(Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from the autobiography of Jerry Robinson called "Listen to Your Father." In this excerpt, he recalls his mother and life with his family in the 1920's in Portland.)

Mom was born Eva Mae Scott in Newark, New Jersey in 1881. She had two older sisters and a little brother.

Her father was a moderately successful pattern maker in East Orange and on Sundays he took his family out in the family carriage. The horse's name was Ben and he was 17 hands high. I guess that is a pretty big horse because Mom bragged about it numerous times.

Grandpa Scott was apparently a very bright guy but better with his hands than his head. According to Mom, Grandpa invented a machine that wound the core of a golf ball with a continuous strip of thin rubber. He took in a partner who promised to raise money to develop the working model. The partner stole the idea and later filed for the patent.

Mom never got farther than a grade school education but she had a natural gift for writing and hand skills.
When she was 16 she went to work for Thomas Edison making Gramophones, the forerunner of the phonograph. Her crowning moment was the day the brilliant inventor talked to her on one of his visits to the factory.

Her patron saint was Carrie Nation, famous for bashing in saloon doors. Mom was a little less violent but did her best to battle the booze peddlers, serving for many years with the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

Perhaps her most endearing quality, aside from her caring nature, was an almost childlike innocence that she carried to the grave.

If the Ten Commandments were written in stone, Mom probably wielded the hammer and chisel. To my knowledge she never violated any of them.

She also never tasted liquor or nicotine in any form and threatened to wash our mouths out with soap so often we lived in fear of any transgressions. She once told my sister Doris that she planned all ten of her children and would never consider making love except for the purpose of propagating. If true, and I can't conceive of her lying, my Dad must be considered a martyr.

She has to hold some sort of record for church attendance. She would crawl on her hands and knees in a blizzard rather than miss a Sunday sermon. For ten years she made us crawl with her.

I don't recall Dad ever setting foot inside of a church, though he could recite chapter and verse of the Bible.

I was baptized at the Mallory Avenue Christian Church in the Piedmont District of Portland. This was in 1932 and the structure was simply a basement without any upper floors. You walked down a couple of flights of stairs to a huge room that served as an assembly room and it was surrounded by numerous Sunday School classrooms.

Mom couldn't tell you the square root of eight but she could bake an apple cobbler, sew a patchwork quilt or make a corded cloth handbag. She knew what was important about raising a family.