Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
THE LATER YEARS
Lula married Warner Graves and moved to Los Angeles. She had two children and put her Wild West days behind her. After her husband died, she lived alone in a house in San Jacinto, still speaking with a southern drawl and waving a shotgun at unwanted guests. She died at age 100 in 2008.
Susie married a Southern Pacific Railroad employee, George Fry. She left the desert when she began to suffer from heat-intolerance, a post polio complication. She later divorced Fry and lived alone on a bluff in Leucadia, near San Diego. She had always been a fervent Christian and in her later years she began teaching scripture and aiding Braceros (Mexican farm laborers) who walked by her house along the railroad tracks. She invited migrants in for meals, feeding as many as 21 men each day and housing them in shacks on her property. She also visited inmates weekly at the Tijuana prison.
When she died at 87, Susie's estate was handed over to a county administrator who found little of value and tossed everything--including five black bound photo albums--into a dumpster. Ron May, an archaeologist and historian working in the same office building, jumped into the dumpster and rescued most of the work you see here.