Erma Alice Spece

Erma Alice Spece, daughter of Cora Belle Warner and Alfonso James “Alie” Spece, was born 22 July 1904 in Martintown, Green County, WI. She was the last of three children, though in a sense, she was the last of two because her only brother William Nathan Spece had died as a baby and so the only sibling she would ever know was her sister Beryl, eight years her senior.

When Erma was a baby, her parents acquired a farm a mile or so north of Martintown in rural Cadiz Township -- acreage that had belonged to long-time acquaintance Julius Stark. Alie began making a number of infrastructural improvements such as building a new barn and digging a new well, and by the spring of 1908 completed and opened a cheese factory. These improvements were part of the Speces’ plans to remain in Green County for the long term, but by the end of 1908, Belle was showing signs of coming down with tuberculosis, a scourge that had already killed some members of the extended clan and was making life hellish for others. Deciding to behave proactively, Alie and Belle abruptly moved at the beginning of 1909 to the San Joaquin Valley of California so as to put themselves in a region with an arid climate suitable for a battle against the disease. The health worries turned out to be a false alarm -- Belle never contracted TB and in fact would live to be quite elderly. The move to California, by contrast, was a “done deal.” Erma would be left with only a few direct memories of life in Green County. This was one of the ways that she and Beryl differed in their upbringing. Another difference was that Erma was left with few memories of her grandmother Ellen Spece, who died late in the summer of 1908 just after Erma turned four years old. (This loss may have been a factor in Alie’s willingness to leave Wisconsin behind.)

One of the biggest reasons for the choice of California as a new home was that the trail had been blazed by relatives, first by distant cousins, the Frames, and then in late 1906 by Belle’s parents, John and Nellie, and brothers Cullen, Bert, and Walter, who had relocated for the sake of Cullen, one of the family members afflicted with tuberculosis. These relatives were based upon a ranch in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Fresno County near a small trading post called Academy. The family sometimes called their property Spring Brook Ranch, and that was where Erma and her parents and sister were based for their first few months as inhabitants of California. That means they were on hand during the latter part of April as the death vigil for Cullen took place. He died on the first of May and the next day the recent-arrivals were among the family members who helped lay his body to rest at the cemetery near Academy.

Some time during the summer of 1909 the Speces moved into a house in Sanger, a small but thriving town located about ten miles due south of Academy within the rich agricultural swath of Fresno County that ran along the Kings River. They were the first of the clan to settle in the community, but not the last -- at various points over the decades to come Sanger was home to Erma’s grandparents and to every single one of her mother’s (surviving) siblings and their households. Some would live there for long stretches. Erma herself would go on to be a denizen of Sanger or its rural fringe essentially for the rest of her life -- the only intervals when she was based elsewhere were transitory.

It took Alie Spece a while to find just the right employment situation. For the summer and autumn of 1909, his main gig was hauling loads -- and in those days, that meant he did so with a team of horses -- or even mules or oxen -- and a wagon. This was a rented team and rig. The family had brought Mike, the family horse, out west with them, but while he was still fit enough to pull the family buggy (which had also been brought out from Green County), he was not well-suited to haul freight. At other points Alie and Belle and both girls made money picking fruit or working in packing sheds -- such work in those days often consisting of cutting up peaches to lay upon drying racks because many grocery stores could not yet afford large refrigeration units and fruit was often sold in dried form rather than fresh. In addition to peaches, the family members picked oranges, grapes, and plums. They did some of this work in tandem with (and sometimes for) some of the Frame cousins.

Erma stands in front of a load of peaches in the summer of 1910 at her father’s feed lot (mentioned below). The feed lot office is the building behind the loaded wagon. The wagon is atop a set of scales, weighing loads being one of the ways the feed lot generated income. Pup, the Spece family dog, is on the left. (Pup is referred to as alive in family correspondence from 1927, so he was a fixture of the household throughout Erma’s school years.)

In early 1910, Belle’s oldest brother John M. Warner and his wife Anna moved from Martintown to Sanger, Anna having been less lucky than Belle and having unquestionably come down with TB. John immediately partnered up with his father to found a huge feed grain warehouse in Sanger, which they named Warner Warehouse Company. Alie saw this as the right opportunity to be his own boss again. Even as the warehouse was going up, so was the A.J. Spece feed lot on an adjacent parcel of land along the railroad tracks. It was a separate business in terms of ownership, but the operations were often “looked after” on a communal basis.

In the summer of 1913, Alie and Belle traded their Sanger residence and the feed lot for a peach farm farther south in Fresno County. The exchange happened just as the peaches were ripe and needed to be harvested. Quite a few of the surviving family photos chronicle the flurry of activity of getting that crop off the trees, cut into halves, baked in sulfur ovens, and then set out in the sun on trays to finish becoming dried fruit. (Erma can be seen in one of those photographs reproduced on the page of this website devoted to her first cousin Elbert Clare Warner. Click here to go to that page. She can be seen in another 1910 photo of the feed lot reproduced on the page devoted to her uncle John Martin Warner. Click here to go to that page.)

The peach farm apparently was too much of a challenge and the Speces returned to Sanger before long. It is even possible they kept the farm only as long as it took to harvest the crop. Instead of farming, Alie became co-manager of Warner Warehouse Company, young John Warner having decided to sell out in the wake of his wife’s death, and elder John having decided to retire. For the rest of Erma’s upbringing she was a “town” girl. Sanger would loom large in her existence throughout the remainder of her long life, and it would be her actual place of residence for the great majority of that span.

(At right, Erma in about 1940.) Erma was wed shortly before turning eighteen to Keepers George Johnston, oldest of the three children of Frank W. Johnston and Annie B. Alberry. Frank and Annie had come to Fresno County from Ohio, and Keepers had been born 21 May 1902 after the big move west. The wedding occurred 30 May 1922 in Sanger.

Erma and Keepers set up their home next-door to his parents in rural Fresno County, on a vineyard and tree-fruit farm. Keepers no doubt worked for his father. Early in this phase of the couple’s lives -- in fact precisely nine months after the wedding -- they became parents of their only child, Lillian LaVerne Johnston. From the time Lillian was small, Erma worked outside the home -- an unusual trait in women of her generation. While still in her twenties she became a telephone operator, and kept this occupation for twenty years or more.

In fact, her occupation lasted longer than her marriage. In this, Erma was like her sister Beryl. Both women were on their own by the mid-1940s. The precise timing of Keepers and Erma’s parting-of-ways is unknown. They seem to have split up temporarily in the 1930s. However, they were together when Lillian was wed in 1940 -- marrying at seventeen, a couple of weeks after graduating high school -- and voter registers through 1944 do still show Keepers at the same address as Erma. (This may perhaps be an artifact of what address he chose to use for voting purposes.) Again like Beryl, Erma would not marry a second time. With the death of her father in 1949, Erma joined forces with Beryl and with her mother to form a team, all of them supporting one another in their various ventures, both commercial and domestic.

Erma left the phone company in favor of opening a hamburger and pie restaurant at Shaver Lake five thousand feet up in the mountains of Fresno County. This was a seasonal business, dependent on summer tourists and vacationers to generate enough of a customer base. During the portion of the year when the establishment was in operation, Erma would live at Shaver Lake. Belle was her business partner. Belle would make the pies and other baked goods -- her concoctions are fondly recalled by surviving relatives. Erma may have regarded her Shaver Lake cottage as her primary residence, even though she was not there year-round. Certainly it was the one place she could call her own. Her mother had her own cottage within walking distance, but it was separate. During the winter, Erma and Belle would return to Sanger and stay with Beryl. Erma worked for Beryl as a clerk at her gift shop on Seventh Street. It does not appear she ever became a co-owner of the shop (Beryl’s formal business partner was her son, Lloyd), but as Beryl slowed down in the 1960s due to age, Erma was likely to be the first person to greet customers and relatives as they came through the door.

Erma was quite a traveller, and possibly never more so than when her mother and uncles and aunts were elderly, in part because Erma was a “modern woman” who knew how to drive whereas the women of the older generation never learned to do so (even though they had in their day been perfectly adept at the greater challenge of handling horses and buggies). Erma was often the driver, or one of the main drivers, on jaunts through many parts of the United States. She and her mother in particular liked to go back to Martintown and its vicinity for extended visits, their main hosts generally being Emma Warner Hastings and Dorothy Warner Yost. One marathon excursion occurred in 1956. Various Martintown-area relatives had come out to California for the May, 1956 funeral of the wife of Erma’s double second cousin James Lawrence Hastings. Erma and her mother took Emma Warner Hastings back by automobile as part of a two-car convoy, the other automobile containing Jim Hastings and his mother Lena Brown Hastings. The travellers set out 15 June 1956. Erma and Belle then spent many weeks visiting kinfolk “back home.” They also took side trips. These included shorter trips of two to five days to such places as Iowa, northern Wisconsin, and northern Michigan, but also one huge additional push east to Boston, MA to see Jim Hastings’s sister Ethel Ruth Hastings Parsons. Erma and Belle (again with Emma riding along) did not arrive home to Sanger until 1 October 1956, having added perhaps eight thousand miles to the car’s odometer reading.

Belle and Beryl both passed away in the 1960s. Erma continued on in the home they had shared, and entered her retirement phase. She perished 6 October 1985 in Sanger. She had made it to eighty-one, a good span by most measures, but somewhat short of the average lifespan of members of the Martin/Strader clan. Her uncle Bert Warner attended her funeral, though he was by then 101 years old. He would live another three years.

By the time of Erma’s death, Keepers Johnston was deceased. He had remained unmarried for decades after he and Erma had split up and it is not clear just when the pair formally divorced. He was a year into a remarriage when he passed away 25 March 1980 in Fresno.

In this scene from the 1950s, Erma, second from right, is shown in front of Beryl’s house, where Erma and Belle lived during the winters. Erma would eventually reside here full-time, and continue to do so into the 1980s. The picture was taken during a visit by Erma’s first cousin Willa Roberta Warner Chase, second from left. Willa’s husband Leslie E. Chase is on the left. Cora Belle Warner Spece is on the right.

Descendants of Erma Alice Spece with Keepers George Johnston

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