Wilson Family Genealogy
Stories by Dennie
Part 1:
Daddy Leon - Leon Armour Wilson
I was born into a household that included my parents, my Dad's parents (Leon Armour and Bonnie Bunger Wilson), and Grandmother Bonnie's mother (Ida Agler Bunger), who became a silent and bedridden stroke victim early in my life. I know she had lived with my grandparents since at least 1920 (1 found the census record on the Internet) but don't know when or how my great-grandfather died. Mother's aunt Clara, widow of Earl Gardner, helped nurse my great-grandmother and me, at least till the poor old soul died in 1940. Then there were Daddy Leon's 2nd cousin Katie Rebasz who lived in an apartment up the block with her 3 glamourous daughters, Betty, Margie and Dorothy, as well as Grandma Bonnie's younger sister Ann and her husband, Charlie Mullis, who also lived within walking distance. Daddy Leon's mother, Phebe (nee Hultz), lived in a series of boarding houses fairly nearby. Her husband Stephen had died several years earlier, and I'm fairly sure they had come to California quite a while before that.
Stephen, who was born in Wilson, New York in 1854, was listed variously in census records as a chemist and salesman; he was certainly a traveler, and apparently had somewhat uneven success. The story goes that when he and Charles Nash were partners, Nash sold carriages, and Great-grandfather Stephen sold the horses. When Nash decided to back the new "horseless carriages", Stephen opted out, on the theory that those noisy, smelly, unreliable contraptions would never catch on. Wrong. Nash's autos were one of the early successes. I didn't hear that story from his widow but from my father; poor great-grandmother Wilson was not very communicative, and certainly not a happy soul by the time I came along. She got kicked out of the boarding houses regularly because of her cranky disposition. I have one vivid memory of her - she poked me in the chest with her cane so hard that she knocked me over backward into some of my grandmother's treasures, when I got too close during one visit. I might have been 2 or 3. I learned later that she suffered from tic doloreux, an excruciating disease of the nerves in or around the mouth, which, combined with widowhood, perhaps explained her temperament. I am sorry now I didn't have the chance to know them when they were younger or I was older - letters show they lived all over the country at various times, and I suspect they were interesting people. Certainly their offspring were bright and accomplished in a variety of ways, and each one utterly unique. And my Dad's baby book is full of affectionate cards and notes they had sent him. An undated newspaper article about their 50th anniversary, which was celebrated in California at my grandparents' home, says they were married in Illinois, the wedding date around 1875 or so.
But back to Leon. My grandfather was born in Illinois in 1885 - the second eldest child in a family that included his brothers Melvin, Harry, Glenn and Ellis, and sisters Eunice and Helen. I met his older brother Glenn once or maybe twice - although he and his wife lived in California too, their home was far enough away that we didn't see them often. I do remember from one visit that he and his wife lived on a miniranchette in Fallbrook or thereabouts, and had a patient old horse that let me clamber up on its back, though it didn't move 10 steps with me up there, and that he died of cancer some time before Granddad passed away. I've touched a little on Uncle Mel and Aunt Eunice - and Harry was a physician. Helen was a sweet woman who had what was called "palsy" in those days - I suspect muscular dystrophy or MS, as the symptoms seemed to come and go. She was married to a longtime University High School teacher, Harold Ives - their only child, Pauline, is several years older than I, and as I recall, got her M.A. at either the U of 0 or Pacific Lutheran Her ex-husband went to one, and she to the other. I heard that by the time they completed both degrees in those soggy towns, she was clinically depressed. Uncle Ellis was a traveling man, like his father - he had some flaw that wasn't spoken of much, either drink or gambling, but I thought he was a pretty nice person, and remember that he brought me presents whenever he came to visit. His daughter (Dorothy) June became a Jungian analyst. I found references to her on the Internet lately, and an author named Cynthia Nodland wrote "The Life History of June W(ilson) Kounin" in 1996, so she may even have been a good one. Certainly she was an early advocate of Jung in the US - not surprising as I never thought Freud was someone a woman could get too excited about.
Early photos show Leon to be a handsome devil, tall and red-haired, with the generous Wilson ears and nose. I don't remember, if I ever knew, how Daddy Leon met my grandmother, who was a few years older than he was. She was the eldest (living) child in her family of 7 children, and had pretty much raised her youngest sister, Fern, who was 17 years her junior. I only know they were living in Iowa at the time, not in Illinois, where I believe both were born. To my eyes they had a warm and loving marriage, if very traditional as to gender roles, and were devoted to each other and my father, their only child, who was born in 1913, when his mother was nearly 32 and Granddad was 28.
I gathered Leon had often been pretty much a mainstay of his family. He worked at whatever he could find to help support all the other kids when his dad was traveling, or perhaps commissions weren't quite keeping the wolf from the door. Both he and his father were fascinated by mechanical things, and worked with everything from farm equipment to (too late!) automobiles. He was intrigued by things new and different, and we have photos of his crew setting up early power or phone poles after a blizzard in Iowa, where he was repair line boss, and others of, him (and a teenage Uncle Ellis, who worked for him) in his auto mechanic shop, which my Dad told me was the first one west of the Alleghenies. Too busy earning a living to go to college himself, he nonetheless helped support at least his brothers Mel and Harry and sister Eunice through university.
For some period of time he was head of the Valve Rotator Corporation, which had offices and a showroom in downtown L.A. I don't know if that was a franchise, or something he developed himself, or what eventually happened to the business, but there are several newspaper articles about it in Dad's baby book. It may have been the business that failed in the '29 Crash.
One of Daddy Leon's more successful enterprises was the development of "Petrolagar", which was the most widely used anti-diarrhea remedy in the world for a good long time. Actually my grandmother, Bonnie, figured out and patented the method of emulsifying the mineral oil and agar-agar (a seaweed which absorbed moisture) which were the major ingredients- and they created and then expanded the business worldwide with the help of his brothers. At some point, for some reason, Uncle Harry was given a power of attorney, and used it to sell the business out from under my grandparents without their permission or knowledge. I heard that Harry pocketed over a million dollars - my grandparents about $250,000.00, which, although a fortune in those days, was hardly a fair split. Granddad didn't speak to Harry for many years - until Harry's only son committed suicide, if I recall correctly. I don't know what Uncle Mel's part in that fiasco was - I gathered not much, as they were on pretty good terms by the time I came along.
Leon invested his and Grandmother's share of the proceeds in Beverly Hills real estate, which would have been a marvelous thing, except that, like so many people in the huge market surge before the Crash, he then mortgaged it all to the hilt to go "out on margin" in the stock market. When the Depression hit, he lost everything. Mel's timing wasn't a lot better, though eventually his lucrative law/CPA practice made him quite wealthy. Just before Prohibition went into effect in 1919 he had bought into the Almaden Winery. He may even have owned it outright. Granddad helped out occasionally by hauling wine from the large stockpiles in the winery to people in Beverly Hills during the 'dry' spell, but I gather none of them did very well in that venture. At least they never got caught!
Granddad was willing to try anything. Sometime in the early '30's after the crash, the family even went gold mining on the American River for a stretch of time, which helped give them a new grubstake. Dad told me about how they packed in their supplies along a hair-raisingly narrow trail, and lost one of the horses over the edge.
Though he loved Mel, Granddad was forever scornful of the 'airs' his brothers the doctor and lawyer affected. I remember one conversation I had with Uncle Mel - he seemed prouder of having his photo on the cover of the L.A. Country Club brochure than anything else we spoke about, and Harry made a big thing of being secretary, then president of the California branch of the American Medical Association (AMA,) playing polo with celebrities such as Will Rogers and Hal Roach, and tracing the family arrival in America back to pre-Revolutionary days so he could join the Sons of the American Revolution. (Too bad he didn't know about our even more illustrious royal forebears - he'd have been over the moon!) So Granddad was almost deliberately anti-elite in his views and actions - speaking non-grammatically unless he forgot himself and slipped into perfectly proper English. Actually, I tended to agree with Daddy Leon in some ways. When I was offered the chance to join the very exclusive D(aughters of the) A(merican) R(evolution) while I was at UCLA, I turned it down flat because they accepted neither blacks nor Jews into membership at that time. They've since reformed, I hear.
Sometime in the early to mid 1930's, while still recovering from the Crash, my grandfather went to work for Holmes Hardware - a company that manufactured overhead garage door hardware and springs. Garages were rapidly replacing barns all over the country, and the one-piece door made sense in sunny California where the eastern problem of water and snow build-up on the projecting portion of an open door just didn't exist. One piece doors were inexpensive and simple to construct on site, were easier for customers to deal with than barn doors or sliders, left usable room in the garage, and could be made to match the style of the house, so the business boomed. In 1936 when my mother and dad stopped in LA to visit on their way to Dad's new job with a paper in San Diego, Daddy-Leon talked my father into coming to work at Holmes instead, selling him on the idea of a product whose time had come. My parents moved into the house at 1036 S. Bronson with my grandparents and great-grandmother. All that was in preparation for their opening their OWN hardware manufacturing and door business, Atlas Door, which was born about the same time I was, in 1937. They also negotiated, together, to buy the Bronson house for $3,500, from Uncle Mel, who had been renting it to them. The independence of 'owning their own' again sounded mighty good after their experiences in the Depression. They rented a little garage/ workshop/office (probably no more than 500 s.f. in all) on the corner of Pico Blvd. and Victoria, in part of an L-shaped building surrounding 2 old glass-top gas pumps. Then they hired Lyle Garcia and eventually his son to work for them, contracted to make hardware for Holmes, and started the business that would more or less support both families for the next 31 years, with a couple of years of slowdown during WWII when my dad worked for the war effort, and steel was hard to obtain, and then again in the '50's.
Daddy Leon was just indomitable. Having been up and down as often as he had been, he still had the emotional energy to start all over in his 50's. And owning a business with his only son made my grandfather a happy man. Having me in the house was icing on the cake. But only my mother's willingness to bend made those arrangements possible. Daddy Leon was a man of his era, used to getting his own way with my grandmother, and he had absolutely no clue as to what my mother was about. He was a funny, loyal and loving man for the most part, but both he and my grandmother adored and clung to my dad, and manipulated him in ways that were not particularly good for his relationship with Mom - convincing him that they should have no more children, for instance, when Mother desperately wanted more; keeping him tied to the door business when he had great gifts and enthusiasm for designing and building houses, a team effort at which he and Mom turned out to be incredibly talented - generally intruding in their life together. They were clearly not much impressed by my mother's singing, or by any cultural or intellectual pursuits in general - and though they were generous with my parents in many things, and truly bright people, they had emotional limitations which helped limit what their son, who had an IQ in the high genius range (190+ by a test he took in his mid-50's,) might have become. I'm sure they never realized what a loss that was, or how their clinging affection hurt both my parents. My mother did, and I believe it is a touching credit to her strong commitment to family loyalty and love for my father that those overshadowed her disappointments, some of which were bitter. My father's love for his parents, relative immaturity at the time of his marriage, and rather surprising lack of self-confidence were also part of the equation. Yet, despite the negatives, the mutual support and that funny little door business eventually gave them a certain freedom and flexibility with finances that allowed them to do quite a lot, and ultimately led to my meeting Bob, which I, and our offspring, have a lot to be grateful for!
I know they absolutely meant only to help, and their generosity had some very good practical results. My grandmother cared for me before and after school from about ages 2 to 8 so that Mom could go back to work; this time as an executive secretary to the company president at Mode-O-Day, a clothing manufacturer and shop franchise that lasted, despite really frumpy styles, into the 70's. Of course, a lot of the money Mom earned went into the business and household. But she was also freed to join and participate in the Opera Reading Club, and Mother and Dad were able to go out at night as much as they (or rather Dad, liked. Mom admitted later she would rather have saved the money and gone to bed a little earlier!) During the years of WWII, Granddad carried the business by himself, since Dad had to go to work for first Bethlehem Steel (which just closed after many years of business, in April, '03) and then AiResearch to help the war effort. His eyes and my existence kept him out of the draft, but he still was required to work for a war provider to fulfill his patriotic obligation. And when the Bronson house was finally sold for about $9,500 in 1947, my grandfather let my parents use most of the profits to buy the lot and build their first home project in Manhattan Beach, a huge success. The grandparents went to live with her sister Viola in Compton. They all saved out just enough to help build, in 1949, Atlas's new shop/factory in Lennox, a suburb of Los Angeles near LAX, - a triumph for Granddad. At that point, they were able to greatly enlarge he manufacturing aspect of the door company, and from a marginal show, it began to make real money for the first trine.
Granddad did much of the office work, Dad was the salesman and sometimes installer, and Lyle and son (the son quit sometime in there) were supplemented by the rehiring of Jimmy Price, who had gone to work for them at age 18, just before WWII, and had come back after he served his draft term to work in both manufacturing hardware and building and installing doors. Clearly Dad was a super salesman, and in June, of 1950, after I graduated from 8th grade, it was decided that we would sell the Manhattan Beach house, buy a travel trailer, and tour the country establishing outlets for Atlas hardware; while Granddad again ran the business. That would take Atlas into a new realm of "big business", and coincidentally allow us to see the country, plus keep me back a year to put me a bit closer to my own age group when I started high school. [It should have worked like a dream except that the U.S. entered the "police action" in Korea at just that point, and steel, the material from which we planned to build all this new hardware, became impossible to buy. That left us sitting in a 26' mobile home in Inglewood, directly across from Hollywood Park racetrack, and the business not only could not expand, it stagnated.
Along with the disappointment of our abandoned plans and shattered hopes for new wealth were other problems. We had just one car at that point, which Dad drove to work and to do sales calls and installations - but in anticipation of the success of our plan my grandfather had just bought himself a brand new Cadillac, something he'd wanted for years, which sat in front of the plant all day long. My mother was stuck in that little trailer with little to do but be available for me; bus service was spotty, and was complicated for her to get to many of the things she would have liked to do unless friends picked her up. And Granddad flatly refused to let her borrow his car in case she, as a 'woman driver '(who never so much as dented a fender till she was in her late 80's) might put a 'ding' in it. That was almost more than Mother could take, though she had mostly kept the peace through the other interferences and frustrations. I don't think she ever quite forgave him that refusal, which was probably the least of his transgressions, but insulted and hurt her. We lived in the trailer for a whole year - one of the freest and happiest of my young life, and one of the hardest for my mother. My grandfather knew how she felt; she explained it all in detail, and it moved him not one iota. Mother didn't specifically complain about that in front of me then, but I knew she was frustrated by not having mobility, and later I heard the whole story. It was enough to make a raving feminist of me when f finally realized what had happened. Of course, I only heard Mom's interpretation, but I knew my granddad well enough to know she was probably accurate.
That ability to disregard Mother's feelings was surely the result of both Granddad's temperament and era and yet he was not a really or selfish man. He took in and supported Grandmother's sister Vi and her young son Burt when she and her husband divorced, a fairly unusual situation in those days, and helped everyone in his extended family at one time or another. His mother-in-law came to live with them °for over 20 years that I am sure of) and he accepted the load. He often took me with him to work when I was small, and with Grandmother we went visiting all their old friends and relatives on a regular basis. He teased and joked with me - I was his 'sly punk' - and he made it very clear that he loved me dearly. He read the funny papers to me and helped teach me to read. He saved coins and taught me how to compute their value - then gave them to me. We played canasta and Rummy by the hour, and I can hardly remember him losing his temper with me when I turned the tables on him and unmercifully beat him at cards. He had hair like my Dad's - baby soft and fine, though it had turned from its original sandy red to grey by the time I came along. I remember standing behind him after dinner every night and restyling it - an attention he accepted with very good grace . One of those intense maturing moments that happen in people's lives hit me while I was doing that, shortly after Man-Man died. I suddenly realized that eventually Daddy Leon would die, too, and that I could do nothing to change that. I could only stand there and weep into his silky hair, helpless to explain why I was crying for fear of upsetting the family with my insight.
His tender strain included his feelings for a little blue bird of some sort that he had when I was a baby. It was let free in the house, and it would run to greet him when he came home from work, hopping from the floor to his pants leg and clambering up to his shoulder to lovingly groom his ears and hair. When Aunt Clara accidentally smashed the bird behind a door, he wept. Then roared! My cat, Ginger, loved and welcomed him and my Dad home every night, and sulked if they didn't play with her. Granddad always did. He stayed friends with his brothers, (except Uncle Harry) brothers-in-law Charlie, Floyd, Jay, and Everett, cousins, and other buddies through their whole lives, and their Saturday night pinochle games were punctuated by his gleeful chortles when he was winning, which he generally did, and occasional howls of dismay when he wasn't. He was utterly faithful to his family, in his own way, and to his friends. It was just that he was pretty hardheaded when it came to anything he had decided, no matter who did or didn't agree with him.
Since they couldn't expand the business at that point, the two Wilson families took the money from the Manhattan Beach house and invested some of it in two lots in Palos Verdes Estates, a lovely cliff-bordered, eucalyptus-shaded peninsula jutting into the Pacific Ocean south and west of L.A. We sold the trailer late in the summer of '51, and lived briefly with the grandparents in the house they were renting at 5835 South Mansfield in the part of LA. known as Windsor Hills (or Pill Hill, because of all the doctors who lived there.) That was just until we could find a place to rent while we built on our lot. Later we planned to build another home for the grandparents on the second lot, on Via la Selva.
Somehow, that second home never happened. The grandparents were comfortable on Mansfield, and simply stayed there. As they also had a chance to sell the Lennox plant and the second lot for an even better gain, they then acquired a fairly large parcel of land in Culver City across from the Studio Drive-In Theatre on Sepulveda Blvd., from the famous (or infamous) Mrs. Machado - the even cannier widow of a canny Basque immigrant who had at one time owned much of what became Culver City and part of West L.A. They had decided to diversify, so there they built both a new (smaller) Atlas factory and office and a manywindowed store building for pottery factory-seconds and baskets, a fad then in its infancy. The grounds were like a small private park, complete with a large rock waterfall feeding a little stream that ran into a miniature concrete-lined lake, dotted with an island just big enough for a palm tree or so. There was a second, smaller waterfall and pond; all were inhabited by huge koi, and surrounded by lush lawns and a fence made of wood framed 4' x 8' glass panels. Birds loved the place and eventually dropped enough wild crawdads into the stream that they reproduced and lured local kids to sneak in to try to catch them. It was a grand place to work, and a precursor to the passion for water features that has become so popular now.
Granddad continued to do the day-to-day office work, and things were fairly calm, prosperous and stable. Dad was running the gift-shop, and selling, and Jimmy Price was doing the hardware manufacturing and installations, with part time help from a local fireman. Daddy Leon had a bout with colon cancer, but it was caught early, and he recovered quickly, without any difficult after-effects. After I moved up to UCLA in my junior year of college, married and had Minto, Mother and Dad moved to Brentwood, still in a rented apartment, a bit closer to the grandparents and me, and then, about 1.5 years later, they bought a house in Sherman Oaks and moved to the San Fernando Valley. And when the grandparents' landlords decided to sell the Mansfield house and move closer to their kids, they bought that too. Daddy Leon and Grandmother celebrated their 50th anniversary at the Sepulveda property in September of 1957, not long after Minto was born.
By this time Granddad was 72, and slowing down a bit. He had always been slim, handsome, and fit looking, but a lifetime of 'meat and potatoes' and smoking was catching up with him, and he showed signs of heart problems, despite his lifelong habit of starting the day with a glass of hot water with lemon juice squeezed in it, which he was sure was a panacea, along with regular visits to a chiropractor. He kept right on smoking, though; this was long before the Surgeon-General's report, and we didn't yet know how dangerous that was. Two years later, on July 11, 1959, he had a major heart attack. My Dad raced across town to him, but by the time he arrived, the ambulance had already picked up his father, and was transporting him to Daniel Freeman hospital. Granddad didn't live to get there. A lifetime Mason, 33rd degree, he was given a major Masonic funeral, complete with bagpipes and swords, and buried in the Inglewood Cemetery.