As already noted on my Facebook page, my mother, Barbara Scodel, died on December 3 at the age of 87.  Her health had been deteriorating seriously for about two years, and she had had three major strokes over the past six years or so.  She was a person of great generosity and joie de vivre who had a rich and varied life.

I am the eldest of four children, and my father died when I was 14.  My mother went back to work after my father’s death and saw all the children through college, something that would have been much more difficult to do in today’s harsher economic climes.  She was a woman on her own with four children, a $20,000 insurance settlement, and perhaps $10,000 equity in a house in 1964.  The University of California university system was almost free in those days.

My three younger siblings and I will all miss my mother.

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