Rosemarie Margaret Mallory

Our mom, Rosemarie (Penny) Margaret Mallory was born in Philadelphia, PA, on 12 February 1922, the daughter of Bridget Redding (recte Reddan), a native of Killaloe, Co. Clare, Ireland. Raised during the Depression in a series of foster homes, her fondest memories growing up were associated with the family McMahon. Here she was raised with another girl in foster care, Theresa, whom she always regarded as her 'sister'. She grew up where an Irish neighborhood bordered with a Polish and an Italian and this showed through in her cooking where she usually prepared spaghetti with Polish sausages. She was trained in typing and shorthand and her first job was as a bookkeeper and given her background, expectations were very low for her. But our mom was always a fighter and ever since she saw "Flying down to Rio" when she was 11, she harbored a dream of becoming a dancer. When she was 17 she won a local beauty contest and the following year landed a job as a chorus girl and went on the road with the Bert Smith show. This took her across America as part of a travelling troop of showgirls.
When the company closed suddenly in Oregon, mom and several friends went to California and landed jobs in the "Follies Burlesque" on Main Street in Los Angeles. Mom always hated her given name, Rosemarie, and it was here that her friends came up with a new name for her, Penny, which she gladly used for the rest of her life. She then toured Canada with "Count Berni Vici's" touring theater company which consisted of an all-girl orchestra, dancers and showgirls. She then went on tour with the "Earl Carroll's Vanities" which took her across the country. Back in LA mom landed a job at the "Paris Inn' which was famous for its singing waiters and occasional raids during Prohibition. By the 1950s the theater-restaurant was buried under Parker Center. Mom then worked as the principal dancer in "Joe Morello's Club Moderne" in San Francisco. By 1943 she was back in Los Angeles where she worked in the Earl Carroll Theater-restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. The first time she ever had a birthday party was her 21st at Earl Carroll's mansion. One night at Earl Carrolls theatre she dragged a handsome Air Corps lieutenant onto the stage (Clyde (Jim) Mallory) whom she soon married. At this time she also occasionally appeared as an extra in films and can be easily if only very briefly identified in 'Incendiary Blonde' (1945), 'The Fabulous Dorseys' (1947), and 'Body and Soul' (1947).
After the war mom lived in boarding houses around San Gabriel, California, while Jim served overseas and then the couple were posted to Fort Worth, Texas, until Jim retired from the Air Force in 1952. They moved first to Pomona, California, where they lived for ten years (mom often worked as a secretary in the same plants as our dad) and then on to Tustin, California, until Jim retired from the aviation industry and they settled in retirement in Palm Desert, California, where mom devoted her spare time to painting ceramics. After Jim's death in 2001, mom eventually settled in Valenica, California. She died peacefully in her sleep on 20 August 2018 at the age of 96.
Penny is survived by her three children (Jim, Kathleen, Susan), her six grandchildren (Deirdre, Conall, Kenny, Fintan, Mallory and Tom), and her five great-grandchildren (Molly, Keagan, Kent, Declan, and Niamh)
It was always clear to us that mom's show-business days was a golden period in her life that she always looked back upon with great fondness. So it is appropriate that she is buried next to our dad in Desert Memorial Park among many noted artists of the profession she loved so much Busby Berkeley, Frank Sinatra, and Betty Hutton, who starred in two of the films that mom worked in. She would have liked the company.