Cyril Gibson Diffin

Cyril Gibson Diffin, son of Evalena (Lena) Branson and Charles Orlando Diffin, was born 6 November 1916 in Antioch, Contra Costa County, CA. His mother was nearly forty years old at the time of his birth, and Cyril had no siblings. According to Kenneth Marlin Williams, son of his first cousin Vernon Aubrey Williams, the name was pronounced Sirril, but this has yet to be confirmed by a second source. His nickname was Cy, and this is usually pronounced the same as the word sigh, and “Sigh Rill” would be the pronunciation to go with that.

His father had been raised in the Antioch area, and had brought his bride to live there once they were wed. Cy would grow up in Antioch as well. When he was small, the family occupied a rental on Fifth Street. When he was a schoolboy, his parents bought a house at 522 Tenth Street and that was the place Cyril called home for the remainder of his upbringing. In fact, he stayed put there even after reaching adulthood and entering the workforce as a teller/clerk at First National Bank of Antioch.

Unlike his parents, who had waited until they were well past age thirty to end their singlehood, Cyril proceeded into married life in his mid-twenties. His bride was Marjorie (aka Margery) Kathryn Kinnear. A daughter of Lawrence Barge Kinnear and Edith Margaret Lutz, born 28 Feb 1920 in Cawker City, Mitchell County, KS, she was enough younger than Cy that the pair had probably not known each other well in school, but the families were no doubt acquainted. The Kinnears had settled in Antioch in 1920. Lawrence Kinnear owned and operated a local pharmacy, at which the Diffins must surely have shopped for their drugstore sundries, and was probably where they filled their prescriptions. Marjorie’s brother George was near Cy’s age, and it may have been through him that the young couple became better known to one another. The wedding took place 6 October 1941 in Carson City, NV.

The decision to become husband and wife may have been an impulse on the part of Cy and Marjorie -- or Margaret, as she began calling herself at that point. Cy had decided to enter the U.S. Navy, and indeed did so 15 October 1941, a little more than a week after the wedding. Consequently the two did not have any real chance to establish a home together, nor for the moment begin a family. They were apart almost from the git-go. This may have had a defining effect on them as a couple.

Cy went through half a month of training at U.S. Naval Air Station Roosevelt Base on Terminal Island at Long Beach harbor, and then shipped out aboard the U.S.S. California on the first of November. On the twentieth of November he joined the crew of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Lexington, which was based at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii. It was terrible timing. The Japanese bombing occurred less than three weeks later. But his bad luck was balanced by good. The Lexington was out at sea when the attack took place, and was not involved in the devastation. If the ship had been in port, it would surely have been badly damaged, and quite likely destroyed. It was one of the main targets the Japanese were hoping to hit. If things had gone as the raiding force intended, December 7, 1941 might well have been the death date of Cyril Gibson Diffin.

The Lexington was a critical part of the Pacific Fleet’s firepower over the next half a year, and the Navy made heavy use of her. Cy, in the role of radioman, was part of that story. That chapter came to a close on the evening of 8 May 1942, when the carrier, disabled by Japanese planes, was scuttled during the Battle of the Coral Sea so as not to allow it to be captured by the approaching enemy fleet. Cy was among the survivors. By the autumn, he was back at Terminal Island. And with that, we come to a blank in his story. Logic would dictate that he was assigned to another ship or, more likely, a series of vessels, and that he spent the bulk of the remaining years of the war at sea. However, direct confirmation of that has yet to be found.

What Margaret did during the war is more clearly known, and what she did was remarkable. On the first of November, 1943, she joined the newly-created Women Air Force Service Pilots program, which is to say, she was one of the legendary WASPs. The program combined two prior U.S. programs that utilized women to fly military planes in non-combat roles -- such as flying them from the factories where they were manufactured to the airbases where they would be used -- so that more male pilots could be available for combat missions. Just over a thousand women (out of about 25,000 applicants) made it through the process of selection and training. The Air Force was determined only to use women who had extensive experience as civilian pilots, putting the qualification threshold at 1400 hours. Margaret was someone who met that level of experience -- meaning she must have been a pilot for quite some time before she submitted her application. She graduated in April, 1944, becoming a full-fledged WASP. She flew many sorts of aircraft, including the B-17 shown at right. That’s Margaret herself in the photograph. She trained at Love Field outside Dallas, TX, and then was assigned to Bryan Army Air Base near Bryan, Brazos County, TX. Of course, on any given day she was to be found elsewhere, in accordance with the destinations on her assignment sheets.

The shortage of regular (i.e. male) military pilots eased up toward the latter part of 1944, and the WASP program was shut down on the twentieth of December. Margaret had already left a month prior, though. The reason? She was pregnant. She would go on to give birth to a son in the late spring of 1945. The timing of the conception is eyebrow-raising -- late summer, 1944. Margaret presumably was in Texas and Cy off at sea. If so, then the situation definitely qualifies as “complicated.” On the other hand, the pregnancy did not cause the marriage to end, and in 1946 or 1947, when Cy’s mother was asked by her first cousin Maude Branson Chamberlin to provide genealogical data on immediate family, she included Margaret as her daughter-in-law and the baby as her grandson. Apparently Cy and/or Margaret must have been able to obtain leave during the late summer of 1944 and had a chance for a conjugal visit, and the child Margaret gave birth to is Cy’s biological progeny. That said, you won’t find the boy in the California Birth Index under the name Diffin. In the early 1950s, the surname on his birth certificate was changed to reflect that of his new stepfather. He still, in old age, bears that name.

As mentioned, the arrival of the child did not end the marriage. In the wake of the war, Cy resumed working for First National Bank of Antioch, and he and Margaret finally had the chance to dwell together in an on-going, day-to-day fashion. However, they did not manage to do so in any lasting or well-settled manner. For one thing, they spent most of this interval as occupants of a cottage or bungalow on her parents’ home lot at 309 Fourth Street in Antioch. In January, 1947, this structure was moved to 501 Thirteenth Street and became the basis of an existence less in the shadow of the elder generation. Alas, this was not enough to keep Cy and Margaret together. She went her own way before the year was out. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say Cy sent her on her way, because he remained at 501 Thirteenth for a while, including the earliest portion of his second marriage.

Once gone, it would seem Margaret was essentially erased from Cy’s life, and vice versa. She established herself in southern California. Over time, she became involved with George Arthur Dallwig, who during the war had been a civilian photographer for the U.S. Air Corps/USAF, and went on to work in Hollywood for MGM and Technicolor. He is known for innovations in extreme-close-up techniques for motion pictures. The two married in 1952. That union may have hit the rocks some time before his death in 1966, but not to the point of a formal divorce, and there is no question George was the longest-tenured of Margaret’s spouses. She went on to have a brief marriage (even shorter than her first) to Alex William Church beginning in 1967. By the 1960s she was based in and/or near Port Hueneme, Ventura County, CA. She resumed flying planes (on a civilian basis) and was still at the cockpit controls from time to time even when she was elderly. She was long the curator of the military-aircraft museum at Naval Air Station, Point Mugu. She died 16 February 2001 in Port Hueneme.

The marriage to Margaret crumbled during the very months that Cy’s mother was dying of cancer. That somber circumstance may even have been a factor that precipitated the break-up. Cy was surely under stress. That said, it seems likely that the reason things reached the breaking point lay in Margaret’s insufficient empathy and patience. She certainly seems to have been the higher-maintenance member of the household, as indicated by the fact that her later marriages both faltered, whereas once Cy moved on, he proceeded into a “till death them do part” union.

Cy’s second wife was Dellora Mabel Johnson. A daughter of Swedish-immigrant Nels Johnson and Illinois-native Mabel Anna Elfstrom, Dellora had been born 25 April 1918 in Springfield, Sangamon County, IL and had spent her earliest years on a farm in DeKalb County, IL. However, the family was closely associated with Chicago and the bulk of Dellora’s upbringing occurred in that city, where her father was a cobbler. She graduated as part of the Class of 1936 of Bowen High School. (Shown at left is her senior yearbook photo.) Just what brought Dellora to the Far West is not obvious, but somehow she and Cy became acquainted. They were wed 10 July 1949 in Contra Costa County, CA, probably in Antioch. They went on to have three children, all born before 1960.

Given that his father had died in 1941 and that his mother was now deceased as well, Cy’s bond with Antioch was not strong enough to tempt him to stay once a career-advancement opportunity came along. By the early 1950s, he and Dellora arrived in Sacramento, where the first two of their children were born. Later in the decade they relocated to the city of Fresno, where their final child was born. Cy is referenced in the 6 September 1963 edition of the Fresno Bee in an article about the filling of various bank executive positions in the wake of the merger of State Center Bank into the Wells Fargo empire. Cy is described as the assistant vice president at the main Wells Fargo office in Fresno. An article published a few months later mentions that Cy was on special assignment at the headquarters of Wells Fargo in San Francisco. This may mean that Cy and Dellora had by then -- early 1964 -- already left Fresno for good. In any event, they were back in the Sacramento area by the end of the decade. If not at that time, then by the early 1970s they had reached the suburb of Carmichael, where they remained long-term.

In the autumn of 1973, the middle child of the family, Barbara Jean Diffin, perished at only eighteen years of age. Fortunately the couple did not have to endure that sort of sorrow again, even though another death among their descendants was a statistical probability given the number of years they themselves went on to live.

A postcard that survives among Ivan Branson’s papers shows that in the summer of 1981, Cy and Dellora visited Great Britain, including a tour of Buckingham Palace where they glimpsed the newly married Prince Charles and Princess Diana along with the Queen and the Queen Mum. The impetus of the journey was “to christen a new baby in the family.” The identity of that baby remains a mystery.

Cy died 6 September 1995 in the city of Sacramento (i.e. probably at a hospital there). Dellora survived him by a decade, passing away 1 December 2005 in Orangevale, Sacramento County, CA. It seems likely their remains were cremated, but both are commemorated by bronze plaques at Mount Vernon Memorial Park in Fair Oaks, Sacramento County, CA.

Descendants of Cyril Gibson Diffin

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