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Today's Featured Biography
Edith Horton Frampton
In 1946 my parents and four kids headed west in a small house trailer. To finance the trip my dad sold his Brockton, Mass. gas station and auto repair shop. A memorable event along the way was trading some of dad’s tools to a trucker in exchange for a tow across the Rocky Mountains.
Arriving in Orange County completely without funds, the family was rescued by the generosity of the service manager at Miller Chevrolet in Newport Beach. He hired dad and advanced him a week’s pay, enough to secure a spot in the Huntington Beach municipal trailer park and buy some groceries. We enjoyed our ocean-front home for several years.
In 1950 my parents bought a vacant lot at 2058 Placentia Avenue and relocated the trailer to the site. For a few years we had to use an outhouse and take baths in a big metal tub. My older sister, Mildred, holds the distinction of being the only kid who happily took showers in gym class. Eventually my parents completed construction on a two-bedroom, one-bath home.
Although we always lived at the Placentia Ave. address, I attended Harper, Main, Wilson, E.A. Rae, and the inaugural year of CMHS. Probably the height of my achievement during that period was winning a blue ribbon for muffins at the 1955 OC fair. I still have the ribbon, but I long ago spent the thirty-five-cent cash prize. The low point has to be trying to memorize multiplication tables in Mrs. Kohl’s fourth-grade class. I still have trouble with the nines.
After that first year at CMHS my family moved to Phoenix, Ariz. There I attended South Mountain HS, Phoenix Jr. College, and Arizona State University.
During my senior year at ASU I met a Navy warrant officer who was part of a campus recruiting team. We married and lived in San Francisco; Jacksonville, Fla.; Sasebo, Japan, and San Diego. We split up and I have been in San Diego since then.
For almost thirty years my second husband and I provided public relations counsel and services to home builders and construction companies. We were able to keep the business small enough to handle out of offices in our home. We have six children and eight grand-children.
I haven’t won any ribbons since the OC fair, but I still make prize-winning muffins.
At the end of our first year at CMHS my family moved to Arizona. I've lived in San Diego for the past 30 years and have a chance to peek at Costa Mesa now and then. My contact with other CM friends has been limited to saying hello to Cassaundra Bates at the San Diego Wild Animal Park in 1971 and sharing a cab from hotel to airport in Mexico City with a couple who used to live across the street from Geri Ogden.
Wish I had something spectacular to report about my present life. My favorites from other classmates thus far are: 57-year-old Marine serving in Afghanistan; and rock performer, married to Elvis and booking agent for Bob Dylan! My husband, Jim Frampton, and I are long-time public relations practitioners, working out of our home-based business for the last 21 years. We have a daughter, 24, and a son, 22. Jim has four daughters from his first marriage and eight grandchildren.
My memories of Harper, Main, and Wilson elementary; and EA Rae jr. high are more vivid than those of CMHS -- why was I in such a fog that year? Everything worried me -- even getting home from school. What a relief to discover the first day that the beloved Mrs. Matthews was still driving the bus and could be relied upon to get me home.
I don't recall "goat hill" but I do remember brownies, the girl scout house, day camp at Mrs. Dinsdale's, swimming lessons at OCC, taking the train from Santa Ana to the San Diego Zoo, the library, the freedom of going to the Lions Club fish fry and OC fair without an adult, Star Market, Tewinkles, the Brat Shop. Our first party-line telephone -- LIberty 8-2514, and having to ask a friend how to make a call because the phone was reserved for adult business. Velveteen dances at the Friday Afternoon Club. Bus rides with my sister and mother through the bean fields to Santa Ana to shop for school clothes
The boy scout jamboree in 1953 with fifteen hundred troops representing 48 states, the territories of Alaska and Hawaii and 26 foreign countries. My family attended an event one evening at the invitation of a relative from Massachusetts and heard Richard Nixon speak. Later, the buffalo ranch . . .
Marilyn Huscroft's interesting home on Placentia, first a large Quonset hut (got to live in one of those myself at Hunters' Point Naval Shipyard, SF) and then a beautiful craftsman her parents had moved to their lot in the early '50s. Davis and Brown's TV store -- and having lunch at Barb Brown's home -- so much more formal and elegant than my own. My family moved a trailer from Huntington Beach to a vacant lot at 2058 Placentia Ave. in 1951. Each payday my parents would purchase whatever supplies they could for the little house they were building. The half-acre lot supported turkeys, chickens, rabbits, pigeons (Marilyn's lunch often sported squab, but mine was usually bologna), and vegetables.
The Methodist Church where climbing the tower seemed such an adventure; countless events at Irvine Park, where someone in the group always managed to get into poison oak/ivy, and where climbing trees was more entertaining than anything the organizers had planned . . .
The Balboa movie theater and summers at the beach and bay. That is what I probably missed most after our move to Phoenix -- swimming pools just do not compare. I have greatly enjoyed reading about your lives and your memories . . . do keep it up!
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