Betty Jean Leonard: Dreams, In California, It was a real Monday thing, I was born in Oklahoma, I'm a survivor, You can’t be sad when you sing, When I was 25, & No one to play with

Dreams

For many years I’ve had this one dream
I’m in a department store
There is a large table piled with handbags
and I can’t find a bag, I’m frantic. Where’s mine?
And I wake up frustrated, all this fighting
But that’s the way dreams are.

—Betty Jean Leonard


In California

What if I hadn’t moved here,
where would I be? I have no idea.
I wouldn’t want to be back in Arizona
where the desert air is like an oven
where it’s so hot you could fry an egg on a rock
where the dust is everywhere,
on your shoes, on your clothes, in your hair
where it’s too hot to sleep at night

Here, the air is so cool
you can sleep at night
under a blanket, year round
where everything is green
except the hills in summer
I hate these mountains here
because they’re so brown,
everything so dry
like in Arizona desert.

—Betty Jean Leonard



It was a real Monday thing
When I was young
I was fascinated watching my mother
wash the clothes on a rub board
There was a big pot of bubbling water
on the fire and another pot of stew or beans...
I never understood why
they boiled the laundry like that
It was an all day thing
We were ten brothers and sisters
All those clothes and a mountain of ironing
It was a real Monday thing.

—Betty Jean Leonard



I was born in Oklahoma
I wasn’t even a year old
when we moved to Arizona
I remember seeing the picture
of my mother and myself.
My mother was wearing a flapper dress
She had me sitting on a nail keg
I had a bonnet on with lace and frills
You could tell it was me
That’s the first picture of me I can remember
I kept it in my album
But then I gave them to my son.

—Betty Jean Leonard



I'm a survivor. I was living in Hayward.
I’d been to the dentist’s, it was Oct. 17, 1989.
They pulled two of my wisdom teeth.
I came home, put an icepack on my jaws
but the bed was shaking.
I thought someone was shaking the bed.
I lay there and thought: “This is really it.”
You could hear such strange sounds.
I was in a mobile home on wheels.
The china cabinet was shaking,
The plates were dancing.
I had my Hummels in the hutch—13 of them,
& the plates, & things, they all moved forward.
My bronze heads marched forward…
But nothing fell, no breakage. A miracle.
That’s how we survived the October quake.

—Betty Jean Leonard



I'm not musical, I love to sing along
but I’d love to play the piano
Anytime a person plays the piano
It lightens up the room
and if you walk into a room
and there’s a piano there
and someone starts to play
the crowds will come
the crowd comes to join in
with their favorite songs
It brings back such good memories
It’s very uplifting. You can’t be sad
when you hear music or sing.
It’s a joy that fills your heart with laughter.

—Betty Jean Leonard



When I was 25
I was flying the big planes
from Dallas to New York
I was alive as could be
How I loved those Broadway plays
the Big Bands playing until dawn
when I was 25

When I was 35,
I lived in Old Tokyo
I had a young son
he was the star of our hearts
when he smiled like the sun
when I was 35

When I was 45,
I learned to play tennis
while my son was in school
For my husband I took up golfing too
We'd play on the greens
when I was 45

Now I'm remembering
all the fine times we had
how we gathered all our friends
and we'd dance to all the old songs
and how we'd sing to the sky
It was some very good years.

—Betty Jean Leonard


I was the youngest, I had no one
to play with, so I’d go next door
This old couple, they had no children,
but they had 2 big fat cats sitting in chairs
I remember I was so fascinated by them
This old couple, Grandma & Grandpa Shoemaker
we’d call them—he loved to tell stories,
he was a real cowboy, drove cattle
As a child, Grandma Shoemaker fell
into the fire, her feet were disfigured
and he made special shoes for her
Her hands and her eyes were scarred too.
It was so sad. I’d read the Bible to her,
& her newspaper from Lafayette, Arkansas
By this time she was completely blind
She said, “I’ll give you a piece of pie.”
But there were ants all over the pie.
I didn’t know what to tell her...
They were so odd. In the winter months,
they made little sacks of camphor & garlic
My sister made me take mine off.
“That won’t keep you from getting sick.”
They had lots of strange folk cures.
I remember the one for warts:
Take a bean, rub it all over your wart.
Put it in a little package tied up w/ string
and go to a fork in the road. Drop it.
Whoever picked it up got your wart
I tried it and my wart went away.
They filled us with lots of stories like that

—Betty Jean Leonard



I think I’ve been blessed all along
I’m basically a very happy person
I’m thankful for my friends
And for my health
I’ve had an abundance of friends
I went to high school in the same town
I went back to Arizona and saw friends
I’d met in the first grade
People I’m still close to today
Without having friends
I don’t see how you could survive
Without friends.

—Betty Jean Leonard



I remember as a little girl
My brother in law, Ernest
His brother Ben, was in the war, WW1
He had an ocular device
Every year we would take it out
And look at pictures of battlefields
It was fascinating to look at them
With all the uniforms.
It wasn’t even it black and white.
It was in sepia tones—gruesome
How it showed the battlefields.
I was so very young.
It was so gruesome for a young child to see.
I remember how he would explain the battles
All the details.

—Betty Jean Leonard


Good Friday morning we were decorating three dozen eggs for the Easter egg hunt. We had all kinds of tools: decals, sponges, speckles of swirly paint. They were all so beautiful. They came out real nice. One girl who was helping us said she didn’t have any breakfast and was feeling hungry. She asked, “can I have one?” We said sure.

So she cracked it on the table to peel it and the yolk ran out. It wasn’t boiled!. We tested another egg. It was raw too. The kitchen had sent us three dozen raw eggs and forgot to cook them. So we sent them back to the kitchen. They boiled them but all the dye came off. It was such a shame, they were so beautiful. At 4 PM we were still decorating and redipping eggs. All that work. What a shame And it wasn’t even April Fool’s Day. Close, though.

—Betty Jean Leonard

CHRONICALLY LATE 5 /5/05 

 THINGS I NEVER TOLD ANYONE

When I was in the first grade, I would walk to school with my sisters but I didn't like to get up in the morning. Every morning they'd go through this elaborate ceremony, calling me, telling me to get up, to get dressed, and I'd just lolly-dolly around. I just hated to get up. I was always so cranky

So one morning my sisters got up and said "we aren't going to wait for you. Hurry up." But I didn't believe them and I certainly didn't believe that they would leave me behind, but they did. I was so shocked. I didn't know what to think.

So I went outside to play, I made mudpies. I made fancy cookies. I was happy to go outside and play. But as I was making cookies, I looked up and there was a school bus out front.

A big yellow bus. It was a giant bus. The biggest bus I'd ever seen. That bus seemed so long...I'd never seen anything like it. I was out in the back yard playing I could see it from there. It was the biggest bus I'd ever seen.

Mother said, "Clean up!" And they waited for me. And then I had to go to the school and when I got there, everybody stared at me. I was so scared and embarrassed that I was
never late again. 

—Betty Jean Leonard


My husband was an early type. When we used to go to parties and events, we'd arrive so early that we'd have to circle the block a few times because we were too early. I got to know a lot of neighborhoods that way.

—Betty Jean Leonard


SHOES 7/29

When I was little, I loved to play hopscotch. I played it so much, I used to wear my shoes out. I wore them out so fast that the tops would look brand new and there would be big holes in the bottoms. My sisters would cut out cardboard and put it in the bottoms of our shoes. When the war broke out, they had rations for shoes. That’s when rubber and rope sole shoes came out. I only had one pair of shoes. When it came time to get new shoes, my sisters would scrub me up, put on clean socks, put in new cardboard, and take us to the department store for new shoes.

—Betty Jean Leonard

Our neighbors in Arizona, the Shoemakers told me: Take a bean and rub it on your wart and tie it up in a package. Wrap it up in a package and take it to a fork in the road and drop it. Whoever picked it up would get your warts. I worked. I did it and my warts went away.

They’d blow tobacco smoke in your ear for an earache. It didnt help my ears much. Maybe they thought they were doing good.

There really is something about chicken soup that makes it work. It’s a cure all. 

—Betty Jean Leonard



BETTY JEAN: For me, Dog Days meant the beginning of summer. Mother kept me busy all through the summer. They had these bible schools at different churches all around the town (Buckeye, 32 miles from Phoenix), and she’d enroll me in all of them. it didn’t matter what religion it was, we did them all, except the Catholic one, I don’t think they had one.

I really enjoyed Bible School We did arts and crafts, and baked things. It was organized play. I didn’t have any brothers and sisters my own age. I was the tenth child, everybody was older. I had nobody to play with.

The ladies would come around and teach us things like needle crafts too. My mother would enroll me in those classes too. When we got older, then we began to help teach too.

Then, it was back to school and you got all excited because your mother made new clothes for you. I remember standing on a table and turning as she sewed and hemmed my dress. Everything was cotton in those days. I jumped down from the table and tore a hole in my new red plaid dress and she didn’t even scold me. That was unusual. Those were the Dog Days.

—Betty Jean Leonard

I always wanted to be a teacher. I admired them. In those days everyone looked up to teachers, it was like being a doctor. Not like now.

I saved enough money to choose a private school away from home, in Texas. But in school, chemistry didn’t work out. Earlier, I thought I’d like to be a teacher, but now it was home economics. On Tuesdays & Thursdays I had lab, the other days I worked for extra money. I thought, What’s this?

But I got tired of slaving for others. I went home for the summer and didn’t return. I got a letter from a lady wanting to help me out but I made up my mind not to go back. I didn’t want to be beholding to her.

I worked at the bank & at the local theater. I didn’t like it. Not for the rest of my life. My mother didn’t understand why I didn’t want to be a bank teller at the Valley Bank. It was a good job, she said. I thought it’d be fun handling all that money but it was so dirty. Besides, I wanted to go places, to travel, to see the world.

The first time I flew on a plane was after I visited my sister in San Francisco. I got a real taste for travel. Weekends we’d go to Playland, ice skating, plays, the opera—all this was new to me. The summer I was there, she made me dress up. When it was time to go home, she said, “I’m going to get you an airline ticket, TWA, on a DC3 to Phoenix. Flying was still quite rare. There ware several stops. I was afraid to get off the plane. That was my first taste of the world, and my first time in an airplane.

One day I was flipping through a fashion magazine & saw an ad: Would you like to fly? TWA was in Phoenix interviewing. My brother–in-law, a WWII fighter pilot, said, Why not? You’ve got nothing to lose!” I remember the interview was at the Adams Hotel. I was accepted for schooling. I went home, told my mother and quit my job. I got on a bus and came to Hollywood.

From 1951 to 1956, I flew. My first job was in Kansas City, my route was to Chicago & NY. I’d never seen cities before. I was a country girl. People were so friendly, it was safe in those days, not like today.

My first overseas flight was to Paris, Frankfurt, the Azores in a DC4 prop plane. Then to Morocco, Hawaii, Wake Island where we laid over (there were no telephones or anything), and onto Tokyo.

The D6’s were pressurized. It was so much easier to fly. With the D3’s and 4’s, you had to fly under the clouds andy ou had to use oxygen masks. Sometimeswhen the weather was bad we had to fly through the clouds. One time the turbulence was so bad that they had to lay over the plane just to clean it up, everybody was sick. We used these little ice cream buckets. I was tossing them to everyone. And we had to wear our white gloves and scarves and such… That was the beginning of my flying days, the road taken.

—Betty Jean Leonard