| Subject: South Bay Women of Distinction - Mothers: Wilma Conley Tafoya |
Author:
Donna Littlejohn
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Date Posted: 00:27:25 09/06/13 Fri
Two things seemed inevitable when Wilma Conley Tafoya was growing up in Northern California: becoming a teacher and some day being a mom.
She did both with a flourish that had a lasting impression on her family.
"She's someone who is really a class act," said daughter Juliet Tafoya Geraci, 48. "I've tried to live up to that and now, as a mother of three myself, I realize how hard it is to do what she did."
At 79, the Manhattan Beach mother of four and grandmother of five remains central in her family's life.
"She's still the No. 1 person we call," said Geraci.
A schoolteacher in the South Bay Union High School District, Tafoya raised four children: Matthew, 51, who owns a cabinet and door company in Lawndale; Margaret Tafoya, 49, chief of staff in the personnel office of President Barack Obama's administration; Geraci, 48, who owns an architecture and design business in Manhattan Beach; and Michele Tafoya Vandersall, 45, a "Monday Night Football" sideline reporter and radio talk show host in Minnesota.
Wilma Conley Tafoya met her future husband, Orlando, in a calculus class at the University of California, Berkeley. They were married on campus in 1955 and moved to Southern California, where Orlando took an engineering job in El Segundo.
"I loved it when they were young at home with me," she said of her role as mother. "But like most mothers, I looked forward to when they would go to school. After that, the years went so quickly I can't tell you. I can't think of a time, no matter how busy or how hard it was, that it wasn't fun."
Tafoya has been active with the fair at American Martyrs Catholic Church in Manhattan Beach and served as co-chairwoman of the Grand View Fiesta for several years.
She also has been active in the American Association of University Women.
But it's her role as mom that has influenced her children to this day.
"One of the things I used to enjoy was being home when the kids came home from school," she said. "I'd be ironing or baking or cooking or doing something in the kitchen and they'd toss their books down and I'd ask them to tell me what they did that day. I learned more during that 15 minutes than had we waited until dinner."
Tafoya taught her children how to recycle before it became trendy and took it in stride a few years ago when the family's plans to celebrate the Tafoyas' 50th wedding anniversary in the mountains had to be canceled when Orlando had a stroke.
As for advice to today's young families, she had this to say: "Based on how busy I was and on how the time flew, I think I'd recommend fewer activities and more plain family downtime."
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