My mom passed on today. She would have turned 98 in October. I saw her two weeks ago. She was lucid, but her body was failing her and her system was starting to shut down. She entered hospice last week, and she was more comfortable the last few days of her life.

I made the photo of her at her computer ten years ago and put it together with a photo of her when she was 20 years old working in a radio station. In those days most of the music was live, but she could record the performances by cutting records. She had a collection of 78 rpm records that were mostly commercial recordings, but among the collection were several records that she had cut during her years at the radio station. Most of the records she cut were glass platters, but she had some records that were vinyl on aluminum platters.

She had her Ham radio license when she and my dad started dating. My dad was really into radios, especially Ham radios, so while he was working on getting his Ham license he used her call. When they moved to New Mexico in the early 1950s they got consecutive call letters of W5ADX (dad) and W5ADY (mom). Dad was on his radios to the day he died. I don’t remember mom talking on the radios, but she kept her license active while my dad was alive.

I forget what her formal education was, but she was a good typist and worked as a secretary for the elementary school out here in the mid ’60s. Then she worked as a research tech for the Lovelace Foundation doing experiments on smokers, before she went to work for the YWCA in downtown Albuquerque in the late 1960s. She retired from the YWCA in the mid 1980s.

She volunteered at the Corrales Library after she retired. She read all books by all the local authors, and everyone who used the library knew her. She was active in church all her life, also. She took to computers like the radios of her youth, and had email and the web to keep in touch with friends and family.

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