Mildred Elaine Corkins

Mildred Elaine Corkins, daughter of Florence Winnie Branson and Ernest Lee Corkins, was born 2 March 1912 in Stockton, San Joaquin County, CA, where her parents had just established their home. She spent most of her childhood in this community, though while she was a baby the family did relocate to a cattle ranch in the Angel’s Camp/Altaville area of Calaveras County for a year or so, during which time her brother Alvin was born. By the time Mildred was eight, the family was complete with four children, Daniel and Alice being the other two siblings.

Mildred early on exhibited the type of character that used to be known as “flighty.” That is, she showed a tendency toward impulsiveness and rash decisions, even when matters of deep importance to her life were at stake. As a teenager she plunged into romantic liaisons with recklessness. Old family stories even hint that one reason her mother fell in love with neighbor/boarder Charles Dumont was to keep him out of Mildred’s clutches. While that tactic worked -- at the cost of Florence and Ernest’s marriage -- Mildred merely set her sights elsewhere. At sixteen she married Charles Allen Burkett, Jr., born 29 June 1906 in San Francisco, CA, a son of Charles Allen Burkett and Ellen Lynch. The wedding took place 12 September 1928. This date is derived from the genealogical notes of Mildred’s aunt Maude Branson Chamberlin. It has not been possible to confirm through public sources, which leaves open the possibility that the true date was “adjusted” so as to pretend Mildred was not a pregnant bride. If the date is right, it was nine months after the wedding that Mildred and Charles became the parents of Donald Leroy Burkett, born 21 June 1929 in Stockton. Mildred did not finish high school.

The marriage ended as suddenly as it began. Inasmuch as Mildred was not well suited to providing her baby son with a stable home, Florence obtained primary custody of Donald. Charles Allen Burkett, Jr. does not appear to have played much of a role thereafter in Mildred’s life. He went on to marry Alfreda Louise Sporan in late 1933, with whom he went on to have three children. He spent most of his life in Stockton; he died there 14 February 1991.

As her teenage years were coming to a close, Mildred became involved with Arthur Daniel Brodehl, son of Daniel Martin Brodehl and Lydia D. Ulmer. Art had been born in August of 1908 in North Dakota. He had moved to San Joaquin County in 1919 with his parents and four siblings, and had come of age on a fruit farm near Stockton. He and Mildred wed one another 22 August 1932. The pair were well suited to each other and thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company. Their union was, however, not without its pitfalls, because they reinforced each other’s lack of responsibility. Art’s parents were well-to-do, and the couple were adept at spending the money he obtained from them. They would often go off to Nevada to gamble, or otherwise take pleasure holidays as a couple. They would drop the children off along the way to stay with their Grandma Florence at her home in Pollock Pines in El Dorado County. Sometimes they would do so saying the trip was just for overnight, but it would be a week before they showed up to fetch the young ones. The children included not only Donald, but two daughters born in the mid-1930s (names withheld because one of the two is still alive). Donald came to depend on the care of his grandmother and his aunt Alice more than his mother. As the years wore on Art’s parents refused to hand over any more cash, though they covered the couple’s grocery and utility bills by sending payments directly to the vendors.

In the early 1940s Art worked for his father at Lake Tahoe. Daniel Brodehl had obtained a contract with the U.S. Post Office to deliver mail around the shore using his forty-two-foot twin-engine power launch, the Marion B. Art’s workday consisted of cruising across the lake, making postal deliveries to the farflung resorts and small communities along the shore, a trip that typically required two runs, each of which lasted more than two hours given the huge size of the body of water. Sometimes tourists would ride along, providing an additional means of income. Once this job arose, Art and Mildred and the kids began residing in Tahoe City.

The year 1941 proved to be incredibly tumultuous in Mildred’s life. On March 22nd she gave birth to twins at a Sacramento hospital. The babies were probably very premature and they died the same day. They were likely stillborn. They were, however, given names: Michael Brodehl and Arthur Brodehl, Jr. The remains of the infants were interred at East Side Cemetery in Sacramento. (This is according to the obituary; there are no gravemarkers there now.) About two months later -- 17 May 1941 -- Art headed out for his usual postal afternoon delivery run. As he often did, he took along Donald Burkett, then not quite twelve years old. There were no paid passengers that day, but Art’s new assistant Everett Dolan was on board; the morning run had been Dolan’s maiden voyage around the lake. At about 2:30pm the Marion B departed from the pier at Glenbrook and did not reach its next destination. Search parties were organized, but no trace of the craft was found at first. Two days later a piece of charred wreckage turned up on the shore that contained the name Marion B; Daniel Brodehl confirmed it was a piece of the missing vessel. Shortly after noon the next day -- 20 May 1941 -- the body of Donald Burkett was found at the edge of the lake by the caretaker of Homewood resort. The body of Everett Dolan was discovered about an hour later, a mile away from that of Donald. Both were found in an area known as McKinney Bay. This was about fifteen miles from the place where the piece of wreckage had been found. The next day, after reading the newspaper accounts about the incident, two men came forward to report that they had seen the boat burning in the lake at about 4pm on the afternoon of the 17th. They had viewed this from the highway above the lake on their way to Reno. Assuming that a power boat they saw cruising in the general area of the crippled craft was coming to the rescue, the pair headed on to Reno.

The body of Arthur Brodehl was never found. Based on the available evidence and testimony, an inquest came to the conclusion that the Marion B had caught fire due to a fuel leak. Given the fragmented nature of some of the wreckage, an engine had probably exploded. Mildred stated that when she and Art had been painting the boat a few days earlier, they had noticed a small gasoline leak. Witnesses in Glenbrook said the port engine had not been functioning at the time of the boat’s departure from the dock. Investigators speculated that Art was killed immediately, and inasmuch as he had not been wearing a life jacket, his body sank. Everett Dolan had perhaps been knocked unconscious. Everett and Donald had been seen already wearing life jackets as the boat left Glenbrook. Dolan’s jacket kept him from sinking, but he drowned. Donald’s case was the most tragic and horrific. His autopsy revealed he had died of exposure. In other words, he froze to death in the icy water. He did not drown. He had probably remained conscious, tried to swim to shore, but he was too far out in the lake to make it. If the power boat had gone to help at 4pm as the witnesses assumed it would, it is very likely Donald would have been saved. Fate had decreed otherwise, and soon a grave was created for him beside his baby half-brothers at East Side Cemetery. The remains were interred there Saturday, 24 May 1941 after a memorial held in Tahoe City.

(At right, Mildred is pictured having a smoke on the porch in Lake Tahoe in the early 1940s.)

Mildred took shelter with family in Stockton, pulling her school-age older daughter out of school for a week or so. Mildred reacted to her grief by ending her loneliness as rapidly as possible. She married Melvin Johnson 31 July 1941. The relationship lasted a matter of months, the divorce becoming final no later than October, 1942. Because of the brevity of the union and the commonness of Melvin’s surname, almost nothing more is known about him, except that he may have earlier been a romantic interest of Alice Corkins. The couple lived in Sacramento during the brief time they were together.

Mildred’s fourth husband was Bertrand Grafstock Siljan, a son of Norwegian-immigrant newspaperman Lars Johnson Siljan and his second wife (Elizabeth) Eva Bleth. Bert had been born 23 January 1917 in Grand Forks, Cass County, ND. He was five years younger than Mildred and the relationship could fairly be described as his first real stab at marriage. He had been romantically involved in the late 1930s with a teenager, Elaine Cantu, with whom he had fathered a daughter in 1938, but the relationship had not endured and Bert was subsequently so little a part of his daughter’s life that she was raised bearing the last name of a stepfather. Bert and Mildred were probably wed in late 1942. Bert served in the Navy during World War II, and during those years, while he was a cook and baker on the submarines the U.S.S. Orion and the U.S.S. Gunnell, Mildred and her two girls lived on or near a military base in the San Diego area. By the late 1940s, when Bert and Mildred became parents of their first child, the household was back in Stockton. The next birth -- the seventh and final time Mildred became a mother -- occurred in Butte County in the early 1950s.

A little later in the 1950s, Mildred and Bert moved to Crescent City, Del Norte County, CA with the two youngest girls, while Mildred’s older daughters, now teenagers, were taken in full-time by Daniel and Lydia Brodehl back in central California. Bert opened a butcher shop next to a slaughterhouse. Mildred worked in a café. The situation had the makings of a stable and lasting situation. Bert Siljan, though he was a drinker as his father had been, was a steady breadwinner type and is recalled as being a positive influence on Mildred. However, she couldn’t resist skimming from the butcher-shop cash register whenever she needed funds -- not a formula that allows a business to thrive. Then she began having an affair with Eugene L. Atkins, a logger she had met at the café. Not surprisingly, this ended her marriage to Bert. The divorce became final in the spring of 1957. Bert would go on to remarry in the mid-1960s. He spent most of the rest of his life in Klamath Falls, OR. He eventually shifted from being a butcher to selling mutual funds and insurance. His second marriage lasted nearly forty years, brought to an end only by his death. He passed away 26 October 2003 in Klamath Falls.

(Shown at left is Bert Siljan with his two girls in the 1950s around the time of the divorce.)

Eugene Lausen Atkins, a son of Leslie Victor Atkins and Jane J. Colburn, had been born 7 December 1924 in Butte County, CA in or near Chico. Known as Gene, he had grown up in a logging and sawmill milieu and while with Mildred, the household tended to remain in areas of California where Gene could find jobs he was familiar with. Mildred had never been a person to stay in one place. Over the course of her adult existence she lived in Stockton, Lake Tahoe, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Diego, Chico, Paradise, Crescent City, and Redding, and various foothill communities of El Dorado County, such as Camino, near Pollock Pines, as well as in Nevada in Sparks and Reno. Being with Gene only heightened her transient lifestyle. They left extreme northern California in the mid-1950s and came to Stockton. From there they went to Nevada, then to El Dorado County.

Gene was -- technically speaking -- the longest-term of Mildred’s husbands, in that they did not formally divorce until 1973. The comparative longevity of the union was not necessarily positive. Gene was a pedophile. He was the last sort of person to be allowed unsupervised access to a pair of underage step-daughters. The older of the Siljan girls ran away from home at age fourteen, seeking the shelter of one of her half-sisters, who was by then married and raising her own family. Later the runaway spent her high school years in Oregon with an uncle and aunt, the aunt being one of Bert Siljan’s half-sisters -- the teenager was not about to return home to Gene’s clutches. Afterward Gene was looked upon with “good riddance” sentiment by Mildred’s family members. He passed away 8 January 1996 in Placerville.

By the time Mildred split up with Gene, she had finally ceased bouncing around California, and would remain in El Dorado County, mostly in Camino, for the last couple decades of her life. Incredible as it may be, Mildred managed to be licensed as a foster mother with the El Dorado County Probation Department. This job was a key source of income for her during the final seventeen years of her working life. Disturbing as it is that she even managed to pass the screening needed to get the license, she approached her job with a “last chance to do it right” attitude, and went on to be remembered as a good foster mother by a number of the individuals she cared for.

Mildred’s health was far from good during the last thirty years of her life. A case of rheumatic fever in the 1950s weakened her heart and ultimately resulted in more than one heart surgery. Later she developed diabetes. She had become a chainsmoker in her adolescence and continued this habit far too long. As the wear and tear piled on and her circulatory system grew more and more impaired, she sank into dementia -- perhaps Alzheimer’s Disease, perhaps simply a case of not enough oxygen reaching her brain. Perhaps both. She had, despite her questionable judgment and manipulative nature, been an intelligent and articulate person, and in spite of her other domestic failings, had always been a good cook. Now even these things slipped away from her.

During her final year or so of her life, Mildred was admitted to Pines Convalescence in Placerville, an arrangement arrived at through the involvement of her brother Daniel. She died at that care facility 1 December 1991.

Children of Mildred Elaine Corkins

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