Tamara Landre

Rose Mary Landre

June 3, 1923- March 6, 2009

Rose Mary Waszkiewicz was born June 3, 1923 at Short Creek, near Glen Robbins, Ohio, to Walter and Valeria Waszkiewicz. Well-known and loved in South Lake Tahoe and far beyond as “The (Banana) Cake Lady,” thirty-two-year South Shore resident Rose Landre passed away at her home in the early morning hours of March 6, 2009.

Rose was raised in the Polish-speaking Detroit suburb of Hamtramck, Michigan where she attended Catholic school, all in Polish until the secondary level. As a young woman, she was gifted with a beautiful soprano singing voice and had aspirations of becoming an opera diva. Her fiery and independent nature that all know so well was forged in her youth as she made the difficult transition from a Polish-speaking home and school to the Detroit public school system.

After a brief secretarial stint, Rose worked in the pre-World War II aircraft industry in Detroit. Soon after the beginning of the war, she was selected to go to Los Angeles as an experienced riveter/driller for the Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica. Due to her diminutive stature, she was in great demand to work inside the wings of the B17s and other aircraft produced in the Douglas plant. She took great pride in her work there. She related a story once about a group of disgruntled male workers, resentful of the female presence, taking credit for some of her fine work. Grandma simply directed the supervisor to take a look at the initials inside the tip of the wing of the aircraft—a place only someone her size could reach—and sure enough, RW was scratched inside. She well earned her name and fame as one of the real original “Rosie-the-Riveters” of WWII.

Despite the pride she took in her work, Grandma was practical. In 1943, she made what turned out to be a fateful decision to take a job waitressing at the B-19 Restaurant next to the Fox-Westwood Theater in Westwood Village near the UCLA campus. A certain red-haired Navy sailor/student from UCLA visited the restaurant with his classmates with increasing frequency. Their first date was to a beach party. Sympathetic friends could see that the young man was shy, and invited them to attend together.

From that day on, they spent almost every afternoon walking Hollywood Boulevard or sitting under a tree on the campus, talking for hours. Butter was subjected to wartime rationing at that time, but a few extra pats were somehow hidden between the hotcakes on his plate when he’d visit her at work between morning roll-call and class. After a convoluted courtship involving a bus trip to see his family in Capitola, California, and a Christmas break hitchhike by Lowell all the way from Texas to Detroit to meet hers, Rose and Lowell Henry Landre were married by a Justice of the Peace in Wayne County, Michigan in June of 1945.

Together, Rose and Lowell established homes in places as diverse as New Orleans, Okinawa, Japan, Augsburg and Heidelberg, Germany, Forts Benning in Georgia and Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Richardson in Alaska, during Lowell’s extensive military career. Considerable time was spent in California’s Monterey Bay region, both in the Capitola and Santa Cruz area, where Lowell was from, and at Forts Ord and Hunter Liggett and the Presidio of Monterey. They were blessed with three sons, Lowell Dean, Lance Henry and Lee Raymond, the elder two of whom are still living. During the many years that Lowell was absent plying his trade around the world, Rose was both father and mother to three very adventurous young boys. That was a real job.

In 1977, upon Lowell’s retirement from the military, they relocated to their home in South Lake Tahoe. An avid cook and baker, Rose’s home was never without a sweet treat. She collected recipes and cookbooks, and always enjoyed finding new things to make. Rose and Lowell made many, many friends all over the world, due to their kindness, linguistic abilities and outgoing natures. She gave away thousands of her patented homemade banana cakes, and would sometimes bake ten or twenty each day. IF you were lucky, and you rated a place on the list to receive a plastic-wrapped cake with a hand-colored label, it was a pretty special honor. We miss the smell of those cakes baking at Grandma’s house.

Rose is survived by the love of her life, husband Lowell, two of her three sons, Lowell Dean and Lance Henry Landre, grandchildren Tamara Landre, Nicolle Landre, Laura (Landre) Clendenning and Michael Landre, great-grandchildren Kayleigh Jones, Jessica Wood, Justus Hunstable, Dylan Landre and Casey and Conor Clendenning. Had she lived to see her 86th birthday this June, she would have been delighted to meet her first great-great-grandson, Milo Jones.

Grandma, to say that we miss you would not be enough to convey the loss we feel at your passing. The world has a big hole in it without you. We love you now and always.

We give special thanks for the care and concern given to Rose during the long and difficult course of her final illness to: 1) Doctors Hoffarth and Miller. 2) All the departments and functions of South Lake Tahoe’s Barton Memorial Hospital from Emergency to Hospice. 3) Each of the 24/7 on-site caregivers of Carson City’s Advanced Home Health Care and their management and staff that together maintained Grandma’s well-being and comfort as long as possible. At Rose’s request there will be no funeral or memorial or wake. Her cremains will be privately placed alongside those of her youngest son and her first grandson in the near future. If you need or desire to commemorate her, do a good deed ASAP and then hug someone and breathe a special air-kiss to Rose.

*Note: this is revised from the original version I posted a few days ago, with additions and changes by Grandpa.