The Writings of Edith Gaylord Muller

In the late 1980s through the early 2000s , my mother, Edith Gaylord Muller (1919-2003) wrote a series of articles for various purposes, including publishing reminiscences in the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, and creating a book for my daughter Halina. She took a writing class at the college of Marin to improve her skills and marketability.

She published one copy of the book for Halina in two installments, in 1995 and 1996. More installments were clearly intended. but never gathered together with the line art she did to illustrate the book. It is obvious to me that the memory problems which plagued her later in her life (from 1997 onward) were already at work, affecting the second installment in 1996.

As far as I know, most of the articles are factual reporting of events and people that she remembered. There are several poems, at least one of which is through her own eyes as a child. I have not found any fiction.

I believe that most, if not all, of the articles were written on several personal computers. The earliest was probably a CPM machine running WordStar, which my dad had gotten from his sister June Bogard. Later my mom migrated (with the assistance of my father Stanley) to Windows 3.1 (still using WordStar) and finally Windows 98 (now using MS Word).

In January, 2007, I decided to look for these files on the long unused computer. I found them, and to my surprise, there were many more than I expected, and almost all of them have answered genealogical and historical questions that I have been regretting not asking my mom before she died.

I have since copied the files to multiple, more modern computers, and have worked to convert them from WordStar format into MS Word. It's not hard, just tedious.

It was my desire to publish them immediately, so I began this blog to do so.

It was not until after she died that I began to grasp how talented my mother was. I just took it for granted.

This is for you, mom, and thanks for answering some questions that I didn't possess the wit to ask you when you were alive.