While almost anyone in the family would agree that my mother
did not have an easy life, that claim could be made of almost any of her
siblings - and perhaps in particular her sister Beryl. Beryl was born in 1924, three years younger
than Mom and in many ways they were similar. They were about the same height,
both with blond hair and round faces that seeming to take after the Sitzmann
side of the family. Both loved to talk and smiled a lot and, out of a family
with ten children, they were the two who ended up with the most children
themselves - Beryl with six and Mom with seven. She and Mom were running about
even and Beryl might have had more,
except for the turn that her life took in 1958.
Beryl was married to a man named Mickey Near. My memories of him are vague. The earliest
that I remember seeing him was in was when we lived in San Diego and I was ten or eleven years
old. Her had dark wavy hair and had a
reputation for drinking. I remember little about him except that I did not like
him. He seemed a bit of a braggadocio and so different from my father, not the
kind of person I felt comfortable around.
The one concrete thing I remember was that we were playing cribbage and
he commented that the only time he had ever lost a game was to a blind
man. That level of humor probably
captures the general aura that surrounded him.
When I was twelve and beginning seventh grade, my family
moved up to Santa Ana.
We lived on South Baker St.,
only a few blocks away from Aunt Beryl and her family who lived on Camden Ave. We would go around to visit them and all of
the cousins were expected to play together. At that time Mom had five (Ed was
the youngest) and Beryl had four. The
oldest two in each set were parallel ages.
Beryl’s oldest, Teresa, was six months younger than me. She had her dad’s wavy black hair, light skin
and freckles. No one ever actually called her by her given name. Instead she was called Tinker or just
Tink. Her next youngest sister Patty,
was tall, thin and had dark blond hair. The two had very different
personalities. Tink was precocious and
brash, whereas Patty was quieter. Patty died of lupus in her mid-twenties,
without children and having been married only a few years. The rumor was that
when she began to get really sick, her husband deserted her. Tink’s life took quite a different course. When our families got together the house was
crowded.
It was not long after we were settled into our place in
Santa Ana and I was attending junior high, that Beryl called Mom to say that Mickey
had died. She found him lying on the bathroom floor. The circumstances of his
death were never exactly clear but it appeared to be connected with his
drinking. Making the situation even more difficult was that Beryl was pregnant when Mickey died.
Beryl pledged that whether her child were a boy or a girl (there were no
ultrasounds in those days), she would name it after her husband. So her
youngest daughter was named Mickie. This
was in 1958. At age 34, Beryl was
widowed with five children.
How Beryl met Frank Liska, I have no idea, but within a
couple of years, they were married. Beryl was 36 and Frank just 32. Frank was
originally from New York, the first easterner in the family. He wasn’t the
handsomest guy in the world – he had a head of hair like Larry Fine and was
already starting to bald in the middle – but of all my male relatives, Frank
may have been the nicest and most genuine. I heard others say more than once
that it took a pretty remarkable person to make the commitment to raise five
kids that were not his own.
No doubt Uncle Frank’s commitment (and Aunt Beryl’s too) was
tested pretty soon because in 1962 at age 15 Tink was pregnant and, like any
Catholic girl of that time, got married. It wasn’t exactly a shotgun wedding,
but it was probably pretty close. Her husband’s name was Marion Blair, but he
went by Junior. So by the time that she was 37, Beryl was also a
grandmother.
Shortly, thereafter Frank started a business putting up
block walls called Star Construction. Frank
hired my Dad and Junior to work with him. It was long, tough work. Dad would come home with his hand torn and
calloused from working with the blocks all day.
Even so, Dad and Frank were proud of their work because they could drive
almost anywhere near the city of Orange and see their walls lining all of the
homes in the mushrooming the suburbs.
When I was 16, not long after the company started, I worked for it too as a mason tender during
the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. Both Dad and Frank
had a tremendous work ethic, but Junior, Dad used to say, though a nice enough
guy wasn’t much of a worker.
Once I graduated from high school I pretty much lost contact
with Aunt Beryl’s family. They
eventually all ended up moving north to Paradise in Butte County, California.
No one in Mom’s family had it easy. “Happy Days” notwithstanding, life wasn’t
easy for everyone in the fifties. When
vying for which of my mother’s siblings had the most to contend with, though,
I’d say Aunt Beryl was in the running for top place.
