Elaine Nobuko Yochum Obituary (1930 - 2016)

Nobuko Yamabe was born in Kumamoto, Kyushu, Japan on September 4, 1930. She attended the highest-echelon First High School, equivalent to college-level studies in the US. She worked at Kumamoto Hospital as a cytologist, preparing tissue samples for doctors. She met Elmer Yochum when he was stationed by the army at Camp Wood in Japan, during the Korean War. She emigrated from Japan and became a US citizen in 1954. She became a Catholic to marry Elmer and took the name Elaine. They first lived at Elmer's father's house for a short time, then two low-cost residences. She and Elmer conceived three boys, Christopher, Alexander, and Jerome. Elmer, being very creative, at the time an art director at a Pittsburgh advertising agency, designed a custom home in a rural area south of Pittsburgh, McMurray, PA. The home was a great challenge, as its lot comprised almost two acres, which Elaine proceeded to turn into a site so beautiful people would stop in their cars and ask if they could take pictures. Elaine was not only smart technically, but gifted artistically. She was an expert calligrapher and was well versed in the Japanese arts of the tea ceremony and flower arrangement. She was an expert seamstress and made a large portion of the clothes that Chris, Alex, and Jerry wore to school, from grade school to high school. For a time, she partnered with another woman and created custom dresses for clients. After leaving that endeavor, she would make custom dresses for a loyal client who couldn't find anything appealing in her size. Elaine would go to fabric and department stores to pick out fabrics and patterns, then meticulously assemble beautiful one-off pieces that were rather like works of art. An interesting encounter was in New York, when she pointed out the low-quality stitching and assembly of a very-high-cost dress to a taken-aback clerk at an elitist department store. Her sewing was that good. She had a huge sewing table and a file cabinet full of patterns, accompanied by the many types of accessories, like buttons and threads of many colors and sizes. She used a Singer sewing machine that was actually built by Singer, not the Asian-made name-only knockoffs sold today. You needed two hands to lift it. All the while, she was sewing for clients, the kids, and Elmer, she was cleaning fixtures, wiping windows, waxing floors, doing laundry, and running errands. Concurrently she was setting up and maintaining a drop-dead gorgeous Japanese-style yard replete with pebble gardens, boulders, wood bridges, and artistically placed groups of flowers and plants. The yard didn't have just the typical row of flowers tracing the edges of the house. Instead, flowers, grasses, and ferns were placed for contrast in color, height, and texture. In combination with some small and some huge boulders that were trucked in, the Yochum yard was like something featured in an architectural magazine. If that weren't enough, Elaine taught herself how to make world-class dishes you might expect in a four-star restaurant. Notable were stuffed cabbage, lasagna, baked beans, pizza, cheese cake, bakery-quality cookies, and the lightest pancakes and heaviest french toast we ever experienced. Her stuffed cabbage didn't have the typical sour tomato sauce, but was coated with a brown sugar glaze. The leaves and enfused ground meat (usually a custom-ground steak mixed with rice) fell apart in your mouth. The lasagna wasn't a mass of pasta frugally interspersed with some cheese; instead, it was more aptly described as thick layers of cheese with pasta in between. The baked beans were dried beans soaked in water, not canned beans. They were then covered with a combination of molasses, ketchup, and brown sugar. Thick chunks of bacon were stirred into the mix. When dug out of the huge roasting pot, the beans would not fall off the spoon even if the spoon were turned sideways. Her pizza astounded two of Chris's friends who visited from college on two separate occasions. One was Italian and the other refused to be labeled Italian...he was "Sicilian." Well, upon hearing Chris say Mom's pizza was the best he'd ever tasted, both friends rebuffed Chris and reinforced their heritage and their respective mothers' pizza-making skills. At the end of each visit, however, each friend sheepishly admitted Chris's Mom's pizza was the best he'd ever had. Elmer, a world-class creative director traveled the country and experienced the finest restaurants in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. He maintained Mom's cheesecake was identical to those he'd had in the finest restaurants in New York. Not a dry, gummy, tasteless concoction, Mom's cheesecake had a good half-inch of buttery graham-cracker crust at the bottom. The consistency of the upper portion was so substantial the knife would slow trying to cut through it. It was creamy, thick, and moist, combining sweetness and sourness. She didn't invent her own cookies, but instead started out using Pillsbury Bake-Off champion recipes. One marvelous cookie comprised a thick chocolate/nut center wrapped in a soft but substantial cooked layer, then topped with a thick brushing of a chocolate paste. The pancakes included the right amount of powders and other ingredients to make them crispy on the outer edges, then soft and airy on the inside. The french toast wasn't made as is typically done in restaurants, by swiping once on the top, then once on the bottom. The breads, many times a heavy French bread or similar, would be soaked in a pan of egg coating. Upon leaving the pan, the bread weighed three times or more than when it went in. We never had dry french toast...unless we ate out! John Ulam, the founder of All-Clad Metalcrafters, came over to the house one night to ask Elaine to be a cultural coordinator and translator for him because he wanted to take his company sales into Japan. Mr. Ulam perfected the bonding of stainless steel to copper, among other combinations. The purpose was to speed even and efficient heating from the outside while leaving the inside an inert metal that would not contaminate the food. The world-famous brand, used by professional chefs around the world, was located in nondescript Canonsburg, next door to McMurray. She had previously also helped translate for a top advertising executive from Japan. Tadahashi Nishio authored a tome highlighting the best and brightest in the US, describing campaigns Nishio thought world-class. It showed up one day at Elmer's agency with a story surrounding an innovative campaign Elmer had created for Scott Paper Company. Elmer had to take it home and ask Elaine what it said because it was written in Japanese. While Elmer was doing many more award-winning TV, magazine, and newspaper ads; logo designs; and product- package designs, Elaine was adding to the panoply of activities she took upon herself. Back to the backyard, Elaine never stopped growing things, cultivating a huge vegetable garden, growing cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes, pumpkins, and numerous other vegetables. Very attentive and adaptive, she taught herself how to grow them overly large and delicious. Always keeping very fit, Elaine frequented the gym and consistently looked 20 to 30 years younger than her chronological age. Often, after being told "Do you know I'm XX years old," by an acquaintance, she would reply, "I'm XX+20 years old," which would usually cause the much younger person's jaw to drop. Almost 70 years old, she put herself through and graduated from a certification program to become an aerobics instructor. As the cold winters started having a deleterious effect on her joints, she and Elmer moved to Oro Valley, with son Chris. She stoically attended to taking care of them, while maintaining extraordinary physical fitness, still looking 20 to 30 years younger than her real age. Elaine was a superwoman. She cared for her family, their habitat, and her fitness, never slowing down. She was a loving spouse and mother who could do anything and who actually did everything. She was not just average or good at a few things; she was fabulous at many things, artistic, technical, and practical. Most people would feel accomplished doing a fraction of what Elaine did. She is greatly loved and will be missed forever by a heartbroken family who had the best wife and mother in the world. May God wrap His hands around her and keep her with Him, in Jesus' name we pray.