Pasadenan JoAnna Houston Foster was born four years before the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918 into a world very different indeed from what it is today.
Foster was born June 8, 1914, in Waxia, near Opelousas, Louisiana. She was the second of five children of her Samuel Houston and mother Irene thomas-Houston.
Foster came to California in 1941 to live with relatives in Los Angeles for a few months. She’s still here.
In late 1941 she and her son, Harold Jones, moved to Pasadena and lived on Valley Boulevard near Friendship Baptist Church.
Over many years, she lived on Mountain Street, Lincoln Avenue, and then on Orange Grove Boulevard until 1953, when she married Walter Carter.
The couple moved to Sunset Avenue, where Foster still lives today.
She has been a member of Scott United Methodist Church on Orange Grove Boulevard since 1949. She has been life-long friends with the Jackie Robinson family.
In 1958, Foster went back to school and earned her cosmetology license. She opened her own hair salon business in Pasadena 1962.
Foster can tell you her remembrances about the many major world events that occurred during her life.
She experienced the Spanish Flu epidemic; at 15 years old, the Great
Depression began and lasted until she was 19 years old, and she was 25 World War II started.
Over the next six years, 75 million people perished in this war, including her first husband.
Smallpox was an epidemic until she was 36. The Korean War started when she was 36 in 1950. She witnessed friends and family dealing with the Polio epidemic. Next came the Vietnam War that lasted 20 years, the Cold War, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
On February 8, 2011, at 96, Foster was invited to visit with President Barack Obama in the Roosevelt Room at the White House. She remembers this event as her occasion of a lifetime when she got to hug the President and he hugged her back.
She will tell you that there is “no place like Pasadena”. JoAnna’s niece, Le’ta Thomas, provides day-to-day check on her support. Foster is still very active—loves to walk, loves her church and all her nieces and nephews.