MATRIARCH MONDAY
M. Marjorie Smith Moon
1920
1898-1984
By all accounts M. Marjorie Smith Moon led an interesting life. Born in 1898 in Pueblo, CO with the given name of Myrtle was something that an adult Marjorie found equally humorous and distasteful to her. "Blech! I hated that name! Myrtle rhymes with turtle!" For this reason she insisted on using her middle name of Marjorie until her death.
The early 1900's found little Marjorie's family on the move from Kansas where they had lived for several years to Pueblo, CO and then on to a sunnier climate in Long Beach, CA. by way of Portland, OR. Circa 1908 the family settled in Long Beach where Marjorie's folks owned the Seaside Cafe on the Long Beach Pier at
The Pike .
Here is a picture of Marjorie's folks George and Clara working at the Seaside Cafe.
A tin-type of a young Marjorie about 1914
Marjorie was educated in Long Beach area schools through the 10th grade and she also helped her parents run the family business along with her sisters Erma and Ellen and her brother George Marion.
Long Beach was a bustling city in the early 1900's and people were flocking to the area from all over the United States. At the age of 17 Marjorie met and married a fellow migrator to Long Beach- James Wray Moon from
Iowa. Together Marjorie and James Wray had two children, Marjorie Mae and James Wray Jr. Marjorie's marriage to James Wray quickly deteriorated and they divorced. At that point her children went to live with their father and grandmother Alta Cole Moon. By 1923 Marjorie married again-this time to her first husband's older brother Cecil Burdette Moon. Marjorie's new husband Cecil was a jack-of-all-trades and spent a fair amount of time working for the railroad at that time. In the 1920's Cecil made an investment in some property he came across while working in California's Antelope Valley. Marjorie and her infant daughter Mildred Lenore (Mickey) moved on to the property to homestead while Cecil traveled for work. Homesteading was a very adventurous opportunity for Marjorie, especially alone on the isolated desert property with a young child. She loved to recount the story of one of the perils of homesteading in early Antelope Valley that went something like this: "I was hanging out the wash and I heard a terrible rumbling sound and had just enough time to grab little Mickey and run as fast as I could before the high waters of a flash flood were upon us. We made it to higher ground only to realize with horror that we were surrounded on that hilltop by SNAKES! Fortunately the snakes didn't pay any attention to Mickey and I. They were just as grateful as we were that they made it to higher ground as well and didn't drown!"
Marjorie and baby Mickey circa 1925
Never afraid of hard work and progressively ahead of her time, Marjorie took jobs outside the home when daughter Mickey was old enough to go to school to help support her family. The 1930 census finds Marjorie working as a packer in a packing house in Los Angeles. Like many
women in the United States during WWll Marjorie went to work in the aerospace industry at an L.A. area factory. She was quite good at her job and from the way she described her work to me she was assembling radio parts for military planes.
Marjorie retired to the Downtown Los Angeles area and spent her days involved in educational and spiritual pursuits, talking to her glorious African Violets, visiting friends and relatives and indulging her curious nature regarding world cultures and religions. In her advanced years Marjorie lived in a nursing home in Los Angeles and although wheelchair bound due to a broken hip she led her fellow residents in rousing games of Bingo wearing her signature Revlon
"Love That Red" lipstick and flaming red hair all the way into her eighties. Her mind was sharp as a tack until she drew her last breath.
Exciting as her adventures were perhaps Marjorie's greatest accomplishments from the vantage point of her descendants may have been surviving the deaths of all five of her children as one by one they passed away before her. Great strength and faith in an afterlife comforted her during these times of loss as all of her children passed relatively young and tragically. During her second marriage Marjorie lost 2 infants- a son in 1922 and an infant in 1930 whose gender is currently unknown. Her eldest daughter Marjorie passed away at the age of 18. She also outlived her son Wray who died at age 53 and daughter Mickey who passed at age 45.
Marjorie was an amazingly resilient matriarch.
Marjorie is my Maternal Grandmother.
