Barbara’s Obituary Barbara Ellen Allred was born January 4, 1920 in Chicago, IL to parents who would soon divorce – taxi driver and inveterate gambler George Allred and dancehall girl Barbara Jane DeMars. Before she was two, Mary Ellen (as known until her teens) was contracted out to a variety of rooming houses in the Chicago area, where attention to children was little more than perfunctory. Alone many evenings, she would sing loudly down the halls to create a feeling that, as she put it, “everything was OK”.
By 2nd grade she had taken to wandering the streets for companionship, finding it in evenings in bright, warm church basements and the choir groups that allowed her in to listen. Pocket change from her occasionally materializing father bankrolled solo outings to the imagined companionship of motion picture theaters and the glamourous actresses that graced the screen. With her first girlfriend, Doris Lichtgarn, who lived in a house with a father and a mother, Mary Ellen had her first experience – and as a child her last – of ‘being home’.
And she dove voraciously into books. At age nine her mother abruptly reclaimed her. From Detroit to Cleveland, Columbus, Pittsburgh, and lesser towns, then back to Chicago, she, new half-brother Jim, and several cousins now found themselves in a travelling road show of her mother, street-walking though affectionate Aunt Ruth, recently divorced Aunt Polly, and the husbands and boyfriends irregularly in train.
Punctuating their usually disastrous but occasionally successful financial schemes were dead-of-night motel departures and unpredictable, inebriated parties, children peaking from the bedroom. The ultimate scheme was to migrate to California, and in 1932, when she was 12, they departed, kids packed into a rear metallic rumbleseat. The Depression had settled in with a vengeance.
Cash mostly exhausted, the group stopped here and there to replenish itself, particularly with Mary Ellen’s father George in San Antonio, whose current wife Hattie openly resented the competitors’ presence. A year later they were in Los Angeles. In the Pittsburgh phase of those wanderings she had been promoted a grade or two on the basis of her IQ tests, a recent innovation in U.S. education.
With reading skills beyond even these big kids she sailed easily through a year at clubby Hoover High in Glendale, working the counter at See’s Candies in the afternoons and weekends. She braved alone the La Crescenta flood as, rooftops and trees drifting past their second-floor window, she waited for a lifeboat with little Jim and two smaller cousins. Finally transferring to Manual Arts High in Hollywood, she graduated at 16, having endured what she estimates to have been 26 school changes in ten years.
Real name restored, Barbara jumped promptly into the job market. The venturesome spirit of a boarding house survivor was an asset. Climbing the backstairs one day to a clerical hiring office, she was advised by the group descending that nothing was available.
She continued up anyway and was hired on the spot. Here at a Kress’s ‘five and dime’ store was the turning point of her life in the person of stockroom worker Loris J. Buccola, whose open smile and energetic step, she said, “kept drawing my eye”. A year of acquaintance and another of exciting, secretive dating (forbidden by Kress Co. rules) landed her an invitation to a Buccola family picnic in the summer of 1938.
Four or five Italian families on a Sunday picnic outing were an entirely novel affair to Barbara Allred. Abundance and a certain hierarchical regimen were the hallmarks. “Potatoes were brought in to peel, salads to toss, meats to barbeque…the staple spaghetti and meatballs… wine, impressive desserts, coffee …” The young women chipped in to cook, rubbing shoulders and exchanging jokes under the elders’ direction.
The men sat nearby, reminiscing and laughing in more democratic fashion. Mama Buccola, Sicilian by birth and preference, regarded the self-raised waif her son had brought with poorly concealed skepticism. But the waif jumped right in.
“I loved them instantly,” as she had loved those choir singers barely noticing her a decade earlier. Twelve months hence they were married at St. Elizabeth’s Catholic Church in Altadena, in what Barbara called “this truly transcendent moment in my life”. New sister-in-law Lauretta walked her down the aisle of the cavernous mission-style interior to the grand total of seven people awaiting them on her side of the front pew, including “a girlfriend from work”.
Loris and Barbara raised nine children in the Pasadena area over the next three and a half decades. Loris brought in the money (it took plenty) and Barbara ran the house (16 hours a day). Their cheerful and open spirit, a large family’s nearly chaotic informality, and the stability and unity that nevertheless prevailed in their household were a magnet to outsiders.
The Buccola home became a headquarters for everyone’s friends. Like-minded nieces and nephews multiplied too, and the outlines of a clan began to take shape. Grand picnicking, indoor and out, went on.
The popular, story-telling George, admiring of his daughter and proud of his grandchildren, came and went between horse races and poker games. With brother Jim were memories of those shared traumas and miracles of recovery, with sisters-in-law Laura and Lauretta an uncomplicated comaraderie. Visits to mother were, though de rigueur, another matter: “mother” stiff and distant, daughter nervous and correct.
In keeping with her times and childhood experience Barbara avoided today’s penchant for hovering over one’s children. Hers could go – armed with warnings, advice, and sack lunches – wherever they wished provided “all your work is done first,” and “you be home by 5:00”. She taught them to dance (waltz, bop, and jitterbug, at which she excelled), coached on dating (“Don’t blurt everything on the first date; leave some for later”), assigned weekly chores (dishwashing, sweeping, ironing, changing diapers), and advised on technique (“Start with the first thing you see and you’ll figure out the rest”).
Forever at a task herself, she would often break unselfconsciously into songs, many of them romances and spirituals like Savior Like a Shepherd Lead Me from her nocturnal wanders in Chicago. Barbara gained more time from home as the children grew older. She became active in the Catholic Laywomen’s retreat movement, becoming the 1970 General Chairwoman of its 2000-member Retreat Congress at the Century Plaza Hotel in Hollywood.
She lunched with her large coterie of women friends – neighbors and fellow mothers and parishioners. In 1975 her husband sold his share of the furniture manufacturing business he had operated with his brother Russ for 30 years. Barbara and Loris moved to Silverton, Oregon.
They squared-danced and round-danced and traveled the state selling garden supplies. She became secretary to the Benedictine Seminary High School and Retreat House in Mt. Angel, then at Kelly & Kelly attorneys in Silverton.
In 1982 her husband and lifemate Loris died. The unreality and shock of his death were partly relieved by the attentive presence of her children and her own adaptive bent. Adjusting to single life soon became a project.
She moved to Wilsonville, learned to play golf, began familiarizing herself with computers, painted and quilted, religious books still at her bedside. After several years of friendship Barbara married Sam Speciale in 1990. They bought a new house together.
She obtained a real estate license, began selling houses, and wrote her autobiography. Later separating, Sam died in 2018. As the 20th century closed Barbara’s memory began to flicker.
Onset was slow and uneven. But the person remained. The steady, cheerful temperament.
The undivided attention to visitors. The measured reassurances, often devolving to fancy (“everything’s fine”), as a child’s mind might have reasoned when the house mistress was out and there was nothing to eat. Memory gradually unhooking in fact, Barbara’s character stood out the stronger: in its unassuming determination, adaptability, and patience.
Imperceptibly, the threatening flood fused with the saving lifeboat, the difficult birth with the welcome cry, the orphan’s smock with the wedding dress, the unnameable daughter with the angel of mercy.
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