Ellen Theresa Lothrop Bishop

Ellen Theresa Lothrop Bishop died on March 28, 2024 in Red Bluff, California and was born on November 21, 1925 in Sacramento, California. Her husband of more than 74 years died on November 9, 2021 in Red Bluff, California and was born on October 8, 1925 in Red Bluff, California.

Carrying on his legacy are his three children, Michael, who is a cosmetic chemist, Marilyn, who is a physicist, and Timothy (Prasanna), who is a musician. Additionally carrying on his tradition are seven grandchildren, Benjamin Certner and Geoffrey Certner, who are Marilyn’s sons, Jessica Bishop, who is Prasanna’s daughter, and Elison Bishop, Edwin Bishop, Evin Bishop, and Elyana Bishop, who are Michael’s children.

Growing up, Ellen lived in Sacramento and attended the same junior high school and high school (Sacramento High School) as Arthur. They took many classes together, including courses like solid geometry. Starting in junior high school, Ellen was concertmaster of the school orchestra and Arthur was principal of the second violins.

Since a couple of months after Arthur's death, Ellen has been living in what she considered a mountain resort, at Lassen House Senior Living in the Memory Care Unit in Red Bluff, California. Although she had lost her short-term memory and was living in another decade, she maintained the fun-loving attitude of her whole life and loved interacting and participating in the activities.

Ellen was always learning throughout her life and was always teaching others. As a toddler, she would follow her mother around the garden and learn the names of all the plants, which began her life-long love of gardening. Her mother would take her to the store to look at clothes, Ellen would indicate which clothes she liked, and her mother would go home and make them for her. Her mother was an excellent cook, and Ellen also learned about that, always preparing delicious food herself.

Much of Ellen's childhood was spent during the Great Depression, and her family took into their home various relatives who had lost their jobs, which made for a lively household, with lots of children, and she loved playing with them. She was especially close to her brother Bob (John Robert), who was only about a year and a half younger. He would tell lots of fantastic stories, and she would laugh hilariously, always having lots of fun. Ellen was also close to her cousin Lucille Eddy, who was a few years older than she was, and who had become deaf from an illness at the age of three. Because of that relationship, Ellen was always attentive to the needs of those with disabilities. When she was around 10 years old, her brother David (James David) was born, and this added to the fun in the family.

Ellen had many talents growing up, and around the age of twelve found a passion in studying music. By the time she was 14, she began playing professionally in an ensemble that played at major conventions in Sacramento. When she started the job, her mother made her a fancy evening gown and told her that she would be required to smile while performing on stage. Ellen later in life would talk about how she was practicing playing the required pieces from memory in front of a mirror smiling, with tears streaming down her face because smiling seemed so difficult. She was always conscience of displaying a spirit of fun while performing after that.

When World War II rolled around, many of her friends were drafted, including Arthur. At that time, she and Arthur were good friends but not really boyfriend and girlfriend. She had graduated from high school and attended a year at Sacramento City College, and her family had moved to Berkeley. Because the war was raging, she decided to go to work for a year at the Southern Pacific Railroad, because she wanted to make a contribution with many friends leaving and making sacrifices. Her parents did not want her to quit school but agreed to let her go to work if she would go back to college afterwards. By a year later, the war had ended, and Ellen enrolled at Cal (University of California, Berkeley).

Ellen had lost contact with Arthur and did not realize that he had been a prisoner of war in Germany. He did not return to school until a semester after Ellen did, and they happened to meet between classes. Her mother recalled that Ellen came home that evening and said in a very excited voice, "I met Arthur!!" He had mentioned that there was an event at the Newman Center that evening, and that she might want to go, without actually inviting her. She realized that she really ought to go, and they were always together after that.

During college, on August 23, 1947, Ellen and Arthur got married and continued their studies. Before she graduated, Michael was born on June 19, 1948, and Ellen would push him in the stroller to her mother's house to stay while she went to class. She was studying the new major of Statistics, within the Mathematics department and continued to do well in spite of her added responsibilities. She graduated with a degree in Mathematics in December 1949, and Marilyn was born January 19, 1950. (They wouldn't let her have the new statistics degree, because they wanted a man to get it first.) Arthur graduated before Ellen and initially got a job as an electrical engineer at PG&E in Sacramento. Art remembered, “It was kind of a boring existence, and one of the guys actually told me, ‘You know, everybody here, all these engineers here, all belong to this particular lodge of the Masons. If you want to get ahead, that’s where you kind of have to be.’ So, I changed jobs.” Art wanted to make it on his own merit and intelligence. His next job led him to work for the state in the Department of Architecture, but he didn’t stay long. He joined the Air Force Reserve and received a direct commission. He was recalled to active duty for the Korean War and was stationed in Anchorage, Alaska.

Ellen had never been out of California and Nevada, and they had two young children, Michael, 3 1/2 and Marilyn 1 1/2, with many struggles getting adequate housing at the beginning. Once they got settled, Ellen joined the Officers’ Wives’ Club. Her mother, Angie was a very good seamstress and she knew her size and everything. She made her a bunch of really neat clothes and sent them up. She joined in many activities, and Ellen started to fit in and to look for her own niche. She found it in the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra and ended up being Assistant Concertmaster. She even got her picture in Forbes Magazine! Though she was just a second lieutenant’s wife, her college degree and musical background opened doors. She said it was like coming home.

After two years in Alaska, Arthur was stationed at Andrews Air Force Base in Forestville Maryland, and Ellen joined the Air Force Wives' club there. Ellen was always a fun and loving mother and made sure that the family frequently went on interesting outings. She joined the local orchestra and began teaching Michael and Marilyn the piano, and Michael began school. After three years in Maryland, the family moved to Stillwater, Oklahoma, where the Air Force enrolled Art in the master's program in electrical engineering. Meanwhile, in 1952, Art's father and mother had bought a walnut orchard. The family visited Art's and Ellen's family every summer, and Ellen was interested in understanding more about cultivating walnuts. Besides becoming the concertmaster for the university orchestra, she decided then to take courses to become more familiar with horticulture. The department head and dean met with Art and Ellen to plan her studies, and they were concerned that she had not taken college chemistry, which was a prerequisite for soil physics, and only high school chemistry. She told them, "Oh, I read my husband's college chemistry textbook and worked out all the problems." They were astonished, and agreed to let her take the course. She was the only woman in her courses and was the top student in all of them, which frustrated the men who had never met women who were smarter than they were. Marilyn was in first grade now, and so the whole family was going to school. Art got his master's degree in electrical engineering in just one year.

The next assignment for Arthur was Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Ellen was again active in the Officers' Wives' club and also joined the Albuquerque Symphony. After three years, the Air Force sent Art to Command and Staff College in Montgomery, Alabama. Ellen continued activities with the Officers' Wives' club and made a wide array of ceramics. Unfortunately, she became very ill while pregnant with Timothy, and she had to send many unfinished ceramics to her mother to finish them for her.

After graduating from Command and Staff College, Art was stationed at the Air Force Technical Applications Center in Fairfax County, Virginia, where the family moved in the summer of 1961. Timothy was born November 26, 1961, and the whole family got involved in interacting with him. Ellen joined the local orchestra and continued activities with the new Officers' Wives' Club. At the same time, she made sure the family went on sight-seeing trips in Washington, D. C., and trips to the beaches on the east coast.

In January, 1966, Arthur was stationed in Los Angeles, Marilyn and Michael were both in high school, and their house was in Torrance. She began teaching Timothy piano and violin, joined the Beach Cities Symphony, and went to El Camino College and started taking music theory, music history, voice, and joined the orchestra. Before long, she became concertmaster of that orchestra, a position she held for over twenty years. She also, being involved in music at El Camino College, made lasting friends with Jim Mack, the orchestra conductor and first clarinet teacher of Timothy (Prasanna) Bishop, Pat Mack, violinist, a member of her string quartet, with a pianist and cellist, and Gordon Orme, the voice instructor. She was known for singing all day throughout her life, and this was the first time she learned the proper techniques for singing. She also played in the orchestra and in a string quartet with Leonard Wibberly the well-known author of "The Mouse that Roared", which became a movie, among many books. Her son Michael and daugher Marilyn attended El Camino College from 1966-1969 and would meet her in the music department with their little brother Tim. Ellen was popular with her fellow students that had met her son Tim, and they did not think of her as being from another generation. In fact, one time when Michael was with Tim, they heard him call her "Mom", and they exclaimed, "Ellen's your mother?!" They even had to verify it with Tim.

Another activity that Art and Ellen began when living in Maryland and continued when they moved was square dancing and round dancing. Ellen even made all her own square dance dresses. Ellen and Art became very good friends with their fellow square dancers. Ellen later in life even played violin at the funeral of Lois Leonard, one of those square dancers, since Lois and her husband Jerry had spent so much time with Ellen and Art dancing.

Arthur retired from the Air Force in June, 1970. A few months later, he joined Aerojet Electrosystems Company in Azusa, doing similar satellite work to what he had been doing in the Air Force, and soon became Vice President and was responsible for directing the Advanced Defense Satellite system. With the LA traffic, it took him about an hour a day for a one-way trip to the office. During the Arab Oil Crisis of October, 1973, when gas was being rationed with even versus odd license numbers allowed every other day, Ellen went and sat in long lines at gas stations every day, since their two cars fit the opposite categories, so that Art could drive the car with a full tank. This was in between her various other activities.

After many years of success at Aerojet, Art retired in 1989, and they began to spend more and more time in Sacramento and Red Bluff supervising and renovating rental houses, and overseeing the operations of the walnut orchard. With the profits from the walnut orchards, they bought new land, planted new orchards, and used money to help their children in their pursuits. Eventually, in March, 1993, they sold their Torrance home and purchased a new home in Sacramento. Ellen joined the Camelia Orchestra and they continued their square and round dancing. They also spent considerable time renovating houses. In addition, Ellen became an expert at Photoshop and Illustrator on her Macintosh and made cards with pictures of family members and cute figures for all occasions and sent them to various family members and friends.

In January, 2001, Michael Bishop got Ellen and Art tickets the the first inauguration of George W. Bush, and they found the whole experience enjoyable and enlightening. While there, they met some of the national officers of the Military Order of the Purple Heart and learned about the contributions of helping veterans. Since Art receive two purple hearts in World War II, he thought that this was a worthwhile organization to join. Ellen, as a result, joined a veterans' group that was doing volunteer work at Mather Veterans' Hospital in Sacramento. When she arrived for the first meeting of the volunteers, the hospital representative decided that this group would be good hospital visitors and they told her to go and visit the patients. She was horrified at first that she would have to go in the room and talk to a strange man by herself, but she braced herself, saying, "I'm a patient visitor from the VA", and somehow the conversation diverged from there. By the end of the short visit, the patient and Ellen had become good friends, and the patient had a much more positive attitude about the hospital stay.

After two years of visiting patients, Art joined her in the visitations and helped cheer up the patients. Their daughter Marilyn even went with them when she was in town. They also made hundreds of fleece lap robes using a fancy serger that they purchased. Art would help Ellen purchase and cut the fabric to the right size and thread the machine, and Ellen would sew the borders. During the visitations, they would hand out the lap robes for, as they said, "appreciation of your service". Ellen became so skillful that the nurses would ask her if she would visit a particular patient who was causing disturbance. Ellen would talk to the patient for a few minutes, and before the conversation was over, that patient would be smiling and laughing, thinking that life was worth living after all.

During this same time, Ellen and Art became even more active in the Military of the Purple Heart(MOPH). Art served as the State of California and local chapter adjutant and national POW-MIA representative. Ellen was the state of California President of the Ladies' Auxiliary (LAMOPH) for two years, having chartered the Ladies' Auxiliary of the local unit. She even had to run the Ladies' Auxiliary portion of the national convention in Los Angeles the second year in that position. As part of that, she brought lots of food to the convention, including dozens of cookies and dozens of brownies with walnut halves skillfully placed on the top of each one. In fact, she brought cookies and brownies to all the conventions within driving distance.

In 2015, at the age of 90, Ellen and Art decided that they were too old to keep up their main home and a rental home in Sacramento, in addition to the main house, three rentals, and the orchard in Red Bluff. They had Rick Gumm renovate the house and sold the Sacramento houses. They used that money to buy 30 acres of land, had the old trees dug up, and planted a new orchard, all supervised by Greg Gilchrist and his wife. They became close friends with Rick, Jeni, and their disabled son Chucky, and even went on vacation in Pacifica with them. Ellen was always interacting with Chucky, recognizing his intelligence in spite of his difficulty doing what others can do easily. This was the same understanding that made her interactions with veterans in the hospital so successful. She attributed it to her early life with her deaf cousin Lucille and her ability to see beyond the superficial to see who the person really was. Rick and Jeni were central to looking after Art and Ellen in the last years of their life.

Ellen and Art both joined the March on the Hill to lobby for benefits for Veterans while they were living in Sacramento and continuing after that. As stated by Bill Hutton, a former President of the National MOPH, "Ellen & Art were the best! Ellen was central to not only the success of the auxiliary, but contributed to the Order as well. Ellen & Art were also the first couple to walk Capitol Hill & meet with elected officials on behalf of the Order during the March on the Hill." For all their efforts, they were both awarded the Legion of Honor Bronze Medallion on August 13, 2016 by the Chapel of Four Chaplains, "in recognition of your lifetime service to all people regardless of race or faith. This award symbolizes for all Americans and for all time the unity of this Nation, founded upon the Fatherhood of the One God."