THE YEAGER FAMILY

This picture was taken in 1977 on the back steps of my mother's parents house in Santa Monica, California.   That is me holding our son Jason and my grandfather, Edgar W. Yeager, who could have been 92 at the time.   We think he was born in 1885 in Pennsylvania and very little is known about his parents or if he had any siblings.   In his later years grandpa Yeager was known for sitting in his favorite chair watching sports on TV, smoking black cigarettes and cussing out President Nixon.    Sometimes we could hear him talk about his experiences in WWI, where he was a First Sergeant with the army in France and how he kept telling solders to keep their heads down in the trenches as some would look up and get shot.    I have found his military records showing him a member of a Pennsylvania National Guard unit as early as 1912 serving on the Mexican border near El Paso during a border dispute.   He must have been in his early 30's when his unit was called up for WWI in 1917.    I do recall him talking about gold mining in Quebec in his early years before his military service.   At some point he attended Penn State University and may have majored in horticulture.

After the war he married grandma Dorothy Yeager, also from Pennsylvania, who held a grudge against grandpa because he never revealed his age when they married as she was born in 1900, so there could have been 15 years between them.    They moved to Turlock, California, where they had a farm with a peach orchard and grandpa was a writer for a local newspaper.  They had three children, starting with Uncle Bill, born in 1922, my mother, Jean, born in 1924 and Uncle Dick, born in 1926.   Some time in the late 1920's or early 30's they moved to Santa Monica where grandpa worked for the California State Department of Agriculture.

Uncle Bill served in the south Pacific with the army during WWII.   My mother worked for McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft at their Santa Monica plant building planes for the war until she married my dad in 1944, while he was in the Army Air Corp.   Uncle Dick joined the National Guard and his unit was called up for the Korean War, where he served in the Signal Corp.    

Grandpa retired from the state in 1955 and took up painting landscape pictures using his garage as a studio, where he also enjoyed a shot of gin at times.   He was also noted for using a pellet gun for shooting at Jays or was it squirrels that invaded his back yard.   One of my fondest memories as a youngster was walking up town with grandpa to buy some groceries and maybe some of his favorite liquid refreshment.   While in the market he picked up a can of Dinty Moore stew and said we better get this in case grandma does not want to cook and we get caught short.   Grandpa fell in 1979 or 80 breaking his hip and later died in a nursing home, he may have been 94.   Grandma died a year or two later from cancer, she may have been 80 or 81. 

Uncle Bill never married, was a taxi cab driver and at times suffered mental disorders, possibly from the war as he would check himself in to the VA hospital for periods of time.    He disappeared from our lives until my youngest sister got notice that he died in Southern Oregon in about 2014.  Uncle Dick became a high school science teacher, married a Scottish woman by the name of Jean, who was a nurse and they had a daughter, named Diane, who is our only first cousin.   Uncle Dick died from cancer at the age of 50.   After my dad died in 1979 at the age of 57, my mom lived in Torrance until her death from cancer in 1994 at the age of 70.    Cousin Diane lives in Walnut Creek where she operates a horse stable and is close to her mom, who is 94 or 95.  

My four sisters, one brother and myself can all see similarities in ourselves to grandpa Yeager as we refer to him as EW in our conversations.