Eleanore (Ellie) Larson was born in San Francisco in 1924, the first child of Ernest and Margarethe Gitschel, German immigrants who had come to the USA after World War I. She was raised speaking German at home but learned English when she began to attend public school. 

A younger brother, Eric, was born into the family as well.  The family friends were mostly German relatives who had also immigrated to San Francisco.  Ellie's best friends were three girls, Jean, Irene, and Charlene - and they would remain friends for the rest of their lives.

Ellie graduated from George Washington High School in 1942.  Her first love was a naval seaman and they would have started dating but he was called into service in 1941 and she never heard from him again or found out what became of him.

During the World War II years she worked as a civilian secretary for the U.S. Army at the Presidio.

She married John A. Larson in 1950.  He had been raised in Los Angeles and has also been a naval seaman during WW2 with duty in the Pacific; they met in San Francisco when he was visiting friends next door to her Anza Street home.

After living in several apartments in San Francisco, John and Ellie bought their first home down the Peninsula in Belmont.  In 1954, their first and only child, Randall, was born.  Eventually they moved to Sunnyvale, and then to Los Altos.  While John worked as an advertising execuitve, Ellie took up secretaral and proof-reading duties for a medical book publishing firm.

John passed away in 1984.  Ellie moved to a smaller home in Sunnyvale in the early 1990s and spent her retirement quietly with few close friends, and with close company with her son Randall.  When he retired in 2009, they both moved up the northern California community of Eureka, where Randall's daughters lived. But the hopes of spending close family time with her granddaughters was not to be, as Ellie began to suffer from increasing dementia.  After spending several months in an assisted living facility, her illness along with a fall that fractured her pelvis required the needs of a dementia care unit, and she lived there for the remainder of her life.  

But despite the infliction that distorted her memory and confused her social awareness, Ellie remained cheerful and content throughout her final years.  The halls of the care facility frequently rang with the soft sound of her cheerful singing!  When the end came, it came quickly, with Randall by her side.

We consider her passing as a blessing for her, having endured more than three years of dissociative dementia and decreasing health, and we are confident that now her mind and spirit have reunited and she is at peace with our Lord, which is surely cause for celebration.

- rdl