Lois Arlene McConnell Randall, 1921-2013

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Photos by Ariane Randall, 1988-1989

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Lois M. Randall: (Largely) In Her Own Words

Lois M. Randall to Loren D. Estleman, 16 June 1997.

I’m a native Californian, born a long time ago. I grew up during the Great Depression and had no hope of college. However, after high school, thanks to the availability of an excellent local junior college, I was able to attend and graduate from it in 1942 and worked at the San Bernardino Army Air Base all during World War II. I was able to finish college (UC Berkeley, English major) after what my generation still refers to as The War, and met my husband at Berkeley. That’s the in-a-nutshell version of my biography.

A few important family biographical particulars: my father was a Missouri farm boy whose schooling ended at about the fourth grade, after his father died from a fall in an icehouse where he had been working in 1904 (obviously, with no pension or other social benefits), and my grandmother [did] her best to support him. They moved to Southern California when my father was fifteen, and seven years later he and my mother (daughter of a small-town grocer) were married after her high school graduation. I was born four years later.

My father worked as a cement contractor, and he and my mother bought a very small house in 1925, four years before the 1929 stock market crash. Obviously, my parents had no stock or bonds, but the building trades were about the first to be affected by the Crash. The years up to 1933 were nightmarish for my parents: no work, no money, nothing to fall back on. My mother was an excellent seamstress and cold bring in a little money, but not very much. I don’t know how old I was when my dad had to apply for financial assistance, but I do remember the day he came home and told my mother he had had to sign something called a “Pauper’s Oath” to get help. I think he was then about thirty-five, an age when he had expected to be able to pay off the mortgage and be a responsible citizen. Signing the oath may not seem like much now, and he did it; but it was something he never forgot.

Before the 1932 presidential election, California had some sort of inadequate work program that my father signed up for.

Lois M. Randall to Don Sharp, 5 May 1983

I’m a native Californian who has been driving since 1940 and copy editing since 1965. Your mentioning the tree-and-pulley method of engine repair reminded me that my cousin tore down, as I recall it, a bright red Essex under an ash tree in our back yard during the mid-thirties and then put it back together in better condition than it had been when he bought it. I’m afraid I got more than a little grease on my hands (and clothes) while he was working on it. ….

As the native California daughter of a native California mother (my mother taught herself to drive in my parents’ Model T in the early twenties), I can say that many women have driven cars alone as long as I can remember.

Lois M. Randall, Job Application to Library Journal, 31 March 1960.

I am a native Californian, born in 1921 …. I Majored in English at the University of California at Berkeley and was graduated with the class of 1948. My husband in is college English teaching, which is something of a gypsy profession; and we were married while he was in graduate school. Consequently, as we moved from graduate school to various teaching positions, I gathered experience in a variety of occupations which might fit me for the position that you have open.

While we were at the University of Minnesota I worked as an editorial assistant in the College of Education, editing and summarizing reports on school administration and construction written by the director of the Bureau of Field Studies and Surveys and his staff. Moving on to Northwestern University, I was an assistant to the documents librarian in the university library. Since we have been at Wellesley I copy edited four children’s books on a freelance basis under the guidance of Mrs. Mary Rackliffe, head copy editor at Little, Brown and Company; since last June I have been employed by the Wellesley Free Library.

Lois M. Randall to Arnold Tovell, 14 May 1965

When my husband took his first full-time position (at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois), I worked in the university library, and my editorial work—officially—came to a halt. However, it was then that my husband was finishing up his dissertation, and I gained a lot more unofficial editorial experience, since I typed all but the final copy of the dissertation. Later, when it became a book (The Landscape and the Looking Glass, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1960), I was again unofficially employed as a proofreader.

By that time, we have moved to Massachusetts, where he has taught American literature (at Boston College) since 1960. For two years, 1960-62, I worked as editorial assistant and secretary to Ruth Hill Viguers, editor of The Horn Book Magaine, leaving only because we were going to live for a year in Belgium, where John was Fulbright lecturer in American literature for 1962-63. My work on The Horn Book included both copy editing and proofreading, as well as indexing the magazine.

Since our return from Europe in the fall of 1963, I have been employed as a more-or-less full-time housewife, a part-time secretary, and a free-lance manuscript reader of children’s books. I have discovered that I would prefer to be a full-time copy editor and hire a cleaning woman. It would be nice to be paid $95 a week.

Sarah Flynn, 18 July 1986

As some of you may know, today is Lois Randall’s last day with Houghton Mifflin. She has chosen to retire on her sixty-fifth birthday. Lois has been with us for eight years. Among the authors she worked with are Paul Brooks, Pat Conroy, Loren Estleman, A. G. Guthrie, Jr., Morgan Llywelyn, Edwin Newman, and Robert Taylor; she expects to take on certain projects on a free-lance basis in the future. Before joining HMCo, Lois was production editor at Beacon Press, and she started in publishing at The Horn Book.

Loren D. Estleman: Memories of Lois Randall

I respected Lois more than anyone else I’ve worked with in thirty-seven years in the profession. She belonged to that school of copy editors who maintained broad personal libraries and could diagram a sentence faster than a master chef can filet a fish. And she was my friend. Among so many other things, I enjoyed our genial running argument over the legacy of FDR—I had to defer to her, who’d lived through his administration—and was extremely moved when she paid me the compliment of assembling a style sheet tailored specifically to my idiosyncrasies. She edited with a light, sure hand; when she questioned something, it was always worth serious consideration, and usually resulted in making the change she’d suggested. (But how I enjoyed our banter when it didn’t!)

She spoiled me. Upon leaving Houghton Mifflin, I found myself having to lecture copy editors on elementary issues of grammar and usage. When I learned Lois had gone freelance, I immediately petitioned Tor/Forge to employ her services for my books. It felt like coming home.

She was a gracious woman, and a true professional. I’m very much afraid we’ll never see her like, but I’ll be forever grateful for the privilege of having worked with her and to have been permitted to call her my friend. ….

I stole a march on Lois just once, when I dressed a female character in a bustier and she asked what a bustier was. I said, “Ask your husband.” ….

[Read] the enclosed. It’s the dedication I’ve written for the current Amos Walker novel, tentatively titled FORGETTING PAULA. Unfortunately, because of a logjam of Estleman books awaiting publication, it won’t be out before 2015 at the earliest.

Monday, January 20, 2014

Glen W. Redman: Memories of Lois M. Randall

Lois McConnell Randall (1921 - 2013)

Until her own death in February, 2007, my mother and Lois had been friends since their kindergarten days at San Bernardino's Riley School. (My father was in the same class for a couple of years until my Grandparents Redman and he moved to a new neighborhood in San Bernardino. The three were reunited at San Bernardino High School in autumn 1936.)

Lois's Senior Class Picture, San Bernardino High School Spring '39

In my father's 1939 yearbook, Lois wrote the following:

Dear Paul,

We've had a grand friendship, both through our mutual admiration for "a certain party" [Barbara Warboys] and because we seem to get along pretty well together. I hope it will always continue.

Sincerely,

Lois McConnell

And it did, for another 66 years.

Until the 1970s or so, my father was a registered Republican. I delighted in Lois' occasional tales of political debates she had with my father. In that matter, I was always on Lois' side.

In 1942, Lois and my mother and father were graduated from San Bernardino Valley College.

(L-R: Lois McConnell, unknown, Paul Redman, Barbara Warboys)

When my parents married and my father finished his Army service in World War II, they rented a house on Baseline Street next to the McConnells'. When I came along, Lois and her parents were a regular part of my early life. I was already very lucky to have two sets of extraordinary grandparents, both living in San Bernardino; Lois' parents were like bonus grandparents and Lois a very special aunt--whom I adored.

While at the University of California, Berkeley, Lois met John Randall, and eventually they were married. As an adult, I never thought of John as athletic. However, I do remember an occasion when Lois and John were visiting the McConnells. One day, Mr. and Mrs. McConnell, Lois and John, and my mother and I were together in their front yard. I must have been three or four at the time and had with me a helium-filled balloon acquired, as I recall, after a day at San Bernardino's National Orange Show. At some point, I lost my grip on the balloon's string, and balloon and string sailed skyward. Without hesitation, John chased after the balloon. John made a valiant effort to retrieve it. He was not successful, but I appreciated his effort and was completely won over.

In 1950, construction of my parents' new home was completed, and we moved from Baseline Street to a new neighborhood, leaving behind the McConnells, their adorable dog Freckles, and a cat whose name I cannot now remember. Below is a photograph of me with Cat McConnell.

Lois and John visited San Bernardino annually. Sometimes more frequently. Sometimes less so, depending on where they were living. Occasionally, Lois visited on her own. In the meantime, I took great pleasure in accompanying my parents for Sunday afternoon drives which sometimes ended with a visit to Mr. and Mrs. McConnell, then living in Rialto.

In 1964, when I began living and working in Los Angeles, scheduling issues sometimes precluded my seeing Lois and John on their visits. In that case, I at least had the opportunity for a visit by phone. During a recent major house-cleaning, I discovered several menu cards from 1982-1983. Among them was one from 7 August 1983, when my parents, Lois and John, and Donald Nelson, a favorite Bronson Canyon neighbor, came for lunch at the Canyon Drive house. For dessert, I'd prepared a tart which turned out to be John's favorite.

Summertime in the San Bernardino Valley can be unpleasant to visitors unaccustomed to 100-plus-degree daytime temperatures and nighttime temperatures that would dip down, if one were lucky, into the 70s. I do recall how uncomfortable John seemed on those occasions; Lois seemed never to be bothered.

Throughout the years, we exchanged cards, letters, and notes. I needn't have looked at the return address to determine the sender, as Lois' fine hand--not unlike my mother's--was the give-away. These days, one hardly sees penmanship as Lois' had.

The last time I saw Lois and John together was in Boston. By then, I'd retired from one job and had gone to work as a flight attendant for a legacy airline company. In 1998 or '99, I had a long lay-over in Boston and was staying in a downtown hotel. Lois and John came from their home in Newton Upper Falls for a visit--and it was, as always, a pleasure to see them both and to have the luxury of spending time with them.

In October, 2005, my father died. When I called Lois and John to let them know the news of my father's passing, Lois answered. She was stricken, and, 3000 miles away, I was helpless to mitigate the effects of the sad news I'd imparted.

In January, 2007, Lois, now a widow herself, came to see San Bernardino and to have what was to be a final visit with my mother. Lois' memory had been failing, and several times she needed reassurance that the woman before her was actually Barbara Warboys Redman. Nevertheless, my mother enjoyed her old friend's visit, and I think Lois felt the same. I don't think Lois really knew how I fit into the equation--but she was still Lois, as warm and loving as she always had been. Within a month of Lois' visit, my mother had passed away, then ending an 80-year friendship, remarkable alone for its longevity.

My mother was the youngest of three girls, and she was extraordinarily close to her two sisters and to Lois McConnell Randall, her special, long-time friend--and mine, too.

To Barbara -

May this memory book hold a record of all the wonderful times we have had during our high school years, the years before, and, I hope, the good times we shall have in the future.

Love,

Lois

Christmas, 1938