The
grandfather clock blends in nicely with the rest of the old fashioned house. It
sings a light melody at noon reminding Mary-Ann Prelock it is time to feed her
serene cat which purrs peacefully at her ankles. She puts her paperwork down, to
spend time with her cat. Despite being in her 70s, Mary-Ann Prelock is an
essential part of the community. She volunteers at the La Canada Presbyterian
Church as a deacon and is a part of the Royal Canyon homeowners association as a
secretary. However, working as secretary is no new deed to an experienced woman,
who was once an ambitious young lady. After working as a secretary, one of the
best jobs for the 300-person population of Latham, Illinois, her determination
brought her to the city and according to her, it made her life. Her days in
Illinois, she says, did a lot to build self esteem and confidence, and she
wouldn’t have had it any other way. She is planning on visiting this year.
My high school was four years, the year that I graduated there were thirty-seven students in the high school; there were eleven in my graduating class. It was two story brick, with the gymnasium, with the hard wood floor and the stage were we played basketball games with other towns. We were the Latham Rabbits. The school was too small to have a football team, boys and girls played on the same team because they needed everybody and that’s why it was wonderful because you got to participate in everything, just the stars were not picked.
I mean they did have some cheerleaders, I think there were three girls that were cheerleaders for the basketball team but everybody else had to participate. I played the piano for the orchestra and the chorus; they had a band, ha-ha, which wasn’t very good.
In fall it was really fun to have hayrides, and this is because of the farming community. They would get these big open wagons and load up kids, teenagers, and you know with hay. The farmer would drive around the country and there would be singing, and you know, making out, and then in the winter there would be parties.
Now, kids like 13-14 years old had no money but in the summertime, because it was farming time, at five-thirty I the morning, a farmer, who had big fields would come to town in a big flat truck. All the kids would go out to the cornfields and you had to wear a long-sleeved shirt, because all day long, you would walk these rows, and pull the tassels, up and down, by hand out of the corn stocks, and the stocks would scratch our arms if you didn’t have a long sleeved shirt on, stocks were very sharp. They did this to germinate the corn so that it would grow, and they didn’t have machinery at that time, so they paid the kids twenty-five cents an hour. We worked all day long, in the sun, took our lunch. It was dirty and hot and backbreaking work and I was thirteen years old.
There was no newspaper, so info got around with gossip. In this town of 300 we knew everybody, and also for a long time as a child that telephone up there, that was the phone system that people had. Downtown, in the business district of down town, there was the telephone company, with a woman who plugged in the plugs, you know on the board. You had a ring, now, say my ring at my house was two long rings, well that meant the call was for you but it rang at my neighbors house too so they could pick up the phone and listen in to your conversation. There were no secrets and gossip was prevalent, absolutely everyone knew everything in town and you know, you liked it unless it was about you.
It was a W.A.S.P community, White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant and we had one minority, family, and they were Catholic and they had to go to another town to go to church. There were three churches in this little town, Baptist, Methodist, Christian. We were Christian and we had to go. It was social, it was expected, and it was moral.
Logan Bartles scared all the kids to death. He had some sort of a mental retardation, he didn’t work, and if you were going home, ‘course the town has two main streets that crossed and downtown. Downtown was the grocery store, the café, the hardware store, the lumber store, and the train depot. And so the kids would go downtown to the drugstore every night and then walk home at nine o’clock and if you thought Logan Bartles was on the street you ran because you were scared, not that he ever hurt anybody.
Although they lived in this little village, they had no socialization, they didn’t go to church, they lived there and they were very strange. A notable person was a fellow named John Kiick, who became a commercial airline pilot, which was very glamorous coming from a small town, most kids, were farm kids.
There was a Doctor Harry Pope, who delivered every baby in town, even me, during the Depression. Doctor L. Williams was the town doctor and his wife was his nurse in the office and he had a couple of kids and they had money with a nice house but it wasn’t ostentatious in any way. Everybody was pretty much at the same level financially. If money was a problem in a family it wasn’t obvious.
In my family, every Saturday night we went as a family to the next town which was seven miles away, that had a movie theater, because we loved movies and I still do. There was just one Movie Theater for everybody. You’d get a double feature, it would be a comedy, you know a cartoon, and probably for a dime of you were a kid.
I was married and divorced, and I was ambitions and I came to California in ’63 but back to Illinois, I had lots of relatives in this little town, many, many cousins. The house moved down two or three generations, my whole family lived in the area. So it was a real secure, and oh god every Sunday my Grandmas with my Cousins and Aunt would meet, it was a very close family.
I was thirty when I came here. I wanted opportunity, and I had the best job in town for a long time, an executive secretary, called administrative assistant or office manager.
I was just young and ambitious and it changed my life, it made my life and oh I’m so glad I came up here.
I would never wish to have not grown up in a small town, because, I had a wonderful education. We learned phoenix, and I am absolutely an A+ speller. I had a wonderful education, and was free to flourish, as I said they needed every kid to participate you didn’t feel left out. It did a lot to build self-esteem and confidence, especially confidence because there wasn’t any fear, and the competition was for grades and boys, you know, and it wasn’t clothes, certainly not cars.
I’ll be going back to visit this year.
Interviewed by Lily Mkhitarian