S.R. Durand: "I knew my wife's dear mother for only a very short time, for she died of cancer at age fifty in 1932, less than two years after Jerry and I were married. I met her early on the morning of the day we were married, when she arrived by train at the Pennsylvania Station in New York City after a long trip across the country from her home in San Gabriel, California. We had breakfast in the Pennsylvania Hotel, and then took a train up the Hudson River to Kingston, where the wedding took place. The next day, Jerry and I sailed for Europe on a honeymoon trip, so I hardly got to know Jerry's mother at the time of our marriage. She went to Cambridge to visit my sister and her husband, where she was entranced by their three-year-old twins. Then, she went to Milwaukee to visit my parents and meet my brother, Loyal, and his wife, along with several of my parents' friends. On the return trip home, she stopped at Binford, North Dakota, to spend a few days with her sister Ada and brother-in-law Will Colvin. In 1931 we went to San Gabriel for Christmas with Jerry's parents and her sister Jean. It was during the next five months that I really got to know Jerry's mother, and to love her dearly. I got a job for awhile in Hollywood, and Jerry and I had a small apartment there. Each Sunday we drove over to San Gabriel for dinner with Jerry's mother and father, and each Wednesday they came over for dinner with us. After our meals, we enjoyed duplicate bridge, playing sixteen hands "down" we had previously played, and then sixteen hands "up" for our next session. Jerry's mother was an expert bridge player, and enjoyed these games with us immensely. Fern Abbott was born in Brant, a town about four miles north of Chilton, the seat of Calumet County, Wisconsin, on February 13, 1881. The county is on the eastern side of Lake Winnebago, and her father was the pastor of the Baptist Church there. Some time later, he became pastor of a church in Lodi, Wisconsin, twenty miles north of Madison. It was from Lodi that Fern left in 1898, at the age of seventeen and with pigtails hanging down her back, for Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Her sister Ada had graduated from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin two years previously, and was teaching school in Denver, Colorado, where she was a friend of the Richardson family. It was when pigtailed Fern stopped en route to Stanford that year that she first met her future husband, Fred Ranney Richardson. After Fern Abbott's first year at Stanford, her brother Lee was suffering from typhoid fever. She studied the next year at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln so that she could help care for him. After his death, she returned to Stanford for her last two years of college. She graduated in June of 1902 with a major in English, and having also taken sufficient education courses to obtain a teaching certificate. In the list of graduates in the class of 1902, she is recorded as being from Harvard, Nebraska. She spent the following year teaching school near Flagstaff, Arizona. Her stories of a young teacher having to control big, tough ranch boys in class were fascinating; she had the courage to gain and maintain discipline. During vacation periods spent in Denver during her years in college, Fern had renewed her friendship with the Richardson family; during her year of teaching, she became engaged to Fred Ranney Richardson. They were married on August 17, 1903 in Denver by his father, Rev. George Richardson. From 1905 to 1909 when they were living in Northern Idaho, she taught school, for which job she had to ride horseback some distance through a forest to a schoolhouse. On one occasion, her horse shied just before coming to a tree, upon a branch of which lay a mountain lion. The lion might have sprung on them, had not the horse balked at going on. Another time, while she was superintendent of schools in an area of Northern Idaho, she was thrown from her horse and lay buried in the snow, unconscious. She surely would not have been found by a search party had not her horse stayed beside her. Her injuries from this accident cause her to suffer so greatly that the only way to keep her quiet was by playing musical records for her on her Victrola. After getting her back to their cabin, Fred had to repeatedly wind up and play this machine for twenty-four hours on end. On October 25, 1909, Fern (Abbott) Richardson was at her sister Ada Colvin's home at Binford, North Dakota when her first child, my future wife, was born. She selected the name Hildur for her child, having admired one of her pupils, a lovely girl bearing that given name. When she returned to Idaho with her baby, it was so bitterly cold that she was afraid the child would not live through the trip. It was during that winter of 1909-1910 that she and her husband decided to move to a warm climate. They went in the spring of 1910 to Southern California, where her mother was living, and established a chicken ranch at San Gabriel. A second daughter, Jean, was born in San Gabriel on January 23, 1913. During the childhood of their two daughters, they had a summer home on Catalina Island for a few years. Later, for several years their summer home was on Bay Island (near Balboa Island) on Newport Bay, where it was easier for her husband to get to from the ranch each weekend. Their home in San Gabriel was a beautiful large house at 1200 Broadway, a house of great comfort and spaciousness. It remained the home of Fred Ranney Richardson until his death in 1958. In 1932, we were back in Milwaukee after I could no longer find employment in Los Angeles, when word was received that Jerry's mother was suffering from cancer and was not expected to live more than a short time. Jerry and our baby Lucia (who had been born in May) went to California to care for her mother. She died just after Christmas, on December 30, 1932 at the age of 51. This was a very sad time for us, to lose such a lovely, dear person.

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Record Change October 15, 1999