Melba Arlyne Branson

Melba Arlyne Branson, daughter of James Sutton Branson and Mary Ethel Harrigan, was born 26 January 1909 in Mariposa, Mariposa County, CA. She came into the world in a large cabin that her grandparents Alvin and Mary Branson were renting. The cabin had regularly served as the family abode whenever Alvin was employed at Mount Ophir mine, and Melba’s uncle, Ivan Branson, had been born within those very walls a little over seven years earlier. The Bransons called the place the “Gann House” after its owner, who is believed to have been Elias Newton Gann, a rancher whose primary residence was in the Whiterock precinct of Mariposa County. Melba’s parents had not established a home of their own, and were boarding with Alvin and Mary. The cabin was within sight of the Mariposa County courthouse (a building still in use today as it has been since early in the Gold Rush era).

Melba’s arrival in the world could be described as a “complication.” At the time of her conception her father was a bachelor miner who probably had no real interest in starting a family. Her mother was not quite sixteen years old. As described in greater detail in the biography of James Sutton Branson elsewhere on this website, James and Ethel (as she was known by the Bransons, perhaps to distinguish her from her mother-in-law Mary) were not even particularly well suited to be a couple, much less a set of parents. The pregnancy was not planned. The two may not even have meant their act of sex to have been more than a casual encounter. At best, they were sweethearts who had “gone too far” one night. The wedding, held at the insistence of Alvin and Mary and Ethel’s mother, Nellie M. Robinson Harrigan, had taken place seven months before Melba’s birth. Divorce would follow within another year and a half.

That eighteen-month span involved more than one shift of residence. As mentioned, Jim and Ethel stayed with Alvin and Mary, but the older couple in turn did not stay in one place. Alvin Branson’s dream was that he would strike it rich from his “Last Chance” mine, a claim he had filed in 1897 at Exchequer, a locale now known as the place where the Exchequer Dam holds back the waters of the Merced River, forming the huge reservoir, Lake McClure. At the time of Melba’s infancy, a smaller precursor of Exchequer Dam had recently been completed, just barely upstream from where Alvin was laboriously, year after year, tunneling and trenching his way down to a prehistoric streambed that had been untouched during the Gold Rush and which he believed must be rich in old placer gold. Thus far his diggings had not yielded the anticipated bonanza -- and never would. Alvin was obliged to take jobs as a miner or blacksmith, and sometimes as a carpenter or a teamster, in various spots in Mariposa County to build up enough cash to spend a few more weeks or months back at Last Chance. The Gann House was one of those places. Another was Exchequer itself in a cabin that Alvin and Mary owned. In addition the family sought out familiar stomping grounds near Quartzburg, where Alvin’s parents John and Martha Branson had lived the last forty-five to fifty years of their lives on a ranch that had since become owned by Alvin’s brother Joseph Branson. Jim often worked in the same places as his father. When he did not, he stayed in raw miner accommodations unsuitable for a mother and baby, so Mary Ethel and Melba (and sometimes Jim) stayed with Alvin and Mary. Melba can therefore best be described as a native daughter of Mariposa County as a whole, rather than one particular community within its boundaries.

Melba was Alvin and Mary’s first grandchild and they were determined to remain a part of her life. They would succeed in this desire, providing her with nurturance and keeping her within the sphere of the Branson family even as Jim failed to be much of a father. (The same scenario was true of Melba’s first cousin Doris Curtis, whose father’s case of tuberculosis prevented him from being a part of her upbringing. Doris was five months younger than Melba. Given the rustic life at Exchequer, the two girls sometimes shared the same crib during their “diaper phase” of life. It is Doris’s arm you see draped over Melba’s shoulder in the photo in the upper left corner of this biography.) However, with the divorce, Melba and her mother headed off on their own. They went first to Merced, Merced County, CA, where Ethel obtained a job as a title clerk in the Merced abstract office and as clerk in the Merced County Recorder’s Office. This soon led to a job in Stockton, CA in the San Joaquin County Recorder’s Office. While in Stockton she met bartender Marion Bennett, a native of Corvallis, Benton County, OR, son of Alexander Bennett and Sarah Catherine Keeney. The pair were wed in 1913 in Stockton.

As newlyweds, Ethel and Marion moved to Oakland, Alameda County, CA, where Marion became a deliveryman for the National Ice Company. In those days when people still depended upon ice boxes instead of true refrigerators, ice delivery was a booming business, particularly in an area as urban as Oakland. Here Melba seemed poised to enjoy a stable childhood that would counter the tumultuousness of her first four years of life. Soon she became a big sister upon the 24 September 1915 birth of half-brother Marvin A. Bennett. She started school. All seemed well. But things would take a terrible turn. Perhaps finances were shaky, or perhaps Ethel and Marion’s relationship was strained, or perhaps both, but in any event, Ethel made a choice that would literally be fatal to her. Finding herself pregnant again in 1917, she kept her condition secret from her husband. Learning the name of a physician in San Francisco who performed abortions -- an illegal procedure at that point in California history -- she had the pregnancy terminated.

A week later, realizing her recovery from the procedure was going horribly wrong, Ethel sought out the help of a doctor in Oakland. She chose a woman physician, Dr. Clair Stockton, who perhaps she hoped would maintain discretion. But when Dr. Stockton saw that the surgical area had become infected and that Ethel was slipping into sepsis, she admitted Ethel into Fabiola Hospital and enlisted the help of a more experienced colleague, Dr. A.L. Cunningham. There was nothing either physician could do to halt Ethel’s decline. She died at the hospital in the night, Wednesday, 16 May 1917.

An investigation of the death followed. Testimony was taken from Drs. Stockton and Cunningham, who described the circumstances of Ethel’s final hours. Though it was obvious to everyone why she had died, neither doctor would swear that it was a certainty the infection had resulted from the procedure. Either they felt that objectiveness demanded that they not say under oath that there was no other possible cause, or they declined to render an opinion out of solidarity with another member of the medical community. When the San Francisco doctor was supoenaed, he denied he knew Ethel or that he had treated her. He was shown a card bearing his name and with his night telephone number penciled upon its face. The card had been found among Ethel’s personal effects. The doctor said he did not know how the card came into her possession. The case was handed over to the San Francisco authorities for further investigation, given that the doctor’s practice was in their jurisdiction.

Meanwhile, the family was left to cope with the tragedy. Like most men of that era, Marion Bennett was not prepared to be a single parent. Nellie Robinson Harrigan stepped in to care for Melba and little Marvin. This had its benefits and its problems. Foremost on the plus side was Nellie’s devotion to her grandchildren. Another advantage was that Nellie owned the house at 420 27th Street in Merced that her father had built when he and Nellie’s mother had retired to that town in the year 1900, handing over their pioneer ranch in the Snelling precinct of the county to their son Benjamin Butler Robinson. That house would repeatedly be a sanctuary to Melba. On the downside, Nellie’s means of supporting herself was working as a nurse in private homes. This meant she travelled a lot, and therefore, the kids were uprooted a lot. For the rest of her childhood Melba experienced many changes of venue and attended quite a number of different schools. Nellie made it work somehow. Because her employment was typically live-in, she was able to keep her grandchildren under direct supervision. The fact that Melba had reached school age was probably a significant reason why the arrangement was viable. Sometimes Nellie was even successful in obtaining postings somewhat near the Bay Area, meaning that Marion Bennett could pop by from time to time. One such posting in 1919 (extending into 1920) was in Pittsburg in the Sacramento delta, only twenty miles from Oakland.

(At right, Melba’s birthplace, the so-called Gann House on the outskirts of the village of Mariposa. This photo was preserved amid Alvin and Mary Branson’s memorabilia.)

Unlike Marvin, Melba had her Branson kinfolk to turn to. It is extremely likely that she spent extended visits -- perhaps even several weeks during summer vacations -- with her Grandpa Alvin and Grandma Mary, whose home was now in Stockton. These paternal grandparents were always there for her. In fact, in the immediate wake of Ethel’s death, Alvin and Mary and their teenaged son Ivan moved to the East Bay for several months, finding a rental about four blocks from the Bennett home. Alvin found a job at the Standard Oil refinery in Richmond. Ivan became a streetcar conductor. The trio only returned to Stockton once Melba’s situation had become clear. Unfortunately, Melba’s father could not be of help to her, except by proxy. Jim Branson had been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon and precisely one week after Ethel’s death, he began serving his sentence at San Quentin Penitentiary.

It is unclear how much Melba was told about the cause of her mother’s death -- or, for that matter, about her father’s status as a convict. It is reasonable to assume she eventually came to know the details. It is likely, though, that she was kept in the dark at first out of consideration for her age. If she did come to know the whole tale, she guarded the secrets in her turn. In 1945, Melba wrote a dozen entries for the volume Descendants of Joel B. Younker (1809-1879) and Sarah (Stiffler) Younker (1813-1893), published in 1946. The book was a major genealogy about the clan of Joel and Sarah, the parents of Melba’s great-grandmother Melissa Ann Yonker Robinson. It contained biographies of 325 descendants. (The spelling of the surname has two variations, Younker and Yonker. Melissa, who passed away shortly before Melba reached three years of age, used the shorter version.) Melba wrote that her mother “died suddenly of a burst blood vessel.” Her father’s conviction was unmentioned -- in fact no details of his life after the divorce are touched upon, and Melba adjusted the date of the wedding to April, 1908, putting it nine months rather than seven months before her birth.

Marion Bennett’s life after 1917 gets little coverage in the book, either, except to say he remained involved in “the ice business” until his death in February, 1937. Melba’s relationship with her stepfather was undoubtedly negatively impacted by his failure to be her custodial parent. He seems to have regarded her as beyond his responsibility given that she was not related to him by blood. After he remarried in 1919 and had a wife to help out, he took back custody of Marvin and raised him to adulthood. Melba does appear to have enjoyed a lasting bond with her half-brother -- certainly the city of Oakland continued to figure in a big way in the daily life of her own descendants, and for his part, Marvin gave his daughter the middle name Arlyne, which was surely in Melba’s honor -- but she can’t have felt an abundance of loyalty to Marion. By contrast, she demonstrated time and again her deep appreciation of her grandparents.

Having had the example of a grandmother who supported herself at an occupation other than homemaking, and for that matter having the example of her own mother’s entry into the working world as a government clerk, Melba took a business course at the Stockton College of Commerce and launched a business career. With the exception of two brief intervals when each of her sons was very small, she would continue to have a professional occupation from her late teens right up to her old age.

It is not clear how Melba met the man who was to become her first husband. He was Lesley Louis Larsen, born 12 July 1903 in Caspar, Mendocino County, CA to Carl Louis Larsen and Marthine Velladsine Sorensen, who had only just recently immigrated into the United States from Denmark -- so recently that Lesley was born not in a house, but in the room at the hotel where his parents were quartered. (Decades later, Lesley would point out to his offspring the window of the room where he had made his arrival into the world, the hotel having survived all that time. The hotel is in fact still in existence today.) Throughout his childhood his father was a maintenance engineer at the Caspar Lumber Company sawmill. Lesley therefore was not from a place associated with Melba. Perhaps he had reason to be spending time in either Stockton or Merced. Perhaps Melba found a job in Mendocino or in some other locale, such as the Bay Area, that Lesley frequented. In any event, they did meet. They became spouses in January, 1930.

The couple spent their newlywed phase in San Francisco. They rented a unit in an apartment building at 1290 Hayes Street. This was the building in which Melba’s uncle Ivan Branson also dwelled along with his wife, the former Marion Christensen. (Like Lesley’s parents, Marion was also an immigrant from Denmark.) Lesley worked as a steel industry salesman, Melba as a stenographer for an insurance firm. Within two years of arriving in San Francisco, Melba gave birth to their first child.

These years of being close neighbors finished cementing the connection between Melba and Ivan, who was already an older brother figure to her. The bond would endure for a lifetime. In the winters of these years of the Great Depression, the off-season when his salesman occupation brought in few commissions, Lesley was able to earn much-needed rent money working for Ivan and Marion’s new venture, Morning Glory Catering and Sandwiches. At first this business -- which thrived on batch sales to downtown employee cafeterias rather than to individual retail customers -- operated right out of the apartment building.

In the deepest part of the national economic gloom, i.e. 1933-34, Melba and Lesley made an attempt to establish themselves in Merced. They rented quarters from Mrs. Evelyn E. Hapgood in the same neighborhood as the home of Nellie Robinson Harrigan, who was still at 420 27th Street. But the job situation was dicey, so much so that Melba and Lesley even went as far as Detroit, MI in search of a solution. Relocating to a different part of the Great Lakes region had worked out for cousin Doris and her husband Richard Fette. The latter couple would end up spending nearly all of the 1930s there before retreating back to California. But Detroit was only home to Melba and Richard for a brief interval in the winter of 1935-36. They decided to pin their hope on a new plan: Lesley would resume his sales work in San Francisco and go to college part-time in the hope that a degree or credential would help his employment prospects. So back to The City the pair came along with their young son. Once again the Larsens cleaved to Ivan and Marion Branson, occupying an apartment in the same building as the older couple, though after a number of months they moved down the street a tiny bit. Melba worked as a stenographer.

In 1938, with their son having reached school age, Melba was able to take a more demanding, better-paying job. The Larsens returned to Merced. Over the next seven years, Melba became a force to be reckoned with in the business and municipal life of Merced. By the time she wrote her autobiographical sketch in March of 1945 for the Younker-clan genealogy, she was able to lay claim to having been, or to still be serving as: Assistant, then as Secretary of the Merced Chamber of Commerce, City and County; Recreation Director for Merced County; owner/operator of a Public Stenographic Office; First Merced President of Delta Nu Chapter of Beta Sigma Phi, National Sorority; Past Executive Secretary of Merced County Tuberculosis Association; Past President of the Parent Teacher Association; Member of Business and Professional Women’s Club and Soroptimist Club.

One of Melba’s very first priorities once the financial prospects looked good was to help out her beloved grandmother, a token of gratitude for the on-going support Nellie had demonstrated. Nellie had even gone along during the mid-1930s sojourn to San Francisco so as to help with childcare. Though Nellie had for a quarter of a century been able to treat the legacy family home as her main base of operations, the actual ownership had undoubtedly been held in common with her siblings. Melba purchased the deed, clearing up the inheritance tangle. That done, she hired a contractor to remodel the nearly forty-year-old structure, which had among other things been built in the era before interior electrical wiring or indoor plumbing had become standard. Nellie’s nickname was Happy. Melba wanted to do her part, after all the challenges Nellie had endured, to make that nickname literal. She and Lesley and their boy did not share the house, though. It was Nellie’s domain. Melba and family did, however, reside along on the same street.

Another positive effect of Melba’s success was that with the founding of her private stenographic service business, known as The Letter Shop, she had more command over her schedule. This surely was a factor in the decision to have another baby. Yet no matter how carefully planned the pregnancy may have been, it had its unpredictable side. Complications developed that obliged Melba to enter San Francisco’s Stanford Lane Hospital, where she gave birth prematurely to another son in early 1944. Melba accepted an invitation to stay with Ivan and Marion while she recuperated and the baby grew strong enough to leave the hospital. (Despite his alarming manner of making his appearance into the world, that son ultimately grew up healthy, served in the Navy, and sired three children.)

Life was very full in this mid-1940s period. Perhaps a little too full, leading to stress upon Melba and Lesley’s marriage. Perhaps Lesley felt overshadowed by his wife. He had shifted from sales work to being a postal worker -- at the time Melba wrote of him in the Younker genealogy, he was still with the post office as a dispatcher and clerk. They decided to divorce in 1946 or early 1947. She moved to Berkeley, Alameda County, CA, which put her back somewhat near her uncle Ivan and even closer to her half-brother Marvin Bennett. Her older son was enrolled in Berkeley High School. The boy would stay there only one academic year, though, because Melba and Lesley -- who had temporarily moved to Stockton -- reconciled. Together they moved to San Jose, Santa Clara County, CA, where they founded a business, the Art Letter Shop. This did not work out as well as hoped, so in 1949, they reversed course and moved to Berkeley. Their son had just entered the University of California at Berkeley. The move meant the family could stay intact a bit longer and the eighteen-year-old could walk to the campus from home.

Unfortunately, the spouses’ relationship was still not fully repaired. It became doomed when Melba went to work for a printer in Oakland that made labels for automobile parts. There she met Charles Wallace Sharp, who was setting up new printing equipment. The two liked each other right away. Melba asked for a divorce and this time there was no reconciliation. Family recollection is that late 1950 was the tipping point.

Just a few years earlier, Melba had possibly been envisioning that she would live out her life in Merced. So much had changed. She would never live anywhere near Merced again. She did even have much cause to visit because her grandmother moved to Stockton. Without question, Melba had “turned the page.” Lesley went on to marry again. After an interval in Burlingame, San Mateo County, CA, he and his wife, Margaret, would move to Beaverton, Washington County, OR, in order to be near her daughter from a previous marriage and her son-in-law. Lesley became a widower in 1978, but stayed in Beaverton, where he died 16 October 1982. Nellie “Happy” Harrigan died in 1959. It was a heartwrenching event. After all of the hardships she had endured over the course of her life, Nellie deserved better than to reach the end she did. She was severely burned while disposing of household trash in her Stockton backyard, and died later that week.

Melba and Charles remained in Berkeley. They were a good match, not only in the usual domestic sense, but as business partners, their mix of print-shop skills complementing each other. Charles was a son of William Sharp of Ohio and Evah May Seeley of California. Born 19 November 1910 on a farm on acreage that is now part of the city of Gardena, Los Angeles County, CA, Charles had gone on to be raised in that area and had started his own family there in the 1930s with first wife Opal Ferguson. After a late-1930s divorce, Charles had come north. His three sons were raised mostly by his ex-wife with the help of her parents, John and Addie Ferguson. Melba did not play a direct maternal role with her stepsons, the youngest of whom was almost eighteen years old when Opal died in 1953. However, over the decades the two older ones kept in good touch with their father and Melba and her Larsen sons.

Being in Berkeley meant Melba got to see her uncle Ivan more often, inasmuch as he was still based in San Francisco. She was nearby to comfort him as Marion died in 1962, and was likewise on hand to cheer him on as he unexpectedly found a new love almost at once in the person of Signe Linnea Zettergren. Ivan and Linn became husband and wife before the year was out. Melba suddenly found herself being a quasi-aunt to Ivan’s new stepkids and not long after that, to his two biological children as well, and got to see Ivan savor fatherhood, something he had long since reconciled himself to being denied because Marion’s heart, weakened by high fever early in life, had been too compromised to chance the ordeal of a pregnancy. Meanwhile Melba was increasingly a grandmother. Only a few years after her eldest boy filled out his family in the early 1960s, her younger son and his wife began producing babies.

During her Bay Area years, Melba was an active member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She served as Regent of the La Puerta de Oro Chapter based in San Francisco. In the autumn of 1965, she was no doubt instrumental in arranging for Ivan, who already had a reputation as a Gold Rush/Mother Lode historian, to give the Constitution Address at the first meeting held after she assumed the post.

By the time of that D.A.R. presentation, Ivan was in the midst of making good on his long-conceived retirement plan. Morning Glory had done well over its thirty-five-year existence. He had guarded his money well, and had just received a lump sum from selling the business. Having purchased a large parcel of land near Rough and Ready in the Grass Valley region of Nevada County, CA, he was building a large manor house upon it. Originally he had not expected this to be a family home, but he was delighted to know it would be the place where he would finish raising his offspring. As he followed through on this migration into the foothills, Melba followed. She and Charles moved into a house within sight of Ivan’s “Mariposa Manor.” However, unlike Ivan, Melba did not feel as though she was quite ready to retire, nor was Charles, so they founded the Golden Sierra Printing Company. Their operations included the design, camera preparation, and printing of books, and it was only natural that when the time came for Ivan to complete Bones of the Bransons, his long awaited magnum opus, the production side of its publishing was handled by Golden Sierra. By the time of its release in 1982, Melba and Charles were well into their seventies and the genealogical memoir may have been the last title the company ever issued.

Charles died 5 May 1984. He and Melba were still residents of Rough and Ready -- or more precisely, the neighboring hamlet of Penn Valley -- but the California Death Index indicates he died in Sacramento, which can be taken to mean the location of the hospital. Precisely six months later, Ivan passed away as well. Melba continued on in Penn Valley for a number of years. She died 2 September 1991 in a care facility in San Ramon, Contra Costa County, CA. She was survived by both sons and all three of her Sharp stepsons.

Children of Melba Arlyne Branson with Lesley L. Larsen

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