Vernon Aubrey Williams

Vernon Aubrey Williams, first of the four children of Alice Branson and John Henry Williams, was born 4 October 1904 at Mount Bullion, Mariposa County, CA. Alice and John had lived at the mining outpost of Mount Bullion, the site of Princeton Mine, ever since their 1902 wedding had taken place. Mount Bullion had long one of the more reliable mining sites in the Mother Lode and was still productive even in these early years of the Twentieth Century when, in general, gold was getting difficult to find in quantities that would allow profitable extraction. The family would remain in place through the births of Vernon’s brother Ray Burton Williams in 1907 and his sister Ruth Evelyn Williams in 1911. However, before Vernon had reached ten years of age, his father had conceded that mining had no future, and the family moved to a farm near Manteca, San Joaquin County, CA. Vernon’s youngest sibling, sister Frances Bernice Williams, was born there in 1914.

John Williams died in 1923 when a bad case of the flu led to pneumonia. Vernon was then eighteen years of age. It is possible that the young man helped his mother keep the farm going during the next few years. However, this did not go on longterm. Perhaps neither Vernon nor Ray wanted to be farmers. In October, 1928, Alice married a long-time neighbor, Milton James Henry, and moved to his farm, taking with her Frances, the one child who was still a minor. The adult children -- Alice’s older three as well as Milton’s two -- exercised their independence. Most did so by leaving the area, though M.J.’s son Lloyd did serve as a dentist in Manteca for many decades. Vernon, meanwhile, turned to railroad work for a living, as had many of his cousins on his mother’s side a generation earlier.

In the late 1920s, Vernon’s relationship with a long-term sweetheart fizzled out. His “rebound gal” was red-headed Ethel Leona Brill. Born 21 July 1904 in rural Hamilton County, OH, outside of Cincinnati, Ethel was the youngest of the eight children of Charles Henry Brill and Sarah Lydia Trimble. The latter couple had been married in 1881 or about then, first dwelling in Colorado, then back in Missouri (Lydia’s birthplace), then in Hamilton County, OH (Charles’s birthplace), before moving in the early 1920s to a farm near Lathrop, San Joaquin County, CA. Some of Ethel’s older siblings had not come along to California, but she was still in her teens and was among the portion of her birth family that relocated. Lathrop and Manteca being essentially adjacent to one another, it is no surprise that Ethel’s and Vernon’s paths crossed. The pair were wed 24 December 1929 when both were twenty-five years old. They soon purchased and settled into a home at 321 Taft Avenue in Tracy, about ten miles west and somewhat south of Lathrop and Manteca.

Having a bit of physical distance from Vernon’s family may have been a blessing for Ethel, because some of the kinfolk appear to have felt he could have done a little better in his choice of spouse. The clan could be disparaging of someone who had only graduated eighth grade. Though Vernon’s great-grandparents John and Martha Branson had been illiterate, some of the surviving daughters and granddaughters were inordinately proud of being educated. Several of the granddaughters had in fact grown up to become school teachers, an example being Vernon’s aunt Inez Branson. Looming above all in judgment was Vernon’s great aunt Nancy Branson Harrington Napier, a close neighbor of Alice and M.J. Henry in the Summer Home district of rural Manteca. Nancy -- in tandem with Inez Branson -- had championed the placement of a woman on the San Joaquin County board of education in 1914. Nancy had then proceeded to open up a library branch out of her own home when the county failed to establish one in her district. She was the head of the Summer Home-Manteca Literary Society. Her husband Babe Napier was on the board of directors of the Bank of Manteca. Ethel would have had ample reason to feel intimidated by the old matriarch. Nevertheless Vernon and his wife and kids were often in Manteca during summer vacations and holiday gatherings. The farm of Alice and M.J. was a sanctuary, not the least because of Alice’s excellent Chinese cooking and the wonderful vegetables and fruits grown by her live-in brother Hugh Branson.

Vernon and Ethel became parents of three children, born from the early 1930s to the early 1940s. They kids all came into the world while the family was based in Tracy. Vernon worked as a brakeman and then as a conductor. These were relatively low-level positions but during the Great Depression it was no small thing to have steady employment with such a giant of a firm as Southern Pacific, these still being the days when railroads were the main means of getting freight to and fro across the continent and one of the most common means of passenger travel. To have any regular position with S.P. at all meant qualifying for the company retirement plan. Pensions in the railroad industry were considered so robust and well-crafted that rail workers were exempted from Social Security because they were considered to be well-looked-after already.

Finally an opportunity came for meaningful career advancement. After America committed fully to World War II, military infrastructure began being built at a furious pace along the Sacramento River and the edges of San Francisco Bay. Workers were brought in. Existing shipyards were refurbished. New ones were added. Soon a constant stream of liberty ships were being launched. One of the places where the boom was at a fever pitch was Pittsburg in Contra Costa County. In 1942 (or early 1943), the Williams family relocated there. Vernon was assigned the role of trainmaster. He was responsible for coordinating the logistics as troop transports arrived bringing fresh soldiers and sailors to the West Coast for their deployment in the Pacific theater of battle. Vernon was also put in charge of the gravel pits, a major responsibility in that (railcar-based) movement of gravel was essential to completing new shipyards at the highly accelerated schedule the powers-that-be had set.

Things changed rapidly right after the war. Suddenly most of the shipyards were no longer needed. Further, the writing was on the wall in terms of the decline of the railroad industry as freeways began to appear and aircraft began to get huge and jet-powered, allowing a far greater quantity of goods to travel by methods other than rail. Vernon’s ability to choose the ideal job situation was limited. Inasmuch as the delta weather and pollen had aggravated Ethel’s asthma, the family made a fairly radical change, moving completely out of state to Klamath Falls, OR.

Vernon and Ethel found that they liked southern Oregon a great deal, but other factors turned the sojourn in Klamath Falls -- an interval lasting about a year and a half -- into a disaster. First, even getting the transfer required unwelcome compromises. The area was popular among senior S.P. employees, and so Vernon was not able to obtain a job at the same level of responsibility (and pay) he had enjoyed during the war. There were simply too many men senior to him who already had those jobs. He was reduced to minor roles such as switchman, and to get that much, he had had to trade in a portion of his accrued retirement credits. Then things got much worse. An on-the-job accident cost Vernon an eye.

The railroad did not step up to do the right thing. Vernon was forced to hire a lawyer. Though lawsuits in those days proceeded through the courts quite a bit faster than they do now, the family nevertheless faced a substantial waiting period. They spent these months in San Diego, CA. In the end, Southern Pacific caved in. The settlement was so substantial Vernon and Ethel knew they could live pretty much in whatever part of the nation they wanted, and had enough investment funds to establish most any type of business they might like to get into. Given how much they had liked southern Oregon, they came back to Ashland, Jackson County, about forty miles west of their previous stomping grounds in Klamath Falls. They purchased the White Cabin Motel about two blocks from the campus of Southern Oregon University. This would prove to be an excellent means to secure their income inasmuch as the facility was ideally placed to cater to visitors to the university and to tourists coming to enjoy the Shakespeare Festivals. Vernon and Ethel ran the motel together, never needing to fall back on other financial ventures.

Being in Oregon meant, of course, that Vernon was separated from the other members of the Branson/Ousley clan. That did not change, and distant cousins for the most part lost track of him. Closer relatives were another story. Having the motel rooms available meant family visitors could be easily accommodated, and even today Vernon’s nieces and nephews recall staying there during trips they and their parents made in the 1950s and/or 1960s. On her side of things, Ethel was also separated from most of her kinfolk, many of whom lingered in Manteca (Lathrop), Stockton, Modesto, and Lodi. One small exception was that in her old age, a grandson of her sister Clara did come up to live not far away in Grants Pass, OR.

In the mid-1970s, after the motel days, when they themselves were entering their own seventies, Vernon and Ethel divorced, even though they had been married four and a half decades by then. Both stayed in Ashland or its vicinity, however.

Vernon suffered a stroke in 1984 (or so) that left him needing major nursing care. He spent his final couple of years in a rest home until finally perishing 10 July 1986 in Talent, Jackson County, OR. Ethel survived him by two years, dying 19 July 1988 in Ashland, OR. Vernon’s body was cremated and his ashes are as of this writing (January, 2011) still with his eldest son. Ethel’s grave is in the town cemetery in Phoenix, Jackson County, OR, just north of Ashland.

Children of Vernon Aubrey Williams with Ethel Leona Brill

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