CLARA

The year of my grandmother Clara’s birth remains uncertain even now. For many years she changed it according to the situation of the moment. Then the disaster of the San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906 became her ally as it destroyed all vital records in the City Hall obliterating the date of her birth for good.

Clara’s marriage license states her age as 25 in September of 1895. Since her birthday is in November she would have been born in 1869. On the other hand her passport in 1925 issued in October claimed she was 48 years old, which would mean she was born in 1876. Then her Sun Life Assurance policy in 1933 stated that in September of that year she was 66 years and 9 months old, making the year she was born 1866.

The birth date of her passport, 1876, seemed the least likely for that would have made her only 19 in 1895 when she was married and she had said she was 25 then. The family knew she was 25 or more in 1895 because she had traveled alone to Australia to visit her sister around 1885 and she did not make the trip when she was only 15 or 16 years old.

In 1933 these falsehoods came undone when Nina’s daughter, Vera Talbot Michelson, offered to provide an annuity policy for her Aunt Clara’s retirement when she was 65. Desperate that she would lose this possibility for retirement, Grandma willingly renounced her youth and called on her old school friend, Mame Benjamin to reveal her secret. As it turned out she was already past 65, for according to Mame’s testimony, she was born in 1866. While this testimony was accepted by the Sun Life Assurance Company who were issuing the annuity, the family still felt that the year of Clara’s birth was uncertain.

It was during the summers of the 1870s when Clara was a child that her mother, Margaret, would pack things and take her children on the train down to Redwood City to visit in the home of her brother, General Patrick Connor, and his family. Clara used to say how she loved these trips to the country where she played with her cousins.

One of the cousins to whom Clara was especially close was Kit Connor Oliver (later Kit married Bartly Oliver, of a well-known family in San Francisco). Even into the 1930’s Clara and Kit visited, for I remember once going with Grandma Clara to see Kit and her family when they were renting a summer place on the Stanford campus.

A memory which must have been most impressive to Clara was the single incident in her childhood that she spoke of and told as a cautionary tale. It occurred in Clara’s sewing class at the convent. A girl was pulling a needle through the garment on which she was working. Accidentally she stuck the needle into the eye of a classmate and blinded her in that eye. The moral of this tale, as Grandma saw it was, always put your finger over the point of the needle when you pull it out of what you are sewing. As a child I was so impressed with the vignette, to this day I always cover the needle point when I pull it from the material–and so, too, do my daughters carry on the preventive practice as a result of hearing the story.

Although I know very little of my grandmother Clara’s early life I did grow up with the knowledge that she was very proud of her antecedents the Black Douglass’ of Scotland. She often spoke with awe of these ancestors and kept a piece of green and blue material in her desk drawer which she said was the Douglass Plaid.

When I was in high school I learned something of them Douglass Clan in a brief discussion of the clans of Scotland. I felt it important to inform Grandma of an historical fact about these distant relatives, so I told her, “The Douglass Clan were robbers and horse theives.” Grandma received this information with angry indignation, saying, “They were no such thing! The Douglass Clan was highly respected,” she insisted leaving no room for argument. So, that was the end of all discussion about those ancestors!

My mother, Helen, writes in a letter to me about Clara’s life and character: “In her early teens your grandmother had dreams of being an actress. The words she always used to me were, ‘going on the stage.’ It was a common term in those days for an unmentionable profession, much frowned upon by cultured people. A career in drama wasn’t acceptable for a refined woman. This desire to be an actress was not just a phase with Mom. She said she had a consuming interest in the lives of all the famous contemporary actors and actresses. She read anything that was written about them, and during different periods in her life she would imitate certain ones.

“Her parents apparently had nothing against the family attending the theater, as that was one of the few treats in the entertainment line of that day. I suppose there were only the Tivoli Opera House and the Orpheum in San Francisco. Perhaps there was one theater where travelling stock companies played for short seasons. That might be a few weeks twice a year.

“Mom did have a beautiful singing voice and, as a young girl she had been given singing lessons. She often had singing parts in the convent plays that were put on at school. Mostly religious plays, I would imagine.”

Helen continues writing of Clara, “Mom’s mother was ‘horror stricken,’ Mom’s words, when she learned of her daughter’s stage ambitions. ‘You will be nothing less than a fallen woman if you should go on the stage,’ Margaret told her daughter, Clara. Professional actors and actresses were all right in their place. They were acceptable as long as they remained on stage and behind the scenes, but heaven forbid that they venture into respectable society.

“This ambition for the stage was quite a bone of contention between Mom and her mother (Margaret) over a long period.” Helen writes. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Mom’s final positive refusal to continue attending the catholic Church was an attempt to assert her rights to make her own decisions and choices. She may have been laying the groundwork for realizing her dream of ‘going on the stage.’ She might have been eighteen then, or even younger. If she was younger when she gave up the Church, then she didn’t finish high school, because she never attended anything but a convent.

“From time to time all through her life, Mom would say, with such longing, ‘I would love to have been an actress.’”

Indeed, as I remember Grandma Clara, she was an actress!

“Or,” Helen writes, “she would say, ‘I wish I had gone on the stage.’ We’d talk a while about it, but she was only partially convinced that that would also have had it’s pitfalls. She’d sometimes say impatiently, ‘Oh, but your father was such a fool! He just threw away what he had in his hands,’” apparently meaning money and business ventures.

Perhaps, on a deeper level of consciousness, Grandma was referring, not so much to her husband’s ineptitudes, but to profound regrets about her own inadequacies, feelings of her own lost opportunities and lost directions.

Clara, as an adult, stood at 5’5” and was a handsome woman. She had a well shaped, aqualine nose, deepset dark brown eyes that could flash in anger or frustration, or could be warm and soft when she looked at her grandchildren. The strong, square chin from her Huguenot grandmother reflected the determination that was so much a part of her character. Her long brown hair, pulled loosely over her high forehead just avoiding severity, was worn in a knot just above the nape of her neck.

Like her parents and to different degrees her siblings, Clara was distinguished and aristocratic appearing. “Your Highness” would not have been an inappropriate term in which to address her, for she carried herself with regal grace and dignity no matter what the occasion. Even into old age she maintained a fine, straight figure.

Sometime in the years between completing school and getting married, Clara visited her sister, Nina, who had married and moved to Australia. Though I know little of that trip, I’m sure she enjoyed the long sea voyage because following her trip to Europe many years later, in 1926, she told me of her fascination with the sea and her love of the shipboard life. She particularly described to me her experience crossing the English Channel during a fierce storm. “I loved sitting on the deck and watching the huge waves rise high and crash right over the rails. I remember the steward came out and said he would have to lash me to the chair if I insisted on staying on deck. So that is just what he did. Oh, I loved it. Of course I got wet. But that didn’t matter. It was thrilling with those immense waves sweeping across the deck. I was the only one on the ship who stayed out in that storm. Most were seasick, but not me. I shall never forget it.”

Just where in Australia Clara went, how long she stayed, or what she thought of the country is not recorded. The trip must have occurred before 1888 because Nina was married to her second husband, William c. Talbot and had had their first child, Vera, by 1891.

After her trip to Australia Clara returned to San Francisco to live with her parents. It was in 1890 or shortly before, that the Douglass family, William and Margaret with their grown children, Et, Stephen, Clara and Louise, were living in their house on Broderick Street. I have a picture of them gathered in the living room there, just a few doors away from the home of the Jerome Stanford’s.

It was probably also in the early 1890’s that Et was married and she and her husband, Horace Laidlaw moved to Maui, Hawaii. Again Clara took a sea trip, this time to visit Ett and Horace in their home on the Spreckles Plantation where Horace was the medical doctor. Mother told me “Mom was sent away to forget a young man that her parent’s (her mother) deemed unsuitable for Clara.”

The only reference to this Hawaiian trip was one Grandma used to enjoy telling me. With well remembered pleasure she would recount an evening horseback ride, “The women rode side-saddle in those days, you know,” she would begin. “This particular evening we were going to the home of friends of Horace and Et’s. We rode up a steep, winding trail to the very top of a mountain where we attended a lovely party.” Then she recalled the excitement and the fright of the descent down the mountain in the dark. “One misstep of the horse and I would have plunged over the side to my death,” she always concluded without equivocation.

Clara was approaching thirty and was still unmarried. She had had a number of proposals, but either these young men didn’t meet her own strict demands for a husband or they failed her mother’s requirements. It strikes me that both Clara and her mother may have been using a glorified yardstick of the husbands of the two older girls to measure Clara’s future husband. In retrospect it can be seen that after all previous caution Clara abandoned reason and married as the result of an apparently overwhelming passion.