1917 was the year that my mother, her mother, and her step-father came out to California from Indiana, changing their lives and future forever.
My mother said she remembered very little about her natural father -- or Indianapolis, for that matter -- but as I've written elsewhere, after doing a lot of research, I don't think she remembered her biological father at all. He was gone from Indianapolis, establishing a new life and family in St. Louis, by the time my mother was two years old. She could have had some vague memory of him, I suppose, but it's not likely. Also, her mother sued my mother's father for divorce in the summer of 1912, when my mother wasn't even a year old. The parents were not living together at the time and it's possible they never lived together as man and wife.
I always thought that Leo, the man who became my mother's stepfather, was Irish-American, but in fact his grandparents were German. I'm pretty sure my mother thought he was Irish, too. Maybe he pretended to be Irish for the hell of it. "Passing" as it were.
Leo was definitely a romantic, and he must have believed that something wonderful was inevitable. He worked as a machinist in Indianapolis, but when he went out to California, he worked as a mechanic at the Dodge Brothers dealership in Santa Maria -- after a brief sojourn in Santa Ana, the end of the line for the railroad that brought him and my mother and her mother to California. Leo and Edna (my mother's mother) were married in Santa Ana in October of 1917. Edna stated on her marriage certificate that she was a widow. Leo claimed it was his first marriage, but I've found records that suggest he was married before in Kansas City where he lived for about ten years, married, if he was married, to a woman who died in an asylum in 1921. I found no record of a divorce, and it is possible he was still married to her when he married Edna in Santa Ana. Which would be ironic as hell, since my mother's biological father had another wife and family in St. Louis when he was killed in that rail yard incident. We won't even get into my mother's grandfather, shot and killed by his mistress when he threatened to leave her...
As far as I can tell, Leo did very well for himself and his family in California. He became the service manager at the dealership, he was able to buy a nice bungalow a few blocks from the shop shortly after he started work, he had a car of his own, and my mother said he always provided very well for her and her mother. All of this would have been almost impossible had they stayed in Indianapolis among the suffering and seething working class.
But sometime in the early '30s Leo quit his job at the dealership and bought a filling station which he ran profitably for a while. He sold that and bought a motor court cum filling station in Willits on the Redwood Highway which he operated until 1939 when he sold it in order to invest in a "mine" in Nevada -- a phony mine as it turned out. He lost everything, and I think he just barely escaped going to jail for fraud, though it didn't appear that he knew that the partners in the mining operation were engaged in swindling their marks, chief among them Leo.
Leo and Edna returned to California in 1941, where he went to work at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard building Liberty Ships for the War. Edna was sick with the cancer that would shortly kill her. Leo himself died in 1945, still working at Mare Island.
1916 was the year that started this sequence. My mother's father had been killed in a rail yard incident in St. Louis in December of 1916 -- actually just before Christmas. His funeral was on December 23. My mother said she remembered going to his funeral (she was five) but she never mentioned St. Louis. I think she "remembered" all of this happening in Indianapolis. She never mentioned the trip to California, either, but she had strong memories of living in Santa Maria from a very early age -- she was still only five years old when they arrived.
She considered herself a California girl for the rest of her life -- even though she was born in Indianapolis. She never really wanted to live anywhere else, and if she'd had her druthers, she'd have stayed on California's Central Coast the rest of her life.
1917 was the year the US entered WWI, and although I only heard about that from my father -- he was a junior officer on the Home Front in Iowa during WWI -- I think the War was a critical element in the decision of Leo and Edna to move to California. The opportunities were greater on the West Coast, or seemed to be.
It was a risky move as I doubt Leo had a job lined up before the departure from Indianapolis. But what did it matter? There would be plenty of opportunities once they got there. And so it was to be.
Dumb luck? I don't know.
At any rate, he did well, and he would have been wiser to have stayed in his position rather than going out on his own with his filling stations and disastrous mining adventure. But I can imagine his romanticism informed his vision. He couldn't believe he could fail.
Of course I didn't know either Leo or Edna, let alone my mother's father, as they had all passed on by the time I was born.
In fact, all my grandparents were dead by the time I was born. At the time, it was a fairly unusual situation, as nearly everyone had grandparents. I didn't.
Not having the anchor of grandparents -- among other things -- has helped differentiate my point of view from that of many people who did have grandparents. I see and experience things somewhat differently than most people, and I always have.
1917 -- and WWI -- are considered the era when the US "came of age." That is another topic for another day, but I would agree there's something to it. Given the devastation in Europe and the creation of the Soviet Union, the impending collapse of the global economy and the breakup of the European Imperial Projects, the role of the US in world affairs had to change. It did. We thought for the better, but recent events -- say, over the last 60 years or so -- bring that into question.
We (collectively) seemingly aren't better at all. In fact, many of our collective worst aspects are on display. There's little or nothing "good" about it. And our model is being adopted widely.
I don't know that Leo learned his lesson with the collapse of his mining venture, My mother had nothing good to say about him afterwards, but I didn't know him, so I have nothing to base an opinion on. The indications prior to the collapse all seem positive, so whatever happened afterwards I think would have to grow out of that.
Much the same can be said for the US -- many, many positive indications that go haywire toward the end.
We'll see.
[Note: this post has been difficult for me to write, not so much for the topic as for the continuing problems I'm having with my condition. For the last week or more, I've been experiencing an RA "flare" that has been very painful and debilitating, and has been devilishly difficult to control. All part of the disease they say....]
Showing posts with label Indianapolis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Indianapolis. Show all posts
Saturday, April 1, 2017
Thursday, April 28, 2016
Leo the Incurable Romantic
Leo was my mother's step-father. He died before I was born, and I've never seen a picture of him, so I didn't know him and I have no personal knowledge of what he looked like. But since I've been on this journey of genealogical discovery, I feel like I've learned a great deal about him, enough, perhaps, to have a fairly good idea of what he was like.
I have little doubt that he was an incurable romantic.
He was second-generation American. He and his parents were born in the United States; his grandparents were born in Germany. That surprised me, for I thought he was Welsh or even Irish, but according to the records, he was German. He was born and reared in Indianapolis, and as far as I know he was a friend of my mother's biological father. That's what I was told by my mother, and the records I've found indicate they both worked for Indianapolis's streetcar company, and at least for a time they were neighbors.
Leo was a machinist for the streetcar company, whereas Larry (aka "Riley"), my mother's biological father, worked mostly as a conductor. When he worked. Leo was a member of the Sons of Pythias, and seems to have parlayed that and his own rather sunny personality into a much better life than Larry the Rebel was able to do for himself and his many offspring.
Larry would be killed in a railyard incident in St. Louis just before Christmas of 1916. He left behind a widow and young daughter in St. Louis and another widow and young daughter in Indianapolis. There were a number of other women and children, but those two households were primary at the time of Larry's death. The yard boss in St Louis married Larry's St. Louis widow Marie and adopted her daughter Helen, and they lived in St. Louis for the rest of their lives.
Larry's Indianapolis widow Edna would be married by Leo, and Leo, Edna and her daughter Virginia -- my mother -- would move to California in 1917 to start a new life. Leo never legally adopted my mother, but he treated her as his daughter and she used his last name as her own until she married.
Leo and Edna had no children together of their own.
In California, Leo started out as an auto mechanic for the Ed Reubel Dodge dealership in Santa Maria. He worked his way up to service manager, and he and his little family had a nice little California bungalow a few blocks away from the dealership. The house is still there and it still looks cozy and cheerful though it's now part of a multi-unit compound.
Sometime after 1930, Leo pulled up stakes and bought an auto court and filling station on the Redwood Highway in Willits called "U-Auto-Stop" where he and Edna moved. By this time my mother Virginia was married to her first husband, and shortly she would give birth to a daughter, Patricia, my (half) sister. They continued to live in Santa Maria where my mother's husband, Polk, worked as a mechanic and at other jobs for Ed Reubel.
In 1939, Leo sold the "U-Auto-Stop" and at first, I didn't know what had happened to them. Turns out he and Edna moved to Reno where he became the Secretary-Treasurer of a mining company. After some further search, I found out it was called the Jungo Mine, and it was located outside of Jungo, NV, the site of a very famous gold mine that had been extensively featured in Life Magazine. That mine was called the Jumbo Mine.
I found some ads for the Jungo Mine offering penny shares to all and sundry with extravagant promises of riches to come. Sacks of ore were being taken out of the Jungo Mine, some of them assaying at $12 and $15, so the ad copy said, and this translated to a remarkable return on a penny investment. "Get in now!"
Whether or not this mine actually ever operated, I don't know. There were lots of diggings around Jungo following the Jumbo strike in 1936, but whether any of them proved worthwhile is unknown to me. The ads I found for the Jungo Mine seem to have been placed only in 1940 -- I found none before or after -- and by 1941, Leo and Edna were living in Vallejo, CA.
Leo took a job as a machinist at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard -- where all those Liberty Ships were built to win the War -- and Edna took sick with the cancer that would shortly kill her. She died in October, 1941. Leo continued to work at Mare Island until his own death in 1945.
My mother spoke rather highly of Leo, when she spoke of him at all -- which wasn't often. Except that, when it came to her mother's death, she became hard and unforgiving. Suddenly her attitude toward Leo changed, and she blamed Leo for her mother's death at age 52. According to her, Leo and Edna had adopted Christian Science, and that meant Edna got no medical attention during her illness and according to my mother, she died in agony. There were hints in the story she told me that they had turned to Christian Science because they couldn't afford traditional medical treatment, and the fact that they couldn't afford it was due to Leo's profligacy.
That could be, but my mother didn't say anything to me about Reno or the mine or Vallejo. Her stories of her mother and stepfather stopped in Willits, which is where I thought Edna had died. But it wasn't so.
She lived at least briefly in Vallejo and died at the Solano County Hospital where she was taken when it was too late.
At the time, my mother was living with her husband and daughter on an orchard-ranch in Yolo County owned a Japanese-American family. Her husband, Polk, she said, was working as an oil-jobber, but according to records I found, he was a service station attendant. It's possible he was both. She divorced Polk in 1941 or 42 -- due to his infidelity, she said. She and my sister stayed on the ranch until some time after the Japanese family was sent away to the camps. Then they moved into town, Sacramento, just across the river from the ranch. Polk was also in Sacramento at the time, and he stayed there through the War and afterwards. In fact, he's buried in Sacramento, which surprised the heck out of me as he died in Walnut Creek where he lived with his second wife for thirty years or more working for Chevron, eventually becoming a vice president for sales.
But his new wife Jean was from Sacramento, and after Polk died she moved back to Sacramento where she lived the rest of her life.
This is getting far afield of Leo, however.
Leo's romanticism comes through in the path he follows from Indiana to California, from California to Nevada, and from Nevada back to California -- when it seems that his hopes in the mine were dashed.
In the end, I see his story as a romantic tragedy.
Leaving Indiana in 1917 and making a new life in California with my mother and her mother was in itself a romantic gesture, a supremely romantic gesture, it seems to me.
My mother's mother Edna had come from a rather well-off matriarchy headed by her mother Ida. Ida was a widow-woman who had apparently inherited quite a lot of property from her parents and her husband, land and buildings in the path of Indianapolis's growth during the 19th and early 20th centuries. She lived off the income and proceeds of sales of this property and provided a home for her sisters and son and daughter, and soon would be providing a home for her granddaughter when Edna gave birth to my mother Virginia in 1911. The house where they lived on N. Sherman Drive is still standing, and it seems like a rather modest place, though it's deceptively large. It's next door to a fire station which was built in 1915 on the site of Ida's former home, the place she'd shared with her husband and children. Though I've never seen a picture of that house, my impression is that it was an old two story farm house that was built when that section of Indianapolis was rural. It apparently burned in 1912 or 1913, and Ida sold the lot to the city -- for a fire station. The household moved next door to a house Ida also owned at the time.
These places on N. Sherman Dr were half a block from the Michigan Avenue streetcar line where Larry, my mother's biological father, worked -- when he worked -- as a conductor.
Larry was quite a ladies' man.
He'd been married in 1896 and had three children with his wife Maud, but they were divorced around 1907 and his children were farmed out. His daughter Florence went to live with his brother Frank and Frank's wife Edna, and for all anyone knew, Florence was Frank and Edna's daughter for ever more. Larry's sons, George and David, went to live with Larry's parents where they stayed until they reached majority.
Larry fathered other children, three of whom I found records of. One, Virgil, was born the same year as my mother (1911) to a woman (girl, really; she was 17) who never claimed to be married to Larry. My mother's mother Edna did claim to be married to Larry, though I could find no proof of it. According to what I did find, she claimed to be married to him in January or February of 1910. But she did not live with him as man and wife -- ever, so far as I could find out -- and she did not use his last name until after my mother Virginia's birth.
Larry's other child, Helen, was born to Marie, his wife in St. Louis. I did find records of their marriage, though he married her under what appears to have been an assumed name. My mother always claimed that he was a bigamist, and the scandalous discovery was made at his funeral when his "other family" was revealed. My mother remembered attending his funeral, and she recalled feeling sorry for his daughter Helen who was then two years old (my mother was five.)
She recalled the funeral taking place in Indianapolis, but it didn't. It was in St. Louis on the 23rd of December, 1916, and Larry was buried in Friedens Cemetery in Bellfontaine Neighbors just north of St. Louis.
I suspect my mother simply didn't remember the train trip of several hours from Indianapolis to St. Louis to attend his funeral.
My mother said she had few memories of her father, but I suspect she had none. Not only was he a ladies man, he was a somewhat notorious petty criminal, accused of numerous robberies and burglaries from the time he was a young teenager. In March of 1912, he was chased through the streets of downtown Indianapolis by a "merchant policeman" who was firing his gun at the fleeing Larry -- who he accused of burglarizing a drugstore.
Larry was apprehended by regular police -- who knew him -- and taken to the stationhouse where he denied everything. The proprietor of the drugstore averred that nothing had been taken from the premises. Larry was arraigned and the case was bound over to the grand jury but I found no disposition. He may have gone to trial, but maybe not.
Larry's father David was a prominent Civil War veteran who held a number of patronage positions in Indiana state government. He was the legislative parliamentarian, later the state land clerk, and he served in a number of other capacities. He had six sons, three of whom became prominent in Indiana in their own right. Larry, the second youngest, on the other hand, became notorious.
It seems that Larry's father got him out of one scrape with the law after another, but the 1912 incident may have been the last straw. By sometime in 1913, Larry had moved to St. Louis where his older brother Harold had long lived and worked as a printer and Linotype operator for the St. Louis Globe Dispatch. (As a side-note, David, the pater familias, had published a newspaper in Lebanon, Indiana, before moving to Indianapolis and taking up positions with the state government.)
After Larry died in St. Louis, Leo -- his friend in Indianapolis -- took it upon himself to "make an honest woman" out of Edna and to take care of and protect Edna's daughter Virgina. They moved to California to start a new life -- a project which appears to have gone very well.
The family's life was very different and better in California than it could possibly have been in Indiana. Indianapolis was rough and gritty and dirty, and whether she wanted to be or not, Edna was caught up in scandal brought on by Larry's misbehavior.
Given the "moral" standards of the era, Edna was sullied, and there was nothing she could do about it -- though she tried. Leaving was her best option, and the fact that Leo was there and ready, willing, and able to take the risk of building a new life in California with Edna and Virginia was a godsend.
It's too bad that Leo's romantic vision culminated with his mining adventure in Nevada -- which apparently came to nothing and left him broke, his wife ill, and his stepdaughter hating him.
It's a very common story in some ways, but on another plane, it may be unique to this particular group of people at this particular time in American history. I knew little about it because it all took place before I was born, and my mother was not necessarily forthcoming. She harbored great resentment -- indeed hatred -- towards Leo, blaming him and his incurable romantic vision for her mother's death. She could not and did not forgive him. I have little doubt he carried his own sense of guilt and failure to his own death a few years later (I believe he died of a heart attack -- or perhaps of a broken heart).
I didn't know Leo or Edna -- let alone Larry. I've never even seen a picture of any of them. But they had an influence on my life through my mother. Finding out about them -- who they were, where they came from, what they did -- is an adventure for me, something I could not have done to this extent prior to the advent of the internet.
Now that I've found living cousins I'm learning a whole lot about my father's family I never knew before, too. It's all quite a wonder.
I have little doubt that he was an incurable romantic.
He was second-generation American. He and his parents were born in the United States; his grandparents were born in Germany. That surprised me, for I thought he was Welsh or even Irish, but according to the records, he was German. He was born and reared in Indianapolis, and as far as I know he was a friend of my mother's biological father. That's what I was told by my mother, and the records I've found indicate they both worked for Indianapolis's streetcar company, and at least for a time they were neighbors.
Leo was a machinist for the streetcar company, whereas Larry (aka "Riley"), my mother's biological father, worked mostly as a conductor. When he worked. Leo was a member of the Sons of Pythias, and seems to have parlayed that and his own rather sunny personality into a much better life than Larry the Rebel was able to do for himself and his many offspring.
Larry would be killed in a railyard incident in St. Louis just before Christmas of 1916. He left behind a widow and young daughter in St. Louis and another widow and young daughter in Indianapolis. There were a number of other women and children, but those two households were primary at the time of Larry's death. The yard boss in St Louis married Larry's St. Louis widow Marie and adopted her daughter Helen, and they lived in St. Louis for the rest of their lives.
Larry's Indianapolis widow Edna would be married by Leo, and Leo, Edna and her daughter Virginia -- my mother -- would move to California in 1917 to start a new life. Leo never legally adopted my mother, but he treated her as his daughter and she used his last name as her own until she married.
Leo and Edna had no children together of their own.
In California, Leo started out as an auto mechanic for the Ed Reubel Dodge dealership in Santa Maria. He worked his way up to service manager, and he and his little family had a nice little California bungalow a few blocks away from the dealership. The house is still there and it still looks cozy and cheerful though it's now part of a multi-unit compound.
Sometime after 1930, Leo pulled up stakes and bought an auto court and filling station on the Redwood Highway in Willits called "U-Auto-Stop" where he and Edna moved. By this time my mother Virginia was married to her first husband, and shortly she would give birth to a daughter, Patricia, my (half) sister. They continued to live in Santa Maria where my mother's husband, Polk, worked as a mechanic and at other jobs for Ed Reubel.
In 1939, Leo sold the "U-Auto-Stop" and at first, I didn't know what had happened to them. Turns out he and Edna moved to Reno where he became the Secretary-Treasurer of a mining company. After some further search, I found out it was called the Jungo Mine, and it was located outside of Jungo, NV, the site of a very famous gold mine that had been extensively featured in Life Magazine. That mine was called the Jumbo Mine.
I found some ads for the Jungo Mine offering penny shares to all and sundry with extravagant promises of riches to come. Sacks of ore were being taken out of the Jungo Mine, some of them assaying at $12 and $15, so the ad copy said, and this translated to a remarkable return on a penny investment. "Get in now!"
Whether or not this mine actually ever operated, I don't know. There were lots of diggings around Jungo following the Jumbo strike in 1936, but whether any of them proved worthwhile is unknown to me. The ads I found for the Jungo Mine seem to have been placed only in 1940 -- I found none before or after -- and by 1941, Leo and Edna were living in Vallejo, CA.
Leo took a job as a machinist at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard -- where all those Liberty Ships were built to win the War -- and Edna took sick with the cancer that would shortly kill her. She died in October, 1941. Leo continued to work at Mare Island until his own death in 1945.
My mother spoke rather highly of Leo, when she spoke of him at all -- which wasn't often. Except that, when it came to her mother's death, she became hard and unforgiving. Suddenly her attitude toward Leo changed, and she blamed Leo for her mother's death at age 52. According to her, Leo and Edna had adopted Christian Science, and that meant Edna got no medical attention during her illness and according to my mother, she died in agony. There were hints in the story she told me that they had turned to Christian Science because they couldn't afford traditional medical treatment, and the fact that they couldn't afford it was due to Leo's profligacy.
That could be, but my mother didn't say anything to me about Reno or the mine or Vallejo. Her stories of her mother and stepfather stopped in Willits, which is where I thought Edna had died. But it wasn't so.
She lived at least briefly in Vallejo and died at the Solano County Hospital where she was taken when it was too late.
At the time, my mother was living with her husband and daughter on an orchard-ranch in Yolo County owned a Japanese-American family. Her husband, Polk, she said, was working as an oil-jobber, but according to records I found, he was a service station attendant. It's possible he was both. She divorced Polk in 1941 or 42 -- due to his infidelity, she said. She and my sister stayed on the ranch until some time after the Japanese family was sent away to the camps. Then they moved into town, Sacramento, just across the river from the ranch. Polk was also in Sacramento at the time, and he stayed there through the War and afterwards. In fact, he's buried in Sacramento, which surprised the heck out of me as he died in Walnut Creek where he lived with his second wife for thirty years or more working for Chevron, eventually becoming a vice president for sales.
But his new wife Jean was from Sacramento, and after Polk died she moved back to Sacramento where she lived the rest of her life.
This is getting far afield of Leo, however.
Leo's romanticism comes through in the path he follows from Indiana to California, from California to Nevada, and from Nevada back to California -- when it seems that his hopes in the mine were dashed.
In the end, I see his story as a romantic tragedy.
Leaving Indiana in 1917 and making a new life in California with my mother and her mother was in itself a romantic gesture, a supremely romantic gesture, it seems to me.
My mother's mother Edna had come from a rather well-off matriarchy headed by her mother Ida. Ida was a widow-woman who had apparently inherited quite a lot of property from her parents and her husband, land and buildings in the path of Indianapolis's growth during the 19th and early 20th centuries. She lived off the income and proceeds of sales of this property and provided a home for her sisters and son and daughter, and soon would be providing a home for her granddaughter when Edna gave birth to my mother Virginia in 1911. The house where they lived on N. Sherman Drive is still standing, and it seems like a rather modest place, though it's deceptively large. It's next door to a fire station which was built in 1915 on the site of Ida's former home, the place she'd shared with her husband and children. Though I've never seen a picture of that house, my impression is that it was an old two story farm house that was built when that section of Indianapolis was rural. It apparently burned in 1912 or 1913, and Ida sold the lot to the city -- for a fire station. The household moved next door to a house Ida also owned at the time.
These places on N. Sherman Dr were half a block from the Michigan Avenue streetcar line where Larry, my mother's biological father, worked -- when he worked -- as a conductor.
Larry was quite a ladies' man.
He'd been married in 1896 and had three children with his wife Maud, but they were divorced around 1907 and his children were farmed out. His daughter Florence went to live with his brother Frank and Frank's wife Edna, and for all anyone knew, Florence was Frank and Edna's daughter for ever more. Larry's sons, George and David, went to live with Larry's parents where they stayed until they reached majority.
Larry fathered other children, three of whom I found records of. One, Virgil, was born the same year as my mother (1911) to a woman (girl, really; she was 17) who never claimed to be married to Larry. My mother's mother Edna did claim to be married to Larry, though I could find no proof of it. According to what I did find, she claimed to be married to him in January or February of 1910. But she did not live with him as man and wife -- ever, so far as I could find out -- and she did not use his last name until after my mother Virginia's birth.
Larry's other child, Helen, was born to Marie, his wife in St. Louis. I did find records of their marriage, though he married her under what appears to have been an assumed name. My mother always claimed that he was a bigamist, and the scandalous discovery was made at his funeral when his "other family" was revealed. My mother remembered attending his funeral, and she recalled feeling sorry for his daughter Helen who was then two years old (my mother was five.)
She recalled the funeral taking place in Indianapolis, but it didn't. It was in St. Louis on the 23rd of December, 1916, and Larry was buried in Friedens Cemetery in Bellfontaine Neighbors just north of St. Louis.
I suspect my mother simply didn't remember the train trip of several hours from Indianapolis to St. Louis to attend his funeral.
My mother said she had few memories of her father, but I suspect she had none. Not only was he a ladies man, he was a somewhat notorious petty criminal, accused of numerous robberies and burglaries from the time he was a young teenager. In March of 1912, he was chased through the streets of downtown Indianapolis by a "merchant policeman" who was firing his gun at the fleeing Larry -- who he accused of burglarizing a drugstore.
Larry was apprehended by regular police -- who knew him -- and taken to the stationhouse where he denied everything. The proprietor of the drugstore averred that nothing had been taken from the premises. Larry was arraigned and the case was bound over to the grand jury but I found no disposition. He may have gone to trial, but maybe not.
Larry's father David was a prominent Civil War veteran who held a number of patronage positions in Indiana state government. He was the legislative parliamentarian, later the state land clerk, and he served in a number of other capacities. He had six sons, three of whom became prominent in Indiana in their own right. Larry, the second youngest, on the other hand, became notorious.
It seems that Larry's father got him out of one scrape with the law after another, but the 1912 incident may have been the last straw. By sometime in 1913, Larry had moved to St. Louis where his older brother Harold had long lived and worked as a printer and Linotype operator for the St. Louis Globe Dispatch. (As a side-note, David, the pater familias, had published a newspaper in Lebanon, Indiana, before moving to Indianapolis and taking up positions with the state government.)
After Larry died in St. Louis, Leo -- his friend in Indianapolis -- took it upon himself to "make an honest woman" out of Edna and to take care of and protect Edna's daughter Virgina. They moved to California to start a new life -- a project which appears to have gone very well.
The family's life was very different and better in California than it could possibly have been in Indiana. Indianapolis was rough and gritty and dirty, and whether she wanted to be or not, Edna was caught up in scandal brought on by Larry's misbehavior.
Given the "moral" standards of the era, Edna was sullied, and there was nothing she could do about it -- though she tried. Leaving was her best option, and the fact that Leo was there and ready, willing, and able to take the risk of building a new life in California with Edna and Virginia was a godsend.
It's too bad that Leo's romantic vision culminated with his mining adventure in Nevada -- which apparently came to nothing and left him broke, his wife ill, and his stepdaughter hating him.
It's a very common story in some ways, but on another plane, it may be unique to this particular group of people at this particular time in American history. I knew little about it because it all took place before I was born, and my mother was not necessarily forthcoming. She harbored great resentment -- indeed hatred -- towards Leo, blaming him and his incurable romantic vision for her mother's death. She could not and did not forgive him. I have little doubt he carried his own sense of guilt and failure to his own death a few years later (I believe he died of a heart attack -- or perhaps of a broken heart).
I didn't know Leo or Edna -- let alone Larry. I've never even seen a picture of any of them. But they had an influence on my life through my mother. Finding out about them -- who they were, where they came from, what they did -- is an adventure for me, something I could not have done to this extent prior to the advent of the internet.
Now that I've found living cousins I'm learning a whole lot about my father's family I never knew before, too. It's all quite a wonder.
Saturday, January 24, 2015
"It Was A Breakdown In Public Order" -- The Indianapolis Streetcar Strike of 1913
While I've been on somewhat of a hiatus -- due to infirmity and feeling vaguely out of sorts, not sure what it is -- every now and then, I've looked back into my ancestry, filling in some of the missing links and pondering the nature of my mother's father, the outlaw who spurred my research in the first place.
One of the things I was told about him when I was young was that he was a streetcar conductor in Indianapolis who was killed in a tragic accident. He was crushed between the cars when my mother was five years old. That would have been in 1916.
I learned something about the Indianapolis city and interurban traction -- or streetcar -- system years ago. It was immense, not just in the city but throughout the region with routes from Cincinnati to Chicago. It was the major way people got around in those days and it was one of the main ways of moving freight between cities and towns in the region.
And there was a strike in 1913; there was another one in 1918. I wondered if my grandfather had participated in the 1913 strike. Because he must have been such a rebel, I wondered if his death was not an accident at all but was retaliation for his union activities -- assuming he was a union member. It wouldn't surprise me. Not in the least.
I've recently looked into the 1913 Indianapolis Streetcar Strike again to see if I can get a better picture of what was going on and what the outcome was.
The strike was instigated by the Amalgamated Street Railway Employees of America, and it started on Hallowe'en night, October 31, 1913. The strike was called because the traction company essentially refused to negotiate pay and working conditions for the employees and then fired hundreds of union workers then employed by the company and refused to hire any union workers in the future. We often think that employer/employee relations are bad now. They were much worse then. Almost inconceivably worse, which should be a clue to how bad things can get once again.
The company offered workers nominal pay of 20¢ or 21¢ an hour; work schedules were typically ten or twelve hours a day, but schedules were often arbitrarily cut, days off were random -- if there were any at all -- and workers could never depend steady employment or regular pay. Many workers reported they were not paid for the work they did and often received much less than the company's nominal pay rates. Instead of 20¢ or 21¢ an hour, they received 10¢ or 15¢; the company would dock the pay of workers for any reason or no reason, and workers were essentially at the complete mercy of the company and its management. There was no sick leave, no vacation, but the company provided paid meal breaks -- so long as the workers weren't en route which motormen and conductors almost always were. Workers had few or no rights, they could be assigned or fired at will, and they they were afforded neither dignity nor justice within the company. They were little more than disposable and replaceable parts. It was a rough time for workers in every industry, but the streetcar systems of America -- and particularly Indianapolis -- were particularly mean and soul crushing to their workers.
My mother's father worked intermittently as both a conductor and a motorman in Indianapolis from about 1905 until he left town -- which would have been between 1912 and 1914. I know that he was arrested for burglary in May of 1912 and waived his preliminary hearing, but I've found no record of the disposition of his case. I thought he might have gone to prison, but there is apparently no record of that. I thought maybe he'd left town in 1912, but the other day, I found a brief reference to him in Indianapolis in a newspaper clipping from June of 1913. This was getting very close to the beginning of the strike -- and the notice referred to him as a conductor.
Ah ha. So he was still in Indianapolis -- and apparently still working for the traction company -- as late as mid-1913. By that time, the Amalgamated Street Railway Employees union were organizing in Indianapolis and running into all sorts of duplicity from the company. It would have been difficult or impossible for Lawrence Riley (my mother's father) to stay out of it. Given his rebellious nature, I doubt he'd want to stay out of it in any case. I can easily envision him stirring things up instead.
The Indianapolis Streetcar Strike of 1913 was the biggest transit strike in the country up to that point, and it snarled or stopped transportation throughout the upper Midwest for days. There was a police mutiny in Indianapolis as well. Sympathetic policemen refused orders to quell the strike. They would not fire on the strikers. Many resigned from the force; others were fired for "insubordination." The company brought in Pinkerton strikebreakers from Chicago to run the cars. The strikebreakers were promptly set upon by strikers and other citizens of Indianapolis. The police -- what few were still on the job -- refused to protect the strike breakers. Street cars were vandalized, overhead wires were cut, the whole system was brought to a screeching halt. The situation was characterized as "a breakdown in public order." Restoration of law and order was the chief demand of the streetcar company, but they faced the devil's own time getting their way.
Four strikers and two strikebreakers were killed in the ensuing mayhem, hundreds were injured in the so-called riots. A considerable portion of the company's rolling stock was damaged or destroyed. Electric wires powering the streetcars were cut. There were reports of extensive vandalism throughout downtown Indianapolis, though how true they were it's hard to say at this distance. The governor eventually called in the National Guard to restore order and they were even going to be assigned to run the cars if the strikers did not go back to work. There was a mass gathering of strikers and their sympathizers at the Capitol building at which a list of demands was presented to the governor. He spoke to the crowd and promised that he would present labor reform legislation to be voted on early the next year. The crowd was not mollified, but in the end, he met with strike leaders and company management and mediated some of the issued sufficiently that the strikers agreed to return to their jobs under certain conditions and workers and management agreed to submit grievances to binding arbitration.
The company, after refusing to even acknowledge workers and their grievances, finally faced the necessity of dealing with the problems workers had been pointing out for years, specifically abysmally low pay and arbitrary working conditions. While the union demanded 35¢ an hour minimum, the company granted 28¢ -- after defending their lower pay scale as just and proper and quite sufficient for their workers who were, with few exceptions, satisfied. After all, workers who had been with the company five years or more were already receiving 25¢ an hour, so what were the whiners complaining about anyway? The company also agreed to minimum weekly and monthly schedules and pay. Minimum per month was set at a princely $45. About $11 a week. It's easy enough to imagine how little transit company workers were paid prior to the agreement.
My grandmother, Edna, was working as a telephone operator at the time, and I did a little research on what operators were paid in the early 1900s. It was pretty bad. Starting pay was around $20 a week and it was considered by telephone workers to be insultingly low. Telephone companies justified the low pay by claiming that it took years and years for operators to become skilled enough to warrant higher pay, after years and years of training and experience, it wasn't uncommon for them to make $25 or even $30 a week, considered a magnificent sum for the day.
My grandmother didn't work for the telephone company, she worked for a bank -- which coincidentally enough was managed by Lawrence Riley's brother George. She worked there for years and years. I don't know how much she made working as an operator at the bank, but it was probably more -- conceivably quite a lot more -- than Lawrence Riley received from the traction company as a conductor or motorman before or after the strike.
In the bigger picture, the strike led the Indiana Legislature to pass all kinds of labor reform. Minimum wage, end of child labor, establishment of worker rights, rules and mechanisms for grievances, on and on. It was an extensive package of reform, one of the most extensive in the country at the time. Compared to where national labor law was at the time, Indiana's reforms were stunning.
All because of a week-long strike and the determination of workers in the face of violence and duplicity by the state and the company and in the face of provocation from strike breakers.
Let's be clear, though. It was not a "peaceful" strike by any means. It wasn't as bloody and violent a some would be both before and after, but the key element, I think, is that the police mutinied and refused to carry out orders to suppress the strike. The people of Indianapolis for the most part stood with the strikers and with the police mutineers. Even though the traction company got most of what it wanted in the arbitration, and workers seemed to get very little, the results overall were remarkable.
A lesson can be learned from this 1913 "breakdown in public order." Don't give in and don't give up. Stand for what is right. Stand with one another. You have nothing to lose but your chains.
"Ain't no power like the power of the people
'cause the power of the people won't stop."
Be not afraid...
One of the things I was told about him when I was young was that he was a streetcar conductor in Indianapolis who was killed in a tragic accident. He was crushed between the cars when my mother was five years old. That would have been in 1916.
I learned something about the Indianapolis city and interurban traction -- or streetcar -- system years ago. It was immense, not just in the city but throughout the region with routes from Cincinnati to Chicago. It was the major way people got around in those days and it was one of the main ways of moving freight between cities and towns in the region.
And there was a strike in 1913; there was another one in 1918. I wondered if my grandfather had participated in the 1913 strike. Because he must have been such a rebel, I wondered if his death was not an accident at all but was retaliation for his union activities -- assuming he was a union member. It wouldn't surprise me. Not in the least.
I've recently looked into the 1913 Indianapolis Streetcar Strike again to see if I can get a better picture of what was going on and what the outcome was.
The strike was instigated by the Amalgamated Street Railway Employees of America, and it started on Hallowe'en night, October 31, 1913. The strike was called because the traction company essentially refused to negotiate pay and working conditions for the employees and then fired hundreds of union workers then employed by the company and refused to hire any union workers in the future. We often think that employer/employee relations are bad now. They were much worse then. Almost inconceivably worse, which should be a clue to how bad things can get once again.
The company offered workers nominal pay of 20¢ or 21¢ an hour; work schedules were typically ten or twelve hours a day, but schedules were often arbitrarily cut, days off were random -- if there were any at all -- and workers could never depend steady employment or regular pay. Many workers reported they were not paid for the work they did and often received much less than the company's nominal pay rates. Instead of 20¢ or 21¢ an hour, they received 10¢ or 15¢; the company would dock the pay of workers for any reason or no reason, and workers were essentially at the complete mercy of the company and its management. There was no sick leave, no vacation, but the company provided paid meal breaks -- so long as the workers weren't en route which motormen and conductors almost always were. Workers had few or no rights, they could be assigned or fired at will, and they they were afforded neither dignity nor justice within the company. They were little more than disposable and replaceable parts. It was a rough time for workers in every industry, but the streetcar systems of America -- and particularly Indianapolis -- were particularly mean and soul crushing to their workers.
My mother's father worked intermittently as both a conductor and a motorman in Indianapolis from about 1905 until he left town -- which would have been between 1912 and 1914. I know that he was arrested for burglary in May of 1912 and waived his preliminary hearing, but I've found no record of the disposition of his case. I thought he might have gone to prison, but there is apparently no record of that. I thought maybe he'd left town in 1912, but the other day, I found a brief reference to him in Indianapolis in a newspaper clipping from June of 1913. This was getting very close to the beginning of the strike -- and the notice referred to him as a conductor.
Ah ha. So he was still in Indianapolis -- and apparently still working for the traction company -- as late as mid-1913. By that time, the Amalgamated Street Railway Employees union were organizing in Indianapolis and running into all sorts of duplicity from the company. It would have been difficult or impossible for Lawrence Riley (my mother's father) to stay out of it. Given his rebellious nature, I doubt he'd want to stay out of it in any case. I can easily envision him stirring things up instead.
The Indianapolis Streetcar Strike of 1913 was the biggest transit strike in the country up to that point, and it snarled or stopped transportation throughout the upper Midwest for days. There was a police mutiny in Indianapolis as well. Sympathetic policemen refused orders to quell the strike. They would not fire on the strikers. Many resigned from the force; others were fired for "insubordination." The company brought in Pinkerton strikebreakers from Chicago to run the cars. The strikebreakers were promptly set upon by strikers and other citizens of Indianapolis. The police -- what few were still on the job -- refused to protect the strike breakers. Street cars were vandalized, overhead wires were cut, the whole system was brought to a screeching halt. The situation was characterized as "a breakdown in public order." Restoration of law and order was the chief demand of the streetcar company, but they faced the devil's own time getting their way.
Four strikers and two strikebreakers were killed in the ensuing mayhem, hundreds were injured in the so-called riots. A considerable portion of the company's rolling stock was damaged or destroyed. Electric wires powering the streetcars were cut. There were reports of extensive vandalism throughout downtown Indianapolis, though how true they were it's hard to say at this distance. The governor eventually called in the National Guard to restore order and they were even going to be assigned to run the cars if the strikers did not go back to work. There was a mass gathering of strikers and their sympathizers at the Capitol building at which a list of demands was presented to the governor. He spoke to the crowd and promised that he would present labor reform legislation to be voted on early the next year. The crowd was not mollified, but in the end, he met with strike leaders and company management and mediated some of the issued sufficiently that the strikers agreed to return to their jobs under certain conditions and workers and management agreed to submit grievances to binding arbitration.
The company, after refusing to even acknowledge workers and their grievances, finally faced the necessity of dealing with the problems workers had been pointing out for years, specifically abysmally low pay and arbitrary working conditions. While the union demanded 35¢ an hour minimum, the company granted 28¢ -- after defending their lower pay scale as just and proper and quite sufficient for their workers who were, with few exceptions, satisfied. After all, workers who had been with the company five years or more were already receiving 25¢ an hour, so what were the whiners complaining about anyway? The company also agreed to minimum weekly and monthly schedules and pay. Minimum per month was set at a princely $45. About $11 a week. It's easy enough to imagine how little transit company workers were paid prior to the agreement.
My grandmother, Edna, was working as a telephone operator at the time, and I did a little research on what operators were paid in the early 1900s. It was pretty bad. Starting pay was around $20 a week and it was considered by telephone workers to be insultingly low. Telephone companies justified the low pay by claiming that it took years and years for operators to become skilled enough to warrant higher pay, after years and years of training and experience, it wasn't uncommon for them to make $25 or even $30 a week, considered a magnificent sum for the day.
My grandmother didn't work for the telephone company, she worked for a bank -- which coincidentally enough was managed by Lawrence Riley's brother George. She worked there for years and years. I don't know how much she made working as an operator at the bank, but it was probably more -- conceivably quite a lot more -- than Lawrence Riley received from the traction company as a conductor or motorman before or after the strike.
In the bigger picture, the strike led the Indiana Legislature to pass all kinds of labor reform. Minimum wage, end of child labor, establishment of worker rights, rules and mechanisms for grievances, on and on. It was an extensive package of reform, one of the most extensive in the country at the time. Compared to where national labor law was at the time, Indiana's reforms were stunning.
All because of a week-long strike and the determination of workers in the face of violence and duplicity by the state and the company and in the face of provocation from strike breakers.
Let's be clear, though. It was not a "peaceful" strike by any means. It wasn't as bloody and violent a some would be both before and after, but the key element, I think, is that the police mutinied and refused to carry out orders to suppress the strike. The people of Indianapolis for the most part stood with the strikers and with the police mutineers. Even though the traction company got most of what it wanted in the arbitration, and workers seemed to get very little, the results overall were remarkable.
A lesson can be learned from this 1913 "breakdown in public order." Don't give in and don't give up. Stand for what is right. Stand with one another. You have nothing to lose but your chains.
"Ain't no power like the power of the people
'cause the power of the people won't stop."
Be not afraid...
Monday, December 29, 2014
What I Learned This Year: Part The First
I have to start with how much I learned about my ancestry that I never knew before.
For example, I now know my mother's father's full name, where and when he was born, how, where and when he died, some of the highlights (well, low lights) of his career as a (petty?) criminal, how many children he fathered with how many women, and quite a bit about his family.
My mother told me she had few memories of her father because he died when she was five years old, and she had very few memories before she and her mother and stepfather moved to California from Indianapolis when she was six. I suspect she had no memories of her biological father at all. He was arrested for burglarizing a drug store in Indianapolis when she was six months old in May of 1912. He appeared in court a week later, and his case was given to the grand jury. In August, my mother's mother sued him for divorce. From that point, he disappears from Indianapolis.
Next time he turns up in the records, he's in St. Louis, working on the railroad. In 1914, his 'wife' in St. Louis (whether they are legally married or not, I don't know) gives birth to a daughter. And in December of 1916, he's killed in a horrible railyard accident. His death certificate lists the manner of his death as "Body cut in two."
In 1917, my mother's mother married again in Santa Ana, California, to a man who was a neighbor and possibly a friend and colleague of my mother's biological father.
My mother had been told that her father died in a streetcar accident in Indianapolis, but that wasn't so. She'd been told he was a streetcar conductor in Indianapolis, which he was at the time he met her mother, apparently. But he was living in St. Louis when he died; he was working as a railway switchman. His older brother was a Linotype operator for the St. Louis Globe newspaper at the time and had been living in St. Louis since about 1890.
At some point, Harold -- my mother's father's older brother in St. Louis -- seems to have married my mother's father's first wife Maud who had divorced my mother's father sometime before 1910. Or maybe he didn't marry her. They were living together as husband and wife, but who knows whether they were married? I don't.
I haven't been able to figure out whether my mother's biological father was legally married to anyone but Maud, as there seems to be no record of any other legal wife but her. But in those days, I've found, common law marriages were routine, and it's quite possible that his other wives were common law.
The problem is that my mother was sure there was a scandal when he died and it was discovered he had another family "at the other end of the line," as both wives and daughters appeared at his funeral. My understanding was that all this happened in Indianapolis, but it couldn't have. He died and is buried in St. Louis. The only way it could have happened is if my mother (then a five year old girl) and her mother traveled to St. Louis for the funeral. I suspect that's what actually took place.
My mother was convinced her father was a bigamist because of the wife and daughter "at the other end of the line." But that may not be true. He may not have been a bigamist in the legal sense. I found no record that he was legally married or divorced from my mother's mother, for example, nor were there any indications in the records that my mother's mother and father ever lived together as husband and wife. Instead my mother's mother is listed as living with her mother and aunts in Indianapolis, even after my mother was born, until they moved to California in 1917 -- almost a year after my mother's father's death in St. Louis.
That story still holds some mysteries, but the story I was told, that my mother's father was a streetcar conductor who had died in a streetcar accident in Indianapolis when she was five wasn't quite accurate, and I'm pretty sure it's what my mother was told and passed on to me without any particular knowledge of her own about it. She said she remembered the little girl -- the two year old daughter of her father's other wife -- and she felt sorry for her. If that's true, then more than likely that meeting took place in St. Louis. But she never mentioned St. Louis in her tellings of the stories. I doubt she remembered where she was at the time.
My mother's father is buried in Friedens Cemetery in North St. Louis (actually in Bellfonatine Neighbors). This is about a mile from Calvary Cemetery where Dred Scott is buried, and about two miles from St. John's Cemetery where Mike Brown is buried.
In the early '80's I lived and worked for a time in St. Louis -- well, it was actually in Webster Groves -- but I had no idea that my mother's father ever lived or was buried there. Instead, I used some of my free time to go to Iowa where I was born and where my father had lived and died. I didn't check out his grave -- which I've never seen in person, though I have seen pictures -- but I did check out his house, and recapture some of my earlier memories of the town.
If I had known my mother's father had connections to St. Louis, I would have made a kind of pilgrimage to various sites I know about now, but had no knowledge of then. For example, the railyard where he died is still there by the Mississippi River. It looks like a Superfund site, but the tracks and much of the other infrastructure that existed in 1916 is still in place. The homes where he was listed as living are no longer there because they were torn down to build the freeways, but his older brother's place in Baden (north of St. Louis) still stands.
Baden, I found out this year, has an interesting connection with my father's family, too. In that case, though, the Baden is in Germany where my father's mother's parents were from. I'd been told they were Germans, but exactly where they were from was somewhat murky. Frankfurt, Prussia, Bavaria, Munich were all mentioned, but not Baden, interestingly. Apparently, from what I was able to find out, my father's mother's parents were from a little village called Weibstadt that has been absorbed by Heidelberg and therefore no longer exists. There may have been travels and sojourns elsewhere in Germany ("Germany" didn't exist at the time, either), but if so, it would have been when they were children. Both my father's mother's parents emigrated to America when they were 15 years old in 1855.
I was told that the family was "probably originally Jewish," but I have yet to see any proof of it. It's possible as there are Jewish families in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands with the same last name, but I haven't found any direct connection between them. At any rate, the family had long been Catholic by the time they came to America.
In researching the Irish side of my father's roots, I found there was a good deal of confusion and not a little Blarney. My father was convinced that we were descended from a prominent American Revolutionary family with deep roots in Maryland. Well... no. Not the way I found the line, at any rate. I will say it is possible that my father's Irish ancestors and the Maryland family he claimed descent from were related distantly, in Ireland, but there is no connection between them and my father's ancestors after 1700 or so. They may not even be branches of the same family as several independent and unrelated families use the same last name.
There was confusion, however, because apparently two brothers emigrated to America with their families at two different times and settled in the same places, first in Ohio and then in Iowa. Edward emigrated with his family in 1842 and settled near Springfield, Ohio; his brother Alexander emigrated with his family in 1850 and settled nearby. Both brothers and most of their families then moved to Iowa in 1857, where they appear to have taken up a number of farmsteads in the general vicinity of Davenport. Edward and Alexander's families and descendants are so intertwined and they use many of the same given names so it's difficult to sort out just who was who. There are similar problems sorting out who the mothers were, as there were at least four different women married to Edward and Alexander, and indications are that two of them were sisters, and one may have been traded between the brothers, first married to one and then to the other.
I have not been able to unravel who is actually related to whom and how beyond my father's father's generation where it's pretty straightforward and clear. Earlier, however, it's very confused and confusing.
Again, this kind of informality of marriage and relationships was not uncommon in the 19th century. It seemed in fact to be a feature not a bug of the Westward Expansion. Today we might think it's very odd -- I certainly do -- but apparently it wasn't in those days, and people took it quite naturally.
We have a notion of Victorian patriarchy, prudishness and propriety that doesn't quite match the reality.
My mother and her mother were part of matriarchies, for example, in which men were at best useful accessories and often enough were little more than despised interlopers. "Sperm donors."
From the research I did this year, I found that my mother's mother's mother, Ida, had been widowed in 1904. She set up a household for her mother, herself, her sisters (all widows themselves) and their children (two boys and a girl) in Indianapolis. Ida apparently inherited a lot of property from her husband -- who I found she hadn't lived with for years before he died as he had moved back to his parent's house to take care of his own mother who was apparently an invalid. Ida was left well off for the rest of her life, however, though her sisters were apparently not so well fixed after their husbands died.
My mother's mother, Edna -- Ida's daughter -- worked as a telephone operator at an Indianapolis bank managed by my mother's father's younger brother, George. I suspect that any memories my mother said she had of her biological father were actually of George, who would have been her uncle, but I don't know that for certain. All I'm sure of is that her father left Indianapolis sometime between mid-1912 and mid-1913 (when my mother was not even two years old) whereas Edna and my mother stayed in Indianapolis until 1917 -- when they moved to California with Leo who became my mother's step-father.
I learned much more about other characters among my ancestors this year, people I'd only heard about previously. Many were long dead, but others were still alive when I was young though I didn't meet or know them.
One was my father's older brother Vincent. He was accused of and tried for the murder of his wife, Garla a couple of years before I was born. He and his wife cared for -- essentially they adopted -- my half-brother Terry after my father's first wife Ted (nickname for Thelma) died in childbirth. Vincent's alibi was that he was with his mistress in town when Garla died, and he said he discovered her body at the foot of the stairs when he returned home the next morning. The prosecutor claimed that Vincent had beaten her to death as she had numerous bruises on her body. The cause of death was a brain hemorrhage.
My half-brother was apparently the only witness, but he could not testify due to his condition -- now called autism. He was 11 or 12 years old at the time.
Vincent was tried for murder twice. The first jury hung; the second acquitted him. I didn't know about the first trial until this year. My father had been one of his defense attorneys -- the only time he tried a criminal case in court -- and he kept voluminous records and wrote a newsletter for the rest of the family describing what was going on, but the records I've seen and the story he told didn't mention the first trial and the hung jury, just the second trial and the acquittal. That story included the fact of my half-brother's testimony to the judge in chambers, but not what his testimony was. My father's story was that the judge then directed a verdict of "not-guilty."
I didn't know what happened to Vincent until this year. He moved to Santa Barbara in 1947 with his mistress from Iowa and they were married. He died in 1962, in Santa Barbara. I had no idea he was there. From 1949 to 1953, I lived 50 miles north of Santa Barbara, and from 1953 to 1959, I lived in Los Angeles, a few hours south on Highway 101 from Santa Barbara. The only thing I knew about Vincent at that time was that he'd left town after he was acquitted and his whereabouts were "unknown."
Whether anybody (for example, my parents) knew where he was and just didn't want to say, I don't know, but I was surprised as heck to learn he was in Santa Barbara until his death, as I had no idea until I saw records this year.
There were many more things I learned this year about my ancestors and their relatives. I'm still attempting to process all of it. I've started to novelize some of the story as that seems to be the best way for me to understand what I've learned.
In some ways, I wish I'd known these things before now, but in other ways, I'm not convinced it would make any difference. All my grandparents were dead by the time I was born, and the stories I heard about "my people" when I was young were not that far from true. I'm far from convinced the records I've seen this year are necessarily true themselves -- especially Census records, which are notoriously untrue.
People make up stories about their own past as well as that of their ancestors.
Maybe next year, I'll be able to fictionalize what I've learned this year...
For example, I now know my mother's father's full name, where and when he was born, how, where and when he died, some of the highlights (well, low lights) of his career as a (petty?) criminal, how many children he fathered with how many women, and quite a bit about his family.
My mother told me she had few memories of her father because he died when she was five years old, and she had very few memories before she and her mother and stepfather moved to California from Indianapolis when she was six. I suspect she had no memories of her biological father at all. He was arrested for burglarizing a drug store in Indianapolis when she was six months old in May of 1912. He appeared in court a week later, and his case was given to the grand jury. In August, my mother's mother sued him for divorce. From that point, he disappears from Indianapolis.
Next time he turns up in the records, he's in St. Louis, working on the railroad. In 1914, his 'wife' in St. Louis (whether they are legally married or not, I don't know) gives birth to a daughter. And in December of 1916, he's killed in a horrible railyard accident. His death certificate lists the manner of his death as "Body cut in two."
In 1917, my mother's mother married again in Santa Ana, California, to a man who was a neighbor and possibly a friend and colleague of my mother's biological father.
My mother had been told that her father died in a streetcar accident in Indianapolis, but that wasn't so. She'd been told he was a streetcar conductor in Indianapolis, which he was at the time he met her mother, apparently. But he was living in St. Louis when he died; he was working as a railway switchman. His older brother was a Linotype operator for the St. Louis Globe newspaper at the time and had been living in St. Louis since about 1890.
At some point, Harold -- my mother's father's older brother in St. Louis -- seems to have married my mother's father's first wife Maud who had divorced my mother's father sometime before 1910. Or maybe he didn't marry her. They were living together as husband and wife, but who knows whether they were married? I don't.
I haven't been able to figure out whether my mother's biological father was legally married to anyone but Maud, as there seems to be no record of any other legal wife but her. But in those days, I've found, common law marriages were routine, and it's quite possible that his other wives were common law.
The problem is that my mother was sure there was a scandal when he died and it was discovered he had another family "at the other end of the line," as both wives and daughters appeared at his funeral. My understanding was that all this happened in Indianapolis, but it couldn't have. He died and is buried in St. Louis. The only way it could have happened is if my mother (then a five year old girl) and her mother traveled to St. Louis for the funeral. I suspect that's what actually took place.
My mother was convinced her father was a bigamist because of the wife and daughter "at the other end of the line." But that may not be true. He may not have been a bigamist in the legal sense. I found no record that he was legally married or divorced from my mother's mother, for example, nor were there any indications in the records that my mother's mother and father ever lived together as husband and wife. Instead my mother's mother is listed as living with her mother and aunts in Indianapolis, even after my mother was born, until they moved to California in 1917 -- almost a year after my mother's father's death in St. Louis.
That story still holds some mysteries, but the story I was told, that my mother's father was a streetcar conductor who had died in a streetcar accident in Indianapolis when she was five wasn't quite accurate, and I'm pretty sure it's what my mother was told and passed on to me without any particular knowledge of her own about it. She said she remembered the little girl -- the two year old daughter of her father's other wife -- and she felt sorry for her. If that's true, then more than likely that meeting took place in St. Louis. But she never mentioned St. Louis in her tellings of the stories. I doubt she remembered where she was at the time.
My mother's father is buried in Friedens Cemetery in North St. Louis (actually in Bellfonatine Neighbors). This is about a mile from Calvary Cemetery where Dred Scott is buried, and about two miles from St. John's Cemetery where Mike Brown is buried.
In the early '80's I lived and worked for a time in St. Louis -- well, it was actually in Webster Groves -- but I had no idea that my mother's father ever lived or was buried there. Instead, I used some of my free time to go to Iowa where I was born and where my father had lived and died. I didn't check out his grave -- which I've never seen in person, though I have seen pictures -- but I did check out his house, and recapture some of my earlier memories of the town.
If I had known my mother's father had connections to St. Louis, I would have made a kind of pilgrimage to various sites I know about now, but had no knowledge of then. For example, the railyard where he died is still there by the Mississippi River. It looks like a Superfund site, but the tracks and much of the other infrastructure that existed in 1916 is still in place. The homes where he was listed as living are no longer there because they were torn down to build the freeways, but his older brother's place in Baden (north of St. Louis) still stands.
Baden, I found out this year, has an interesting connection with my father's family, too. In that case, though, the Baden is in Germany where my father's mother's parents were from. I'd been told they were Germans, but exactly where they were from was somewhat murky. Frankfurt, Prussia, Bavaria, Munich were all mentioned, but not Baden, interestingly. Apparently, from what I was able to find out, my father's mother's parents were from a little village called Weibstadt that has been absorbed by Heidelberg and therefore no longer exists. There may have been travels and sojourns elsewhere in Germany ("Germany" didn't exist at the time, either), but if so, it would have been when they were children. Both my father's mother's parents emigrated to America when they were 15 years old in 1855.
I was told that the family was "probably originally Jewish," but I have yet to see any proof of it. It's possible as there are Jewish families in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands with the same last name, but I haven't found any direct connection between them. At any rate, the family had long been Catholic by the time they came to America.
In researching the Irish side of my father's roots, I found there was a good deal of confusion and not a little Blarney. My father was convinced that we were descended from a prominent American Revolutionary family with deep roots in Maryland. Well... no. Not the way I found the line, at any rate. I will say it is possible that my father's Irish ancestors and the Maryland family he claimed descent from were related distantly, in Ireland, but there is no connection between them and my father's ancestors after 1700 or so. They may not even be branches of the same family as several independent and unrelated families use the same last name.
There was confusion, however, because apparently two brothers emigrated to America with their families at two different times and settled in the same places, first in Ohio and then in Iowa. Edward emigrated with his family in 1842 and settled near Springfield, Ohio; his brother Alexander emigrated with his family in 1850 and settled nearby. Both brothers and most of their families then moved to Iowa in 1857, where they appear to have taken up a number of farmsteads in the general vicinity of Davenport. Edward and Alexander's families and descendants are so intertwined and they use many of the same given names so it's difficult to sort out just who was who. There are similar problems sorting out who the mothers were, as there were at least four different women married to Edward and Alexander, and indications are that two of them were sisters, and one may have been traded between the brothers, first married to one and then to the other.
I have not been able to unravel who is actually related to whom and how beyond my father's father's generation where it's pretty straightforward and clear. Earlier, however, it's very confused and confusing.
Again, this kind of informality of marriage and relationships was not uncommon in the 19th century. It seemed in fact to be a feature not a bug of the Westward Expansion. Today we might think it's very odd -- I certainly do -- but apparently it wasn't in those days, and people took it quite naturally.
We have a notion of Victorian patriarchy, prudishness and propriety that doesn't quite match the reality.
My mother and her mother were part of matriarchies, for example, in which men were at best useful accessories and often enough were little more than despised interlopers. "Sperm donors."
From the research I did this year, I found that my mother's mother's mother, Ida, had been widowed in 1904. She set up a household for her mother, herself, her sisters (all widows themselves) and their children (two boys and a girl) in Indianapolis. Ida apparently inherited a lot of property from her husband -- who I found she hadn't lived with for years before he died as he had moved back to his parent's house to take care of his own mother who was apparently an invalid. Ida was left well off for the rest of her life, however, though her sisters were apparently not so well fixed after their husbands died.
My mother's mother, Edna -- Ida's daughter -- worked as a telephone operator at an Indianapolis bank managed by my mother's father's younger brother, George. I suspect that any memories my mother said she had of her biological father were actually of George, who would have been her uncle, but I don't know that for certain. All I'm sure of is that her father left Indianapolis sometime between mid-1912 and mid-1913 (when my mother was not even two years old) whereas Edna and my mother stayed in Indianapolis until 1917 -- when they moved to California with Leo who became my mother's step-father.
I learned much more about other characters among my ancestors this year, people I'd only heard about previously. Many were long dead, but others were still alive when I was young though I didn't meet or know them.
One was my father's older brother Vincent. He was accused of and tried for the murder of his wife, Garla a couple of years before I was born. He and his wife cared for -- essentially they adopted -- my half-brother Terry after my father's first wife Ted (nickname for Thelma) died in childbirth. Vincent's alibi was that he was with his mistress in town when Garla died, and he said he discovered her body at the foot of the stairs when he returned home the next morning. The prosecutor claimed that Vincent had beaten her to death as she had numerous bruises on her body. The cause of death was a brain hemorrhage.
My half-brother was apparently the only witness, but he could not testify due to his condition -- now called autism. He was 11 or 12 years old at the time.
Vincent was tried for murder twice. The first jury hung; the second acquitted him. I didn't know about the first trial until this year. My father had been one of his defense attorneys -- the only time he tried a criminal case in court -- and he kept voluminous records and wrote a newsletter for the rest of the family describing what was going on, but the records I've seen and the story he told didn't mention the first trial and the hung jury, just the second trial and the acquittal. That story included the fact of my half-brother's testimony to the judge in chambers, but not what his testimony was. My father's story was that the judge then directed a verdict of "not-guilty."
I didn't know what happened to Vincent until this year. He moved to Santa Barbara in 1947 with his mistress from Iowa and they were married. He died in 1962, in Santa Barbara. I had no idea he was there. From 1949 to 1953, I lived 50 miles north of Santa Barbara, and from 1953 to 1959, I lived in Los Angeles, a few hours south on Highway 101 from Santa Barbara. The only thing I knew about Vincent at that time was that he'd left town after he was acquitted and his whereabouts were "unknown."
Whether anybody (for example, my parents) knew where he was and just didn't want to say, I don't know, but I was surprised as heck to learn he was in Santa Barbara until his death, as I had no idea until I saw records this year.
There were many more things I learned this year about my ancestors and their relatives. I'm still attempting to process all of it. I've started to novelize some of the story as that seems to be the best way for me to understand what I've learned.
In some ways, I wish I'd known these things before now, but in other ways, I'm not convinced it would make any difference. All my grandparents were dead by the time I was born, and the stories I heard about "my people" when I was young were not that far from true. I'm far from convinced the records I've seen this year are necessarily true themselves -- especially Census records, which are notoriously untrue.
People make up stories about their own past as well as that of their ancestors.
Maybe next year, I'll be able to fictionalize what I've learned this year...
Thursday, October 9, 2014
The Quest Continues
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| Street scene in St. Louis, c. 1915 |
The street scene above, for example would have been familiar to my mother's biological father the year before he died. The location is about two miles from where he was killed in 1916.
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| Union Traction Building in Indianapolis, c. 1910 |
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| Knights of Pythias Building, Indianapolis, c. 1910 |
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| U-Auto-Stop, Willits, CA c. 1931 |
These are just some of the photos I've been sorting through. Most of the sites where these people were living and working from about 1900 to 1940 or so are long gone. But the rail yard in St. Louis at the end of St. Louis Avenue is still there.
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| Wabash Rail Yard at the end of St. Louis Ave, St. Louis, MO, c. 2012 via the Google |
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[I added a bunch of pictures and links but apparently didn't save them. Oh well! Here are some others....]
These are some additional pictures I've found that give me a better idea of the environment members of my family and some of my relations came from:
Both my mother's mother and her mother worked as telephone operators for the Fletcher American National Bank from 1910 or earlier to 1915 or 1916. This picture isn't them... so far as I know:
I wonder who's watching me....
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| "Number pluh-leeze" c. 1912 |
Note the street car. At various times in his life, my mother's father worked as a street car conductor, and as I was going through a bunch of Indianapolis street car pictures, I found this one:
2.jpg)
Among other things, what's interesting about this picture is the location, E. Michigan Street and N. Emerson Avenue, the line's termination point. According to the story where I found the picture, the E. Michigan Street line was completed to N. Emerson Avenue in 1911. The E. Michigan line ran half a block from where my mother's relations -- including her mother and grandmother, her brother and a cousin -- were living in 1910 and where my mother would live after she was born in 1911. Lawrence, my mother's biological father, was working as a streetcar conductor in 1911. Wouldn't it be something if one of the men in the picture is her father? If the picture was taken in 1915, as stated in the story, it couldn't be him as he was then in St. Louis, but if it were taken any time between 1910 and 1913, it could be.
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| Progress Laundry c. 1911 |
A saloon:
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| Wm Brommer Saloon c. 1909 |
The drug store Lawrence was alleged to have burgled in 1912 was owned by a fellow named Ferdinand A. Mueller, who soon thereafter went on to other pursuits:
Saturday Evening Post, published in Indianapolis, December 18, 1915.
Dreher's 1916 Simplex Guide and Map of Indianapolis -- detailing streetcar lines, how to get where you want to go, and showing views of the city.
Afterwhiles, by James Whitcomb Riley. My mother had several copies of this. I didn't know why. Now I do. She also had some other Riley books. Lawrence's middle name was... Riley.
A Hoosier Romance, by James Whitcomb Riley. 1910.
Sooty, gritty, grimy Indianapolis in the movies, c. 1916.
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| The Golden State, the Sunset, and the California all were "Limiteds" that passed through the orange groves of Southern California back in the day. Looks like the picture dates from before 1920. |
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
How The Past Trembles in the Hands of Historians
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| Union Traction Company service map, Indianapolis to Muncie, c. 1910. (Clickage will make the image larger) |
He was my mother's father, her natural father. She knew that he had died in Indianapolis when she was very young, died "in a streetcar accident," but didn't know the details until much later. She found out some of it from her mother, but she would find out most of the story from a half-brother she learned about when she was an adult -- but whom didn't meet until I was about 7 or 8 years old and she was well into middle age.
She found her half-brother when we were living in Los Angeles. He was living not very far away in San Dimas and came to visit. I remember one visit quite clearly and he may have come by several other times that I don't remember as well. His name was Frank King; his father's name -- my mother's father, too -- was Frank Olive. He said he'd taken a different name partly because of what had happened in Indianapolis. It wasn't his step-father's name, it was a name he had chosen himself. How my mother had found him, I don't recall in any detail, but it had something to do with military records and I remember she had been calling anyone with the same name she found in those records for years.
Frank Olive was a streetcar conductor for the Indianapolis interurban transit company, and he was also a union organizer who had had an increasingly important role in all the strikes that had hit the system since the early 19-teens. He was well-known to the company as an agitator and a troublemaker. He died on the job, yes, but it wasn't an accident (and he didn't die in one of the riots). After one of the strikes was settled, I believe it was around 1915 though the date was always a bit hazy in my mind, so it may have been earlier or a bit later, he was told that there was something hanging off the front of his car, and to go get it before he began his run. When he got to the front of the car, another conductor or motorman started the car moving forward and it struck the car ahead, crushing Frank between them, killing him. Everyone knew what had happened. He had been murdered in a way that made it look like a careless accident. As were a number of strikers and strike leaders who went back on the job that year.
His funeral was huge, apparently, and at that funeral, Frank's widow, my mother's mother, found out about his other widow, Frank King's mother. Oh. Yes, Frank had two wives who lived at opposite ends of the interurban line, in this case, one household in Indianapolis and one in Marion. Apparently the discovery was quite the scandal at the time. One of Frank's close friends at the transit company took it upon himself to marry my mother's mother quite soon after Frank's demise, and thus make her an honest woman again. He had been fired from the transit company due to the most recent strike, and figured it was the perfect time to move out to California and start over, which they did. He ran Flying A filling stations and sold Dodge cars on the Central Coast, then retired around 1940 and bought a motor court up in Willits where my mother's mother died not long after, and he passed within a few months of her death (or maybe the sequence was the other way around... I wasn't there, and my mother was always pretty anguished about it).
Frank King's mother also remarried fairly soon after her Frank Olive's death, but they stayed in Marion. Frank King moved out to California on his own after WWII. My mother didn't know about them at all until she was well into her twenties, and she said she was shocked when she found out her natural father was a bigamist who had another household and family. When she learned about her father's union activities and the strikes and the violence that went with them, and how her father had actually died, she was horrified. She had no idea it was like that, she said. But she developed a greater (albeit grudging) respect for him. She said she got a much greater understanding of why she herself felt the need to stand up for the downtrodden, to fight for her own rights, and to try to change bad situations she or others found themselves in -- though that didn't always include her own relations.
I didn't realize until much later myself how pivotal the Indianapolis transit strikes had been -- I hadn't even heard of them at all before my mother's half-brother told the stories to us at our house in Los Angeles in the 1950s. Much of labor history in this country has been suppressed or forgotten, just as civil rights history has been. We may have romantic notions of what happened and believe in stories and myths of "heroic struggles," but have no idea at all of what really happened. The Indianapolis and other transit strikes were essentially disappeared from history, just as so much of civil rights history was disappeared.
An example was just last night on PBS. We were watching the "1964" program -- it was a pretty big year for both of Ms Ché and me, after all. That was the year Ms saw the Beatles at the Cow Palace, and one doesn't forget things like that, and I was mesmerized by the Civil Rights marches and Free Speech Movement in Berkeley -- and for the most part, it seemed the program was pretty good. It tried to show how events were linked together and not just discreet incidents, the way so much "history" is presented. The premise was essentially: "Everything changed on November 22, 1963, and the '60s as we remember them really began in 1964." True enough. I've been saying pretty much that for years and scholars have been making the same point though somewhat less stridently than people like me. But it was odd how much was missing -- and who was missing -- from this program. One huge absence really stuck out to me (for reasons I may get into another time). Stokely Carmichael was never mentioned. Huh? Whut the...? He appeared in a picture or two of civil rights events, and SNCC was mentioned briefly, but his name was never breathed. I could not believe it. You cannot have a history of the Civil Rights Movement, even in 1964, without Stokely Carmichael -- but apparently he's been disappeared, as if he were a Soviet dissident.
Todd Gitlin was all over the place last night being interviewed about this and that, his title changing depending on the topic, but what he was doing in 1964 and where he was was never mentioned; it was implied he was at Berkeley in 1964 and had some role in the the Free Speech Movement, but so far as I know he wasn't there. He was at Harvard (or maybe Columbia, he moved around a lot back east) -- and he was running the SDS (which also was never mentioned.) There was some well-coifed and manicured woman (wish I could remember her name [looked it up, it was Stephanie Coontz, listed as a "Berkeley student," which I guess she was in 1964]) describing FSM events accurately enough but with little seeming interest, though she claimed she was part of the struggle, and "stood up and walked out of" [Sproul Hall] (though the iconic name of the administration building at UC Berkeley was never used) rather than being dragged down the stairs as so many were, and I thought it would have been more interesting if they'd had Alice Waters yakking "spiritually" about it instead. She may not have complete memories, but they're both more fun and more personal.
Anyway, what I'm trying to get at is that what we think we know about historical movements and events is definitely not the whole story, and in many cases, it's not even close to what was really going on. It's often a highly romanticized and cleansed version that leaves out many important aspects and people, and which declares "X" result, when the result was actually "Y". Or the result might have been something else altogether.
The Indianapolis and other transit strikes in the early 19-teens were pivotal in part because though they were declared to be settled in favor of the workers, they were failures, despite the huge number of people participating and supporting them. They literally brought the city and a good deal of transport in the region and the country to a halt, and though the official violence which was brought to bear against the strikers -- and the many murders that occurred as a result -- were widely condemned, the strikers did not win much of anything despite their enormous sacrifices. This was the pattern of the labor movement of the time. While discreet incidents may be recalled, and minor victories celebrated, the pattern of failures leading to tiny advances often isn't. I've read transcripts of the investigation into the conditions that led to the Indianapolis transit strikes, and it was horrible. It didn't get much better, despite the struggles, not until after World War I, and even then, victories were reversible. My grandfather lost his life in the struggle, but for what? A noble sacrifice? Maybe. But he was a flawed human being, and so, like the largely failed strikes themselves, largely forgotten.
1964 was a pivotal year for the American consciousness, but even as close as we are to it now, only fifty years on, it appears that key people and important events are being disappeared and whitewashed for some purpose, perhaps to enhance an official mythology, to simplify the record, to glorify certain aspects, diminish others -- on behalf of...? Well, that's the question, isn't it? Always the question. What are we being led to believe? On whose behalf? Or on behalf of what objective?
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