A Horse Thief and a Flapper

The aforementioned Earl Beers was my legal grandfather and also loved to assert (often within earshot of his exasperated older sister Lena) that his father George had been hanged as a horse thief. This is one story I always doubted: Pasadena/lynching/1905 seemed unlikely. So I Googled “George Beers horse thief” and found nothing to make me (or my great-aunt Lena) faint in horror.

I hereby maintain and attest that George Washington Beers died on 2 February 1905 in Pasadena, with nary a rope in sight. I suspect his cause of death was pneumonia.

George Washington Beer's family was used to subsisting on slender means, but surely his death caused them great duress. There was no one to help them because by this time their feisty Uncle Patrick had been issued a one-way ticket to Smithereens. The older children must have earned money any way they could; there were few child labor laws in the early 1900’s.

In 1910 Annie was the head of her own household, living with her young sons Lu Verne, Earl, and Glenn. In 1918 she resided at 1810 North Summit Avenue, Pasadena, CA with Earl and Glenn, who were classified as “gardeners”; son Verne had married Ruby Riggs and now lived several blocks away on Summit. He called himself a “rancher”. The 1920 census shows the widow Annie living with 18-year-old Glenn and his 16-year-old bride Olive. Now Glenn was termed “head of household.”

Current home at 1810 North Summit Ave., Pasadena. Source: Google

By young manhood Earl Beers had accrued enough money to buy himself a motorcycle. He zipped around Pasadena in his spare time, and one day he spied a very young, chubby girl with a “rich old father” riding behind a suitor on another motorcycle. For the rest of his life, he claimed the girl was a wild, loose “flapper” for doing such a thing.

That girl who lived across town was my grandmother Alma Hansen on my father's side, and Earl was chagrinned when my only reaction to his tale was laughter and “Good for her!”