This was the only photograph in mom's collection that I can identify from Lomita Avenue in Orange, CA. I was still in the 7th grade and Ann would have still been in elementary school. Mom would likely have come over after we attended church for Easter of that year since the picture has May of 1962 along the margin.
What we would not know at the time was that 13 months after this picture was developed, Georgann and I would be leaving Orange and Lomita Avenue. What changed? It all started with the day Georgann left the house and walked all the way to dad's paint store in Fullerton, many miles from our home in Orange. I would not have even known the route to walk. To give just one example of what we had had to put up with in recent months, I was walking on the sidewalk beside our two bedrooms and bathroom between. I heard someone crying out inside the house. I ran inside and looked into Pam and Georgann's bedroom where Freddie was helping to hold Georgann down on the bed while Willene beat her. I yelled at them to stop. Willene's response was that this was the only way to keep Georgann from kicking her.
At some point over the next year, during one of my many exiles to the bedroom, Willene came in and noticed that I wasn't sitting on my bed. She demanded that I do so, but I firmly responded that I would not. She came at me, arms upraised. Realizing that I was both taller now, and probably stronger, I grabbed both her wrists as she was about to strike me. She struggled mightily to break free and smack me, but I kept her hands in check. In frustration, she backed away and warned, "Wait until your father gets home." I was not worried about dad. He had become a non-factor in his own home. There had been a night of confrontations in which, at one point, dad tried to get Willene to calm down, to which she then began to kick him in the legs. He had done what I did and held her back from hitting him with her fists. Freddie was weeping openly about how his mother was being manhandled when it was obvious to both the girls and me that Willene was being the aggressor and dad wasn't laying a finger on her.
The final incident occurred in early spring of 1963. I heard a commotion in the front of the house. I stuck my head out to see Freddie standing in the living room and Willene in the dining room. Georgann was out the sliding glass door and walking across the field next door, where the entrance to the alley now is and the small shopping center. Willene, seeing me, demanded, "You go and get your sister and you bring her back." I immediately sized up the situation, realizing that Georgann probably was provoked into leaving, and firmly countered, "Heck no. I'm going with her." So out I went through the open door as Freddie and Willene issued all kinds of threats at my back.
I quickly caught up with her and we began discussing our options. Not many weeks earlier, we had stayed with mom in her new apartment in South Gate, CA, where she had moved after living on La Reina in Downey. We liked her place and we liked South Gate. How we then got a dime, I don't know, but we decided that we were going to call dad at work and give him an ultimatum: he was to contact mom and tell her that we would henceforth be living with her. We were not going to take any more physical or emotional abuse.
In retrospect, I don't think dad believed us. Or perhaps he hoped that we would change our minds in the few months remaining before the school term ended, the date we told him we were leaving. From that point on, we were elated. We were finally going to be out from under Willene's tyrannical, and unfair, rule. Frankly, too, I don't believe Willene minded a bit losing the two of us. Dad took me to the junior high production of Brigadoon the night before we left. After our final day at Yorba Junior High, we packed up our things in the station wagon and left. We would not even see Willene, Pam or Fred for several years after that. We eventually arrived at mom's place that evening.
I clearly remember the moment she opened up the door. She looked at dad and then at us and invited us in. What she never told us until many, many years later was that dad never did call her to say that we were coming to live with her. She had no idea that night. I realize now that that was why she wasn't really prepared for us spending the night, though she never let on. We brought our meager possessions into the one bedroom apartment and that was it. I slept on the Murphy bed that dropped down from a closet in the living room. Georgann shared mom's queen-sized bed. Our lives were about to get much, much better, and we knew it.
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