Travel Tuesday: Rebirth in the Land of Mañana

Benita (McGinnis) McCormick (1889 - 1984)
Phillip Columbus McCormick (1892 - 1981)

When a letter begins with the words, "Sit down," a big announcement is sure to follow.

That was how my great-uncle-and-aunt, Phillip and Benita (McGinnis) McCormick, learned that their daughter, Jane, had married her true love, Eldon "Ole" Olson, in a private church ceremony in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, in May of 1960.

Reading the news in their Barcelona pension, some 5,000 miles away from home, they were undoubtedly surprised, though maybe not entirely. True, it had been easier to see their son, Bud, marry and start a family, but letting go of their daughter was tougher to do.

They had to admit that she did what they would want her to do, which was to follow her heart and do things her own way.  Besides, she had tried her best to cushion the news.

Did Aunt Detty gold-leaf this small statue of
the Virgin Mary? From her collection of Spanish
Madonnas, it now sits on my dressing table. 

In characteristic fashion, Uncle Phil and Aunt Detty rose to the occasion. Swallowing their pride, they sent her and Ole their congratulations and decided to extend their stay a while longer. And being the larger-than-life couple they were, even in their 70s, their idea of "a while" turned into a year.

Spain, a place to retreat in a moment of uncertainty as they struggled to give their daughter some room to grow, became the place of their rebirth and rediscovery.

They made the rounds of the major art museums and architectural jewels, not just in Catalonia but throughout the country and became active members of the local artists' colony. Uncle Phil, already somewhat familiar with Spanish, began taking a conversational class so he could talk to people during his long walks through town.  Aunt Detty, always looking to reinvent herself artistically, signed on with a master artist to learn the art of gold leaf.

In a 1960 letter to my parents, Aunt Detty's words spill out breathlessly, and she seems to abbreviate many of them to help her fingers keep up with her rapid-fire thoughts.  Here, "g.l." stands for "gold leaf," while "E" stands for España, or Spain:

I've had 6 days of wonderful gold-leaf application.  Yesterday I g.l.  a little shelf.  Today I do the Virgin (plaster) that I helped repair & prepared for g.l. yesterday.  There is no one I know of in our country doing this gold and silver work and after we tour the rest of E, we may return here for Sept. & Oct. do do further study with this wonderful maestro - the head of the craft in Barcelona.  We work in his studio-workshop - the former stables of a castle (walled - even now, if you please) and so old that even Antonio's father, who had the place before him, doesn't know its age.

I wonder if the small statue of the Virgin Mary, shown in the picture above, is the same plaster Virgin that Aunt Detty was gold leafing?  My cousin, her granddaughter Suzanne (Olson) Wieland, gave it to me a couple of years ago, one of a collection of Madonnas Aunt Detty brought back from Spain.

Evidently, her hosts were equally fascinated by their older pupil:

Each day our lesson from 4:30 pm till 8 pm is punctuated by loud rings of the bell to admit some visitor, or client, to meet the "Americana."  [The maestro's] daughter, 14, brings her school friends and his sister-in-law came to check on me. . . . Evidently I pass muster, look harmless, and so get the welcome Española!  I love them all.

Aunt Detty and Uncle Phil were especially taken by the Spaniards' slower pace of life, their philosophy that there is always mañana - another day, and that if things don't resolve themselves right away, they will work themselves out eventually.  In the same letter to my parents, she marvels at this slower pace of life.

Joan, this is a week to the day from the start of this note.... you also know what mañana means - Mary Harlow told me that if a Spaniard says "Mañana - mañana" that really means the next day.  but life is so full here - I can understand how it takes months to get things done.  No wonder they think we do everything by "machinas" we move so much faster than they.

As with everything else they did, Phil and Benita McCormick wholeheartedly embraced the lifestyle of mañana.  Sure enough, they gradually accepted the idea of Jane's being married and lovingly welcomed their new son-in-law, Ole Olson.

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Copyright ©  2015  Linda Huesca Tully

Sentimental Sunday: Loving and Letting Go

Benita Elizabeth (McGinnis) McCormick 
   (1889 - 1984)
Phillip Columbus McCormick (1892 - 1981)
Phillip Eugene "Bud" McCormick (1927 - 2004)
Benita Jane "Janie" (McCormick) Olson 
   (1927 - 2011)
Elson "Ole" Olson (1924 - 1994)

Benita Jane McCormick, known as "Jane," circa 1960.

As happens eventually to parents everywhere, Phil and Benita McCormick must have wondered how they could have just blinked one day and looked up to find their son and daughter all grown up: living independently, working, falling in love, and starting families of their own.

Their son, Bud, married a local beauty queen named Ruth Kant sometime in the 1950s.  Bud and Ruth had a daughter, but their marriage was short-lived.  Some time after their divorce, Bud fell in love again, this time with a young woman named Barbara Bowman. They married, had five sons, and established a home in the Chicago suburbs. 

Jane went away to university in New Mexico to major in English and worked during her summer vacations as a "Harvey Girl" at the Fred Harvey Bright Angel Lodge at Grand Canyon, Arizona.  After a few years, she was offered a job as a reservations agent for Trans World Airlines (TWA) in California.  She worked for the airline in Fresno for a short time before transferring as a ticket agent to San Francisco International Airport, where she met a handsome and charming Norwegian-American TWA freight agent, Eldon "Ole" Olson.

This menu cover from Bright Angel Lodge at Grand Canyon,
Arizona, hung in Jane (McCormick) Olson's kitchen for many
years, a fond memory from her days there as a Harvey Girl.

Meanwhile, by 1959, Phil, who had retired some years before, and Benita were feeling lonesome for their daughter. They sold their home in Chicago and moved to California,  renting an apartment at The Arlington at 1401 Floribunda Avenue in Burlingame, near the airport.  It was a big move for a couple entering their 70s, but they were thrilled to be closer to Jane and looked forward to seeing her often.

A TWA gate agent offers his hand to
Jane McCormick as she disembarks
a jet on one of her many travels.

At 32 years old, she was having the time of her life, working for a major international airline during the Golden Age of air travel.  It was the same way Phil had felt during early days with the railroad in the 1920s. 

In 1960, most airports were new and clean, bright places that attracted not only business and leisure travelers but also the curious who came to see what all the fuss was about. And there sure was a lot of fuss. Large concourses displayed artistic tourism posters beckoning people to see new places. Passenger lounges offered travelers and would-be travelers enormous windows to gaze through at sleek and silvery jet airplanes that promised to take them in style to see their families, or maybe even to an exotic vacation abroad, much quicker than by rail or boat. Airline employees, usually clean-cut young men and women, wore crisp uniforms, enjoyed good pay and flight benefits, and received special training in customer service, charm, and etiquette.   

Eldon "Ole" Olson, year unknown

Passengers at the time were generally from the middle and upper classes. Decked out in smart outfits and wearing the latest hairstyles, they came to airports to see and be seen. Those traveling for pleasure were typically accompanied by large entourages of family and friends who saw them off and greeted them on their return as if they were the most important people in the world.  

No wonder, then, that Jane and Ole's courtship felt so magical, especially against this glamorous backdrop.  Ole Olson was everything Jane had dreamed of:  funny and bright, kind, attentive, and romantic.  She could not believe the similarities between him and her father.  Like Phil McCormick, Ole was fair-skinned and fair-haired and was from Minnesota. To top it off, he was a freight agent (and later supervisor of ramp services) for TWA, just as Phil had been a freight agent for the railroad.  

When asked years later about those days, Ole recalled that Jane was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.  He loved her lilting laugh, the way she looked up at him through her clear blue eyes and long dark eyelashes, and the graceful way she moved through a room.  He teased her about being sentimental, but he loved her for it, all the same.  

It gradually became clear to Benita and Phil that their little girl was falling in love with Ole Olson.  As she began spending more time with him and less time with her parents, they reluctantly had to admit that they were no longer at the center of their daughter's life.  

Sometimes love is about letting go.  As much as they understood that, Phil and Benita also  realized they would have to find something else to fill their new-found time.  So just months after arriving in California, they closed up the apartment and obtained two one-way TWA airline passes to Barcelona, Spain, to begin the next phase of their lives.

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Copyright ©  2015  Linda Huesca Tully

Wisdom Wednesday: Crossroads

Gilbert Cayetano Huesca (1915 - 2009)
Joan Joyce (Schiavon) Huesca (1928 - 1987)

My parents, having decided that our family should leave the high altitude of Mexico City for the sake of my little sister's health, now had a decision to make:  Where should we go?

Flickr Creative Commons, Photo by Laenulfean

We had been living in the Federal District for nearly three years after leaving our home in Chicago, Illinois, in 1964 following the Cuban Missile Crisis.  We were very happy living near our Huesca relatives.  My sisters and I had learned to speak, read, and write Spanish, and we had acclimated well to the culture.

Unfortunately, the city's high elevation (7,350 feet above sea level) had affected my sister's health and  enlarged her adenoids, which made it hard for her to breathe and eat.  Although the rest of us did not suffer the effects as severely, on occasion we found ourselves huffing and puffing from the thin air as we went up the stairs or exerted ourselves physically.

It was not unusual for people of lower altitudes to suffer from Mexico's thin air.  When Mexico City hosted the Olympic Games in 1968, just a year after we left, I remember reading newspaper reports about the challenges the high altitude posed to many athletes.  It turned out that those who came from areas with similarly high elevations had an advantage over the others and performed much better, particularly in the track and field events.  In fact, someone took advantage of this to promote a souvenir during that time - a metal tin of "Mexican Air," said to be especially helpful for beating athletic performance records.  The thin air was so detrimental to the performance of many of Olympians that the Games have not taken place in such a high elevation ever since.

There was no shortage of beautiful cities and towns in Mexico where we could have moved.  My parents had their favorite cities:  Puebla, Guadalajara, Cuernavaca, and Merida.  Of these, the most job opportunities would have been in the first two cities, so it is possible that they would have been at the top of the list.  The biggest drawback was that there were no relatives living in any of those places by then.  As was the case with many Mexicans in the mid-twentieth century, most of the Huesca family had migrated to the capital, where the jobs and opportunities were.  

Other options were areas back in the United States.  We had been living in a warm climate long enough by now that my parents did not want to return to the extreme temperatures of Chicago, even with my grandfather still living there.  My mother, Joan (Schiavon) Huesca, missed him and her brother and his family, but she thought it was time for a change.   My father, Gilbert Huesca, felt the same way.

That December in 1966 as we celebrated what would be our last Christmas in Mexico, my parents began to talk to us and to our relatives about the upcoming move.  It was a difficult topic, to be sure, but their sadness at leaving our relatives was tempered by their concern over my sister's health.  While they were still uncertain about their decision, they also felt excited about the wide range of choices available to them.  

I was not too sure I wanted to move somewhere else at this point, if it was not back to my hometown of Chicago.  As happy as I was living in Mexico, there were moments when I missed our old house and my grandfather and cousins and friends back there.  I used to fantasize that we would return there one day to a rousing welcome by the mayor  and a ticker tape parade down State Street, with all my old classmates cheering and Frank Sinatra singing my favorite song, "Chicago, That Toddlin' Town" in the background.  On the other hand, I had grown very close to my Mexican relatives and had made lots of friends and did not want to leave them, either.  But the more my parents talked about the move, the more we became caught up in the excitement of a new adventure.

My parents began leaning toward moving back to the States, as both of them were American citizens (a native of Mexico, my father had become a naturalized American citizen in the early 1960s) and could own property and have a better chance of finding good jobs.  They might even be able to start a business once they got settled.  The more they thought about the possibility of starting a business, the clearer it became that we should move to an area where the economy was strong and growing.

Two states seemed to fit the bill:  Texas and California.  Both were known as forward-thinking states, were experiencing rapid growth, and had warm climates.  The cities that appealed to my parents were Brownsville, San Antonio, and Houston, in Texas; and San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles, in California.  All of these cities were at or close to sea level.  Texas was closer to Chicago than California, which was a plus if we were to visit my grandfather.

But that led to a discussion that would end up deciding the question.  When all was said and done, where would we feel most at home?  There needed to be family or friends, at the very least, nearby.  My parents had made friends with the Baileys, when we had visited Brownsville a couple of years before.  They also had old friends from Chicago who had moved to Los Angeles.  And then my mother thought of her aunt and uncle, Benita (McGinnis) and Philip McCormick and their daughter Jane, who by now was married and the mother of a little girl.  Aunt "Detty," as we called her, and Uncle Phil and Aunt Jane (McCormick) and her husband Ole Olson, lived on the San Francisco peninsula in California.

My mother and her cousin Jane were only a year apart; they had grown up together in Chicago as their mothers were sisters.  A few years after Jane had arrived in California to work for Trans World Airlines, her parents followed so they could live close to their daughter and her family.  By now they were in their early 70s but were still active and in excellent health.

My maternal grandmother had died only three years before at this point, and my mother missed her deeply.  The idea of living near her mother's sister and her cousin, was comforting and felt right.  My father thought it was a wonderful idea.  It would be a healthy place to live

I still remember how excited my sisters and I got when we heard we were moving to "sunny California."  I don't think we knew much, if anything at all about the place.  I can't speak for my sisters, but I was very proud that there was one thing I knew something about:  San Francisco.  It was the home of the Golden Gate Bridge and of my second favorite song:   Tony Bennett's "I Left My Heart in San Francsico."  It was also the home of my favorite American commercial - Rice-A-Roni, The San Francisco Treat.  I couldn't wait to hear the ding-ding of that cable car.

Copyright ©  2013  Linda Huesca Tully

Did you know, or are you a member of the Huesca, McCormick, or Olson families?  If so, share your memories and comments below.