Dorothy Lorene
" Rene"
b. April 22 ( living)
Hickman County, Tennessee
m. William Robert Herion Jr.
February 7, 1945
Mason County, Kentucky
children:
Bobbye Joyce
m. Kenneth Leland Thornton
Novembet 8, 1954
Fresno, Fresno, California
children:
Michael Leland
Rene, the 5th child and 3rd daughter of Jim and Etta, and I, the 5th grandchild and 3rd granddaughter, were " best friends" and each others life bouy's for the first 8 years of my life, then with a new husband & daddy and soon a new baby son and brother, our dependency of each other slackened. Her world was complete and life hadn't beaten her.
She worked all the years I can remember. One story I have always heard involved Sam Pekinpah, the Hollywood actor, writer, director... but this story doesn't have anything to do with casting couches and is before he became an actor , writer or director . He was just a clerk for Woolworths Dept Store, as she was. As Mom tells it, she was waiting on a difficult customer, who seemed to be looking for someone to take a bad mood out on, and Mom happened to be that person and place. After this customer had reduced Rene to humiliation and tears for a minor infraction of customer service, Sam came to her defense and told the customer off. This action, along with the accusation of Rene's infraction, were reported immediately to the store manager, who was of the school that "the customer is always right", fired them both on the spot.
When I was really young, she worked the fruit packing houses of Clovis where I could go as long as I didn't get in the way and true to her expectations I was never a problem for her employer. After I started school, she went to work at Bervin Rug Mill in Fresno, weaving huge rugs on a hand loom.
After working there for probably was about 3 years, she decided to try her hand at being a Nurses Aid, she went to work at a small t.b. sanitarium in the Sierra Neveda foothills, outside Auberry, California. Being an Aide was her calling and that is what she done for the next 40 years of her life. Retiring, after a slight stroke in 1991.
Rene has a beautiful voice and is the type of person that wakes up singing in the morning. I could always tell what kind of mood she was in by the songs she choose to sing. Ditties, ballets, torch, soul, gospel, country, where her way of releasing her feelings. She did have a chance to sing on the Grand Ole Opry, when she was a teenager, but alais, fate worked against her. She and her younger sister Lula Mae, had auditioned and won a spot on the show, but when it came time for the preformance, Lula got a fit of the giggles, wet her pants, and Rene wouldn't go on without her......so a career that never got it's start came to a halt real fast.
Mom wrote a song especially for me when I was very small. There is more to it, but this is all that has survived our old memories....alas, it was never written down until now.
" Brown Eyed Senorita "
Senorita, Senorita, Senorita
Oh my brown eyed Senorita
God in Heaven up above
knew I needed someone to love,
so he sent you to me
Senorita
Dorothy Lorene Herion
1953
