Fortunately, on the back of this photograph, I now know that the Easter visit of everyone to the Santa Ana, CA, house was in the spring of 1953. Cousin Doug Green is standing behind the two chairs. Then, from left to right, Georgann, Greg, second cousin Betty Jo Nuzum and, in front on the second chair, her sister, Nancy Nuzum.
At first my sister and I thought that one of the two girls was a neighbor who lived on the next block of South Broadway. She died of diabetes in the early 50's while we were still living there. We went to her funeral in a church not far away from where we lived. She was under a pink mesh, see-through covering in a casket, as if asleep. That image has stuck with me all these years later, as it has with my sister. Perhaps we were too young to attend a funeral, especially of a young friend our own age.
But even this photograph brings with it sad memories. We would not see our cousin Doug again until 1964, when mom took us by bus to San Francisco where Doug picked us up at the downtown station and drove us across the Bay Bridge to where they lived in San Leandro. We would see Betty Jo and Nancy again in 1957, when mom took us by train to Kansas, to visit the relatives that summer after school was out, and then in the summer of 1966, when we road with mom and our Uncle Robert back to Kansas that year.
Doug would be diagnosed with cancer several months after attending mom's funeral in White Cloud in 2002. He would die in early 2003 and be buried in the Los Banos Veteran's Cemetery in the Central Valley of California. While we were in White Cloud a few months later for Doris and Hap's funeral in White Cloud in May of 2003, we would visit the cemetery at Highland, Kansas, where Betty Jo was buried. She died in her late 40's or early 50's, also of cancer. I was saddened to see that she never has been given a proper headstone. It was just one of those temporary metal markers that, even after all these years later, was not replaced with something more permanent.
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