Doris J. Ryder

Doris Ryder April 11,1930 – Mar 22,2020

“And the two shall become one flesh” Genesis 2:24

Wow! I have heard it said that when people are made one spiritually through the Vows of Holy Christian Matrimony, and then made one physically/emotionally that brings about the birth of children, they do not live long after one on them dies. This is what happened to Doris Johannessen Ryder. She passed into the healing arms of her Savior Jesus the Christ, March 22, 2020, a short four weeks after her beloved husband, Richard Charles Ryder, passed away on February 22, 2020.

They are survived by: their three daughters and husbands, their eight grandchildren and their respective husbands/ wives, four great- grandchildren and a fifth grandchild due to arrive in May.

I am here to speak to you of who she was and what she did. Also to speak about how deeply my father and mother loved each other, through good times and bad, through sickness and health,  through times of plenty and times of  “ oh my goodness we might lose everything we have  ever worked for!”

So, sit right back and let me tell you a story, a true story of love, loss, sickness, bodily brokenness, theft and perseverance. Because as Mom and Dad’s Pastor’s wife, used to say, “The Lord doesn’t promise you an Easy Life, He promises to those who believe in the Savior an Eternal Life!”

Ahhh, now to tell you about when Dad first looked upon my mother. The beginning of them……First I must explain to you that as I tell this great love and life story, I will be weaving in the Holy Bible passage Proverbs 31:10-31. I do this because this passage reflects who my mother was.  She was not as perfect as this passage of course because we are all sinners in need of our Savior, but it outlines so much of who she was.

THEIR STORY

When Dad first looked upon my mother….

Proverbs 31:10

“An excellent wife, who can find? For her worth is far above jewels”

When Mom opened the door to see her blind date, who would ask her out for ice cream, Dad would tell us his breath was taken away. She was kind, gentle, smart, gracious, tall, blonde, gorgeous and Norwegian. For some reason what impressed him was that she was neat and tidy and didn’t drink too. Anyhow, within two weeks he would ask her to marry him while they were on a date at the beach. She was so surprised and well, wasn’t so sure (fitting, Mom was a shopper and Dad knew exactly what he wanted and would go out and just get it.) Well after a few months of dating Dad asked her again, “So Doris do you have an answer to what I asked?” Mom told me she said, “Yes I do, and it is yes.”

Yes, and yes (!) she was a Norwegian- American through and through. Born April 11, 1930 in the Norwegian neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. She was the only daughter of Karen Svendsen, immigrant from Tromso, Norway and Harry Johannessen, orphaned child of Norwegian immigrant parents. It was the beginning of the great depression. By 1935, times were bad and her parents had lost their fourplex that they had worked so hard to own on Long Island. She vividly recalls packing up their car. Her dad, my Grandpa Harry, would say over and over again on their trip to California how thankful he was that he had bought a new one before the “Crash”. Surely, they would make it across the nation. She remembers waving frantically to Aunt Alvilda through the back window and her friends as they drove away. She recalled Grandma saying that we would likely never see them again because they were driving to the other ocean, to California. She would later tell me that they had enough money to stay in little roadside rooms, they picnicked a lot and her father carried a gun. Her Dad had been over the highway across America before in the early 1920’s and knew about the difficulties crossing the great Mojave Desert and the Sierra Nevada Mountains. What an understatement! It was still only 1935! When she got to California her earliest memory was a box of beautiful oranges from some neighbors as they moved into their apartment on Melrose Place, Los Angeles. They had made it.

Proverbs 31: 13

“She looks for wool and flax and works with hands in delight”

Mom’s first job was at a department store on Wilshire Blvd. Such began her lifetime of work! She graduated from Fairfax High School. She excelled in high school and went on to UCLA when most women of that decade did not go on to college. She was a member of a sorority called Alpha Omicron Pi. She became a teacher and then suddenly the old Viking spirit in her blood stirred….

Proverbs 31:14 She is like merchant ships; she brings her food from afar.

Yes, she was like a merchant ship! She sailed to England and taught a year at  Lakenheath U.S. Air Force Base. Then  she went to Japan to teach a year at Tachikawa U.S. Air Force Base. Brave. She did this ALONE as a single young professional woman in the early 1950’s after the war to end all wars, World War II. She did this even though she remembered the war time food rations, the ration stamp book, her mom working making radios for the fighter airplanes, the blackouts, the sirens, the Japanese submarine bombing of the Santa Barbara oil fields at Ellwood. (This bombing had spurred great fear in Los Angeles and laid the basis for the Japanese internment camps in California! ) She lived and saw how across the street the family at the beginning of the war had 4 Blue Stars in the window and by the end they were all turned to Gold! The mother and father had lost ALL of their sons to battle. A palpable shadow would cross her face when she spoke of that. She remembers no young men on the streets or in the stores. She lived and breathed that Sunday morning in church when Pastor announced that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor and the Pacific Navy had been lost.  She felt the fear as they gathered around the radio that night with her mom and dad and listened to the President speak. Was it her mom or dad who said, “Well, then we fight.” Mom was 11.

We fought.

The war eventually ended, and we have a photo of her holding up a sign saying so! Grandpa Harry was giving mom a driving lesson on an UNPAVED Sepulveda Blvd. (!) My, my how times have changed.

Despite the Japanese war memory after finishing college and earning her teaching credential in the early 1950’s, she went off to taste the food and live the cultures of Europe and JAPAN!

Proverbs 31:11-12

“The heart of her husband trusts in her and he will have no lack of gain. She does him good and not evil all the days of her life.”

I can’t imagine how mom felt when she got the call that her husband had been in a serious car wreck and had broken his neck, back and hand. She was big and pregnant and they had just moved into the newly built house on Armourdale Ave.  He had just started to be in the black with his medical practice.  I remember asking mom about it in my mid 30’s, she didn’t revel in misery about the memory of it or give details of the struggle.  She simply said it was so scary when she went into the hospital big and pregnant and saw dad in traction. Grandma was there. Grandma told her that they would “get through this ” in that Norwegian matter of fact stoic way.  Later I vividly recall Mom saying, “well you just had too. period” .

There was no Workers’ Compensation Insurance then, so mom said Grandma ran the front office, Dad went into work in a half body cast with a hole for his face cut out and his arm and hand in a raised cast. We have a photo somewhere.  I believe mom is standing there beside him looking gracious, beautiful and inwardly very strong.   By the way, Grandma J told me when patients saw dad they couldn’t believe what they were looking at and  confessed they didn’t really feel all that sick when the saw what he was going through!!! Mom nursed him,  cared for him, and he trusted her with all the finances. Honestly if it wasn’t for her thrift, Dad had a generous heart he may have given all he had away…… He had no lack of gain. She was trustworthy and good. Got through tough times and never looked back. Dad would say,” Kim life wounds you, you’ll get a scab, but if you keep picking at the scab you won’t’ heal up. It may leave a scar, it may not.”

Proverbs 31: 15

“She rises also while it is still night and gives food to her household and portions to her maidens, she considers a field and buys it.”

Well, actually it was Dad who rose while it was still dark out……BUT every morning when it was time to go to school there was four brown paper lunch sacks on the landing by the front door all packed and ready to go before 8:00 a.m.. Mom’s lunch menu: ham and Swiss cheese sandwich for Dad, peanut butter and honey for us girls, (sometimes deli meat and American cheese square (an extravagance!) tuna or egg salad, a piece of fruit, and on an occasion, a homemade cookie. Milk cost 7 cents, chocolate milk and orange juice at 15 cents were just too expensive to buy, forbidden!) Yep, that was basically it for 10 years or so. We were fine. Every night and I mean every night my mother cooked us dinner. We sat around the dinner table, swapped stories of our day’s work, thanked the Lord for food and listened to each other as we talked over each other, around each other and finished each other sentences. It worked out, we understood each other.

Oh YES!, Mom purchased a “field” in Palos Verde with her retirement savings from being a Vice Principal for the Wiseburn School District, Los Angeles. Yes, quite a feat for an unmarried woman in the 1950’s. YEARS later I learned she had written her Master’s Thesis on teaching in Japan in the mid 1950’s. So imagine my surprise when in the early 2000’s a UCLA grad student contacted her and wanted a copy of her thesis, the microfiche record wasn’t too clear!!!!  What ?! She had a Master’s???She was bemused and chuckled at the request. I remember her finding it and her victory call went out from the den hallway of “I found it!”.   I turned the corner to see her standing in the hall with her finger raised in triumph and holding the thesis. You know mom boasted a lot about us kids, which embarrassed us greatly. Yet,  she never boasted about her work accomplishments. Yet, when she did talk about her kids accomplishment in later years, it was more of a musing/reflection of about how great everyone had “turned out”, not really pride in her voice anymore, but more of a slight awe.....  BUT let’s get back to,  “she considers a field and buys it”.

P roverbs 31:16 – 18

She considers a field and buys it: From her earnings she plants a vineyard, she girds herself with strength and makes her arms strong. She senses that her gain is good; her lamp does not go out at night.

She sold that field that she wanted to build her dream house on overlooking the ocean, because she didn’t want to have dad drive so far to his practice or potentially uproot the children from their school and church. With it she bought half of the corner lot for my dad’s brand new medical practice. We can hear the story to this day. “We were mortgaged to the hilt, we hung up a shingle advertising Daddy as a new doctor and would watch the cars drive by and pray somebody would stop. “   Finally they had a break. Daddy watched over a doctor’s practice at church who was retiring.

Over the years she and my dad invested!  I remember my Grandmas Karen saying, “Doris if you don’t risk a little something you will never get ahead”. So she risked a little more and she kept at it. Bought and sold, made a little and lost a lot and then made a little more.

Proverbs 31:19-20

“She stretches out her hands to the distaff, and her hands grasps the spindle, she extends her hand to the poor and she stretches out her hands to the needy.”

Mid 1970’s and early 1980’s: Vietnamese Boat Refugees and  Cambodian Refugees (from communist  Pol Pot ) come to America.

My mom was part a group from St. Timothy  that  were part of a larger effort by Southern California churches to go pick up and sponsor these refugee families from Camp Pendleton Oceanside, U.S.Marine base. They were to bring clothes, find housing and jobs for them. Basically, they volunteered to get them settled into American life. I can picture my mom thinking “ housing? I can help with housing!” First they helped with the Vietnamese, then with the ones who fled the Khmer Rouge “Killing Fields” of Cambodia a few years later. A few years ago my dear friend shared with me she was one of these refugees as a young girl who escaped on a boat from Vietnam. I was absolutely stunned, humbled and speechless as she shared with me her precious amazing journey to Camp Pendleton.  She recalled arriving as a naked 7 years old to America and being handed clothes by “big American women” at Camp Pendleton. I was so stunned as I pictured Betty Hazelwood, my old Sunday school teacher….

One funny story I recall is that my mom worked so hard to find twelve beds and a rental house for the Cambodian family. After picking them up and settling them in the house etc. she announced, “Oh Richard this family is from the countryside of Cambodia, they don’t sleep in beds they prefer the floor!” she GROANED. She also had lots of funny stories of housing immigrants…a book could be written.

Proverbs 31:21-25

“She is not afraid of the snow for her household, for all her household are clothed with scarlet. She makes coverings for herself; her clothing is fine linen and purple. Her husband in known in the gates and he sits among the elders of the land. She makes linen garments and sells them and supplies belts to the tradesmen. Strength and dignity are her clothing. She smiles at the future.”

Her smile, yes, my mother had a beautiful kind smile that I will miss so much. Daddy loved her smile, and yes she did smile at the future. She had such optimism. Even though I must say she did not like to sew or knit and was amused her daughters loved it (thank you Tante Harriet!) She really didn’t like to.   She liked  business and she kept a few close friends throughout her life. She was especially close to her mother’s half sister Harriet in Tromso, Norway. She sent us girls abroad to live with her when we each reached the age of 15 years old. Now years later my mom’s kids and grandchildren are dear friends with Harriet’s kids and grandchildren even though a continent and the Atlantic Ocean separate us! What a wonderful legacy she started up and we all, about 20 of us, have had our lives enriched because of it.

“She is not afraid…. and she clothes herself with strength. “

I would add a bit of daring to that list. She loved to travel to really quite extraordinary places…. 1950’s she told of going to Macau China and having to put on a blindfold on the ship when they went through Communist China’s waters. Who would take their three CHILDREN and her husband BEHIND the IRON curtain to Leningrad, Now St. Petersburg Russia via a ship from Finland during the height of the cold war? Um, my Mom did. Yeah really. It was 1976. I could write a book about that trip. One thing I want to share, she was right, we were fine, and it was the most amazing experience of my life. It was complete with   scary looking Russian soldiers following us, forfeited passports before we boarded the buses at the Leningrad port. I recall Dad “forfeiting” dollars and his prize Super 8 mm camera to a soldier with bad teeth this little hallway shack thing. They kept them for safe keeping we were told. My dad was a bit upset about this, but my mom would say,” Oh Richard, it’ll be okay”.  We were. There were no restaurants, only once did we have  lunch in Leningrad, it was dark dry bread and this cold beet soup in this weird old dark upper room. We saw long lines for food and beer, there were very, very few cars on the road. The children wore bows in their hair like mom said she did in the 1930’s. Yet, we did see the most amazing circus complete with wild white tigers that walked not two feet from me as they went into the ring,  no bars, just when they got into the ring…. We saw Catherine the Great Winter’s Palace full of jewels unguarded(!) ( the gulag was/is a real thing by the way ) Enormous columns made of malachite dwarfed us in the palace halls. No churches or religion were allowed in communism, again there was Siberia, and the state church had a pulpit that preached not the gospel but Communist ideology. (happening again now in China, Lord have mercy.)  We saw a bride and groom put flowers in from of a Stalin statue. Odd.   We roamed the beautiful gardens of Peter the Great Summer Palace. It was amazing. But we remember how odd it was, there was no one selling ice cream or cold drinks, or balloons. Communism. The great Socialist State. Not So Great.

Anyhow Mom didn’t stop with that.   Oh no.  She took us in 1980 to take a nice close look at the East German/ West German border. She had the map and Dad was slowly driving and driving down little dirt roads…soon we were followed by a German “farmer” on a tractor. Dad got really, really nervous and said ‘Let’s get out of here.” Only after  mom had a good look with binoculars  at the border wall……did we jump in and get the “ bleep” out of there…..

Proverbs 31:26-31

“She opens her mouth in wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness.  Her children rise up and bless her, her husband also, and he praises her saying many daughters have done nobly but you excel them all. Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain but a woman who fears the LORD, she shall be praised. “

Mom was kind. She was chatty. She was stoic. She loved beautiful things and surrounded herself with beautiful things, like her beautiful garden and home. Yes, she was a shopper, but she would buy really just a few things of great quality and of great beauty and then kept them for decades. Yes decades! She was kind but firm and she ran our household well. Did she eat the bread of idleness…? Well, we all eat a little too much as Americans.  She was a fabulous cook. She really enjoyed cooking. She was part of the El Dorado gourmet club for decades. And there was always some delicious cake or cookie she had made and ready to share with all of us.  She made the house a home, a place of warmth, beauty and above all Peace.

She gave her whole self to the raising of us children and the success of her husband’s medical practice. Oh yeah on the side she “ did a little real estate and taught a bit”. Understatement.

She gave the gift of her faith to her children as she walked through hard times with a simple acceptance and perseverance. She knew her role in this life and understood the great awesomeness of the LORD almighty in a quiet totally matter of fact way. She modeled what it was to be a godly wife and mother.

Daddy had found his wife of excellence, his heart trusted in her all the days of his life. We daughters rise up now and bless her name to all who will listen, and we praise YOU Lord for the mother You gave us! Praise the Lord,

Amen and a very amen it has been.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 15TH SERVICES HAVE BEEN UNFORTUNATELY CANCELED DUE TO THE PANDEMIC.

Luyben Dilday Mortuary (562) 425-6401