Aunt Flo’s wisdom

The cheering this week by Rose Parade fans had nothing to do with flowers or floats or New Year’s Day weather forecasts.

I joined in, thrilled at the news that Stephanie Edwards will return this January to emcee the 120th anniversary of the Pasadena parade.

Score one for the old broads -- and you can take that however you want.

As a woman on the downside of 50, I took it personally in 2005 when Edwards -- then 61 -- was banished to the bleachers by her KTLA bosses and replaced as 67-year-old Bob Eubanks’ partner by a younger, perkier TV news anchor.

It’s hard to age gracefully in this town. The kids move out, the boyfriend moves on, the job gets wobbly . . . and suddenly you’re whitening your smile and eyeing plastic surgery ads.

Or in my case, I’m studying older women who’ve survived the transition with style, wisdom and grace.

That’s how I wound up this week at Aunt Flo’s house for lunch -- fresh fruit from crystal goblets, chicken and salad on matching china -- and looking back through eight decades of life.

We’re not related. Florence Candee is the great-aunt of a friend of my youngest daughter. But we’ve crossed paths at 10 years of school plays, parties and graduations, and I live for her cellphone messages:

“Sandy, dear,” she says, in that bubala voice. “It’s Aunt Flo. I loved your column on the County Fair. Did you know I won a blue ribbon there?” Her winning tapestry hangs on her kitchen wall, faded ribbon attached, 16 years later.

She grew up in South Los Angeles and graduated from Fremont High in 1942, one of five Jewish kids in a mostly Italian class. At 19, she married Joe Candee, followed him to four Army bases around the country and had three children in short order. They returned to Los Angeles so broke, “my parents had to pay our rent,” she said.

But Joe launched an airplane parts salvage business that did well enough for them to build a home in Cheviot Hills, put all three kids through college and retire to their Encino condominium.

She’s a throwback to an era that we sometimes poke fun at, when ladies busied themselves with PTA meetings, bridge clubs and art lessons. But “I loved being a mother and a housewife,” she said. And I secretly wish I’d had that chance.

Joe’s death 20 years ago broke her heart, but didn’t slow her roll. She took tap dancing lessons for 10 years, “until I got both hips replaced and I had to stop.” She taught art classes, took disaster management training from the Fire Department, became a volunteer docent at the Skirball and a student of the Kabbalah.

I asked her for advice about building relationships with my grown kids. She laughed. Her kids were hippies in college, she said, embarrassed when she and Joe rolled up to visit in a shiny Cadillac.

Forty years later, the visit is a family joke. So I’m hoping that what bothers now will be something we laugh at down the line.

Next month for Flo’s 85th birthday, her daughters -- an art historian and a real estate agent -- are taking her to Chicago to fulfill a dream, to attend a taping of the Oprah show.

The news that my Tuesday column will now only appear online didn’t sit well with Aunt Flo. This week, I’ve heard from other readers ready to bail on me.

“I won’t be joining you on the web,” e-mailed Betty Krachman. “I like reading my newspaper over breakfast, over lunch, while waiting in line, having my hair done or curled up on the couch.”

I know the feeling. I’ve been reading the newspaper since I was 8 years old; reading online feels foreign to me. Some loyal, longtime readers feel like they are being dumped while we go after younger, flashier partners.

I explained to Aunt Flo that the online column will be easy to find and that I’m going to be writing more often. We went upstairs and kicked her grandson off her laptop so I could show her how to find my column.

Click on your Internet icon, I said. “Then enter www.latimes.com. Use this drop-down arrow. Once you get on the page, scroll down and click on ‘local’. . . .”

I might as well have been speaking in Swahili.

It was too much to remember, too many steps. The bright, busy website disoriented her. A woman who would spend hours patiently weaving a tapestry couldn’t make her way through an online website.

So I sought advice from Sean Gallagher, our latimes.com managing editor.

Good news. He’s one of us. He has worked on the Web for 15 years, “but I still want to pick up my paper from the stoop each morning and spend 15 minutes turning the pages and going through it.”

He understands that the change hits some readers hard. He’s tried to get his mother online and she won’t have it.

So he’s tweaked my column on our website a bit to make it easier to find:

All you have to do is type in latimes.com/sandybanks in the address box on your Internet page. All my recent columns should appear.

Let me know how it goes. It is, after all, a work in progress.

And Aunt Flo, since it’s Saturday, I know you’ll be reading this.

Try it. Ask your grandson to help. Please don’t make me have to print out my Tuesday columns and mail them to you.

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sandy.banks@latimes.com