Marian Agnes Hodge

Marian Agnes Hodge, daughter of Arthur Judson Hodge and Jennie Esther Atwood and a twin of Alice Elizabeth Hodge, was born 3 July 1913 in Pasadena, Los Angeles County, CA. She and Alice were the younger pair of A.J. and Jennie’s four children, their siblings Esther Louise Hodge and Arthur Oscar Atwood Hodge being quite a bit older. Unlike those two siblings, Marian and Alice did not really get to know their hometown of Pasadena, where the Jacob S. Hodge family had settled in 1887 during that community’s pioneer days. The twins were only two years old when the family moved to Long Beach and lived on a boat in San Pedro Harbor, and then briefly resided in Torrance, the site of their father’s new job with Union Tool (later to become National Supply Company). In 1917, the family moved onto a three-acre parcel A.J. and Jennie had purchased along the Pacific Coast Highway in Lomita, Los Angeles County, CA. This “personal paradise” estate was the milieu Marian knew through most of her childhood. In addition to the family home, the property contained a huge garden, an ornamental pond/swimming pool, a tennis court, orchards, and much more. Her parents would live out the rest of their long lives there.

In the early days of the Great Depression, at a point when A.J. Hodge was concerned he might be laid off from National Supply Company, he helped Jennie found a pottery and garden accessories shop along the edge of the three-acre parcel. Because he in fact was not laid off from his day job, it was up to the women of the household to bear the brunt of the daily operation of the shop, which they called Lomita Ornamental Products Company. Marian and Alice were an integral part of the venture, not only serving as sales clerks, but taking classes in pottery art and sculpture at University of Southern California (after attending Compton Junior College) and the Edna Kelly Studio in Long Beach so that they could contribute original designs and finished items to the inventory. They both proved to have quite a talent for three-dimensional art. With their new training to call upon, they expanded the business plan to include figures, as in statuettes, busts, fountains, and memorials. However, in her early twenties Marian gave this up in favor of becoming a wife and mother, and soon the pottery shop was sold to a Lomita couple who converted the shop into their private residence. It marked the end of Marian’s plans for some sort of career in art. Alice could have forged on, but chose not to do so without her sister there beside her.

The object of Marian’s affection was Harold Hiram Carpenter, a classmate of hers from Compton Junior College. The pair were wed 4 August 1937 in Torrance. A son of L.A. city policeman Hiram Jonathan Carpenter and Mabel Ethel Robertson, Harold had been born 1 March 1913 in Los Angeles. The couple had two children, both born during the early years of the marriage. Marian chose to concentrate upon being a mother and homemaker. The pair made their home in Lomita, close to her parents -- and then closer still when in the late 1940s she and Harold acquired a lot carved out of the original three-acre parcel her parents had purchased thirty years earlier, and used this site for their residence. Marian was therefore easily able to check on her parents as they proceeded into old age, and her kids had a “built-in” babysitter in the form of their grandmother Jennie. (A.J. Hodge, though proud of his grandchildren, had a personality typical of a university-trained mechanical engineer and was not naturally suited to sessions of childcare.)

Harold worked at National Supply, the wholesale hardware and manufacturing company that for decades had employed his father-in-law. This was an upscale and secure career and meant Harold was an ample breadwinner, but unfortunately, his career was cut short. Just as the couple’s offspring were proceeding through their college years, when he was only in his early forties, Harold suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body and took away his ability to speak. He never regained full health. He passed away 23 January 1964 in Wilmington, Los Angeles County at only fifty years of age. His body was buried at Green Hills Memorial Park in Rancho Palos Verdes -- a cemetery chosen perhaps because it was the favored burial ground of the family of Marian’s son-in-law Richard Price Berry.

Marian never married again. She had begun working outside the home as a school clerk shortly before Harold suffered his first stroke. She continued to be employed as a school secretary until the mid-1970s, a career about two decades in length.

Marian spent her early widowhood at the Lomita home, but by the time her mother passed away in 1972, with the kids both married and long gone, there was less of a sense of home to the place, especially given the way in which the area had increased in population and housing density. Marian was willing to embrace a change. Accordingly, in 1976, she moved to the Oklahoma/Arkansas border area to reside near her son and his family. This was a huge adjustment in some respects, putting her in her early sixties into a different climate, landscape, and cultural milieu. In addition, it was a shift from city to country life. Marian handled the transition well, though naturally not without a complaint or two about Oklahoma summer humidity. She was able to derive considerable enjoyment from this final phase of her life, free to pursue interests such as gardening, cooking, and of course, art.

Marian passed away 22 December 2002 in Fort Smith, Sebastian County, AR. Her remains were interred five days later in Macedonia Cemetery, Pocola, LeFlore County, OK.

Descendants of Marian Agnes Hodge with Harold Hiram Carpenter

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