Obituary

Margaret Fish Margaret Scott Fish, a native of Ventura Country and a long-time resident of Santa Paula, died in Camarillo on December 16, 2008. She was born in Fillmore, December 30, 1916, where her father was a teacher at the then new Fillmore High School.She was a fourth-generation Californian, whose great-grandparents on her mother’s side migrated to California during the Gold Rush period. Her great-grandfather John Harriman, a Congregational minister, traveled overland from upstate New York in either 1846 or 1847, and her other great-grandfather, Thomas Roberts, an engineer, sailed directly to California around Cape Horn from Cornwall, England, in 1850. Both families settled in the Oakdale and Sonora area of the Sierra foothills.Her parents, Wilmer Scott and Edith Harriman, earned their degrees at the University of California in 1909 and 1910. Her mother taught high school for a while in Angels Camp, but the rules in effect in those days forced her to give up her teaching career when they married.After spending the first two years of her life in Fillmore, Margaret moved with her parents and older sister, Florence Jean Scott, to the San Joaquin Valley. There her younger sister Marian was born, and her father became the high school principal for many years in Livingston, California. When Margaret was 12 years old her father, who had grown up on a farm near Dos Palos, California, took a leave of absence while the family lived for a year on a small ranch in Twain Harte, California.After graduating from Livingston High School, Margaret attended the University of California in Berkeley between 1934 and 1938, where she earned a B.A. in history and a general secondary teaching credential. She also met her first husband, Roland C. Ehret, at Cal. After they married in 1939, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps, and they lived on a number of air bases around the country between 1939 and 1942, including Kelly Field in San Antonio, Texas, Merritt Field in the Bay area, and Merced Field in Merced, California.Margaret and her family had belonged to a group of citizens of Livingston who were strong supporters of the large local Japanese-American farming community. In early 1942, after the outbreak of war in the Pacific, the U.S. government began taking these people from their homes and temporarily housing them at the Merced County fairgrounds before sending them to internment camps. Margaret and her mother took on the task of helping their Japanese-American friends by going to their houses and bringing their belongings and valuables to them at the fairgrounds.After Roland Ehret died in a military air crash December 15, 1942, Margaret moved south to Pomona, California, with her first child, Christopher, to be closer to Roland’s family.On May 2, 1947, she married Robert A. Fish, who had served in the Seabees, clearing airstrips on South Pacific islands early in World War II, and then as the engineering officer on an LST landing troops on islands all across the Pacific from 1943 to 1945. Her daughter, Florence, was born in Pomona in July 1948.Between 1949 and 1954, Margaret and her family lived in Monrovia, California, where Robert taught high school. In 1954 they moved to Santa Paula, where Robert continued to teach high school until his retirement. Margaret herself became a well-known and highly successful substitute teacher, sometimes at junior high schools, but usually at the high school. Twice they hosted foreign exchange students for a year in their home.