Gertude Louise Cowsert

Gertrude Louise Cowsert, daughter of Margaret Branson (Theresa Margaret Alice Branson) and Jack Cowsert (John Patton Cowsert), was born 24 December 1920 in Taft, Kern County, CA -- a Christmas present for the family. Her names came from her aunt Gertrude Branson and from her maternal grandmother Louise Armstrong Snediker Branson. In daily life she was called Louise or Tootsie.

Louise’s parents had only recently come to Taft. They would make Taft and its fringes (South Taft and Ford City) their base for much of the next decade or so, with temporary stays elsewhere, including an interval spent in Compton in Los Angeles County when Louise was a toddler. Both Margaret and Jack had wandered a great deal in their earlier lives, so in some ways it was an achievement that Louise was able to attend the same school and have the same classmates during the bulk of her childhood.

Louise’s half-brothers Oliver Charles Heitkemper and Edgar Robert Gaver were substantially older than she and were soon gone from the household, but she had the company of her “Sissy” -- half-sister Margaret Brandy Gaver, more often known as Little Margaret -- at least into her adolescence. By then, she was beginning to become a big sister herself, in a way, thanks to a close bond with her niece Mary Ellen Heitkemper, born in 1927.

In 1936 or thereabouts, the Cowsert family moved to Bakersfield, the “big city” of Kern County, a place becoming even bigger due to the influx of people streaming in from Oklahoma due to the Dust Bowl and the hardships of the Great Depression. Louise spent her junior and senior years at Kern County High School, somewhat overwhelmed at first by how huge the institution was compared to what she had known in Taft. In general, Bakersfield would remain Louise’s base of operations until her children were all old enough to leave home.

Said children began arriving early and often. The first was conceived when Louise was seventeen and was born only a few months after she turned eighteen. The father was Louise’s first husband, James Harold Walker. A son of James Huston Walker and Josephine Hedrick, he was known as Harold in early life and while married to Louise, but became James later because his second wife hated the name Harold. He had been born 16 July 1919 on a farm near Tipton, Tulare County, CA, and had been raised in Coalinga, Fresno County, CA. Altogether James and Louise had four children. However, despite the frequency with which he begat those offspring, James was not the model of a nurturant father. Raised by a widower in a household replete with brothers, James had lacked a female role model in the home and tended to think the women in his life were there to be domestic servants rather than creatures to whom he could demonstrate his softer side. Louise finally had enough in about 1943. However, she was pregnant for the fourth time when the separation occurred. Inasmuch as she had no spouse and was responsible for two little girls -- her second child, John James Walker, having died the day after he was born -- she agreed to adopt the newborn out. That child became the son of Little Margaret Gaver and her second husband Robert Bruce Lander, and was given the name Robert Bruce Lander after his adoptive father. Whether he was officially a “Junior” is unknown; to the family he was known as Skipper. Unfortunately, Skipper suffered brain damage as the result of a difficult birth. He barely made it to adulthood and was institutionalized for a large fraction of his life.

James did not make an effort to see his girls after the divorce until a decade later, and then probably only because he was urged to do so by his second wife (who is by contrast regarded today with affection by those girls). Louise thought little enough of James after the split that she did not talk about him if possible. The younger of the girls had no memory of her birth father living in the home and until she was a teenager assumed she was a biological child of her stepfather. That stepfather was Donald Eugene Kileen. He was the opposite of James Harold Walker in many ways. He was even-tempered and enjoyed his family tremendously. Son of Harry John Kileen and Frances Cecelia Wilhelm, Don had been born 12 April 1922 in Vincennes, Knox County, IN. He and Louise were wed 18 May 1944 in Bakersfield.

The pattern of frequent births continued. By the end of 1950, Don and Louise were parents of four children of their own. This meant she had given birth a total of eight times, and was not quite out of her twenties when the last one came along.

Somehow, despite a household full of youngsters, Louise managed to find time for creative pursuits. She was a painter. She wrote songs. She was such a seamstress she could look at a garment on the rack and be able to sketch out the pattern from visual memory and create a copy. She had enough talent that she probably could have pursued some or all of these interests professionally, but demands on her time as a housewife, mother, and then grandmother were extraordinary. She had her own many children, and then the grandchildren began arriving in the early 1960s. Eventually their number would expand to a total of eighteen. And then, to top it off, she needed to provide increasing care to Don.

Don, in his prime, was a brilliant man. A straight “A” student in school, a prodigious reader of books, a tax consultant and bookkeeper by profession, he was a figure to be admired. These qualities made it all the more tragic when he developed early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease. The symptoms struck at the age of forty-six (1968) and rapidly gnawed away at the person he had been. In part because of his condition, Louise and Don slipped into an early “retirement” phase of life in Pismo Beach on the coast of San Luis Obispo County, CA. On the happy side, this home provided a vacation venue for the children and grandchildren who wanted to escape Bakersfield for a few days or weeks -- this was a particularly nice asset for the family during the times when Louise’s daughters were divorced -- but it was also a kind of hospice. Donald Eugene Kileen finally expired 26 January 1982, at not quite sixty years of age. (He died so early even his own father survived him. Harry John Kileen did not perish until 1988, when he was eighty-nine, having avoided contracting Alzheimer’s.)

Louise had a long widowhood, but aside from the lack of male companionship, her last years were good ones on the whole. She could practice her many avocations. In addition to those mentioned above, she loved to garden -- the beneficent coastal climate helped make this a pleasure -- and she tried her hand at short-story writing. Her younger daughter with her second husband and family lived in neighboring Grover Beach during these years. Another local was Louise’s ex-husband James Walker, though he and Louise did not associate with one another. James died 27 April 1990 in Grover Beach. Louise passed away 10 October 1998 in Pismo Beach, San Luis Obispo County, CA.

Children of Gertrude Louise Cowsert

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