Sarah Esther Daily (now Gore)

Sarah Esther Daily was born on the 22 of January 1941 in Los Angeles, California. She is the youngest child of Howard Eloise Daily and Orva Lorena Camp. Growing up she had a hard time because she was not treated well by her mother or sisters. She had to clean the house, at least when she was older, and was never allowed to play card games, even though her mother and sisters could. She did not have a horrible childhood however and there are many fond memories she told me.

 When she was young she loved to play outside and would do so as often as she could. This caused her to have quite a tan, so much so that people thought she was Mexican. People would come up to her and start to speak to her in Spanish expecting her to understand them. She did not like this at all and so she made it a point never to learn Spanish. 

My Grandma Sarah also spent a lot of time with her grandfather, Bernett Justin Daily. He was her savior and best friend. He would protect her as much as he could and tell her advice for the future, always saying, “you will not understand this now, but later you will.” He was correct about that. A lot of the advice he gave my Grandmother she used later in life. She was devastated when Bernett died.

When my grandmother was in high school she had to dissect a frog in one of her classes. On the day of the dissection she fainted in class and had to be carried to the nurses office by one of the boys in her class. She was so embarrassed.

When my grandmother was fifteen she got married because she wanted to get out of the house. Her mother spread the rumor around that she was only getting married because she was pregnant but that wasn’t true. She didn’t even know what it was that people did to get them pregnant. She wasn’t pregnant until several months after her marriage. Her first child was my Aunt Kathie.

My grandmother was married three times throughout her life. Her first two husbands were not very good people. They would beat her and insult her. One of these husbands would even bet her when he ran out of money while he was gambling. For this reason she always had to lock her doors and be careful. At one point she fled to Oregon to get away from one of her husbands. Eventually she drove the Yukon Trail through Canada and into Alaska just to say she did it. She never thought she would stay in Alaska, but she did and she still lives there now.

Alaska is where she met her third and final husband. His name was Robert Watson Gore. He was a cop for the Anchorage, Alaska police department and met her children before he met her. I don’t know how he met her children; I just know that he did. One night Grandma Sarah gathered all of her children together and they prayed that God would help my grandma. In her prayer she said that if God wanted her to get married then he would have to have the man knock on her door because she was not going to go out looking for one. About an hour later Robert Watson Gore knocked on my grandmother’s door. He helped her and her children and eventually they fell in love and were married. He treated her and her children like they should have been treated from the start and he adopted her children. Together they did many things and lived in many different places throughout Alaska. At one point they even ran a gas station together. Apparently my grandma was always the one to go outside and pump gas for people when they asked. That always irritated her but she still loved him. On the fifteenth of July 1984 Robert Watson Gore died of a heart attack in Fairbanks, Alaska just outside of the door to his truck. After his death my grandmother had many legal battles with his second wife over the assets he left behind. She wanted every penny she could get.