The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  Still mourning their mother’s early death, Ida and Emma watched as their older sister Minnie began to waste away. She suffered from a stomach ailment that went undiagnosed, and she died on March 25, 1892. She was buried near her mother, MINNIE carved into the top of the stone and the inscription reading M. SCHUCKMAN, AGED 18YS 7MS 9DS.

  Soon after, Emma married and moved to a nearby farm. Teenaged Ida was on her own in the rugged and relatively isolated world of the Mountain House. She and Emma would remain close the rest of their lives, though their personalities differed markedly. Content to raise a family in the small world of Colusa, Emma never yearned for anything more. Ida found her hometown stifling and longed for adventure. She would later tell her grandson that the Mountain House was “wonderful”; yet in a photograph of herself with her sister, brother, and father outside the inn, fifteen-year-old Ida scratched out her face. She told her family she wanted to erase any association with the place.

  Other families with children lived on farms scattered five to ten miles apart in Venado, the name of the area around the Mountain House. Ida’s close friends were two sisters, Millie and Lu Clark. Ida finished eighth grade at the one-room Williams schoolhouse, riding a buckboard to and from school. She liked her studies well enough to keep her English grammar book,14 which included a chapter on letter writing. The subject was not taught until high school rhetoric class, but “very few of the pupils of the grammar schools will ever attend any school of a higher grade,” the textbook noted. “Their equipment for the duties of life, so far as given in a school education, must be completed here. As all persons find occasion to write letters, it seems desirable that some specific instruction should be given in this important subject.”

  Letters soon became a source of entertainment for Ida. Her father had scored another business coup by winning a post office for the Mountain House, a patronage plum that provided additional income. Ida worked as the Venado postmistress. Out of boredom and inquisitiveness, she clandestinely steamed open letters to read them before they were delivered. Then the Clark girls moved to San Francisco, and Ida went to visit.

  2

  The Paris of America

  Turn-of-the-century San Francisco called itself “the Paris of America,” a cosmopolitan city that reveled in its public life, entertainment, and culture.

  “There is in the whole world no city1—not even Constantinople, New Orleans, or Panama—which possesses equal advantages,” Henry George wrote in San Francisco’s first literary journal, Overland Monthly. “She will be not merely the metropolis of the Western front of the United States, as New York is the metropolis of the Eastern front, but the city, the sole great city.”

  A remote outpost just a few decades earlier, San Francisco had become the ninth-largest city in the United States and a major tourist destination. Visitors and locals alike flocked to the Palace Hotel and the Opera House, grand buildings that were emblematic of the city’s vitality and ambition. Renowned architects were drawing up plans for the thousand-acre parcel the city had set aside for recreation, which would eventually become Golden Gate Park. A Midwest transplant named Hubert Howe Bancroft had opened the largest bookstore west of Chicago. Frank Norris, a recent graduate of the new University of California, wrote features about San Francisco culture for The Wave, a magazine that had been started by the Southern Pacific Railroad to promote tourism and morphed into a journal for the sophisticated literary set.

  Artists and writers presented in public venues and celebrated in private at the Bohemian Club, the male-only bastion that would later host presidents and counted among its early members Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, and John Muir. To emphasize the premium placed on enjoying leisure free from business pursuits, the Bohemians adopted their distinctive motto: “Weaving spiders come not here.” Summer outings into the redwoods north of the city grew into longer encampments on the Russian River.

  San Francisco was less than 150 miles from Venado, but a world apart. While the rest of the Schuckmans were content with the Colusa lifestyle, eighteen-year-old Ida had other plans. After she visited her friends in San Francisco in 1896, Ida never returned to the Mountain House. San Francisco became her classroom, and Ida embraced with delight and curiosity the city she would call home for more than seven decades. “There were suddenly all these opportunities,”2 she would later say.

  Soon after Ida arrived in San Francisco, friends introduced her to Ed Brown. She was eighteen; he was eight years older, five feet seven and three quarters inches tall, green-eyed, fair-haired, full of energy and big dreams.

  Ida Schuckman was still a teenager when she left the family ranch in Colusa for turn-of-the-century San Francisco, a city she loved. (Courtesy of Karin Surber)

  Ed was born to Irish immigrants who had fled the oppression and misery of the potato famine. His father, Joseph Brown, was born August 14, 1829, the youngest of five, all baptized in the Catholic parish of Tipperary. Joseph had a typical Irish childhood, growing up in a mud house on an estate owned by a large landowner in the town of Springhouse. Later the family moved up the hill to a coveted spot above the stables, an indication that they had skills valued by the land barons. After potato blight destroyed the principal source of food and income for Irish peasants, Tipperary lost a quarter of its population to death and departures. Between 1847 and 1854, more than one million Irish men and women emigrated to the United States. Joseph joined the exodus, arriving in Boston Harbor on November 25, 1850, on the clipper ship Anglo American.3 He settled in Framingham, midway between Boston and Worcester, a rural town more than two centuries old.

  Sixteen-year-old Bridget Burke had also fled Tipperary for the United States at almost the same time. With her parents and three sisters, she had sailed from Liverpool with more than four hundred other passengers aboard the Aeolius,4 landing in New York on June 26, 1850. By fall, the Burkes had settled in Framingham, where Bridget met Joseph Brown. They were married on January 26, 1857. He was twenty-seven; she was twenty-two.

  Joseph worked on a farm. The Browns started a family and lived in a neighborhood called Saxonville, named after the Saxon Factory mills that produced carpets and woolen blankets. Many of the Browns’ neighbors were scions of long-established families, like the blacksmith Joseph Angier, whose roots in America went back nine generations.

  Sometime around the end of the Civil War, the Browns decided to move west. Like many cities in the East, Framingham had offered the Irish an escape from the famine that wreaked havoc in their homeland, but not from the oppression or stigma of their roots and religion. Ed Brown would grow up hating the English for how they had treated his parents, in both the old country and the new.

  Being Irish in San Francisco was different. Catholicism was the dominant religion, despite the best efforts of Protestant churches in the East, which had dispatched emissaries after the Gold Rush to try to save the souls of the new state. San Francisco acquired fine churches and prominent ministers, but the strong Catholic presence easily withstood the proselytizing. Catholics built community around schools, orphanages, and hospitals. In 1851, the Jesuits opened Santa Clara, a preparatory school south of San Francisco, which became the first college in California. The Catholic presence in the Bay Area attracted Irish immigrants, who in turn strengthened the state’s Catholic roots. That circumstance, coupled with the lack of an established elite, made California a place where the Irish could aspire to greater prosperity, dignity, and even political power.

  By 1866, Joseph Brown was a registered voter in the Twelfth Ward of San Francisco. Edmund Joseph Brown was born on October 12, 1870, the fourth of five children. They grew up on North Point Street, a block from the bay and the Pioneer Woolen Mills, where their father worked as a teamster and the older girls worked in the mills, until the building was taken over by the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company (later to become Ghirardelli Square). Ed’s father worked grading streets and then for more than two decades as a gardener helping with the construction of Golden Gate Park.

&
nbsp; Ed went to Spring Valley School, one of the earliest public schools in the city, which earned notoriety around the time he graduated as a test case in San Francisco’s discrimination against the Chinese. The racial prejudice that had led to the national Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was particularly prevalent in San Francisco, where Chinese made up almost 10 percent of the city’s population. Tens of thousands of Chinese had been hired to build the transcontinental railroads; when that work ended, many settled in what became the country’s first Chinatown. In 1884, eight-year-old Mamie Tape was denied admission to Spring Valley School, though she lived a block away. Her Chinese immigrant parents sued to force admission and won. Rather than integrate, the city set up a separate school for Chinese pupils.

  When Ed Brown met Ida, he was living with his parents on Shotwell Street in the Mission District and working for the nearby La Grande and White Laundry Company. He collected dirty clothes from customers on his route, delivered them to the laundry to be washed and ironed, and returned the clean clothing.

  On Monday, August 16, 1897, Ida and Ed took a ferry across the bay, the only way to reach Oakland, and were married by a justice of the peace.

  They moved frequently in the early years of their marriage—156 Seventh Street, 613 Larkin, 201 Turk, 1408 Divisadero. Ed hustled enough capital to open a cigar store on Turk Street, then added a nearby penny arcade. When he was in the money, he bought Ida the fine clothes, furs, and jewelry that she enjoyed. Ed was often out at night, leaving Ida on her own to explore the city. She attended talks by writers and became an avid reader and frequent patron of the library, which already had half a dozen branches.

  Ida was so thin that she padded her clothes. She likely suffered from anemia, which may have contributed to her infertility. The Browns had almost given up hope of having a family. Then, seven years after her marriage, Ida became pregnant. Edmund Gerald Brown was born April 21, 1905, at Children’s Hospital and baptized two months later in St. Agnes Church. His parents doted on the boy and outfitted him for photographs in the style of the day—dresses and patent leather shoes with pink tops, which Ida kept long after her son outgrew them.

  In the early hours of April 18, 1906, three days before Edmund’s first birthday, the great earthquake struck San Francisco, triggering one of the country’s greatest natural disasters. The Richter scale had not been invented, but the best estimates place the strength of the quake at magnitude 7.8. Several thousand died and most of the city was leveled. Damage from the tremors was compounded by dozens of fires that erupted during the confused response. People poured into the streets, uncertain what to do or where was safe. Ed sent Ida and the baby to stay with her sister in Colusa. Then he went up into the hills and watched the city burn.

  The visit would have been one of the last times that Ida saw her father. By the fall, she was pregnant again and stayed close to home, giving birth to Harold Clinton Brown on July 19, 1907. August Schuckman died two weeks later. He had just turned eighty. The German immigrant and his family had become fixtures in the community, and his passing merited a lengthy write-up in the Colusa Sun about “the Pioneer of Venado.” August left the bulk of his $1,200 estate5 to his nine grandchildren, including Edmund, who each received $75. The remainder, after expenses, was split among the surviving children—$7.47 apiece.

  August had sold the Mountain House to his son Frank in 1894 for $1,500, and Frank proved to have the frugal Schuckman business genes. He rebuilt the inn. As cars replaced stagecoaches and business dropped off, he bought adjoining parcels to expand the size of the ranch to more than two thousand acres. Frank became a moneylender and a civic pillar of the nearby city of Williams. He put up money to finance bonds to build the first City Hall, set up telephone lines from Williams west to Venado, and then sold the lines to the phone company. He was a Mason of such long standing that the secret society eventually waived his annual dues.

  During the summers, Ida would bring Edmund and Harold to stay with her sister for several weeks. The trip took a full day. Ed accompanied them on the ferry to Oakland and then saw them off at the Fourteenth Street train station. Like Ida and Emma, Edmund and Harold were two years apart, so close that their mother swore that they talked to each other in their sleep. Edmund was dark and Harold was blond, and Ida perceived that her husband favored Edmund, so she compensated by paying special attention to Harold. In Colusa, the boys played with their older cousins. They collected eggs, pestered the chickens, roamed the ranches, and absorbed a sense of how their mother had grown up, in an isolated house with no indoor plumbing.

  San Francisco, the city that had sprung up overnight during the Gold Rush, rose quickly yet again after the earthquake. Officials rejected plans to redesign the city as a grand metropolis with wide European-like boulevards and opted instead to recreate familiar streets and buildings. Spirited and defiant in the face of natural and man-made calamities, San Francisco returned to business and prepared to welcome tourists again by hosting the World’s Fair in 1915.

  Like the city, Ed Brown was resilient. He had an eye for the next big thing and rode each wave of civic reinvention with great gusto. Henry George might have been writing about Ed when he described the special sense of hope and self-reliance among Californians that dated back to the Gold Rush days, “the latent feeling of every one that he might ‘make a strike,’ and certainly could not be kept down long.” Being broke was not a cause for embarrassment or hopelessness; everyone had been there. “The wheel of fortune6 had been constantly revolving with a rapidity in other places unknown, social lines could not be sharply drawn, nor a reverse dispirit. There was something in the great possibilities of the country.”

  For a while, Ed marketed Dr. Rowell’s Fire of Life, a muscle liniment that promised to cure asthma, rheumatism, cancer, and colds. In the back of his cigar store, Ed started a betting operation. He had an aptitude for math, which may have contributed to the success of his lucrative sideline as a bookie. For ten dollars,7 Ed bought a lot in the Western Addition, a neighborhood sprouting on the outskirts of the city. Ida took the money her husband had made from gambling and invested in the construction of a three-story flat. She later regretted allowing the architect to persuade her to omit a garage. He argued that cars were a passing fad.

  The house at 1572 Grove Street had one large apartment on each floor. The Browns lived on the second floor and rented out the other two. There was a bedroom over the stairs, a kitchen, a dining room, washtubs, bins for wood and coal, then a long hall that led to a half bath, full bathroom, and two bedrooms in the back. The fireplace in the front room was the primary source of heat, which they supplemented with small round stoves fueled by coal and oil and carried from room to room.

  The Panhandle, two blocks away, became the children’s backyard, first as babies in strollers and toddlers on swings, then as youngsters playing soccer and baseball. Dunes began only a few blocks from the house, nothing but sand all the way to Ocean Beach, where the boys swam in the summer. The boundaries of their neighborhood encompassed nine square blocks, from Fillmore west to Masonic, from Haight north to Turk. They attended Fremont Grammar School, two blocks from the house, which drew about four hundred students from a six-block radius, including several dozen from the nearby Pacific Hebrew Orphan Asylum.

  The Browns’ tenants at 1572 Grove were Jewish. They brought the Browns gefilte fish and matzo on Passover and asked the boys to light their gas on High Holy Days. The neighbors were German, Italian, Russian, Mexican, Jewish, Irish, and English. Ida shopped at the neighborhood butcher, the corner grocery, bakery, creamery, vegetable market, and delicatessen. There was a drugstore, a barber, and a tailor. Stores delivered goods by horse and buggy. For a nickel, you could get downtown in about twenty minutes on the No. 5 McAllister cable car, which stopped two blocks from the house, or the No. 21 Hayes line, which stopped even closer. In good times, Ed would take the family out to dinner once a week at a popular restaurant like the German House or the Heidelberg Inn.

  Ed put
his sons to work at an early age, giving them late edition papers to hawk in the street and Christmas cards to peddle. He took the boys to fights and to minor league baseball games where they cheered for the San Francisco Seals. Ed loved poetry and recited reams of poems by heart; he had Edmund read speeches aloud to coach him on delivery. Ida focused on the content of the speeches and instilled a love of learning. She read so much that Edmund and Harold mimicked her by starting their own lending library.

  In 1912, the Browns’ daughter, Constance Augusta, was born. Four years later Ida gave birth to their youngest, Franklin Marshall. Nine-year-old Harold wrote his mother a letter while she was in the hospital, which she kept for the rest of her life: “We are all anxious about you.8 Pa told us that we got a little baby boy … Edmund is writing a composition on Carbon tonight … Papa said we couldn’t come over to see you because we were not of age. We have a little canary bird. Papa bought it a couple of days ago. We all send our love.”

  The house at 1572 Grove gave the Browns a permanent home as well as a source of steady income from the rental apartments. That financial security helped offset the frequent ups and downs of Ed’s entrepreneurial pursuits.

  After the cigar store, Ed moved into the entertainment business. He nabbed one of the last vacant storefronts on the south side of Market Street and opened a penny arcade in the building that housed the Portola, an eleven-hundred-seat theater that was one of the first to open after the earthquake. Then he opened his own small theater in a storefront on Fillmore Street. Musee Moving Pictures was a nickelodeon, one of the increasingly popular entertainment venues where a nickel bought admission to watch a combination of short silent movies and live vaudeville acts.

  Nickelodeons popularized movies as entertainment, and soon feature films that required large theaters put the smaller storefronts out of business. By 1912, Ed moved up to operating a real theater, the Liberty, on Broadway in North Beach. For several years, business was good. Ed took the boys to the movies once a week, walking through Chinatown to the theater. Then the theater across the street was renovated into a modern movie house that sapped the Liberty’s business. Ed fired the stagehands to save money. They picketed, and he came home ranting about unions. Labor unionists, he told his children, were bad people—just like the English.