On The Fly

Los Angeles, CA. - Beth Eaton, 83, of  El Camino Village passed away at 9:20 p.m. Tuesday, March 19, 2019, at Kaiser Permanate Medicial Center in Harbor City.  Beth was born July 9, 1935 in San Bernardino, California. She was adopted at birth by Ernest and Marie Carver of Pomona, California. Raised in the farming tradition on the Carvers’ Hatchrite Turkey Ranch , Beth graduated from Pomona High School in June 1953. She attended Mount San Jacinto College. She studied business and later worked at Security Pacific Bank in Claremont, CA. Beth met and married Gerald Davies from Marlette, Michigan. They married in Pomona and lived in Claremont, where their daughter Lori Jo was born in 1959. The family moved to Santa Barbara and in 1962 had a son, Kenneth Andrew. Shortly after they moved to Michigan to start a business and raise the children closer to the Davies family. In 1978 the family moved back to California so Beth could be near her widowed father, settling in he...

  Have you ever owned a “lemon?” An automobile that’s just a bottomless pit of money to keep it on the road. The car I’m talking about is best remembered for it’s propensity to combust in rear end collusions. Yes, you guessed it - the Ford Pinto. We named ours The Mean Green Booger Machine .  Back in the late 1970s my best friend, Nathan, and I decided we would embark on a road trip from Cuba, Illinois to California, to photograph the country. He had a clever idea, “I’m going to take the back seats out of the car and fabricate plywood beds.When the front seats are folded forward we will be able to sleep in the car very comfortably with a backpackers pad and our sleeping bags.” Brilliant! We would save hundreds, well maybe a few bucks, on motel rooms to California and back.  So the renovation began. Seats removed, plywood measured, cut, and 2x2 wood blocks screwed into place to keep the boards from sliding around. Nathan's father owned a Skelly Gas Sta...