Memoirs and history treat her write

A Newport Beach resident since 1976, Mary La Haye, has always been

fascinated with literature and writing.

When she was a freshman in high school, she tried unsuccessfully

to get a job at the local newspaper. She went on to college at Mount

St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles, where she majored in English and

took creative writing classes. After getting married, she temporarily

let go of writing in order to focus on her family -- but she saved

all of her notes.

She completed her first self-published book after her husband

passed away years ago, a book about her father opening the first pay

parking lot in Los Angeles, “It Started with a Nickel.”

La Haye, who turns 83 today, recently finished another

self-published book about her aunt and uncle’s experiences living in

Samoa in the late 1930s.

The Daily Pilot’s Lindsay Sandham recently caught up with La Haye

to get the story on what’s next for the local writer.

What exactly is your book, “Letters from Samoa,” about?

They’re letters from my aunt [Anna] and uncle [Wray] -- he was a

pharmacist in the Navy -- and they were stationed in the village of

Luma on the island of Ta’u and that was the same village that

Margaret Meade was in, in the ‘20s, and they were there from 1936 to

1939. She wrote these fabulous letters home and he did too, where

they covered the culture, the habits, everything, the typography, the

history. So I found these letters in my mother’s desk after she died

and went through them and edited them.

So you have excerpts from the letters in the book, and you did

some research of your own?

I did a lot of research ... the last half of the book -- I went

there in 1994 and I stayed with the chief and his family on the

island. Their stories are in there and the stories that Anna told.

What would you say inspired you to write books?

Well, I’ve always been interested in memoirs and family history

... I’ve always had this interest in literature. I found that I was

enjoying biographies better -- I think it was because I didn’t have

to make anything up -- and so when I was in college, Sister Marie ...

she had the creative writing class and she worked with each of us one

on one. She had me do an essay-biography type of my background, of

the German background and the Italian background, and we were in

World War II and we were fighting my ancestors ... so that inspired

me.

But in the meantime, I taught school, then I got married and that

became much more important -- raising my family -- but I always had

this in the background and I always kept my notes, I never threw

anything away. So after my husband passed away, which has been about

23 years, I concentrated and I finished the book about my father, “It

Started with a Nickel.”

You mentioned that you had always been interested in writing and

that you tried to get a job at the local paper when you were in high

school, so when you went to college, did you major in writing?

I was an English major, and part of that was the creative writing

classes. That was funny, the day I just walked in there, what was I,

14 years old. There was a comic strip called “Brenda Starr.” She was

a redhead reporter and she was very glamorous ... so I think I walked

into the Montebello News thinking I was going to be the Brenda Starr

of the century or something.

Do you have plans to write more books, now that you’re finished

with “Letters from Samoa”?

Yes, I have a book started about my brother and the family

connected with our business ... it’s going to be the story of my

brother who is an inventor. He lives up north. He invented the first

automatic pool cleaner ... a hose fell in the pool one day and he saw

the force of the water going against the pool and cleaning, so he got

under the house and set all these things up and it took him, I don’t

how many years it took him, but he’s very thorough. My dad always

said, “Someday that boy’s going to invent something.”

What do you hope to accomplish, who do you hope to reach with your

books?

One of the things I want to stress with what I’m doing, and

especially my interviewing my grandparents and mother and dad, is the

younger generations, children in school, have to go and talk to their

grandparents. They have to get the story out of their grandparents. I

wanted the next generations to know about it and to appreciate

family.