my lifelong love affair with farms, the countryside et toutes les choses françaises!)
Later, after a few years in Europe - both Laura and Georgia were born at an American base near Wiesbaden, Germany - we returned to the US, settling a mile or so from where I now live, in Terra Linda. After two years Dad was transferred to Montgomery, Alabama, where we lived for four years. My memories include Mom coordinating Halloween festivities at my elementary school, being a Cub Scout den mother, traveling with other officer wives to Natchez, Mississippi, playing Debussy and Chopin on our Hammond electric organ, taking my sisters and I on an annual Easter visit to a fabulous flower garden near Birmingham, and organizing Easter egg hunts every spring.
In 1962, Dad was again transferred by the Air Force, back to California. But - with the marriage on shaky ground - Mom and my sisters moved onto a farm a few miles from where her folks lived, outside Boston. After a couple of years the family reunited at Vandenburg Air Base, in central California, then split up again when Mom and "the girls" moved here to the Bay Area, followed a year or so later by Dad and me. A temporary rapprochement took place in the mid-1960s, when we all lived in Palo Alto together for a few years, broken when Dad volunteered - yes, foregoing his Stanford ROTC post and the resulting tuition-free Stanford education available to his kids - to fight the war in Viet-Nam.
In Palo Alto, Mom worked as a substitute high school English teacher, and expressed frustration that Sixtiess era students didn't sharing her love of classic literature. She was then hired as secretary to the head of Stanford's Communications Department, and had the remarkable good fortune to serve as personal secretary for historian Arnold Toynbee during his visit to Stanford. Mom instituted, through Stanford, hosting in our home a succession of foreign students, including one fellow from India who arrived bearing gifts of sweets wrapped in gold and silver foil, and another fellow from Thailand who brought her a gift of raw silk fabric.
But after Dad left for Viet-Nam, Mom divorced him - a feat in those days, requiring a trip to Mexico - and she then remarried and moved the family to Long Island, New York; her new husband was also an Air Force colonel, albeit an entirely different and compatible personality. The honeymoon was disrupted only briefly by Harry White's own year in Viet-Nam, following which he, Mom and Georgia moved to Sacramento, where he then retired. Mom took up secretarial work in the state capitol, serving as secretary to the California Arts Council, established in 1976 by the state Legislature and Governor Jerry Brown. There, she worked with sculptor Ruth Ohsawa, actor Peter Coyote and writer-sage Gary Snyder. She trained as a docent at the Crocker Art Museum, volunteered at Sacramento's annual jazz festival, took up wine tasting and travel with Harry, visiting Europe, Turkey, Greece and a number of jazz festivals in the U.S. and Canada.
A devoted daughter and attentive, loving mother, Nancy regularly visited and hosted her parents through their deaths in the 1980s. She encouraged and at times supported - in every manner - her three kids, even when she neither understood nor agreed with us. She cultivated a vibrant rose garden in her backyard, held fabulous parties, dinners, wine-tastings and soirées, enjoyed a diverse and intimate circle of lady friends, and epitomized the very essence and meaning of joie d'vivre.
For me, Mom was my first teacher, the living example of intellectual curiosity, social gregariousness, a heart open to an incredible range of cultures and perspectives, and a refined appreciation of all the arts, including food, cooking and pleasure. But her Midwestern sensibilities and Leonine dignity reflected a quiet interior that never lost its moral compass or fortitude. Only after her death in 1999 did I learn that - for years - she had made annual charitable gifts to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and to Sacramento's Bread and Roses, dedicated to caring for the homeless and poor.
If she were with us today - and she is, in my sisters and me as well as in the hearts and memories of so many people - Nancy would no doubt express concern for the least of us while simultaneously drawing us out to dance, recite poetry, have a taste of her soufflé or latest Zinfandel discovery, or incite us to learn about Chaucer, visit the pyramids and/or express ourselves in whatever way we might be moved, right this minute. To this day I find it fascinating that she exited this earth on the arms of - angelically speaking - two of the finest gentlemen of the 20th century: Joe DiMaggio and Joe Williams - alright! OK!
We love you, Mom.....more!!!!
Marc
