Alta Manda Moos Holmberg, a beloved Lemon Grove resident since 1939, died on May 10, 2014. She was 94 and the last of 13 siblings born to Mathilda Schweigert and Johann Moos in Blue Grass, ND. Her parents had emigrated from Ukraine to North Dakota in the late 19th century.
True to her prairie roots, Alta was family-oriented, a great cook, and an adventurous young woman. She moved to San Diego in 1935 at the tender age of 16 and it wasn’t long before she met Alf Holmberg, the tall Swede who could invent and/or repair virtually anything.
Together they found a hillside lot in Lemon Grove and built their own home--a cool, spacious, adobe brick, hacienda style house roofed with terra cotta tiles discarded from the old Santa Fe Railroad Depot in San Diego. Alf installed clever closets with slide-out shelves, cubbies, pull-down screens, a wonderful kitchen and a large workshop beside a breezeway. The grounds were terraced with native stone and filled with fruit trees and roses. This Golden Avenue home still stands, happily occupied by a new family.
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Alf and Alta were inseparable and spent their spare time leading Sierra Club hikes and campouts. She loved his art work and nonstop inventions and he loved her cooking and baking. Active in the Lemon Grove School District, Alta was a past president of the Golden Avenue and Palm Avenue PTAs.
About 1950 she became a “Pfister Lady” in food services in the school district. Dynamo Ruth Pfister not only wrote the book on nutritious menus for local schoolchildren, she wrote it for the State of California. In their hairnets and white uniforms, shoes and stockings, the Pfister Ladies cooked from scratch from Ruth’s recipes. They baked bread for sandwiches, sliced fresh ham and whipped up huge pots of soup, all on U.S Navy surplus kitchen equipment purchased from the Port of San Pedro (see photographs).
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Ruth Pfister ran the school kitchen and cafeteria with military precision. She had a willing acolyte in Alta whose cooking skills, honed at her mother’s knee, love of children -- she and Alf raised two daughters -- and sense of humor made her the perfect presence at the dawn of the modern school district when eight schools were being built and enrollment was through the roof.
Alta was the last of a breed in our school district: a woman who could bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan--and do that for nearly 4,000 kids.
Alta lost her Alf in 1997. She is survived by daughters Ardyce and Brenda, grandsons Larry and Jeffrey, and great granddaughters Sabrina and Jessica. A memorial service will be held on May 28 at 1 p.m. in the Chapel of the Roses, Glen Abbey Memorial Park, 3838 Bonita Road, Bonita.
