Tender Remembrance of a Swell Girl in a Yearbook

In recalling recently the inscriptions my classmates had written in my Belmont High School yearbook, I quoted one from a girl named Florence Bock.

“Dear Jacky Wacky. Don’t forget me. As if you could. Florencia de Bock. Alias Florence Bock.”

I found also that she had signed her name under a line in an advertisement: “With Sincere Appreciation of Your Patronage.”

Those two entries reminded me of the feelings we shared. But I never kissed her, never asked her out. I did not know then, as I said, that “good humor in a woman is as rare as beauty.”

I did not know what had become of Florence. But I think my tone suggested that I felt more for her than I ever showed and that I wondered wistfully how her life had been. I had never seen her at a class reunion.

Now I know.

I have received a letter from Fred H. Bock of Lompoc, her brother. He wrote for two reasons, he said. One was to say that he had recently reviewed his Belmont yearbook (Class of Summer ‘40) and found that most of his classmates regarded him, as mine had me, as “a really swell guy.”

“The second, and most important reason for being so personally affected--deeply and tearfully--was your tender remembrance of my sister, Florence Bock. Poignant memories flooded back as I read your words. Indeed, Florence was a very, very special person with much talent in any area she chose. Since you evidently felt so close to her, I thought you might like to know what became of her. . . . “

I knew, from those words, that it could not be good.

Fred recalled that Florence had been handicapped by arthritis from the age of 10. Before entering Belmont she had attended school at Orthopaedic Hospital. She later attended Frank Wiggins Trade School and went to work as a designer and dressmaker in a Hollywood shop that catered to many movie industry clients.

But she was not physically able to stay on. She needed constant medical attention. When her grandparents retired to Hawaii, she went with them as a companion. Two years later her grandfather died and she and her grandmother moved back to Los Angeles. By this time, she was mostly confined to bed. Fred remembers how shocked she was when she heard the news about Pearl Harbor and the endangerment of places she knew.

Strange, I thought, that I too had spent two years in Hawaii and might have been there before she left.

“In spite of good medical help,” Fred wrote, “she continued to decline in health. She spent a couple of weeks in the French Hospital, then returned home and in February, 1942, she lost her brave battle. She was still the same Florence almost to the end, brightening the lives of those she touched, even from her sickbed.”

Her death made Fred question some of his religious teachings. “Why Florence, who had so much good to give to the world, when there were so many the world would have been better off without?”

Indeed, I wonder what Florence would have to say to that.

“I’m not sure I’ve found the full answer even after all these years,” Fred says, “and often hope that some of her talent and feel for other people and her ability to lift their spirits has rubbed off on me.”

As I suggested, much as I liked Florence, I tended to pursue more sophisticated girls, those who, like Edna St. Vincent Millay, burned their candles at both ends, or pretended to.

They hung around the Belmont Sentinel office, toying with journalism, arguing the theories of Sigmund Freud and discussing Hemingway and the advocates of free love, though never, as far as I knew, putting it into practice. They were the forerunners of the liberated woman, and of course I loved them.

I remember that my involvement with Florence was light and playful. No touching. She was a girl who always seemed on the edge of laughter. I’m sure she teased me, and I’m sure it did me good.

As a member of the Knights, a rather snobbish boys’ club, editor of the Belmont Sentinel and a first-string Class B basketball player, I must have been insufferably self-important; Florence probably trimmed my sails. In repartee I was said to have a sharp tongue, but I doubt that anyone who called me Jacky Wacky was afraid of that terrible swift sword.

I wish now, of course, that I had got to know Florence better. I can’t remember that I ever was aware of her physical problem. Of course she wouldn’t have wanted me to know.

I wish she could have known that I remembered her. I hope she remembered me.