Ethelyn Inez Culbertson

Ethelyn Inez Culbertson, first of the three daughters of Mabel H. Branson and Frank Andrew Culbertson, was born 17 December 1903 in Butte, Silver Bow County, MT. At the time of her birth, the family home was actually in Placerville, El Dorado County, CA, the Mother Lode town in which her father had been born and raised. However, a job situation had required Frank to journey out of state, and Mabel had gone with him. When Ethelyn was an infant, the family returned to Placerville. There would be other instances when Frank took jobs elsewhere, including a month-long stint in 1906 when he served as a guard at San Quentin prison, and at least one more trip to Butte. Sometimes the other members of the household would go with him, including a stretch in 1909 to early 1910. However, Placerville remained the official family home until Ethelyn was nearly ten years old. Placerville was where her sisters Gwendolyn and Alma were born. And Placerville would again become home to all the household members -- including Frank -- in the spring of 1910.

Unfortunately the economy of the Mother Lode region deteriorated in the early 1910s. Frank Culbertson’s blacksmithing venture, Kirschner & Culbertson, did not thrive as much as he wanted, so in the summer of 1913 the family packed up and moved to Honey Lake Valley in Lassen County, CA. Frank’s uncle, Thomas Henry Epley, had been a noted pioneer of the region and Frank still had contacts there. The Lassen County phase lasted no longer than a few years. (It may have lasted as short as a few months, as Mountain Democrat newspaper articles from December, 1913 mention that Ethelyn’s younger sisters participated in the Christmas program at Placerville’s Presbyterian church, but this may simply mean the family had come back to Placerville for the holidays.) By no later than 1918, the family settled permanently in Butte. Ethelyn would finish coming of age as a Butte gal and, aside from an interval off at college, would not leave again until she was in her mid-thirties.

Ethelyn may have attended the University of Montana at Missoula. This has yet to be confirmed. She is known to have had a taste of the campus, though. In May, 1924, she attended an annual conference of the High School Interscholastic Press Association at the university, going in her capacity as editor of The Mountaineer, the school newspaper of Butte High School. (Like many females of her generation, she had not had the chance to attend high school at the age typical of modern children, and she was still there at age twenty.) If she did go on to be a student at Missoula, she did not go as far as graduation. Instead she obtained a credential in nursing, and did so not at Missoula, but at the Murray Hospital Nursing School in Butte, where she subsequently went to work. The 1930 census shows her lodging along with many other nurses at the hospital, that being an era when medical staff “residents” were literally residents of their workplaces. Her occupation is described as head surgical nurse. The 1930 census also shows her as part of her parents’ household, an indication they viewed her as still at home, and the hospital as her temporary quarters. The attitude was understandable; in that era, women were often not seen as having left the bevy of their parents’ home until they had married. Though Ethelyn was twenty-six years old in 1930, she was still single, and would remain so for five years more.

Despite her clear choice to maintain a profession, Ethelyn would ultimately marry. Eventually she became romantically entangled with Roger P. Deeney. He was a well-known figure in Butte, where he had been born 10 November 1901 to Irish immigrants William E. Deeney (one of the Deeneys of Deeneystown, Ireland) and Katherine Collins, a couple who had come to be prominent citizens of the community. Roger was artistically inclined and made multiple attempts to pursue the arts -- this perhaps accounting for his lingering status of bachelor. In the mid-1920s, he had toured as a stage entertainer, telling stories and singing songs while doing an impression of a Scotsman. The photograph at right is taken from the Billings Gazette, from publicity material associated with a 1924 gig at the Babcock Theater in Billings. Whether Roger was ever able to earn a living from his performing is not known. If so, he was not able to keep it going, and in the late 1920s was an insurance salesman based in Butte. A newspaper article in the Montana Standard singles him out as a particularly adept and successful agent. It is safe to say Ethelyn was intrigued by him not as a potential breadwinner but because she admired his talents. She had her own creative streak. She had of course written articles for The Mountaineer. She was also interested in stage production. In December, 1928 at Murray Hospital, she directed the Christmas play “Three Little Runaway Trees” utilizing nursing students as cast members.

Hearing the siren call of art, Roger headed for San Francisco in the 1930s to take a shot at being a painter. In late 1935, Ethelyn joined him there. They became husband and wife in that city, applying for a marriage license on 3 December 1935 and holding the wedding itself 7 December 1935, rites conducted by William J. Deeney. For both bride and groom, it was a one-way trip. They would never return to Montana. They spent at least the next decade residing right in the city, and when they did move, it was only to go as far as the other side of the bay. However, in recognition of their roots, the couple helped put together the Montana display at the 1939 San Francisco Exhibition. (This was the equivalent of the World’s Fair, but due to the war raging in Europe and the Far East it was scaled back and the name World’s Fair was not officially used.)

Ethelyn and Roger’s presence in San Francisco was a magnet for family and friends. They welcomed a steady stream of visitors. The city was a popular choice as a venue for weddings among this group. Two examples are the 1939 nuptials of Roger’s sister Margaret and bridegroom Earl Trombley Ellis, and of Roger’s University of Montana classmate J. Howard Dunn to Nina M. Davis. The year 1939 was also when Ethelyn’s sister Alma, whose marriage to Don Mitchell was ending, moved up from Mexico and settled in San Francisco for the next half decade and more.

It is safe to say Roger’s art career always had to be a “spare time” thing. His occupation as it appears on voter registers and city directories is never shown as any kind of artist after his art-school days of the mid-1930s. He worked as a clerk in the second half of the 1930s, a salesman for an import company in 1940, and then as a mechanic and machinist in the World War II years. The Deeneys may have had trouble paying the rent, judging by how their address is almost never the same from one year to the next in those voter registers and directories. However, the couple probably never shifted completely away from a life devoted to appreciation of the arts, if not participation in them. This was probably a key reason why they never produced children.

Some time after the war Ethelyn and Roger moved to Contra Costa County -- probably to Berkeley, but perhaps to Richmond or El Cerrito, putting them near her aunts Alma Branson Youd and Inez Branson. The couple finished their lives there, both passing away in the 1960s. Roger died 2 January 1962. Ethelyn did not long survive him, perishing 16 November 1966. Perhaps her medical career exposed her to a disease that eventually caught up with her, because her sisters lived well into their nineties and it seems odd Ethelyn would only have lasted until her early sixties.

Ethelyn’s grave is in the “Magnolia Court” section of the huge East Lawn Memorial Park in Sacramento. She is otherwise unassociated with the city of Sacramento and this choice of final resting place surely means that her sister Alma, who was a resident of Sacramento at that point, was the person who made the arrangements.

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