March and Albert (and Tami)

I was looking through old saved work emails for something and found a unique email. I don't remember if I ever wrote about this.

March Fong Eu is a household name to Californians of a certain age. As it says in the Wikipedia article,

Eu was elected Secretary of State of California in 1974, becoming the first Asian American woman ever elected to a state constitutional office in the United States.

I remember when Leroy Greene (D - Sacramento) retired and reminisced about a time he introduced a bill to legalize prostitution. Someone asked Mrs. Eu what she thought of Greene's prostitution bill and she said, "I think he should pay it."

My great-grandfather Albert Paulsen was an outgoing man who liked to have lots of friends. He counted Mr. Kong as one of them, in connection with selling him a building in Richmond. When March was little he helped her with her penmanship, and later took great pride in her as she went on to success at college and university and beyond.

An occasion I do not remember led to me writing to Mrs. Eu some years ago and telling her of this connection. She wrote back very kindly. I might have the mail or email somewhere, I might not. But in old saved work emails, I found the following. It was completely unsolicited.

From: March Eu
Sent: Friday, March 15, 2013 8:32 PM
To: Teeter, Don
Subject: hi

Dear Don
I have been agitating awhile about this and I must write to tell what is causing it.

For quite sometime now I have avoided accepting invitations of all kinds. My health is just not good and I do not have the energy to last long in social situations. I am just not the March Fong Eu I use to be. You knew a healthy, active vibrant self reliant person. I am no longer that person. Overnite time caught up on me. Today I move at a much slower pace and walk warily for fear of falls. My poor vision compounds matters. Feeling all ofthis that I describe of course then makes me uncomfortable with people individually or collectively I have never been able to articulate this..and I hope you can understand what I am trying to say.

So Don, that is how it is. I did not want any birthday celebration. But neice Cynthia and others persist. I want to see you, but I don't want you to see me!!!

march

More than likely this was an address book mixup. I never replied.

Gramps (Al Paulsen) came to my attention recently when for some reason I did a Facebook search on his name and found a math class page with some of his work on it. He was a calligraphic artist, a fun-loving trickster, a "Wizard Penman" with a booth at the 1939 Golden Gate Exposition. Some of his tricks and giveaways were such as the Lord's Prayer or the Gettysburg Address rendered entirely with the number "2", upside down. I've long since lost the copies we had. But the math teacher had some and had scanned them and put them up on her page! This was very exciting.

We established a connection in comments and finally private message whereupon I discovered she was an old friend of mine. Evidently she had gotten Gramps' work from me around when we were in high school. Sadly, the "Friend" button on her Facebook page is not enabled and she has not replied to my revelation of how we already knew each other. I remember her fondly, though, as a bright combination of super-smart and super lust-worthy around about eighth and ninth grade. In fact, a phone conversation we had the summer before ninth grade stayed with me a long time ...

You're thinking that's why she didn't write me back, aren't you?