My Grandmother on my father's side, my 'Grandma Moody', was the daughter of Rosalie Cerrero (born Calcagno) and Esteban Cerrero, formerly a Spanis Cavalryman in the employ of the Medici's in Florence, Italy.
My Great-grandmother Cerrero's family - she was known in the family as 'Rerra', again because as a baby I couldn't pronounce Cerrero - and was the daughter, one of two sisters, of a wealthy Genoese merchant family who lived outside of Genoa in a town called Aranzano. Rerra never really talked much about her childhood. I suppose that that was partly because, even after fifty or more years in America, she still had a heavy Italian accent and spoke English with some difficulty, and partly because the story of how she came to America was, at least in my mind, a sad one. I'll write about that in a later post.
My Grandma Moody was a hard-working woman who labored all of her life. As a young girl she worked in the family restaurant at Third and Townsend, hard by the train station and trainyards where the line south to Los Angeles and points between started and ended. After the 1906 San Francisco Fire and Earthquake destroyed the restaurant, she ended up in Santa Cruz after marrying my Grandpa Moody. She and Rerra operated a Railway hotel and restaurant, the Saint James Hotel, right next to the beach and, again, at the end of the spur line that brought passengers from the Bay Area, or from the South, to Santa Cruz. It was a hotel frequented by salesmen and railroadmen and Grandma and Rerra cooked and cleaned and more-or-less single-handedly kept the hotel going. It was, in the fashion of the times, my Grandpa Moody's picture that appears on the hotel stationery that was kept long after he moved on to another occupation and eventually to another part of California.
My grandfather was born in Northern California, near Marysville. Although I never met him - he died shortly before I was born - family legend records that he was a stagecoach driver, then a volunteer in the Spanish America War, serving in the Philippines and rising to the rank of Company Sergeant. When he returned home his family had begun to relocate to Santa Cruz and he took a job as a railway brakeman with the Southern Pacific Railway. It was during this time that he met and married my grandmother. He became, probably because he was one of those men who everybody knows and who knows everybody, an easier task in the Monterey Bay area in those days because it was still a small-town kind of area, the first game warden for Monterey Bay. It was a natural for him: he was a hunter and a fisherman and loved the Santa Cruz Mountains. Later, as he rose through the ranks, he moved to San Francisco and the family, including my father, followed him there.
Next post: Brother and Sister: my father and my Aunt Ella
