Part IV · THE YEAR THE FAMILY BROKE APART · Chapter 13

The Four Hundred Dollars

Los Angeles, and a farm near Tulsa · 1946

In the record Galen Vane Krewson (1897–1957) · Margery Knight Marshall (1922–?) · Félice Marshall Mitchell (née Knight) · Marvel Krewson · Alfred George Marshall · Al Krewson (b. 1943) · Glenn Krewson (b. 1943) · Marjorie Krewson · Rosie Krewson

In 1946 a woman named Félice Mitchell — "Granny" to the four children in this chapter — came from England to Los Angeles to see her daughter, and found her, in the words her grandson would quote sixty years later, "married with 4 babies on her hands." She was, in her own words, "shocked and horrified beyond words" [1].

Everything in this chapter comes from one man's memory, written down once. Al Krewson — one of the four babies, three years old in 1946 — sat at a keyboard in Portland, Oregon, on the morning of 21 January 2005, sixty-two years old, and wrote his nephew Michael two long emails in a row about the year his family came apart, in answer to a question about who his father was. He had pieced it together, he said, "from several talks we had during my growing up years in Ireland" with the grandmother who took him there, from two cousins who had known his father, and from what a three-year-old keeps. He sent the second email by accident before he had finished it, and then finished it. At the end he wrote: "I will assure you what I shared is as accurate as I can make it based on information given to me first hand. You may consider this as a piece of family history and you should perhaps keep it for your records" [1]. This is the record he asked for.

Granny

She had been born Félice Knight, in Belgium — French was her first language, English her second, "which answers an age old question I had of her knowing French before she did English" [2] — and had married an English research chemist, Alfred George Marshall, and borne him a daughter, Margery, at 62 Foxley Lane, Purley, Surrey, on 21 April 1922 [3]. The marriage ended in divorce; she married again, a British Army major with a Military Cross from the Boer War and an estate in the mountains of central Ireland, and the grandchildren would know that man as Grandpa; he has his own chapter. She was, Al said, "a real globetrotter," fluent in French and Spanish, and she carried, and passed to him, a story that the family descended from Ferdinand and Isabella — "we most certainly have royal blood in us (though we are very distant from it now)" [2]. That is family legend, and the book leaves it labelled so.

Her daughter Margery had somehow got from Purley to Los Angeles by her twentieth year — the likeliest route is her father: Alfred George Marshall, Granny's first husband, divorced from her and living by then in Berkeley, California, and the one who would fetch the children home in 1946 — and had married a machinist fifteen years older than herself named Galen Vane Krewson, who had come out of Iowa in the thirties for reasons the last chapter set out, and had two wives behind him that his cousins knew of [4]. By 1946 she was twenty-four and had four small children: Al, born in February 1943; Glenn, born in December of the same year, ten and a half months later; and two girls, Marjorie and Rosie, whose birth dates the family's record does not yet hold. Galen "was holding a steady job as a mechanic in Los Angeles and taking care of his family (us 4 and Mom)" — that is Al's own summary, and the cousins who had known Galen in Iowa agreed with it: he "was trying his best to settle down with his family (us) in LA" [1]. "Then Granny showed up on the scene and all hell broke loose."

What she thought of him

Al did not soften what his grandmother said, because she had not softened it to him:

And then the money:

Four hundred dollars in 1946 was about two months of a machinist's wages. It was the price, in this family's history, of a farm that never existed — the last of a long line of farms, from twenty-eight acres at Gowanus to 580 in Bucks County to whatever Charles had held near Centerville, and the first that was a lie. Whether Galen ever meant to buy land in Oklahoma, or invented it on the spot for a woman who had told him to his face what she thought of him, nobody can now say; the cousins who confirmed the story to Al confirmed only how it ended — "he did indeed show up in bars in the Midwest bragging about how he took his stupid mother-in-law for several hundred bucks under the pretense of using it for his family. When his drinking buddies heard he did this to his family, many of them turned away from him."

The farm near Tulsa

He took the family to Oklahoma — "It was also at this time we were all indeed in Oklahoma, not too far from Tulsa" — and left them with his oldest sister, Marvel. The two of them, Al learned much later, "never got along and were always fighting each other since they were kids. But she wasn't above helping out in a time of need." Galen showed her the money, told her it was for land nearby, "and he asked her to put us up temporarily until he could get the final details put in order. I guess she believed him, because we wound up there" [1]. Then he was gone.

What a three-year-old kept of the farm is the best thing in the letters, and the book gives it whole:

The heavy-set woman with large bones was Marvel; a cousin's photograph, twenty-three years later, would confirm it. She had four small children on her hands that she had not agreed to keep, and a brother who "was not heard from again by her, and she became concerned lest his family got dumped on her permanently." Somehow — Al was never told how, and guessed that Granny, who "had to return to England," got hold of him herself — word reached "our other grandparents in Berkeley": Grandpa Marshall, "my true grandfather, father of my mother, Granny's first husband before they divorced," and his wife. They came to Tulsa "making arrangements for our journey back." Marvel "was more than pleased to let my grandparents from Berkeley take us away" [1].

The train

Two boys, three and two, kneeling on the seat of an observation car watching the track unspool behind a train that was taking them away from their father, one of them believing the train made the rails. Michael's father is the younger of the two. Of everything in four centuries of this family's record, this is the passage that could only have been written by someone who was there.

The house across from the school

Back in Los Angeles the family did not go home, because there was no longer a home. A family named McDonald, "somewhere in west Los Angeles," took the four children in: a house with "a bunch of stairs going up to it from the street," an estate "up in some hills" they were sometimes taken to, a day when "fire trucks came up there with sirens blaring," a playroom with a rocking horse "it was always forbidden for us to ride. Of course … guess what we played on … yep … the rocking horse … and always getting in trouble for it" [1]. A teenage daughter named Sally. Photographs survive of the four of them on chairs in a driveway, and on top of a doghouse, and Al pointed Michael to them: "so we do have some photographic proofs of these days." Then a house "right across the street from a school," where Al, four or five, would go and sit quietly at the back of a third-grade classroom, and the teacher let him. Cardboard boxes over their heads on the sidewalk, seeing who could walk farthest. Glenn, "always a great climber," shinning up a pole and jamming the STOP arm of an old semaphore traffic signal in the up position so that the GO arm rose behind it, unseen, and the cars sat and waited, and the boys tried to wave them on, "but they wouldn't lest they get a ticket" [1].

Granny was still there, staying at a hotel; the children went to her in turns at weekends, "one weekend was for us boys, alternate weekend for the girls." Margery came on Sunday mornings to walk them to church — Episcopalian, Al thought — where he and Glenn leaned over the balcony rail and spat chewed paper on the singers below until "Mom was asked to not let us ever return there. Hmm … Wonder why. So much for our young spiritual development" [1]. And then, in the letters, the memories stop; "my memory banks draw a blank." What Al could say of what happened next was that Granny went back to England in 1946, "at this point in time believing my dad was back east looking for a farm to raise us on"; that the marriage did not survive; and that some years later, when he was ten or twelve, Granny took him to visit Mrs McDonald, who "asked me how my brother and sisters were doing. I said fine but we weren't living together. She was very saddened to learn of us kids being broken up like this" [1].

1948: the bell-tent

Granny went home believing her son-in-law was in the Midwest looking for a farm. Two years later she came back and found her daughter and the four children "on the desert in Lancaster, Calif in 1948":

Lancaster is in the Antelope Valley, the high desert north of Los Angeles over the San Gabriel Mountains — sixty-odd miles from the city, and in 1948 a small railroad and alfalfa town with cheap land at its edges, which is presumably why a woman with four children and no husband had ended up there in a tent. In the same year Al "was stricken with the polio and nearly died from it. Granny got me to the hospital. Mom thought I had a bad case of the flu or something and was treating me as well as she knew how" [1]. He was five.

And yet the two-room house is where the letters' happiest memories are, because it is where Al and Glenn were boys together with a mother and a yard: painting the kitchen "this awful pea-green color, getting paint all over the place"; pulling the labels off every can in the pantry so Mom would have to guess; the "Devil chicken," a speckled black-and-white hen they blamed whenever another bird turned up dead, and their confusion the morning it was found dead itself; and the hot day the two of them, "with such compassion," helped a pie tin of thirsty yellow chicks to a good long drink by holding them under — "The next thing we knew they stopped moving … Here I was with my big proud smile for my Mom telling her I was helping them get a drink of water. Boy did she ever give me the spanking of my life." Glenn, who had gone to fetch her, was spared. "Of course we had no concept of death itself" [1].

The four were separated after that. When and how, Al did not say; he said only that when Granny later decided she could take one grandchild to Ireland but not four, "she told me she chose me because I got the worst end of the deals back in 1946 and 1948, and she was trying to make this up to me. She'd not tell me any more than this, except that she perhaps felt some guilt over what happened and did not expect our family to break up like it did" [1].

Nor does it go where Al chose not to. On his father's drinking the two accounts he had disagreed: the Iowa cousins "never knew my dad as a heavy drinker, though he has seen my dad have a nip here and there"; his grandmother and his mother both said "he was a very heavy drinker at home … and she feared his anger many times. He'd often take his anger out on her and us kids." And then: "I won't go into details on this, because there are some I personally remember and I do not want to bring them out for scrutiny lest other feelings get hurt or old wounds get opened up and begin to fester" [1]. He was writing to a nephew whose father was the other boy on the train. The book keeps his silence.

What Al did with it

Al saw his father once more, "a few months before leaving for Ireland," and had "written correspondences with him" — letters from his father that he kept "in the safety of Grandpa's care in Ireland because I never wanted to lose them." They were still there when Grandpa died, in 1963 or early 1964, while Al was a soldier in Berlin; the Army refused him leave for the funeral, Granny did not learn of the death for three months, and by then "his property was closed off for legal reasons pertaining to inheritances," so the letters were never recovered [1]. What Al remembered of them was that he had told his father he forgave him, "and he thanked me for this saying he wanted so bad to have his family back but could never find us." Galen died in 1957 — if a cousin's Ancestry tree has the right man; the family's own record marks the date probable, not confirmed — the year a photograph shows Al, fourteen, standing with Grandpa Marshall in California, about the time he left for Ireland.

In 1969, out of the Army, he wrote the letter that found Bill Krewson in Indiana, and heard for the first time the other half of his father's story — the flight from Iowa, the dead brothers, the father who "was after my dad's blood." Bill and Earl and Aunt Anna gave him what Granny had not: a version in which his father had been running from something before he ran from them. He wrote it all down in 2005 and drew, at the end, the only conclusion the evidence allowed him:

The book has now told three centuries of this family's rifts from the documents: a will burned, a brother's lawsuit, a grape arbour, two dead sons in Iowa. This is the first one told by someone who was inside it, and he ended it the way none of the others were ended, by forgiving the man who caused it and saying so in writing. The family's genealogist, asked why the Krewsons never built up what other families did, said the rifts went back to the 1600s and "no one was talking about what they were." In 2005 one of them was. This chapter is what he said.

The ground it happened on

As always, what follows is the period's own description of the places, not a record of these people. Los Angeles in 1946 was a city that had grown by half a million in the war and had nowhere to put them; the veterans were coming home to a housing shortage so severe that families doubled up and children were taken in by neighbours as a matter of course, which is part of why a family named McDonald with a house on a hill could absorb four small Krewsons for a season [5]. Oklahoma in 1946 was oil and wheat, and a farm "not too far from Tulsa" with a Dutch-style windmill pumping water for stock — the steel-bladed American windmill on a tower, blades reaching nearly to the ground on the small models — and potato bugs in the garden and chickens in the yard is the ordinary farm of the Osage plain [5]. The train from Tulsa to Los Angeles in 1946 ran by the Rock Island or the Santa Fe through Texas and New Mexico and Arizona, two nights, with a dining car staffed by Black waiters — the men who, on every American railroad of the period, fed and teased the children of white passengers, and whom one of those children remembered sixty years later before he remembered his own aunt's name — and ended, as Al remembered, in the streets of downtown Los Angeles, where the Santa Fe's tracks ran at grade past the warehouses to the terminal [5]. The observation car with rounded windows was the streamliner's rear car, the last thing on the train, with a window across its back through which the rails did indeed appear to come out of nowhere.

1. Al Krewson's two emails to Michael Krewson of 21 January 2005 (11:01 a.m. and 11:55 a.m., the second sent "by accident" before it was finished and then completed), cc. his siblings — the family archive's al-krewson-early-childhood-1-2005-01-21.htm and -2-, and the family record's story "The Year the Family Broke Apart." All quotations in this chapter are his words, with typing slips silently corrected and nothing else changed. He describes the account as "pieced together from several talks we had during my growing up years in Ireland," from Bill and Earl Krewson (who knew Galen in Iowa) and Aunt Anna, and from his own memory from the age of three; the reader should weigh it as that. Michael's decision of 3 August 2026, on the private record, was to keep it "plainly, hard parts included"; the book follows that, and follows Al's own refusal to detail the anger at home.
2. Félice Mitchell — born in Belgium, French before English, the Cambridge and Oxford claims, the Ferdinand-and-Isabella legend, "a real globetrotter," her move to Málaga after Herbert's death: Al Krewson to Michael, 26 June 2002, great-grandpa-and-grandpas-history-uncle-al-2002-06-26.htm; the family record marks the royal descent and the degrees as family lore, undocumented.
3. Margery Knight Marshall's birth: GRO Certified Copy of an Entry of Birth (Application No. 4934606-1, Certificate No. BXCF 844765, issued 11 June 2013), father Alfred George Marshall, research chemist, mother Félice Marshall formerly Knight, 62 Foxley Lane, Purley; the family record's card.
4. Galen's earlier marriages and the cousins' view of him: Al's 21 January 2005 letters; see chapter 12. The four children: the family record's cards for Al (born 2 February 1943, self-reported), Galen Jr. (Glenn) (born 21 December 1943, Los Angeles County certificate), Marjorie and Rosie (no birth dates on record; the order of the four is not documented, and the book does not assume it). Galen's death in 1957: the record's card carries it as a probable match to "Gaylen V Krewson sr, 1897–1957" in a cousin's Ancestry tree, not a primary document. Grandpa Mitchell's death "in 1963 or early 64," the refused leave and the closed estate: Al's 26 June 2002 and 21 January 2005 letters. The photograph "Al K (age 14), Grandpa Marshall, Aunt Kay and Uncle Bill" (~1957): the family archive.
5. Los Angeles's postwar housing shortage, Oklahoma farm windmills, Lancaster and the Antelope Valley in the 1940s, and the Tulsa–Los Angeles rail routes and dining-car staffing of the period: general histories; stated as period-general, not as a record of this journey. The streamliner observation car is described from the railroads' own equipment of the era.