Willa Roberta Warner

Willa Roberta Warner, second of the three children of Walter Clare Warner and Margaret Jane Bell, was born 5 February 1912 in Fresno County, CA. Her birth probably occurred in the town of Sanger, but it could be the family did not move to Sanger until she was one or two years old. Her father and her uncle Charles Elias Warner were operating a fruitstand and grocery store in the city of Fresno in 1912. The endeavor was called Warner Brothers and was located at 422 Railroad Avenue. This was a business address and it is not clear whether Walter and Margaret Warner lived nearby or if he commuted into work each day from Sanger.

The grocery business ceased operation in either 1912 or 1913. Walter Warner became a carpenter and the household was established in Sanger, assuming the family had not already moved there in late 1910. Sanger was fast becoming the main base of the Warner clan as a whole. Willa would know Sanger as the place where she went to elementary school, though she perhaps attended first grade in the foothill community of Tollhouse. Her father had a job at a sawmill in Pineridge, higher up in the mountains, but there were not many dwellings suitable for a young family at Pineridge, so her mother kept house down at Tollhouse within reach of schools and civilization in general. This job ended in late 1918 or in 1919 and Walter and Margaret came back to Sanger.

Willa’s elder brother Clare suffered from tuberculosis from an early age and died when Willa was only a year and a half old. She would have no memory of him when she was an adult. Therefore the only sibling she ever really knew was her younger brother Charles Alfred Warner, known as Alfred and as Buster. He was four years younger than Willa.

During the first half of the 1920s, if not earlier, Willa and her family lived just three doors away from the residence of Willa’s aunt Cora Belle Warner Spece and her family. Belle and Alie Spece would continue to be nurturant figures in the lives of Willa and Buster. This family-togetherness period ended in the mid-1920s, though. Willa may or may not have had the chance to graduate from the eighth grade while still in Sanger. The Speces resumed farming in the southern part of Fresno County. Willa and her parents and brother moved to Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz County, CA. Here Willa went to high school. One of her classmates was Leslie Earl Chase, son of Chandler C. Chase and Eda M. Jurich. Leslie was a local kid, having been born in Santa Cruz 2 March 1910. His father was an undertaker, well known in the community.

Willa and Leslie were wed 17 January 1930 in Fresno where the majority of the relatives could more easily attend the event. Home base was still Santa Cruz, though, and that is where the young couple settled, at first boarding with his parents. They would go on to have two children, a daughter and then a son, both born during the first half of the 1930s. During that period Leslie was employed by his father at the funeral parlor, but given that his eldest brother Wilber had dibs on taking over the family businessm, Leslie may have worked there simply because it was so hard to find any kind of job during the Great Depression. Later in the 1930s and into the 1940s he was a farmer, a butcher, and a carpenter. In the late 1940s he personally built himself and Willa a new house at 1925 Encina Drive in the Santa Cruz borough of Live Oak. When Buster Warner was debilitated by tuberculosis earlier in the 1940s, Leslie went down to Buster’s home in San Bernardino and added an extra bathroom in the master bedroom so that the invalid’s needs could be more easily accommodated.

Shown here are Warner family members at the farm of Belle and Alie Spece in late 1932 or early 1933 near the small communities of Del Rey and Fowler in southern Fresno County. The property may have been the same parcel that Willa’s parents lived upon in 1909 and 1910. It was subsequently the home of her grandparents John and Nellie Warner, and would have been where they were living at the time Willa was born. Later it became the Spece farm. The adults in this view are, left to right, Charles Elias Warner, Cora Belle Warner Spece, Alfonso James Spece, Walter Clare Warner, Willa Roberta Warner Chase, and Charles Alfred “Buster” Warner. The baby in Willa’s arms is her daughter. The toddler petting the dog is Belle and Alie’s granddaughter Joyce Carter.

Willa’s parents moved back to Fresno for a while, as did her brother Buster. Willa, however, remained loyal to Santa Cruz until her old age. The choice did not leave her entirely isolated from kinfolk. She had the company of her aunt Elizabeth Bell Osgood Nouque and her Osgood first cousins. Also, many Warner-clan family members loved to spend vacation time in Santa Cruz. Belle and Alie Spece resided there from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s. However, steady as was Willa and Leslie’s affection for the area, they did change residences more than once. Their addresses included 237 38th Avenue in the 1930s and 216 Clinton Street in the 1940s before they settled into the long-term home at 1925 Encina Drive.

In the late 1930s, Willa opened Chase’s Flower Shop, probably inspired by her first cousin Beryl Spece Carter’s successful business back in Sanger. It isn’t clear how long this enterprise lasted. Leslie went on to become a clerk, then in 1949 or 1950 became a maintenance engineer at Sisters Hospital. (At left, Willa and Leslie are shown during a 1950s visit to her aunt Belle Warner Spece and first cousin Erma Spece Johnston at their home in Sanger.)

Leslie passed away 13 December 1966 of what his funeral notice describes as a “brief illness.” He had survived long enough to see seven of his ten grandchildren born, but he was not yet fifty-seven years old, so all-in-all it was an early death. With both children grown, Willa did not keep the home at 1925 Encina Drive. By no later than 1970, she moved westward to the core part of Santa Cruz.

Willa was young to be a widow -- only in her mid-fifties when Leslie died. It was only natural she leave open the possibility of an additional marriage, and in due course, that development occurred. The precise timing has yet to be determined, but it was probably in the 1970s, and probably in the early portion of the decade. Her new husband was Colonel Frank Gordon Ketcham.

Frank was a son of John M. Ketcham and Mary Wolfe. The latter couple had married just before the turn of the century. Frank was their first child, born 27 May 1900 in West Chicago, Dupage County, IL. A second child, Margaret, soon followed, but then John M. Ketcham, a railroad employee, perished in early 1903, when little Frank was only two-and-a-half years old. His mother soon married Charles William Geyer. Also a railroad worker, Charles and his employment situation brought the family to Kenosha, Kenosha County, WI, where they remained into the 1920s, a span covering the remainder of Frank’s childhood. Frank graduated from Kenosha High School in the summer of 1918, a few months before the last of his three half-brothers was born. Those three brothers were Harold, Willard, and Frederick Geyer.

Frank enlisted in the U.S. Marines in 1920. He served five years, stationed in Virginia and then in Washington, DC. Having grown accustomed to living in the latter place, he remained there as a civilian, becoming a a draftsman for National Aeronautics. Not long after leaving the military, he wed Carrye E. Smallwood, eight years his senior, daughter of Isaac and Mary J. Smallwood. He and Carrye resided in Washington with her parents for a few years, then established a home of their own in Arlington, VA some time after the death of Isaac Smallwood in 1930. The marriage was childless.

Frank became an engineer for Studebaker Automobile Company. This took him through the Great Depression. Then, having no children to fret over, he went back into uniform, enlisting 9 October 1940, this time in the U.S. Army rather than the Marines. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he went to Camp Maxey, TX, and after training there, was deployed into the European theater as commander of the 270th Quartermaster Battalion, serving in that role through the Allied counter-invasions of North Africa, Italy, and southern France. He was sent back to the U.S. in 1944, perhaps on a compassionate transfer due to Carrye’s health -- she died that year. Once the war was over, Frank chose to continue his career, beginning with a three-year assignment in Augsburg, Bavaria with the Quartermaster of the Army of Occupation.

Frank was swept up in the Korean War as well. He was assistant to the commanding officer, and then was commanding officer himself, of the 23rd Quartermaster Group. Injured in Korea in 1954, he was sent back to the U.S. to recuperate. He spent much of that time in Santa Cruz, and realized that it would be a good place to which to retire. Accordingly, he did so in 1958, after serving three years as Port Quartermaster in Oakland, Alameda County, CA. He retired with the rank of full colonel.

Despite being from Wisconsin and having spent so much time on the East Coast, it was perhaps inevitable that Frank would retire somewhere in California, because after he had left home as a young man, his mother and stepfather had moved to Roseville, Placer County, CA. That said, he was well pleased with his situation in Santa Cruz. He had a place outside of town, north on Highway 17, where he raised Keeshonden dogs. He was extremely active in lodge activities and other social doings, and this would appear to be how he made the acquaintaince of the widow Mrs. Chase.

Frank was over a decade senior to Willa. This was the reverse of his first marriage -- in fact, Willa was born almost precisely twenty years after Carrye Smallwood. Given the age difference between Willa and Frank, it was not surprising Willa eventually became a widow again. Frank died 30 May 1987 in Santa Cruz. Willa spent her twilight years in Sacramento, where she was able to be with her daughter. She finally expired in that city 6 November 2003.

Descendants of Willa Roberta Warner with Leslie Earl Chase

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