Pat and Lon divorced in 1955. Pat moved to Santa Barbara, where she worked as a secretary in a bank for about a year. Her grandmother Minnie Cawelti came to fill in with the children for some months of that time. After about a year, Pat married Harold Bell, and moved back to live on his ranch in Camarillo. Harold had a son, Jimmy, who was fourteen at this time. Pat said that Jimmy lay on the couch watching TV for the entire summer that year. (Later Jimmy had a good relationship with Pat and her girls.) The household already had a dog, Bonbon, a slightly overweight standard poodle, and a siamese cat, Beanie, with a crook at the end of his tail and a deep siamese voice. Beanie was pretty accomodating about, for example, playing the baby in the doll carriage. He did, however, manage to steal two pets out of a bird cage—the first a parakeet, and the second a baby jackrabbit that Jimmy had captured on the ranch. Pat's two girls started school, Jimmy started high school, and they became a family. On weekday mornings, Harold's foreman, Jack Pitts, would come to the house for coffee in the morning, and he and Harold would plan their day. Pat created a set of dinner menus for the family. It did not include hamburger because Harold had had enough of that in his earlier life. Each dinner was balanced as to meat, starch, vegetables, and color on the plate, and we ate those menus for about ten years. No one was complaining—Pat was a good cook—but Nora, Jimmy, and Sally could all tell you what were the side dishes for pork chops (corn, mashed potatoes, and preserved crab-apple slices), or steak (baked potatoes, green salad, and corn on the cob in season), lamb chops, fish, or barbecued chicken. The adults drank coffee with every meal, which was traditional with westerners (I don't know about other parts of the country). Almost every day Pat asked someone what they would like to have for dinner, and then shopped for the ingredients—mostly, in the early years, at the Howell's Meat and Grocery Store in the old downtown. Harold often grilled the meat on the in-kitchen gas grill. (Harold had built the house when married to his first wife, and had designed in many clever features, including two-doored cabinets for milk and trash (outside door for milkman, inside door for cook). There was lemon wallpaper in the eat-in kitchen and avocado wallpaper in the formal dining room (lemon and avocado trees surrounded the house). Harold had a circle of friends in Camarillo that Pat became part of, and they gave, and went to, dinner parties and Christmas parties with them. Those were some very good years. Pat became active in girl scouts—she was troop leader for a class in between Sally and Nora, because she didn't want to have to deal with having her own child in the group—an idea that I came to appreciate when I coached my daughter Mary's soccer teams. Dora and Reg lived about two miles away, on the ranch where Pat had grown up, and the two families had dinner together often. Sally and Nora went barefoot on the ranch, which they wandered around at will, and joined their own scout troops, and read a lot. Pat wrote frequently to her sister Marge, who had moved to Boston with her family, and to other friends—Pat was an inveterate collector of friends and correspondents. As the kids got older, and girl scouts ended after the eighth grade, Pat needed more to occupy her mind, and found it in the League of Women Voters. Pat was a great asset to the league, with her lively intelligence and writing ability. I remember her talking on the phone for what seemed like (and probably was) hours, hashing out the “Pros and Cons” for ballot measures.