Origins

My great grandmother stands taller in the photograph taken in England in 1887. The one taken in 1890 in Tarrytown, New York, where she, her husband, and nine children settled that year shows a certain set to her jaw that contrasts with the fluid and elegant carriage of the earlier photo. It looks as if much has happened between the pictures.

Indeed, the epidemic of Spanish Flu, that cut across America in 1888, cost the family dearly. Diminished by two, the Banham family returned to England, where my grandmother was born, only to return to the new country a few years later. My great grandfather found work in upstate New York as a stone mason building Croton Dam near the Hudson River, and many houses in and around Sleepy Hollow. The home he built for his family is now part of the Rockefeller Estate.

To see the outside of it in 1975, on a trip to New York with my husband, even from behind a fence, gave me comfort and a gestalt of wonder mixed with bone marrow tingling perspective. My great grandfather built a home that is still standing, still being loved and lived in. Solid stone bones linking me to them across the decades and generations. I only wish I could have touched it with my hands, breathed the air near it, maybe listened for ghostly laughter, sobs, and family conversations of old.

I never met my great grandparents Mary Banham, nor Charles, but their youngest child and I became fast companions.  I was blessed to spend many hours, days, weeks, and years with my Grammy and Gramps. 

Florence and Lawrence met on a train in New Rochelle, NY. He had seen her standing on the platform along side her sister Mary Polly and Polly’s eight year old son. Lawrence turned to his traveling companion and quietly said, “That’s the woman I’m going to marry.” He was 21 at the time. She was sixteen and had miles of auburn hair piled high on her head. She was slender waisted, and had a dignified bearing. His friend raised his eyebrows, nodded, and smiled.

On the train, each sought out his or her assigned berth. When Mary Polly saw hers, she burst into tears. It was an upper. She didn’t think she could manage it, weighing over 300 pounds at the time. And she was meant to share the space with her son. 

My grandfather saw his chance. “Excuse me, please, I much prefer the upper, and unfortunately, I’ve been assigned this lower. Is either of you charming ladies willing to trade with me?” My Grammy Florence told me shyly once that she fell in love with him right there on the spot where his gallant gesture turned the situation merry.

Over the course of several days, on their trip across the country, Lawrence and Florence, or Ross and Floss as they would come to be known to close friends and family, got to know one another. When they finally disembarked the train, Florence went with her sister and nephew to West Los Angeles, while Lawrence and his friend went eastward to Pasadena. I don’t know how they stayed in contact. Certainly no cell phones in 1910 and very few telephones of any kind. Somehow, they did manage it, and were married in 1914. My mother was born in 1919 in Cleveland, Ohio. My ancestors got around all right!

Lawrence Gustave Stern was born in Marine City, Michigan, the youngest of eleven children. His father had lied about his age and enlisted in the Union Army in 1862, when he was fifteen. After the Civil War…or was it uncivil? Alexander returned to Michigan where he and his wife Zueleh opened a general store near the banks of the Saint Clair River. Gramps spoke fondly of being able to build things from scraps of wood when he wasn’t working in the family shop. And of skating in winter down a creek.

Lawrence began working in aircraft in 1910. Starting out with Glen L. Martin in Seattle, he helped build the Hanley Paige, a war plane, which had to be disassembled to be moved into Madison Square Gardens in NY, and reassembled once inside to show it off. The year was 1912, just two months before the Titanic set out on her maiden and only voyage. Gramps retired from McDonnell Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica in 1962. My mother designed and built a patio cover with her dad for the house I grew up in. Three to five feet across, each geometric shape was made of left over nose-cone sheeting - somewhat the texture of fiberglass - which Gramps had on hand. They strung them together with wire and turn buckles. It made a wonderful shade cover. Very modern.

I think of the changes my grandfather saw in the world of aircraft. From seven years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, to supporting the cause of people walking on the moon. Both my grandparents saw and experienced so much during the seventy-seven years of their marriage. Including the great depression which took their chicken ranch in San Bernardino and forced my granddad to re-enter the world of flying machines. 

Among the artifacts of their life, which my uncle has somewhere in a meticulously assembled album, is a typewritten letter from Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, of New York dated third of January, 1915.

“Dear Mr. Stern, Regarding your inquiry to purchase a policy, we must decline. We understand that your job has to do with airplanes. We cannot insure your life knowing you may go up in one of those machines.” 

I’m forever grateful to my maternal grandparents for teaching me thrift, proper use of tools, and for showering me with unconditional love. I hope I may be able to impart to my granddaughter some of the unconditional love and regard that I received from Ross and Floss.