Imhoff

Although I do not remember ever having seen my Imhoff great grandparents, the picture on the right shows me with my arm on my great grandfather's knee, and my brother Bert with my great grandmother. Dad is in back, with his arm around my mother's shoulders. I look to be about 4 years old, so the picture was probably taken in 1935 or 1936. I have not been able to identify the woman on the right. Someone had to have taken the photo, so perhaps she was accompanied by her husband or another relative? One more of those fascinating mysteries that keep cropping up when you look at old photographs.

An accomplished confectioner, he met Cora Miller, my grandmother, when he went to work at a candy store owned by a cousin of my grandmother. Cora was working there behind the counter. They married in Tacoma and moved into a house built just the year before by Cora's father. My mother, Gladys Imhoff, was their only child. After having lived for a few years in Auburn, Washington, the family moved to Canada, where Anthony had taken a position with a candy company. He later took a position in Seattle, creating new candies for the Imperial Candy Company. They are shown in the 1920 census as living at 1912 First Avenue North.

In about 1925, however, my grandfather decided to go to California, where he wanted to create and market a new oyster sauce! He went by himself and was gone several months when letters home became less and less frequent. Cora and her parents drove to Los Angeles where they found that he was living with another woman. Divorce quickly followed. His second wife died a few years later and he subsequently married for the third time.

Although he made a few trips North to visit our family when I was very young, we knew little of his life in California, other than that he worked for Sears and Roebuck. I visited with him for a day on my way to the Navy's Boot Camp in San Diego in 1950, but that was the only time I remember having seen him. He died on August 18, 1958, in Los Angeles. By that time he had changed his first name to Cortland (some kind of "legal trouble", my mother said) and was giving an age that seems to have been shy of his actual age by two years. Altogether a most interesting man!

Following her marriage to my father in 1931, mother continued drawing and painting, in addition to keeping house and caring for me and my brother, Berton Leroy, born in 1933. She was especially proficient at working with pastels and I can still picture a beautiful drawing of a house and flower garden that she did when I was still a small child.

Later in life, after my brother and I had left home, mother turned to craft work, finding it more enjoyable or at least more profitable. In addition to making and decorating stationary, jewelry, and a host of other gift items, she learned how to "paint" on silk with dyes. Then, with the assistance of my father, she began designing, making and selling exquisite silk scarfs and blouses. Most had Southwestern motifs as can be seen in the scarf at the right.

Following the death of my father in 1995, Mother moved from Globe, Arizona, to Raleigh, North Carolina. She fell and broke her hip a year later and had hip replacement surgery. After her recuperation and physical therapy, she moved to an Assisted Living facility in Durham, North Carolina. She passed away June 24, 2007, as a result of complications from a severe infection.