Gladys Beryl Spece

Gladys Beryl Spece, eldest of the three children of Cora Belle Warner and Alfonso James Spece, was born 5 August 1896 in Martintown, Green County, WI, the town founded by her great-grandparents Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader. She was known lifelong by her middle name and her first name is absent -- by her preference -- from many records, especially those made later in her life.

Beryl was not only the first of Belle and Alie’s children, but the very first grandchild of John and Nellie Warner and the first great-grandchild of Nathaniel and Hannah Martin. This means she was also the forerunner of the subset of fourteen great-grandchildren of Nathaniel and Hannah who were, simultaneously, grandchildren of Green County, WI pioneers William S. Spece and Julia Ann Youngblood. Her parents’ wedding in the mid-1890s was the first of three between grandsons of William and Julia and granddaughters of Nathaniel and Hannah, the other two being the unions of Mary Emma Warner to Fred Philo Hastings and Mary Lena Brown to Frank Opal Hastings. Because all three of these doubly related households were located in the Martintown or southern Green County area more or less continuously until the end of 1908, Beryl had ample opportunity in early childhood to get to know her Hastings cousins, several of whom were just barely younger than she. In fact, she knew them better in some ways than her own siblings, because her only brother, William Nathan Spece, died at only four weeks of age in 1902, and her sister, Erma Alice Spece, was eight years her junior. (By contrast, in adulthood Beryl and Erma would be very close.)

Beryl spent the first nine years of her life on a farm right on the fringe of Martintown itself. Her grandmother Margaret Ellen Spece shared the family home. Beryl attended Martin School, as had her mother. All in all, she was about as immersed in her heritage locale as she could possibly be, but this circumstance began to change beginning in 1905, not long after the death of her great-grandfather Nathaniel. That year her parents became owners of the former Julius Stark farm about a mile north of the village. Here her father began making improvements such as a new barn and new well, and worked steadily to found a cheese factory. The building was ready by the beginning of 1908 and soon Alie opened up for business. Ironically, his long-held ambition to be a cheesemaker was soon abandoned. In the previous few years Beryl’s Warner grandparents had relocated to Fresno County, CA along with the majority of her Warner uncles. The reason was tuberculosis. The disease had killed a number of members of the clan and the relocation to an arid climate was recommended by a family doctor in order to benefit Cullen Warner, whose case of TB was dire -- he had already lost his wife, Minnie, to the scourge in early 1906. In late 1908 concerns arose that Belle might be at risk. Given that Grandma Spece had recently passed away, the connections to Green County were fraying, and the family decided to join the kinfolk in California. They set out in early January, 1909 by train. Along the way they were forced to pause in Cheyenne, WY, where Alie and Beryl were both hospitalized due to congestion and fever. Both developed pneumonia. In that pre-antibiotic era, the situation was likely to lead to death. Beryl managed to improve in a timely manner, but her father was bedridden for weeks and just barely pulled through. It was not until the fourth of February that he even felt well enough to pick up a pen and write a post card to his cousin (and brother-in-law) Fred Hastings back in Green County saying he was going to be okay. It was not until later in the month that the family reached their destination. Soon Alie and Beryl’s recovery was complete. So was Belle’s. She never did develop TB. Alas, the same luck did not apply to Cullen Warner, who died a miserable death 1 May 1909.

John and Nellie Warner had established a ranch in the foothills near a trading post called Academy. This was where Cullen passed away. But Alie and Belle decided to live in the small town of Sanger, ten miles due south of Academy. A suitable house was found right away. Settling in took some time, though, because for the first year and a half of their California tenure, Alie and Belle were obliged to grab whatever jobs they could to get by. Beryl got her own introduction to working life in the San Joaquin Valley during that period. One of the ways the family earned income was to follow the example of some of Nellie’s Frame cousins, who followed the ripening fruit crops and helped the growers harvest them. Some of Beryl’s day-to-day existence was spent in tents and migrant-worker shacks as she and her parents helped pick peaches and table grapes in the summer, and oranges in winter. Naturally she spent some of her time looking after Erma, as well as her young cousins Selma Warner and Clare Warner when they happened to be present.

In 1910, life became a little more stable with the arrival of her uncle John Martin Warner, who teamed up with his father to open a huge feed grain warehouse and hardware store in Sanger, which they called Warner Warehouse Company. Alie created a feed lot next door and the two businesses contributed to each other’s success in a synergistic fashion. Belle worked as a clerk -- perhaps for Alie, perhaps elsewhere in town. For Beryl, this was the beginning of consistent involvement, at the proprietor and/or manager level, with retail business ventures in the town of Sanger, a phase that would still be on-going when she passed away six decades later.

In 1913, Alie and Belle had the sudden opportunity to take over a peach farm farther south in Fresno County between the small communities of Fowler and Del Rey. This was a twenty-acre parcel purchased by John and Nellie with the intention that Beryl’s uncle Walter Warner would become the farmer and eventually become owner of the acreage, but Walter had left after only a couple of seasons. The Speces made a swap, exchanging their Sanger house for the farm. They acquired the acreage just before the 1913 harvest was to kick into gear. The Speces spent a very hectic harvest season in 1913 getting the ripe peaches cut up and dried. (Cold storage facilities were rare in those days, so a great many local peach farmers chose to turn their crops into either dried or canned fruit.) Many photos survive of this ordeal, which involved even such extended-family members as some of the distant Frame cousins. The effort also included Beryl, who was by then seventeen.

Being peach farmers did not seem to agree with Alie and Belle at that point in their lives. They would pick it up again in the 1920s, but in the meantime, they came back to Sanger, though it is not clear if they were able to reclaim their former home. Alie became partners with his brother-in-law Bert Warner and together they operated the warehouse. This arrangement began in either late 1913 or in 1914, as both John Warner and John Martin Warner no longer wished to run the business. The elder John wanted to retire. The younger John had lost his first wife Anna to TB in 1911 and wanted to forge some other kind of existence with his new bride, Grace. Alie and Bert remained partners until 1919. At that point, the pair were unable to agree on the future of the firm. To resolve the impasse, Bert bought out Alie’s share. Alie went on to become an insurance agent and do other temporary occupations until the resumption of the peach-grower career.

It was during this warehouse-management period of her father’s life that Beryl came of age, graduated from Sanger High School, and established herself as an independent being. (At left, Beryl as a Fresno County teenager on the back of an early Davidson motorcyle.) Having become familiar with retail sales, she was primed to support herself, and would eventually do so. First, though, she followed a more traditional pattern and became a housewife.

Her husband was Wilbur Thomas Carter, whom she wed at age twenty-one. He was a native of Nelson, Nuckolls County, NE, born 21 January 1893 to Oliver Carter and his wife Nellie Blanch Sargent. The wedding took place 6 Nov 1917 in Sanger. The couple waited a couple of years to have children, then had sons Harold James Carter (later better known as Nick Carter) and Lloyd Thomas Carter in quick succession in the early 1920s. Wilbur, too, chose a career in retail. He (no doubt with Beryl’s assistance) operated Carter Hardware in downtown Sanger. As it turned out, the 1920s were the prime years of the marriage. (The photograph at right, taken 9 May 1929, captures Beryl during that period. Seated in the chair is her elderly grandmother Nellie Warner. Her mother Belle is on the left. Beryl is on the right with her hand on the shoulder of her young niece Lillian LaVerne Johnston. The scene is the garden at Beryl and Wilbur’s home at 707 West Avenue in Sanger.)

In the summer of 1931 Wilbur and Beryl welcomed their third and final child, Joyce. This long-hoped-for daughter could be said to have been an attempt at keeping the marriage strong. If so, the step met with only partial success. Early 1930s voter registers show Beryl and Wilbur at different addresses. By the mid-1930s they appear to have reconciled, but not so much the household brimmed with domestic bliss. The pair separated for good in 1946. A divorce became final in late 1952 -- by then, all communal property had already long since been divided.

Beryl first began forging the option to be independent with the 1 September 1936 launch of Beryl’s Flower & Gift Shop. At first, she had her own storefront in a newly-constructed building. This locale happened to be right next door to the Sanger Telephone Company, where her sister Erma worked as an operator. (Erma, in the dark pant-suit, and Beryl, in the lighter-toned dress, are shown at lower left in front of Beryl’s shop.) During World War II, while things with Wilbur were still on a somewhat even keel, she operated out of the basement of Carter Hardware. Given that that flower orders waxed and waned depending on holidays, weddings, funerals, etc., the business had its sideline aspects in order to keep enough cash flowing in, one being the sale of gift items (including pottery or other containers in which to put flowers). Another significant sideline was to deliver telegrams for Western Union. This was still an era when many private homes did not have telephone service, and telegrams were still a vital means to send urgent messages. This was particularly true during the war, when soldiers (or their commanding officers) sent news home from overseas. It was Beryl’s sad duty a number of times to dispatch word of the death of a loved one.

In the mid-1940s, as the couple went their separate ways domestically, the shared-storefront arrangement was dispensed with as well. Wilbur had long been engaged in a sideline business as a horsebreeder, and having gained a solid reputation as such, he gave up his life as a hardware merchant in favor of raising Morgan horses and goats on rural property to the east of town. This brought him to a locale still sometimes referred to as Centerville after the once-thriving village established there back in the 1800s, but also known as the “Sanger riverbottom,” inasmuch as Centerville had faded virtually to non-existence and its addresses been absorbed into the Sanger postal area. (The region consists of the part of Fresno County where the Kings River emerges from the foothills and begins its multiple-channel journey south toward Reedley, Kingsburg, and other communities, to eventually culminate in the Tulare Lake wetlands.) Wilbur had been accustomed to raising horses from his childhood -- his father had raised Belgian draft horses. One of the ways he and Beryl accomplished the splitting of assets was to sell their place at 707 West Avenue. Soon after her father died in 1949, Beryl bought her mother’s home at 2211 Seventh Street. That would be her residence for the rest of her life.

After the war years, Beryl obtained a new business location near Seventh and N Streets in the heart of Sanger’s small downtown, just a block and a half north of her uncle Bert Warner’s home. Here, as the Western Union-counter aspect dwindled in importance, she built up the focus on gifts. But in the meantime, she was above all a florist. Her daughter Joyce, who obtained a drivers’ license in her early teens, helped make flower deliveries in a wood-panelled station wagon. But the child who played the largest role was her son Lloyd. He was a full business partner. It was Lloyd who made the overnight trips to Los Angeles to the big wholesale flower outlets to bring back the store inventory. Lloyd would also make wholesale deliveries to flower shops in Fresno and Tulare Counties; over time, this wholesale side of the operation became his personal fiefdom, while Beryl concentrated on retail transactions from her shop.

Lloyd remained Beryl’s business partner to the end of her life. Eventually he and his wife Madeline took over nearly all of the florist aspect. In old age, Beryl preferred a less logistically challenging role. The store’s name was now just Beryl’s Gift Shop, in keeping with the changed emphasis. After Joyce moved away to begin her independent life, Beryl’s mother and sister filled filled the void, both domestically and professionally. By the 1950s, Erma and Belle were spending their summers running a hamburger restaurant and bakery at Shaver Lake, a resort village in the Sierra Nevada. But that venture was seasonal. In the winters, Erma and Belle would live with Beryl in Sanger, and work at the gift shop as employees.

This photograph of downtown Sanger, printed in the form of a postcard, was preserved among the mementoes of Beryl’s aunt Mary Emma Warner Hastings. Emma lived in Sanger and then in a nearby part of Fresno during the span from 1918 to 1928, so the photograph is assumed to date from that interval. This was the Sanger that Beryl knew as a young wife and mother. The view is down Seventh Street, informally known as Main Street, and the foreground is the intersection of Seventh and N Streets. The top floor of the building at left was the Sanger Hotel. Beryl’s Gift Shop would eventually occupy one of the bottom-floor storefronts on Seventh, below the hotel. The hotel continued to rent out rooms during Beryl’s tenure as a merchant, though its glory days were well in the past.

Even with no children left at home, Beryl’s life remained full. She was a fixture of the civic life of the town of Sanger. She was a member of the First Methodist Church, the Wesleyan Guild, and the Sanger Business and Professional Women’s Club.

Wilbur finally married again in 1962 to Ethyl Meeks, daughter of Garfield F. Meeks and Georgie V. Marsh. Paradoxically, this development may have helped restore family bonds, because Ethyl maintained an active interest in her stepchildren, even though all of them were grown by the time she became the new Mrs. Carter. She was, and still is, fondly remembered as “Grandma Ethyl” and “Aunt Ethyl” even though she was not a blood relative of those doing the remembering.

By the 1960s, Beryl was a grandmother several times over. All boys. She was delighted by the adoption of a granddaughter toward the end of her life. She never married a second time. Beryl continued to be involved in her shop as long as she was able, but as the 1960s went on, she eventually suffered a series of small strokes. The gift shop was handed over more and more fully to Lloyd and Madeline. The strokes continued until one was severe enough to be fatal. Beryl succumbed Wednesday, 25 September 1968 at Sanger Hospital.

By the time of her death, Wilbur Carter was recently deceased, having passed away 3 July 1968. (Her grave and his can now be found at Sanger Cemetery.) Unfortunately, the loss of both father and mother in such quick succession may have been too much for Lloyd, who took his own life later that year. Madeline however kept the gift shop in operation as a widow and single mother, doing so for over a decade, by which time all three of her sons were fully grown.

This photograph was taken in 1937 or about then. It seems to have been taken to commemorate a visit of some of the Martintown relatives. The setting is the front porch of the home of John Warner Hastings and his wife Irma on Olive Avenue in Fresno, CA. Some identifications are tentative, but for now the group is believed to consist of: Left to right back row, Wilbur Thomas Carter, Harold James “Nick” Carter, Charles Elias Warner, Lloyd Thomas Carter, unknown woman (who might be Grace Caroline Greenfield Smith, mother of the hostess), Irma Edith Smith Hastings (hostess), Walter Bert Weldon, Jr., Albert Frederick Warner, Joseph Alfred Smeds, Josephine Alberta Warner Smeds, Alfonso James Spece. Middle row: Carl E. Fike, John Warner Hastings (host), Marian Ruth Warner Weldon, Grace Mildred Branson Warner. Front row: Joyce Carter, Gladys Beryl Spece Carter, Erma Alice Spece Johnston, Elma Grace Hastings Fike, Deral Hastings Fike (the little boy), James Lawrence Hastings, Barbara Anna Hastings, Frank Opal Hastings, probably Blanche Critchfield Hastings, Mary Lena Brown Hastings, Cora Belle Warner Spece, Lillian LaVerne Johnston (on her grandma’s lap).

Descendants of Gladys Beryl Spece with Wilbur Thomas Carter

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