Wandering California

          After little Elsa’s birth, Christian and Alma Hansen started having serious conversations with Alma's parents Christina and Zacharias Pohle about the difficulties of earning a living in the dreary East, while across the country a golden state beckoned. The thought of traversing thousands of hot, grueling miles overland with small children in tow appalled them, so the two families agreed to leave Buffalo by ship, just the way they had come in the first place.

          The village of Pasadena was a trendy health retreat for asthmatics, and in the 1880s experiencing a great land boom. Christian found employment as a carpenter with the Pasadena Manufacturing Company. Both his wife Alma and mother-in-law Christina worked as laundresses to supplement his income.              

A third child, Arthur Christian, was born in November 1887.

Soon after this son’s birth, Christian moved his family upstate to San Francisco, where he built staircases. Then he broadened his professional range by serving as a foreman in the construction of several churches. He admired the large Queen Anne Victorian homes (now fondly called “Painted Ladies”) springing up all over the Bay Area, and resolved to someday build one for his family. Here his son Arnold Albert was born in 1890.

Next the family went to Modesto in Stanislaus County, where the ambitious young man worked as a contractor and builder. By 1894, a little older and much more experienced, he was ready to return to Pasadena with his in-laws, and open his own contracting and architectural firm.

After the younger Hansens returned to Southern California, Dorothea Hansen died (1898). She was in her mid-sixties.

Migration to Buffalo, NY

               Prussia held Schleswig-Holstein and the City of Flensburg firmly in its iron grip. The Hansens were not Lutheran. The freedom of religion factor has always been cited as the sole reason for their immigration, but as Dorothea’s descendant, I think her qualms about her family’s remaining in Flensburg ran deeper than that.

There’s a school on the hill

Where the sons of dead fathers

Are led toward tempests and gales,

Where their God-given wings

Are clipped close to their bodies

And their eyes are bound ‘round with ships’ sails.

               These lyrics were composed by a Scottish folk singer, Andy M. Stewart, but they perfectly describe the situation in Flensburg. Dorothea didn’t want her sons to be forced into the seafaring life of their father.

               So in 1881 Dorothea put her sons Christian and Andrew Theodor on a ship and headed for Buffalo, N.Y. I’ve seen a photo of these boys leaning on the ship’s railing, gazing down at Mama. They tried to look nonchalant, but their eyes held both apprehension and excitement. They were 18 and 17, respectively.

Christian and Andrew Theodor were among the great wave of immigration that started around 1880. They probably passed through the newly opened Ellis Island. Source:  en.wikipedia.org.

               Evidently both boys worked very hard at the jobs they found on the East Coast; Christian made a specialty of creating interior hardwood finishings for the firm of Miller, Brown & Messmer. The young immigrants were able to send for Dorothea before too long. By the time he was 20, Christian felt he could afford a wife and family.

               Christian and Alma’s first child, Theodore Martin, was born in Buffalo, N.Y. ten months after his parents’ marriage. Their daughter Elsa Lydia followed two years later in 1885.

A Danish Sea Captain

This is a painting of the Urania of Flensburg. Hans Hansen captained a ship very much like this one.
Source: www.schiffshistorisches-archiv.de. 

               Like almost every other man in Flensburg, Hans Hansen was involved in the rum trade. He must have started out as a lowly sailor, but eventually his abilities earned him the captainship of a vessel.
               He wasn’t home very often.  He typically left Flensburg at the beginning of March, sailed northwards around the tip of Jutland and through the North Sea, down the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay, slipped past Portugal and docked briefly at Madeira to obtain fresh water and foodstuffs for his crew.

               Doubtless he also took on barrels of the local wine. This wine was immediately fortified with a neutral brandy to help it not spoil during the long voyage. As the ship swayed, so did the barrels, so their contents were constantly mixed and agitated. Exposure to below-decks heat and salt air gave the Madeira its famous oxidized, salty, and nutty characteristics.

               Then Hans’s ship’s sails caught the trade winds and he reached the Danish West Indies by May or June. He unloaded his goods, restocked the vessel with raw materials, and rushed to leave port before the local autumn storms hit. Then he followed the North American coast northwards for a while, and finally cut back across the Atlantic. With a little luck, he was home before Christmas.

               This left his wife Dorothea as a more-or-less single parent to their four sons, Henry, Peter, Christian Martin, and Andrew Theodor. She was a tiny woman, but no clinging vine. When Hans died young, she “cared for and raised the children, preparing them for useful and honorable positions in the world”, according to an old Southern California history book. She arranged for her 15-year-old son Christian to be apprenticed to a Flensburg cabinetmaker, and three years later she decided it was time to send her younger boys to the United States.

Rum City

               Back in Buffalo, N.Y. Alma Hildegard had married a young Schleswig-born carpenter in December 1883. They were both 20.

               Christian Martin Hansen in later years described himself as German, because that was a simple explanation of a complex situation. His birthplace, Flensburg, was located on a fjord along the coast of the contentious province of Schleswig-Holstein. When he was born in 1863, the area was still part of Denmark, but after the German-Danish War of 1864, it became Prussian territory.

               Flensburg was a “Rum City” and had a fleet of 300 trading ships involved in the rum industry.  More than 200 local distilleries processed sugar cane juice into grog, and a plethora of refineries, oil mills, and soap and tobacco factories handled other raw goods the traders brought home. It was a given that nearly every man in town would be somehow involved in the West Indies trade. Food, building materials and coke were transported from Flensburg to Christiansted on St. Croix, and bartered for sugar cane, color wood and spices.

  

Flensburg harbor

             Christian’s father Hans was born in Naestved on Denmark’s big island of Zieland, and his mother Dorothea came from Angeln in Schleswig-Holstein. Both his parents were ethnic Danes, which causes difficulties for anyone trying to trace their origins. Before 1828, Denmark practiced the use of patronyms and matronyms. For instance his father Hans Hansen, born around 1835, was probably Hans, the son of another Hans. Hans Senior might have been named something like Hans Gunnarsen or Hans Eriksen.

Likewise, we know Christian’s mother as Dorothea Petersen (or Jensen; there’s some confusion here). But her father might have been baptized Peder Olesen or Jens Ottarsen…or? And her mother would have been identified as someone’s daughter, as in Elsa Einarsdatter. Later in this chronicle, I’ll be able to trace some of our family branches back over a thousand years. But as for anyone thinking they can march into Naestved or Angeln and trace our forebears to the Viking Age, I wish them luck.

Poppies Near Pasadena

               Zacharias and Christina Pohle toiled in Buffalo, N.Y. for sixteen years, but were intrigued by stories of a distant haven where promises of the good life hung on trees like big, succulent fruit. Finally they boarded another ship, sailed around the tip of South America, and relocated to California in 1887.

               If they disembarked near Los Angeles in springtime, they would have seen a heavenly sight. Forty miles north, vast swathes of California poppies shimmered orange in the sunlight on a gentle slope rising above the village of Pasadena, just below the mountains. Later this tract was paved with houses and called Altadena, but before that happened local artist Benjamin Brown immortalized the scene in his Poppies Near Pasadena.

I have been unable to unearth any information about the children John or Theodore Pohle, except that around 1893 one of them might have sired a son Lloyd by a Norwegian-born woman with the last name of Birg.  About their little sister Lydia, I know a bit more. Once I caught a glimpse of a picture of a pretty girl posing coyly in a skintight turn-of-the-century bathing costume. My Grandma Alma indignantly snatched the photo from me and tossed it back into a storage box.

               “That’s Lydia. We don’t talk about her,” was all she said, but from the expression on Grandma’s face, I knew THAT conversation had ended.

               Everything I understand about Lydia suggests lyrics penned by the late troubadour Sonny Bono: She was a scamp and a tramp and a bit of a camp, a v-a-m-p: VAMP.  

On November 21, 1891 this item appeared in the Los Angeles Herald under the heading “People Who Yesterday Secured Permission to Wed”: R.W. Alven, a native of Germany age 21, residing in this city, and Lydia Pohle, a native of New York, age 13, residing in Pasadena.

               I didn’t make a typo here, and neither did the newspaper. The girl was 13. In 1916, when she was around 39, she married one Webster Elmer Fike in Santa Monica. By 1930 they resided in San Diego. What happened during the gaps in Lydia’s documented history, I do not know.

               This sad notification appeared in the Herald on March 3, 1898: “Zacharias Pohle, aged 71 years, died of old age in his home on North Mentor Avenue yesterday. Mr. Pohle had been a resident of Pasadena for eleven years, and leaves here a son and a daughter. The funeral was held at 2 o’clock this afternoon from the home and interment was made in Mountain View Cemetery.”

               The widowed Christina and her little grandson Lloyd were not left alone and desolate. The Pohles’ married daughter Alma Hildegard Hansen and her family were residing with them at 634 N. Mentor.

               The strikingly handsome Lloyd Cyril Pohle, evidently without parents through death or disinterest, grew up as part of the Hansen household and served in World War I as a medic.  He later lived in San Gabriel, married a Mabel and had a son also named Lloyd. He died in 1954.

Non Lutherans Had to Leave

               Alma Hansen's mother, another Alma emigrated from Meerane, Saxony, Germany, in 1871 at the age of seven. Meerane was a hub of cloth production and associated industries like dye works and tanneries, which employed the family of Christina Brautigan, little Alma Hildegard’s mutter. When still in the Old Country, her father Zacharias Pohle described himself as a “printer”. It’s unclear whether he printed designs on fabric or words on paper.

The location of Meerane in Germany

              

              This was the period of German unification, when the hyper-aggressive kingdom of Prussia forcibly melded all the other Teutonic principalities and kingdoms into a big and powerful empire. The goal was to forge a unified people with one philosophy and one religion. That religion was Lutheran, which the Pohle family was not. Their situation became unpleasant.

               So Zacharias led his wife, daughter, and infant son Johannes onto the immigrant ship Herschel. Sometimes this vessel carried the wretched refuse of Germany’s shores to the ends of the earth (well, to Australia) but fortunately on this voyage it docked at Buffalo, New York on September 13, 1871.

               Once there, Zacharias classified himself as a “laborer." He and Christina produced two more children in Buffalo, a son Theodore and a daughter Lydia. At one point Christina bore a fifth child who died young.

The Great War was Over!

The Great War was over! The Pasadena Star-News reported on November 7, 1918 that the Armistice had been signed, and the city reacted to the grand occasion as it always did: with a big parade. Everyone poured into the streets, banging on pots and pans in jubilation.  World War I veterans marched in rank and file with those from the Spanish-American War and even a fife and drum corps of grizzled Civil War vets.    

Pasadena hadn’t seen a crowd in months. Spanish flu was rampant, so the town had adopted prohibitions against gatherings indoors or out, even in churches.  The Star-News chirpily documented everybody’s scofflaw behavior: “Influenza regulations were forgotten and the ‘flu’ germs probably died in the noise and sunshine”.

               It was a glorious celebration. Unfortunately, the Star-News had made an error and the Armistice was actually signed on November 11. Unfazed, Pasadena threw another parade and giant block party a few days later.

               It was on one of these occasions that Harry met Alma. Or rather, 15-year-old Alma Hansen spied the head and shoulders of a tall, slim young man looming above his fellow soldiers. She turned to a bevy of her girl friends and announced “I’m going to get that guy”, and then promptly walked over and introduced herself.

               Harry Frederick Herman Heather was 28 years old and one of the most forlorn men on the planet. Years before, everyone he cared about had been torn from him by death, rejection, and disgrace. He must have been bewildered but touched that someone wanted to meet him.

               The girl smiling up at him was anything but alienated and bereaved. The youngest child of successful immigrants, she knew nothing but life swaddled in the protective cocoon of a loving family circle.

Frances and Earl

Let us return to 17-year-old Frances Woodley, who had vague dreams of becoming a doctor. But then her client’s son took one look at her, plunged his hands down her bodice to fondle her breasts, and she didn’t know what to do. I’m sure she turned pink and got flustered, as she did all her life whenever she fancied some male was interested in her. She had no way of knowing this man was morally unbalanced and took liberties with every female he ran into. She was young and naïve; he was the first man to drool over her.

Earl Beers’ psychic sister Lena had envisioned Frances at a clothesline hanging out diapers, and sure enough by the time her mother Edith died, there were two baby sons. By this time Frances realized she had married in haste; another man smelled her discontent and started sweet-talking her. Offended by her husband’s roving eye, she commenced a sporadic affair with her brother-in-law Verne (which was confirmed decades later by Verne’s wife Ruby). Then, to her horror, she became pregnant with a daughter her husband named Anna May.

Earl and Frances' family lived in various homes in Pasadena. Source: http://www.buncee.com/

In later years, Frances admitted she hadn’t wanted this female child of uncertain paternity, so she deliberately tried to starve the baby. Finally a doctor, upon examining the emaciated, rickets-ridden little waif, threatened to file a complaint with the police. It wasn’t the last time my grandmother was threatened with the law.

Three years later she had another daughter, Virginia Pearl. She liked this pretty girl better, but resentment and bitterness made her an abusive mother. She beat her first four children hard and often; children do try one’s patience and Frances had no patience at all.  Her life’s possibilities had somehow been stolen from her, and it was everyone’s fault but her own.

Earl was worse. The Depression made it hard for a gardener with little education to support his family, so he depended on charity baskets for help.  When his sons Bill and Roy defied him, he reacted savagely. Occasionally the boys had week-long vacations from school while the welts and bruises around their necks faded away. By the time Anna and Virginia were toddlers, their father often plopped them down on his lap and taught them to pleasure him sexually. His demands on them grew as their bodies developed, and he was impervious to their pleas and tears.

Frances didn’t even attempt to protect her children. She would merely pout until he let his sobbing daughters escape, and then turn his amorous attentions on her.

Actually, my grandmother didn’t do much of anything. She was determined not to be a drudge like her own mother, so she became something much worse. Her house was always filthy, and her children were too mortified to invite in their friends. In truth they were ashamed of themselves: their smelly bodies, greasy hair, dirty clothes and reeking underwear. Frances also disliked cooking, and her husband seldom found a hot meal awaiting him when he got home from work. She saw no reason to put herself out for his sake.

They snarled and yipped at each other like a pair of rabid curs. My grandparents poisoned their own lives, and the lives of everyone around them, because they were trapped together. In the 21^st century when people realize they made a mistake, they are able to get divorced almost as quickly as they got married. Only the wealthy had that option in the first part of the 20^th.

Frances finally called the police when her daughters were teenagers. Earl was carted off, but she was horrified when a prosecutor threatened to order her arrest as an accessory.  So, with the help of her brother-in-law Verne, she took her daughters and went into hiding. Because no one appeared in court to testify against Earl, charges against him were dropped.

It amazes me that four of their five offspring survived their childhoods.