With the Trump regime —  driven by hate and racism — stigmatizing, brutalizing, and ostracizing immigrants across the country, I want to share the eulogy I was honored to deliver on Saturday at the memorial service for my wife’s mother. 

I have an easy assignment today – to engage you, and hopefully soothe you a little, with some words about the life of Catalina Elizabeth Isabel Santa Maria Smith. It should be easy to do this, even though we’re grieving, because Katie told great stories about her life, and her life is a great story.

In fact, Katie put many of her stories in a memory book she filled in some years ago for her granddaughter. In that book, Katie explained to Chloe why she made it:

Hoping you’ll remember me, and how much I love you, after I’m gone

She was born Catalina Isabel Santa Maria in 1933. But she made some changes to that name along the way.

She added another middle name, Elizabeth, apparently because she admired Elizabeth Taylor, whom she met once while in high school. She kept Isabel, but sometimes she embellished and said Isabella.

When she married Kulman Smith she changed her last name from Santa Maria to Smith.

And most of her friends called her not Catalina but Katie.

But her husband Kully, he usually called her Duke. Do you know why? Karen and Kelley did not. But I found the answer in Katie’s book: Growing up, Duke was the name of Kully’s favorite pet goat.

So what is Katie’s story, beyond all of those names?

Katie’s grandfather came to Mexico from Madrid in Spain.

Katie’s mother and father each grew up in Mexico, on their families’ haciendas, horse farms.

Katie’s mother met her future husband when she was 15. They saw each other during a walk in the park. Their parents did not approve. They married anyway, secretly.

Katie’s father, she understood, rode with the Mexican revolutionary forces of Poncho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. At some point, he quit, and Villa’s men went looking for him, as were the Mexican authorities. A priest snuck Katie’s father out of Mexico and into California.

Katie’s father sent his wife separately, worried about her safety. Katie recounted that her mother traveled to California concealed in a turnip truck, clutching her baby daughter Mercy, Katie’s older sister. In other tellings, it was a train car full of watermelons.

Katie’s parents settled in Los Angeles, where Katie and her brother Louie were born.

Katie’s mom cooked, cleaned, and sewed for a living. Katie’s father worked in a brick factory according to his son’s birth certificate. Katie recalled he was a jefe on a cattle ranch.

Growing up, Katie’s sister Mercy played the violin, her brother Louie the Spanish guitar, and Katie was a singer. The children would sing together when they cleaned up after dinner.

As a little girl, at the farmers market in LA, Katie got a spoonful of peanut butter from Cary Grant. She once met Joan Crawford at a store.

Katie’s father died of tuberculosis when she was 10 years old.

Her brother worked as a theater usher, and he would bring Katie to work while her mother went to night school to learn English. Katie sat in the back row “and,” she remembered, “I got my love of movies from that.”

In high school, Katie danced at sock hops, went on dates for 50 cent hamburgers at Tommy’s, went to pajama parties and drive-in movies. She also went to the bullfights in Tijuana – and saw movie stars there, like Gary Cooper.

Katie reported in the book for Chloe that she was co-captain of the girls basketball team but added, in parentheses: (I never made a basket).
She lettered in tennis.
She was in the madrigal singers and acapella choir.
She also sang duets with her classmate Odetta Felious, later well known as the singer and civil rights activist Odetta.

Katie loved Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, and Doris Day singing “Sentimental Journey.”

She worked as an usherette at the Westlake Theater – where there were lots of premieres and movie stars. Debbie Reynolds sat behind her at a screening once.

She remembered she had a crush on movie stars like Gregory Peck, whom she met at a big premiere when she worked as an usherette at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood. She was wearing her Chinese outfit and hat, and Peck patted her head and said, “You are a pretty little Chinese.”

At 21, Katie took her first airplane ride, to New York City. She took her mother to the Statue of Liberty, Broadway shows, and on a carriage ride in Central Park. Katie was spotted and hired for some modeling jobs.

Her first big job was with the FBI– in Los Angeles and then New York and later San Juan Puerto Rico. There were no women agents – women got only clerical jobs – but Katie helped capture one of the FBI 10 most wanted anyway. She had studied their pictures on the office wall, and at a drug store where she was having coffee, she spotted one of these fugitives. She called the FBI operator and gave, she remembered, “a bit of a coded message.” Two agents showed up and arrested the man.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover himself appeared afterward to thank Katie for her quick thinking and action.

Katie met her husband while she was working at the FBI bureau in San Juan. He was an Army officer. They married at El Moro Castle.

And although she was a big flirt, at least while I knew her, her husband was her true love, and she spoke of him until she stopped speaking.

The family lived all over the place. Kelley was born in Lexington, Kentucky, Karen in Savannah, and son Kully in Miami. They also lived in Columbus, GA, in Charleston, Georgetown, SC, Fayetteville, NC, Fort Sheridan, IL, Okinawa, Japan, and for the longest period, in Charlotte.

When her husband was in Vietnam, Katie juggled a house with kids and sometimes with her mother-in-law, known as Big Grandma, and her own Mexican mother, known as Tiny Grandma. Big Grandma, it turns out, was all of 5 foot 4. So you can imagine – Tiny Grandma was like 4 foot 8.

The two grandmas died, two weeks apart, in 1972.

Katie had her rituals, her rosaries and Sunday mass, and also her daily 4 pm happy hour with wine and a fish dip. She loved enchiladas and also caviar. She loved books, especially, she said, romantic novels and southern ghost stories. She loved to blast her record collection, classical and show tunes.

Wherever she lived, Katie loved to have parties, and to decorate the house for all the holidays, especially of course Xmas.

Katie loved when her kids brought friends over. She adopted every one of them, making them sandwiches at 2 am.

Katie had an image to present. She put on lipstick just to go to the mailbox. She wouldn’t let her daughters leave the house without makeup or nice clothes.

When Kelley interviewed to be a flight attendant, Katie wanted her taller, so she duct-taped a fake hair bun to Kelley’s head.

At a department store job, Katie sold Estee Lauder perfume to men by insisting it had magic ingredients going back to the days of Cleopatra and would make, shall we say, a happy marriage. Guys would buy 5 bottles – one guy came back in and said it worked and introduced his pregnant wife.

Katie also worked as a volunteer docent at a historic house in Charleston, and she knew the history of the city and the house but sometimes embellished a bit, including with ghost stories. She also embellished her accent a bit, leaning toward southern. And she said, well I am a southerner, I’m from southern California.

When I challenged Katie on the accuracy of some of her information, or if I teased her, she elbowed me hard in the ribs. I can still feel it. I didn’t mind. I’m grateful to Katie not only for being Katie but also for bringing my incredible wife into the world. Katie was so proud of Karen, and of Chloe. I loved seeing them all together.

Katie had to bury her husband 19 years ago. And then her son, her baby, Kully, came to live with her, and then she had to watch cancer take him, and to bury him in 2018.

Katie lived in Augusta and for a period in Florida with Kelley and Keith, who took care of her with love and devotion, including as the dementia started to slow her down. She was lucky to have visits with Keith and Kelley’s family: Brenda and Don, Brittney and Tyler and Mason, Ashley and Kyle.

Even at the Madison Heights memory care home, Katie was doing her makeup and making up the other ladies. She loved painting sessions and making flower arrangements. She was blessed at the home to have the loving care of Sarah, Dolores, and others.

The week before she died, she wasn’t speaking much anymore, but Karen and I were visiting, and Karen played some of Katie’s favorite songs, like “Que Sera Sera” and “America” from West Side Story. Katie smiled and said, clearly, “I remember this song.”

In the book she made for Chloe years ago, she blamed any lapses in handwriting on jostling by her beloved, pajamas-wearing dog Pepper, sitting by her side: “Hope you can read this,” she concluded. “I was on the couch with Pepper.”

The day she died, the word I thought of for Katie was firecracker. I looked up that word to see if it was accurate.

The Oxford English Dictionary says firecracker means:
A feisty, energetic, or hot-tempered person. A lively and attractive person, esp. a woman.

Urban Dictionary has more. A firecracker is:
fiery, strong willed, romantic, passionate, confident, beautiful, exciting, someone who is bold, sassy, free spirited, and often has explosions of energy; an upbeat person with a loud personality, usually the person in the room who has all eyes on them.

The example of a sentence they provide is:
That girl over there is a Firecracker.

Catalina Elizabeth Isabel Santa Maria Smith was that girl.

We loved her so much, and we will miss her always. Thank you all for being here to honor and remember her.