My mother died on Monday, February 17, 2003 of cancer. She was 86, born on July 5th 1916 in Stillwater, Oklahoma and raised in California's San Fernando Valley. She is survived by my father, her high school sweetheart, after 67 years of marriage, and by her two sons. She was a graceful and caring homemaker whose intellect, good taste and good sense were necessary resources to the less endowed menfolk in her charge. She seemed to have a life of joy and contentment with, as she expressed near the end, no regrets.

My father died on Friday August 12th, 2011, also of cancer. He was 96, born on April 30th 1915 in Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania. He came to the San Fernando Valley at the age of 4, played football and pole vaulted in highschool, and married his high school sweetheart, my mother, in 1936. His vocation was metalworking. A welder for McDonald-Douglas during WW2, he became the manager for an aircraft supplier in Los Angeles afterwards, and then began his own business, making heavy metal fabrications for Disneyland and Disney World. Two major avocations dominated the last half of his life: car restoration which included three Model-A Fords, a 1922 Packard touring car (best in class at the Pebble Beach Concourse), and two MG Tc's; and lawn bowling, which included, in addition to playing, construction of the specialized mower necessary to maintain the green. In all things mechanical he was a perfectionist who would rather do it himself than depend on others. He was in all things good. A good husband, a good father and a good man.