Ronald George Hoopes was born and raised in the small town of Casa Grande, Arizona. After graduating high school, Ron spent his career in the beverage industry, holding various positions in production and maintenance management. Despite the fact that he spent the last ten years of his life in California, he always proudly referred to himself as a “Zany ‘Zoni.”
Below is Ron’s pedigree chart.
For a downloadable version of Ron’s chart, click here.
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POLIO
People born in the United States after 1960 don’t remember it. Those born in the 1950’s might not remember anyone suffering from an active case of it, but we surely do remember numerous adults who carried the life-long signs of having survived it.
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My stepchildren were fortunate to spend a great deal of their Arizona childhoods with their maternal grandparents, Cliff Hanlen and June Holland. After I married their daughter’s ex-husband, this wonderful couple was quick to recognize how much I cared about their grandchildren and I was welcomed with open arms. They always made me feel very much a part of their extended family. No DNA match required.
I grew up hearing stories about “Uncle Grabner” but until I started digging into our family history, I wasn’t exactly sure who this guy was. Turns out that Ferdinand Grabner and his wife, Katherine Pauli, were my great great grandparent’s best friends. The family legend was that Uncle Grabner had sent a photo of Sophie Scheuer to Ernest Taeuffer suggesting he marry her and that Ernest moved to California to do so. It makes a good story, but turns out it cannot have been true. The truth is that the two families were inseparable throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries and that they remained close friends even after the Grabners moved out of Healdsburg in the late 1920s.
In the 1950s, the American Legion Auxiliary was the women’s branch of the “men only” American Legion. It was a service organization comprised of wives and mothers of American Legion members and was focused primarily on veterans’ affairs and promoting patriotism, as well as other worthy causes.
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