Bottom photograph: Norma Jean, Doris, Robert and Anita, May 1989, White Cloud, Kansas. Likely before or after the funeral of their mother, Gladys Breeze.
Mom was born July 4th, 1921. Aunt Jean in 1923. Aunt Doris in 1925. Uncle Robert in 1927. Mom had first moved to Phoenix for her health, and soon moved on to California, first living in Pasadena.
In that first photo, all four had the most important events of their lives yet to come.
Mom would have been 23 years old. She would not marry dad until 1947. They would settle in Southern California when dad was stationed at George AFB in 1951. She was advised not to have children, but she produced me and the only girl offspring among the Breeze siblings before they left Florida for Georgia and then California.
Aunt Jean, at 21, likely had graduated from nursing school in Kansas. She and a friend took the train out to stay with mom in Pasadena. Jean had joined the Army as a nurse and would soon be stationed at an Army rehabilitation facility in the converted El Mirador hotel in Palm Springs. She would meet her future husband, Lloyd Green, when he was recovering from battle wounds in the hospital. They would marry in 1945 after she left the Army. They would settle for a time in Oklahoma where Lloyd was from and Texas also before eventually settling down in the Bay Area, in San Leandro with their son, Gordon Douglas, born in 1946.
Aunt Doris would have been 19. She would marry her childhood sweetheart, Paul Nathan "Hap" Rowe, who also graduated in White Cloud, and they would also marry in 1945. He had been in the Navy in WWII. Their son, Jim, was also born in 1946.
Uncle Robert would have been 17. He would be in the Army the following year and spend some time in Japan after the end of the conflict as part of the occupation force under General McArthur. He would return and eventually marry and have a son, Ray, named after their father, Ray Breeze.
Only Jean and Doris married for life. Doris would take her ailing husband off life support, leave the hospital to visit a friend, suffer a massive heart attack in Highland and die on the way to a better equipped hospital in Topeka. While we were all gathered for her funeral, Hap would die within a day and they would have a joint funeral in Hiawatha, KS. In 2008, Lloyd Green would die, like his son, Doug in 2003, of cancer. Jean would die of a burst blood vessel in the brain at the age of 93 in 2017.
In 1944, all of them young and hopeful, no doubt, would have no idea of the various arcs their lives would take in the coming years: how they would lose their father in less than a decade, how their mother would live to be 86, how two of them would divorce and two would remain married for life. How each would produce one son and one, our mom, a daughter and how three of their offspring would outlive both parents but how one would predecease both his parents.
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