Willow Glen Resident

Community

Lila Lloyd, well-know performer, was a best friend to everyone

By Alicia Upano

All the world's a stage, and Lila Lloyd was quite a player.

Lloyd, a Willow Glen resident, was one of the South Bay's most well-known performers. She began her career 40 years ago at the San Jose Music Theater, now the American Musical Theatre of San Jose, and spent the following decades performing in venues throughout the Bay Area.

On Jan. 11, the lively actress died in her Avis Drive home. She was 76 years old. Friends and family, including her nine children, honored Lloyd on Feb. 13 at the San Jose Stage Company. The celebration of life was infused with performances, just as Lloyd would have wanted it, Lloyd's daughter Bonnie Jean Brekke said.

Lloyd was born Lila Monkhouse on May 20, 1930, in upstate New York, and moved with her parents to San Francisco a decade later. During the summers, she would pick fruit in Willow Glen's orchards, which left a lasting impression on her.

At 19, Lloyd moved south and enrolled in the Pasadena Playhouse. She returned to the Bay Area with her first husband, Bellarmine Martinez, who was a photolithographer with the San Jose Mercury News. The couple had five children during their 10-year marriage--Larry, Gary, Barry, Daryl and Mary Anne.

Lloyd had one child, Jerry, with her second husband, Gene Lloyd. After their divorce, Lloyd's father helped secure a home for Lloyd and her six children. When asked where in San Jose she would like to own a home, Lloyd chose Willow Glen, Brekke said.

Her third husband, Henry Clay Landram, was a banjoist 23 years her senior. They were married for 20 years and had three children--Clay Alan, Bonnie and Lilli Marlene. Family time included numerous hours spent in rehearsals with their mother, and many of Lloyd's children became performers.

"My sister and I would know the parts word for word from reading with Mom," Brekke said. "We were sort of known as the odd family that lived on the corner. Instead of sports, we were all musically inclined."

Despite Lloyd's active life in the theater, Brekke remembers her mother as being home often, on hand to help with homework after school and sharing her dry humor with friends and her children's friends. She was supportive and honest, Brekke recalled, and remained friends with her ex-husbands.

Pocket Opera executive director Dianna Shuster, former artistic director of American Musical Theatre, describes Lloyd as gregarious and flamboyant. Shuster directed Lloyd in one of her final American Musical Theatre performances, A Little Night Music.

"It was the best work of her life in Night Music. It was very real and very honest and really terrific," Shuster said.

While Lloyd never lost her taste for stage life, thyroid cancer nearly put an end to her career in the mid-1980s. Lloyd was able to sing again after treatment and years of vocal therapy. In December 2000, Lloyd had a stroke that made it difficult for her to walk. Yet Brekke said her mother was still mentally sharp, and spent her four months of rehabilitation joking with the therapists.

Lloyd used a wheelchair for the past three years but continued to perform at hospitals. Brekke said her mother would wheel up to the audience, and a nurse would take off her mother's shawl to reveal wings. She would recite, because she could no longer sing, and she still got audiences laughing.

"She loved warming people and seeing the smile on their faces," Brekke said. "She was really a best friend to all of us."

Jacqueline Casad Johnson

Jacqueline Casad Johnson of Willow Glen, 97, died Feb. 19. Johnson, the third of five daughters, was born in Merced to Walter and Gertrude Casad, a pioneer Merced family.

Johnson attended the University of Washington before settling in San Francisco, where she met her husband, Robert Johnson. The couple moved to San Jose in 1939. During World War II, Johnson was one of the first full-time married employees at IBM. She worked for the company until her retirement in 1974. Her husband died in 1988.

She is survived by her son Bill Johnson of Costa Mesa, daughter Janie Polizzi of San Jose, and grandchildren Robert Johnson, Jacqueline Gray, Jocelyn Polizzi, Caroline Johnson, Katherine Hohenstein and Jennifer Martes. Johnson also had 13 great-grandchildren.

Donations can be sent in Johnson's name to Lincoln Glen Manor, Skilled Nursing Unit, 2671 Plummer Ave., San Jose, CA 95125.