TomHarvill.com - In Remembrance of Mom

My mother was a Jones. She had a funny first name: M. Lazora. She was born on March 18, 1902, to Arthur Guy Jones and Alice Irene Preddy Jones in Austin, Texas. Apparently, there were second thoughts about her first name since most of her life she was known as Zoe, as in Joe. She was an only child and much loved by her parents, and she had beautiful hands. Her mother was born in Montgomery, Alabama; her father somewhere in Nebraska. Early on, they migrated west to the Imperial Valley of California, where my Grandpa Jones supported his small family by farming. In 1912, Grandpa Jones accepted an offer from the Australian government to move to that land down under and introduce some, at that time, more modern methods of irrigation and farming to the locals of New South Wales.

It must have been, to say the least, an adventure for a smaller than average, 10 year old girl. My mother told me years ago that the schools in Australia at that time were strange to her. She attended a country school comprised of several grades, taught by a no-nonsense schoolmaster, in a small, one-room wooden schoolhouse heated by an old woodstove. The plumbing was outdoors, of course. Since the school was several miles away, my mother rode horseback to and from. An older raw-boned boy on a neighboring farm would ride by in the morning, help the little Yank up on her huge horse, and ride alongside to school. There was a time, my mother said, when they were late arriving. The neighbor boy had too many chores to complete before leaving that morning. His hands were often chapped and bleeding from the milking and feeding the stock. On that particular day, the schoolmaster decided to make an example of the two late comers. He called them to the front of the class, had them hold out their hands, and proceeded to whip their hands with a ruler. As a result, the boy’s hands were split and bleeding. When my mother returned home that day and Grandpa Jones saw her swollen hands, he was infuriated. He went to school the next morning and confronted the schoolmaster in such a physical way he never again punished my mother. I never learned just what he did, but I understand Grandpa Jones was a tall wiry man, strong for his size, and very protective of his only child. Grandpa Jones contracted tuberculosis a few years later which resulted in his death at age 42 in June of 1920. He was buried in the town of Cobram, on the Murray River.

When, with her mother, she returned to California as a beautiful eighteen year old with long blond hair and a captivating Aussie accent, Mom caused quite a stir among her cousins and friends of the family. She met and married Pop in 1924, two years before I was born. My brother, Jack, completed our family in 1928. We settled down in a small stucco house on a side street in Huntington Park, and while there, we survived the Long Beach earthquake in March of 1933.

Sometime in the summer of 1933 or ’34, Mom decided to take a trip to Port Arthur, Texas, to visit Aunt Johnny, Grandma Jones’ younger sister. We also had relatives in Lake Charles, Louisiana…more Joneses…and we planned to visit them as well. We loaded the 1929 Dodge sedan with a few groceries and changes of clothes, and with Grandma Jones riding shotgun, the four of us started out. It took us all of four days, since the roads were narrow and rough, and Mom always stopped in a town in mid afternoon to find a tourist cabin. There were no such things as motels in those days; at least we didn’t see any. Apparently, it was important for Mom to provide us with a hot home-cooked meal every evening and she would shop for fresh vegetables in a local market. Those tourist cabins were something else. They were usually individual frame buildings set back off the road among the trees. As I remember, they had linoleum floors throughout, and single naked bulbs hanging form the ceiling. The beds were usually ancient, sagging mattresses on wire springs. .Plumbing was indoors, however, and there had to be a kitchen of sorts for Mom to fix supper. However, we made it to Aunt Johnny’s and later to the Lake Charles Joneses, before heading home again.

Periodically, Mom would take Jack and me to the picture show in Huntington Park. She loved the romantic films because they always made her cry, and Mom loved to have a good cry. However, Jack and I were bored half way through a “wuve story” and grew restless, standing up on the fold-down seats and getting our legs stuck. Mom would have none of that, and if after a single warning we continued, she would usher us out of the theater, explain to the manager that we would return, and lead us around to the back alley. We returned several minutes later, with bruised backsides and teary eyes to sit silently sobbing until the show was over.

Before Pop lost his job during the depression years, he bought a new 1935 Ford sedan. Grandma Jones lived with us in a rather run down frame house in South Gate, California. It seemed that South Gate in those days had more vacant lots than houses, and most of our neighbors were on relief as we were. Grandma Jones kept busy sewing for people for a few dollars. Pop spent his days to and from L.A. on streetcars and buses looking for work, and he was seldom home. My memories of Mom back then were of a hardworking lady, doing ironing and cleaning houses in order to make ends meet. My Aunt Clara was a principal of a school in Huntington Park and she would periodically send left over groceries from her cafeteria. Although Mom was embarrassed, she accepted them gratefully.

There was a trunk built on to the back of the Ford sedan, and often in summer afternoons, Mom would make a huge pot of spaghetti, load the car, and the trunk, with Jack and me, and several neighborhood kids and head for the Colorado Lagoon or the Horseshoe Pier in Long Beach. She was a small, thin lady with a bit of steel built in. As the natural disciplinarian of the family, she ruled the Harvill roost in South Gate as she did in the picture shows in Huntington Park. She kept us boys in line with a wooden coat hanger she kept hanging on the kitchen door for emergencies, which occurred quite often. When we didn’t behave, she had no qualms about swinging that wicked weapon across our bottoms. I guess that helped keep us out of jail later on.

A year before Pearl Harbor, Pop found a job and we moved to Glendale. I was in high school by that time, and Brother Jack was in junior high. Mom worked in the glass factory where Pop was employed as an accountant. Grandma Jones died in July, 1943. Several months after high school graduation in 1944, I was drafted into the Navy. Mom hated to see me leave home. However, I didn’t see any action, nor did I leave the states, and that pleased her. After the war, I met my future wife, Betty, and we were married on January 1, 1948. Shortly after that, I began working for the Sanitation Districts of L.A. County, and was later recalled for 18 months during the Korean War. Discharged again, Betty and I bought a house in Fullerton and began building a family that ultimately totaled three sons.

Pop died in October 1955, never knowing his grandsons, and Mom lived with us for a while. She developed uremia in the early summer of 1973, and suffering from chronic asthma, we admitted her to a hospital in Santa Ana. By then she weighed less than a hundred pounds and later she lapsed into a coma; she was on life support and constant dialysis. Although she was comatose, I visited her every morning before driving to the office in Whittier. On the morning of August 7, 1973 when I slipped into her room, her doctor was there, wanting to talk with me. He said I had a decision to make. The hospital at that time had only a few dialysis machines and he said Mom was dying and the treatment wasn’t helping. If I said so, they would keep her on life support and dialysis; otherwise, the machines were needed for other patients. I told him since she wasn’t responding to the treatment and her prognosis was terminal, that they should take her off the equipment. I received a call from the doctor at the office later that morning informing me that Mom had passed away peacefully. We buried Mom in Memory Gardens cemetery in Brea, a town a short distance from Fullerton. She would have liked it there. My brother, Jack, died in October, 1979, and is buried next to her. She would have liked that, too.

When Mom was a young woman, she had beautiful hands. At a Thanksgiving gathering at Aunt Clara’s house back in the 1930s, one of her cousins had a black and white movie camera and asked to photograph her hands holding some blooms on a rose bush. As I recall, the film turned out wonderfully. I wish I had a copy today, but alas, her contemporary cousins have all passed away, I fear, and the photographer as well. In later years, her fingers developed arthritis, but even then, she had beautiful hands.

And so, my mother was a Jones with a funny first name. What did she think of me? Well, among my collection of family things is a picture of me 18 months old pulling a cat from a crawl hole under a house we once lived in. On the back Mom had written, “Tommy is the sweetest baby in the world.” I’m glad she thought of me that way back then. I wonder what she’d think of me now that I’m not quite a baby anymore, and I’ve finally given up abusing cats and other animals, don’t you know.

M. Lazora "Zoe" Jones, 1908	Arthur Guy and Alice Irene Jones, 1900 (Zoe's Parents)

Mr. & Mrs. J.E.B. Jones (Zoe's paternal grandparents)	Sovrin Jones (1789-1863) Welsh Immigrant (Zoe's paternal great-grandfather)

Jesse Paul, Tom's Father 1920	Tom, 1930

Tom and Father, 1939