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| Vera Bachman (Hastings) |
She described her childhood
as flying on the coat tails of her mother who liked a good time. She once said
that she raised her mother; it was not the other way around. This probably
explains an early marriage to Carl Meyer that ended in divorce. Her second
marriage was to Charles Goodnough in 1934 when she was nineteen. She had a
serious car accident while married to him. She was pregnant at the time and
lost the baby. She was not able to have children after that which may have
contributed to the divorce later. In 1939, she married Gilbert Hastings. Gib
had grown up in a mining town is Utah. His father worked at the Bingham copper
pit. His parents had come from England. He was a Navy veteran and even to a
young girl like me very handsome with his head of white wavy hair that he never
lost. They were devoted to each other for the duration of their lives.
I was in grade school when we
took a trip to California to see Aunt Vera and Uncle Gib, Grandma Ethel, Uncle
Mel and Aunt Violet and their children Dick and Sis. I remembered Mel’s family
from when we all lived in Washington during the war. Dick and Sis babysat Susan
and I sometimes and liked to tease and tickle us. Uncle Mel played popular
songs on the piano by ear and I used to beg him to play for me. He was the
inspiration that made me start asking for lessons when I was about five.
We picked up Grandma and Ray,
her husband, at the apartment building they managed and drove to the small
duplex apartment in Montebello where Vera and Gib lived. A large black grand
piano took up a good part of the small living room. Vera had learned to play. I
don’t know if she took lessons or taught herself. She only played for me a
couple of times but was enough to encourage me to want lessons even more. Mom
would make me perform for her and once when I was bout 12 I played first Bach
invention I had learned. It had been difficult and i was not yet sold on Bach
so when Vera praised my playing and told Mom I should only be allowed to play
Bach I was not happy about it.
She was reader. There were
always piles of books there that she was working on. And she always had cats
that would rub against us to be petted. I remember her cooking dinner a couple
of times and the grownups having a drink or two that made them all lively and
talkative, mostly about politics from a labor union point of view. Both Vera
and Gib worked for U.S, Rubber, a major tire company at that time. Vera’s voice
was husky and Gib’s animated as they talked of problems at work and their
socialistic philosophy.
Usually while the grownups
talked, Uncle Gib would see that we kids were getting bored. He would nod his
head to Susan, Tina and I to follow him outside. There we played hide and seek,
chase, and usually ended with us guessing what he had in his pocket--sometimes
a fifty cent piece or even a silver dollar.
Niece Violet (Sis) remembers
that when she was younger they used to bring Grandma and come to visit but as
they grew older Vera and Gib’s life style could be described as “urban hermit.”
They went to work and came home every day on the same schedule. On Saturdays
they bought groceries, did errands and went to eat, always at the same
restaurant, Frenchy’s. If we were visiting on a weekend they would invite us to
eat out with them. They did not take vacations or travel. Mom tried for years
to get them to come and see us in Vegas but they never would, not even after
they retired. When Grandma Ethel became frail and senile they found a rest home
nearby and went every day to help her eat and to care for her. Over time they
added other residents to their care list and were valuable volunteers for the
facility until Ethel died a few years later.
They continued to live their
quiet lives until Gib became ill and died of heart complications. Vera was
devastated at having to go on without him. When we were notified of her death
we learned that it was from an advanced cancer. She had probably known she was
ill but had made the choice not to seek treatment. We met her friends, the
family that had also been their landlord when we went down for her service.
They gave me an old suitcase that had a photo album, family papers and letters
which I used to put this project together.
We learned that their rather
considerable savings were to be divided among the nieces they had between them.
We were surprised and blessed by this windfall.
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| Gib |