Remembering Aunt Fern, who made us Californian
“I thought that if we had a national character and a national genius, these people, who were beginning to be called Okies, were it.” – John Steinbeck
We ain’t Okies anymore.
My Great-Aunt Fern was the last member of our California family born in Oklahoma. But she never cared for Steinbeck’s portrayals of Okies as the epitome of American working-class struggle. We Okies, she said, were ordinary people — no better than all the other California migrants who sent their kids to the public schools where she taught.
She was right, with a caveat. Families sometimes have an extraordinary person who changes everyone’s trajectory. On my mother’s side, that was Fern. Before her, we were uneducated Oklahoma cotton-pickers. Today, we’re middle-class Californians, some with college degrees.
On Thanksgiving, I liked to thank her for that. This year I can’t. She died in October at 84.
Fern was the fifth of Bull and Linnie Humphrey’s five children. Her birth was good news in Okemah, Woody Guthrie’s hometown, at a time of Depression and dust. Soon her family had to leave for California. Fern came west at age 6. The family worked in and lived near the fruit packing houses of East Highland, next to Redlands, in San Bernardino County.
Fern didn’t feel welcomed. When I asked why she taught, she talked about a teacher who had told her she was a dumb Okie. Fern never wanted another student to feel like that.
A profound faith, which did not come from her unchurched family, also fueled her. At 7, she convinced neighbors to take her to church. Soon Fern was carrying a Bible, witnessing to San Bernardino’s homeless, and joining Temple Baptist.
Fern graduated Redlands High in 1956 and attended San Bernardino Valley College, where she met Donald Dewees Jr., a Pennsylvania kid, on the student council. They married in 1960.
Bull Humphrey hadn’t wanted his youngest daughter to go to university. But her brother Dale, a truck driver, was hauling sand to Cal State L.A. and suggested she check it out. Fern became the first in our family to get a degree.
After some time in Covina, Fern and Don—and their two young boys, Donnie and Michael — returned to Redlands. In 1967, they bought a three-bedroom house that would be home for 51 years.
In Redlands, Fern became as familiar as the orange groves. She was the kindergarten teacher everyone wanted. She was the wife of a high school football and baseball coach. She organized the Easter Pageants at the Redlands Bowl. She volunteered in dozens of community organizations.
She taught with missionary zeal. She embraced project-based learning before it was fashionable. She was especially adept at supporting struggling kids; she even tutored particularly hard cases at home.
“Mom knew what it was like to be an outcast,” says her son Michael. “Her whole life, she was very protective of outcast kids.”
She inspired some students to become teachers. Today at Mariposa Elementary, the teacher in Fern’s classroom is Mara Comadena, who was her student in the 1970s. As colleagues, Fern advised Comadena that “being a kindergarten teacher is not just about learning. I recall her saying often, ‘You want kids to love coming to school.’ ”
Fern loved school, too. Over 41 years in the classroom, there were no limits to her ambitions. To inaugurate elementary school curriculum on weather, she convinced TV meteorologist “Dr. George” Fischbeck to visit Redlands. She taped construction paper on the bottom of students’ desks and had them lie down beneath and paint facing upward — to show how Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
If Fern had any enemies, they were probably the cardiologists of friends and relatives for whom she made meals from old family recipes.
Her signature was Aunt Fern’s Chocolate Pie, made with two sticks of butter. It tasted good enough to make you believe in God almost as much as Fern did.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Remembering Aunt Fern, who made us Californian
