My mom and dad (Barbara Smith & Gordon Thomas) decided in 1969 that the three of us kids (me, age 10; Teresa, age 9; and Jeannie, age 7) needed to see the country and planned a West Coast summer trip by car with the idea of seeing some family and friends while we were out there. Among the stops was the family of my mom’s cousin, Mary Kate LeBlanc, in Livermore. It took about a week to get out there, since we were stopping at various places deemed to be educational or at least interesting, ranging from the Rockies (a real novelty for Nebraska kids who had never been west of North Platte or east of Chicago) to the Great Salt Lake to Lake Tahoe. From there, we went to Sacramento, where mom and dad broke down and got a motel with a pool since it was so hot. The next day, on to Livermore!
We stayed with Mary Kate and family for a couple of days, going to San Francisco during the day. The kids were a bit younger than us: the oldest, Mary, was around Jeannie’s age, and Elizabeth was still a toddler, I think. Mom had often spoken of Mary Kate, who was a few years younger than she was and had been a role model in many ways. Mom also played cello, although not seriously once though high school. My mom was a good enough student, but as she hinted, social life (i.e., boys) sometimes got in the way. Mary Kate, by contrast, had staged a triumphal march through college and graduate school and was the academic star. My uncle, Dick Smith, had eventually gotten a doctoral degree, but his progress through college and graduate school was rocky and circuitous, to put it mildly.
The LeBlanc household was as active as four kids under ten could make it, but there was a great sense of calm. I recall that there were a number of falls, a couple of spills, and some squabbling, but Mary Kate was completely unruffled by it. Keep in mind that this was a big contrast with my own mom, who certainly had inherited an “Irish temper” and had limited reserves of patience. One of the peculiar things I remember was “Candy Day” at the LeBlancs: no candy during the week, but kids’ choice on one day of the week (Saturday?).
After Livermore, we traveled down to Long Beach, where my dad’s aunt, Maude Schwartz and her husband Joe had lived since the 1930s after moving from Iowa. From there, we went to San Diego where my dad had been in the navy, and then back to Nebraska, stopping in Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon on the way. The whole trip was very memorable, and I am glad that I got to meet Mary Kate then: I’ve never been to northern California since then, only southern California.
The patterns that emerge in families are strange. I am a professor of Greek archaeology, but I teach Latin every semester and ancient Greek when needed. It was not surprising that someone good at math and science like Mary Kate would find fascination with those languages.
Pat Thomas (Evansville, Indiana)