Getting updated...

Name: Glendon Moore
Race: White
Marital Status: Married
Rank: Private
Birth Year: 1917
Nativity State or Country: Missouri
Citizenship: Citizen
Residence: Elko, Nevada
Education: 4 years of high school
Civil Occupation: Paymasters, payroll clerks, and timekeepers
Enlistment Date: 23 Jun 1941
Enlistment Place: Salt Lake City, Utah
Service Number: 39678118
Branch: Branch Immaterial - Warrant Officers, USA
Component: Selectees (Enlisted Men)
Source: Civil Life
Height: 68
Weight: 136

Name: Glendon John Moore
Gender: Male
Race: White
Birth Date: 14 Nov 1917
Birth Place: Flat River, Missouri
Death Date: Jan 1993
Father: James W Moore
Mother: Phoebe McNew
Last Residence: 89318, Mc Gill, White Pine, Nevada, USA

Getting updated and will be edited down...

But where Johnny's life links up with Rita's (from her page):

"...The two eldest Fields sisters, Connie & Rita, met two eligible bachelors, Earle & Johnny, who also lived in Owyhee, Elko County, Nevada, where, according to their 1940 military draft reporting, they worked like other family members for the U.S. Indian Service (by the 21st century, now called the Bureau of Indian Affairs) on the "Duck Valley Indian Reservation of the Western Shoshone and Northern Paiute". Circa 1936, 18/19yr old Connie Fields married 19/20yr old Granville Earle Poodry (b1916 New York - childhood w mum in mid-Oklahoma - d1982 California) who went by "Earle", of the Sac and Fox & Seneca Nations. And younger sister Rita, 16/17 in 1936 when Connie married, was sweet on Earle's coworker & possibly friend who introduced them, an 18yo Irish-Scottish-German boy by the name of "Johnny" Glendon John Moore (1917 Missouri - 1993 Nevada). Johnny had gone to Nevada around the same time as the Fields family, as a teenager on the invitation of his established elder sister Marie (Moore) Snider McNeily, who was 12yrs older than Johnny, and she was a respected ranking registered nurse with the Indian Service at Duck Valley, and soon second wife of the Superintendent of the Reservation, "Mac" Emmett McNeily, a Scott-Irish man of the Mormon faith, originally from Illinois, but formidably lived in the seat of the religion Salt Lake City, Utah, where he has been previously married with children, who also had travelled along with him to Indian Service duty stations until that marriage broke down, and Mac's first nuclear family went to stay in SLC. -- Before soon-to-be Rita's husband, Johnny's sister Marie, Johnny had lived with Marie and first husband "Willie" Snider. It is with Snider and Snider's dad & brother, that Johnny remained, a "single men's boarding house" arrangement, a short spell once Marie moved on. From that house of four men, Johnny waited to be with Rita.

When Rita's father, "Doc" Harvey Earl Fields, died prematurely at age 40 in July 1939 in Owyhee, the Fields Family was suddenly without a breadwinner. It had been about four years living there in Nevada together. The remaining family were forced to separate as they struggled to cope. -- Doc's death had been by particularly shocking suicide by self-stabbing (see recently discovered obit on his page).

While perhaps considered too young to marry yet, it appears Johnny either asked his sister Marie to help his sweetheart Rita, or it may have been an initial attempt to separate the couple over racism, to keep an eye on Rita. The 1940 US Census finds middle Fields sister Rita temporarily moved to the town of Havre, Hill County, Montana, just outside the border of another reservation, Rocky Boy of the Chippewa and Cree. -- On the actual reservation itself, only 25 miles down the road from Rita in Havre, Johnny's elder sister Marie was then living in the town of Box Elder, which was the headquarters to Rocky Boy Reservation. At about the same time in late 1939 as Rita moved, Marie (Moore) Snider McNeilly with little daughter Mary Lou from her first marriage (but adopted early on & raised as her step-dad's) and husband Mac, had moved from Duck Valley Reservation, Owyhee, Nevada, to Rocky Boy Reservation, Box Elder, Montana, where Marie's husband "Mac" Emmett McNeilly was Superintendent of each reservation with the US Indian Service in which he served over his long career that included earlier posts across the American west, and Marie a senior registered nurse for the same. -- Rita, with two years of college completed, was most likely under an "Indian Training School" scheme that focused on training young Native American women for mainstream domestic work. The April 1940 Census lists her under a non-specifically named "government school", working as a "housekeeper" while living as a "boarder" in the "teacher's" house. Rita was 20 and the only other person in the house, listed as "head", was the "teacher", a 29yo single White woman named Annabell Bernis. -- The parallel move of Marie & Rita's placement could possibly have been a favor from Mac, Johnny's brother-in-law, to help out Johnny's sweetheart, Rita, suddenly absent financial support by her father's untimely passing. (Or an attempt to separate them. No way of knowing if it was kindness or racism.) Because 20yo Rita's situation was made more urgent than just continuing college, she needed a trained means of supporting herself going forward.

Rita's beau of four-ish years, Johnny Moore, was still back in Owyhee, Elko County, Nevada. He had been living with his sister Marie since joining her from Missouri about five years prior as he was turning 18, after finishing high school at 17 in 1935. But when Marie's then-second husband got the job transfer from Superintendent of Duck Valley in Nevada to Superintendent of Rocky Boy in Montana, to begin in the new year of 1940, this time Johnny did not follow his sister, but stayed in Owyhee working on the Duck Valley Reservation as a Rodman Surveyor. By then, Johnny had just turned 22. -- And his 1940 Census enumeration is actually in the house Marie left when she divorced her first husband: William Robert Snyder, Mary Lou's biological father, to whom Marie was only wed two years, and left with the 1yo baby. Johnny basically lived at "Willie's" house as a 'men's boarding house'. It was Willie (divorced & never remarried), Willie's dad Ben (divorced & never remarried), Willie's brother "Abe" Floyd (never married), all decades older than Johnny who bode his time there maybe two-three years until he could be with his sweetheart Rita.

The rest of Rita's family, after dad Harvey's July '39 death, for the 1940 Census, *appeared* to have gone from Nevada back home to Oklahoma. But there are duplicate records, probably due to their moving around & the census takers arrived in-person at different homes during different months that year. So it wasn't entirely unusual for people to be counted twice.

Rita's older sister, Connie's husband had a farm in Indian City, Payne County, Oklahoma. Her sister Connie (Fields) Poodry (mis-transcribed as "Annie Pentry" on the list), by 1940 with two baby boys herself, went to husband Earle Poodry's place, taking in from Nevada her own grieving widowed mum Nancy (Beamer) Fields, her younger sister Wahleah Fields (18), and her younger brother George Fields (listed 11, but only 9), to the 1940 Census Household of husband Earle Poodry, even though he is marked "temporarily absent." Earle Poodry stayed in Nevada earning a wage on the reservation, still working alongside Johnny Moore, as his 1940 WWII draft registration reports. Johnny & Earle registered on the same October day, likely together. They needed to improve their lot in life & get off the Duck Valley Reservation. So they registered for the U.S. military draft in 1940, a year before America joined the fight in WWII.

Answering a big question about their newly-widowed mum Nancy, Wahleah appears counted twice in the 1940 US Census. Once at married sister Connie's in Oklahoma (maybe mom took her there at first after they left Owyhee after dad died, but then Wahleah went on), and secondly, where Wahleah *actually was* further west, age 18, as a student with, thus far, three years of high school completed at the Sherman Institute (now Sherman Indian High School) an off-reservation boarding school run then by the US Indian Service (now Bureau of Indian Affairs) in Riverside, Riverside County, California. This is how mom Nancy must have met the man she married after the tragic death of first husband, Harvey Fields in 1939, father of her four children. Nancy's second husband was a recent divorcée with his youngest two similarly aged children to the Fields kids at home with him. Nancy's new husband till death did they naturally part of old age, was an English-French-Canadian rancher named Arthur Leslie Morrell, who lived in the 1940s near Wahleah's school, in Lake Elsinore, Riverside County, California. Nancy (Beamer) Fields & Arthur Morrell married after February 1942, because in Nancy's infant granddaughter Glenda Moore's February 1942 obituary, she is still listed as "grandmother, Mrs. Nancy Fields of Santa Ana" (not yet Mrs. Morrell). When they did marry circa 1942/43, Mr. Arthur Morrell & Mrs. Nancy (Beamer) Fields Morrell lived out their lives there together (till death did them part when he died in 1973, she died 1985), near her four kids and his five, and their families.

So that's how Rita, her siblings, their spouses, and their mother, all parked in California, it seems, for the most part. -- And Johnny followed with the U.S. military.

Rita Jane Fields Moore herself (1919-1996), who had completed at least two years of college, married "Johnny" Glendon John Moore (1917-1993), circa 1941. We don't know where or exactly when yet. But while Johnny reported his address as Owyhee, Nevada, on his *registration* for the draft card in October 1940 as a SINGLE man with his sister Marie in Montana as his "Next of Kin", he actually reported for duty still as a resident of Elko County the next June in 1941 (before the country actually entered the war that December), but by then as MARRIED by those eight months later (sometime btwn Oct 1940 & June 1941; no source image available, no wife's name transcribed), and both registration & reporting were done through Salt Lake City, Utah. Possibly Johnny & Earle both enlisted through SLC because it was the nearest major city with a military recruitment office at the time (roughly 300 miles Owyhee to SLC, Utah, as the crow flies, versus over 500 Owyhee to Las Vegas in the same state of Nevada), or possibly because he & Rita may have been shortly in SLC to marry with The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (LDS / Mormon). Johnny's sister Marie had converted from their Protestant Moore family upbringing in Missouri to Mormon in Nevada in order to marry Mac, who was established in The Church through SLC. Johnny may have become LDS as well. Looks like it. And conversion among Native Americans to Latter Day Saints was strong, too. Maybe a marriage decree (religious sealing ceremony) can one day be found among church records in SLC. Maybe they had a May or June 1941 wedding just before Johnny reported for enlistment duty? "Getting hitched before going to off war" (or the imminence of America declaring war) being a common love story. Johnny would have been 23 & Rita on the cusp of 22.

It doesn't appear that he ever "shipped out" over seas, though. Perhaps having gotten an established office position going six months ahead of the U.S. officially declaring war in Dec 1941 with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Johnny served as a paymaster, across all branches of military, for WWII out of Los Angeles, relocating from Owyhee, Elko County, Nevada. -- At least through the end of the war in 1945, as noted in sister Polly's early death back in St. Louis at only age 30 in 1945, when Johnny was 28. -- Earlier in the war, maybe nine or ten months after the very possible wedding date, Rita gave birth to their first daughter, Glenda Moore, her daddy's namesake, in Santa Ana, Orange County, California. Baby Glenda very sadly only lived to be one day old, from February 10th to the 11th in 1942. There is an obituary in the "Santa Ana Register" newspaper, page 4, for her on the 12th. (Image and full transcript on Glenda's page.) It says Mr. & Mrs. Glendon Moore reside(d) at 2038 North Main Street in Santa Ana. That being Rita's husband's fixed address, too, but not where he would have necessarily resided while on active duty during wartime, that part is unsure. After WWII, Johnny & Rita continued living in Santa Ana and later Huntington Beach, surrounded by all of Rita's family for decades.

The 1950 US Census was just released in 2022. Attached is an image of their numeration living in Huntington Beach, Orange County, California. It was just the two of them, age 32 & 30. He a carpenter, she worked in a perfume factory. -- A year later finally came the second baby girl! Almost a decade after baby Glenda. {Not giving the second daughter's name etc here as she is someone likely still living, to be respectful of privacy.} As told by a co-worker friend who knew both Rita and her surviving daughter in the 1960s, Rita was a foreman for McDonnell Douglas in nearby Long Beach, where they built planes still in use today, such as the DC-10. Strong woman!

Eventually, semi-retired, Rita & Johnny moved to Bouse, Paz County, Arizona, and then McGill, White Pine, Nevada, not far from Owyhee, by the 1970s. Johnny held several now defunct mine rites. Johnny died in McGill, 1993. Three years later Rita died, 1996, having moved back to Bouse for her last couple years. But Rita as widow died while visiting or possibly having recently relocated as an elderly widow to be with her adult daughter in Olympia, Thurston County, Washington state, which is where she died in 1996.

Did Rita get paid to rest in Olympia, Washington state to await her adult daughter? Or maybe she was delivered back to the cemetery where her baby daughter rests, as well as her mother, step-father, and her beloved siblings there and nearby, but all in Orange County, California.

Rita's elder sister Connie had had two more children, girls, with Earle Poodry, before divorcing him, going to California near Rita & Johnny, and marrying "Bert" Berten M. Shumaker (1919-1989) who also served during WWII, in the Army. Connie with her four children & Bert lived with their kids in Riverside County, near the family.

Rita's younger sister Wahleah married Jerry C. Banuelos (1919-1997), also a veteran of WWII. Wahleah & Jerry also lived with their kids near Rita & Johnny for decades in Orange County.

And Rita's baby brother George Timothy Fields, 13 years younger than their eldest sibling, George never married, but was very close especially to nearest sister Wahleah's kids. He was more than ten years younger than all of his brothers-in-law who all three served in WWII, so George missed that war, but served in the US Army in both the Korean and Vietnam Conflicts. He also lived amongst the family in Orange County. Attached to his page is a recently discovered newspaper article of his being severely wounded at age 19 in Korea. He may have lived with severe impairment, and did reside within a veteran's home by his later years. George is resting near a favorite niece by Wahleah.

Rita's father, "Doc" Harvey Earl Fields, (1898-1939), is buried back among Fields family members in Olympus Cemetery in Grove, Delaware County, Oklahoma.

Rita Jane (Fields) Moore & her husband "Johnny" Glendon John Moore were married more than 50 years. He died in 1993 at age 75, and she in 1996 at age 77. They seem to have been happy together and among Rita's family, gladly. The heartbreak of losing their first child, infant Glenda Moore, awful. Their joy to have finally had a second daughter almost a decade later, a huge relief. Persistently unfortunate though, since the '40s, Johnny & Rita felt they would face religious bias and racial bigotry back in Missouri, so Johnny never went there again after he left home immediately after high school, not even later after having served in the war, with his bride or surviving daughter. -- Ultimately, under all the strain, Rita & Johnny had a tumultuous relationship in later years, and often lived apart. In the very first years of the courtship, the only other Moore family member living in proximity, Johnny's elder sister Marie surely knew Rita both in Nevada and Montana before WWII. And Polly, Johnny's nearest sibling by two years of whom they were very fond of one another, likely visited with Johnny and met Rita when she (Polly) visited their elder sister Marie late in 1939/early 1940 out West, before Polly died only age 30 after a prolonged illness in 1945 in St Louis, where she lived and worked. The eldest of the Moore siblings, Ruby (b1904) and Marie (b1905), had helped raise the little ones, Polly (b1915) and Johnny (b1917), taking on more responsibility when their mother Phoebe McNew Moore died prematurely after gall bladder surgery complications in 1927. By that "Mother Figure" endearment of both eldest sisters, Johnny & Rita did keep in touch the rest of their lives over the phone with his surviving sisters, Ruby and Marie. But there was never a visit made either direction. Just phone calls.

It's very possible that Rita & Johnny are buried in the same cemetery as Rita's sister & husband, Wahleah Fields Banuelos (Jerry), their brother George Timothy Fields, and Rita & Johnny's own first infant daughter Glenda. Baby Glenda's obituary tells us she was definitely interred in Westminster Memorial Park, Westminster, Orange County, California. (Source on Glenda's page.) Rita's mother & stepfather, Nancy (née Beamer) Fields Morrell (Arthur Morrell), and sister & husband, Connie (née Fields) Poodry Shumaker (Bert Shumaker), are buried just up the street. We just need to find Rita & Johnny's obits & headstones, and pictures of all three headstones for the little family. May Rita & Johnny, with little Glenda, Rest In Peace Eternal."