Jean Clair Branson

Jean Clair Branson, daughter of John Joseph Branson and Jean Marie “Pearl” Drumm, was born 9 April 1915. She is almost certain to have come into the world in the lowermost foothills of Mariposa County. This was where her father had been raised, and it was there that Jean herself was raised for the first two years of her life. However, the “ground zero” precise locale of her birth and subsequent home has yet to be absolutely determined. Her parents may have lived on the ranch of grandparents Joe and Ella Branson about two miles north of the village of Hornitos near the mining outpost of Quartzburg. Alternately, John and Pearl may have had their own dwelling, and if so, the most likely scenario is that the couple rented quarters within Hornitos itself.

When Jean was scarcely out of diapers, her parents’ marriage faltered. Her mother went back to her original stomping grounds in the Santa Maria Valley of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. Her father did not want to give up on the union and he also relocated. It is possible a brief reconciliation occurred, during which time the couple -- and Jean -- shared a home in Orcutt, just south of the town of Santa Maria. In the long run, there was no saving the marriage, which ended in 1918 or 1919. (The actual divorce paperwork may not have been completed until the early 1920s.) Jean would go on to be raised primarily in her mother’s household. She did not entirely lose contact with her father, though. She retained the name Branson through the remainder of her childhood. As an adult, she would see her father occasionally, including when she put in appearances at significant Branson-clan events such as the celebration in Hornitos of the 50th wedding anniversary of her grandparents in 1929 and later the funerals of each of them, Joe’s in 1934 and Ella’s in 1946.

Jean lived in so many locales over the course of her childhood, and attended so many different schools, that she may well have ended up viewing herself as being from California in general rather than any particular spot within the state. This was particularly true of the late 1910s and early 1920s immediately after her parents parted ways for good. Her mother left Orcutt, even though she had been raised in the area and then had spent her first marrriage (to Burnett Knotts) in nearby Nipomo. Strangely enough, John Branson stayed put, almost as if he were the one who was native to the region. Pearl supported herself as a nurse at many points during the remainder of her life, whenever she wasn’t being a full-time housewife. The 1920 voter register shows her as a practical nurse residing at 745 Geary Boulevard in San Francisco. This is the only source found thus far that places her as a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area at any point in her life. She and Jean did not stay long. They went on to southern California, and were residents of Whittier, Los Los Angeles, CA when Pearl married her third husband 24 August 1923. The groom was Clifford Emmett Turley, a Missouri native. He was oil-field worker, a very typical occupation at that point in Los Angeles County history. He was six years younger than Pearl and had not been married before. Jean did not get much chance to judge how good or bad a stepfather he might be. Three months after the wedding, her mother became pregnant by boyfriend Jack Arthur Hurn, another oil-field worker. If Clifford Turley had not already headed off to greener pastures by then, that development must certainly have speeded him on his way.

Jack Hurn would prove to be the “fourth time’s the charm” figure in Pearl’s life, and would be a consistent presence and father figure for the rest of Jean’s childhood and beyond. That said, the road to domestic tranquility contained some bumps. One of the early bits of turmoil was the death of the new baby. Born 19 July 1924 in Long Beach, CA, little John Louis Moffett Hurn survived less than four months, passing away 16 November 1924 in Bakersfield, Kern County, CA just nine days after his parents’ wedding. As things worked out, he was Jean’s only brother. She did however soon gain a couple of half-sisters. Pearl and Jack became parents of Janet Lee Hurn 25 September 1925. Late the following year, John Branson’s new wife Marie Thurlwell gave birth to Gertrude Ellen “Trudy” Branson. Naturally, given that Jean was mostly or entirely a member of the Hurn household, she would get to know Janet far better than she ever got to know Trudy.

By the time of the baby’s death in late 1924, Pearl and Jack had established themselves in Bakersfield. This city, the residential hub of the Kern County oil-industry, was a regular base for the couple off and on for quite some time. Jack was already familiar with Bakersfield from his bachelor days, and it was the town in which his mother, Ona Mae Usher Moffett, resided. The latter was “the” grandmother figure of Jean’s upbringing in the sense that she rarely saw her grandmother Ella Geary Branson back in Mariposa County, and had never known her maternal grandmother, Mary Cordelia Stubblefield Drumm, who had passed away all the way back in 1894 when Pearl was still a child. However, for Jean as an individual, Bakersfield was somewhat temporary haven, home to her for no more than five years. Toward the end of the 1920s, she and her parents ended up farther south again. Pearl’s sister Ruby Drumm and uncle Claude Eugene Goodrich were residents of Brea, Orange County, CA. Pearl had more than once in her adult life sought out the company of her sister -- she and Ruby were only sixteen months apart in age and were the only two girls among the first eight children of James Howard Drumm and Mary Cordelia Stubblefied -- and so it was again. Pearl and Jack moved to Brea by no later than 1929. Both Jack and Claude were oil workers there. They were glad to keep getting hours as the Great Depression struck. Even so, times were so challenging that Pearl resumed nursing.

Brea played a formative role in Jean’s life. Her high school years began just as the family arrived. Jean attended Brea Olinda High School, an institution that had only been founded two years earlier (in 1927), meaning she was part of only the third graduating class of students who could claim to have spent all four years there. Indeed, when her mom and step-dad moved back to Bakersfield in the latter part of 1932, Jean stayed with her aunt Ruby -- even as Ruby’s husband Claude and her son William Glenn Ashton Goodrich and family made a similar move to Bakersfield so that the menfolk could acquire jobs in the oil fields.

Jean is the little girl in the center of this group. The year would seem to have been 1919, meaning this image dates from shortly after the break-up of Jean’s parents. On the far left is her aunt Hattie Drumm. Her mother is on the right. The boy in front is Jean’s first cousin Glenn, son of Ruby Drumm, still known by his original last name of Ashton at that point. The two adult men here are unidentified. They would appear to have been the current boyfriends of Hattie and Pearl, and were not involved in the lives of either woman for much longer.

It was undoubtedly in Brea that Jean met her husband-to-be, Bernard Richard Wall. However, he was seven years older than Jean so they were not a high-school tandem, and probably did not become acquainted until she was a single woman out in the working world, mingling in a more general way. Jean spent the summer after her 1933 graduation in Bakersfield with her folks, but soon she was expressing her independence. She moved to Los Angeles, where she supported herself as a bookkeeper. Her place of residence -- certainly by 1936 and possibly as early as 1933, was a boarding house at 1269 S. Woods Avenue. This meant Jean was situated on the southeast side of central Los Angeles, and therefore Brea was a destination that would have appealed to her for purposes of socializing. In those pre-freeway days, getting all the way back to Bakersfield -- three times as far away and on the other side of a major mountain range -- was inconvenient. By contrast, it was quick and easy to hop on a commuter train to Brea to hang out with friends. One way or another, she and Bernard met and became romantically entangled. The pair were wed 13 August 1936 in Fullerton by Reverend Paul Early, attended by Bernard’s brother Vincent and Jean’s high-school classmate Idah Eddis Jacobs.

Bernard, born in Rifle, Garfield County, CO 8 February 1908, was a son of Nathaniel Anthony Wall and Catherine Josephine Bradshaw. The Walls had moved to California early in Bernard’s primary school years, at first making a home in Gilroy in Santa Clara County, where Nathaniel, who had been an attorney back in Colorado, ran a candy store and then a dry-cleaning service. In the early 1920s the household had been reestablished in southern California, where Nathaniel had died in 1923. Bernard had come of age in Brea, where his widowed mother supported the family by operating a boarding house at 100 N. Pomona Street. Even in the summer of 1936, at a full twenty-eight years of age, Bernard was still there, as was his brother Vincent. It is possible the house played a role in bringing Jean and Bernard together. While Jean is unlikely to have been a lodger there, it might well have been where one or more of her friends had chosen to rent a room during their own post-high-school, pre-marriage phases of life. Some of Jean’s social visits to Brea may literally have brought her right through the front door of Bernard’s own place of residence.

Unlike the relationship of John and Pearl Branson, Jean and Bernard’s union endured for life. Some of their early years together were spent back in the region Jean was familiar with. Bernard acquired a job with Standard Oil, which brought the couple to Taft/Ford City, Kern County, CA. As it happened, Taft in 1936-37 was where one of Jean’s first cousins, Josephine Warner, was living along with her new husband, Alfred Smeds, also a Standard Oil employee. It is not clear, though, that the two newlywed couples were aware of each other’s proximity. The Smedses went back to Fresno County by 1938. The Walls lingered in Taft/Ford City for another year or so beyond that. Their first child, Jon Arthur Wall, was born in Taft 18 September 1937. Sadly, Jon survived less than eighteen years, passing away 14 May 1955.

Now that Jean and Bernard had a child to think of, a better employment situation was called for. Bernard decided to become a teacher. This involved a move to Los Angeles and a temporary return to being a student so as to get his credential. To support them through this transitional period, Jean got a job as a stenographer for a mail-order clothing company. It would have been impossible to keep that job while being a full-time mother of a young child, so Jon was left in the care of Pearl and Jack in Bakersfield.

As the 1940s proceeded, Bernard succeeded in finding a teaching position back in Brea, where he and Jean and Jon spent the middle part of the decade. Jean and Bernard’s second child, a daughter, joined the family during this period. (Name withheld because she is still alive.)

The Walls moved to Sonoma County, CA some time in the late 1940s, living at first amid the redwoods in the western part of the county in the Russian River’s lower reaches -- the part of the county that contains the village of Guerneville and the famous Korbel Winery (of sparkling-wine fame). This was during a seven-year period when Jack Hurn was employed as an oil driller in Iraq by the Near East Development Corporation. For some of this interval Bernard was also employed in Iraq and it would be quite some time before he returned to teaching (and even then in the role of substitute-teacher). This left Jean holding the fort back in Sonoma County, sometimes with the help of her mother, but for much of that span her mother was with Jack in Basra and Jean was the lone adult overseeing her household. Some of the burden was alleviated by sending Jon off to the St. Vincent de Paul School for Boys in northern Marin County.

Jean and Bernard lingered a while in Sonoma County, but in the city of Santa Rosa rather than the Russian River area. They were there when Jon passed away in 1955. Sonoma County is where Jean and Bernard’s two grandchildren -- their daughter’s children -- were born in the late 1960s. They northward migration was eventually mirrored by Jean’s half-sister Janet and family, and by mom Pearl and stepfather Jack. Jean and Bernard seem to have ventured farther still, spending at least some of the 1970s in Crescent City, Del Norte County, CA, in the extreme northwest of the state. However, by 1983 -- as shown by Jean’s address on the list assembled that year by family genealogist Ivan Branson when it became time for him to distribute copies of his book, Bones of the Bransons -- Jean and Bernard moved to Ukiah, Mendocino County, CA. They probably arrived no later than 1981, because it was that year and in that community that Jack Hurn passed away. All indications are Jean and Bernard spent the rest of their lives in Ukiah. That is where Pearl passed away (at age 100) in 1988, and where Bernard perished 7 June 1995.

Once on her own, it would have been only natural for Jean to relocate some time during what would go on to become ten years of widowhood in order to live in closer proximity to her daughter, but Jean was content to stay in Ukiah among her established group of friends. Her passion was going to garage sales. She was gregarious and liked making things lively. Her daughter was quoted in the obituary as saying, “She had a sense of humor like Gracie Allen. You had to be on your toes.”

Jean spent her final weeks at Ukiah Convalescent Hospital. (By total serendipity, the recreation director at Ukiah Convalescent Hospital while Jean was there was the mother-in-law of Dave Smeds, son of Jean’s cousin Josephine, the very cousin whom Jean had lived near while in Taft in the 1930s.) Jean’s date of death was 13 January 2005.

Children of Jean Clair Branson with Bernard Richard Wall

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