1929-2011 Benjamin Bustillos

When mom and dad got into their 70s no one would guess that dad would go first. It’s hard to imagine that it’s been over ten-years since his passing. I started this personal media blog because, at dad’s funeral, my son took picture of the pictures that my sister, Kathie, had made into a memorial display of dad’s life. I felt like I needed to gather the images and stories together in one place so that they wouldn’t be forgotten.

We were closer to my mom’s family than my dad’s, which is evident in that I’m having a hard time remembering how many siblings he had and where he was in the pecking order. I think he had an older brother, Max (Junior) and two older sisters, Ruth and Esther. He also had a younger brother, Raymond, and younger sister, Dolores. When dad was just starting in school, in kindergarten, he would spend the afternoons with his grandmother who was a formidable woman, owning two houses in the area all on her own. Every day after school he read the same picture book and had an orange for a snack. Over twenty years ago I made this story into a video: Benjamin’s Picture Book.

When he was still a boy, dad’s folks split up. Dad had an uncle, Louie, who acted as a kind-of father-figure. I also know that dad worked for a gardener who worked on the yards of some of the more wealthy residents of the Los Angeles area and that inspired him to work hard for a better life than what he found in his local neighborhood. He said that he saw his contemporaries working on their cars and drinking and was determined to have a better life than that.

He had a passion for landscaping. He was an artist with what plants and trees should go where and what would be needed to keep them healthy. The time spent working in the richer neighborhoods combined with what he saw in Japan when he was in the military (Korean era conflict) strongly influence his sense of design. The landscaping of our house in Mission Viejo was his never-ending project (until they sold the place in the late 1990s). Here are two examples of his work:

Dad was a dreamer, which in his case, was often expressed in his frustrations and anger because Life rarely cooperates when it comes to ones dreams. And a houseful of noisy, mostly good kids, also, probably didn’t match up with whatever idyllic notion he entertained of what a home should be like. But he never stopped trying, day after day, hour after hour, doing his best and imagining a better world for his kids and grandkids. In as much as my siblings and I and our friends were afraid of him, the grandkids had a very different experience. He could become very emotional with his gratitude at reaching a stage in his life where he could enjoy his grandkids and eventually great-grandkids.

He gave me my work-ethic, stubbornness, personal high-expectations and sense of mission. He was gifted and recognized his gifts without pounding his chest or being boastful. Your excellence is expressed in the work, not with flowery self-congratulatory words. You do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, not for reward or recognition. We were not close as some might measure such things. And I learned these things from him from observation, not from some personal tutelage. He did pretty good and did really good for his family.