Mam-ma was a Tomboy
Mam-ma was a tomboy. You wouldn’t know it by the fact she was also a lover of clothes. When she was young, she sewed her own clothes. She also loved shopping for new clothes and she loved looking nice. For many years, turquoise was her favorite color, but in later life pinks and purples also became part of her color palette. A dress she made But she told me she was really a tomboy. She was named Pansy Louise but she hated her name, feeling it sounded too sissy. She liked sports and played softball as a young woman. But as the only girl in a household of boys and her mother being ill with Parkinson’s disease, she had to do a lot of housework and taking care of her younger brothers. So she learned to cook, clean, and sew. She married at 19 and had my mother at 20. She worked as a seamstress, mending and altering men’s clothing and as a saleslady in women’s and men’s clothing stores. She worked at Goldman’s and for many years at The Clothes Horse, working at both the Walnut Creek and