Robert Seafield McDonald

Robert Seafield McDonald, son of Mary Josephine Harrington and Charles Sweden McDonald, was born 3 November 1898 in Visalia, Tulare County, CA. He was often known as Bob and will be called that for the rest of this biography. Bob’s place of birth is something of an oddity in his life story because he is not otherwise associated with Visalia. His mother had been born and raised in Merced, Merced County, CA, and if any place could be called home in 1898, it was that community. For example, Merced was the locale of Bob’s baptism 12 March 1899 at the Church of Our Lady of Mercy. But Charles S. McDonald was a supervivor and civil engineer for Southern Pacific Railroad, and his job required him to spend intervals at various sites up and down the Great Central Valley of California. When possible, Josephine travelled with him, and continued to do so even after -- or perhaps especially after -- becoming a mother.

Bob has the distinction of being the first great-grandchild of John Sevier Branson and Martha Jane Ousley to come into the world, and the only one born before the close of the 1800s. (By contrast, the last great-grandchild was not born until 1965.) He was the namesake of his paternal grandfather. He had two younger siblings -- Ruth, who perished in infancy, and Elton (Charles Elton McDonald).

His father’s continuing career took the family farther south from Tulare County into Kern County when Bob was still extremely young. A photograph exists of Charles S. McDonald outside a tent pitched in the sagebrush flatlands of the county near the spot where the small community of Gosford now lies. This tent may even have served as the family abode, though in general Josephine and her offspring stayed in traditional housing if the option existed. Sometimes they could not all be together, and Charles would get by camping on his own or sharing railway company barracks with members of his crew. Bob shared a strong bond with his father, but it is probably fair to say he had an appreciation for the times they spent together because it was not always a day-to-day experience.

Ruth McDonald died at the age of six months in mid-1901 during the Kern County sojourn. For that reason among others the family was glad to say good-by to the southern end of the valley, to which they would never return. In about 1903, Charles S. McDonald became a key part of Western Pacific Railroad, the upstart competitor of his monolithic previous employer, and for years to come most of his work locales lay somewhere along the route from WP’s hub in Oakland, Alameda County, CA to Sacramento. The family to settled into more stable domestic circumstances in Stockton, San Joaquin County, CA, arriving there no later than 1906 and departing no earlier than 1910. For most of those years, the McDonald residence was at 16 N. Union Street. At at least two junctures, the household included others beyond the nuclear family. Inez Branson, a first cousin of Josephine, lodged at 16 Union while getting a teaching credential at Stockton Normal School in 1907. A few years later the McDonalds took in Clarence Johnson, another of Josephine’s first cousins, along with Clarence’s wife Lillian and their young daughter. (At right during the Stockton years, Bob poses for a formal studio portrait with his younger brother Elton.)

How far into the 1910s the McDonalds stayed in Stockton is not clear. Within a few years at most they became established in Oakland. Bob’s earliest photo album survives, and in it are three pictures of freshman orientation -- presumably his freshman orientation -- at Oakland Polytechnic High School in 1914. Before getting to Oakland, the family may have spent an interval in the Salt Lake City area. A photo survives of Bob, Elton, and their father in Corinne, UT in the early 1910s, and another image shows the Corinne depot. Salt Lake City was become the other end of what was to become Western Pacific Railroad's “claim to fame” segment which, when completed, allowed the company to capture a significant chunk of the long-distance freight-hauling business that had made Southern Pacific and Union Pacific so obscenely profitable for so long.

The East Bay would be a long-term home for Bob, and was where he and his little brother Elton (born in 1903) finished coming of age. Once Bob was done with high school, a career path immediately opened up for him. In 1917 to 1918, Western Pacific achieved its destiny by completing the route through the Feather River Canyon in the northern Sierra Nevada Mountains. Charles was a head civil engineer on the project. Bob was a member of the construction crew. Later in life he told his own son tales of being called upon to be the mail dispenser, doctor, payroll clerk, cook’s assistant, and all-around errand boy. Many of the images in his aforementioned photo album show him at the Feather River Canyon work camps, and/or show some of his co-workers (Clarence Johnson being one of them).

In the late 1910s in Oakland, Bob continued to live with his parents. He also continued to take jobs with Western Pacific, but not without being lured away temporarily in order to take advantage of the job opportunities being created as a result of World War I. His draft registration card, filed 12 September 1918, describes him as a chart clerk working for Alberthaw Construction Company at the Liberty Shipyards in Alameda. His photo albums show work gangs on the ships, identifying friends of his such as Charles Edward Bourne. Among the other photos in the album are ones that variously feature a pair of young women (though never both of them in the same image). One was Charles Bourne’s sweetheart and eventual wife Hortense Winters. Another was the object of Bob’s affection, Vera Douglas. Dates on the prints make it clear Vera was an item in Bob’s life by 1918 at the latest.

Bob is at the right in this group of colleagues, taken in 1918 outside their workplace, the Western Pacific yard office in Oakland. Chris Jacob Feik (1878-1961) is on the left. Francisco Asprer (1891-1947) is in the center. Though only nineteen years old, Bob’s severe haircut makes the stubble above his ears look white, giving him an older aspect. In other photos taken in his late teens, he tends to look like a man in his thirties or even forties; the Feather River construction workers called him Uncle Bob. In the photo shown here, he looks somewhat slender, more so than in any other photo of him. He may have been on a diet. Bob inherited his father’s propensity for stoutness, and even in photos taken at younger ages, such as those taken at the Feather River Canyon work sites, he displays a large, low belly. Note the cigar in his right hand; smoking them was a regular habit.

In the summer of 1919, Charles and Josephine McDonald acquired a good house at 1442 Morton Street in the town of Alameda. Bob was still a member of the household, as he prepared to marry Vera. In fact, in the 1 January 1920 Federal Census, Vera is shown as already a member of the household, even though the wedding had not yet occurred. That census describes Bob as as a weigher at a public scale.

1920 was a watershed year for Bob. His father passed away in late February. Bob was just about to marry Vera. In fact, it is possible the death caused a postponement of the original wedding date to allow a respectful period of mourning. The couple became husband and wife 18 May 1920 in Oakland, Presbyterian minister F.M. Silsley presiding. Given the sudden double change in the status quo, Josephine decided to dedicate the newly-bought Morton Street house to Bob and Vera to use as their home. Officially speaking Josephine did live there for the next four years, but she was often gone on visits to her sisters and her mother in Manteca. When she wed Daniel Baysinger in 1924, he did not move in with her. Instead they found a place of their own in Palo Alto, Santa Clara County, CA. Elton McDonald also spent time living at 1442 Morton Street during the first half of the 1920s, but he was gone for at least a year in the early 1920s to Elko NV. So to all intents and purposes Bob and Vera were the king and queen of their castle from the moment their union began, perfectly set to begin a long, secure life together. (Shown below right in the late 1920s are the two McDonald boys and their wives. On the left are Elton and his wife Tonia Utkin McDonald. On the right are Bob and Vera.)

Things did not go as planned. Vera would ultimately vanish from Bob’s life so completely she became something of a mystery figure. Her origins were not recalled at all. One reason for this is that Vera was an orphan at a young age and so Bob and his family members never had the chance to know her family. It is only thanks to public documents that her background has been brought to light. Vera was the daughter of John Douglas (aka Douglass) and Katherine E. (Katie) Dobbins, both born in Kansas. John and Katie married in 1898 in Santa Cruz County and settled on a farm near Watsonville, where Vera (middle initial “K,” which probably means that her middle name was Katherine after her mother) was born in September of that year. The 1900 census shows Vera and her parents on that farm, along with a teenaged cousin, Robert Share. That census is the last indication of John and Katie’s continued survival. They apparently died quite early in the 1900s. Vera ended up in foster care. (Judging by public records, by 1900 she had no surviving grandparents or uncles and aunts, either.) Vera appears as an eleven-year-old in the 1910 census in San Jose, CA in the home of sixty-nine-year-old David H. Howes and his thirty-three-year-old wife Mattie. Vera’s status is given as “boarder” and her parents’ birthplaces are “unknown.” (The information was not literally unknown, though. On the 1920 marriage license application, Vera correctly filled in the names and birthplaces of both parents. It’s not clear whether she could remember either of them, but at least she knew who they were.) Whether Vera had other foster parents than the Howeses is not known. Vera graduated from Durant School in Oakland in 1913 -- clearly it was her presence in the 1910s in the Oakland/Alameda area that resulted in her meeting Bob.

The reason Vera vanished from Bob’s life also became a kind of mystery. It was of course known to the family members who were involved, but afterward they did not readily discuss the matter with the younger generations or with anyone who hadn’t “been there at the time.” Josephine put it so far out of her memory that when asked for genealogical information by her cousin Maude Branson Chamberlin in the early 1940s, she indicated Vera had died in 1928. That is not correct. Vera is listed in the 1930 census as an inmate in Agnews State Hospital for the Insane in Santa Clara County. She did not die until the ninth of November of that year.

Bob and Vera’s marriage seems to have lasted until her death, but her institutionalization did not allow for a normal domestic existence. In 1930, Bob’s own census entry shows him manning the fort back in the Alameda house, having taken in a friend and co-worker, Harold Sutter, as a housemate. Harold worked in the same office as Bob as a freight inspector and would remain a friend lifelong. He and his wife and Bob and his second wife often spent social occasions together.

Just when Vera’s psychological troubles became severe is not known, except that she appears with family members in photographs that appear to date from the late 1920s, and she registered to vote at the Morton Street residence for the 1928 election. Perhaps the 1928 reference in Josephine’s list was the year Vera stopped living with Bob. It could be she had been disturbed for many years prior, which perhaps helps account for the lack of children born to the couple. Or on the other hand, her emotional stability might have been compromised in part due to the lack of children. As the only survivor of her family, Vera may have had a huge emotional investment in reproducing, and her (apparent) barrenness would therefore have been quite a blow. True clarity will probably never be possible. Those who might have known the real story kept quiet. For example, Bob’s son did not get firm confirmation that Bob had been married more than once until he was nearly thirty years old -- well after Bob’s death -- though he had suspected for some time due to finding a photo of Vera during his childhood.

As a widower, Bob began a romance with a nurse who had just moved to the Bay Area from Kansas. She was Loretta Marie Verschelden, daughter of Alphonse Verschelden of Belgium and Annie J. Meyer of Missouri. Her baptismal name was Mary Loretta Vershelden, and she had been born 1 Jul 1906 in St. Mary’s, Pottawatomie County, KS. Bob and Loretta were wed 29 March 1932 at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in St. Mary’s. The honeymoon trip ranged all across the United States, the arrangements no doubt smoothed out by Bob’s perquisites as a railroad man. The long absence from Alameda allowed Josephine to have the Morton Street residence converted from gas lights to electricity as a wedding present. (At that point, Josephine was still the deed holder of the property.)

Bob and Loretta became the parents of three children, born from the early 1930s to the early 1940s. They spent the whole of their life together based at the Morton Street house. “Based at” is meant literally. Though he had usually had close-to-home employment situations while with Western Pacific, he ultimately worked for other railroad companies, and sometimes his assignments kept him moving about. When those stints covered stretches measured in months, he sometimes arranged for Loretta and the kids to join him in temporary quarters outside the Bay Area. Family members recall the places included Sonoma County and various spots in the Central Valley. Over the course of his career -- incorporating the period he was married to Vera -- Bob personally roamed at least eight Western states, especially while employed as a freight agent for Erie Lackawanna Railroad.

Bob was a much-admired figure within his close family and among his associates -- likeable, steadfast, and responsible. He enjoyed social activities and was a member of the local Elk Lodge. On the negative side, his health became troubled far short of old age. Much of this unwelcome ordeal was the result of a family curse that flowed from his great-grandfather, Sweden McDonald. Bob had inherited the gene for hereditary haemochromatosis. The disease had shortened the lives of Sweden McDonald, all of his sons, and all but one of his grandsons. It accounted for the early death of Bob’s father. The presence of the gene interferes with the normal metabolizing of iron, leading to “iron overload,” which in turn can cause a host of negative health effects. Bob was long a victim of a couple of the most common symptoms -- severe weight gain and diabetes. As he reached middle age, it was almost inevitable he develop further and more severe conditions. The stroke he suffered in 1952 is extremely likely to have been prompted by the degenerative effect of the disease, and/or a consequence of his body’s long struggle to cope with the stress. He went on to develop bladder cancer.

As 1955 arrived, Bob probably sensed he was not long for this world, not when he knew from family history what was in store. That year was hard on the McDonald clan. Not only was he ailing, but his mother developed colon cancer and passed away early in the summer. By then Bob was in very bad shape. However, because Loretta was a nurse, he was able to remain at home until his final breath. His aunt Nina Harrington Riddell came up from Santa Cruz to cook and generally take some of the load off the immediate family members. Bob succumbed the morning of 20 September 1955. While the cancer was the underlying cause, the death itself was attributed to heart failure -- yet another common development seen among carriers of the hereditary haemochromatosis gene.

Loretta never married again -- though as she was quick to point out, not from lack of offers. There was simply no replacing Bob. She passed away 16 February 1990 in Alameda.

This photo dates from 1928. It was taken outside the Palo Alto residence of Josephine Harrington McDonald Baysinger and her husband Daniel, and it was undoubtedly Josephine who handled the camera. From left to right behind the bench are: Robert Seafield McDonald holding his baby niece, Charles Elton McDonald, and Daniel Webster Baysinger. Seated from left to right are Vera Douglas McDonald, Bob’s grandmother Nancy Anne Branson Harrington Napier, and Tonia Utkin McDonald.

Children of Robert Seafield McDonald with Loretta Marie Verschelden

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