About My Mother

Normally I write about articles my mother Marion Deaver wrote about, area history, and things that other people did.

Today I am writing about my mother and some of the things she did. I found an article that the Bakersfield Californian wrote about her. The paper was writing articles about various correspondents in honor of National Newspaper Week.

My mother had the bad habit of tearing things out of the newspaper and not leaving the top of the page with the date on it, so I am not sure when this was written. It mentioned her son William Deaver who was a Pfc. at the time. Bill told me that had to have been between 1959 and 1960. That would have made me nine or ten at the time.

I learned from the article that my mom had first started writing for a newspaper in high school. I never knew that. It was in 1924 when Mark Wilcox, a journalism teacher at Kern County Union High School, asked my mom to write articles for the Bakersfield Californian. She agreed and wrote them for several months.

Thirty years later she learned that the Californian needed a correspondent and again began writing for the newspaper. At first she only covered Mojave and later added Rosamond, Boron, Willow Springs, Tehachapi and an occasional article about Edwards AFB (she later added California City to the list, once it came into being).

“The best part of writing about the desert has been seeing the growth of the area,” she said, “I have seen the entire area blossom with new homes, new roads, and more industry.”

Those industries that she saw come to the area included Crescent Carbon added to Rosamond, Calif., Portland Cement Company west of Mojave, Spencer of California in Tehachapi (the site of the new city police department), an expansion of U.S. Borax (including the change to add open pit mining), development of new communities (including California City and Desert Lake) and finally new facilities and flight tests at Edwards AFB.

My mother’s education included Bakersfield’s Lincoln, Lowell and Emerson Elementary Schools, high school and junior college, then a major in Economics at Stanford University. (Didn’t know what her major was either. I am impressed – I hated economics!)

Later she took a training course in Los Angeles to prepare her for juvenile work in Kern County and with the state as a case aid. Other jobs included working for one year as a drug store clerk, spending a year as Mojave’s only florist, and volunteering as secretary of the Mojave Businessmen’s Association for several years. (I still have her notebook from that association.)

All of this, she said, prepared her to be a correspondent.

At the time the article was written, she served as a local registrar for the Kern County Health Department, signing off on death certificates for those who died in the area. This way the funeral homes did not have to drive to Bakersfield to have the papers processed.

She was also a member of the Antelope Valley Branch of the Red Cross. Later she would be a charter member of the Kern-Antelope Historical Society.

Mom said she enjoyed that every day was a new adventure.

“I have ridden in a crane near Boron to photograph a new desert gas line, ridden a bucket down into the ground to see the bones of a pre-historic animal and climbed through fences to photograph airplane and car crashes.

She added that she had photographed Gov. Edmund G. Brown and former Gov. Goodwin Knight, traveled to Florida to see an air show, arose six (count ‘em) times to write about the X-15, photographed rattlesnakes “and loved every minute of it!”