Eugene Harrington Converse

Eugene Harrington Converse, eldest of the four children of Eunice Lucille Harrington and Winfred Delorane Converse, was born 29 June 1902 in California. His parents are believed to have been living in the Snelling District on the eastern edge of Merced County at the time of his birth, and so that is where his birth probably occurred. If not there, he was born in the town of Merced. He was often known as Gene. The family name was Convers, not Converse, but his mother does not seem to have liked that spelling and eventually talked her husband into adding the final “e” to make it more Irish than Scots. There are no records of Gene or any of his siblings having ever gone by the Convers spelling, but it is possible this was the case for the first part of his childhood. His younger siblings were Clyde, Milton, and Josephine.

When Gene was three or four years old, his parents left Merced County and reestablished the family in San Joaquin County near the small town of Manteca, where his mother’s mother had moved in 1902, and where his mother’s sisters Elsie and Irene had just settled with their new husbands. Gene and his siblings were raised from then on in the Manteca area with the possible exception of a short interval in the mid-1910s when they lived farther west in San Joaquin County near Tracy. While in Manteca, they did not always have the same address. His father was usually employed as a farmer, farm hand, or farm supervisor, but does not appear to have ever purchased his own land, and so from time to time the household would move as his employment circumstances changed. As would be expected, Gene worked as a farm laborer as well as he reached adulthood, to the degree that he is listed in late 1910s San Joaquin County directories as a farmer.

Gene left home early. As his brother Clyde would later do, he went into the Navy. He did so just in time to be in the service during World War I, and could therefore claim to have been a veteran of that war, though it appears unlikely he ever went overseas. He entered the service by lying about his age -- he was just barely sixteen when he signed up. This deception means that his birth year is 1900 on quite a few public documents. After the war he was stationed as an engineer at the Naval Training Station at Mare Island, Vallejo, Solano County, CA.

Returning to civilian life as a machinist, Gene came back to Manteca, where he spent much of the 1920s. He continued to work as an engineer on heavy equipment. A newspaper article dated 15 June 1928 reveals he was employed at that point by Manteca Plumbing Company. The article describes how his hand had been crushed when a pump fell on him at work on the 14th. He suffered a compound fracture. This is the type of injury where the bone juts out through the skin. This was severe enough that Gene would have had a scar for the rest of his life, and possibly some permanent impairment and/or pain. However, he recovered sufficiently to resume his career in maintenance of heavy equipment.

The 1930 census lists him as a divorced man, so it is considered likely he was married for an interval during the 1920s, but the name of the wife is not included in family records and her identity remains a mystery. It does not appear the pair had offspring.

At the end of the 1920s, Gene went to Butte, Silver Bow County, MT. The 1930 census shows him as a lodger in a boarding house. His occupation is given as stationary engineer at a hotel -- perhaps a reference to the very place in which he was residing. A “stationary engineer” is someone responsible for maintaining heavy, immobile infrastructure such as boilers, turbines, and pumps. He probably went all the way to Butte because in those early years of the Great Depression, he had to take jobs where he could find them. He had come far beyond the pale of most of the greater Branson clan, but he was not quite alone. His mother’s first cousin Mabel H. Branson had settled in Butte twenty years earlier with her husband Frank Andrew Culbertson. Gene had three female second cousins in the town who were only slightly younger than he. These were Ethelyn, Gwendolyn, and Alma Culbertson. It is not known if he took advantage of any family hospitality, but there is no doubt Eunice would have alerted Mabel of Gene’s presence and suggested the Culbertsons check on her firstborn from time to time.

Gene was still single at the time the census was taken, but he struck up an acquaintance with a young drygoods store cashier that quickly led to a wedding. The object of his affection was Margaret Marie Skubitz, daughter of Anton Skubitz and Angelina Pilcenich. Her parents were from Austria-Hungary -- specifically, from a village near the city of Leibach. This city is now usually called Ljubljana, and is the capital of the Republic of Slovenia. Anton had come to the U.S. in the early 1890s, and Angelina in 1898, whereupon they married and produced a large family in Butte, Anton working first as a miner and then as a farmer. All of the children, of whom Margaret was one of the youngest, were born in Montana. Margaret herself was born 10 October 1913 in Butte -- she was still a teenager when she and Gene wed, and still not yet twenty when she became a mother.

Gene and Margaret had one daughter early in the marriage, and then another eight years later. The couple spent these years in Butte, where Gene continued his career. By the mid-1930s he was business agent and secretary of the local branch of the International Union of Operating Engineers -- meaning he had switched from his involvement with fixed-in-place equipment to mobile heavy machinery such as bulldozers, cranes, and drilling gear. In 1936, he was a negotiator in a jurisdictional dispute between unions representing the two types of engineers.

The Converses remained in Butte at least into 1942 -- newspaper accounts mention the involvement of both Gene and Margaret in July 4th parade organizing in 1942, such organizing being something they had done a number of times before. However, at some point during the World War II years they left Montana behind, settling into a home in French Camp, east of Stockton, San Joaquin County, CA.

Gene was back in easy range of his relatives and able to see old friends. He probably assumed he was entering a particularly fine stage of life. Unfortunately, things turned out differently than he imagined. Margaret soon began having an affair with Everett Roscoe Stark (often known by his middle name). She had become restless -- perhaps a consequence of having been “tied down” to Gene at such an early age. The affair grew serious and ultimately, became openly known. Needless to say, this left Gene in the lurch. The same was true of Roscoe’s wife, the former Viola Mae Moore. In the wake of the divorces, Margaret and Roscoe married one another in the autumn of 1945.

Gene’s pride was stung. He chose to leave the area. This contributes to an irony in his life story. He brought Margaret and the girls to live near his original home, and then it was they who remained there while he did not. Over the decades to come they would live in such communities as Stockton, Modesto, and Oakdale. Some of Margaret’s relatives left Montana and also made central California their stomping ground.

Margaret did not have offspring with Roscoe Stark (11 November 1895 - 8 February 1969) even though she was still a few days shy of her thirty-second birthday when they wed. He was turning fifty and had just finished raising the kids he’d had with Viola, so he probably preferred not to start over -- except of course in the sense that he became a stepfather to her kids. Fifteen months after Roscoe’s death, Margaret wed Donald Leon Valentine (15 October 1919 - 25 December 1998), with whom she worked at Sharpe Army Depot near Lathrop, San Joaquin County, CA. (Their wedding took place 2 May 1970 in Carson City, NV.) Margaret and Donald spent much of their marriage as residents of Stockton until retiring to an assisted-living facility in Manteca. After Donald died as a result of a car accident, Margaret spent the final fragment of her life in a nursing facility in Oakdale, Stanislaus County, CA, where she passed away 16 October 2000.

Gene clearly wished to get away from Margaret did so in a thorough way. Though the war was now over, he had plenty of skills to offer as a ship’s engineer. He served on a number of merchant vessels and appears to have kept doing so into the 1960s. He was so often gone on long voyages -- some taking him as far as Europe -- that he does not seem to have maintained a home during the late 1940s and early 1950s. On the rare occasions he was not at sea, he stayed with his sister Josephine and brother-in-law Plinio Bianchi in Ripon (near Manteca), and used their home (their farm) as his mailing address. Eventually he became based in Long Beach, where his brother Clyde had settled, and that is where he remarried 7 March 1953. The new Mrs. Converse was Mary Estelle Herendeen, born 1 March 1901 in Colorado, daughter of Albert Newton Herendeen and Christiana Bell Zans. Known as Stella, she had been employed variously as candy factory worker, an actress in silent movies, and a medical supplies saleslady. She had married Henry B. Clay in the early 1920s. The marriage had not lasted long, but one son, Henry Edward Clay, had sprung from that union. The latter was thirty years old by the time Gene married Stella, so Gene did not spend any time as a day-to-day stepfather. How long Gene and Stella stayed together is not known, except that they must have divorced because after her death, which occurred 4 July 1968 in Long Beach, her relatives did not see fit to mention Gene in her obituary as one of her survivors.

Gene ended up far from California. How that all unfolded is vague. His brother Milton’s 11 August 1984 obituary places Gene in Prattville, Hillsdale County, MI and Gene’s own Social Security Death Index entry lists his final residence about ten miles southeast of Prattville in Morenci, Lenawee County, MI. The Michigan Death Index shows he died 13 December 1984 in Adrian, the seat of Lenawee County, which probably means he was taken to a hospital there, Prattville and Morenci being less replete in terms of medical facilities.

Children of Eugene Harrington Converse with Margaret Marie Skubitz

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