Luella Pearl London was born in Ogden, Utah when the family lived down by the tracks on Reeves Avenue, a few blocks west of Wall. She later moved with her parents to the home on Rushton, where her two younger sisters were born.
Aunt Lu says she was the tomboy of the family as she was growing up. She liked to play ball in the field across the street by the church. She played with the neighborhood kids and her sisters, Barbara and Vera. “But I was the most athletic of the three,” she says.
She also liked "country living" more than her sisters and spent a lot of time with her grandparents and other relatives in Croydon – playing in the hayfields with her cousins.
Luella always got good grades in school. She graduated from Ogden High and then attended Weber College for a couple of years. She had planned to go into teaching – but then she married Tony and that was the end of that. Asked if she was ever sorry that she didn’t go into teaching, she said, “I would feel sorry for the students if I had!" She certainly wouldn’t have put up with any of their nonsense!
How old was Aunt Lu when she got married? “I wasn’t a teenager, that’s for sure!” She had a friend who was interested in a young man who ran a bar in Ogden. She went to the bar with her friend to see that young man, and while she was there, she met a handsome young airman, Anthony SanGiovanni. Tony was the youngest in a close knit Italian family from Newark, New Jersey.
Tony and Luella married and made their home in Stockton, California. They had one daughter, June Marie. One of June’s favorite memories of her mother is that she always made Christmas very special – so special that Christmas is still June’s favorite holiday of the year.
June also says, "My Mother is a chocoholic!. She loves her chocolate! Instead of milk and cookies for Santa at Christmas, she always made sure Santa got milk and a dish of the fudge that Aunt Vera or Aunt Barbara sent her. Of course on Christmas morning, there was not one piece left! Hmmm?"
Aunt Lu never watches TV before noon, but after lunch she watches some of the crime shows and she loves watching sports on TV. She keeps the TV guide from the newspaper and marks all the games that she wants to watch so she doesn’t miss anything. She has had a subscription to Sports Illustrated for years, but didn’t renew it this year.
Aunt Lu mentioned several times that she was very different from her sisters. She said that she was the tomboy, the athletic and active one. She said “I guess I should have been more like Vera and Barbara. They were both good cooks, and I couldn’t cook worth a darn. I could make spaghetti and meatballs, but that took a while.”
Lu may not have been able to cook, but she sure could clean! She and Uncle Tony came to visit the Londons every summer and Grandpa London always said that while they were visiting, Lu scrubbed everything so much that he had to repaint when they went home! You have to wonder if she requested her apartment number at Fellowship Manor - 409.
Her sister, Vera, gave her a 49ers dog that plays, “Who Let the Dogs Out?” June says, “She plays it every time she goes by it in the living room to dust, so naturally, it gets played a lot!”
Grandpa Arrington always enjoyed picking on Aunt Lu. When she moved back to Ogden after Tony died, she asked Grandpa one day, “Who did you pick on before I came back? I’m sure giving somebody a rest!”
June said that Lu’s friends in Stockton used to refer to her as “The Sergeant,” because she was so bossy.
We will miss Aunt Lu!
