times she watched her mother’s hands holding potatoes and deftly peeling potatoes with a small paring knife. Sometimes Helen declared, “This potato is just too small to waste my time on,” and she would discard it. Potatoes, it seemed to Judith, brought a sense of normality and continuity to her life and to the household.
On a few thrilling occasions, Judith got permission to run the two-block distance from their house over to Katie’s Corner, a small grocery store, where she would purchase a few pieces of penny candy. Then, she slowly walked home, sucking on something delicious, while happily flicking her skirt in a circular direction around herself with her hands.
Judith felt excited and downright giddy while running down the sidewalk to the end of their street to meet “Clyde” the mailman. She skipped along next to Clyde and prattled at him while he delivered mail to the houses on the block until they reached Judith’s house where they would say goodbye until the next time. Clyde was a nice mailman and one of the characters Judith held dear in her tiny world.
One summer afternoon, Judith was pleasantly surprised when a traveling band of sales people came to the door of their house offering to take pictures of Judith while she sat atop one of their rental ponies in the front yard. They had cowboy hats and related costume garb available for an additional small fee. Helen said yes, of course, always wanting to make life better for her daughter, so Judith donned the cowboy gear and joyfully posed on a pony for a photo.
Uncle Si looked after Judith while Helen went out on occasional dates. Helen had finally accepted her title of “widow” and believed enough time had gone by for proper grieving. She dated casually but always kept her guard up. It would not be easy for any man to penetrate the invisible safety barrier she had constructed around her precious family trio.
One date, however, in 1953, brought a man named George Pillatos right through the front door of their lives. Helen had been set up for a blind date with George by a female co-worker at Boeing. George was the co-worker’s brother-in-law. After a few more dates, it seemed like they had always known George and he slowly became part of their new normal life. Judith liked George very much.
George and Helen dated exclusively over the next two years and George became a welcome, extra hand and sounding board for Helen as she faced a twofold difficulty: One, Judith growing into a bigger girl who was becoming more forceful, physically, in getting what she wanted. And two, Uncle Si’s heart condition. Could Helen continue to manage both issues?
George assisted Helen in moving Uncle Si into a nursing home facility so that he could receive daily medical care and the additional help he now required for bathing and dressing. Fortunately, the proceeds from the sale of his home and land were available to cover the costs for Uncle Si. His heart was failing, and it broke Helen’s heart to see it happening. Uncle Si had been her mother and her father and her everything for her entire life. She closed her eyes tightly and cried whenever she imagined life without Uncle Si. She leaned heavily on George during this time and, with his reassurance, felt convinced moving Uncle Si out was the right thing to do. The couple regularly took Judith to the rest home to visit Uncle Si.
George tried to lighten the mood for his new women by taking them on car trips for fun. They regularly visited “the cow,” otherwise known as Herfy’s Hamburgers in Renton for 19-cent hamburgers. The restaurant had a very large cow statue mascot in the parking lot. It was a fabulous treat for Judith when they got to go to “the cow” for hamburgers.
Occasionally, George drove Helen and Judith to the middle of the state, near Kennewick, Washington, to visit his family. It was on one of these trips that George inadvertently injured Judith. It was August 1954. Judith was ten years old. George was swinging her around in a garage with a cement floor in a playful, familiar exercise they had developed over the past months. On George’s cue, Judith would jump up and wrap her legs around George’s waist. He would then hold her hands while she tossed her head backward, away from his chest, and flipped her legs along after her head, through her arms, making a circle back to the ground, over and over again, squealing out laughter the whole time. “Let’s do it again George. I want to do it again!” Judith begged. On this occasion something went wrong, George lost his grip on her hands, and Judith smashed her head down on the concrete floor with a horrible clunk sound. Judith immediately felt a large bump on the back of her head. Then she had nausea and vomiting.
Short, robust, Judith, with yellow-blonde hair, trusting eyes, and a wide smile, held no anger toward George. She simply viewed it as a bad accident, just like her mother said it was. And she fervently continued to wish he would be her father.
Two months after the accident, a brain seizure disturbance began. Suddenly, the good times ended. Seizure episodes in Judith terrified Helen for years and left Judith with too many gaps in memory, pieces of her childhood forever lost.
Helen took her little girl to see a very special doctor, a neurologist, in Seattle. The two traveled by bus, as Helen had never cared to learn how to drive a car. Judith was put through a series of neurological tests that included gluing wires all over her head. It was all strange and frightening to Judith. She knew that something was terribly wrong with her, and she had never seen the strained, pale look on her mother’s face that she was seeing now. The neurologist diagnosed “petit mal seizure disorder” and prescribed Dilantin. Helen and Judith walked to a Bartell’s Pharmacy and sat at the soda fountain, sipping on delicious tasting ice cream sodas in tall, frosty glasses while the prescription was filled. A bus ride home finished the day.
The seizures diminished in frequency for a while. The medication was apparently working.
In 1955, at age eleven, Judith’s wish came true. A Justice of the Peace married George and her mother, and then George moved in with his new wife and stepdaughter. The newlyweds took Judith along on their honeymoon to Kennewick where they visited with George’s family again.
Judith could see how happy her mother was, and this knowledge, in turn, made her feel very happy. Finally, Judith had a real, complete family. She began calling George “Daddy.”
A new trio was formed.
George took his responsibilities of stepfather to heart. He immediately implemented new, strict rules in the household, including asking Judith to finish eating the food on her plate and not to interrupt adults while they were talking. It was no longer acceptable for Judith to jump on the furniture like a rambunctious puppy. A sense of structure and order came into place with regular bed times. More rules. And— punishment for Judith when she broke the rules? George spanked Judith in the hallway of the house when she disobeyed the rules, and he sternly, with an authoritative voice, delivered lengthy lectures to Judith on why she must not break the rules. This change of rules planted some seeds of conflict in Judith. On one hand, she had wished for a father with all her being—and got one. On the other hand, this new father unleashed awful rules upon her—something she instantly loathed and rebelled against. Why couldn’t she just have a daddy and keep living the way she was before with her mother? Why did everything have to change? None of it made sense. It was a great relief to Helen to be able to share the responsibilities of raising a child with another able adult. With her new husband in the home, she possessed more hope for the future and felt optimistic that things would somehow work out for the best.
In 1956, twelve-year-old Judith began menses. With the onset of her periods, the Dilantin, unfortunately, no longer controlled the seizures. Seizures fired up again, with, curiously, an increase in seizure activity around Judith’s periods. Sometimes her periods would last for three whole weeks with heavy flow the entire duration. With seizures manifesting while Judith was in school, her classmates witnessed behavior they had never seen before—dizziness, Judith falling down to the floor, wetting herself, making strange noises, acting goofy and disoriented afterward. The children did the only thing they knew to do—they teased Judith mercilessly. She was deemed a freak. In addition to the health difficulties in school, Judith was only reading at a fourth grade level when she was in the seventh grade, inviting further mocking from her peers when she was asked to read aloud in the classroom. Judith began lashing out in anger at her classmates when they teased her. Teachers took note and made reports to the school counselor and principal.
The next year, at age thirteen, Judith watched her world and