Annie Laurie Johnson (Ellenberger)

My Mother, Annie Laurie Johnson, was born in Auburn, California, on August 2, 1893, on Duncan Hill in a cabin near the mine where her father worked. She was the sixth child born to Fredericka and George Penn Johnson, so the cabin must have been crowded. William, Emily, Christine, Robert, and John were ahead of her. And another sister, Myrtle, was born later.

After a fire in the mine, her parents moved the family into Auburn where they built a small house on three acres of land. When she was about 5 years old, she became friends with a miner who had a cabin nearby and he gave her a picture which I still have. She told me that even though this miner lived alone, he always used a tablecloth and a napkin when he ate. This really impressed her!

My Mother's brother, William, was crippled with crushed toes, so one of the things I can remember my Mother telling me was that she always saddled up the horse, old Pete, for him to use to go to school. Another of her daily chores was to empty the chamber pots that the family used at night instead of going outdoor to use the outhouse. She also had to bring the drinking water into the house in a bucket from a spring about 500 yards away.

She frequently went into Old Town Auburn to pick up the mail. She told of walking through Chinatown on her way to the post office.

One year for Christmas she received a twenty-five cent doll. It was a small doll made from bisque unglazed porcelain and had arms and legs that moved. We have a photo of her with her doll in a little reed buggy.

My Mother went to school in Auburn through the ninth grade. She said that she never went to high school. She worked for a while in Weinstein & Luben, a department store in Auburn. She also took care of the children in a family at a home where her mother was employed.

Recreation for the young people in those days included picnics and outdoor dances sponsored by the churches. She attended the Methodist Church in Auburn where she met my father. James Budden Davidson. He was working at Squaw Valley as a lumber hauler and building snow sheds for the trains. He and a group of other young men would come down to Auburn to go to church. When he and my mother started courting, he would rent a buggy to come down to visit her in Auburn from where he was working.

Eventually he left this job when it ended and went to work in McGill, Nevada, at the smelter. Before he left, they got engaged. To get married, Annie was to take the train from Auburn to Nevada. When she reached a place where she was to change trains, she missed her connecting train and had to wait overnight for the train the next day. The only place to stay that night was a room over the train station. When the station master was showing her the room, he was embarrassed to talk about necessities such as the chamber pot, but he finally brought one into the room and said that maybe she "might need this."

The next day she caught her train. When she finally arrived on the evening of June 13, 1911, she was met at the depot in Ely, Nevada by the groom and a small party of friends, and "given a royal welcome" to quote from the newspaper story announcing the wedding. They were married right away that night at the home of friends by the pastor of the First Methodist Church. After the wedding, there was a supper served at Fuller's Cafe and then they departed for McGill to set up housekeeping.

Their home was a "company house" which was one of many small houses owned by the Strepto Copper Smelter and supplied to the workers and their families as part of the way the mines were set up in those days. When it was time for my Mother to give birth to me, she went back to her mother's in Auburn and I was born on March 30, 1912.

The smelter company closed down a while later and we moved to Middle Stewieke, Nova Scotia, where my dad worked for his father who had a cabinetmaking business there. Annie had her second child, Eugene, in Nova Scotia. Her third, Thelma, was born in Auburn, California. Eventually they settled in the Bay Area--Annie's last child, David was born in Alameda.

When she moved to Oakland, her children went to a brand new school, E. Morris Cox school. They needed a P.T.A., so Annie organized one at the new school. As part of this effort, a small oak tree, the symbol of the P.T.A., was planted by her and a coupe of other members. This tree grew well and stood in front of the school for many years until the school was demolished to build a more earthquake-proof one.

During these years, she was active in the community with fund-raising activities for the schools and other social events such as graduations and dances. She helped start a new program in which graham crackers and milk were served in the mid-morning in the grammar schools to assure that the children were being properly nourished.

My mother thought that her children (and later her grandchildren) should experience all sorts of events, and she was sure to celebrate all holidays in a special way. For Valentine's Day, we each had a special Valentine from her under our plates at breakfast. For Memorial Day, she would send us to the nearest cemetery with bunches of flowers to lay on the graves. We saw all the holiday parades in Oakland, such as the Veterans Day Parade. She took us to the Oakland Airfield when Amelia Earhart set off on her race to Hawaii. We probably didn't realize how memorable this was, but to my Mother, it was just something that we had to be a part of. When one of the atomic bomb tests was being done in the 1950's, she made sure that my son and I got up early that morning and saw the flash in the sky that the bomb made. She also took a couple of her grandchildren on the bus to San Francisco and taught them how to ride the buses and streetcars to get around the city.

Annie and her husband, James, had not been getting alone very well. She felt that he did not pay enough attention to her, and frequently went out to social events without taking her. So they decided to divorce around 1923 and Annie "went home to mother" in Auburn, California, and started the legal proceedings. During the year that it took to get divorced, she rented a house on a fruit ranch in Newcastle and found work in the orchard and packing sheds. Apparently she always intended to return to Oakland with her family because she kept her house there.

At one point after her return to Oakland, she got involved for a short while with selling Bibles, The Mary Francis Sewing Book, and The Mary Francis Cooking Book door to door. But she discontinued this job when she married the new love of her life in 1925, an Oakland policeman named George Ellenberger. They had met when he walked the beat in her neighborhood and he had courted her right from the beginning of her divorce proceedings.

Life went along nicely with the family having a good stepfather to take care of them until 1929 when Annie's husband had a serious accident on his job. He was given a desk job, but he was worried that he might not be able to continue with the police department because of his poor health. So they began to look around for a rural area in which to buy some land. They figured that they might be able to raise chickens to make a living, so they purchased three acres in the Hayward hills on Fairview Avenue (which was later changed to D Street) and began building a house on the property. During this time Annie brought her invalid mother down from Auburn to live with us so that we could all help take care of her.

They did end up moving to Hayward in 1932 and George continued with the police department until he died of a stroke in 1939. My Mother always blamed the stroke on his previous accident and unsuccessfully worked for many years to get the Oakland Police Department to pay her a widow's pension.

So now Annie was alone again with just her two high-school age children at home, and no income to support them or herself. Her mother had done what was then called "practical nursing", and Annie had obtained a lot of knowledge in this field just by observation. So she decided to go out and work in this field. She worked during World War II in the Richmond Hospital and later worked in the homes of invalids taking care of them for their families. These jobs at this time did not require social security coverage, so in her later years, she had only a very small social security grant and had to supplement it with s.s.i. in order to have enough money to live on.

As she got older and no longer worked away from her home, she spent a good part of her time in her garden. She had large beds of strawberries, and also grew beans, tomatoes, bell peppers, and boysenberries. She and George had planted lots of trees when they bought the land, and it had already had many apricot trees on it. So she maintained their rock-lined paths through the trees--it was like walking through a park to walk through her yard. She also had a fish pond with carp living in it.

Of course, by now her sons and daughters were married with children of their own. Annie decided to divide up her property after the war and give a parcel of about an acre to each of her two oldest children. My brother and I built homes for our families, and so we all lived in a row on our own long driveway off of D Street.

Annie enjoyed the many large family gatherings that took place at family homes for Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. She herself liked to give showers--she felt that everyone deserved a wedding or baby shower to start off that new part of their life. In 1968, we had a big 75th birthday party for her.

She lived in her own home for the rest of her life. Since I was right next door to her, I was able to visit every day, and help her with her meals, shopping and laundry. She had a short last illness and died at the age of 83 on December 3, 1976. She is buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California.