The six-day Santa Barbara Writers Conference ended last night. I'm exhausted and I need to catch a train home. I'll try to post to night, but for now check out this previous post about the woman whose image is on the masthead of this blog.
This is a long blog post, but by now you might trust me enough to read it, knowing I will tell you a good story.
No one has ever asked me who the woman is in the masthead of WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com.
Her name is Gertrude Damrow Sunderland. She was my father’s stepmother, so that technically makes her my step-grandmother. She is the only grandmother I ever knew on that side of the family, though, so as far as I was concerned, she was Grandma.
Most of what I know about my real grandmother came from Gertrude, who related the story to me in her later years.
My father’s real mother was Ruth Rowan. Her parents were probably never married. After being passed back and forth between her mother and her father a few times, she was abandoned by both in Baltimore in the late 1800s. Under circumstances I was never able to determine, she was adopted by a family in Illinois, in the Champagne-Urbana region. She would have been about thirteen. Her new extended family included a cousin—a girl her own age named Gertrude. The two girls grew up together through their teen years.
One evening, late in the first decade of the twentieth century, Ruth showed up at Gertrude’s parents’ home. She pulled Gertrude aside and whispered that she had someone at the back door she wanted her to meet. That someone was John Sunderland, my paternal grandfather. He was drunk (alcohol is a recurring theme in my family).
Ruth and John married shortly afterwards. They had a daughter, Zeta, about 1909, followed by a son named Johnnie, another daughter named Ruth, and my father, Charles, who was born in 1925. Somewhere in the mix before my father there were two other sons. One was stillborn, and the other a blue baby who died within a few years of birth.
I know very little about how my grandfather earned a living in those days. According to Gertrude he owned a tobacco store for a while. In 1927, when my father was two, my grandfather moved the family to California. Gertrude, who had always been close to the family, accompanied them. They first lived around Temple Avenue near downtown Los Angeles. My grandfather drove for Yellow Cab, a job he had for thirty years. They were living there in 1930 when my grandmother, Ruth, died of diphtheria.
By this time the oldest daughter, Zeta, was married. The three remaining children shuttled between my grandfather in Los Angeles and Zeta and her husband, who settled in the Long Beach area. Somewhere during this time Gertrude returned to Illinois and got a divorce from her first husband. She returned and in 1932 married my grandfather and they moved to an upstairs apartment on Burlington Avenue in Los Angeles. This is where my father remembered most of his growing up. Ten or twelve years later, around the time my father left for WWII, they purchased a home in the San Gabriel Valley, ten miles east of Los Angeles.
My first memories of Gertrude and my grandfather were around 1960. By then they were both in their seventies and had separate bedrooms. I grew up thinking that theirs was a marriage of convenience so that the younger kids could have a mother. It was the Depression and people did those sorts of things.
My grandfather died in 1965, but Gertrude lived to 1989, dying a month after she turned ninety-nine. In her later years she told me much of what I have related here. But she didn’t tell me everything. She didn’t tell me the family secret.
After she died we cleaned out her house. I found a box of old photographs. It was apparent that as a young girl, Gertrude had a fun time. To use a cliché, she did not let any grass grow under her feet. Judging from the notes on the back of some of the photos, many with double entendres, her life included a lot of alcohol and cigarettes—racy stuff for a young girl in those days. I also found the papers from her first divorce.
Then I found a stack of photographs and everything became crystal clear. They looked as if they were taken at a picnic—all from the same roll. Judging from the age of my Aunt Ruth, it was about 1923. My father had yet to be born. The photos were of my grandfather and grandmother and Gertrude at the picnic. Some of the photos were of all three of them together, a few were of just my grandparents, and then some of my grandfather and Gertrude. It was evident from the body language, the subtle touches, the tension and the expressions on the faces, that my grandfather and Gertrude had a close relationship. I looked at other photos again and confirmed my suspicions. Grandpa and Gertrude were having an affair long before my grandmother died.
My mother saw me looking at the photos. “You never knew that, did you?” was all she said.
I then understood all the tensions in that side of my family. Why my father’s sisters were always impatient with Gertrude. The reasons why my Uncle Johnnie, who was thirteen when my grandmother died, was so emotionally disturbed.
I, however, always felt a kinship with Gertrude. When I was eight or nine the family was at a carnival and I wanted to go on a ride called the Scrambler (so named because it scrambled your stomach). My father and mother had already been on it with me, and they were scrambled out. I wanted more. Gertrude, who was seventy five, at least, went on it with me.
Sorting through the pictures in that box from her bedroom, I realized Gertrude did those things quite often when she was younger.
Some say you are, in part, the sum of your ancestors. Gertrude was not related by blood to me, but her spirit runs through me. She was a grand old lady.
See ya’ later.
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