As youngest of the family, Marta soon acquired the nickname "Babe". I don't know how Lumir or Helen felt, but I always thought she got away with doing the least. For instance, usually Helen had to wash the dishes, I would dry them, and Babe just put them away. She also seemed to be Mom's favorite.
Babe was the prettiest of the three girls and got along well with her schoolmates. She did well enough in high school to be able to enter U.C., Berkeley, but there she seemed to concentrate more on social life than on studies. She and Helen had an apartment together. Since she didn't seem to be that concerned about an education, it was easy for Helen to talk her into taking the trip to Florida. As mentioned under Helen's pages, the two got as far as Phoenix when they realized they were running short of money and needed to stop and earn some. Babe trained for work on the comptometer and then went to work.
I don't recall the circumstances that took Babe to Santa Maria, but she must have left Phoenix after Helen met Warner. At Camp Cooke, Santa Maria, she met Sam Miller, a good-looking young officer, and they were married on October 13, 1945. Beverly was just three months old at the time, and I took her along with Mom and Pop to take part in the wedding. Babe and Sam arranged a lovely ceremony in the garden of the Santa Maria Inn, followed by dinner at the Inn.
When the war was over, Sam and Babe moved to his hometown in Pennsylvania where he opened a radio and TV repair shop. Although he was good at electronics, the shop wasn’t a success, so he gave that up and they moved to California. As a veteran, Sam was able to get a job in Yosemite National Park as a forest ranger. They lived in a cabin for a while, but when Babe had trouble getting along with the landlady they bought a little Airstream trailer. One night a bear stood up on the trailer and rocked it, scaring all of them. At this point Babe was afraid the bear would get Sheila who was about a year old then, so insisted that Sam give up the job. She did say that she didn't like the mountains because when she was young she couldn't wait to get off the farm and into the city. Apparently she later regretted this move because she knew Sam really wanted to be a ranger.
They pulled the trailer to San Jose where he got a job in a sweet potato-packing plant and later was able to work delivering mail. When the walking was too painful for his legs, Babe talked him into going back into the service. He had overseas duty in Panama and Japan, but unfortunately the high living of a young officer turned him into an alcoholic.
The three children born of this marriage are Sheila, born August 23, 1946 in Meyersdale, Pennsylvania; Keith, born January 15, 1950 in Panama, and another daughter born in 1951.
Back in the states the family ended up in El Paso where Babe divorced Sam. He retired from the service and returned to his family in Pennsylvania where he died March 17, 1972.
In 1968, Babe took a refresher course in comptometer and worked for four years in the bookkeeping office of Safeway Stores. When the computer took over the comptometer function, she was laid off and collected unemployment benefits for a while. After that she earned what money she could doing baby-sitting jobs. She didn’t seem to have the same ideas of managing money that the rest of us in the family had.
After struggling to raise her three youngsters alone Babe met and married William Alen Stewart, but as he turned out to be an alcoholic also, that marriage didn't last long although they never divorced.
Babe was the only one in the family who took up smoking, and perhaps this, in addition to her stress-filled life, led to her early death of a heart condition on April 27, 1983 at age 61 in El Paso, Texas, where she is buried.
Marta in the rocker, Vlasta at the piano
Pop's parents in oval photo
1932
Marta and Family - 1950
1939
Marta and Vlasta - 1935
Helen, Marta, Annie Fiala, and Vlasta -1933