Venice Beach

Sometime before 1920, Emory Straker had had quite enough of the Northeast in general and Vermont in particular. He boarded a train to California, took an amazed look around, and sent word for his family to follow him out to the Coast.

Stories of blue skies and golden sunshine with nary a snowdrift in sight, thrilled his parents Daniel and Maloney Maria, so they pulled up stakes and went west themselves. Daniel died in Venice, CA 0n 16 December 1923, and Maloney breathed her last on 18 December 1927.

Perhaps because she was now living in a land of fresh starts, Edith, Emory's wife, resolved to have her umbilical hernia repaired. The surgery was unsuccessful, and she died on 23 February 1922. She was 52 years old.

When her daughter Frances went to the funeral home, she backed out of the viewing room in consternation. She was certain she was in the wrong place; the attractive, beautifully groomed woman displayed in the coffin couldn’t be her mother. But in fact it was Edith, and the funeral director had given her the care her husband, and her own innate simplicity, had always denied her.  

Emory seemed to enjoy life in Venice, California as a single man. Frances sniffed that her father lived near the beach so he could ogle all the floozies in bathing costumes. Hubba hubba!

Security Pacific National Bank Collection - LA Public Library

Before 1930 Emory married a slender, savvy businesswoman named Iola. She was either widowed or divorced, because she had four grown daughters in tow. On the 1930 census form, they claimed their last names were Woodley and Emory as their father, but he could not have been. When they were conceived in Indiana, he was shoveling snow in Mooers, NY.