Alice Bretelle Johnson (Bretelle
Johnson)
Alice Bretelle Johnson was the third child and only daughter of
Mary Jane Branson and Alonzo Diah Johnson. She went primarily by her middle name, which was given her
in honor of her father’s sister, Bretelle C. Johnson Eastman. As this was often
pronounced “Bur-tell,” some family members spelled the name Bertelle or Burtell, but Bretelle is
correct. She was only occasionally referred to as Alice, mostly late in life.
Bretelle was born 8 September 1887 in Merced, Merced County, CA. Her father ran off when she was an infant, or perhaps even before her birth. As a result, Bretelle grew up in somewhat unusual circumstances. Her mother chose to raise her kids as a single parent. To do so, she worked full-time as a clerk in a drygoods store. She also owned and helped run a boarding house with her sister Nancy Anne Branson Harrington, probably beginning in 1890 after Nancy was widowed. While Nancy stayed on site as cook and housekeeper, Mary Jane did the boarding house laundry in the evenings (and often into the night). Though Mary Jane made sure to take the time to see that Bretelle was dressed nicely and made bows for her hair, Bretelle had to learn a certain amount of self-sufficiency among a household that included her mother, her aunt, her aunt’s six children, a number of lodgers, her brother George, and beginning in 1896, her aunt’s second husband, John Napier. Bretelle’s eldest brother, Clarence, lived three doors down as a ward of an aunt and uncle, Theresa Branson Moore and William Moore.
While at the boarding house, probably in her teens, Bretelle spent an extended period of time dealing with debilitating pain in her legs, for which she received injections of some kind. There is at least one reference in a family memoir of her being “crippled.” This was a reference to a temporary problem, from which she recovered. She was probably fortunate the treatment, whatever it was, did not leave her permanently afflicted, as “cures” of the 1890s were sometimes more likely to injure health than help restore it. The condition may explain why Bretelle did not go to high school at a typical age. She did not enter Merced High School until 1904, just as she was turning seventeen, and did not graduate until June, 1906, at nearly nineteen. (Merced High School is believed to have been a two-year institution during the early 1900s.) It is also possible Bretelle had to work as a teenager and could not go to high school until financial conditions improved.
In the early 1900s, a teenager named Gifford Mecklenberg Fowle (born 30 July 1885) moved to Merced, and possibly was a lodger at the boarding house. Gifford was the eldest of the three sons of John Allen Fowle, Jr. of Massachusetts and Cora Mecklenberg, whose German-born parents had been early settlers of Calistoga in Napa County. Cora had divorced John before 1900, creating a broken-home situation that led to Gifford setting out on his own at a younger age than he otherwise might have. After graduating eighth grade and before turning fifteen, Gifford had obtained a job with Southern Pacific (a company his father may have worked for), and this had brought him to Merced, a major hub of the railway. He worked his way from station sweeper to station agent at the depot there, achieving the latter level by age seventeen. He later became the night agent. He and Bretelle became sweethearts by 1906, and probably made plans to marry while both were residents of Merced. However, they would marry only after both had left Merced behind for good.
Perhaps it was in anticipation of becoming a family man that Gifford gave up his night shift in favor of a better-paying position in the San Francisco Bay Area. He moved to Oakland, Alameda County, CA by no later than early 1906. By doing so, he was returning to familiar stomping grounds. He had spent most of his childhood in Oakland while his father was a printer there for The Times. Gifford's younger brothers Allen and James had in fact been born in Oakland. Generally speaking, the East Bay was the on-going place of residence of Gifford and his brothers for most of the rest of their lives, and even his mother came back for stretches of time, even though Calistoga continued to be her legacy sanctuary. An article in the 16 April 1906 edition of the Oakland Tribune confirms that Gifford had finished his relocation by then -- the article mentions him as one of the organizers of a play intended to raise funds for the public library in San Leandro, the community just south of (and these days, contiguous with) Oakland. That means Gifford went through the great San Francisco earthquake of 18 April 1906. Suddenly he would have had his hands full as Southern Pacific Railroad rushed to repair the infrastructure damaged by the tremblor. The abrupt need for manpower and consequent job opportunities appears to have lured Bretelle’s brothers Clarence and George from Merced. (Though like Gifford, it is possible they had already relocated.) Bretelle, once she finished high school in June, appears to have joined one or both of them in Oakland, putting her near Gifford again and allowing the final months of their courtship to proceed. The pair were wed 21 October 1906 at 1649 Hayes Street in San Francisco. Clarence and his new wife Lillian Brown Johnson were the witnesses on the certificate. The ceremony was officiated by Congressional Minister T.R. Earl. The wedding party included a small number of the Bay Area-based members of the Branson clan, including Bretelle’s first cousin Nancy McDonald Price and her husband Roy Ames Price -- Nan and Roy resided a couple of doors away from the site of the wedding, and probably were responsible for finding the venue.
The young couple spent the first fraction of their marriage living
in Berkeley. Gifford rode the ferry daily to his job site in San Francisco. The situation was rather
temporary, though. Gifford was soon reassigned to a depot in Redlands in San Bernardino County. He and
Bretelle moved there no later than the second half of 1907. First child Gifford Benjamin Fowle was born in
Redlands in early November of that year.
Bretelle’s mother Mary Jane also came to Redlands and either lived in the household or nearby. It is not known if she also had been with her daughter and son-in-law during the Bay Area sojourn. Probably she arrived about the time of the baby’s birth to help with the post-partum phase. She remained behind when Bretelle and her two Giffords moved back north. The 1910 census shows Mary Jane in a boarding house in Redlands, while Bretelle and her family were reestablished in Oakland. (Shown at left are Mary Jane and Bretelle in Redlands in 1909. This image was printed on a post card sent by Mary Jane that summer to her niece Maude Branson Curtis.)
In that 1910 census, Gifford Sr.’s occupation is described as “auditor” for the railway, and over the years he would have various accounting and otherwise clerical jobs for the company, moving up to those with more and more supervisory authority. However, he seems to have found his early positions limited and also tedious compared to the excitement of participating in the post-earthquake restoration. Later in the 1910s, after the births of children Esta Jane Fowle and Voyle Johnson Fowle -- the latter occurring in November, 1913 -- he tried other employment. He became a buyer for an agricultural produce company -- “buying beans” is how one family memoir describes his duties. The job drew the family south again, this time to the outskirts of the town of Lompoc in Santa Barbara County. His 12 September 1918 draft registration card shows Bretelle and the family in Lompoc, while Gifford’s job (described as “company manager”) was in nearby Santa Maria.
During World War I, Gifford served in the Home Guard, the equivalent of a reserve unit of the National Guard. He did not become a regular soldier nor did he go overseas. However, in one sense, the war nearly did him in. With the returning soldiers came the so-called Spanish Flu. Gifford was one of those who contracted this pandemic disease in late 1918. His doctor declared him doomed. His doctor then proceeded to die of the flu himself. Gifford recovered.
Regaining his health and eager to capitalize on the
second chance fate had offered, Gifford went to
night school in order to make up for his lack of high school education. Esta Jane wrote seventy years later
of her recollection of doing homework in the evenings at the dining table beneath their Lompoc home’s
chandelier, her father studying his own assignments next to his children. Seeing him pore over books so much
may have been one of the formative reasons why all three offspring grew up to be avid readers.
(Shown at right is Bretelle standing in front of the Grizzly Giant.) Having increased his chances of better jobs within Southern Pacific, Gifford went back to work for the company in approximately 1919. The 1920 census shows the family in a house in Santa Maria, with Bretelle’s mother living with them. Gifford, in fact, was not there at the time, though the census describes him as the head of household. He was in Oakland. The 1920 census has a second entry for him, showing him living as a lodger in the home of George Fox, next door to Bretelle’s brother George Bertrand Johnson and his first wife Elizabeth. His job had apparently brought him back north. Why Bretelle did not come with him immediately is a subject of family gossip; at least one account suggests Mary Jane had to have a “little talk” to remind her daughter of the ordeal she had gone through raising children as a single mother. If so, the advice worked. Bretelle and Gifford remained lifelong partners.
By the early 1920s the family put down roots in the East Bay for good, at first residing on Claremont Avenue in Oakland. Soon the household shifted to Merced Street in a neighborhood in the northern part Berkeley. The kids all remained in the home until the early 1930s. The 1920s and early 1930s was a particularly steady, happy period for the Fowles. Holiday gatherings were festive and well-attended. Sometimes these were held in Merced or Manteca with extended-family members there, but in the main, the feasts were local affairs occurring in rotation among three regular locales. When not held at the Fowle house, they were hosted by either George Johnson and his second wife Bessie at their home in Alameda or by Nan and Roy Price, who had relocated from San Francisco to Oakland in late 1909 or early 1910. George’s home was just around the corner from the residence of Josephine Harrington McDonald, the eldest of the Harrington girls with whom Bretelle and George had been raised in the boarding house, so Josephine and her immediate family members were sometimes on hand for the feasts.
In the late 1930s, after all their children had left the household, Bretelle and Gifford moved back to Oakland and resided there for the rest of their lives. During those decades their sons both lived in the area as well -- their daughter, however, would spend two years in China and Macao and then move to Calaveras County and on to extreme northern California. Gifford did extensive travelling himself, as his senior auditor responsibilities took him throughout the American West and even as far as Houston, TX.
Bretelle is the woman in the center in this photograph. On the left is her daughter-in-law Evelyn Marie Tanner Fowle, wife of Gifford Benjamin Fowle. The man behind on the left is her son-in-law Robert Kennedy Service, husband of Esta Jane Fowle. Behind on the right is her husband Gifford Mecklenberg Fowle. On the far right is her daughter Esta Jane Fowle Service. This photo was taken near Esta Jane and Robert’s home in Chester, Plumas County, CA some time between the late 1940s and the mid-1950s.
Bretelle played piano and was in general artistically inclined, but this trait was better expressed in her descendants. She was part of a generation in which women remained housewives unless some sort of disruption, such as the type her mother had experienced, required a more varied role.
Bretelle and Gifford both died 21 September 1962. The identical date is not an error. Gifford spent his final days in the Southern Pacific hospital dying of leukemia. When he breathed his last in the early hours of the 21st, his son Gifford had the sad duty of going to the family home and fetching his mother to the hospital to view the body. He found her difficult to awaken, and disoriented even after she got up. She collapsed completely within a few hours. The recorded cause of death was cerebral hemorrhage. It seems possible the knowledge that she was soon to lose him may have led to her collapse; she was literally unable to go on without him.
Children of Alice Bretelle Johnson with
Gifford Mecklenberg Fowle
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