Mike Mebs, and Linda and Dennis Madura at Mike and Lida's house in the Valley, circa 1981

I included this photo here because it and one other, poorly lit, were the last two that I have of Dennis and Linda Madura.  The back of the photograph indicates it was developed in January of 1981, after I was out of the Air Force; so this was probably taken during the Christmas holiday week of 1980.

 

I had begun working at Kaman Sciences in Colorado Springs in June of 1980.  They typically gave their employees the Christmas to New Year's week off, so that, unlike my years in the Air Force when it was difficult to get leave that week, it was often the time I visited California and all of my friends there.

 

As with the Zito's and the Schurrs and the Durrs, I wonder how Dennis and Linda are doing these days and how their children have grown since they were very young when I last saw them in the early or mid 1980's.

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Dennis, Linda and Greg in the family room of the South Gate house, circa Christmas 1977

Whomever they had bought the home from, this family room was an addition to the back of the house.

 

As you can see, an undecorated Christmas tree stands behind us in the bottom photograph.

 

Since it was often difficult to get leave during Christmas itself, I would often travel a week or more before Christmas.  The photo album states that this is Winter 1977, the year before I left Minot for the Air Force Academy.

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Linda Madura with their puppy, circa 1976, South Gate

Here Linda is, cradling their new puppy, in the backyard.

 

One of the reasons that they moved from South Gate is that they were having a family and the house was not large enough.  In addition, it must have been nearer to his job.

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Dennis and Linda Madura in front of their South Gate home, with the Camaro circa 1976

Here they are standing before their home in South Gate.  To the left is Dennis's prized 1973 Camaro, which he bought about the same time that I bought my '73 Camaro, at the same dealership off the San Diego freeway, Cormier Chevrolet.

 

His was more of a muscle car version than mine with the top.

 

He eventually sold his before I did, after he and Linda eventually moved inland from Oceanside, CA, not far from Camp Pendleton.  At that time, he worked for one of the large, California aerospace companies.

 

I once visited them there, it seems around Christmas, in the mid 1980's.  After that, we seemed to have drifted apart.  I was open then about being gay, and I am not sure that sat as well with Linda.  She was a more religious person, and after they married, she and Dennis, who never had been a church goer, attended church regularly.

 

They had a couple of kids at that point, as well.

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Greg in the Madura's South Gate garden, circa 1976

Here I am displaying, or being shocked by, the produce from their backyard garden in South Gate.

 

I believe this was the day I had stopped by the Carson Mall on my way, intending to buy some candy in a sweet shop there.  I ordered two pounds of white chocolate, not know how much that actually would be.  The sales girl made a snippy remark about the quantity, but, in a huff, I confirmed, "Yes, I want two pounds." 

 

I ended up with more white chocolate than I could ever hope to eat, so I shared some with the Madura's when I got to their house.

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Dennis and Linda Madura, circa 1976, South Gate, CA

I no longer remember how Dennis and Linda met.  She was from Idaho.  Mike, Lida and I drove up to Boise for their wedding in 1973 or 1974, before I entered the Air Force.

 

After they were married, they lived in South Gate, renting half of a duplex not far from where I used to live in South Gate.  However, after a year or so, they bought a house in South Gate.

 

The photograph above is the two of them playing "American Gothic" in their back garden.

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Dennis Madura, mid-1970's, South Gate, CA

I met Dennis Madura in 1968 or 1969 through Mike's eventual wife-to-be, Lida, at East L.A.J.C.  She and Dennis went to school together at Bell High School, the town on the other side of the unincorporated berg of Cudahy from South Gate, just over from Huntington Park.

 

Dennis drove a hot 1967 white Chevy two-door.  He had an awesome sound system for 8-track tapes.  He also bought a Roberts 8-track tape recorder.  Until I bought one for myself, I would drive over to his house and we'd make 8-tracks tapes of our own to listen to in our cars.

 

Whereas Daylin and I might drive to West Hollywood to the Pickwick Book Store, Dennis and I would head there to the Tower Records store.  We also enjoyed planetarium shows at the Griffith Park Planetarium (hence the picture of Dennis and Ann inside the planetarium theater post earlier).

 

Dennis's dad ran a Richfield gas station in Bell, which Dennis worked at much of the time.  It was later converted to an ARCO station when they changed the brand.  Dennis's parents were also divorced.  We were friends from the late 1960's until sometime in the 1980's when we just sort of drifted apart.

 

The photograph above was taken in the mid-1970's, possibly 1976 or 1978, when Dennis and his wife, Linda, bought a house in South Gate, not far from where the Butlers lived, south of Tweedy.

Grandpa Sanchez relaxing at home, Yucaipa, CA, circa 1975

While Grandma Sanchez had probably less than two years remaining of her life, Grandpa Sanchez would live for another 12 or so productive years, surviving those two more wives who are buried next to him in the cemetery by the freeway just east of Yucaipa.

 

We visited the cemetery a couple of years ago, me for the first time.  An unusually cold and strong wind blew, making the visit uncomfortable.  One of his wives, probably the last one, has her name on his headstone.  However, his other wife probably occupies the space next to his grave, but she has no headstone.  I thought that sad that perhaps she had no children or friends living who would get her a headstone, to mark at least the beginning and end of her existence of earth.  She might have been the third wife, who died not long before he did, so he was unable to provide one for her either since he was also dying.    

 

Accompanying dad, we would see Grandpa Sanchez five days before he died, upon the advice of his doctor who told dad that his father had only a few days to live with his kidneys failing.  Grandpa Sanchez was certain that he was 95 about the time he died, but dad was able to figure out the year he was born in Spain and that he was just shy of that age, 94 years old instead.

 

I look back at the arc of their lives and realize how very little I know about how Grandpa came to America after WWI, in approximately 1919.  Why had he decided to leave Spain as a teenager and come to America alone?  He had no other relatives here that I am aware of.  We met his sister and her husband when they visited us in Orange, CA, in the early 1960's; but I don't recall anyone discussing the particulars of their lives in Spain in the early 1900's, when they were children together. 

 

Grandpa Sanchez, in leaving Spain when he did, was long out of the country by the time Francisco Franco and the Nationalist forces initiated the bloody Spanish Civil War--nearly three years long from 1936 until 1939--with the help of the Nazi's.  They were attempting to oust the elected Republican government, and they succeeded. 

 

Grandpa was also not in Spain during all of those oppressive years of Franco's dictatorial rule, the General having long outlived those other extremist dictators, Hitler and Mussolini, by several decades.  He lasted in power for 36 terrible years until he finally died in 1975, then becoming the long-running news joke on Saturday Night Live:  "General Francisco Franco is still dead."  An ironic epitaph if there ever was one.

 

As I said, I don't know how Grandma and Grandma Sanchez met since her family lived in Montana and dad was born in Martinez, CA, in 1920.  So they must have met in California, but how Grandma or Grandpa got there, I do not know.  How they sctually met and fell in love, I also do not know.

 

I suppose no one really talked about those sorts of intimate moments and memories among their generation, nor shared them with their offspring.  I certainly have no idea how Grandma and Grandpa Breeze met, fell in love, and married; and they were from that same generation.

 

Grandma and Grandpa Sanchez raised two boys, George and Leon, while owning a grocery store.  They had had a daughter who died in infancy, though I do not know what she died of or what her name was.  Dad died in 2002, Leon two years later.  Dad had me, Ann, and Lorri with two different wives.  Leon had five children with his first wife, kept a mistress, finally divorced Lourdes, whom I have never met, and then married another woman late in his life whom I did meet when dad was dying in April of 2002 in an emergency room in Orange County.

 

Dad was a bombardier and an officer, as well as a P.OW. in Germany, the country from which Grandma Sanchez's family came perhaps 100 years ago; and Leon left the U.S. for Mexico before he could be drafted and serve as an enlisted man in a war that killed so many countless men and women on all sides.

 

Among Ann, Lorri and me, we have no offspring.  Among our cousins in Mexico, I have no idea how many of them married or have offspring.  Jose died childless.

 

It's all a rather strange situation that we kids never asked about so many details of their intimate lives, and they never really told us much either.  Perhaps they thought we wouldn't be interested.         

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Greg, Grandma and Grandpa Sanchez, circa 1975, Yucaipa, CA

Grandpa and I seem to be thoroughly enjoying ourselves, but Grandma was caught with a profoundly forlorn and faraway look. 

 

Basically, she died of old age, as far as I can tell, at 77 years old or so in 1977,  perhaps 1978 (I know I was living in that end BOQ room when I got the call from Ann). 

 

The same happened to Grandpa Sanchez at 94 when everything began breaking down all at once.  The same also happened to dad at 81 when everything with his body had failed or was failing.

 

Not really cancer or heart disease, just total system failure, primarily the kidneys, but mostly because of old age with everything giving out at almost the same time.

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Ann and Greg at Grandma and Grandpa's circa 1975

An even better look at the garish trousers, and I had forgotten all about those white slip-on shoes with the gold buckle.  Ah, 1970's fashions!

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Ann, Grandma and Grandpa Sanchez, circa 1975

When I think back, I realize that we have those B&W photographs from mom of Grandma and Grandpa Sanchez in Newport when they owned the house on the water and the sailboat.  I have those very few photographs taken before my graduation or Ann's graduation.  And these.

 

I do have a couple of Grandpa Sanchez when he remarried a couple of years after Grandma died and we visited them in the same trailer, but they are fairly blurry.

 

In fact, Grandpa Sanchez remarried twice.  His second and his third wives also died before he did at the age of 94 in a nursing home in Yucaipa that Ann and I visited five days before he died.

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Ann, Grandma Sanchez, and Greg in Yucaipa, circa 1975

I'm wearing my usual dark blue dress shirt, and this may be the only time I was photographed wearing those red, white and blue bell-bottom pants.  I bought them before going into the service, from that same clothing shop that Daylin told me about in South Gate.

 

Fortunately, despite the fact that they were rather garish, in retrospect, I was slim enough to wear them.  Bell bottoms were not for the overweight. 

 

The three of us are sitting on their couch in the living room of their long trailer.  When we did visit them in the 1960's, Ann slept in the main trailer.  I was relegated to sleeping in the Airstream trailer in the storage lot.

Grandma Sanchez, Ann, Grandpa Sanchez, Yucaipa, mid-1970's

When Ann and I lived with mom, the summer of 1964, we spent the better part of a month staying with Grandma and Grandpa Sanchez at their trailer park in Yucaipa, CA.  We road down with them to Ensenada, to a trailer park there in their Airstream trailer.  I slept in their station wagon. 

 

They spent the remainder of their years either living in one or another trailer park in Yucaipa, or taking their Airstream down to Mexico to see the cousins in Mazatlan, the children of Leon and Lourdes, living there.  I have never met nor corresponded with Jose (when he was alive), Lourdes, Bennie, Malou, and the final cousin of whom Ann does not remember the name. 

 

Frankly, I am not sure how often any of them visited the United States.  And I have never visited Mazatlan.  Ann, however, has been there a few times back in the 1980's primarily, so she has at least met them at one time or another.

 

As I look over my collection of photographs, and the ones I inherited from mom's collection, we have so few of the Grandparents Sanchez.  While Grandpa Sanchez would live into the late 1980's, Grandma Sanchez would die in 1977, but managed to drag herself to Mexico and died there, where the requirement is to bury the dead within 24 hours of passing.  There was no way either Ann, dad or myself could have gotten there for the funeral.  But Ann has always believed Grandma Sanchez wanted to be buried in Mexico near her grandchildren there.

 

So the following photographs we took on the patio of their trailer and inside the trailer are the last I have of Grandma Sanchez.  These are probably taken just a couple of years before she died, possibly in 1975.

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Grandpa Sanchez and Uncle Leon

This photograph was likely taken in the 1970's.

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Las Canoas Trailer Park, the 1960's, Mazatlan

My Uncle Leon left the United States during WWII and settled in Mexico.  He eventually married a Mexican citizen, Lourdes, and they had several children:  Jose and four others.

 

I never have met any of my cousins, nor Aunt Lourdes.  I have only met Uncle Leon on a couple of occasions, the last time when my father was in an emergency room, dying, in April of 2002.

 

With my Grandfather Sanchez's financial help, and his wife's Mexican citizenship, Uncle Leon was able to buy the trailer park on the ocean in Mazatlan.  I have also never been to Mazatlan, and especially not to the trailer park.  My sister, however, has been there of a few occasions of the years.

 

Most of what I have ever known about Las Canoas trailer park is from looking at the post card duplicated above.  According to my sister, the vicinity around the trailer park has changed considerably as Mazatlan has become a more prominent Mexican resort.

 

Since a portion of the trailer park was in my cousin Jose's name, he sold his portion without my uncle's permission.  I have also heard that my cousin Jose, before he committed suicide several years ago, was gay.

 

If true, I find it fascinating that both my father and his younger brother's oldest offspring were gay.

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Start of the 2nd half and end-of-game celebrations

The top picture appears to be just before the second half kickoff.  The bottom photograph may be after Oakland intercepted a pass and scored again, putting the game out of reach.

 

Look, I was disappointed that it wasn't the Rams in the Super Bowl that year.  The first two years of their run under Chuck Knox in 1973 and 1974, the Rams were 12-2, had a better record that Dallas, and had beaten Dallas in the regular season; they were 10-4 the next year and had beaten Minnesota in the regular season and had the same regular season record; however, both of those years in the playoffs, the Rams had to travel to Dallas the first year and to Minnesota the next year.

 

Everyone knows now how important home field advantage is.  Yet, in those days the playoffs rotated home field among division champs rather than rely on regular season records and head-to-head competition.  The one year the Rams finally got home-field against the Vikings, a freak heavy rainstorm began before the game started, turned the field into mud very quickly, and continued all game long.  The Rams could get nothing going and lost another close game.

 

Chuck Knox was a good coach, winning far more often than he lost; but when his game plan wasn't working, he never seemed able to adjust.  Too often, the Rams lost games they should have won, most especially in the playoffs.  And, given their regular-season dominance, they should have been in several Super Bowls in the 1970's.  Nineteen Seventy-Seven was another year in which an inferior Minnesota team again got to the Super Bowl, and lost again, badly.  Chuck Knox left after the 1978 season.

 

So I rooted for Oakland in this Super Bowl and was pleased to note that Minnesota was not very good, having lost all four Super Bowls against Kansas City, Miami, Pittsburgh and, finally, Oakland.  That was the end of their run of futility, and appearances, in the Super Bowl.

More half-time entertainment at Super Bowl XI

They released lots of balloons and we held up our cards again as the Goodyear blimp circled overhead.  Modest certainly by the current standards.

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Halftime entertainment at Super Bowl XI

They had us hold up colored cards on queue.  You can see on the far side of the stadium the bands of blue on the top, white in the middle, and red (our color) on the bottom.

 

It all seems rather primitive compared to today.  No Rolling Stones or Bruce Springsteen or Madonna performed.

 

Also, as you can probably tell from all of these pictures, the game started in the early afternoon (probably some time not long after noon or 1:00 PM) and ended while there was still plenty of daylight left for the drive home.

 

I kept my colored cards for several years, and I even kept my Super Bowl program.  However, I would have to look to see if I still have any of those souvenirs left.

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View from my seat at Super Bowl XI in Pasadena

Not one of the best seats in the stadium, but that's never really the point of attending a Super Bowl game when you cannot afford the best seats, or even afford to go today.

 

The top picture is of the nothing-spectacular opening ceremony.  The bottom photograph is one taken during a timeout in the first half of the game.

 

The Super Bowl may not have been spectacular in those days compared to today, but at least someone like me could acquire a single ticket and could actually afford one of those precious tickets.

 

Today, I would not even consider trying to acquire a ticket, not just that I would not be able to get a ticket through normal means (I am no longer a season-ticket holder for any team).  I could not afford to attend a game, even if it were being held in a location near me. 

 

The Super Bowl has become a monster, way out of proportion to anything that we normal people could afford to attend back when it was just barely over single Roman numerals and the tickets did not cost so much.

 

Having been to two Super Bowls and getting a ticket to a third, I felt fortunate enough then.  But after the Rams moved out of the Coliseum and to Anaheim, and then out of Southern California altogether, I moved on.  Professional football lost a fan.  Oh, I may watch a Super Bowl now and then; but it was never the same for me, and I don't watch the regular season any longer, and rarely I bother to watch most playoff games in any given year.

 

After the Rams departed, I pretty much gave up on the game permanently.  I suppose it was a more innocent time in the 1970's, compared to today.   

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On the way to the 1977 Super Bowl in Pasadena

Being an L.A. Rams season ticket holder did have some advantages even if the Rams did not make the Super Bowl until the end of the decade. 

 

I got a ticket to the 1977 Super Bowl between the Minnesota Vikings and the Oakland Raiders in Pasadena, CA.  I believe the price I paid was $35.00 for an end zone seat in the Rose Bowl.

 

I obviously took leave and flew in from Minot to be able to attend.  You can see snow on the San Gabriel Mountains on the way to the event.  Uncle Robert drove me there in mom's 1968 Ford Galaxy.  He dropped me off and then returned later to pick me up after the game was over.

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LA Coliseum mid-1970's, L.A. Rams game

The team shifted the field toward the peristyle end the year I took these two pictures, so they could sell seats in that end zone.  However, even under Chuck Knox with several winning seasons, they never could fill up the 90,000 seat-plus Coliseum.

 

Eventually, the field was moved back toward the West end of the Coliseum.  Even temporary stands were added at the other end, just inside the outside track. 

 

The first Super Bowl I ever got a ticket for was the Dolfins vs the Redskins, Super Bowl VII in 1973.  Considering how expensive Super Bowl tickets have gotten in the past couple of decades, I believe I paid $25 for my first ticket in the peristyle end, to the right as you look toward that structure.

 

That was the last time the Super Bowl was played in the Coliseum.  After that, it would move to the Rose Bowl with its higher seating capacity.

 

I spent many hours on Sunday afternoons in the Coliseum, even after I joined the Air Force.  Those first two years of 1971 and 1972, when I was still a civilian, I invited several different friends to use the second ticket.  In 1971, I recall that each ticket was $5.50 that first year.  For 1972 and 1973, a single game ticket from my seating area was $6.00.  When I bought a season ticket in 1973, the season was only 14 games long.  The price stayed at that level until the team moved to Anaheim in 1980, and the Rams then raised the prices to $10.00 per ticket.

 

Mom used my unused ticket whenever I could not be there after I was stationed in Minot.  She could catch a bus in San Pedro and directly head to the Coliseum.  But with the team's move to Anaheim, she could not easily get there so, with the price increase, I allowed my season ticket to lapse.

 

I used to park on the other side of the USC campus where free street parking was plentiful.  I'd then walk across the campus to the Coliseum.  By the time I returned to my car, most traffic had dissipated and it was easy to drive back to South Gate. 

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Mom & Greg at LA Coliseum for LA Rams game

From approximately 1971 until 1985, I had one or more tickets to L.A. Rams preseason, regular season and post season games, including three Super Bowls.

 

The two photographs above were developed in August 1977, so this was likely during a preseason game when Chuck Knox was the coach of the L.A. Rams.  In addition, besides buying a pair of tickets of all games in the 1971 and 1972 football seasons, I then bought a season ticket from 1973 forward.  It was in the West end zone of the coliseum, not far from where we are photographed above.

 

Tommy Prothro was the Rams head coach in 1971 and 1972, and he posted very poor records in those two seasons after being a successful college coach at UCLA and Oregon State before that.

 

In 1973, before I left from Air Force OTS in Lackland, TX, Chuck Knox, an assistant coach for Detroit, was hired to replace Prothro.

 

Throughout the 1970's, the Rams were a very successful franchise, though they never got to the Super Bowl under Coach Knox.  They often had one of the best, if not the best, record in the NFL; but Coach Knox never could get them any further than NFC championship games where he typically lost to either Minnesota or Dallas.

 

By the end of the decade, the Rams finally made the Super Bowl under former assistant coach Ray Malavasi, leading the champion Pittsburgh Steelers at the start of the 4th quarter, on January 20, 1980.

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Mom's rental house on 13th Street in San Pedro, circa 1975

When I left for San Antonio and OTS in the summer of 1973, mom moved to San Pedro.  I returned in December of 1973 until the very beginning of 1974, before I flew to Minot after New Year's Eve.

 

This picture could have been taken then, or when I was at Vandenberg AFB in the spring of 1974, during one of the several weekends I drove down there.  More likely, this was later, in 1975, when I was at Vandenberg in May of '75 for the missile launch and had my new camera.

 

I really don't recall how many months mom lived in that rental house on 13th Street before the owners needed her to move out.  Sometime later, she moved into two other rental houses before she finally moved into the senior Harbor Towers high rise where she would spend the next twenty-five years before we were forced to move her to an assisted living facility in San Pedro and then a nursing home near where my sister lived in Maryland, in 2002, before she died in June of that year. 

 

This photograph of Ann and her first husband, Mark, is of the front steps leading up to the porch where I am standing.  This appears to have been taken with my new Canon camera that I got in 1975.  If that is true, then even the Disney photographs with Uncle Robert would have had to have been taken in 1975, as well, and not 1974.

In front of the Sleeping Beauty castle

The picture below was taken, as only some of us recall, at the end of a roll of color film.  There really isn't enough film left to take one last photograph, but I sometimes did.  I cropped this but you can still see the yellow discoloration on the right half.

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All four of us in front of the Chicken of the Sea pirate ship

As I said earlier, this was in 1974 or 1975, during my first year or two stationed in Minot.

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All of us at the Tomorrowland restaurant

All four of us having lunch at the Tomorrowland restaurant that mostly serves burgers and fries.

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Robert and Mom on the People Mover

More pictures on the People Mover.  The Pirate Ship in the background served Chicken of the Sea tuna sandwiches for several years.  Below is mom with the Skyway buckets and Matterhorn in the background.

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Robert & Mom and Ann on the People Mover circa 1975

Perhaps it was because the People Mover proceeded with a more leisurely pace that we took so many photographs while riding in one or another over the years.  Here are two more photographs.

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The four of us at Disneyland circa 1975

The picture on the left is Ann at the Monorail station with the Matterhorn in the background.  (Again, note the holes in the side of the mountain for the Skyway buckets to pass through--now covered over with the buckets long gone.) 

The picture on the right is Uncle Robert, mom and me inside the Park in front of Mainstreet USA.

This visit was likely the first of the three mid-1970's trips to Disneyland.  (The earlier slides of Ann and Robert along Mainstreet was later in the day after it started to rain.)

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The three of us in Frontierland

Mom was always grabbing some unsuspecting passerby to take out picture.  This is obviously the case here in Frontierland.

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Can Can Dancers at the Golden Horseshoe Revue

I took a number of pictures, and slides, over the years of the Can Can dancers at the Golden Horseshoe Revue.  However, this was the best of the lot because they moved so fast and the film was never able to capture the moment properly.

 

We were able, obviously, to get seats on the side of the stage.  The opposite side in this picture shows what our seating area looked like.   

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Greg & Ann in Frontierland

On the same trip but obviously taken with mom's camera in Frontierland.

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Ann & Mom eating candy from the shop on Mainstreet

Again, without benefit of a flash, this picture taken at night looks much better than any taken during the day with the same film.

 

Mom always loved a specific candy that was carried in the candy shop on Main street at Disneyland. 

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Ann & Mom at a restaurant in Disneyland

We must be at a restaurant indoors.  The quality of the picture improves, so I must have used low light film that did not work as well out of doors.

 

Sometime after her open-heart surgery, mom did have minor plastic surgery to her face.  Frankly, as the years passed, she was not happy with the results in that she looked worse, rather than better, with tighter skin.  I believe that this trip to Disneyland took place after the plastic surgery because her face and facial skin do look different than the previous pictures on that (likely earlier) trip to Disneyland.

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Ann at Disneyland

A very nice picture of Ann at Disneyland.  Again, it is difficult to tell which trip came first, although I believe the visit with Robert came before the other two visits. 

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More pictures of Ann & Mom on the People Mover

Again, whatever film I used was not as good in daylight, as will become obvious soon.

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Greg & Ann on the People Mover

Mom took this picture.  Obviously, the speed of the film, and a lack of a flash attachment, lead to this picture being dark and a bit discolored.  The Matterhorn is in the background.

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Ann & Greg on the People Mover

Even the coloration of the photographs is different from the earlier pictures from Disneyland.  So, obviously, we went to Disneyland three times after I had my new Canon camera.

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Ann & Mom on the People Mover

Three trips to Disneyland in the mid-1970's?

 

The above photograph is--again--taken on the People Mover.  However, it's obvious that this was not the cloudy and rainy day when Uncle Robert went with the three of us to Disneyland.  Nor is the sunny day that I previously offered several photographs of.  Clothing and hairstyles are obviously different.

 

Mom had open-heart surgery in approximately 1977.  The earlier pictures might have been before the surgery.  These photographs appear to be after that.

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Wally Boag & Fulton Burley in the Golden Horseshoe Revue

I cannot even remember how many times I saw the show over the years.  One can never forget the balloon animals and spitting teeth routine and the songs and music and dancing.  Yet no matter how many years Wally and Betty performed, and all of us saw them, their performances finally came to an end.  I guess they did get a bit long in the tooth as the many years passed, but we were entertained, regardless.

 

I was amazed to read that he died in 2011 at age 90, one day before Betty Taylor died at age 91.

 

From this color slide, you can see that we had seats and a table in the balcony, a rarity.  This was obviously on the other trip we made to Disneyland rather than the one when I took the picture of Slue Foot Sue and the dancers previously. 

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Slue Foot Sue and the Golden Horseshoe Revue

Slue Foot Sue and the Golden Horseshoe Revue was probably mom's favorite attraction in all of Disneyland over the many years we went there.  I don't know if she ever missed a chance to attend.  The last time we took her to Disneyland in December of 2001, after 9/11, the review had long been gone.  We wheeled mom around the park in a wheelchair, but she enjoyed herself nonetheless.

 

From 1955 until 1986, I read that the Revue was maintained.  Wally Boag was the main attraction along with Judy Marsh the first year and, after that, Betty Taylor.  Wally was replaced along the way in the 1980's, but it was never quite the same.  I also read that Betty Taylor played the part from 1956, and remained for 30 years.  Hard to imagine how many shows she and Wally put on over all of that time, with several shows a day, six days a week.

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Ann & Mom aboard the monorail

When the monorail was built, I was thrilled.  It was a great way to see the park from above.  I was finally able to ride in the front with the engineer or in the back end when a friend and I went to Disney World in the later 1990's.  All of us seemed to believe that monorails would appear everywhere around the country, just like the flying cars I saw in magazines in the 1950's or the cars that you did not have to drive because you could just program where you wanted to go and the car would simply take you there utilizing cables buried under the highway.  So much for that future.

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Mom & Ann beside the Matterhorn

The bobsleds have always been, and will probably always continue to be, my favorite Disney ride, regardless of the park or era.  (I have been told they have been modified once more, and that I might not enjoy the ride as much as I used to.)  Soaring Above California in the California Adventure park has moved up to be almost as entertaining.  But if I am forced to name one ride, it's the Matterhorn bobsleds.

 

The Disneyland Paris Space Mountain ride was definitely entertaining if I had to name a ride not in the original Disneyland. 

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Mom & Ann just inside of Tomorrow Land

One of my two favorite rides in Disneyland is now gone.  The circular theater that showed America as if you were traveling through it, in the air or on the ground, not far from where mom and Ann are standing.  It was one of those attractions that I could enjoy repeatedly over the years because it was often being updated with new footage or resonating a different theme from time to time.

 

Also, not far from where they are standing, was the Monsanto House of Tomorrow, another attraction that was torn down years ago but which, when it was still standing, was a favorite of mine.

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Mom & Greg on the People Mover at Disneyland

The Carousel of Progress is in the background of this picture.  (At least that is what I remember it was called back then.)

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Ann on the People Move in Tomorrow Land

The Matterhorn is in the background.  You can see an orange "bucket" from the sky ride just behind Ann on the left in the picture, though they were removed in the last decade or so.

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Mom's favorite picture of me

Mom told me that this was her favorite photograph of me.  She even had it enlarged and framed when she lived in the senior high rise, Harbor Towers, in San Pedro, CA.

Here I am on the people mover in Tomorrow Land.

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Ann & Greg, Disneyland, mid-1970's

We went to Disneyland a couple of times in the mid-1970's while I was stationed in Minot.  Once when the weather was overcast and rainy and our Uncle Robert was with Ann, mom and me; and one other time from which the above picture, and more, were taken with my new Canon camera.

 

Having gone in the past decade, it's difficult to imagine that Frontier land was so relatively uncrowded, even on a sunny day.

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