Clyde Chesley Converse

Clyde Chesley Converse, second son and second child of Eunice Lucille Harrington and Winfred Delorane Converse, was born 24 November 1903. His precise birthplace is uncertain. When Clyde was no more than a few years old his parents settled in Manteca, San Joaquin County, CA and remained there until Clyde was grown, but prior to that they are known to have lived in Merced County in the vicinity of the small community of Snelling (near the Mariposa County boundary). The latter locale was probably where Clyde came into the world.

Clyde felt the itch to get away from his parents and his roots as soon he could. Without bothering to complete a fourth year of high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy at age eighteen, initiating what would turn out to be a career of over two dozen years, coming to an end just after World War II. He would never as an adult reside again in the San Joaquin Valley. One side effect of this vanishing act is that he is seldom mentioned in family notes and correspondence. Most of the information presented in this biography was cobbled together using public source information.

Clyde was a crew-level man for his whole career and therefore spent a great deal of time at sea. The full list of ships he served upon and where he went has been difficult to reconstruct and will probably never be complete, but some glimpses have come to light. For example, an article from the 10 July 1927 edition of the Modesto News-Herald mentions that Clyde had made a visit home to Manteca for several days while his vessel, the U.S.S. Mississippi, was in port at San Pedro, Los Angeles County, CA.

Later in the 1920s Clyde apparently was home-ported in Bremerton, Kitsap County, WA. There he met a woman in her late teens who was in the process of extricating herself from a marriage to a Mr. Shafer. She was Jessie Irene Harrison, a native of Oshkosh, WI born 19 April 1910 to parents John Harrison and Abigail C. “Abbie” Pooler. Her family history is complex. Some of the details remain fuzzy, but with the help of internet sources that became available by 2017 -- i.e. a dozen years after the first version of this biography of Clyde was uploaded -- this portait has emerged:

Abbie Pooler, born in 1889, was a middle daughter of the large family of Perry C. Pooler and Nellie Bowker of Oshkosh, and rather than being entirely raised by her parents, spent many years of her childhood in the care of her widowed aunt Arabella Bowker Cross, whose residence was also home to Ida Bowker, maiden sister of Arabella and Nellie. When Perry and Nellie moved to Seattle just after the turn of the century, Addie remained in Oshkosh with Arabella. In fact, Addie and husband John Harrison even spent the early part of their marriage continuing that living arrangement. As a consequence, Jessie began her life as an occupant of Arabella’s house.

The marriage of Addie to John Harrison ended before 1920, and she moved to the Puget Sound area, boarding with her elder sister Goldie Greenwood and family for a while until marrying Herman Hunich in 1920, and then John Hefner in 1924. She did not keep Jessie with her, or if so, did not do so consistently. Jessie may have been with her father, but it seems more likely she went into a foster-parent situation, probably landing with one or more of her many aunts. By her late teens, she had renewed her bond with her mother and had become based in northwestern Washington. One of the mysteries of her tale is that she is Jessie I. Perry on the marriage license when she wed Clyde. Chances are good she was not quite free of Mr. Shafer in the legal-paperwork sense. Wanting to avoid using either Harrison or Shafer on the document, she resorted to a fake name based upon her maternal grandfather’s first name.

Clyde continued to often be at sea. Jessie must have spent at least some of the next few years in Naval housing, who knows where, but definitely also spent much of the 1930s in the home of her mother and stepfather at 506 Washington Beach, Bremerton, WA. This was Clyde’s official address during that period, though he would only sporadically have been physically present.

Clyde and Jessie only had one known child. There was probably an issue with infertility -- perhaps coming from the Converse side, given the lack of prolificity among Clyde’s siblings, but the limited amount of cohabitation was probably a factor as well. The Washington Death Index shows that son Richard Cecil Converse died 23 August 1937 in Poulsbo, Kitsap County, WA (just north of Bremerton). The index says his age was twelve. This is impossible if it refers to twelve years. It probably was twelve hours; i.e. the baby never had a chance. At most, it meant twelve months.

In the late 1930s, Clyde was again home-ported in southern California. He and Jessie established themselves in Long Beach. The 1940 census shows the couple there. (No kids.) Jessie’s name continues to appear in directories in tandem with Clyde through the mid-1940s, but again, the pair saw little of each other. The Navy needed its men at the battlefront, and Clyde went from one assignment to another. From the autumn of 1941 on through until after the hostilities drew to a close he was in succession part of the crew of the Chester, the Swallow, the Sarasota, and the Lubbock. The Chester was home ported at Pearl Harbor. Clyde was part of the crew when the Japanese sneak attack occurred but he and his shipmates were spared involvement in that catastrophe because the Chester was out at sea, coming back to Oahu from training maneuvers held in the vicinity of Wake Island.

Ship manifests of July, 1946 show that in the immediate aftermath of the war Clyde was a passenger aboard the Maquoketa and then served aboard the Mattabesset. When he finally got back stateside in a lasting way in 1946 or 1947, if Jessie was still waiting for him, she did not linger. She went back to Bremerton. She married Lester Smith in 1949, and passed away as Jessie Smith 16 April 1963 in San Francisco, three days shy of her fifty-third birthday.

The divorce happened at just about the time Clyde and Jessie were finally in a position to actually be a couple. Maybe that was the problem. It could be that Jessie tolerated him in brief doses, but did not want him around on a regular basis. She had undoubtedly become accustomed to calling her own shots. For his part, Clyde had spent so many years in the company of other sailors without the social moderation of a woman in his daily life, that he wasn’t fully equipped to treat Jessie with the grace she deserved -- especially given that he does not seem to have been able to limit his use of alcohol outside a military setting. He had enough of a problem with this that his sister Josephine, when later speaking of him to their mother’s first cousin Maude Branson Chamberlin, characterized him as a drunkard.

Even as a civilian, Clyde continued to be employed by the Navy, and remained in Long Beach for the remainder of his days. He would marry twice more, but the first of those unions was brief -- perhaps only a fraction of a year, and definitely not much more than two years. The woman was Marie Modean (aka Modene) Coats, born and raised in Weakley County, TN, who had come out to southern California during or just after the war with her husband Douglas Rickman and their two kids, Harold and Gail. Modean and Douglas had divorced some time in the 1940s and she met Clyde as a divorcée residing in Long Beach. She appears in a 1952 city directory still under the last name Rickman, and then is Modean M. Converse in the 1953 directory. This suggests the timing of the wedding to Clyde, i.e. probably in late 1952 or early 1953, but no documentation has been found that would reveal the date and place more precisely than that. Harold Rickman was an adult by that point, but Gail was still in high school and depending on whether she lived with her father or her mother, may have been part of Clyde’s daily life, but not for long, because she wed James Galloway in late August, 1954 at age seventeen. Modean wed subsequent husband Daniel Earl Brown in late February, 1955. She would go on to spend the rest of her life as his wife, a span of more than forty years. Clyde would be a footnote in her life story. (Modean’s stats: 25 March 1915 - 25 January 1998.)

Clyde had better luck with his final marriage. His bride was Elsie Mae Williams. Her origin story is strikingly similar to Jessie’s: Elsie was born 31 January 1908 in Lestershire, Broome County, NY to shoe-factory employee Alfred Loran Williams and his first wife Katheryn Wilbur. Alfred and Katheryn split up in the 1910s -- possibly quite early in that decade when Elsie was still quite small. Neither parent made a place for her in their subsequent households. Instead, Elsie and her slightly-older brother Loren were raised by their paternal grandmother, a widow whose home was just over the state line in rural Susquehanna County, PA, and this remained the case even as each of Elsie’s parents went on to subsequent marriages. Given this sort of abandonment, it is hardly a surprise that Elsie turned to an early romance as a means of finding the affection she had been denied. Unfortunately, she acted too precipitously. She became pregnant at seventeen, at a time when her boyfriend, Leon Alfred Hickok, was still only sixteen. The pair wed in the summer of 1925 several months before the birth of daughter Frances Elaine Hickok. Elsie and Leon would manage to stay together into the 1930s, but given the awkward circumstances under which their marriage began, and then the challenge of getting by in the Great Depression, they were not able to provide a home for Frances. Much as Elsie had been given up, Frances was in turn given up by Elsie. Ironically, Frances was raised by Elsie’s mother, with the help of her second husband, Anderson Burdette. This time around Katheryn kept it together and brought up her foster daughter with such steadiness, Frances would go on to be described as a daughter, not a granddaughter, in Katheryn’s 1974 obituary.

By 1940 at the latest, Elsie and Leon had broken up. He would remarry in the 1940s, remaining in Broome County (mostly in that county’s main city, Binghamton). Frances and her husband Jerry Paul Kordula would likewise linger in Broome County before moving to Cocoa, FL in 1964. Elsie on the other hand appears to have said a permanent good-by to her original stomping grounds and did not look back. Where did she go? Hard to say, except that eventually she made her way to Long Beach and met Clyde. She is referred to as Elsie Mae Little in her mother’s obituary. Her name by then was Converse, not Little, but the reference implies Elsie must have been married for a time to a Mr. Little. Later she was married to a Mr. McKay, and her last name is McKay in the Nevada Marriage Index entry detailing her wedding to Clyde in Las Vegas, an event that took place 26 May 1961. They would be together until his death a bit more than four years later.

Clyde’s final place of residence, shared with Elsie, was 365 Daisy in Long Beach. His official place of death was the U.S. Naval Hospital at Camp Pendleton, where he was rushed after he suffered an aortic dissection. Aortic dissections tend to manifest in a catastrophic fashion, and it is possible he did not actually live long enough to reach the facility, but that was where his death certificate was processed. Date of death was 20 September 1965. His remains were buried with military honors in that county at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery.

Elsie survived him. She remained in Long Beach for the next eleven years. However, the 1974 death of her mother appears to have put her and her daughter Frances back in touch. By that point, all three of Frances’s sons were grown, and in the late summer of 1976, she made room for her mother in her home at 6469 Aster Drive in Cocoa, just as she had earlier made room for Katheryn in her final days. Three months later, Elsie passed away at Wuesthoff Memorial Hospital in Rockledge, a few miles from that home. She was buried at nearby Brevard Memorial Park. Her date of death was the seventh of December -- the 35th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the event that had figured so prominently in Clyde’s life story.

Descendants of Clyde Chesley Converse

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