Mildred “Millie” Moser Smith, a longtime Pilgrim Place resident, died on April 1, 2015. She was 95. She was born on August 11, 1919 on a farm in Iowa, the fifth of sixth children of Edna and Alex Ross. Her father died of blood poisoning when she was six and her mother eventually rented the farm on shares and moved the family to the town of Oelwein, Iowa. The family’s share of the farm’s produce helped feed them during the Depression.
Beatriz Zita, a longtime resident of Claremont, died after a brief illness on Friday, March 27, 2015 at Pomona Valley Hospital. She was 84.
Mrs. Zita was born in 1930 in Argentina to Leopoldo Salazar and Elvira Riondet. She received her degree in English there and began her teaching career.
In 1960, she participated in a teacher exchange program that brought her to Ashland, Ohio to teach high school Spanish. Soon after, she met her future husband Donald Zita, who was a journalist for a local newspaper doing a story on the teacher exchange.
Longtime COURIER reporter Patricia “Pat” Lee Yarborough died on Wednesday, March 18, 2015 at the Pilgrim Place Health Center. She was 80.
She was born on December 12, 1934 in Riverside to Clifton and Leona McCasland. Her parents had come to California from the dust bowl area of Arkansas and settled in the Coachella Valley, where Mr. McCasland worked as a ranch manager on a raisin farm and later for the Coachella Water District.
