New Burbanker named ‘Mother of the Year’

One evening around sunset about a decade ago, Burbank resident Catherine Marsh sat in the passenger seat of her mother’s car on the Ventura (134) Freeway, in labor with her second child, daughter Avery. Her mother, JoAnne Michels, was driving.

“Our intention was to go to our own St. Joe’s Medical Center,” Michels said, but there was “no way we could have made it.”

So Michels maneuvered through several lanes of traffic and pulled over, Marsh wrote in a letter recently, “barely in time to recline my seat and deliver the baby.”

Michels then asked a man whose car had broken down nearby to call 911 and to donate a shoelace to tie the umbilical cord as well as grab a pillowcase from the back seat to swaddle the newborn.

“What astonished me was that it never seemed like an emergency to her,” Marsh wrote. “While I was anxiously on the phone, calling the paramedics, mom was cooing, showing Avery the sunset and telling her, ‘Welcome to the world, precious girl.’”

If it seems like that calm under pressure could earn Michels “Mother of the Year,” it did — at least in part. Marsh’s letter describing the event was one of three recommendations supporting a nomination for 2015 California Mother of the Year.

Today, the California Assn. of American Mothers Inc. will award Michels that honor.

Beverly Nelson, the association’s president, said the criteria for the award is service and community influence. A panel of four judges — one from the field of education, one from the community, one from business and one from the religious community — judged about a dozen nominees and rated them on their submitted portfolios.

Mark Sarvas, a writing instructor in the UCLA Extension’s Writer’s Program, helped Michels write a forthcoming biography called “Out of Nowhere” about a Mormon missionary who grew up as a street child in the Philippines. He said he was thrilled, but not shocked to hear she’d earned the honor, and that it couldn’t go to a kinder person.

“She’s truly, remarkably kind,” Sarvas said. “More people could and should emulate her.”

Michels, 71, a mother of seven boys and one girl, and a grandmother of 21 — with a 22nd expected in about six weeks — recently moved to Burbank to live closer to Marsh and her children. But for 45 years, she and her husband, a dentist, lived in Encino, where she has been very involved with youth education at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In addition to raising eight children, she’s worked as a surgical nurse and has taught courses for the American Red Cross — which she said prepared her for the roadside delivery.

She has also opened her home to people in crisis over the years and has supported several humanitarian causes, including dental missions to Belize and a boarding school for special-needs children in Kenya that was founded by her son to honor her grandson, Sean Michels, who was born with several birth defects and died when he was 6.

Michels said last year she helped organize a dental mission to the school, which required all of the dental equipment to be flown in, and which treated 300 people who had no prior access to dental care. She said her father taught her to support humanitarian causes and she’s been happy to see her own children follow that tradition.

Later this month, Michels will attend a national conference of American Mothers Inc. in Washington, D.C., where a national Mother of the Year will be selected from among the state-level honorees from more than 20 other states.

American Mothers Inc. has awarded the Mother of the Year honor for 80 years.

Michels said she believes the state platform will help her to raise awareness about child sexual slavery and to support two nonprofits, Operation Underground Railroad and Innocents at Risk, which are working to end such practices and bring human traffickers to justice.

It’s a rampant problem worldwide, she said, and takes place “in our own backyard,” as well.

Michels said her love of children is at the heart of what she does, whether it’s spending time having “chocolate picnics” with her grandchildren or in her humanitarian causes.

“I, myself, was cherished as a child — absolutely adored,” she said. “That’s a great gift to have been given and I would like to be able to pass it on.”