Gerri Bono loved hummingbirds, sweet peas, black and white cows, baseball, country western music, her four children, Janet, Linda, John and Bill, and her three grandchildren, Kristy, Jenna and Tyler, and all of them with equal intensity.
Geraldine Doris Newton was born in Centralia, Washington on August 29, 1931, to Elsie and Charles Newton. She joined two sisters, Patricia Anne and Marilyn Joyce, more informally called Pat and Jo, at home in Oakville. Gerri lived there the first 19 years of her life.
Pat, Jo, and Gerri were known around town as “The Newton Boys,” but at home, their harmonized singing inspired their father to refer to them as his “Andrew Sisters.”
Gerri graduated from Oakville High School in 1949, Secretary for the class of “Forty-niners.” At their graduation, she had to read the Class Will to the gathering, and was terrified of reading the difficult bequeath of one of her classmates. It said, “To forestall mental depreciation and enhance intellectual capacities, I bequeath my incredible brain to the junior class.” All her life, Gerri obsessively recited that line at every opportunity.
Her mother gave her a suitcase as a graduation present, and Gerri used it to move to Seattle, to her Aunt Rhoda’s, and began taking classes at Griffin-Murphy Business School. She excelled at shorthand dictation, and quickly got a job with Farwest Garments after completing her studies.
Gerri, her sister Joyce, and friend Gert, got an apartment in downtown Seattle. Gerri liked to stop at Pike Place Market after work and get fresh cottage cheese to eat on the way home. On Sundays, the three of them went down to Pier 91, then the Naval Dock, to befriend some sailors far from home, show them the “floating bridge” in Seattle, and treat them to a home cooked fried chicken dinner.
Jo and Gert married two of the men they met on these excursions, known as Zeke and Zeb to their friends, but on July 7, 1951, Gerri chose to marry a man she’d met when she was still living in Oakville: Frank Edward Bono.
At first they lived in an apartment in Seattle, and two of Frank’s brothers stayed with them for a time when they “came north” from Mississippi.
Gerri left her job at Farwest to become a mother and full-time homemaker in 1954, hiding the fact that she was pregnant until well into her 5th month so that she could continue to work.
Children were not allowed in the apartment they lived in, so Frank moved them to a home in Lake City while Gerri was in the hospital having Janet, their first born. The family lived in the Lake City area of Seattle, just a block and a half from her sister Jo, until 1958. By that time the family consisted of two girls, Janet and Linda, and one boy, John. With one more child on the way, they moved to Lynnwood.
Having four children in five years was pretty overwhelming for Gerri, and she often fretted about keeping the house clean, the laundry done, and getting a hot dinner on the table every night. Nevertheless, she excelled at homemaking, making sure the children did their homework every night around the big, red Formica kitchen table.
When Frank started his own television repair business in 1964, Gerri used her secretarial and accounting skills to keep the business going for the next 17 years. She manned the phones, scheduled service calls, kept the books, did the quarterly taxes and made sure Frank had a clean and ironed shirt to wear to work each day. This on top of caring for her four, now school-aged, children!
One of the things she thoroughly enjoyed was going on fishing trips with the family. Gerri caught steelhead in northern rivers, trout in lakes on both sides of the Cascades, salmon in the waters of Puget Sound, and even smelt in the Cowlitz once a year. One of Gerri’s favorite fishing stories involved a steelhead that managed to get off the hook just when it was nearly beached on the river rock in upper Snohomish County. In hip boots, she ran to the escaping fish and promptly sat on it so it wouldn’t get away.
Gerri often attended her sons’ little league games, either sitting in the stands, or running the concession stand and fixing hot dogs and pouring soda for the other spectators. Nothing made her more proud, and more nervous, than when both her boys were playing on the same little league team. John, the eldest son, played first base, and her younger son Bill played outfield or pitched. Gerri screamed herself hoarse at those games—she never missed them.
In 1981, Frank and Gerri divorced, and Gerri lived on her own first in an apartment in Mukilteo, then in a mobile home in Lynnwood for many years, and finally in a condo in Issaquah.
Wherever Gerri lived, she grew sweet peas. They were her favorite flower, and were her father’s favorite flower too. She certainly had a farm girl’s green thumb. Often she had so many sweet peas blooming that she ran out of vases to put them in and gave handfuls of them away, the stems wrapped in wet paper towels and aluminum foil. She also insisted upon hanging fuschia baskets to encourage the hummingbirds, with which she felt a special affinity. She collected pictures and calendars and anything with a hummingbird on it.
Gerri also had an abundance of black and white cow refrigerator magnets, stuffed dancing cows, black and white cow-design coffee cups, cookie jars, sweatshirts—she loved most anything that came with a cow on it. She said it reminded her of her childhood on the farm.
While living on her own in Lynnwood, Gerri loved going out often with friends to listen to country western music and enjoy some dancing. She especially loved to waltz, and taught many of her friends, both male and female, to “count to three! You just have to be able to count to three!”
Scrapbooking was one of her favorite hobbies, even before it became popular, and Gerri took several hundred pictures each year, always adding to an enormous collection of albums. She assembled a “baby book” for each of her four kids, documenting most of their lives up until the grandkids came along. No one has been able to get an accurate count of the number of scrapbook volumes she compiled for her three grandkids. The grandkids were the true the focus and joy of her later years.
In 2000, Gerri joined the computer world. “eMom,” whose moniker was “WaltzinLady,” enjoyed writing her family and friends with great regularity, often several times a day. She was thrilled when she received emailed pictures of the grandkids, or their pets. Not one to overuse the delete button, she saved thousands of emails every year.
Gerri loved baseball her whole life, even after the boys outgrew Little League, and delighted in attending Mariner games at Safeco Field. Garlic fries and “Major League Mariner Dogs” were a requirement of each trip. She had many favorite baseball players, and always referred to them as “my boys.” For her 75th birthday, she attended the game with both her daughters and Kristy, her eldest granddaughter—three generations of female baseball fans, sitting side-by-side, all wearing Mariner gear. As a special surprise, Gerri was thrilled when her name appeared in lights on the scoreboard after the second inning: “Happy 75th Birthday, Gerri Bono, You are Loved!”
Gerri had some health challenges beginning in the first part of 2012, and after several falls, went to assisted family living to help keep her nutrition and medications stabilized. She lived for five months back in Lynnwood, but after another hospitalization, went to spend the rest of her life with her youngest son Bill and his wife Stacy in Marysville.
When Gerri’s mother died in 1952, “In the Garden” became what Pat, Jo and Gerri called “The Family Hymn,” and it’s been played at nearly every family service since. At Gerri’s request, we’ll play that hymn now, sung by Jim Reeves, one of her all-time favorite country western singers.