Cerini Bess died on June 22nd, 2023 after a years-long struggle with dementia. She was 86. She leaves 2 sons, Tim Bess and Piet Bess and grandchildren Nigel Bess and Delphina Wedell along with nieces Anne Anderson, Catherine Creely-Hodges, Elizabeth Creely, and Emily Creely and nephew James Creely, close to her because of her lifelong relationship with her brother Christopher “Kit” Creely, who died in 2007.
Cerini was born in Los Angeles, a couple days before Christmas on December 20th, 1936. She complained that this meant she only received one gift for both occasions. She grew up in the middle of the Great Depression, the daughter of bookstore owners Bunster Creely and Virginia Wellendorf Creely. They lived in South Pasadena as a young couple. Bunster joined Virginia's family’s business, the Holmes Book Company, and later opened the Abbey Bookstore on Los Angeles' famed Bookstore Row.
Cerini and her brother Kit were very close despite their eight-year difference in age. She talked about how her brother cared for her, and how she would constantly tag along after him and his friends. One of her favorite stories was about when he mischievously gave her a chile, then watched in horror as a single tear rolled down her cheek. He carried her around on his shoulders for the rest of that day, as she described it.
In her early childhood, Cerini lived in Pasadena. Her mother sought out a school there that was not almost all white, and she hiked in the nearby hills with her friend Freddie Pigg.
After moving to Newport Beach in 1946 with her parents, Cerini lived on Balboa Island in one of the area's early beach shacks. Her mother, “Diddie” divided bedrooms from common areas using rattan blinds. Cerini attended Newport Elementary school where she played on the beach, and gained her lifelong love of the ocean. These days, the playground is on the beach. Back then, the beach was the playground. Cerini told of how she did well in all subjects except recess. She propagated her schooldays attitude in raising her sons. “It’s not a prison,” she said, “Leave whenever you want”, and, “Keep on hitting them until they start crying and stop fighting.”
At that time, people lived on Balboa not only because it was pretty, but also to make a living. Cerini had memories of the small fishing community that existed in Newport beach, before the wide-spread urban development of the fifties and sixties. She sometimes borrowed a dory belonging to a local fisherman. The boat was indescribably heavy, but the man would push it with, as she told it, one huge hand down the sand and into the surf. She and a boy she knew would paddle it around in what I understand to be the ocean off Balboa peninsula, rather than the calmer waters of Newport Bay.
As a teenager, when her parents lived inland on Irvine Avenue, she attended Newport Harbor High School. In a photo of the entire class lined up there, she is one of the few girls with raven hair.
One of her favorite stories in later years is about how an owner of a stable near her home would let Cerini and her friend ride her horses to exercise them. They explored the extensive lands of the Irvine Ranch, consolidated in the 1860s from 3 Spanish land grants. One favorite destination was Shark Island, which may be the same as Harbor Island near Pacific Coast Highway. Cerini and her friends would swim the horses out to the sandbar. Now it is connected to the mainland and covered side to side in houses with their own boat docks.
Cerini also spent some time living with her maternal grandmother Mabel nee Holmes on the high-status Longridge Road in Oakland. Mabel, or “Ma”, as she is still known to her family, was a formidable woman with a high temperament, a loving grandmother who helped raise Cerini.
Ma had pet names for her grandchildren: Impy for Kit and Dweetsy for his little sister, which Cerini confided in her last years, after keeping it to herself all her life. The economic contrast between Diddie’s and Ma’s households may give some clue to why Cerini lived in Northern California for a while, or it may indicate other difficulties in her parents’ household.
Parts of the family lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and others in the greater Los Angeles area. They have driven between the two on Highway 101 for easily more than 100 years. Cerini spent nearly 20 years at the end of her life living at the middle of that road, in Pismo Beach, finding a connection with the Pacific first established in Newport. In her last years of life, she remarked on the landmark this rock, in Pismo, had provided through her whole life. It is smack dab in the middle of the 101.
After high school, Cerini enrolled at Orange Coast College, the local community college, and then transferred to UC Berkeley. Her mother had lived in Berkeley, and had attended the university until Kit’s birth intervened. Cerini was a member of Zeta Delta sorority, and remained in contact with several of her sisters. While at Cal, she also started working as a ticket agent at TWA, and, in an early instance of remote learning, passed a history class there without the professor knowing who she was. Her free flights allowed her to be present to take the exam, but she had arranged with others to share their notes while she was away, and the instructor was left asking the class who this Cerini Creely was who had turned in an excellent final assignment.
It was at Cal that Cerini met David Bess. When they went out on one of their first dates on a Friday during Lent, he was relieved that she ordered a hamburger. Her name indicated that her family was Irish, and if she had been Catholic, then meat would have been forbidden. As it turned out, it was her grandmother’s Episcopalian affiliation that she had settled on. Bunny, her father, who attended mass all his life, had been excommunicated for marrying a Protestant.
After college, Cerini did a Walkabout, touring England, Germany, Italy and other European countries on bicycles and trains, crossing the Atlantic on a ship. This gap year is a tradition that subsequent generations have carried on. She prized her memories of nice German boys at the youth hostel stripping to their Lederhosen and taking sponge baths while her American companions remained sweaty and smelly because there was no shower. She gained access to her friend’s Italian relatives’ kitchens connecting to her great grandfather’s heritage, Francisco Cerini, a Florentine native who had immigrated to San Francisco in the 1850s.
Cerini married Dave in California while he was in the Navy, and they drove cross-country to Athens GA where he was stationed. She followed him to Japan to his destroyer’s home port. In a significant departure from common practice, they lived “on the economy”, or off base. This was out of the ordinary not only because it was a decade and a half after WWII, but also because of cultural attitudes among military families.
Cerini worked hard on learning Japanese, and read extensively about the culture and history of the place, still evidenced by her bookshelf today. Living in a traditional house with walls she described as made of rice-paper, they furnished it with antiques they bought locally. These antiques still furnish their homes. When a typhoon approached, Dave’s ship went to sea to avoid damage in port, and Cerini hunkered down as much as one could in such a lightweight dwelling. Interested in what exactly a typhoon was, she was taken aback to find it equated in the dictionary with a hurricane, not part of her experience in California, but a concept that really made her sit up and take notice!
The Navy took David to Bremerton WA, and then to Oxnard CA. During David’s last few months in the Navy in Southern California, she gave birth to Peter (later Piet). In both places, they lived on or near the water: in Washington, they could even go clamming for their dinner in the front yard! After David’s discharge, around the time Timothy was born, his work took them to Los Angeles, and then to Berkeley again, where he studied for his Master’s degree at Cal. He started teaching at Cal Poly Pomona, close to her brother’s young family in Costa Mesa.
Cerini’s prodigious energies went into childrearing and running a household. She and David bought a 1906 Craftsman style house on Kingsley Avenue in Pomona with a modern 1970s linoleum kitchen and a laundry chute from the upper floors. They painted the kitchen cabinets broadly in bold colors, and entertained in a living room with a plate glass front window, hardwood floors, built-in varnished wood cabinets with leaded glass doors, and an immense “oriental” style rug. A large Marimekko print greeted guests, and the cane backed couch’s cushions were re-upholstered in lime-green wet-look vinyl. Beautiful mid-century "architects" chairs were positioned in the living room, in front of the fireplace, and a gorgeous wooden surround in the formal dining room was the site of many family dinners.
The house was regarded by her nieces and nephews as a grand place, who explored every square inch of it, although they mostly avoided the back stairs and cellar, as these were considered to be spooky and possibly haunted.
The family vehicle was a 1972 Volkswagen Westfalia camper. This served not only as a camper in its own right, but also as a way to go backpacking, the 1970s fad based on new, lightweight gear. They started with well-equipped, Sierra Club standard, 10-essentials day hikes, and then progressed to real backpacking trips in the High Sierras. Goose-down sleeping bags were usually the only thing bought new-- the rest of the large items she found thrift shopping, something she indulged in all her life. She found Boy Scout troops for the children based on their focus on backpacking, not car-camping.
In the Pomona house, she raised not only her 2 sons, but also, at various times, foster sons George Berletich and Kenneth Herrera, now known as Philip Henley. Her nieces and nephews were sometimes in her care, sometimes to attend swim lessons, which looms large in her nephew James’s memory. She showed him at about kindergarten age that he could swim to her arms unaided in the cold, overcast summer morning waters of the Chaffey High School pool. She regarded swimming as a crucial life skill, not surprising for someone who had grown up on the beach. Her sons also took mandatory swim-lessons in the summers.
While raising her sons to become dyed in the wool swimmers had mixed success, another important life skill, bicycling, stuck with her sons, one of whom raced mountain bikes and the other who commutes on a bike. She raised them to get out in traffic and ride according to the rules that apply to cars. In about 1970, she took both sons, along with a somewhat nervous foster son George, to Santa Barbara on bikes. Tim, 7, only had one gear and a coaster brake. The others had 3 speeds. She admonished her sons not foolishly to buy bicycles new: there were plenty of good bikes out there in thrift shops. Often, a coat of spraypaint was all that was needed.
From front: Tim, Peter, worried looking George, Cerini
Luggage on the trip was canvas suitcases bungeed to luggage racks. The route west of Newhall led up oil company access roads. She probably wasn’t supposed to be there, but her map showed a road, so she took it. It became clear that this was a dead end, so she had the boys lift their baggage and then their bikes over a barbed wire fence. So far, so good, but the route north to the highway crossed a motorcycle park. The riders there found it amusing to say the least to see a family of cyclists pushing heavily laden bikes through the sand as they buzzed past. This episode demonstrates an obstinate, anarchic aspect of Cerini’s personality that she has successfully passed on to at least one of her sons, and nieces Elizabeth and Emily.
About the time Cerini’s sons were in junior high school, as it used to be called, she took on the daunting task of becoming a lawyer, following in her grandfather James Creely and uncle Frank Creely’s footsteps. She studied at LaVerne College’s law school, and edited the law review there. The children were left in the law library to do their homework, and sent to Del Taco to buy dinner. She passed the Bar Exam in 1976: Dave had taken the boys to the Montreal Olympics and the bicentennial celebrations in New England to get them out of her hair, and she rejoined them for the return trip.
For the first time since starting a family, Cerini took a job outside the home at a law firm in Covina, connecting to the scouting leaders whose troop she would send Peter and Tim to. Around this time of increasing independence, she separated and later divorced from Dave. Cerini stayed in the house in Pomona as the boys finished high school.
It was at this point that Cerini re-connected with her Christian faith, which had started in childhood, and began to participate in a singles group at an evangelical church. Here she established some of the stronger friendships of her later life with women who were staunchly Christian and found themselves in search of a partner. While these relationships, and shared worship, nourished her soul, she remained single.
Cerini left the Covina firm to start her own practice, focusing on cases relating to family law, but she found she didn’t generally enjoy the company of attorneys. She went to work for Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena in contract administration. She was thrilled to be involved in JPL’s space exploration projects, sometimes witnessing momentous successes live with the other employees and collecting souvenirs of NASA projects.
Cerini stayed at JPL until she was nearly 70. She had invested in rental properties in Arroyo Grande, near Pismo Beach, often staying there in local motels amid the tang of the salt air and the sound of the surf. With Diddie’s death in her 90s, Cerini was able to buy a small mid-century house about 200 yards from the sea bluff in Shell Beach, part of Pismo where she lived out almost 20 years, attending Oak Park Christian Church in neighboring Grover Beach.
While continuing to visit thrift stores, Cerini also used this time to return to her youthful wanderlust, stocking her Lexus with Triple-A maps of California from Temecula to Berkeley, through the landscape she knew best: grassy hills, dotted with live oaks on one side and the pacific ocean on the other. These two landscapes lay on either side of her through the window of her car as she drove through the central coast.
Cerini remained a voracious reader through this time, her tastes running toward spy thrillers, and engaged actively with the stock market, making notes in the margins of newspapers and magazines, and staying on top of her personal finances. Sadly, dementia made all this more difficult, and in 2020 it was so hard for her to organize her life that she agreed to live with Tim in Rancho Cucamonga, alternating between watching TV and enjoying the vista of sky and trees on his patio. A fall sent her to a convalescent home near Tim’s house where he was able to supervise her care for 2 more years before death took her.
She was a major influence in the culture of her family, and passed on a deep appreciation of all of California's landscapes, a belief in the power of the ocean, a reverence of horses, and a veneration of books and the importance of literacy.
She was a loving mother and aunt, and helped parent her sons, foster sons, nieces and nephews with the same mixture of affection, firmness and humor she was raised with. She was at the center of her family, and was deeply loved and respected. She will be missed, and remembered, always.
