My maternal grandmother, Terese Beatrice Dorroh, was born 28 January 1894, at her parents' home in Angels Camp. Doctor Dorroh didn't deliver his daughter; that task fell to a trusted colleague, Doctor Werich [?]. Though she was baptized Theresa, the more usual spelling, and in honor of her grandmother Theresa Curran, her legal name was always Terese. She was always "Grandma Phil" to me.

Her parents were very strict, not letting young Terese do many of the things that her friends were allowed to do -- but they let her ride. The family always had horses. She liked to ride to the nearby ranch where her boyfriend lived; he would drop what he was doing and ride back to Angels with her.

As a girl, she was very interested in literature and drama. One of her favorite books was Anthony Adverse. As Doctor Dorroh was leaving on one of his business trips to San Francisco, her asked his daughter what she would like him to bring her from the city. She had been reading Robinson Crusoe. The hero of that book had a parrot, and she wanted one too. The parrot arrived at Angels via express in a big brass cage. For a long time it was silent, but it suddenly began to talk, imitating the human words it heard. The Dorrohs at that time had a Norwegian hired girl, and she would swear at the bird in her broken English -- so naturally the parrot learned to swear with a Norwegian accent. It also liked to imitate the sound of Mrs. Dorroh talking on the telephone. Mrs. Dorroh would hit the bird with a switch when she heard it swear, so it learned to whisper the bad words. One of its favorite phrases was "Oh, my -- that's funny!" At night, when it was time to be covered, it would say "Polly's feet are cold." Doctor Dorroh suffered from a bad cough in his later years, and the parrot imitated that sound as well. After the Doctor died, Mrs. Dorroh couldn't stand the sound of the parrot coughing, and since Terese was away at Stanford, she sent the parrot to live with neighbors, who fed it too well, causing its demise.

Terese lived an active life, but did have trouble with her eyes and ears when she was young. To see medical specialists, she had to go to Stockton. The stage coach ride down into the Central Valley was a rough one, but when Grandma was a girl the railroad finally came to Angels, via Jamestown. The train ride to Stockton was a big improvement, but was still frightening. The railroad didn't reach Angels until 1902, with service to Oakdale and Sonora, and was abandoned in 1935. She spent her summers near the ocean, at a boarding house on Lighthouse Avenue in Pacific Grove.

Terese went to St. Patrick's Church as a child, attended school at Angels Grammar School, and graduated from Bret Harte High School, a then-new wooden structure between Angels and Altaville, in 1912. (Bret Harte was another writer who gained first fame with his stories about the Gold Rush Country. Bret Harte High School's athletic field is named Dorroh Field, in honor of long-time board member Elton Dorroh.) She was in the first freshman class at Stanford University that included women. Her major was English, but she was also proficient in woodworking -- some of her projects are still in use at the end of the century. The president of Stanford then was David Starr Jordan, a nationally respected educator, and Grandma Phil was proud to have known him and to have been influenced by him. She lived two years at Roble Hall, where another of the residents was Amanda Knight, daughter of Mormon Pioneer Jesse Knight. At Stanford, Terese also met Lou Henry Hoover, Mrs. Herbert Hoover, future First Lady. Years later, Grandpa Phil would work on a mining project at Jamestown that had been begun by Hoover's engineering firm.

Just before leaving for college, she had met a tall, dashing new mining engineer -- Philip Huber, newly graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. She recalls wishing that someday she would have a 'beau' like him.

[to be added: her return from college, their courtship, marriage, three children, travels, illnesses, and other trials, favorite music, religion]

When she was eighty-nine, and conscious of the short time she had left, she told me "my life has never been dull!" How true! Her life was not always comfortable, not always the way she might have wished it, but she worked hard, took an interest in the world around her, and cared about other people. She built up a store of memories, and took care to pass them on to me. Proud of the tolerance that her father and David Starr Jordan had instilled in her, she felt her greatest legacy was the tolerance she had taught her children and grandchildren.

Terese Dorroh Huber lived to age 99.

email john@jrhuber.com