Augustine LaVerne (McCluskey) Harper

“Born on a bright Spring Day in May…”

That’s how her mother’s eulogy began, written by her oldest son (Mom’s older brother) Howard, and read by his Daughter, (my mom’s niece) Laura, at her funeral.

I’m not sure why but I never forgot that.

LaVerne however was born in a harsher season and a harsher time; September 23rd, 1931. I’m sure it was a bright day, but it was also hot. Historical records show 1931 as the hottest September of the Century in New Mexico, and there’s a good chance there may have been a dust filled wind as well. The second of 6 children, 2 of which died near birth (Carl Edwin and Margaret Ann), she grew up with her 3 brothers, Howard (deceased), David (Sacramento, CA) and Ray (Dixon, CA), her mother, Ethel Rachael Lurana (Bedingfield) McCluskey, and her father Curtis McCluskey.

A large white clapboard home in a big field on a farm, open windows, cotton drapes, and a deep wraparound sun porch would have suited them perfectly. The Depression assured them that would never be. Instead, eking their way through the Great Depression that held a firm grip, they found themselves doing what was colloquially referred to as ‘getting by’, a state of being that would pursue them through much of her young life.

She was born, Augustine LaVerne McCluskey, but when her brother’s developing language skills translated Augustine as ‘Neen’ it stuck for many, especially her future husband. There was another nickname reserved for use only by her mom, to whom she was Sissy.

Born in House, New Mexico, a spec of a town, it was a small collection of hardscrabble ranches and businesses, dwarfed even more if possible, by being located on the massive 37,000 square mile tableland known as the Llano Estacado, a decade still before the Depression would end, and a year after the Dust Bowl started in 1930, leaving the land hopeless. With her father listing his occupation as a farmer on her birth certificate, leaving was a good, if not the only option. The connection to this place seemed to be a proximity to her grandmother and Grandfather Bedingfield who lived nearby. She has almost no memories of this place.

Her first years of schooling were in Oswalt, Oklahoma, in Love County just north of the Texas border where family of her father lived, and with an uncle moving into town, they were welcomed to stay in his house. House is a generous word, as LaVerne described it as a roughly-built shed with wide gaps between the boards of the floor that you could see through to the ground below, and in one case, to a ‘mad dog’ possessed with rabies and foaming at the mouth, one of the things kids, and adults feared most. I’m not sure it settled her or her brothers when they directed the kids to climb onto the bed while the men went out to try and shoot it while under the floor. Another time her mom was making the Christmas presents (presents were always homemade), and the kid were directed to stay on the porch, but to keep an eye out, since it was becoming common to come across mad dogs.

This is where she attended the first through fourth grades. It’s around this time that the only studio photograph was taken of the four children. LaVerne is on the far right in the photo, leaning into, and naturally protecting Ray, the baby. A white beret or some sort of hat, socks with elastic so worn they gather around her ankles, head tilted to the left and exhibiting those neutral eyes that would appear in future photographs. It was after the 6th baby of the family, LaVerne’s only sister (Margaret Ann) died shortly after birth in February of 1941, and between LaVerne’s fourth and fifth grade that her family moved to Somerton Arizona, near Yuma, (10 months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor) attending fifth through seventh grade. Why Somerton seems to be because her Grandfather John S. Bedingfield, was down from Oregon, holding a gospel meeting there, and a friend offered LaVerne’s father a job as an assistant on a ranch if they moved. Packing up the family of 6, they made their way to Somerton where her father and the rancher had a falling out, and if she recalls correctly, he gave the job to her uncle instead. Things sort of worked out though, as her father took a job as a fireman on the Yuma Arizona Airbase.

The next chapter is a little blurry. I’ve never quiet understood what happened or how it came to be, but her father joined the Navy. There are so many ways to spin this chapter, but there just isn’t enough information. Did national patriotism get the best of him, and while her mother was saving balls of foil for the war effort and painting a line down the back of her legs to simulate the seam of nylon stockings that were no longer available, Uncle Sam beckoned for him to do his duty? Or maybe that, and knowing there would be a steady income to send home to the family? I choose to believe it wasn’t wanderlust, but LaVerne recalled “he didn’t discuss the plan with any of the children”. They were just told about it. She was in 6th grade. A picture exists of the family grouped for the picture in what appears to be the desert, cars parked around, her father in his Navy Uniform, and Laverne, lanky and long-legged with her high waist, in a white top and skirt.

With her father in the Navy, her mother made the decision to take the family to Cave Junction, Oregon, near Grants Pass, and it was here at age 12, LaVerne was baptized in a pond by her Grandpa J. S. Bedingfield, into the Church of Christ.

After a short stay or visit in Oregon, her mother then made plans to follow her sister’s family (LaVerne’s Aunt Reva Luster), to the “the Promised Land” where they were certain to escape that state of ‘getting by’. Their portion of the promised land was in the rural town of Winters, California beginning in 1944 where they would ‘work in the fruit’, meaning harvesting, packing, and drying. Still no clapboard family home, rather, the farmer had a circus tent, she and her mom would reminisce about how her mother and her Aunt Reva divided it, creating rooms by hanging blankets so that both families could live there. From the tent they moved to individual farm labor housing, which meant wood floors, a roof, and canvas sides.

It was here in the summer seasons where she was ‘working in the fruit’, for a dehydrating company, cutting peaches, that she was possibly breathing in Sulphur Dioxide. Later in life, some of LaVerne’s specialists would speculate that this was the chemical that would leave her with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) a chronic inflammatory lung disease that causes obstructed airflow from the lungs that she would be diagnosed with and that impacted the last third of her life. But for a 14–17-year-old girl, that was so far in the future – and not that she knew, but even if she had, would have likely seemed to be worlds away! What could be more wholesome than ‘working in the fruit’?

It would be November 9th, 1945, that her father would be honorably discharged from service at the end of WWII and would join the family in Winters. It was in Winters that she attended eighth grade through the completion of high school.

Evidenced in the few pictures we have, she wore her face as if in a casual standby mode, like she was saving expression for a future use. Soft indications of a smile …or not, (the exuberance of her smile would come years later), eyes so relaxed they can only be emulated by consciously relaxing every muscle around your eyes, and then doing the same with your eyelids, which causes them to ever so slightly lower, almost imperceptibly. Not angry, not amused, simply relaxed. they might be 10 minutes from falling asleep, and often, but not always, her head slightly tilted to her left. Her Aunt Dorothy did the same, but to an extreme compared to LaVerne.

Her graduation photo from Winters High School includes those same eyes. Appearing to say in a perfectly level tone, “Fine, take my picture. Let me know when you are done.” The biggest difference is that face that was in standby mode in the childhood photo is just ever-so-slightly beginning to hint at the beautiful high cheeks, although here it’s a relaxed, pleasant smile. But those eyes are the exact same eyes from her studio photograph with her siblings when she was about 9 or so.

Eventually, post-war California would deliver on its long-awaited promise, living in an apartment, with her father setting his sights on a 2-story home for the family that unfortunately wasn’t to be, but eventually moving to a brand new subdivision in West Sacramento in 1951.

Out of High School, LaVerne went to Nursing school for a year, but then became a nursing aide at Mercy Hospital in Sacramento for 2 years. For a subsequent 2 years she worked for Grants Department Store, and then for AT&T Telephone Company in Sacramento from 1954 until 1960. It was the Summer of 1956 when she took advantage of an opportunity offered by AT&T to single women to work as operators in Lake Tahoe. She remembered what a small town Lake Tahoe was then. People would call the telephone operators to ask for wake-up calls in the morning, and only one operator would work the evening shift where there was a couch for you to lay down and sleep between calls. The treat was dinner. She recalls the list of fine dining restaurants where they could eat multi-course dinners and have the entire tab picked up by the telephone company.

Laverne was 28, living with her parents in West Sacramento when she met Kenneth Harper, a United States Airforce jet fighter pilot who had been in a horrible automobile accident when he was only 23, leaving him with an honorable discharge and limbs partially paralyzed on his left side. He told me one Christmas season several years back while loading wood into his pick-up truck, what a depression he had fallen in to back then. He came to California to see his Airforce buddy, Howard McCluskey, and that’s when he met her, Howard’s sister. (Ask her son Eric about the hula hoop. If you had been at the Starbucks on Pocket Road and Greenhaven on any given Wednesday or Saturday morning just a handful of years ago and seen them and asked how they met, which many did, she’d have reached for her too-big-for-her-little-frame purse and pulled out the folded poem about the hula hoop and handed it to you. “My son Eric wrote that!”.)

Anyway, after the hula hoop ‘incident’, mom’s face left standby mode in earnest.

Married on June 13, 1959, those muscles that sculpted that beautiful bright high cheekbone smile we loved and envied bloomed effortlessly as she probably began what was her greatest joy, raising five children: Kevin, then 1 year later Eric, 2 years later Bret, 3 years later Kurt, and 4 years later Peggy (Bogardus).

(Perhaps her only act of selfishness toward us, was not passing that smile and those cheeks on to even ONE of her children. But she did pass something on...)

Mom was careful not to have favorites. Five kids and it felt like we were all just as important and held even more importance as a unit. …Okay, well maybe in the last few years we noticed a bit more dinner conversation comprised of, “Kevin, did you get all you want?”, “have some more Kevin!”, “Richard, pass that casserole to Kevin.” But it was without question that she loved us all earnestly.

Granted, it was a different time and place, but she certainly wasn’t what is now referred to as a helicopter-mom. Ken and LaVerne had moved to Penn Valley and had a home built, then as the family expanded, sold that one and built their 2nd home there where she raised us on two acres, bounded by Squirrel Creek on the flat acre to the North, but connected seamlessly to an 88-acre park, much of it wild, our own Adventure Land that people paid to visit in Disneyland. Go where you want between breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but she had a system; she’d step out onto the deck overlooking the lower acre and blow a shrill chrome metal whistle that hung from a chain. When the whistle blew, you ran or biked home from wherever you were. You didn’t dally, you sprinted, leaping over logs, and fallen trees and ducking under blackberry vines not because you’d get in trouble if you didn’t. You ran home because she had prepared a meal and you wanted to eat it. Mom’s meals were good, and they were hearty (don’t believe anything Jill might tell you about Sundays! Okay, maybe it’s true, but that was a special day, as we expedited things to get to church every Sunday). She never said to stop eating, and never said there wasn’t enough. when we left to college, she’d make certain to have a homemade meal or two to send home with us, all the way up until we graduated from college, and even while working our first jobs in our chosen careers.

It’s a delicate balance watching a parent grow old. LaVerne and Ken moved from Penn Valley to Sacramento in 2013 to be closer to three of their children and to have a home without stairs. When in Sacramento, we wanted to help with the Sunday dinners, and before long we took over her role. Peggy was always careful to have her make special dishes like her Sunday roast, or her cornbread dressing we loved at Thanksgiving, but in the last few years that tradition was delegated to Peggy as well.

My Aunt Yvonne McCluskey said in a text to me while LaVerne was in the hospital that “McCluskey’s are Strong and Proud!” Mom was certainly proud in that she would never tell[BH1] us if anything was wrong, but that requires a whole lot of strength, and now her strength battled against a triple foe comprised of DNA in the form of severe osteoporosis, time, and that COPD that was no longer ‘worlds away’, and it did its best to suppress her, but wasn’t entirely successful. While Dad was in a rehabilitation facility after a recent broken hip through the end of 2023, we wondered how often we should take her to visit. Maybe she needed a little quiet time at home instead. Everything you read says that caregivers need to remember to take care of themselves as well. When asked, she ever-so-slightly turned her head to the left, chin slightly down in a challenging pose, without breaking eye contact or blinking, her forehead and eyebrows rose high, and she replied, “I AM his wife, and I think I NEED to be there!” Okay! It was settled. Even at 92 you didn’t argue with Momma. Every single day we took her to the rehab center where she sat with her husband.

After Dad went through rehab, we were concerned she just couldn’t possibly be the sole caregiver. There was too much to do and it was dangerous for her. I self-selected myself to be the one to broach the subject one Sunday afternoon. To say the least, it did not go well. Defiantly she said “Shall I just move out?! Am I not needed anymore?!” (Is that part of that Pride my aunt mentioned?). His care team insisted he receive caregiving at home, so we held our breath, and moved ahead with it.

Humans are incredibly resilient and adaptable. Some may think that is simply not possible at 92, but it is. She took on a new role that she adapted to and owned. If the caregivers (2 per day, but a rotation of up to 6 different individuals) were like flight attendants, then Mom didn’t sit pouting in her chair, she trumped them and became head flight attendant. The video doorbells caught her endlessly opening that door with cheerful greetings, one of her most popular being a bright, “Well howdy doody!”. One caregiver, Martha, just told Peggy about her opening the door and mom singing a ‘good morning’ song. Martha couldn’t recall the song, but I’d venture to suppose it was, “Good Mornin’ good mornin’ to you” from Singing in The Rain. As kids we were awoken by that song many times. When they would leave after a four-hour shift, it caught her again, cheerfully, wishing them a good afternoon or evening, and saying something they certainly didn’t understand the importance of, “…now you drive careful.” What they have no way of understanding was the significance in terms of endearment and care that phrase carried to Mom. It started when her kids were in high school and got their licenses to drive. Four boys and a girl driving curving country roads to school and back and continued as they moved away from home and having come for a visit, Mom would always give you a hug and kiss goodbye, and then turning her head almost imperceptibly to the left, without breaking eye contact she would gently but commandingly say, “drive careful”.

So much love and concern were captured in those 2 words. It was in her eyes. What the caregivers could never have guessed was how much care that simple little phrase carried. She may have been head flight attendant, but she cared for those who assisted her with Ken (The week after Mom passed, the doorbell camera showed Peggy at the door saying bye to a caregiver. “…drive careful.” Like mother, like daughter).

She went into the hospital on May 27th, 2024, her heart working harder than normal due to what seemed to turn out to be a bacterial pneumonia. Luckily Peggy as a Respiratory Therapist saw signs that something wasn’t right, and we brought her to Emergency on Memorial Day. While the doctors did everything they could, her decline was steady, until after 11 very long but very short days, she passed away on June 6, 2024. Toward the very end of Mom’s life, we would stand beside her in shifts and care for her, always hoping for her to open her eyes. We had talked throughout a day, near the end, that Mom hadn’t opened her eyes since breakfast, and then came a text to the family from Kurt the evening of June 3rd, and in Kurt’s characteristic brevity with a close-up picture of Mom’s face, featuring her light hazel green eyes, it read, “there’s those smiling eyes!”

That was it! I told Peggy in the past that Kevin had smiling eyes and I wasn’t sure if any of our other siblings did or not. It took me until she was pressing toward her 93rd birthday, 3 days before her death to name that feature! The joys of life had sculpted those once passive eyes into smiles. So she wasn’t stingy after all with that beautiful face! She passed her smiling eyes to another generation.

On June 6th, 2024 Mom passed from this brief life to her eternal one, to be in heaven with God and his Son, just as she told Dad she would when she left for the hospital.

“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it”.Proverbs 22:6

A shiny chrome whistle wasn’t blown, but like in our childhood, we came running to be at her side. Gathered around her, we stood and wept, shared laughter through tears, and let her know we were there as she left us for her eternal home. We grieved her earthly life that ended late that evening; the best kind of life, one of no regret, but that of strength and example.

LaVerne is survived by her spouse, Kenneth Harper, her 5 children, Kevin (Janine) Harper, Eric (Lori) Harper, Bret Harper, Kurt (Jeanine) Harper, and Peggy (Richard) Bogardus, as well as her 9 grandchildren, and 3 great grandchildren, and her 2 brothers, Ray (Yvonne) McCluskey, and David McCluskey.

Written by Bret Harper

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