MAY VELLOZA AT 90 YEARS OLD AT HER HOME IN POINT REYES STATION
“My grandmother and grandfather, Paulina and Innocento DeGotardi, came here as newlyweds from Switzerland in the early 1900s. My mother, Caroline, was born at Millerton Ranch. She met my father, Ambrogio Bordessa, who had just emigrated from a small village in Italy, Garzano on Lake Como. When they were married, my mother lost her American citizenship because Ambrosio was not a citizen, as was the law then. My father had to get his citizenship papers and then my mother had to get two sponsors and go to the courthouse in San Rafael and reapply for hers. I was born on a ranch between Marshall and Point Reyes on May 2, 1928. I was very small and premature, and my grandmother put me in a shoe box with a blanket in a warm wood-fired oven for an incubator. I met my late husband, Richard Velloza, on the school bus that we rode to and from Tomales High School. He lived in Inverness with his parents, Lenore and Richard Velloza. Richard was two years ahead of me and joined the Navy in World War ll right after high school. When he returned from Okinawa, he worked for Pacific Telephone and Telegraph out on Point Reyes as a ship-to-shore radioman, and then we got married. We were married for 65 years before he passed
in 2014. Dick and I had two sons, Michael Richard and Robert Ambrose. I love my two boys.” — May Velloza, June 2018