Posted on September 18, 20111
My mother, christened Janet Lolita Moffett Moore (and known to her family as “Janita”), died unexpectedly in March 2008. (“Lolita” was for Lolita Armour, a friend of the family.) Thereafter, she was variously known as Janet Moore Mark (after her widowed mother was remarried to Griffith Mark), Janet Moore Maynard (after she married my father, in May 1949, a marriage that ended in divorce 14 years later), and finally Janet Moore Burrows, after she married Andrew J. Burrows.
In the weeks after she died, over a period of about 10 days, I channeled all of my grief and all of my sadness into a creative endeavor — making a video about her life. At the end of that 10-day period I had pieced together a video that I think helped me better understand who she was. As I pieced together the narrative, I realized that just months after the death of her grandfather, Admiral William Adger Moffett, in the April 1933 crash of the Akron, my mother lost her father, Lt. Elliott McFarlan Moore, USN (ret) in a flying accident off Catalina Island. E. M. “Mac” Moore was one of the pilots for the Wilmington-Catalina Airline, Ltd., an airline founded in 1931 by P. K. Wrigley, who owned Catalina Island and hoped to promote it by creating an air link with the mainland.
I am sharing my video tribute to my mother here so that it can be viewed by family and friends.