Wanda May Salmon

Wanda May Salmon, born 24 November 1907 near Manteca, San Joaquin County, CA, was the first child and only daughter born to Irene Anna Harrington and Claude Devere Salmon. She had one brother, Jack Wesley Salmon, born in 1910.

Wanda’s father’s job as a truck driver for Spreckels Sugar Company led to the household shifting just northwest of Stockton when Wanda was about twelve years old. It was there she must have met Charles William Patrie, a young man also working for Spreckels in the sugar beet fields. A son of well-driller George William Patry and Anna M. Piskula, Charles had been born 11 November 1905 in Kansas City, Wyandotte County, KS. In the 1910s, his mother had died. George had not remarried, and without a maternal figure in the mix, the family had endured considerable upheaval, with only Charles’s youngest brother Ira remaining full-time with his father. Obliged to quit school and get a job early, Charles must have lied about his age in order to be perceived as more mature than he was. The 1905 birthdate agrees with the 1910 and 1920 censuses, and more to the point, he does not appear with his family in the 1905 Kansas state census, a survey taken in the spring of that year. That is because he had not yet been born as of the spring of 1905. But thanks to his reportage, the 1903 birthdate made it into his death record. Wanda was apparently the informant, and she must have believed his story of being older. As a consequence of that death-record stat, genealogies that include him usually perpetuate the error, citing 1903 as his birth year. The same error was included in this website biography until August, 2009, when on-going research made the deception apparent. Another paper-trail wrinkle is that Charles changed his name from Patry to Patrie in the late 1920s. As far as can be determined, all other members of his family kept the Patry spelling.

Wanda and Charles were wed 29 November 1926, shortly after he turned twenty-one and just five days after she turned nineteen. The wedding took place in Stockton at the home of, and officiated by, the Reverend Reuben H. Sink. (Seven months later, Rev. Sink would officiate at the wedding of Wanda’s first cousin Norma Cowell to her beau Theron Hodson, with the rites held at the same locale. Rev. Sink had been the clergyman who officiated two decades earlier at the weddings of Wanda’s parents, and her aunts Nina and Elsie.) The decision to marry appears to have been abrupt. The 16 November 1926 issue of the Modesto News-Herald includes a paragraph in its Manteca section mentioning that Wanda had departed the day before for Children’s Hospital in San Francisco in order to enter training to become a nurse for crippled children. She must have instantly decided she was not meant to be a career woman. Just two short weeks after her departure, she was standing in front of witnesses taking her vows as a wife.

Wanda and Charles settled as newlyweds in Ripon, San Joaquin County, where Charles’s father and little brother Ira were residing. However, they remained no more than a year or so. By 1928 the young couple were residing in the unicorporated town of Riverbank, Yolo County, CA. For a little while this was also the dwelling place of Wanda’s parents, probably so that Wanda could help care for her father, who was beginning to suffer from chronic health problems. However, before long Claude and Irene moved on to Woodland, Yolo County, CA and later back to Manteca. This left Wanda and Charles with room for the arrival of a baby in 1931. Robert Lee Patrie was to be Wanda’s only biological child. In his early years, he was known among the family as Bobby Lee.

Wanda and Charles appear to have remained in the Sacramento River delta region throughout the marriage, though at some point they moved from Riverbank to Woodland, where Wanda’s brother Jack was living, having chosen to establish his home there with bride Daisy Catherine Lynn. Charles continued to work for Spreckels, mostly as a truck driver. The California Death Index shows that Charles William Patrie passed away 28 January 1949 in Yuba County, CA, the locale probably indicating he was hospitalized away from home or that he succumbed while out on the job.

Within months of Charles’s death, Robert Lee Patrie became a husband. Wanda was left to spend several years on her own before she wed Pastiel Lovell Hansel 14 November 1955 in Sacramento County. Pastiel (shown at right as a young man) had come to California from Kentucky, arriving some time between the mid-1940s and the early 1950s and in the process, closing the door on his past to such an extent his mother and siblings weren’t sure what had happened to him. The fact that he left a daughter and son behind may account for the sharpness of the transition. Prior to his move, his roots had been sunk deep in Rockcastle County, KY. Born 21 November 1914 on a farm near the town of Mt. Vernon, he was the eldest of the eight children of Chester Arthur Hansel and Bertha May Lovell.

Pastiel’s story was similar to that of Charles Patrie in that he had been cast into the work force early, in his case because his father had passed away in late 1930 of cancer of the larynx. Pastiel had therefore been obliged to be the man of the household at age sixteen, and in the midst of the Great Depression to boot. In 1936, at age twenty-one, Pastiel had married local girl Winona (aka Wenona) Ponder, daughter of Jake Ponder and Verna Bullock. The marriage had held together for a few years, resulting in the births of the daughter and son, the latter born in 1943, but eventually something happened. A major factor may have been Winona’s case of tuberculosis, from which she died in the autumn of 1946. The precise timing and degree of Pastiel’s abandonment is hard to reconstruct, but even if there were mitigating factors it is a black mark upon his character. It should be noted that he was a good partner to Wanda, and is warmly recalled by a surviving ex-wife of Wanda’s nephew Wesley Salmon.

Wanda herself is remembered by that same niece (in law) as warm and welcoming, and as someone who took a keen interest in family. It was a sorrow of her life that her son was the opposite -- and in fact was so poor at being a father that after the break-up of his marriage in the 1950s, his daughter was adopted by her stepfather, her name was changed, and she was raised as if she had always been the biological child of the man. Wanda’s sister-in-law Daisy Catherine Lynn Salmon commented (sometime not long before her death in 1973) that Wanda was given to waiting by the phone on her birthday for Bobby Lee to call, but was nearly always disappointed. Fortunately Wanda had the solace of Pastiel’s company. The pair would go on fishing trips together. One of his hobbies was making furniture in the garage of their home.

Pastiel died 10 August 1986 in Zamora, Yolo County, CA. By then, Wanda was in her late seventies. She chose not to remarry, and began the widow-in-retirement phase of her life, which went on for more than a decade. She passed away 24 November 1997 in Roseville, Placer County, CA. Her remains were placed at Woodland Cemetery with those of Pastiel Hansel.

Descendants of Wanda May Salmon with Charles William Patrie

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