Pearletta Anne Harris

Pearletta May Lemley was born on April 7, 1931, in the depths of the Great Depression, in the small Indian village of Olequa, north of Castle Rock, Washington. She was born in a primitive settler’s home, without heat, electricity, or plumbing. Most of the neighbors were Indians, with a few French-Canadian trappers and a general store owned by a German immigrant.

Her father was 46 years old when Pearletta was born. These two generations, Pearletta and her father, spanned the period of 1884 to 2022, or more than half the history of the United States. In 1884, locomotives and steamships existed, but most human travel was on foot, or by animal or wind power. When Pearletta passed away this February, every planet in our solar system had been visited by American spacecraft, and robots were crawling around on the moon and Mars.

Change and avoiding conflict were the two themes in Pearletta’s life. She was not fond of change, but change constantly inflicted itself on her. Pearletta was also conflict-averse: she hated argument, disagreement, and fighting.

The Great Depression was not one of the struggles. To children of the Depression, having no water, electricity, or heat in the home was normal. Working around the farm, or growing crops at school, were normal. Having your favorite chicken end up as a Sunday dinner was normal.

World War II was not normal. Pearletta’s uncles were either drafted or enlisted in the Army. The appetites of war led to shortages of food, gas, oil, clothing, metal, and other materials. Army airfields blotted out neighboring farms. Soldiers trained in nearby fields and forests, and P-38 fighter planes practiced dogfights overhead. To my mother and children of this time, this wasn’t normal, but it became the norm.

The first huge change, and conflict, came when Pearletta finished 6th grade. Her father was a laborer, and worked as a farmhand, or lumberjack, or in a sawmill. He saw no need for his daughters to go to school beyond the state-mandated grade school. Pearletta and her sister left home and worked as housekeepers and babysitters for various families while attending high school in Olympia and Walla Walla. Pearletta graduated from high school while working as a maid for a minister on the Colville Indian Reservation.

High school diploma in hand, Pearletta moved to Walla Walla, and informed the telephone company that she was ready to work. Telephone jobs were rare and highly prized in 1949, but they accepted her brash request, and Pearletta soon had a job, her first apartment, multiple pairs of shoes, and multiple dresses. It was the first time in her life that Pearletta felt in control of her life.

This changed in 1952, when Pearletta traveled to San Francisco to marry Leo Charters. Leo was in the Navy, serving aboard the aircraft carrier USS Princeton, and within a couple of days, Pearletta moved back to Walla Walla while Leo and his ship left for the Korean War. Some months later, Pearletta went on maternity leave from the telephone company, moved in with her parents in Ferndale, Oregon, and I was born. Except for two brief periods of shore leave, my father did not see my mother or me until I was two and a half years old. We lived in the Ferndale farmhouse, with no plumbing and a dirt ground floor (covered in carpets). My mother worked part-time for Montgomery Ward in Walla Walla, trying to add some stability to our life and some money to my father’s $36 a month salary.

We moved, as a family, to Oak Harbor, Washington, when my father was ordered to the U.S. Navy seaplane base. My brother Lee was born there, and now my mother had two young sons to look after. My father was then ordered to a Naval Reserve Training Station in Springfield, Oregon, and we moved again. We then moved to San Diego, California, where my father was ordered to the destroyer USS Cogswell. My brother Ian was born in San Diego, and less than a week later, my father was ordered to Taipei, Taiwan, to work as a cryptographic teletype operator.

With a husband on the other side of the Pacific, Pearletta and her children moved to Walla Walla, to stay with Leo’s parents, while awaiting authorization to travel to Taiwan. When Ian was five months old, we flew to San Diego, and boarded the World War II troop transport USS General A. E. Anderson. Weather satellites didn’t exist, and the Anderson steamed into a major typhoon, then dropped off Marines at Guam and Okinawa, and eventually made it to Taiwan. Pearletta now had three young sons, living in a country where she was functionally illiterate, and spent most of her energy trying to make all this seem “normal.”

Pearletta sent her eldest son to a Chinese kindergarten via a water buffalo-drawn cart. To me, this was normal because my mother said it was. When I was upgraded to a pedicab, a three-wheeled tricycle carriage, this was normal. When I went to first grade in an armored train, with anti-aircraft guns on the roof, this was normal. When my two brothers asked for things in a mix of Chinese and English, this was normal. Mother made it normal.

You could say my mother was adaptable, which is true, but I think it is more important to stress her struggle against change. She wanted a calm and stable life for herself and her children, and that was difficult. I ended up going to 42 different schools, in four states and two countries, between first grade and high school graduation. When our hotel was demolished by an earthquake the day we left Taiwan, mother made it seem normal to leave the hotel by climbing through the window. It takes an iron will to act normal when the plane your family is flying on catches fire on the way from Taiwan to San Francisco, making emergency landings in the Philippines, on Guam, and on Wake Island, before finally being taken out of service in Hawaii. It takes effort to accept as normal that your youngest child is more comfortable speaking Chinese than English when you return to the US. After Ian was run over by a car, mother calmly collected us up, flagged down the car that ran over Ian, and took us all to the hospital. It takes discipline to be the calm, caring, loving mother when your child’s Cub Scout den mother is attacked with a shotgun because the den mother is black and your child is not. It is a struggle to make things seem normal when the state of Virginia buses your child 26 miles a day to an all-white school because it is illegal for your child to attend his best friend’s school half a mile away — because his friend is black.

As the Navy bounced Pearletta and her family from Washington to Oregon to California to Taiwan to California again to Texas to Virginia, she strove to create a stable, nurturing environment. My father was an alcoholic, and my mother tried to shield us from his excesses. She made clothes for us, sewing shirts and shorts and coats, trying to stretch our meager income. She canned fruits and vegetables, and with the exception of pickled watermelon, succeeded in providing a varied, healthy diet. As the Navy often took our father away on assignments, she did her best, without a car or knowing how to drive, to attend parent meetings, concerts, plays, sporting events, and other activities.

Normal became much more difficult in 1966 when a telegram arrived saying her husband had died aboard the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal. The Forrestal was in the Mediterranian, off the coast of Palma De Mallorca, looking for a hydrogen bomb dropped by the U.S. Air Force into the sea. Pearletta was now a widow at 34, out of the workforce since I was a child. She immediately got a job, took community college courses in accounting and business management, and applied for a U.S. Civil Service position. She worked in travel, personnel, and accounting for the U.S. Navy at Keyport Naval Torpedo Station, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, Puget Sound Naval Supply Center, Bangor Naval Submarine Base, and Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific. She was very proud of her public service, and her children inherited her passion for such service.

My Aunt Rosemary, also a Navy widow, saw my mother as a model feminist, noting that, after learning she was a widow, mother went to a Ford dealership, and said she would buy a car, but only on the condition that they teach her how to drive and get her a license. With that giant white whale of a car, mother vastly expanded her independence and freedom of movement, and spent almost every weekend taking us to parks or museums or exhibits, or trips to watch the sea and seagulls.

My mother recently wrote that she was more comfortable as an observer of life and not the center of attention. She was not a fan of the Civil Rights movement; though she supported the aims, she was alarmed by the conflict required to make these changes. She was not a fan of the women’s rights movement, again because of the conflict, but strove to preserve her own independence and the stability of her family. She was extremely proud of her daughter-in-law, a U.S. Navy Commander, Ph.D., and clergy member, and admitted that this would not have been possible without the women’s rights movement.

While she had a hatred of moving, she loved to travel, and visited one son in Germany and Austria, and another son in Japan. Over the years, she traveled roughly a million miles by car, truck, train, subway, and bus, visiting at least 42 states, Mexico, and Canada. She went on trips by boat, ship, propeller-driven airplanes, jet planes, and hot air balloons, as well as horses, pedicabs, and as a passenger on motorcycles. She never learned how to ride a bicycle, thinking them suspicious and unnatural. She constantly lobbied for a Star Trek transporter pad, so she could teleport and visit her granddaughter in England. To mother, a ride on a Washington State or British Columbia ferry was the epitome of travel.

She was also playful, squirting us through the kitchen window when we had a water fight outside, or shaking a tree laden with snow onto my girlfriend. She was a ruthless Scrabble player, a deft pinochle player, and a not particularly skillful but joyful innertube rider, gliding down the slopes of Mount Rainier. She was a master of deadpan dry jokes and puns.

In recent months, she slept more, napped more, and seemed to be slowing down. Yet the day before she died, she spent several hours on her iPad, reading the news, reading and responding to email, and keeping electronic tabs on her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. She would have been 91 on April 7.

Pearletta didn’t want to be the center of attention, yet she was the center of the universe for her three sons, and a beloved star to her grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces, nephews, cousins, and many friends. We love you, and we miss you.