As I mentioned in Chapter 1, one or the other of my grandmothers lived with us during most of my childhood, because they had lost their husbands and our home seemed to be the most convenient for various reasons.

Grandma DeWolf was a tiny woman who had borne eleven children. The first died very early, but the other ten grew to adulthood, and most of them lived around the Bay while I was growing up. A family saying described them as "five boys and five girls, five tow heads and five red heads, five born in San Francisco and five born in Oakland".

Grandfather William Morrison DeWolf was born in Lansing burgh, near Troy, N. Y. on Aug. 24, 1848. In a letter to Rev. Galbraith Perry, the author of a book on the DeWolf family, he mentioned that he had left his family home when he was a boy and thus had been more concerned with providing a roof for his own family than for tracing his family tree.

I don't know how he had met Mary Elizabeth McClure, but they were married in Missouri in 1873, and they came to California on the transcontinental train, which was fairly new then of course. They settled in San Francisco, where he became an office clerk for Charles Singer Capp, a prominent insurance and real estate broker. He admired his employer so much, he named his first son Charles Capp DeWolf, and when he was developing the Fruitvale district in Oakland later, he named one of the streets Capp St. The Capp street in San Francisco was named for C. S. Capp also.

Grandfather DeWolf became a real estate and insurance broker with Monroe Greenwood, selling lots in the Richmond district of San Francisco. Later he established the DeWolf Realty Co. and represented the Fireman's Fund Insurance Co.

However, as the family saying quoted above indicated, the family had moved to Oakland during my father's childhood, and settled in the Fruitvale district which was then on the outskirts of the city. Like most people, they had horses as part of the household menage, not stabled elsewhere, and my father enjoyed telling stories about handling and caring for these horses. Unfortunately, I didn't pay enough attention to the details to be able to preserve the stories.

Later Grandpa and Grandma DeWolf (and perhaps the youngest children) must have moved back to San Francisco, because they were living on 19th Ave. when the 1906 earthquake struck.

My father was living in a boarding house on the Berkeley campus at the time. He often told the story that when the first tremors of the earthquake struck shortly after 5 a.m., the landlady was heard to say as she came up the stairs, "Oh, those boys again!", assuming they were responsible for the shaking. As an officer in the student ROTC, my father was also an officer in the National Guard. He was sent with his unit to San Francisco as part of the rescue and salvage work. When he was able to get off duty, he managed to get through the lines and the destruction to find that his parents and their home had survived.

My mother also served as a volunteer nurse, helping victims of the earthquake and fire. Many hundreds of people "camped out" in Golden Gate Park until they were able to get into homes again. At the time, my parents were acquainted, but their relationship was not "serious" enough to affect their separate efforts in handling the earthquake crisis.

Most insurance companies were unprepared to meet their obligations when this disaster struck the city, and policy holders got little or nothing in settlement. But the company my grandfather represented, Fireman's Fund, managed somehow to pay claims in full. This greatly enhanced the company's reputation.

My parents had been married for three years when my grandfather died. I had the impression for years that Grandfather DeWolf had died while he was still a fairly young man, but his obituary reports that he was 68. Perhaps my impression was due to the fact that his youngest son, Ben, was still single and unsettled, and that my grandfather had not delegated responsibility for handling his business, so that the task of taking over the work was difficult.

My father took over the business as the oldest son, and did his best to straighten things out (according to his report, anyhow). But he was an engineer and did not want to be a business man, so he turned over the company to his younger brother William Waldo (who always went by his middle name). Waldo carried on the business for many years until he retired. His partner continued to use the DeWolf Realty name, which would indicate that it had a good reputation.

I am finding it awkward to keep referring to "my father", but I feel equally awkward, even after all these years, to refer to my father as Charles. This was the name my mother always used in speaking to him as well as speaking about him. Casual acquaintances sometimes called him Charley, but my mother never did. A few of his close boyhood friends called him Pete, for reasons I cannot recall now, but otherwise he went by his official name rather than by any nicknames. As I think of him, the name "Daddy" rather than "Dad" comes to mind.

I suppose if he had lived longer, I would have quit using that childish name for him. But I can't imagine calling him by his first name, as our adult children sometimes do with us now, and as some of our grandchildren do in addressing theirparents.

Our children do this as a compliment to our adult to adult relationship rather than to minimize the parent child relationship. But I never felt that sort of intimacy with my father, although I realize now that he was a very warm and affectionate person who probably felt as frustrated sometimes as I did in trying to achieve a greater intimacy.

When I wrote the first draft of this chapter, I knew nothing about my mother's family heritage except what her mother had written in a booklet we had printed several years ago with the title of "A Family Chronicle". In it Grandma McCabe traced her colorful ancestry, birth and growth. But the only mention of her husband was a sentence reporting that she had married him.

Thus it was particularly delightful to discover the manu script which became "County Cavan to California" which revealed the remarkable McCabe side of my family heritage.

It also revealed in very brief and somewhat indirection fashion why I was told so little about that side of my family, and why Grandma McCabe wrote so little about her husband and his family.

Her pride in her own family heritage, and her stubborn personal character, obviously led her to refuse to submit to what must have been a lot of pressure to conform to the McCabe patterns of religious and family life. The fact that she was living in our home during the part of my childhood when I might otherwise have been exposed to stories about the McCabes, may have kept my mother from sharing these with us. Mother told Carol more than once that she had grown up with so much tension in her home, she was determined to keep her own home free of such tension. That strategy resulted, whether she intended it or not, in depriving her children from knowing much about the McCabes.

It was impossible, though, for us to be unaware of tensions between my father and Grandma McCabe while she was living with us. She was not the type of person to hole up in her bedroom, or to keep her opinions to herself.

On rare occasions, my father would go down into the basement and come up to the kitchen with a gallon jug of red wine which he had gotten from his brother Jack's grocery store in San Francisco.

He would sit at the breakfast nook with this jug of wine (sometimes in his undershirt, which Grandma McCabe particularly abhorred), and indicate that he was prepared to drain the jug, or at least to make serious inroads into it. This would drive Grandma sputtering to her room. He would sit there awhile, with the jug unopened, until he was satisfied that he had scored a victory. Then he would return the jug to the basement. My impression is that the jug was still full when I had to clear out the basement after Daddy's death. Its purpose was strategic, not alcoholic.

I understood better the dynamics of the ritual involving the jug of wine when I learned from the McCabe manuscript that my McCabe grandparents met at a temperance rally in Vallejo. Obviously it was particularly abhorrent to Grandma McCabe that her son in law threatened to behave in this way. Actually, I do not remember seeing either of my parents use alcohol.

Grandpa McCabe is a shadowy figure in my memory. During the years when I might have gotten to know him well, he was ill. The last three years of his life were spent in a private mental hos pital in Oakland. Frank has clearer and very favorable memories of him, and others have pictured him as a very fine man. He was evidently the victim of the conflict between strong family loyalty and a very strong minded wife with contrary views on many subjects. He clearly sacrificed his own interests for the sake of his family, by taking comparatively menial jobs when the family moved to Berkeley for my mother's education. My second cousin Jean Foley Murray has also reported that Grandpa McCabe's sisters were concerned about his appearance later in life, and he explained that he would rather see his children prosper than to spend money on clothes for himself.

She also reported that his sisters paid for his care at the King's Daughters Home in his last years, rather than to have him go to the county hospital as Grandma McCabe would have done. A paragraph from Alice Geiger's manuscript tells a lot about tension between the two families:

"Mr. Ellis (Coe's father) was one of those unlucky individuals who always seemed to find the grass greener on the other side of the fence, and he had very positive ideas about what Ross and Coe should do. Coe had utmost confidence in her father's judgment, and insisted on following it. The moves were financially disastrous, and so unnecessary. It was a hard experience in its consequences for Ross and their children."