Wilson Family Genealogy
Stories by Dennie
Part 2:
Bonnie Bunger Wilson, Grandmother
My grandmother was a good, classic, Mid-West farm girl - capable, hard working, and wild about babies and children. She had lovingly cared for her own siblings as the eldest daughter, and spoiled her only son and grandchild with huge enthusiasm. It was she who made massive 'baby books' for my dad and me, and who would help me make scrapbooks full of pictures of babies cut out of magazines when I was a toddler. Some of my earliest memories of her were when she was bathing me in the kitchen sink and warning me against touching the lineup of her cactus plants in funny little ceramic pots along the windowsill, or combing and finger-curling my (then) curly blond hair and stroking my skin, all the while murmuring "skin like alabaster." I loved that word, and asked her to say it for me again and again. She had had long, abundant hair "the color of butter" when she was young, and blue, blue eyes. I suspect her own skin had the luminous whiteness of alabaster then, too - but by the time I was born her skin was wrinkled, her hair, though still long, was thin and grey, and only her blue, blue eyes were left to hint at the bit of beauty she had enjoyed. She, too, was tall for her generation, about 5'7", and had a somehow gawky body - short waisted and angular, though her slightly homely face was round and gentle. She was totally devoid of glamour, and I adored her.
She was immersed in family and long-time friends, many of whom either had preceded or followed her and grandfather out west, and her only "hobby" was collecting - knickknacks, cactuses, antique furniture, all sorts of stuff, wonderful and junky, which crammed their homes. I still have a lot of those things, like the little pink pitcher which I saved up and bought for her when I was about 4, because she was prone to tell me "little pitchers have big ears!" when I was too curious about an adult conversation. Recreation for her was shopping or visiting friends and family, feeding us all, and gossip. I don't remember ever seeing her read a book, though she faithfully listened to the "soaps" on daytime radio. (No TV yet, though she loved it when it was finally common enough to be in people's homes.) She never learned to drive, but walked or took the bus wherever she needed to go when no one was around to be her chauffeur, literally till the day she died.
I knew only a little about her childhood and early adulthood - I knew the family lived on a farm and her finger was crooked because it was broken when she was young by a family goose over-eager for its dinner, and never set. I knew her older brother Bert died from injuries or illness suffered in the Spanish-American war. I knew where she was raised (Fort Dodge, Iowa,) married, (on 9/7/1907, in Webster City, Iowa) lived when she was first married, (Marshalltown, Iowa) and my father was born (Council Bluffs, Iowa.) I surmised that Ann was her most companionable sister, and Viola "the pretty sister" and something of a flirt and independent thinker, (she was divorced - a blot on her reputation in that era, and then widowed, and had worked for most of her adult life to raise her son, Burton, and step-daughter, Jane, who Burt eventually married) and that Fern, who was her mother's 'change of life' child, was especially dear to her, and had been her charge - perhaps because her mother was ill, or just because she was willing. I knew she loved her sisters, brothers and cousins - but heard very few stories about her parents or aunts and uncles. Clearly she loved them too, but probably didn't think they were the stuff of very interesting tales for a little girl. Her mother had lived in the household with her and Daddy Leon for at least 20 years before she died in 1940, but I can't remember one thing grandmother might have told me about her as a young woman, or about her father, J.T. (possibly Jay or James or John Thomas, given their sons' names.) The surname, Bunger, was of German origin, as was her mother's (Agler.) I also know, somehow, that her family had early on included Drakes, who had come to Virginia from England before the Revolution, and that the Aglers were the first settlers of Southern Ohio. That bit of information showed up in a late 1800's newspaper article I found in the attic here at Reiten Drive, honoring them at the Centennial of their having settled the area. Her brother Jay Agler Bunger (he was born in 1889 in Illinois, and died in 1957 in San Bernardino) and his wife Zada were part of our family circle as were Uncle Floyd (Floyd Thomas Bunger, b. Iowa, 1894, d. San Bernardino, CA - 1955) and Auntie Kathryn - and I remember Lathrops and Leamons, Hewetts and Merrymans, who were all cousins of various degrees.
When we all lived on Bronson Avenue, grandmother was the cook and homemaker, and after I was about 2, my caretaker when Mother went back to work. We walked or rode the bus or trolley whenever we left the house - and I clearly remember how tired my arm got reaching up to hold her hand, and waiting interminably for busses and then having to stand all the way to our stop, because if there was a seat, a little girl would always give it up to a weary adult, or during the war, to a serviceman. That meant not only standing, but also having an uninteresting view of thighs and tummies - not being tall enough to see out the window over the seated people, or around the other standees. She faithfully took me on the bus to Miss Sidlow's School for Wee Folk in the Crenshaw district, (started and run by my mother's friend, Ethel Mae Sidlow,) and bussed over to take me home again afterwards. Then, after I started kindergarten, she walked me to Wilton Place School and back again. But with her I got to go shopping in downtown LA, (a straight shot down Olympic Blvd. from where we lived,) and eat at my favorite Clifton's Cafeteria, with its makebelieve forests inside, complete with waterfalls, streams and pools sculpted from concrete, or the other Clifton's, which had a Hawaiian motif with neon palm trees. There was a legless artist who used the sidewalk out front as his canvas, and drew marvelous scenes on it in chalk - for which he was paid by donations of pennies into a jar. Grandmother always gave me pennies to put in if need be, but mostly I remembered to bring some for him from my allowance.
And I remember the long, interesting walks to Auntie Ann's house, where we would visit, often with other relatives, like cousin Min Quackenboss (or bush- another name lost to time,) who still lived on a tiny farm somewhere east and south of LA, and who often brought cream to be churned into butter in an old fashioned wooden churn. After the US entered WWII in 1941, butter was rationed, so that was a real treat, and worth more tired arms. Sometimes my second cousins Annelle and Susan Mullis were there (daughters of Ann and Charlie's only son, Donald, and his wife Mary) and we tried to play together. But Annelle was somehow a difficult little girl for me, and to my mind, cruel to her baby sister, so though she and I were closer in age, it was Susie I liked better, clear through our childhoods. I never did really make friends with Annelle. Maybe because I was no angel, either. One of my very first memories was of bashing her into the bars of my crib when we were perhaps 7 or 8 months old, infuriated because she 'refused' to reply to me as my family did when I talked to her. I remember the intensity of my frustration and anger to this day.... communication MATTERS!
For the earliest part of my childhood we often bought from vendors of milk and produce who drove horsedrawn wagons from door to door in LA, but Grandmother and I walked to the stores on Olympic Blvd., too. In those days grocery stores had metal front doors that folded back to the side walls and opened the whole store to the sidewalks. The grocers would roll out the produce bins to the very edge of the concrete to tempt us. The meat market was a separate store, much as in Europe. Later a new Von's market opened on Crenshaw, around the corner, and IT was completely enclosed - one of the first "supermarkets", with meat, dairy, canned goods, and produce all in one place. It even had a parking lot -something else still fairly new in the '40's. Together we cruised all the little antique-cum-junk shops, and went to the drug store on the corner, where we might get an ice-cream soda, or to the dry cleaners across the street. I loved the new sign on the roof of the cleaners -a long line of uninhabited men's suits and women's dresses crept, grayish, bedraggled and drooping, in one door of the dry cleaners store on the sign, and the same clothes, newly cleaned, paraded out another door, crisp and strutting. Somehow the clothes with no people in them, but with such vivid personalities, really tickled me. All of those places were good for visiting as well as shopping, and we were friendly with all the local trades-people. We even walked up Olympic to the LA library annex, placed in a pretty little park near LA High - it was a very long way home when we were carrying books for me. I much preferred going to the main library downtown, because my mom drove me there, and it was full of wonderful murals of early California history, with a high, domed front lobby. I liked the one further out La Brea Blvd., too, and years later Minto got her first card there after learning to sign her name in cursive script (the library's requirement for obtaining your own card) when she was four.
Grandmother had a couple of areas of creativity that I remember. She liked making her own crochet patterns (it was she who taught me to knit) and did a great deal of needlework. Then when I was 4 or 5, she decided to do some 'art' photography, having seen a picture of a naked baby that she thought was adorable. We still have that picture of me, far too lanky by that age to be adorable, my long arms wrapped around my nakedness and grimacing with embarrassment, on a sheet draped over the back steps. I think her uncooperative model kiboshed her first and last attempt at artiness.
She liked growing things other than cactus, too. We had a scion of the LA official flower, a Bird of Paradise, in a big pot on the front porch, which someone eventually stole. There were scotch broom bushes, hibiscus, and oxalis, as well as 'hens and chicks' a succulent she particularly liked, lining the driveway. There was a gorgeous climbing pink rose on the far side of the garage, and 'china lilies' (narcissus) bloomed in the side yard in the spring. Amazing for the beauty of its spring-time blooms, strings of fuzzy little golden balls, a huge acacia tree shaded the house in back, and we had a row of poplars in front that dropped funny little catkins like caterpillars every spring. Until I was about 4, our backyard was a fine jungle of berry bushes, with a quince tree in the far corner, an apricot and also a mulberry tree whose branches hung down like a tent around the central pole of the trunk.
An apartment building had gone up on Norton Street, and the back of the garages was right on the property line, making a very tall, solid back fence for us. Our single garage was detached from the house, and behind that, down a little gravel walk, was the 'service yard', with its trashcans and incinerator. In those pre-pollution-awareness days, we burned all our paper rubbish - something that was only banned in the late '40's, despite the ancient Native American name for the L.A. basin - 'Valley of 10,000 Smokes'! Grandmother's brother Uncle Jay owned orange and tangerine groves that covered many acres in the San Fernando Valley; with those and our backyard harvest we had a great supply of free fruit which grandmother made into wonderful jams, jellies and pies when she had access to sugar. She always let me make "cinnamon rolls" with sugar, cinnamon and the leftover pie dough, and we had a fine time rolling the dough out, "not too hard, and not too much, or it will be tough!"
She was a perfect middle-America style 'comfort-food' cook - lots of pot roasted, or otherwise well-done beef, boiled or mashed potatoes with gravy, turnips and carrots or (overcooked) greens - cabbage, canned peas and canned string beans for the most part. We had ham, fowl, or pork occasionally, NEVER lamb or seafood, though she would cook and eat freshwater fish, when my Dad or Grand-dad caught them, and made salmon cakes out of canned salmon, eggs and Ritz crackers, which I still do on occasion. She often made coleslaw, which my grandfather would mush together with his mashed potatoes and eat with great relish, and her green salads consisted of a wedge of iceberg lettuce drenched in red bottled "French" dressing. Macaroni and cheese was her idea of something wild. Everything she cooked had a ton of lard, sugar and flour in it, and while it all tasted wonderful (except, to me, the turnips, parsnips, rutabagas and cauliflower) I spent the years we lived in the Bronson house with a constant case of indigestion, and was skinny as a rail. She was pretty non-exotic-tolerant when it came to food - if they hadn't grown or eaten it when she was a kid, she couldn't imagine cooking it. Because I liked them, we occasionally had Mexican or Chinese food for our downtown lunches, but the thought of cooking such things would have boggled her mind, and to be fair, we could never have found the ingredients in our nearest local shops and stores. 'Eye-talian' was represented entirely by spaghetti. That parochial approach to food (and most everything else) seems hard to imagine in this era of mufti-ethnic small-world variety, but we found it all over again when we visited Granny Fannie's family in rural eastern Washington and southern Idaho in the late 1970's or early 80's, and I have no doubt it still persists in a good many places in the first world, and most everywhere in the third world.
After we moved out of the Bronson house and the grandparents moved in with Auntie Vi, grandmother's life changed a good deal. From being in the center of a busy, young family, she was suddenly living with a slightly younger sister who was still working, a husband who was still working, in a house and neighborhood that were not 'hers'. Not driving, she was limited to bus and trolley for visits, and the cleaning of the house, laundry, shopping for food and cooking could hardly have filled her days. I didn't think of it then, but she must have been lonely a good deal of the time. Yet I never heard her complain, or say anything about her situation except that she was grateful to her sister. I went to visit fairly often, or they took me to visit other relatives on weekends - but now I wonder how else she spent her time. She had always done a good deal of embroidery and 'tatting' in the past, but arthritis was a growing problem and her eyesight was not that great either. Her other relatives came to visit, but that was usually in the evenings, and she never was a reader. It seems so odd to me now that I just can't imagine her days. She wasn't very old - in her early to mid 60's - but that was a good deal older then than it is now. I was flattered but surprised yesterday when a young friend, David Vanderlip, was simply thunderstruck when he learned that I am now 65 (older than his mother!) - mentally he had me somewhere in my late 40's - and though he could have added things up, knowing Minto, Graham and Elijah, and (I thought) our relationship to each other, he just never did. I do the same kind of thing all the time.
Fortunately the grandparents only stayed with Auntie Vi a few months before-they found the house at 5835 S. Mansfield in L.A. There they had the perfect spot. It was just about 10 minutes from the shop on Sepulveda Blvd. in Culver City; the grocery store was an easy walk up the hill (all the carrying was downhill) and pretty little Ladera Park a short stroll the other way. The landlords lived downstairs - a pleasant, friendly, but retiring older couple who were easy to get along with - and because they were closer in to town, Grandmother got to visit with other friends and relatives more often - Dad stopped by regularly, too. The house was just the right size for them, with two bedrooms, a bath, living room, (with a little balcony) dining room, kitchen and double garage upstairs, and it had a lovely view out over the city to the ocean, with the end walls of both the living and dining rooms having big windows to take it in. The front yard required almost no work, with its tiny patch of ivy backed by large hibiscus shrubs, and the landlords dealt with the back, but not much - it was a long, weedy slope all the way to the property line, though it did have a productive loquat tree partway down. That was a nice neighborhood - just inside the border of a really posh part of town, but somewhat more modest than those places a bit higher up on 'Pill Hill'. The Crenshaw shopping area with both Broadway and May Co. department stores had begun to develop in the '40's, and had a large array of stores by that time, and Inglewood, Culver City and West LA were all fairly close as well. Bus service was good on both La Brea and Slauson, so grandmother had many more options open to her there than she had at Auntie Vi's in Compton.
I enjoyed both places - at Auntie Vi's there was a dandy fish pond in the back yard, and there were a few kids in the neighborhood to play with, plus, I had discovered I could balance and walk along a whole block's worth of contiguous back fences - mostly old, unpainted wood of varying heights - to get to the cross-street that took me 'down-town' to the movie theatre. That was both an adventure and a problem - I didn't like shoes any better then than I do now, and after one trip along those old. fences in bare feet, I came back with so many splinters that my granddad took almost two hours to dig them all out with his pocket knife. Fortunately the bare-foot-fetish meant that the bottoms of my feet, except for the high arches, were so callused that I hardly felt the operation, although holding still for that long was a pain!
The movie theatre may have had its own sort of problem - it had cheap matinees with movies for kids on the weekends, which I loved, but I remember one visit to the show when I was wearing a brand-new "Gibson Girl" blouse, (a style fad of the late '40's, plaid, with high white collars and cuffs, and long sleeves that were puffy on top and fitted on the forearm) that I thought was just beautiful, and made me look beautiful too. I was about 9. A little old man was sitting next to me, and as the movie started, he reached over and put his hand on my thigh, rubbing a bit. I was just sure it was because I looked so pretty in my new blouse, so I held and patted his hand all through the movie, and at the end of the film, I said thank-you and good-bye to him, and went on my way. He had tears in his eyes. I will never know whether he was actually making a pass at me, or was what I thought then, as a little girl who was often patted and loved by old people, an appreciative and lonely old man; but those tears made me suspect, when I was older and more sophisticated, that even if he started with the first in mind, he ended as the latter. Sometimes innocence is its own protection.
The Mansfield neighborhood was even better. For one thing, it had more kids, and the park was only a block away. For another, it had a 'cliff' across the street, an empty lot edged by a dirt bluff I could climb to my heart's content. It was only about 10 or 15' high, but I was still pretty little, and it was good preparation for the cliffs around Palos Verdes, which were a whole lot higher. And it had the "mansion" at 5840, which fascinated me, and had a set of public stairs beside it running up to the street above. I could climb the stairs and from there peer down into its back yard. I couldn't even imagine then that I might live there some day, be married out of that house, and even see my daughter married in that same pretty terraced yard.
Looking back now, I realize that my grandparents were actually doing a good deal of baby-sitting for my folks, but I always thought of my stays with them as visits for us, not free time for the parents. I'm not sure whether that speaks more for the tact and loving enthusiasm of my family or my affection for and enjoyment of my grandparents - either way, it was always a treat, and never something I had to do.
Life went on comfortably for grandmother for the next 10 or 11 years. She suffered occasionally with migraines (which she called "sick headaches"), and a bit with arthritis, but in general, her health was excellent. She worried and fussed over Granddad and Dad, but otherwise seemed very content during that time. I remember how thrilled she was when they bought the problematic Cadillac - at the same time she got a new 'seal-skin' (actually lamb) coat and toque, black and elegant, the most truly elegant clothing I remember her wearing, and she looked stately and distinguished in it. She must have felt that her life had turned completely around, after all its bumps and downturns.
Our stay with them in 1951 was fairly brief, which was probably a good thing, since the house was small for 5 people, and as I got older and more involved in school, friends and other activities, such as modeling, I naturally spent less time with them. But certain things never changed. Christmas always meant lots of presents for me, a bathrobe from Granddad and underwear from Grandmother, wrapped way ahead of time and stashed under their bed. I would sneakily unwrap and peek at the presents even though I knew what they would be, then rewrap them so carefully that she never knew....) think. The doll with the china head always sat in state on its pillow on the cedar chest (the same one is in our living room now) at the foot of the big brass bed they had slept in all their married lives, and the embroidered sheets and pillowcases with tatted edgings for my "hope chest" could be brought out and admired, along with the baby clothes that had been Dad's and mine, and were saved to be worn by my own babies. I eventually used all of those things that she had so lovingly prepared for me, (though one of her sisters snagged the doll), and Graham was conceived in that brass bed where my father was conceived and born. There were always interesting new knickknacks of some sort and I knew she would spoil me rotten any time I was there, and that for them, at least, I was totally special. They took me to Petrelli's Steak House for dinner from the time it opened in Culver City till Granddad died. I thought of it as our special place. When Bob and I got together and started going there too, it was a little like revisiting them. Sadly, the restaurant is gone now, too.
Because she was such an inveterate fusser and hand wringer, Granddad's bouts with ill health were occasions for much worrying out loud, but when he actually died, she did something that astonished all of us. Rather than moan and complain, she started drinking, first one glass of sherry in the evening with my folks or Auntie Vi, and then several, starting earlier and earlier! She never actually got drunk, but she was definitely using the wine as a sort of anesthesia.
After my parents moved to Mansfield, she spent two weeks per month there and two weeks with Auntie Vi, who by then had moved to Garden Grove, nearer to Burton, lane and their adopted daughter, Ginny. At my parents' own expense, Dad had built a large addition on Auntie Vi's house - a whole new living room and an additional bath, so they could live together comfortably. Grandmother's health was excellent - the migraines and even the arthritis seemed to have gone away, and she still walked everywhere, but she missed my grandfather painfully; it was as if the center of her life had been plucked out, leaving such a gaping hole that nothing, including sherry, would ever fill it. She tried to stay cheerful, but for the first year or so after his death, she just seemed to fade, without any idea of what she might do with the rest of her life. She was just beginning to talk about maybe taking a trip with her sister, and maybe spending some more time with her other family by the Christmas season of 1960. She even talked about joining a club, and we were all relieved that she was finally recovering.
Just before my Dad arrived to bring her up to Mansfield for the holidays, she went out to mail some Christmas cards. As she crossed the street to the mailbox, a car, which had stopped for her, was hit from behind by another car, and knocked into my grandmother with such force that it broke almost every bone in her thighs and torso. It also stopped her heart. She landed on the hood, already dead. The poor man whose car actually hit her had his two little boys with him - when his car was struck, his foot came off the brake so hard that it jammed the accelerator, and his younger son panicked and tried to leap from the car. He caught the hysterical child, eventually stopped the car, and sprinted out to try to help grandmother, but she apparently never even knew what hit her. My unprepared father arrived to find his mother dead, police all over, the man and his kids in blithering shock, and Christmas blighted for a long time to come.
When I heard the news, my nose started to bleed, and bled for the three days until we buried her next to her husband of 53 years, in Inglewood Cemetery. I couldn't even cry - I just bled.
What followed then was something I still wrestle with. Mother and I were elected to go pack up grandmother's things, and when we arrived at the house, many of them were missing - some unimportant, others, like jewelry and antiques, of real value. Her sisters had immediately descended on the house, and helped themselves to whatever they wanted. Auntie Vi had stashed all sorts of items under her bed, and when we retrieved the stuff we cared about, accused us of stealing her things - the accusation laced with nasty anti-Semitic overtones (Arturo's family was Jewish, and she somehow had decided my mom must be too.) Burton, who had been treated almost as a second son in my grandparents' house, and who my Dad thought of as his closest kin and a good friend, called and ranted at him for 20 minutes. Dad lost not only his remaining parent, but also a good portion of his extended family over a bunch of stuff that he cared little about except for the memories they embodied. Bonnee June and Bob Johnston were the only ones who resisted and refused to take part in the nastiness. Years later, after I was living in my parents' home once again, Burton showed up on the doorstep, ready to apologize. Auntie Vi had been in the first stages of senile dementia when grandmother died; and had made up all sorts of awful stories about her and us, which she had been telling everyone in the family. No one realized how sick she was then, and only after she died, after speeding her last years confined ida hospital and totally deranged, did Burt come on the paperwork that proved that my parents had spent thousands of dollars remodeling her house, and paid her generously for grandmother's living expenses, far from robbing her as she had claimed. Dad and Mother were out of town, and though they spoke on the phone, Burt died before he and Dad actually saw each other again. By then it was just too late. My father never really recovered from the hurt, and neither did I.
The exact opposite of that happened when Grandma Frances died. I will be grateful forever for her great forethought, and loving generosity, and for all our family who found ways to share the treasures that were left us, with grace and love. That's how it should be.