JEROME AND CLARA

It is interesting to speculate whether the Douglass and Stanford families knew each other when they both lived in the Mission District between 1875 and 1878. Of course, at that time J’erome and his wife, Lillian, were a young couple only in their _ early 30s and Maud was there when she was from 5 to 8 years old. The Douglass’, on the other hand, had teenagers and their youngest child, Louise, must have been around 7 and Clara about 9. Even if the two families had not met, it seems probable that the Douglass’ would have been aware of ;l the Stanford family, for the name was well known in San Francisco at that time. By 1890, however, these two families found themselves living as close neighbors on Broderick Street between Pine and Bush. By then Bessie and Clark had been added to the Stanford family and Maud and Mable were young ladies of 20 and 18. Louise and Clara Douglass were 22 and 24. By the time the families had become good friends, Eta was married and lived in Hawaii and Steven had already been ;l killed in the mine accident. The families frequently went on Sunday picnics and other outings together. On some weekends the Stanfords r, who enjoyed entertaining, invited Florence’s siblings, as well as their good friends the Douglass’ to their summer home across the bay in Mill Valley. It was the summer 11 place J’erome had purchased in 1890. They filled the house and erected tents in the spacious yard as sleeping quart­ ers for the overflow of guests. There is a picture of r1 them gathered in front of the house, Florence, her sisters and brother, Jerome, little Clark, Maud, Mable, young ·Bessie and Margaret Douglass nd Louise. Clara and her

father, William, are strangely missing from all the pictures, though one may have been the photographer. Perhaps it was Clara, for Clara often said her father was a quiet man, avoiding socializing, while her mother was more out-going and liked to be with people. The suppositi’on i, that Clara was the photographer is also based on the evi­ dence that she took pictures all through the coming years.

Clara Douglass at home of her sister Louise in Glen Ellen, 1894.

Clara Douglass Stanford

Jerome Bonapart Stanford

*The G..W. Clark Wholesale Paint and Wallpaper Store that Jerome bought from his father-in-law in the early *

*aries Ru:nyori Belle Ruyon Clark Stanford . ·Florence Ruyon Stanford Jerome St:anford

The ‘house.Jero e bo pt in; Mill Valley in 1890., • ,, The stanfords often invited family-and fr ends f.or wee) ends at·their p;lace in.· .ill Fred Runyon· Valley. The over-flov>;·s;te·ptt•- Maud. Stanford ·•, e!:l.!llie ·Stanford Mrs. Douglass ..,..;..+0.uise _Doug lass ·t Jessie Runyqn Mable Stanford 1n·tents. • • Clara and her father, William, are noted for their a·l>serice.:in all the pictures of th Ru y n .’ and Stanford gatherings. One •• of them may have· been the photographer.*

3232 Jackson Street, San Francisco, Calif. (The house Jerome had built for Clara in 1897. It is where Helen and Leland were born.)

Jackson Street House in 1988

Jackson House Living Room (top) Turkish Room (bottom)

The family picnics and weekend house parties were not all that Jerome and Clara enjoyed as neighbors. The story goes that it wasn’t long before the two of them were surreptitously waving handkerchiefs at each other out their back windows..From handkerchief waving it went to divorce for Jerome and the promise to relinquish all rights to seeing his son, Clark, again. He also agreed to give a $50,000 settlement to Florence.

Fired in a crucible of passion and desire, pain, anger and tears heartbreak and disappointment swept through these two families. The turmoil tore one from another, while it changed lives forever.

Helen writes, “It was during the year my mother and father were married in 1895, that Papa’s father, brother and sister left San Francisco and returned to live in New York.” His mother had died in London some years before..

I wonder if the departure of Jerome’s father and sib­ lings from San Francsco was directly related to a disap­ proval of Jerome’s behavior when he divorced Florence, gave up his son, and married Clara. It seems likely that they, too, were caught up in the emotionat upheaval in, which th i s.::m, was involved.

For Clara this rupture of the conventional life in which she had been reared was surely traumatic. It seems probable that it created an ambivalent-anxiety between desire and decorum that tore at her conscience, yet it may also have satisfied an underlying rebellion she usually kept at bay. Nevertheless, she too was a victim, as they all were, of emotions out of control.

The situation did result in a serious, though appar­ ently temporary, emotional strain with Clara’s Catholic mother. How her father stood on the issue of her marriage is not revealed. It must have been difficult for him to , see his f.a orite daughter become involved with a married man, and one so many years her senior. Grandma often told me that she was close to her father and “thought the world of him.”

Sometime in 1894, during this restructing of families Clara stayed with her sister Louise who lived and taught school in Glen Ellen, a small town north of San Francisco. There is a picture of Clara, looking very demure, standing on the steps of her sister’s home.►·’ can imagine that she thought it discrete to leave the Broderick Street neighborhood and the turmoil she and Jerome had brought about.

Emotionlessly,. their home.

I JEROME AND CLARA i’I.‘her 4;& ,9 Maud w_ritesv of the break-up of

In 189 Papa separated fro Florence in favor of a Miss Clara Douglass, a neighbor on Broderick St. Papa, Mable, Bessie, Charles Nouges, to whom Mable was engaged, and myself went down to Hayward for the summer. In the Fall we returned to a flat on Oak St. where he [Jerome} was installed with his new wife. Mable was married in November 1895, went to Towles for her honeymoon and settled in a flat on Stanyan near McAllister. Jerome and Clara were married in Santa Rosa, not far 1 from Glen Ellen, on the 21st of September in 1895. They returned to San Francisco and, as Maud wrote, started housekeeping on Oak Street. Maud and Bessie remained with Jerome and Clara after Mable was married. “Your grandmother had many offers of marrage before she married Papa, but she was very particular,” Mother used to tell me, which in retrospect seems rather ironic. This skeleton of Clara’s past rattled noiselessly in her secret closet until many years later hen the family terrorizing, for Grandma’s place in the family was secure. 1 met Minn Hubbs. But by then such skeletons were no longer However, no one ever approached her with the revelations. When Clara married Jerome Stanford she must have felt 1 she was doing very well, indeed. She was married to a man

fortable life her older sister, Nina, enjoyed; the kind of life she had long aspired to. Maud continues with “My Life:” In 1897 Father built a lovely home at 3232 engaged to Norbert Babin. I stayed at Jackson Street a year. In 1898, being restless and discontented, I left home to live-for a year ·with a girl friend and her family in a flat 1347 Taylor Street, corner Jackson, with a fine view of the bay. In 1895 Jerome was financially well off, as his whole­ 1 sale business the G.W. Clark and Company continued to be , 24 Leland was born in the same house in November 1900. The house on Jackson Street was a lovely home for the times, and even later, it was an attractive place. Many years after this, probably about 1965, I went with Mother to see the house. The owners proudly showed us around. “This is the family room,” said our hostess, but Mother whispered to me. “This was the Turkish room.” The sight of her bedroom, now a study, the walls lined with books, brought tears to Helen’s eyes. In her diary Maud tells of meeting her husband and their wedding in the Jackson Street house: Met my future husband (Allen Parsonsn on a houseboat party in Belvedere at the Corinthian Yacht Club. Ella Coffee was with me. Invited by Clarence Sloan on the Atlantis houseboat. Allen took a cottage for the summer in Belvedere. I went to stay with Grace Matoon [sister-in-law] two weeks before my wedding and· was married April 30, 1900 in our house. My father gave me away and Bessie was my Maid of Honor. Lived there six months, then moved to a flat on Larkin near Jackson where we lived 3 years. From the time they moved into their new home Clara took very seriously the managing of a well-run house with the help of a cook, maid and nursemaid and other weekly specialists, such as the laundry woman, the seamstress and. the dressmaker. Her days were filled, too with the com­ ings and goings of her step-daughters and their ·friends, with the arrival of her own babies and the weddings of both Maud and Bessie, with the weekly ‘at home’ and the counter part of that, the visiting day. This was a life Clara liked to feel she was born to, though there were times when she felt this was just a role she was playing, and one that might come to an end. How­ ever, she hardly expected the cataclysmic changes that took place in the years following 1902.