Albert Frederick Warner

Albert Frederick Warner, son of John Warner and Eleanor Amelia (“Nellie”) Martin, was born 13 August 1884 in Willow Springs, Howell County, MO. He was the second youngest of a group of eight children. In early life, and at times later, he was known as Bert. In business, he was A.F. Warner. His descendants, beginning with his daughters Marian and Josephine, began calling him “Pop,” and it was that name he was most often known by over his last thirty or forty years of life, even by casual acquaintances. He is not to be confused with Glenn Warner, the originator of the Pop Warner football program for kids.

Bert was the only one of the children of his parents who was native to Missouri, his birth coinciding with a two-year sojourn in Howell County while John Warner helped his brother-in-law Cullen Penny Brown to fulfill a contract to establish a sawmill. When Bert was a baby, the family returned to its regular home in Martintown, Green County, WI. That village, named after his maternal grandfather Nathaniel Martin, was the childhood home of his mother and was only a mile north, over the state line, from Winslow, Stephenson County, IL, where his father had been born and raised. Bert himself would be raised until age sixteen in Martintown and would retain a lifelong fondness for the place, even though most of that life was spent thousands of miles away. The Warners lived on eighty acres that stretched north from the village, a parcel Nellie had been given by her father as a dowry when she married John in 1869.

As a boy Bert attended the Martin school, surrounded by classmates who included multiple siblings and cousins. The small building where classes were taught was located along the bank of the Pecatonica River not far from his family home -- and right across from his grandparents’ house and his grandfather’s sawmill and grist mill, the economic heart of Martintown. He went on to Winslow High School (a two-year institution at that time) and then he briefly attended Northwestern University in Chicago, but had to quit because his poor eyesight could not deal with the strain of the heavy amount of reading required. Eye challenges in general were a theme with him throughout life. Like his mother, his eyes did not always quite track together, as may be apparent in the photo at the upper left or the one just below right. (The latter photo is a portrait of the three youngest Warner boys in about 1890. Bert is the one on the left. His youngest brother Walter is on the right. Bert’s slightly older brother Cullen is in the center behind the younger two.) Bert wore glasses from an early age due to the problem. Thanks to that and a few other oddities of appearance such as a large cranium, unusually long ear lobes, and narrow shoulders, and quite a bit of extra weight in middle age, he was the sort of person a stranger might at first glance conclude was physically and mentally challenged. The truth was the opposite. Bert was not just physically capable, he was downright robust, and demonstrated that repeatedly. His jobs included construction and cattle-raising, his pastimes fishing and deer-hunting. He was a volunteer fireman. And even in his teens, he was famous for having skated a ten-mile stretch of the frozen-over Pecatonia River in the company of his brother-in-law Fred Hastings, just to see if the ice was thick enough and good enough to take them that far. As for mental ability, he proved his intelligence time and again, all the way up into the beginning of his second century of life.

Bert being one of the youngest of his family, it would have been natural to expect that some of his older siblings would have left the area by the time he came of age, but the John Warner-Nellie Martin family remained tightly knit, both in terms of emotional bond and in terms of geography. During the 1890s, when Bert was still in mid-childhood, three older siblings -- John, Emma, and Belle -- got married and started families, but they set up their households in or near Martintown. One change in the family circumstances arose in the year 1900. John Warner, Sr.’s sawmill business with partner Dayton Duane Tyler had garnered him such a reputation as a lumber sales broker that he was lured away by a bigger sawmill based ten miles southeast of Martintown in Scioto Mills, Stephenson County, IL. A new family home was acquired a short walk from the mill, into which moved John and Nellie and their four as-yet-unmarried sons -- Charley, Cullen, Bert, and Walter. Scioto Mills was where Bert finished coming of age.

When Bert was a senior citizen, he told many stories about the Old Days. One of them involved an incident in Scioto Mills when he was a young man. The occasion was a frigid holiday-season evening, probably during the winter of 1904/05 or the winter of ’05/06. Scioto Mills was a tiny settlement of only a few dozen people. To have a social life often meant journeying a few miles south to Freeport, the county seat, or the other direction to Lena or McConnell (themselves only villages, but more populated than Scioto Mills). Bert wanted to attend a dance, so much so that he was willing to cope with the teeth-chattering temperature. A day or two later he was to read in the newspaper that the thermometers went to forty-two degrees below Fahrenheit that night. The wind chill factor pushed the reading to eighty below. A record. (This may not have been the actual figures, but they were the numbers Bert recalled decades later. Suffice it to say, it was cold.)

The Warner family, being well-to-do, owned a fine two-horse closed sleigh. Its cockpit and apron were constructed for maximum comfort of the occupants. A sealed bucket of coals or hot-water bottles could be placed in the nose to warm the feet of the passengers. The apron could be tied to their necks, leaving only their capped-and-scarved heads exposed. Slits allowed gloved hands to be extended so as to hold the reins. Bert was in the midst of hitching up the horses when a man came riding through the hamlet. He, too, was going to the dance. He was travelling there in an open wagon and the cold was so bad he was considering turning around. Instead, he offered to let Bert put the Warner horses back in their nice warm barn along with the man’s wagon. The man’s horses and the Warner sleigh carried both men to their evening of entertainment.

At the end of the return journey, as Bert put away the sleigh and helped the man hitch his wagon to his team, the full magnitude of the cold was apparent. Bert pitied the man having to journey the remaining mile or so to his home in the open wagon. The fellow made it, but always described it as the coldest night he ever knew. Same for Bert, who used the anecdote as a way of pointing out the difference of his northern Illinois upbringing to the life he knew later. From the beginning of 1907 onward, Bert lived in a region where snow never fell and the coldest nights almost never went more than a few degrees below freezing.

During the Scioto Mills years, Cullen Warner acquired a wife, Minnie Brecklin -- perhaps a cousin of Bert and Cullen’s sister-in-law Anna Lueck. The two soon produced a daughter, Selma Arabelle Warner. While Selma was still an infant, Minnie and then Cullen contracted tuberculosis. John and Nellie rose to the occasion to make sure Selma’s needs were met, along with overseeing the care of their stricken son and daughter-in-law. The importance of their role expanded with the death of Minnie Warner at the beginning of 1906.

A tuberculosis specialist in Chicago confirmed to the family that Cullen did not have much time left, but said his symptoms could possibly be staved off if he were taken to a region with a hotter, more arid climate. John and Nellie did not hesitate. They made plans to move as soon as possible -- an exodus that would consist of nearly the same group that had moved to Scioto Mills. The addition was little Selma. The only one to stay behind was Charley, who liked Scioto Mills and hoped to continue to be involved in the sawmill. The Warners’ chosen destination was the San Joaquin Valley of California. Several households of Nellie’s first cousins, the Frames (children of her mother’s sisters Elizabeth Strader Frame and Anna Catherine Strader Frame Rush), had settled there during the 1890s. They urged the Warners to come. Preparations consumed most of the year 1906. In December of that year, John, Nellie, Cullen, Selma, Walter, and Walter’s new bride Margaret Bell departed by passenger train.

By the time the main group left, Bert was already on his way, having left in a boxcar carrying an assortment of the family’s major personal possessions such as furniture and their horses and carriage. Keeping him company was his sixteen-year-old cousin Fay Martin -- a stowaway so as to avoid having to pay the fare. Fay hid in the horses’ hay, avoiding the spot-checks by the train inspector. (Shown at left are Fay and Bert in Fresno in late 1906, shortly after their arrival.) Shirley Wilcoxon, Bert’s pal from Scioto Mills (a male in spite of the name -- it was an era when names like Shirley and Beverly were still given to males) was emigrating to Washington at the same time in his own boxcar, and at various points on the journey from Illinois to Cheyenne, WY they reached the same depot at overlapping times and were able to grab meals together. After three weeks of travel, during which time the main family group passed up the slow-moving freight train, Bert and Fay arrived at the depot in Fowler, Fresno County, CA, taking temporary shelter at the nearby farm of cousin Will Frame.

Once the family had reached their new stomping grounds, there was the matter of placing Cullen in a situation that would keep him isolated and prevent strangers from becoming exposed to his TB. John and Nellie also must have wanted to create a sense of having a family estate, i.e. a legacy property that could be looked at as the whole clan’s “real” home, as the Martintown farm and Scioto Mills house had been. Therefore they purchased a cattle ranch near the trading post of Academy. This spot lay about ten miles east of Clovis and ten miles due north of the town of Sanger, well out into a lightly populated and mostly undeveloped part of the county along the edge of the Sierra Nevada foothills. At the time of their initial occupation, the nearest neighbor lived over a mile away. At times, the family called this Spring Brook Ranch. However, they often referred to it as the “Fancher Creek place” after the seasonal stream that ran through it. Bert almost always referred to it by the latter name when talking about it in his elder years.

The property may have had some sort of house upon it when purchased, but if so, the family made only temporary use of it while erecting a new, large residence (shown at right) into into which they could properly settle. The Warner menfolk did the carpentry themselves, able to call upon their familiarity with lumber and construction. The project evolved in a natural fashion into a phase of “paying back” for the support the Frame relatives had provided. In 1907, Will Frame purchased a ten acre parcel of land in what was then the rural heart of Fresno County, at a place that would later in the century become one of the core neighborhoods of the city of Fresno. Ultimately Will would decide not to occupy this land, but in the meantime three adjacent similar parcels were purchased by relatives, Will’s daughter Elizabeth Frame Rumsey and family occupying one, Nellie’s other cousin Rachel Frame Webb taking another, and Rachel’s niece Florence Frame Bollinger and family occupying the last one. A 29 December 1907 letter written by Rachel survives in which she mentions that Bert and his father had built her residence in the autumn. It is likely they built -- or at least assisted with the construction of -- the other two houses as well. Rachel’s letter was written just after she had returned home after spending Christmas out at Spring Brook Ranch, the Warners having played host to a group of relatives including Will Frame and his wife Dosia. (And given the need for those family members to travel there via wagon and/or horse, “coming for Christmas dinner” -- a fine big turkey with all the trimmings -- involved staying over the night before and the night after, as was typical of visits prior to the automobile age. In Rachel’s case, John fetched her and then took her home in the Warner-family buggy, no doubt a buggy that had journeyed across the country in the boxcar with Bert a year earlier.)

Carpentry work aside, one of Bert’s “jobs” was to be Cullen’s main companion -- not so much in the sense of nursing care, but helping Cullen carry on his life and not be any more isolated than his situation required. For the first couple of years, Cullen did remain strong enough to be out and about, and to help with ranch operations, even though as Rachel stated at the end of 1907, “the doctor does not give him much encouragement about getting well.” The two brothers ran cattle in the foothills near Academy. Somehow Bert did not contract tuberculosis. In fact, it is possible the exposure to the disease stirred his immune system up to the point he was able to resist all sorts of health problems, helping to account for his extraordinary longevity. The other lasting benefit of these years was that Bert came to know his neighbors. With no rail line going out their way, it simply took too long to go into Clovis or Fresno for every social occasion, so the local population cleaved together. The nearby Letcher District contained a one-room schoolhouse, Round Mountain School. The teacher there was a single woman in her mid-twenties named Grace Mildred Branson. She had been born farther north in the foothills near Hornitos, Mariposa County, CA, a granddaughter on both sides of early Gold Rush settlers to that county. As an adult, she had started her teaching career near her birth home. She had obtained the job teaching at Round Mountain shortly after the Warners arrived. She and Bert caught each other’s romantic interest.

(Grace is profiled on this website as part of the section devoted to the family of her grandparents, John Sevier Branson and Martha Jane Ousley. To read more about her as an individual, please proceed to her biography. Click here to go straight to that page.)

During the winter of 1908/09 Cullen’s condition worsened, and in April, 1909 it was clear he was not going to make it. He perished on the first of May, surrounded by his family -- including some of his Frame second cousins -- and finally getting his release from what had become an incredibly painful condition, manifesting in his skin as well as his lungs.

When John and Nellie had acquired the ranch, John had been intrigued by the idea of raising cattle as a main means of income, but the cattleman life had not appealed to him as much as he thought it would. And given that Spring Brook Ranch was not served by a major source of irrigation water, which would have been essential in order to use the land for crops, the Warners decided to sell their herd and the acreage and shift to some sort of situation more in keeping with John’s propensity to be a merchant and salesman. In 1910, John opened a butcher shop in Fresno in order to sell the beef at retail. By 1911, he traded the ranch for mining shares, and that-was-that as far as the Fancher Creek place being a legacy family estate. The new big-family venture became a feed grain warehouse and hardware store. This was the a partnership between John Sr. and his eldest son, John Martin Warner. The latter, along with wife Anna Lueck Warner and their children Leslie and Dorothy, had moved from Martintown to Fresno County in early 1910, in part because Anna had come down with TB and needed to be in an arid climate. The warehouse was located in Sanger, ten miles due south of Academy. All of the Warner family members lived in Sanger during the 1910s (though some for only fragments of that decade). These family members included Belle Warner and husband Alie Spece and family, who had moved out to California in early 1909, and Charley Warner, who had made many extended visits and finally chose to establish himself in California year round. Alie soon opened a feed lot next to the warehouse.

Unfortunately John Martin Warner was not able to tend to his new business. Anna’s condition worsened and she decided she wanted to die “back home” in Green County, WI. Charley and Bert picked up the slack. By early 1911, Bert was promoted to full co-manager with a salary of sixty dollars per month, with the understanding that he would gradually take over his father’s ownership share -- and indeed this became the case over the next five years. Sixty dollars a month was more than sufficient in 1911 to pay monthly household bills, including mortgage payments. That meant Bert could be sure of his ability to support a wife and family, so he proposed to Grace Branson. The pair were wed 28 May 1911 in Fresno, CA at St. Paul’s Methodist Church, Pastor Harold Govette conducting the rites. (Sad to say, Anna Lueck Warner did not live long enough to attend the ceremony.) The newlyweds honeymooned in Yosemite, not far from Grace’s childhood home. They journeyed into the valley on horseback.

By 1913, Bert had accumulated enough money he was sure he could cope with a mortgage. He and Grace bought a two-year-old house 824 N Street for $6000. It was to be their residence for the rest of their sixty-plus-year marriage. The stage was now set for establishing a new generation. Marian Ruth Warner was born in early 1915. Josephine Alberta Warner, born in the summer of 1917, completed the family. In 1925, in order to provide his growing daughters with individual bedrooms, Bert added a second story to the 824 N Street house at a cost of $8000.

John Martin Warner never fully regained his desire to be involved with the warehouse after his wife’s death -- not even after marrying again in 1913. His restlessness grew following the early-1916 death of his father. This led to him divesting his share of the warehouse in June of 1916, doing so by trading it to Alie Spece for the latter’s grocery business. The new partnership -- A.F. Warner and A.J. Spece -- would unfortunately go on to have awkward moments. Alie was ten years older and had more business experience. Bert had his business school certificate to wave about. Both felt they knew best how to run the operation. An argument in 1919 prompted Alie to challenge Bert to buy out his share of the business, or vice versa. Bert said many times over the years, “Ol’ Spece didn’t think I could do it, but I showed him.” The transfer was made, and Bert operated as sole owner from that point on. This incident aside, after the death of Cullen and over the long haul, Bert was probably closer to his sister Belle in terms of emotional bond than any of his siblings.

One of the bones of contention was that Bert wanted the business to undergo a dramatic change. As soon as he became the only boss, Bert put his vision into reality. He erected a gasoline service station in front of the warehouse, correctly judging that the automobile would soon be affordable even for the most ordinary family, and fewer and fewer people would be keeping horses and needing to buy grain to feed them. He continued to operate the warehouse as a side venture until the 1930s, when the building was torn down. The latter event was hailed in the local newspaper as the end of an era, as the 50’ x 250’ building was one of the first “town” structures ever built in Sanger.

Bert was a member of the Sanger volunteer fire department. This photo was taken in 1921 in order to show off the city’s new firetruck. It was Sanger’s first motorized fire engine. Bert is the third man from the left (the last of the men seated in the firetruck itself). The full group, left to right, consists of Ray Chrismer, Eddie Lewis, Albert Frederick Warner, Kenneth Bosserman, Max Petersen, Leslie Brandon, L.N. Petersen, Dick McCann, Virgil Brumbaugh, Lillard Craig, Dick Carisle, and Bill Jones.

By 1934, Bert had proven so successful and put aside enough savings that he felt comfortable retiring, even though he was only fifty years old. He leased out the station to Shell Oil. In the mid-1950s he would sell that property, acting as self-mortgagor so as to receive payments for the next twenty years to cover Grace’s needs in the final phase of her life -- he assumed she would spend at least a few years as a widow. The first part of the plan worked well. Grace died 4 November 1974. The last payment fell due not long after that. She never had financial worries, and upon her death a substantial estate distribution passed to her daughters, with small cash payments going to the grandchildren. “Pop” was still alive, though. Age ninety and going strong. In the end he would need all of his personal portion of his wealth. He lived so long that two months before he died, he had reached the point where he had depleted his entire hoard, his daughters having bought out the small residual principal from the 1976 sale of his house.

His retirement came so early that he faced the prospect of being unable to take advantage of the Social Security Act, for lack of paying into the system as a wage-earner. Being a prudent man, and simultaneously doing his patriotic duty during World War II, he went to work as a clerk at Jensen’s Auto Parts in Sanger in 1942, working a little more than three years, which gave him enough fiscal quarters to qualify for the minimum social security payment. Retiring again in the late 1940s, he was among the first beneficiaries of the program, and continued to collect for another forty years. He put in perhaps two hundred dollars; by his death, his benefit was $200 per month.

One advantage of such early retirement was that Pop and Grace were able to do a lot of vacation travel while still young enough to tackle substantial distances. They did a lot of this by automobile. Together they visited thirty-eight of forty-eight states of the nation. Pop had a particular affection for visits back to Martintown and Winslow. The excursions were especially frequent in the 1950s when his sister Emma and brother Charley were still alive to greet him. On his own, in the late 1960s, he headed off on a fishing excursion to Alaska, where he caught a huge salmon. Pop was among several Martin family men who loved to fish. The group included in particular his uncle Horatio and first cousins Fay Martin, Clark Martin, and Ralph Bucher.

Pop was enormously well-regarded as a senior citizen. Though he eschewed church-going for the most part, his morals did not waver. He was a “stand-up guy” of great integrity. Further, he succeeded in showing his character without looking down on others. Which is, it must be added, entirely different from being disappointed in others when they failed to live up to the best they could be. When it came to principles, Pop could be exceedingly stubborn -- he and his brother Walter did not speak for a quarter century, and it is apparent this had something to do with Walter having crossed some sort of line of behavior or comment that Pop did not think should be crossed. Pop cherished family of all sorts, even the cousins he met no more than once or twice in his whole life -- his interest in relatives being one reason why this website is able to boast a richness of photographs and anecdotes. Though raised in an era when men were encouraged to be stoic, Pop was not afraid to weep when the occasion demanded -- as he did copiously when he strode up to Grace’s coffin to give her a farewell kiss.

As mentioned above, Pop’s health remained excellent as he grew elderly, but at one point he looked like a goner. One evening in April, 1972 after going to bed, Pop suffered a severe heart attack and was rushed by ambulance to Sanger Hospital. Grace was so unsettled by the experience a neighbor had to make the phone call to daughter Josephine, who hurried to the hospital, picking up her mother along the way. After a few hours, the doctor reported it did not look good. Jo asked if she should call her sister, as by then it was three in the morning. The doctor replied that Jo should indeed call, because coming right away would probably be Marian’s only chance to see her father before he died. No one would have been surprised if the doctor’s grim prediction had panned out. Pop’s siblings John, Charley, Emma, and Belle had all perished in their late eighties. It looked like his turn had come. But those siblings had died in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By 1972, new drugs were available. Pop made it through the initial crisis, even though the momentary issues with blood flow to his brain gave him hallucinations while he lay in his hospital bed. After that, for the rest of his life, he was on one medication to keep his heart from beating too quickly and another to keep it from beating too slowly. The regimen worked. He would go on to live another seventeen and a half years.

Close family members knew the real reason Pop survived. He willed himself to live so that he could continue to take care of Grace. He knew how poorly she would cope as a widow. He pulled through because she needed him to live. If she had been deceased at the time he had the heart attack, he would have let himself slip away.

(At left are Grace and Bert Warner at their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The venue is the living room of the home of daughter Josephine and son-in-law Alfred Smeds.)

Despite the loneliness inherent in becoming a widower after sixty-three years of marriage, Pop made good and happy use of his remaining years, doing more travel, gathering considerable genealogical information, and even getting in a little more fishing. After the heart attack, he was prudent about his activity level, but he did not let himself fall into a rut. Given the increasing availability of cheap, comfortable air travel, he racked up more miles in his nineties than in any previous decade of his lifetime. In 1975, having been contacted by distant cousin Chester “Sonny” Clason about family history, he decided the best way to discuss said history was face to face, so at just short of ninety-one years old, he headed off in late July of that year for Sonny’s home in Honolulu, HI. It was Pop’s first excuse to go to Hawaii and he enjoyed being able to check off another item on his “bucket list.” Hawaii was the fortieth state he had visited. Given that it was the one he had previously regarded as out of reach, he weighed the possibility of visiting the other ten he had not yet seen. He was on hand in Martintown in late 1979 for the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Martintown church, doing so even though he had made a trip there in the summer of 1978. Close to home, he often attended the meetings in Sanger of the Elder Citizens, where a nearly all-female membership cheered whenever he appeared, usually chauffeured there by another elderly gent, his good friend John Welch, who despite his age still possessed a valid driver’s license.

Pop’s health remained robust and his mind clear until shortly before his death. He lived out the final dozen years of his life in Reedley, CA, spending the first half of that span (1976-1982) at the home of his daughter Josephine and son-in-law Alfred Smeds on their farm north of Reedley, ten miles southeast of Sanger. He had stayed with Jo and Al while recuperating from his heart attack and again in the winter of 1974-75 as a recent widower. In the spring of 1975 he began renting a room at the N Street residence to a middle-aged man. Having someone there “in case something happened” meant Pop could move back into his own house, but a year of coping with the tenant’s cigarette smoking and of not having Grace there with him was enough. He moved out in April, 1976. Later in the year, Pop put the house on the market, selling it to a couple who still own it (current as of 2010). His final houseguests were his distant cousin Frederic Ralph Warner and his wife Zelma, who stayed for a week in March, 1976 during a long road trip from their home in Holcombe, Chippewa County, WI.

(At right, Pop sits in the midst of most of the surviving granddaughters of John and Nellie Warner. This photograph was taken at the Winslow, IL residence of his cousin Lena Brown’s son John Cecil Hastings during either the 1978 or the 1979 trip Pop made to visit his childhood haunts. He and his daughter Josephine are in the center. Arrayed around them, clockwise starting from the far left, are Wanda Gore Hastings (in whose living room they were sitting), Elma Hastings Fike, Leah Hastings Schumacher, Dorothy Warner Yost, and down in front, Erma Spece Johnston. The white-haired man in the mirror is John Cecil Hastings.) The house was (and still is) located near the town cemetery. The grave of Pop’s grandfather John Warner lay less than a hundred paces west of where he was sitting.

In 1982, Josephine was feeling the strain of caring for such an elderly father. Pop was never one to want to be a burden. Since he was still doing well for his age, and inasmuch as he still had quite a bit of savings to draw upon, he began renting a bed at Armstrong’s boarding house for the elderly on Dinuba Avenue. This was to be his home for another six years, though he did have to spend a month in a convalescent home early in this period after having hernia surgery. He was so old that the drugs given to him for post-surgical pain were too much for him and made it seem as if he had suffered a stroke and succumbed to dementia. Once he was weaned from the narcotics, he became his old self and was able to move back into his room at Armstrong’s. The facility consisted of six double-occupancy rooms. His roommate was blind, so old as he was, Pop was able to be a helper. His roommate would set a hand on Pop’s shoulder to be guided from the room to the dining tables.

During his Reedley years, Pop’s birthday parties provided one of the best means for members of the extended clan to get together face-to-face for something other than a funeral. Many of these were “pizza and beer” gatherings at the local Me ’n’ Ed’s Pizza Parlor. Even in lightly attended years dozens of family members and friends showed up. The number reached into the hundreds for the 100th-birthday party held in 1984 in a rural “grange hall” type facility north of Sanger. To this day these annual occasions remain fondly remembered. (A good example of what Pop looked like after he turned one hundred is the photograph shown just below at left. He is standing in the yard of daughter Josephine’s home with Jo. At far left is his niece Elma Hastings Fike, and at far right, his nephew John Warner Hastings.)

Possibly no better example of how clear Pop’s mind was in his old age, and how active his lifestyle, is the note he wrote to his Martintown relatives 9 June 1980, about eight months after the 1979 visit. The text is quoted in full in the next paragraph. The handwriting of the original was shaky, but perfectly legible (though it must be said that his penmanship was terrible throughout his life). He sent these words in a greeting card to his niece Leah Hastings Schumacher, who along with his niece Dorothy Warner Yost was his main liaison with those family members who still lived in or near Martintown. The surprise birthday party being referred to had been held in Laton, CA for Leah’s sister Elma, who had turned seventy-five four days earlier. It begins with “Happy Birthday” because Leah herself had a birthday coming up in less than a week.

Dear Ones. Happy Birthday. - We went down to Elma’s surprise birthday party yesterday, had a good time, there were around ones I didn’t know and it’s so hard for me to hear that I stay home at lot more than I would if I could hear. - I was a charter member of the Sanger Kiwanis Club and they asked me to be a special guest at their 53rd anniversary and when they introduced me there they gave me a standing ovation and a large picture of my old station with the old warehouse showing back of it. It sure nearly floored me but I loved them for it. There are only 2 of the charter members alive and I happen to be one of them. - I don’t expect to make another trip back there again but I sure remember the old place and people, and long to see them. One of Mary Ruth’s boys got married on the 24th of May so I may get to see a great great grandchild. Stranger things have happened. Love, Pop. Jo sends her love.

Pop lived long enough to welcome into the world not just one great great grandchild, but seven. But by the summer of 1988, just as he was about to turn 104, age caught up with him to the degree that he could not remain a resident at Armstrong’s, a place that was limited to an “assisted living” level of care. To his disappointment, Pop was obliged to move into Pleasant View Manor Convalescent Hospital. He passed away at that Reedley facility 12 October 1988. He had outlived not only all of his siblings, but every last one of his thirty-nine first cousins. His body was laid to rest five days later beside Grace and next to the grave of his parents at the Mendocino Avenue Cemetery in Parlier, south of Sanger.

A.F. Warner in front of his newly-built gas station, 1919. This was the photograph that the Sanger Kiwanis Club reproduced at 24" x 36" and made into a poster and presented to Pop at the celebration of the 53rd anniversary of the club, an event held 28 May 1980. The photo was also printed on page 82 of the book Sanger, written by Scott Haugland, Ken Marcantonio, and Hal Shaw with the cooperation of the Sanger Historical Society and published in 2013 by Arcadia Publishing Company as part of their Images of America series. The 1921 photo of the firetruck and volunteers likewise appeared in the book, on page 81. The versions used within this biography did not come from that volume, however. They were scanned straight from the copies Bert owned way back when.

Children of Albert Frederick Warner with Grace Mildred Branson

Marian Ruth Warner

Josephine Alberta Warner

For genealogical details, click on each of the names.

To go back one generation to Bert’s mother’s biography, click here. To go back one generation to his father’s biography, click here. To return to Grace Mildred Branson’s page, click here. To return to the Martin/Strader Family main page, click here. To return to the Warner/Alexander Family main page, click here.