Joy Regina Horn was born on August 19th, 1935 in McKeesport, PA. Joy grew up in East Pennsylvania with her mother, grandmother and aunt. In 1941 Joy's mother (Frances Dills) moved to the West Coast by herself to search for a new home for her and her children. Three years later In 1944 Frances was settled with a home and a job, so she called for her daughters Joy and her sister. Together they moved to the Westcoast to join Frances. Frances was a very accomplished Insurance and real estate broker of her time. Frances insisted on her two daughters to travel with her in both her professional and personal life. Because of this Joy became well traveled, curious, art lover, enjoys challenges and school.
Joy’s step-father, the local hardware proprietor, encouraged her to learn all about the business world, so Joy and her sister worked in their high school days. As Joy grew up she traveled back to the east coast very frequently to visit her grandmother, each time they drove back to the east coast they took a new route to explore the U.S. When Joy was 18 she decided that she wanted to travel in her career. She soon found out that the airlines were not interested in anyone under 21, so she enrolled in Jr. College to take some business courses and eventually studied to get her real estate salesman license.
While at Jr. College Joy began dating an old school friend and within one year got married and moved to Walnut Creek, CA. In the next five years Joy had her two children, Guy born in 1955 and Kim born in 1957. They purchased their first home as a family in the Eastbay Area in January 1958. In the next few years Joy became a housewife and learned many home keeping secrets. Once the children began nursery school Joy got involved with the community, she became chairmen of the Easter Seal society, President of the Pacifica Women’s Club and other organizations. During this time Joy was responsible for hosting several charity events to raise money for the organizations.
Joy also starting doing some work occasionally doing income taxes and other tax reports, she felt that this kept her ‘in-touch’ with the business world. Sadly 9 years after Joy and her first husband repeated their vows their marriage ended in divorce. Joy was in shock for awhile and was very worried about her children. Joy decided to take up ‘free-lance’ accounting work, this allowed Joy to work when they were in school and spend time with them when they were out. In this next phase of Joy’s life she did Sales tax reports, payroll reports, weekly payrolls, Sales Analysis Reports (for several restaurants).
Around this time Joy and the children had their first visitor from China ‘Arlene’ stay with them, she stayed with Joy and her children for a year and then moved to Stanford university in Palo Alto. When Arlene went back to China she later returned with an old friend Eddie. Eddie stay with Joy and the children for four years while attending college, he eventually moved to Cambridge to do graduate work. One time, Eddie’s parents came over from China, and Joy gave them a tour of the area and then took them to the mountains to show them how close the Sierra’s were. Over the next several years they had many foreign visitors at their home and it became an ‘international’ house every summer. Joy and her children loved to see new people from around the world sharing their experiences and cultural differences.
After Joy spent 10 years doing free lance accounting work, she decided to look for a new career path. Joy was very interested in the stock market, so she decided to enroll into Jr. College again and begin to study economics, business management, law, etc… to hopefully become a stock broker. Unfortunately during this time the stock market was declining and many stock brokers were seeking other options. Knowing this Joy got her AA degree and ended up pursuing another career. Joy decided to re-activate her real-estate license and begin a career running a ‘Property Management Department’ for a large Eastbay real estate firm.
Once Joy got her new career going and her children had grown into their teen years Joy decided to start traveling. Joy’s first trip outside the U.S. was to Mexico, by herself. She really enjoyed meeting new people and found Mexico to be a warm friendly place. The following year Joy cruised the Caribbean for 3 weeks and saw 17 islands. On her travels Joy met many new friends that she traveled with in future trips. On Joy’s next trip she traveled to Alaska from San Francisco to Skagway.
Then Joy took her first trip across the Atlantic, after doing many months of research, she booked her trip to Europe to see all the art treasures she had read about in Vasari’s book on artists. Joy took a 5 week venture through Spain, Portugal, Roma, Mediterranean Sea, Tunisia, Palermo, Capri and Italy. Italy was an emotional experience for Joy as she had past the place of where a lot of her ancestors were born. Over the next few years Joy had traveled back to several different European countries to view more art history, castles and all of the different attractions they have to offer.
In1974 Joy obtained her pilots license, she had many friends that flew on weekends and they introduced her into this hobby. After two years of lessons and ground school she became a private pilot. Shortly after Joy bought her own airplane and traveled around the west coast with her children in her spare time. Flying has always been something Joy has kept as a hobby throughout her lifetime, she had kept her pilots license and was flying airplanes up until 2008.
In 1976 Joy started a new job path working at the engineering research department for Chevron. Here Joy did various computer programming, flowcharting and other research. During this time Joy learned a lot about the electronic age that was soon coming. Shortly after Joy had met her soon to be husband Maurice Horn (Site link), thru a family friend. Soon they were married and Joy joined Maurice to live in San Francisco where Maurice was and eye doctor at the nearby Kaiser Permanente Hospital.
Thru the 80’s Joy spent most of her time with her husband exploring the hobbies she had introduced herself to earlier in life. They had done a lot of traveling around the U.S. and Europe together and also a lot of flying as well. They also did a lot of volunteer work at the local museums and tourist attractions, such as Angel Island, De Young Museum, Truckee historical Jail house and more… Together they also had a second home Joy had purchased previous to their marriage in Donner Lake. When they could they would take a week off and enjoy the cool mountain atmosphere. Sadly in November 15th 2001 Maurice had pasted away, leaving Joy as a widow.
Joy spent the last years of her life continuing the life she and Maurice had built together. Living life between San Francisco and Truckee, CA. Joy spent her time helping her family, friends and volunteering at the Humane Society, DeYoung Fine Arts Museum, Historical Society, Hospice, Cancer Society and Tahoe Forest Hospital.
