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.

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.

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. 

A Marriage Made in Two Weeks?

Time, work, and constant worry had worn down the widowed Annie Beers and confined her to a wheel chair. Her children decided they needed a practical nurse to care for her, so they hired 17-year-old Frances Woodley, fresh from the Woodstock, Vermont countryside.

Frances Woodley at 17

I think of this as the Hire from Hell. Two people who never should have met collided, sparked, and married two weeks later were Earl Beers and Frances Woodley.

Up to now, I’ve felt competent in researching and explaining what I could about our ancestors’ lives. They proved to be precisely what I expected: humble working folks from alpine Europe and depressed crannies of the British Isles, dealing with History’s outrageous slings and arrows as best they could.

There was nothing about Frances Edith Woodley to indicate her background was any different. She often spoke of disliking her dowdy, “ugly” name and saw no reason to discuss her prosaic “Pennsylvania Dutch” antecedents. She wasn’t trying to mislead me or anyone else; she simply didn’t know.

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!”