Aunt Beryl

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.