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Who could have seen the trouble in this gorgeous woman’s contagious smile and her flirtatious glances?

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I have found my mother’s senior year of high school 1943 year book.  I do not have the technical means to reproduce the picture here so as to do it justice, so this will have to do:

Her eyes were emerald green, her hair thick and wavy dark auburn.  She was 5’6″ and probably weighed about 120 pounds all her young adult life.

In mother’s 1945 diary, link below, Gabby Goudey is mentioned, here stated:  “Class Good Egg”

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*1941 LETTER FROM OLD BOYFRIEND, JOE

*1943 Postcard to Mother From Her Brother

*AT AGE 19 – MY MOTHER’S 1945 DIARY

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I have very mixed feelings about posting what follows.  I would never be the one to begrudge anyone the love of their life.  Guy Wallace, also mentioned in my mother’s 1945 diary, was evidently the love of my mother’s life.  Many a summer afternoon as I and my sisters grew into our teen years, mother would spend hours showing us her teenage photographs and scrapbooks from ‘back east’ before she, her mother and great grandmother moved to Los Angeles in 1945 for my grandmother’s health.  Mother told her stories, recounted memories time and time again — and talked about Guy Wallace, who joined the Merchant Marines and sailed off over the horizon — without my mother.

Yet, what about my father?  What about the man she married, who worked his life away to take care of my mother and his children?  How strange it is to find, among my mother’s mixed up and disarranged papers, Guy Wallace’s Class of 1942 Year Book — with his name circled next to his picture, with a yellowed small news clipping enclosed within an envelope.  That’s a long, long, long time to keep mementos from a simple high school romance — but who knows the secrets of another’s heart?  Certainly not one like my mother’s was!

Yet it seems absurdly fitting that as these two year books have evidently been saved together for all these years, each one containing a picture — one of my mother, one of Guy Wallace — be united in the cyberspace of this blog over 65 years later.