Alvin Franklin Corkins

Alvin Franklin Corkins, son of Florence Winnie Branson and Ernest Lee Corkins, was born 15 December 1913 in Calaveras County, CA, on a cattle ranch near the adjacent communities of Altaville and Angel’s Camp. His parents, along with his older sister Mildred, had temporarily moved to the locale from Stockton, and would return to Stockton while Alvin was a baby. Alvin was named for his grandfathers, Alvin Thorpe Branson and Franklin Corkins. He was sometimes called Al and known to his buddies as Cork.

As Alvin entered his teens (shown at right during those years, standing with his mother outside the family home), the family was not doing well financially. This led to Alvin quitting school as soon as, or just before, completing eighth grade. In his generation young men admired peers who followed this path. Staying in school was regarded as less manly than working. And if Alvin had not done it anyway, the coming challenges of the Great Depression would have eventually pressured him to do so. However, in Alvin’s case, there is some indication he felt he had no choice but to help generate income for the household, and that he hoped to eventually get a high school diploma. Unfortunately, the hard times went on for a while, stemming in great part from the collapse of his parents’ marriage. By the late 1920s, his mother pushed his father out of the house in favor of Charles Dumont, whom she would eventually marry. The divorce was declared final in the late spring of 1929. Shortly afterward, Ernest Corkins reacted by attempting to murder Charles with a pistol. By a stroke of fortune matters were resolved without a fatality. A certain kind of peace was restored, but the family home had unquestionably been disrupted. When things settled down a bit, Alvin’s siblings, who included not only Mildred but a younger brother and sister, Daniel and Alice, spent their remaining period of dependency with Florence. Alvin bucked the trend, and maintained the bond with his father, sharing a home with him in Stockton even in the mid-1930s when, as an adult, he could easily have been out on his own.

Given the difficulty of earning a wage in the 1930s, Alvin went from one job to another. One of his main gigs was as a truck driver/deliveryman. His employers included Stockton Dry Goods and Pacific Fruit Exporters. As far as can be determined, he stayed put in Stockton throughout this phase. His father had a somewhat steadier situation -- one that had been a long time coming by the time it happened -- and worked throughout this period maintaining equipment for Milk Producers Association of Central California.

Alvin became a husband at twenty-three. His bride, Priscilla Jewell Gilmore, was twenty-one. Those ages are old enough to imply the couple waited until they were ready for something as momentous as establishing a household together. That would be a false impression. Jewell was about ten weeks pregnant, and so Alvin eloped with her to Reno, NV. They wed 10 April 1937. Their daughter Barbara Ellen Corkins was born that autumn. Far from being a carefully planned launching of a relationship, it was in many ways a disaster.

Priscilla Jewell Gilmore was a daughter of farmer Joseph Lorenzo Gilmore and Minnie Ethel Jewell. Born 13 October 1915 on the family ranch between Manteca and Ripon in the southern part of San Joaquin County, she she had come into the world not long after the deaths of both of her mother’s parents and was named in honor of them -- Priscilla for her grandmother Priscilla Fifield, and Jewell for her grandfather John C. Jewell, a carpenter. Jewell’s upbringing had been somewhat unusual. Her father, forty when Jewell was born, was set in his ways and hated to be away from his ranch and his cattle. Minnie, age thirty-three when Jewell was born, was equally set in her ways and was determined not to forego the comforts of a town existence. The pair nevertheless had a successful marriage. Joseph would spend most of his time at the ranch, including staying overnight often as not. Minnie would hold down the fort at the family home at 1239 E. Clay Street in Stockton. Alvin and Jewell may have met through the Fette family, close neighbors of the Gilmores. A son of that family, Richard Jay Fette, had married Alvin’s first cousin Doris Margaret Curtis in 1931.

Alvin and Jewell (shown left) remained spouses for nearly three decades and ultimately had three kids. This is remarkable, because in practical terms the couple did not even successfully complete their first year together, not in the sense of sharing a household together as a nuclear family -- husband, wife, and baby. Unfortunately, Jewell was a schizophrenic -- meaning in the clinical sense, not as a personality quirk. The pregnancy and then having to care for a newborn created enough stress to cause her initial breakdown. (It is often characteristic of schizophrenics that they manifest their psychosis in their twenties in the form of a sudden breakdown.) In years to come Jewell would be institutionalized a number of times and she spent other portions of her life at home but under medical treatment for her disorder. Any other man probably would have cut Jewell out of his life at the very earliest opportunity. That Alvin did not do so says a great deal about his character. Time and again it was impossible to keep a stable home situation going. Jewell would retreat to the sanctuary of her parents’ home. This at least had the virtue of providing their child with a caregiver during non-school hours while Alvin was at work. It is safe to say that Alvin’s offspring, especially Barbara, would have had far more difficult childhoods had they not been able to depend on their grandmother Minnie. (Joseph Gilmore did his part as well, but he died in 1943 and Minnie bore the brunt of the ordeal.)

Alvin did not personally move in with the Gilmores. He resided in a series of other of dwellings -- at least five different ones over the years, all in Stockton. This had a big disadvantage. Alvin would get to missing Jewell during those times when she was institutionalized and would end up checking her out of the mental facility to bring her to live with him. He would have to have been extraordinarily unselfish to have resisted this temptation. But his pride got the best of him. He was enough of a man’s man to tell himself, “I want my wife around, dammit!” He didn’t want doctors, nurses, and in-laws in his face telling him how to interact with her. But the fact was, Jewell was at her most stable when being supervised by her birth-family members or by medical professionals. In his better moments, Alvin acknowledged this.

While Alvin’s domestic circumstances could be described as regularly in upheaval, the opposite was true of his employment picture. In 1939, he was able to begin what turned out to be his main career. He became a firefighter for the Stockton Fire Department. In this he was following the example of his uncle Walter Henry Branson, who had by then already served as a Stockton FD firefighter for over twenty years. In fact, in a certain way, Alvin was literally replacing Walter, because Walter was among nine members of the department who had been injured in a collision of two fire engines, and it would take five months before Walter was able to go back to work. Other colleagues were likewise injured long-term, and Alvin was among the four recruits brought in as replacements. The temp job became a permanent position. Jewell gets part of the credit for this. Alvin needed to pass written tests, and so she tutored him in the evenings to help him compensate for his inadequate schooling.

Alvin would spend a total of thirty years with the fire department, including about fifteen years working side by side with his uncle. For most of this span he was a member of Engine Company No. 8, which served the Fair Oaks neighborhood. Alvin was raised to the rank of captain only eight or so years after joining the force -- achieving that distinction at a younger age than anyone in the history of Stockton FD. He was known as “Chef Cork” because he was also the cook at the station. He became renowed for his sauce and was known to prepare a wonderful pot of beans. The latter was a family tradition, as his grandfather Alvin Branson and great-grandfather John Sevier Branson had habitually kept pots of beans simmering at their gold-mining camps.

In the early 1950s, things with Jewell were going fairly well. At long last the couple expanded their family, adding a second child, Carol Ethel Corkins, in 1950. A few years later Jewell went through a period bad enough that she sought shelter yet again with her mother, who by then was a resident of Modesto, but the couple weathered this and yet another baby soon arrived. (Alvin is shown at right with his three kids in the early 1960s.) By the time of the latter birth, Alvin and Jewell were already grandparents. The event also coincided with a change of residence from 1306 E. Worth Street to 11 W. Ingram Street -- a couple of miles farther north, but still in the city of Stockton.

Unfortunately the marriage eventually could not withstand the stresses brought on by Jewell’s condition. The couple separated in the early 1960s. Jewell passed away 18 June 1982 in Stockton.

Alvin might have procrastinated longer obtaining a divorce, but by 1965 he finally had a reason to take care of the paperwork. By then a romance had blossomed with Joy Thomas, a Stockton divorcée. They decided to become husband and wife. Unfortunately, Jewell was not cooperative. As a temporary solution, Alvin and Joy headed down to Tijuana, where he was able to obtain a divorce decree in short order. The pair were married in that city 20 January 1965. Jewell eventually saw that her stonewalling would accomplish nothing positive. Once the divorce was finalized, Alvin and Joy proceeded to obtain their U.S. marriage certificate by heading off to Reno to renew their vows 4 September 1965.

Alvin had finally found domestic bliss. (Alvin and Joy are shown at lower left in a snapshot taken during their wedding/honeymoon excursion.) It was the same for Joy. Born Mafalda Joy Battilana 16 May 1925 in rural Stockton, she was a daughter of Antone J. Battilana and Helen M. McCutchen. (She hated her first name and did not use it in adulthood except in the sense of using the “M” as a middle initial.) Joy had endured three unsuccessful marriages. As a teenager she had wed Gene F. Harvey. At the end of the World War II years, at age twenty, she had given birth to her only child, Kathleen Jane Harvey. Two other marriages, a brief one to Joe Torres and then a longer one to John Thomas, had followed. By the time she wed Alvin, her daughter Kathy was married and had a two-year-old. By the time of the Reno renewal-of-vows, Kathy had given birth again. So Alvin was now not only a stepfather, but a step-grandfather as well. His bond with Kathy was very strong even though he had not had the chance to help raise her. He was a big part of his step-grandchildren’s lives and was immensely popular with them in turn. Their pet name for him was “Papa.”

Alvin was a jack-of-all-trades, a bright man despite his lack of formal education. He repaired his cars, did home improvements, fixed appliances. He was quick with a joke, and enjoyed playing practical jokes. One of his greatest pastimes was deer hunting. In the 1960s and 1970s, he would regularly head up to Shasta County to do some hunting, that being one of the ways he kept in touch with his sister Alice and her family, Alice having long since become based in the Mount Shasta area.

In 1968, the final full calendar year of his career, Alvin was involved in dealing with a large chemical fire. One of his men did not have a functioning mask, so Alvin loaned him his. Unfortunately this meant Alvin ended up inhaling too many toxic fumes that day. His lungs were damaged, leading to a degenerating condition that eventually proved fatal.

During early retirement, while Alvin was still relatively hale, he and Joy moved to Eugene, Stanislaus County, CA, in the foothills east of Stockton, where he built them a beautiful three-bedroom home. The couple were only able to spend a few years there until his health grew worse, and they decided to relocate somewhat closer to Stockton. They chose the town of Farmington, where Kathy could be close at hand to help. Even this was too far from the hospital -- a twenty-five-minute drive. Toward the end Alvin had such trouble breathing that he needed to be rushed to the hospital on multiple occasions. Each time the ride seemed longer and longer. On the last such occasion, he stopped breathing on the way over, and Kathy had to pull into the firehouse at Escalon and have the paramedics resuscitate him. At that point, Alvin gave in to the suggestions of his loved ones and agreed to stay where he could be cared for round the clock. He spent the last month of his life in Doctors Hospital in Modesto, where he expired 8 December 1983, just short of seventy years old. His body was cremated, and after the funeral in Lodi, the ashes were scattered outside San Andreas, Calaveras County, CA, near his birthplace.

Joy survived Alvin by nearly twenty-eight years. She never married again, but she had one further major relationship. In the early 2000s she reconnected with her first husband, Gene F. Harvey. They both realized that whatever they had argued about back in the 1940s had been something inconsequential and it had been an overreaction on their part to get divorced. Though they stopped short of remarrying, they became a couple again. Kathy, who had barely had contact with her biological father for most of her life, finally had the chance to starting getting to know him as she approached sixty years old. Joy died 10 November 2011.

Children of Alvin Franklin Corkins with Priscilla Jewell Gilmore

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