7. The Girls

In the year 1940 Byron and Esther were blessed with their firstborn child. When Esther began having contractions she and Byron raced to the hospital. However, after spending several hours there, the doctors told them that nothing would happen that night. The parents-to-be then went back home. The next day, just to convince the little one that it was indeed time to enter the world, Byron and Esther played a rousing game of table tennis. Byron would lob the ball to Esther, intentionally propelling it beyond her reach so that she had to bend down, over and over, to pick it up. After hours of this rigorous exercise, they went back to the hospital. The birth was a hard one, but on October 16, Esther delivered a healthy baby girl who weighed over eight pounds.

The parents named their daughter Suzanne. Sue was a delightful little baby and soon grew into a curious toddler. She always had a hunger for information and was forever clamoring for something new to do or learn. One landmark experience for her parents happened when Sue was about five years old, and her mother got a nursery school to babysit. Being too young to learn with the other children, she spent the afternoons playing. When the year-end tests came up for the youngsters at the nursery, Sue astonished all the teachers by answering the questions better than those who had been in the school all year! She had merely listened through the door and quickly picked up the information. Even at this tender age, her parents knew that Sue was a precocious child, and that would become even clearer in later years.

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Esther had an easier time of it with her second child. On July 09, 1943, she and Byron drove to the hospital full of expectation. Norma Jean Bristol was born without much trouble; she was a delicate baby at six pounds, and her mother said that she "drank like a little lady". Here was another daughter to make the family complete. 

The Bristol girls were living only a few miles away from Esther's parents, whom they called Grampa and Nana. Tom and Bess dearly loved both Suzanne and Norma. Mr. Boston would sometimes take Suzanne around the farm with him, often pushing her in a wheelbarrow filled with hay. Norma remembers milking the cow with Grampa, then drinking the warm milk right after. Mrs. Boston took Norma under her wing and always had a stash of trinkets for her to play with. Nana and Norma would sit up on the porch waiting for the moon to rise, inhaling the fragrance of flowers, pine, and the moldy smell of the chair cushion. Both little girls were read to, rocked, loved, hugged and cherished. 

Norma was a sweet girl, but incredibly shy. She struggled with what she found out many decades later to be dyslexia, as well as dyscalculia. Nevertheless, while she was still a small child, it became apparent that Norma had inherited her parents' artistic bent. At the age of eight she would entertain herself by drawing humorous cartoons of children and animals, and in her teen years she made intricate abstracts by doodling while gabbing on the phone. As she grew older her artistic skills would grow with her.