Joseph Eldridge Branson

Joseph Eldridge Branson, son of Eldridge Geary Branson and Clara Jackson, was born 9 January 1918 in San Bernardino, CA. He went on to spend his entire life in that city.

Joe was his mother’s favorite. This did not help a natural predisposition for selfishness and lack of good judgment. His life became a shambles, and his behavior ended up hurting all of his close family members in one way or another. This profile was without doubt the hardest to write of the 121 biographies featured on the Branson-Ousley website. Only the biography of his second cousin Mildred Corkins compares to it in terms of distressing subject matter. Having to mention such ugliness as pedophilia is not at all pleasing. However, this genealogical project is meant to hold open the book on an entire extended family, including all its members from the paragons to the “normal folk” to the disappointments. If not for that mandate, Joe’s biography would have been be distilled down to a placeholder. If so, perhaps it would have consisted only of these sentences: Joe drank. He was a deadbeat dad. His early death can be said to be the consequence of his lifestyle.

Among the things Joe rushed into without proper appreciation of the responsibility involved was his marriage. He was only nineteen. His bride was only fifteen. It seems likely a pregnancy was the reason why the knot was tied so early, but if so, there was a miscarriage, because the wedding took place in June, 1937 in Riverside, CA and yet the couple’s first known child was born over twelve months later. Assuming a miscarriage occurred, the two had a chance to reverse course. It would have been better if they had done so. Instead, they chose to stay together. Or that is to say, they stayed together for the time being -- they would eventually part ways after less than a decade as husband and wife. The union resulted in six children. All were born in extremely rapid succession from mid-1938 to mid-1944, i.e. six of them in a six-year span. In order of birth, the six consisted of Ernest Elton Branson, Joseph Geary Branson, Blaine Allen Branson, Richard Stanley Hathaway, Ann(a) Louise Branson, and Gladys Janet Branson.

Joe’s wife was Iva Gladys Laster, daughter of Stanley Ebie Laseter and Myrtle Nona Quaid. (Laseter is used here as the spelling of Stan’s surname because he, his parents, and siblings used that spelling until the 1920s. After that, they shifted on a group basis to the Laster spelling, in keeping with the way the family had pronounced the name all along.) Iva, born 17 October 1921, was a native of Tushka, Anoka County, OK. Her original milieu was rich with extended family -- even to the extent that two of her father’s siblings had married two of her mother’s siblings. Iva was less a part of that family togetherness than she might otherwise have been, though, because her parents divorced when she was small. Her father stayed in Oklahoma for the rest of his life, whereas Iva and her mother were among the various Lasters and Quaids who came out to California. One of the places beckoning them was Ventura County, and that is where Iva and Myrtle were based during the mid-1930s. They moved to San Bernardino County in approximately 1936. Iva and Joe surely did not meet until that migration occurred, which means they had not known one another long when they wed. Iva may have been motivated to “get out young” because her new stepfather, Calvin Lester Harned, was abusive. He was bad enough that Myrtle’s complaint to police about him that same summer led to his arrest. Ultimately, as one would expect, it also led to a divorce. In the meantime, Iva made her escape. She and Joe established themselves as newlyweds at 1278 Esperanza in San Bernardino. By late 1938 or early 1939 they moved to 732 Adell Street, just a few doors away from 808 Adell, the home in which Joe had been raised from birth to adulthood.

Joe was often unemployed, and when he did work, was the sort of employee a boss would not want on the payroll. That said, there were times when he generated income. For one thing, he became a carpenter in the early 1940s and would manage to land gigs in construction from time to time, if not in a lasting way. Some of the other occupations mentioned in directories and voter registers are county hospital laborer, railroad depot agent, and mechanic. His obituary describes him as a former heavy-equipment operator.

Some time after Gladys’s birth -- before Joe could knock her up again -- Iva vanished. She’d had enough of Joe. She’d also had far too much of her mother-in-law. Just where she went at first is still unknown. She probably was abetted by her mother and by various Quaid and Laster relatives, meaning her prime refuges were in such places as Oklahoma and Ventura County. By the late 1950s, she is known to have based in Yuma, AZ along with her mother. She did not involve herself further in the raising of the kids. In fact, it is quite likely that for many years the kids did not know where to find her. She appears to have resurfaced momentarily in 1960 upon the death (by automobile accident) of her mother. She married second husband Martin Lindsay Goad in late 1961. Only in the late 1960s or very early 1970s did she finally re-enter the lives of a couple of her offspring. Ann Louise Branson Ferguson had to have a hysterectomy for uterine cancer at the end of the 1960s or very early 1970s. Iva visited her in the hospital and the two reconciled. During Iva’s final years she and Ann were in regular contact, living near one another in Washington state. Iva was also on speaking terms with Ernest, though he died young enough that the person she ended up literally speaking to was Ernest’s widow, Ramona. Iva passed away 23 April 1991 in Tacoma.

Iva’s abandonment of her children occurred at a point when they needed her the most. That cannot be excused. However, her decision to look out for Number One may say more about how awful her situation was than it says about the weakness of her character. She had come to the marriage too young and quite possibly had done so as a means of getting out of a home where she was being raped by a stepfather. She had no maturity nor any experience to call upon to give her the means to assemble a nurturant and stable home life for herself, her kids, with Joe, or even manage to avoid the manipulations of her vile mother-in-law. She might well have seen only two options: kill herself and end her misery that way, or run away. She chose to run away.

Joe was not capable of looking after his offspring, and that left the burden on the backs of his parents. Eldridge Geary Branson, for his part, did his best to keep a home over their heads and provide regular doses of unconditional love, but Clara Jackson Branson’s capacity for cruelty and control-freak measures could not be suppressed. What follows here are mini-biographies of each of the six kids. The context as described will give you an understanding of how awful “Grandma Clara’s” behavior was. Please note that ordinarily members of their generation would not be profiled on this website, but none are alive, and the light of day needs to shine on their story. Even today the grandchildren and great-grandchildren struggle to be happy and lead productive lives. Every individual among them who succeeds in that goal is overcoming the handicap he bequeathed them. May they from here on out experience the best of luck.

Ernest Elton Branson (1938-1979) was an aggressive and resentful teenager. That could be said to be a natural reaction to his circumstances. He started drinking early. Iva had quite a bit of Native American blood, so Ernie may have inherited an enhanced susceptibility to the effects of alcohol. Certainly he had the tendency from his Branson heritage. It is probably accurate to say he would have been in jail by the time he was nineteen or twenty had he not been steered into the U.S. Air Force at age eighteen by a Jackson great uncle or two (particularly by Robert Jackson). This advice perhaps was echoed by a probation officer. The structured environment helped keep Ernie’s aggressiveness contained. At first it was not a perfect solution. He made a mess of his marriage to a San Bernardino High School classmate, Mona Ann Hayden, aka Ann. This union resulted in a son born not long after Ernie reached twenty-one years old. Ernie was barely involved with the boy’s upbringing. Ann went on to wed her next husband in 1962, and built a life for herself in and/or near Corpus Christi, TX with said husband. About the only way Ernie left an influence upon his firstborn was that the kid kept the last name Branson in spite of being raised by a stepfather in a home that included two younger half-siblings and a step-sister his own age. It is however possible Ernie and his son might have reestablished an adult-to-adult connection if Ernie had enjoyed a longer life. (Mona Ann Hayden eventually moved to central Texas and went on to a third husband. She passed away in San Antonio in 2022.)

Ernie committed some sort of error in his military career that cost him a demotion. However, he stuck it out for the long haul, remaining in the service for over fourteen years. By 1964 his career caused him to be posted to the Montana/Idaho region, where he became romantically involved with Wyoma June Kincaid of Great Falls. They wed at the end of 1964 and she gave birth to a son in mid-1966. Ernie was determined to “do better this time” and cherished the opportunity. Unfortunately two major factors ruined his hope. One is that to provide for his young family, he had to be a breadwinner. What he knew was military life, so he rededicated himself to it. Among other things, he needed the higher pay he had missed out on due to the demotion. In that era, there was only one obvious path to advancement -- go to Vietnam. And if possible, do it with a specialty. This was a course of action Ernie could exert some sort of choice about, and he “did the right thing.” He would go on to multiple tours serving as an explosives ordnance disposal spec sergeant. That was one of the most hair-raising sorts of military occupations he could have become involved in. It put him at risk of getting blown to bits every workday. (Think of the characters of the movie The Hurt Locker or read my novel Piper in the Night.) He survived, though, and eventually he even distinguished himself, resulting in the award in late 1969 of a U.S. Air Force Commendation Medal for meritorius service, a nod from the superiors who had observed his work at Pleiku air base. His hitch ended not long after he received that medal.

The other factor to be overcome if Ernie was to be able to raise a child (or even prospective additional children) as he hoped to do depended on something outside his control. He needed his partner to keep up her end of the plan. Unfortunately Wyoma was the sort of woman whose habit was to move on from man to man. She had already been married three times before Ernie and while he was gone so much to Southeast Asia, she found his absence too much of a temptation, and she began an affair. The romance proved to have a certain amount of staying power and ultimately, once the divorce went through, led to her fifth trip to the altar. Ernie never got to enjoy continued time in a day-to-day father role. And this time, given Wyoma’s desire to erase history, the boy did not even retain the Branson last name. All this left Ernie in a depressed mood. And of course it did not help his drinking. However, after wallowing in misery for a bit, he chose to try to pull himself together. Having finished his career posted at McChord AFB in Washington, he stayed in the Pacific Northwest rather than returning to California, and he entered treatment in Walla Walls for his alcoholism. This was the right move. It kept him away from old influences, and gave him time to create a solid footing for himself. He was now mature enough to hold back in situations that in younger days would have made him blow his top. He was no doubt aware that he was lucky just to be alive. He did not take his circumstances for granted. Among his other good moves at that time was his choice of third wife. He wed Ramona Robin Bueoy (1936-2013, original maiden name Pavey) in 1971 in Walla Walla. They had met while both were in treatment. Their relationship therefore was based on a mutual understanding of their weaknesses and no matter what, they were there for each other. For Ernie’s part, he was inspired to renew his effort to be a better man. In addition to Ramona’s positive influence, a second hitch in the Air Force, from 1973 to 1977, helped straighten him out. Most important, he stayed sober.

Tragically, Ernie came to a violent end, but it says a great deal that the cause was not rage or any sort of other “acting out” on his part. The incident took place during a camping trip Ernie was taking with a friend, Alva Bida Sutton (1918-1986) of San Simon, AZ. (Ordinarily Ernie and Ramona could be found at their home in Sumner, WA.) On 10 November 1979, while travelling along Highway 10 at a spot about a mile east of the Arizona-New Mexico state line in Hildalgo County, NM several miles west of Lordsburg, the camper van Ernie was driving went over an embankment and rolled, flinging both passengers out. Alva survived, but Ernie did not. The accident does not appear to have been alcohol-related. The law-enforcement officers who investigated found no indication of that, and speculated that the many heavy items inside the camper had made it impossible to maintain control as the vehicle went around the curve.

Joseph Geary Branson (1939-1940) died at the age of seven-and-a-half months. A loss like that in any normal family could safely be assumed to have been the result of an unavoidable health issue or a tragic accident, but with a father like Joe and such an inexperienced and overwhelmed mother like Iva, it is impossible not to wonder if parental error -- or even neglect or abuse -- was at the root of the baby’s demise.

Blaine Allen Branson (1940-1997) was the most nightmarish of the kids. The word monster is a label he fully deserves. Some of what is described here has already been laid out within the biography of his grandfather Eldridge found elsewhere on this website, but here are more details:

Blaine was notorious for his actions even as a child, and then all the more so through his teenage years. Amid his many faults, the worst was that he was a sexual predator. His favorite targets were boys younger than himself, sometimes much younger. Among his crimes -- unfortunately not one that he ever stood trial for -- was the rape of his uncle Hugh’s stepson, seven years Blaine’s junior. That particular victim would go on to die of suicide, and though that event occurred when he was sixty years old and took place long after Blaine’s own death, one can’t help but wonder if the lingering trauma of the sexual assault was a factor.

By age twenty-one, Blaine was in theory out of the house -- meaning his grandparents’ residence at 808 Adell, but soon his life was in a shambles and he back he came. He was there far too often over the span of the 1960s. He was in and out of trouble with the law, which not only thrust more worry and stress into Eldridge and Clara’s lives, but swept them up in the economic fallout, because they felt they had no choice but to offer compensation for the property stolen or destroyed by Blaine. The elderly couple stepped in because they knew if they did not, court cases would have proceeded, guilty verdicts were all but certain, and then Blaine surely have been required to serve substantial jail time. Eldridge and Clara should have just let matters take their natural course. Blaine would ultimately spend much of his life in prison and as far as can be determined, died while incarcerated. That demise, probably due to a case of AIDS contracted while incarcerated, occurred in 1997 at the age of fifty-seven. He seemed destined for that fate, but in the 1960s, Edridge and Clara maintained hope he could be rehabilitated -- or at least believed they should act on his behalf no matter what. One would hope they were unaware of the full extent to which Blaine had already crossed the line during his teens and early twenties. They do seem to have been oblivious to the fact that Blaine had raped his step-cousin.

In 1965, Blaine committed a burglary. This proved to be a watershed moment. It was not his first such brush with the law, and thankfully was a crime of property, not direct harm perpetrated upon a living person, but nevertheless was an incident that cost Eldridge and Clara deeply. If not for that collatoral-damage aspect, the scenario is almost laughable, and had the potential to serve as fodder for one of AM-radio celebrity Paul Harvey’s “And Now, the Rest of the Story” anecdotes about the doings of truly stupid crooks. Blaine made so many blunders his arrest was all but inevitable. His behavior was so bizarre the judge would later interrupt the criminal proceedings long enough to have Blaine undergo a psychiatric examination to determine his sanity -- or lack of it. This is the story in a nutshell: During the early hours of 3 June 1965, Blaine broke into the office of Coe Pump Company of San Bernardino. He went after the safe, trying to burn the hinges off with an acetylene torch. He failed. The safe was too well built, and Blaine was an amateur with the tool. Instead, he grabbed anything else that wasn’t nailed down, but might have some value assuming he could find someone to fence the merchandise. His haul included an adding machine, an electric typewriter, an electric drill, a bench grinder, a check protector, and an intercom system. But he had no vehicle, so he was obliged to carry everything away on foot. He left such clear tracks that in the morning, two sheriff’s detectives, Glenn Bowen and Robert Richardson, had no trouble figuring out that Blaine had proceeded to a clump of bushes across the street where he had hidden some of the items. His route from there was plain. The two men trudged along, eyes to the ground, and the traces reliably led them to 808 Adell, a journey of about a mile. They arrived at 9:20am, found Blaine lying placidly on his bed, and arrested him.

Eventually, either in the wake of the 1965 arrest or during the subsequent few years, Eldridge and Clara lost their home, having no choice but to sell it to cover the cost of making up for Blaine. There was one small silver lining to them having to go through such an involuntary process of downsizing. Their new home, probably a rental, had no room for Blaine to gravitate back to, and it had no furnishings or hardware or stockpiled food items for Blaine to steal. If only for that reason, after the mid-1960s Blaine was seldom seen in San Bernardino. In part, that was because he spent periods in jail, but also because when he was at large, he preferred to frequent Los Angeles and the urbanized parts of Orange County. It was easier for him to be an openly gay man there, whereas back in his original, more provincial setting, he would have faced a greater degree of pushback.

The last family members saw of Blaine was in 1974 when he showed up at the hospital to visit with his dying grandmother, Clara. He brought along a boyfriend. A surviving cousin recalls that the boyfriend’s nickname was Bennie. His identity is not better known than that. That Blaine would bring along a significant other at such an occasion might seem to be a positive sign -- implying a steady relationship and a desire on Blaine’s part to reassure his grandmother than he was getting his life together. It seems more likely his motives were otherwise. Blaine probably just wanted to take advantage of one last chance to taunt Clara for her prejudices by showing up with just the opposite of a conventional companion of the opposite sex. That was typical of him. One would hope Bennie, whoever he was, managed to steer Blaine into a better course in at least some small way, buy there is no evidence that happened, and for that matter Bennie and Blaine might have parted ways for good not long after that hospital visit.

Richard Stanley Hathaway (1941-1984) was the victim of one of his grandmother’s heartless actions, perhaps the worst of the schemes she perpetrated. Even before his birth Clara began muttering that the boy, who was known as Stanley Branson at that point, original middle name unknown, had not been sired by Joe, but was the product of an affair Iva had engaged in. Clara had no evidence, nor was her accusation true in any respect. Descendants of Stanley have done DNA testing and the results match other members of the Branson family. Clara made declarations of the same sort about all of the kids at one point or another but in Stanley’s case, was particularly insistent. Her reasoning? (Not that any sort of “reason” actually applies.) Iva named Stanley after her own father. This was hardly a crime. The first two sons had been given names that honored their Branson family members so it was only fair that the fourth son be given a name that honored the Laster family. Clara cited the name choice as proof of Iva’s infidelity. Hence, as soon as Clara had custody of the children, she put Stanley up for adoption.

The timing was especially harsh. Stanley was not yet a kindergartener but was old enough he knew he was being thrown out like garbage, and was old enough to retain this ego-bruising knowledge into adulthood. The only saving grace to the development was that the move took him out of Clara’s clutches, and away from the presence of his drunkard father. Moreover, he went to a couple who absolutely wanted a child. They were Jim Dee (aka Jimmie Dee) Hathaway and Mariane V. Jones, residents of the San Bernardino suburb of Colton who were ten years into their union and who had found themselves unable to have children naturally. Stanley, who became known upon adoption as Richard Stanley Hathaway, would grow up as an only child, which given the circumstances of his origin was a blessing of a profound sort.

Alas, the emotional trauma was not entirely put to rest. While Richard did have the benefit of a stable upbringing for the remaining fragment of his childhood, his life decisions as an adult echoed some of the mistakes engaged in by members of his biological family. The first major misstep was his choice of beginning married life with someone who came to the union at only sixteen years of age. You can guess the urgency -- the bride was pregnant. Her name was Laverne Willard. They married in mid-1962 when Richard was twenty. Laverne was from Armona, Kings County, CA and that is where the young couple would establish themselves. That meant Laverne’s parents were nearby as a support system as the new spouses became new parents. Moving at the same time were Jim and Mariane Hathaway, even though it meant saying good-by to Colton, a town in which they had resided for thirty years. With both sets of grandparents to help, Richard and Laverne managed to stay married for nine years. Along the way they welcomed two sons and two daughters. Unfortunately Richard took a page from Blaine’s book and was arrested for burglary in 1969, and while a plea bargain reduced his sentence, he was obliged to spend some time in jail. The marriage dissolved two years later.

Richard passed away in May, 1984. Details about his circumstances -- or even the precise calendar day he died -- have not surfaced. The degree to which his doings have been hard to trace after the 1971 divorce suggests his paper trail may have become subject to restriction, the most likely reason being that he was in jail. Whether this was true or not has yet to be discovered. The four kids went on to reach adulthood in Kings County. All became spouses. Three and possibly all four became parents. Laverne wed three further husbands. She died in 2012.

Ann Louise Branson (1943-2007) did not have a lot of good luck during her time on this Earth, but compared to her siblings her life story actually trends in the direction of normal. (Born Anna Louise Branson, she was also known as Anna Lou, but she preferred Ann, and that is how she appears in most sources once she became an adult.) She emerged from her childhood circumstances by the same method her mother had used -- she became a pregnant teen. Her case was however not as extreme as her mother nor her younger sister in that she was already seventeen when it happened, and would be eighteen by the time of the birth. She and boyfriend Johnny Leroy Ferguson (1940-1981) produced two sons and then two daughters, marrying a month prior to the birth of the first of those four kids. The sequence of births was at a pace that even beat the record her parents had set, the average interval being fourteen months. There might have been further children but as mentioned earlier on this page, Ann developed a case of uterine cancer and was obliged to have a hysterectomy when she was still only halfway through her twenties. This set the stage for one of the more remarkable and unexpected things that ever happened to her. Her mother visited her in the hospital, Iva having heard about Ann’s situation. By that point it had been two full decades since Iva had run away. She had remarried and had been living only as far off as Yuma, AZ. Ann managed to overcome her resentment and the pair went on to have regular contact.

Ann and Johnny divorced just short of ten years into their original union, but they did not entirely dismantle their relationship when it came to the mutual-support associations. Although they never formally re-tied the knot, they pretended to still be married when it came to dealing with certain bureaucratic agencies, an arrangement that somehow succeeded even though it was plain to see that they were engaging in separate lives, he in Tacoma, WA and she in San Bernardino. This was apparently Johnny’s way of not being a deadbeat and attempting with limited means to make an effort to provide child support. He was a severe alcoholic and he became unable to hold down a regular job. By including Ann as a spouse and his kids as dependents on certain official paperwork, he could funnel some of his disability payments -- the usual kind plus what he got as a veteran of the U.S. Navy -- in their direction. And then when he died in 1981 at only forty-one years of age (of an abdominal bleed caused by the poor state of his liver) they became eligible for any survivor benefits that may have ensued. Thanks to that strategy, and due to childcare help from various relatives, Ann managed to get by as a single mother.

A side effect of Johnny being in Tacoma was that not long after his death, perhaps as a result of inheriting property, Ann moved there as well, and the kids went on to come of age in that setting. And as mentioned above, Ann’s widowed mother moved north as well and spent her final few years within Ann’s sphere. It is quite likely none of them missed San Bernardino or Yuma once they were away from those stomping grounds. Ann would go on to be a resident of the Pacific Northwest for three decades and more, a stretch of her life nearly as long as her time in the Inland Empire. Ultimately she survived into her sixties, something that could not be said of any of the other offspring of Joe Branson and Iva Laster.

And finally we come to the case of Gladys Janet Branson (1944-1985). Like her sister, she made her first attempt to escape the manipulations of her grandmother and the toxic proximity of her brother Blaine by marrying young, which she did at an even younger age than Ann. She was only fifteen and a half. The surprising part of that scenario is that she was not pregnant, though it’s possible she thought she was. In any event, she did not give birth until a bit more than nine months after the wedding. The beau she chose to start a life with was James Edward Karper (1935-2023). A Navy vet more than nine years her senior, son of the owner of a trucking company, Jim was originally from Ohio but had come at age six to San Bernardino along with his parents. He was a steady sort compared to Gladys, and while he could not be said to have succeeded in being a Prince Charming sort of rescuer in the saga that was her life, his existence did mean that the three kids they produced -- all born one-two-three at eleven-month intervals in 1960, 1961, and 1962 at an even faster pace than the births of the offspring of her mother and her sister -- had “somewhere else to go” when Gladys failed to properly care for them.

A big reason why Gladys was not a dependable mother for her offspring was not only profound abuse of alcohol, the bane of her siblings and father and uncle, but also addiction to illegal drugs. That she would descend into the lifestyle of an addict was no surprise. In some ways it was an almost inevitable consequence of her upbringing. As the youngest child, she must have been particularly susceptible to the dysfunction surrounding her, and it had a defining effect on her adult psyche.

By the mid-1960s, perhaps even before Gladys had entered her twenties, Jim Karper had had enough. He went on to marry again in 1966. He and his new wife remained together until his death nearly sixty years later. They welcomed four children into their lives, meaning he was the father of seven kids altogether. Gladys also wed again, but details have proven hard to dig up. She had the last name Lewis in her grandfather Eldridge’s 1972 obituary, and she was still going by that last name when she died in 1985. Hence, she must have married a Mr. Lewis, but who he was and how long they were together is not known at this time.

Gladys’s end came three days shy of her forty-first birthday. As brief as her life was, she crossed nearly as many days off the calendar as did her brothers Ernie and Richard. She probably died of an overdose. One of her first cousins heard indirectly that this was the reason, and given how hopeless an addict Gladys was, there is little reason to think she died as a result of any other factor.

Joseph Eldridge Branson passed away 1 July 1962 at home (that is, at his parents’ home) at 808 Adell Street.

Descendants of Joseph Eldridge Branson with Iva Gladys Laster

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