The Memoirs of Clara Bowe

The Mansur Family, Grandpa, Grandma, four sons, four daughters,
and one son-in-law, migrated by train to Sedro Woolley,
Washington from Eau Claire, Wisconsin in 1905. Gladys, my mother, born in 1891, being small for her age, was instructed
by her father, at that time a poor man, to scrunch
down in her seat when the conductor came by, to
avoid his having to pay a higher fare.

Grandma had filled a huge laundry basket with
enough food to last until they had arrived at their destination.

A house was located large enough for the entire family when they arrived in Sedro Woolley. Food
staples were purchased and work begun. Doing the
laundry by hand, they hung it in the sun and air
to dry. ( The first and best solar invention was
the clothesline!)

Eventually, Grandma went to work cooking for logging camp crews. Needless
to say, she knew how to please the palates and large
appetites of the hardworking men on the logging crews as well as those of her large family!

As the children grew up and found their mates,
the number of mouths to feed increased also. The
older sister and one of her children got very
sick and died. Then Grandpa died.

Much later, Grandma and her deceased daughter's husband got married.
This was such a scandalous occasion to some people that a
Seattle newspaper even picked it up and made it into a big story.

Meanwhile, my father, Guy, who was born in 1887, had just moved from No. Dakota with his mother, Jennie Olive Barker Senff, and younger brother to
Bellingham, WA. They had separated from their father, William Sherman Senff,
and they may or may not have had their Grandma with them too.

My father's name was Guy Everett Senff. Senff is
an old name that means "mustard" in German. My mother's maiden name,
Mansur, meant "one who made hafts for knives" and
probably dates back to at least the guilds of the Middle Ages. I enclose a picture of the family crest with "a naturally colored pelican in her piety, a gold nest."

My father learned to saw shingles and, after the birth of my older sister, Jennie Gay, myself,
Clara Olive, and my younger brother, Lester Leroy, in 1913, we
all moved to Anacortes in 1915 where the local shingle mills employed him for many years. He was known as the best shingle weaver around.
I was about four years old. My birthday is March 26, 1911.

The one incident that still stands out after all these years is my memory of the time I climbed up on the piano stool and drank from a bottle of chloroform used to clean the piano keys in our new home.
I vaguely remember the doctor saying
"Keep pinching her to keep her awake or she may never wake up."
Another incident stands out in my memory of my early years.
That was helping with the war effort.
In my class we were given cloth and scissors
and shown how to trim thread from the cloth that could be used for stuffing pillows.
When the end of WWI finally came,
all the mills and factories started blowing their whistles.
It could be heard all over town!
All over the US people celebrated and hoped their boys would come home soon!
Then along came the flu epidemic.
People died in great numbers.
We were all forced to wear gauze masks.
Luckily, our family was spared.
After having worked in shingle mills for many years, my father developed tuberculosis
and was confined to a sanitorium in Seattle. My mother took in boarders and was given a job nailing
bands on the finished shingles in the cooperative mill
in which my father was still a part owner.
My sister Jennie graduated high school and was able to land a job at Beck's Bakery.
My brother Les and I were allowed to leave school early
to help my mom at the mill with the job of nailing bands. We made extra money by shoveling sawdust and unloading bundles of bandsticks from box cars.
In those days, Anacortes was a railroad stop for the mills and fishing industries.
We also picked strawberries and did other odd jobs.

Other than the usual childhood diseases, we were all blessed with good health,
except my father, whose years in the shingle mill breathing cedar dust probably contributed to his early death at 56 years old.
The latter part of his life, he worked as a guard in the State Hospital in Sedro Woolley,
a job he obtained with the help of a local politician after surviving an operation to collapse one lung.
He was a large man and looked strong enough to handle a job as a guard.
One of his duties also included being a barber to the patients.
My mom and he lived in an estranged relationship for the rest of his life.
Later, he moved to a better paying job in Pendelton, Oregon.
There his health failed him.
However, he kept in touch with my sister writing her many letters that she kept.
I read them finally after my sister's death at 90.
I cried many tears.
Another incident I can't forget is the time my sister and I were walking along the railroad tracks and the little black puppy that had followed us from home got run over and killed by a train.
One time my sister and I walked to Sedro Woolley to see relatives. That was almost 30 miles.
Fortunately, we were offered a ride on one of the repair platforms that ran by hand along the tracks. It sure shortened the trip and saved our blistered feet! Our relatives drove over from Anacortes and gave us a ride home.
In 1928, I graduated high school.
My sister obtained a better job at the Bank of Commerce located where Lori Gere now has her wonderful deli where I like to eat lunch sometimes.
Then I got a job with the other bakery in town called Frye's. My weight ballooned fifteen pounds
from all those little cream pies I got to sample!
Fortunately, the bank where my sister worked had another opening I was lucky to fill
and all those delectable cream pies could now be sampled by others.
After three years working at the bank, along came the Great Depression and a moratorium was declared.
However, Mr. Fred Cartwright, Sr., arranged with some of his fellows who were politicians
for me to be interviewed for a job opening at the H.O.L.C. Headquarters in Seattle.
I got the job and finally I would get to see the great,
wide world outside of Anacortes's small town life.
This happened in 1934.
I forgot to mention that my sister Jennie got married to her high school sweetheart, Clyde LeMaister, in 1932.
My brother, Lester, graduated high school in 1932.
He also married Viola (Scotty) Fayette and, in 1939, purchased a purse seine fishing boat.
He went to Alaska every summer and was able to make a good living for his family.
Later, he trolled. He had three children: Vikki, Bruce and Trudi Senff.
Bruce carried on the fishing tradition when his dad passed on. Lester was in the U.S. Coast Guard for one year.
He worked at a pulp and shingle mill in Anacortes for six years.
He was drafted into the US Navy in WWII and stationed at Oak Harbor in 1942.
He was a Boatswain's mate 1st class on the USS Pintail.
Later, he joined the Eagle's Lodge in Anacortes where we had great fun dancing when my husband was still alive.
He eventually retired from commercial fishing in 1975 and died of bone cancer at 70.
He owned his home on 5518 Sunset Drive, Anacortes, WA and his daughter Vicki moved there after Scotty's death.
It is out on the end of the island on the way to Loop Rd.
My sister's husband Clyde LeMaister is Samish Indian and French Canadian.
He raised hunting dogs, worked at the mill, fished, hunted,
grew gardens, made his own wine and smoked his own salmon.
His mother was Samish and he grew up on an island in the San Juans.
He said that his mom and sisters and he had to beat the pans sometimes
for their father who was out fishing to find his way home when there was fog.
While Jennie worked at various jobs as secretary and/or bookkeeper for two local attornies,
Clyde was employed at the new plywood mill.
They had invested in the mill. Then he was called to serve in the US Army.
He returned home after his tour of duty was over.
He and Jennie didn't have any children of their own but they adopted Tim LeMaister, who was related distantly.
My mom helped raise him while Jennie and Clyde were at work.
He was a great joy to everyone.
We all helped share the expenses that my mother had
until she was eventually granted her Social Security.
Our two story house with four bedrooms was condemned by the city's "urban renewal" project.
We got 10K. Clyde and Jennie also lost their house. They had restored the old Allan Bldg. , that used to have a big store in it. They converted it in the 1940's into an apartment bldg., where they lived until urban renewal took their project. Today, I am almost 93 years old and there is still nothing there in the old homesites but grass and abandoned bldgs. that have been for rent for Seattle prices and empty for 7 years, since Bunnies On the Bay moved on? That 10K helped to buy a house for my mom on
23rd and R. Ave., across the street from our old
house. We had to sell it for her when she went
into the San Juan Nursing Home. Jennie and Clyde
eventually bought a
new place out on W. 3rd where Clyde still lives
today. He had a small stroke in Nov. 2001. He is
95 now and I am writing this in the end of the
year, 2003. Soon it will be 2004. Christmas will
be here soon. We got him a beautiful big card with
a Christmas message of Peace and an original
painting on the front of a
white buffalo with a
woman emerging from her with the sacred pipe of
Peace (The White Buffalo
Calf woman). We pasted a
picture of the whole
family on it and
brought it over to him.

We had that house on 23rd for a long time. Jennie kept up the yard for my mom too.
After I moved to Seattle to work, I frequently made
bus trips home on the weekends. However, when my
mother threatened to kill herself by pouring a
bottle of iodine down her throat (most of it
poured down the side of her cheek) because of her
objection to a relationship I was having with an older man, I left home vowing never to return. She apologized later, however, realizing I needed to live my own life the way I wanted.
My story will continue in Chapter 2.

While waiting for the baby to arrive, I became acquainted with everyone at the apartment building, which was about four stories high with a full basement. The penthouse and roof were where Isadora Duncan lived and danced. The residents when we moved in were all older people, most of whom were over 80 and Jewish.
The apartment building was owned at that time by a Jewish man named Neiderman who wrote music for films. A Jewish lady and her adult son managed the building for him. An elderly woman named Lily Calker was an old Baptist lady whose son Darrell Calker worked for Walter Lantz. She became our cheif babysitter and I returned to work full time at GT&E in Santa Monica when the baby was three. Years later, when she passed on in her son's house in Malibu on the ocean, he gave us her things. Among them was the original score to the cartoon Woody Woodpecker. We still have them.

Eventually, when I knew it was time for the birth, along with my mom, who had come down from Anacortes for the occasion, I took the bus downtown to the LA County Dr.'s Hospital. There, while Andrew waited in Venice Beach praying and watching the last star disappear from the morning sky, Andrea was born. Later, when she had grown, he told her that he said at the time that that would be her star and would watch over her always. She arrived even before the doctor could get there. At 7 pounds, she was a healthy baby. The nurse said the baby came quick and easy because I was so relaxed.
My mom went back home to Washington after she felt I could manage by myself.
Back at the Thornton Towers, Rose Minx, the manager, loved to hold the baby and the very frail and elderly Mrs. Lily Calker loved to take the baby in a stroller walk along the beachfront every day.
When Mrs. Minx passed on, the apartment owner asked us if we would be the new managers in return for free rent. It was a lot of work for us.
I was asked to do many different things for the tenants, most of whom were quite elderly, and the building itself was old and rundown.
Andrew kept the halls and basement clean.
It turned out that Mrs. Calker had no income.
Her composer-musician son, Darrell, who was a concert pianist and composer for Walter Lantz cartoons and films like Big Town, had become an alcoholic and was out of work. He had found a lost part collie dog and called her "Towny", after the movie.
Andrea loved the dog who came to visit her on the roof where we hung the diapers and other laundry. It was on this roof that Isadora Duncan had lived in a penthouse and danced. You could see the ocean nearby. Andrea was a blessing to Lily, who became her "Muzzy", as Lily told her to call her. It was Lily who taught Andrea to read by the time she was three by simply reading her whatever story she wanted to hear over and over until she had memorized it. Her favorite was The Lone Ranger and Tonto. Later, she said that it was like remembering how to read. She didn't even know the alphabet but was able to read almost anything.
I was able to help Lily gain a small Social Security pension and we began paying her to babysit Andrea, who was totally in love with her.
Lily had moved from the East Coast to be with her son. She had had a daughter who had died. Later, her son married a well-to-do woman he had met at Alcoholics Anonomous.
Then they bought a beautiful home in Malibu, with a dome-shaped room built around a grand piano you could play while listening to the ocean coming in and going out on the rocks under the first floor porch.
Andrea had had piano lessons and was able to play the piano once, when we came to see Muzzy before she died of old age. Her son brought her to live with them when she got too old to live alone in her own beautiful apartment with large standout bay windows that looked out at the ocean. This Thornton Towers is still being lived in at the corner of Speedway and Thornton Ave., in Venice Beach. Being originally a planned community, there were only alleys for cars in most of that part of Venice, with large walkways fronting the houses instead of streets. It was definitely a walking oriented community in those days. There were no cars on the Boardwalk either, only the trams and many old people who spent their days arguing in what I guess was Yiddish, sitting on the park benches that could accommodate six people, three facing each way. There were also cupola seats along the Boardwalk where you could get out of the sun, and these benches and cupolas stretched for a mile both directions along Venice Beach. Sometimes, it was like living in a foreign land like Jerusalem. There were enough Jewish people living there then to support not one but two synagogues along a one mile stretch.
However, there were many families of many races living in peace and harmony all over the small town atmosphere of Venice beach. That also included many artistic and beanik types. There was even a Pidgeon lady like in the movie Home Alone.Often called the precursor of modern dance, Isadora Duncan danced with scarves. However, she had a whole philosophy of education, like Maria Montessori, and most people are unaware of her research into Greek philosophy, music, dance and art. She was one of the famous Duncan sisters. When she built Thornton Towers, she must have had this philosophy in mind.
The entrance to the first floor lobby was a large convex staircase on the order of entries to temples in ancient Greece.
All the upper apartments that faced the ocean had full length bay windows with inside seats for viewing the great outdoors. Her penthouse apartment had beautiful skylights and lighting and she had the whole roof to dance on. By the time we moved in to Thornton Towers, there were only very old people there. Andrew was 44 and I was 40 and we were the youngsters. In those days, Venice Beach was a very safe neighborhood. Most of the waves for bodysurfing were not in Venice but in Santa Monica. The beach bunny crowd were all north of Venice. There was no huge amusement pier as there would be in the late 50's. If you could see Venice back then, you would have seen a great standard of living.
There was leisure time for the old folks, very little crime because there was nothing to steal, and the families with young children walked in safety, strolling along the beach boardwalk where life was free and the sun and sea and sand were not the playground of the rich, but of the poor.
Santa Monica had kept it's own tax base when Venice had joined Los Angeles.
Santa Monica was therefore the home of a more affluent populace. Andrea was able to grow up in a place that had the ocean for a buffer against the city life going on on all other sides.
She felt responsible enough at the age of three to seven to make her way to the local store for those in our building who were too infirm to get out on their own. The store was only a block away on the Boardwalk.
She often earned extra money for candy, ice cream or little toys by running errands.
As she grew and I got a full time job at GT&E in Santa Monica, she felt that it was her apartment building!
When we found our own house to buy on Beach Ave., near the canals, Muzzy still babysat for her until she started school at St. Mark's. First and second grade were in a building only a 1/2 mile away. Then she went to the 3rd through 8th grade at the school built near Venice and Lincoln Blvd.'s where St. Mark's church and convent were. It was almost a mile from our house. She walked until Dad bought her a bike. The Lennon sisters who sang on Lawrence Welk and Ed Sullivan shows went to school there, too, and lived nearby. She went to class with their cousins.
I have gotten ahead of myself again. Back to Isadora’s building, Thornton Towers.
When Andrea was three or so, the owner of the building finally sold it and I thought of going back to work. Venice, at the circle park near the post office (the green circle park was originally an island when Venice canals were much more extensive), was where the LA bus line from Culver City ended and the Santa Monica bus line began. They were two separate systems. I was able to take the Santa Monica bus to work right near Thornton Towers. When we moved over near the canals and Venice Blvd, I would often walk a quick mile to catch the Santa Monica bus there at the post office. First, I accepted a temporary job in the steno pool at General Telephone Co. of California in their general office which was located directly across from St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica. This was before affirmative action came along and the only Afro-American was Cecil, the janitor. I became a permanent employee, taking dictation from different departments, and later transferred to the Legal Department and worked for the Claims Department and the Special Agent who was involved with the FBI when they needed phones tapped. I transferred to the Treasury Department to a better job where I stayed until I retired.
We all got to see a lot of movie stars who came to St. John's Hospital and, when I had surgery for removal of my thyroid nodule, I saw Irene Dunne, the movie star, walking toward me down the hall. I asked if I could shake her hand and she said, “Yes, you don’t look very sick.” Her husband, who was a doctor and much older, was in the hospital at that time too.

It was time to think about school for Andrea and Andrew’s family had been holding his part of his dad's inheritance money and decided it was time for him to get it. With that $1,300 and some money we had saved, we were able to obtain a mortgage and buy a new little house on Beach Avenue in Venice. Beach Ave. was one block away from Ocean Ave., which later became the main street to drive from Venice Blvd. to the new Marina Del Rey. However, Beach Ave. was only one block long. We moved to our new home at 2353 Beach Ave. when Andrea was about five years old. Muzzy was still taking care of Andrea until she was old enough for school. Andrew would drop her off at Thornton Towers on his way to work every morning.
Every Sunday we were going to St. Mark's Church in Venice. It was a larger church than St. Clement's where Andrea and I were both baptised into the faith, serving a large area, including Venice Beach, Mar Vista and Culver City.
One of my co-workers and her husband owned a duplex in the same area and her husband worked at the Venice post office. Fran Stephenson and I caught the same bus to work every day and we became lifetime friends.
Andrew started seeing a doctor in Culver City and found out he was suffering from emphysema. His long habit of smoking cigarettes had to stop but the damage had been done and he was to suffer from breathing problems the rest of his life. Eventually, he quit smoking " cold turkey."
We finally enrolled Andrea in first grade at St. Mark's Church. This was 1956 or 7. Muzzy went to live out the rest of her life with her son and his wife at their beautiful home on the beach in Malibu. We found a Catholic family who lived on Ocean Avenue, just a block from us, (really just across the alley and down a few houses), who agreed to care for Andrea while we worked. Irene Dunn, not the movie star, mother of six children all going to the same school as Andrea, was happy to have a little extra to contribute to their family income. The father's name was John Dunn. Andi fit in well with their family and we all became lifetime friends.
Irene Dunn was also the name of their daughter who was the same age as Andrea. She was Andrea's first friend who was her own age. They became inseparable. They still correspond.
Andrea went from being an only child to having six new brothers and sisters. There was Bud, the oldest son, then Midge, Irene, Mary and Steven, the baby. Andrea was overjoyed to have so many new friends after having lived around mostly old folks for the first 7 years of her life. Not only that, but she did not even speak the language of most of the inhabitants of Venice when she was growing up there. In many ways, for her, it was like growing up in a foreign land, except for Lily, her Muzzy, whom she loved with all her heart and soul. It was past time for her to have friends of her own age. Irene and her sisters liked her, too.
Andrea took her churchgoing seriously, I guess. By the time she was three years old, she would approach people she had never met before and tell them "You don't need a car or a house or a boat to be happy. We just need to be brothers and sisters and love each other and we will save the world." You can imagine we wanted to put a stop to that kind of behavior, as it was embarrassing to us. Going to Catholic church every Sunday must have had a bigger impression on her as a young child than it had on us. Andrew, however, was quite pious and, as we settled in to our new home, would often insist on the whole family kneeling down together after dinner every night and saying the rosary. Andrea did well in school and, when my sister Jenny transferred a Sherwood Music School Course to Andrea that her son Tim didn't want, Andi began taking piano lessons. Fortunately, the teacher who was qualified with Sherwood Music School in Chicago to teach the course was giving piano lessons at St. Mark's. Her name was Elisabeth Withrow and she had been the pianist to a dance teacher at the Washington Athletic Club in Seattle who had formerly dated my brother, Lester, in Anacortes. What a coincidence! She taught Andrea for many years and we became best friends. When she needed recital programs typed, I would do them at the office. Andrea played in many recitals over the years for the Los Angeles Music Teachers’ Association.
Unfortunately, the Dunn's moved away to the valley when Andrea was in fourth grade. Andrea was heartbroken, as she had lost her best friend.
After one bad experience with a baby sitter who had a son who was older than Andrea, we found her another Irish family just a few doors away, who had three children younger than her. Their mom, Phyllis Allan, was an Irish seamstress who made outfits for her children: Elisabeth, Jim and Janet. They went to St. Mark's too. They all went to the Scotch Games every year in Santa Monica. Janet did Irish dancing and Jim dressed in Scottish kilts and played bagpipes. Their dad was Scotch and was stationed in the service in Germany. He didn't come home very often. His mom lived nearby and was the only grandma the kids saw as their other grandma lived in Belfast. Janet later won the National Irish dancing competition and won her and her mom tickets to fly to Ireland to see her Grandma for the first time. That was many years later than where I am in my story. Their family was very poor and they appreciated the extra money from babysitting Andrea. Years later, General Telephone Co. of California was really growing fast and Lawrence Welk built a new building at the foot of Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica just for our new executive offices. I frequently got to sit in for the Executive Vice President's secretary as well as for the Treasurer's secretary. We were 11 floors up and, even though the building was earthquake proof, we felt the movements of the quakes quite frequently. Nell Nelson, the Executive Vice President's secretary, and Ruth Goldstone, a Jewish gal whom I met when we both worked in the steno pool, were two of my best friends. Over the years, we would meet whenever I could to have lunch and/ or drinks. We had much fun, especially since we all had the same political views. Andrew eventually developed a great hobby taping country music which he shared with one of his co-workers. We began to attend dances again. Lawrence Welk was still playing at the Ocean Park Pier. There was a band playing at the Santa Monica Pier and quite a few country music bands in the beach area where we lived. Some of the other places we went were The Palomino Club in West Hollywood where a young Whalen Jennings was playing and the Mustang Club in downtown L.A. where Donna Fargo sang "I'm the Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A."
Mr. Welk built a new headquarters for his television show where we saw Glenn Campbell when he was first starting out and also Lynn Anderson who sat at the same table with us. One Sunday when we attended church, all the Welk musicians came to attend the wedding of Dick Gass and Dianne Lennon. Later, Dick Gass came to work in the same department at GT&E that I had worked in. The father of the Lennon family attended church every day and the family were all very friendly to everyone. Mr. Lennon had a golf driving range where he worked every day. It was a very sorrowful day for everyone when we heard that he had been shot and killed at work by a crazed admirer of his daughter Peggy.

As Andrew and I began to save a little money, we arranged to take our two weeks of vacation at the same time every year so we could take Andrea to National Parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite. We also went to Big Bear and to the Kern River.
Andy liked to fish. We tried to go to see our relatives every few years. My relatives in Washington were a little closer than his in Wisconsin. He grew up on a farm in Tilden and also in Chippewa Falls. Two of his sisters became nuns. One wrote us every year from the hospital she worked at in Chicago. Her name was Sr. Jane Francis. She was a Sister of Mercy. Andrew's father's name was John and his mother was Mary Magdalena. She was French and he was German, although they were both born Americans. They spoke German in the home. Many of his brothers and sisters maintained large farms, including dairy farms, and we would always enjoy a week of parties on various farms for Andy's homecoming. The other week of the vacation was spent driving there and back in our old Chevy. Andy used to let Andrea drive on his lap at an early age and she loved it. She also loved the farm horses. Her cousins also taught her to drive the tractor at 10. She shared a pinto horse named Queenie with two of her favorite cousins one year and they would play Lone Ranger. With the horse standing patiently with her rear feet in a hole on a downslope, they would all three jump on her back one at a time, and, with no saddle or bridle, only a rope on her halter, point her head in the direction they wanted to go and off she would go when they were all safely aboard. As horses had been her passion from an early age, that vacation was her idea of heaven!
Andrew took us on many nice trips. We often went to Knott's Berry Farm and Disneyland, or to the tarpits, the only place on the beach you could have a fire and cookout and also go fishing.
That place was covered in tar because Venice beach to the south of Washington Blvd. was covered by a long string of oil wells.
At the middle of Venice was a breakwater, where all the children had free swimming lessons every year, until they put in an oil well there and ruined the breakwater. That was much later when we moved back to Washington in 1974.
This brings me to CHAPTER 5 HONORS AT ENTRANCE