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.