The Willow Glen Resident

Photographs courtesy of Cookie Curci-Wright

Through the Years: Curci-Wright started writing at her mother's suggestion.

Remember When

It all started with a broken hip and overflowing memory banks

By Cookie Curci-Wright

Writing a column for my community newspaper was the farthest thing from my mind the day I brought Mom home from her doctor's office. But looking back now, I realize that's the day it all began.

Mom, who suffers from arthritis, had injured her hip. The doctor's diagnosis: several weeks of bed rest and medication. I knew keeping my active Mom immobile for that length of time wasn't going to be easy. I had to think of something to occupy her. I remembered how my maternal grandma forgot all about her aches and pains whenever she began to spin a family yarn.

Like Grandma, Mom was a great storyteller, but in recent years her family had all become too busy to sit down and listen. Now, fate had taken a hand, and for the next several weeks, with me as a captive audience, Mom related her favorite memories. She described walnut trees that grew along Willow Glen's early streets and how she and other housewives would harvest the walnuts each year and sell them to the local nut factories to pay their household taxes; how the horse-drawn water wagons rumbled down local streets; and how the city limits once ended at Malone Road. Now in my middle age, I was feeling a new appreciation for my past and began jotting down notes as Mom told and retold each guarded memory.

One day after her recovery, Mom noticed our new community newspaper among the envelopes in her mail. After flipping through its sparse pages, Mom announced, "This is a nice little paper, but they sure could use a good nostalgia column. You should write one." She spoke with the confidence only a mother could express.

"Write a column?" I laughed. "I don't even own a typewriter."

"Well then," she insisted, "at least write them a letter suggesting a column and put one of your own stories in to get them started."

At first Mom's suggestion fell on deaf ears, but eventually she convinced me, and before I knew it, I was dashing off a six-page handwritten letter to Joe Guerra, the Willow Glen Resident's young editor. In my letter, I included a story about my Dad's restaurant, the Pronto Pup. The following month, to my amazement, the letter appeared in the paper.

My first few columns were certainly not among the best written and were sorely in need of editing, but somehow they did manage to awaken a flood of memories among local residents. At the end of each column, readers were invited (pleaded with, actually) to send in memories. Residents responded happily, and for a time "Remembering When" was written alternately by me and contributing readers. After a short while, however, reader participation waned. On the other hand, my memory banks were overflowing with stories. Before long, "Remembering When" with my byline became a permanent monthly feature.

My little column was sandwiched somewhere between Auntie Mame's recipes, readers' recipes, letters to the editor, a humorous cartoon by M. Castillo and the SPCA's pet of the week. Back then, my columns were handwritten with a messy ballpoint pen. And because the paper was just a small operation, the luxuries of a proofreader and editorial staff were nonexistent. Any mistakes in spelling, punctuation, dates or facts were printed exactly as I turned them in. Typographical errors were commonplace; letters interchanged or eliminated usually spelled disaster.

I remember in one early column, I wrote "a tear on my cheek." When the story came out, the "t" had been accidentally replaced with an "r," giving the line an embarrassing new meaning. In another story, the words "rare steak" became "bare steak." Then there was the time I used the phrase "wee hours of the morning." The letter "w" was inadvertently changed to a "p." I received a lot of ribbing for that one.

One of the funniest mistakes happened when a word was eliminated from a sentence. The line should have read: "I remember watching our neighbor's dog chewing on an old bone in our back yard." When the sentence appeared, it read: "I remember watching my neighbors chewing on an old bone in our back yard."

Since those days, The Resident has continued to change. According to an old Italian proverb, that which does not grow, dies. We live in a constant state of change; change is growth. I'm awed now by the new machines that aid me in writing my column. These technical marvels help me link the past to the present and ready me for the future. Knowing I'll never write like Proust or possess the knowledge of an Art Buchwald, I'm grateful for the space I'm allowed to occupy with memories gathered from a lifetime in my very special community. Happy 10th anniversary, Willow Glen Resident.

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