By Michael Shannon

Part The Second

Graduation came in May of 1908. After four years of study, the death of her uncle Patrick Moore in 1905 and the following year the great San Francisco Earthquake, Nita walked onto the stage at the Greek theater, accepted her diploma from Benjamin Ide Wheele

Commencement week, a round of celebrations, fraternity and club open houses, receptions and Class Day concluded on Wednesday with graduation. Faculty, regents, honored guests and alumni met at North Hall and the Library.led the graduating class up to the Greek Theatre. Dressed in their finest, the boys in high starched collars, the girls in their finest formal gowns. Their chin high lace collars stitched with traceries done by hand with initials worked as was Nita’s. The silk and chiffon fabrics used for the long narrow skirt ended three or four inches above the waist line and was held by a belt of stiff Petersham Cotton tied with a large bow in the back. The girls wore their hair up in the style of the Gibson Girl. Rolled and fluffed held by pins exposing the neck, the style was considered the height of elegance for young women.

The Gibson Girl had an exaggerated S-curve torso shape achieved by wearing a swan-bill corset. Images of her epitomized the late 19th- and early 20th-century Western preoccupation with youthful features and ephemeral beauty. Her neck was thin and her hair piled high upon her head in the contemporary bouffant, pompadour, and chignon, the “waterfall of curls” fashion. The statuesque, narrow-waisted ideal feminine figure was portrayed as being at ease and stylish.

The illustrator Charle Dana Gibson is credited for popularizing the standard look of the girl. Many women posed for Gibson Girl-style illustrations, including Gibson’s wife, Irene Langhorne, who may have been the original model. Irene was a sister of Viscountess Nancy (Langhorne) Astor. Mrs Astor besides being the first female member of Britain’s parliament was equally famous for her sharp tongue and took great pleasure in skewering Winston Churchill with it on every possible occasion. During a dinner party she informed Churchill that, “If you were my husband I would poison you,” to which he replied, “If you did madam, I would take it”. He could give as good as he got.

The Langhorne girls were immensely rich and two bought husbands with titles, Viscount Lord Waldorf Astor son of the richest man in the world at the time and Robert, the first Baron Brand. Wealthy American girls who married poor but titled Englishmen were titled by the American press as the “Dollar Princesses.”

The most famous Gibson Girl was probably the American-British stage actress, Camille Clifford, whose high coiffure and long, elegant gowns that wrapped around her hourglass figure and tightly corseted wasp waist defined the style. Miss Clifford also made popular the oversize woman’s hat known at the “Merry Widow.”

Irene Langhorne Gibson. The Original Gibson Girl. Public Domain print.

In Gibson’s drawings there was no hint at pushing the boundaries of women’s roles; instead they often cemented the long-standing beliefs held by many from the old social orders, rarely depicting the Gibson Girl as taking part in any activity that could be seen as out of the ordinary for a woman.

Nita and her friends certainly were aware of these trendsetters as any young woman of today would be. Women’s magazines, films and books held them up as ideals and in the old family photos of her at this time of her life she epitomized the look. Popular culture was alive and well in 1908, even in tiny Arroyo Grande where she was from.

Nita always seemed to me a serious woman but once she explained to me why she had a thoroughly beat up plug hat hanging on the hatrack in her office. You see, it was the fancy of students who attended the University of California, Berkeley at the dawning of the twentieth century to wear them. Upperclassmen and women, of which my grandmother was one, wore the old beaten up hats as a fashion accessory, much as my father wore his beanie when he was a student at Cal in the 1930’s. They must have found them on trash heaps or second hand stores, useless to anyone but college students who delight in being contrarians. My grandmother and her friends would walk around campus, from the North Hall to the Bacon Library Hall, or gather at the Charter Oak, dressed in the style of 1908, wearing shirtwaists, high collars and long dresses over high button shoes. The stately look we imagine today as being their nature. It’s too easy to forget that they were twenty year old girls. Just as they are in college today, full of high spirits and dreams of a life yet to be lived.

Photo, Calisphere

Each senior draped in a blue university gown, the mortar board with its golden tassel swaying in time with the march as they made their way to their seats for the ceremony. The sound of sibilant silk and cotton dresses, the soft clack of shoes on pavement accompanied the students like an orchestra. In the gentle breeze coming up from the bay, the mingled scents of cologne and perfume heralded the coming of the graduates. Nita sat between Laurence Herbert Grant, his winged collar and cravat complete with stickpin marking him as a bit old fashioned. He would move up to Fort Bragg and join the clergy. He looks a serious young man with his earnest expression, his thick wavy hair ruffling in the breeze. On her other side, Sydney Baldwin Gray, She of the small round glasses. She has the competent straight forward look of a teacher which she went on to be. Next in line, Ruth Van Kampen Green, married right after graduation. Her husband worked for United Fruit as a packer and she ultimately bore him eight children and spent a good deal of her life in Mexico and Brazil. They followed the banana trade. Next to Ruth was Edith Montgomery Grey who became a third grade teacher at Oak Park primary school in Folsom California. She resigned in 1920 in order to marry. Expectations were such that women should not have a career other than be a homemaker. She died soon after childbirth in 1920

A large majority of the women became teachers. Superbly educated, graduates of Cal were a hot commodity. California was growing rapidly and desperately needed more educators. Just as today, they found their way to the Normal School, Santa Barbara College , todays UCSB where they took a course of study to prep for the state teachers qualifying exam. These women were not the one room schoolhouse teachers of popular fiction. The California State Teachers exam of 1910 was brutal and was the equal of modern teachers requirements. Just as today, it took a five year course of study to qualify for a credential.

The college of Social Sciences at Berkeley, Nita’s school, was the largest at Cal in 1908, numbering over one thousand students. A student was promised a first class education just as they are today. She was required to have taken Latin at Santa Maria High School though Cal did not insist on Greek for the College of Social Sciences. She had a wide choice of classes in humanistic studies. She could choose classes in the great field of literature, linguistics, history and economics. Geography and education were also requirements and from the list of women graduates it can be seen that the most likely career was education.

Her curriculum shatters the old saw about the schoolmarm and the one room schoolhouse. One of the orphan girls Nita was raised with who was also schooled by uncle Patrick Moore, Mamie Tyler took her degree at a school founded as a private institution, ‘Minns’ Evening Normal School founded in 1857. That school became a public institution by act of the State Legislature on May 2, 1862. In 1868 the board of trustees took up the matter of permanent location, and Washington Square in San Jose was chosen. Mamie graduated in 1900 and taught much of her career in a log cabin near Port Angeles, Washington State.

Martha “Mamie” Tyler Kolloch and her students at the log cabin school in the Olympic forest Washington State, 1921 Shannon Family Photo

The first in California was originally founded as a private institution, ‘Minns’ Evening Normal School,’ in 1857, the school became a public institution by act of the State Legislature on May 2, 1862. In 1868 the board of trustees took up the matter of permanent location, and Washington Square in San Jose was chosen. San Jose State Teachers College was born. The Normal Schools were changed to state colleges in 1935 which allowed them to offer degrees in subjects other than education. Those schools make up the majority of the original California State Colleges including UCLA, San Diego State, UCSB and San Jose.

Normal Schools derive their name from the French phrase ecole normale. These teacher-training institutions, the first of which was established in France by the Brothers of the Christian Schools in 1685, were intended to set a pattern, establish a “norm” after which all other schools would be modeled, a pattern which has remained in effect until the present day.

Wether Nita’s goal was to teach we don’t know but many of the girls sponsored by Patrick Moore did become teachers. Education was important to the Moore’s and Nita’s parents, the Grays. Her entire extended family was made up of Irish immigrants for which education was the most cherished goal. A goal still shared by immigrants from all over the world.

Nita’s parents, her siblings, and friends had arrived in Oakland by train from home and waited anxiously in the tiered seats around the Theatre where the folding chairs awaited the arrival of the dignitaries and expectant graduates.

Baccalaureate, also in the Greek had been on Sunday in which Bishop Nichols sermon had emphasized the opportunity for “Men” of character and worth to make their stamp on the great state of California. No mention of women in 1908.

Class day on Monday saw seniors meeting at Senior Oak. A speech by class president Hartley followed by the progression of “Plugs and Parasols” which wound through the campus where they halted for speeches by fellow classmates who spoke on subjects they were most interested. Hardly anyone listened of course. Excitement was building to a fever pitch. Tuesday afternoon they sat for the final Symphony Concert of the year. Finally the last senior assembly in Harmon Gymnasium on Tuesday evening. Parasols were folded and Nita and her roommates went home a tried to get some sleep. Wednesday would be an early start. Gowns to be pressed, hair done up, shoes polished and then the process of dressing, the girls helping each other, pushing pulling and primping making everything “Just so.”

Wednesday, the graduates to be met and organized themselves for the procession up to the Greek. Waiting for the ceremony to begin was almost more than they could stand. Nervous chatter rose above the crowd, the occasional group of boys hooped and hollered to let of steam but finally, lined up in proper order they stepped out to the sound of the University Band and began to walk.

At the Greek they filed into the rows of chairs, carefully arranged in alphabetical order. The murmur of the crowd was underplayed by the chairs creaking as the soon to be graduates took their seats. The rise and fall of low voices marked the expectant crowd. For many this ceremony would be one of the highlights of their lives.

After the always interminable speeches, after four years of University life, Nita rose and joined the parade up the steps onto the stage at the Greek Theatre and received her diploma from the hand of President Benjamin Wheeler himself. Then polite congratulations from Mrs Hearst and the other regents and with that her book of education closed.

The “S” curve is still the mode for women in 1908 and the cut of Nita’s clothes emphasize that. Shannon Family Photo

And here’s to the ‘Naught eight co-eds, Our prettiest, sweetest and best.

Whose eyes laugh back with our laughter, Whose hearts glow warm with our zest.

To the girls who were women at entrance, But who will be girls ’til they die.

A toast! For we know they are loyal.

A toast! With our glasses held high.

For a final deep pledge to our class, boys

O a fig would we care for fate!

In the same old way we would drink to our class,

In a toast to old “Naught-eight.

From the Blue and Gold Yearbook, University of California Berkeley class of 1908 by Sheldon Chaney, ’08

Coming next: Nita, the third. Senior trip to Yosemite Valley.

Please Like and Follow.

Many thanks to my researcher Shirley Bennet Gibson from another old time local family. Couldn’t do it without her.

Michael Shannon is a surfer, traveler, teacher and writer.

The first part.

By Michael Shannon

She was a woman of sturdy shoes when I knew her. I cannot remember her without her apron, a sensible utilitarian piece of apparel worn by women of the early twentieth century to protect their clothes, a leftover from the days when, if you weren’t wealthy enough to have a laundress, you washed and ironed your own garments.

My grandmother was 60 years old when I was born. By the time I was old enough to know her she was well into her seventies. We never, ever talked about her life. Like many people she must have though it wasn’t very interesting which is how it must have looked from inside her head. The only things she ever shared with me came when she was in her nineties. I would sit on her sofa, the one with the pink roses pattern and from the space where she had retreated at the end of her life she would, with enough prompting, dispense snippets of it.

How the hired girl got “Knocked Up,” how uncle Pat would have to spend the night in the barn when he came home three sheets to the wind after a night at Ryan’s bar with his friends Daniel Rice and Patrick Donovan. The most interesting thing wasn’t that these things happened, both are pretty common in the human experience but for her use of the phrase which she would have consider extremely vulgar in her younger days or the story about Patrick Moore drinking which was something she had also disapproved off. She had reason to.

So I sat there with her, she in her bathrobe, something which would have horrified her when she was younger, she basking in the sun coming through the big picture window overlooking the places she had lived nearly all her life. Being ninety is being cold and the afternoon heat nearly put her to sleep, perhaps her guard was down.

When she was younger, every morning she would get up, start breakfast and then retire to her bedroom to complete her Toilette. Carefully combing her hair with the silver plated boars bristle brushes she had used since she was a girl, dusting herself lightly with White Shoulders and applying just a kiss of rouge to her lips with the tip of her Pinky. Girls who grew up at the end of the nineteenth century used almost no makeup; that would have been seen as vulgar in her circle. She had never changed.

Holding her little hand, the skin velvety soft and nearly translucent, having seldom ever seen the sun during her nine plus decades, for her complexion was her treasure. I cannot recall her ever going anywhere without gloves, long sleeves and a hat. Now she sat wrapped in her old pink terrycloth robe with the little embroidered roses on the collar, me listening carefully and giving her the a little spoken nudge to keep her talking, fascinated by what she told me.

My life was as different from hers as if I’d lived on the moon. Though we weren’t considered poor, the family had come down some financially since my grandmother was a girl. Families grow and money has to go farther. She was born to a moderately wealthy farming and ranching family from the Santa Maria area of California. Midwife delivered in a little house just off Division road and the old coast highway in Oso Flaco. She was the second of seven children of Irish immigrants Samuel and Jeannie Gray. Sam Gray and Jennie McKeen were married on May 12th, 1881 at the Orange Hall in Bailie Riobaird Doagh, county Antrim. They traveled to Belfast and boarded the States Line ship, SS State of Alabama and sailed to America on their honeymoon. Boarding at Belfast, they came ashore at Manhattan’s Castle Gardens. The State of Alabama was no Coffin ship like the vessels that delivered the first wave of famine Irish forty years earlier but she was no cruise ship either. Sam and his bride traveled third class, just a step above steerage. They never returned to Kilbride Parish, Upper Antrim, County Antrim, ever again. Like most Irish immigrants the family left behind was forever lost.

Like many they made the long hop across the country to California very quickly. Immigrant families followed a chain of family migration as they still do. Jeannie Gray’s Aunt Sarah, married to Patrick Moore of Cavan, Ireland, todays Cork, had come to America in 1850 when he was just 18. He moved west to Ohio from New York, became a naturalized citizen in 1868 and by Annies birth was living with his extended family in the Guadalupe and the Arroyo Grande Areas of central California.

The Moores by the eighties were a wealthy family, Patrick being what he called a capitalist had acquired thousands of acres of the old Mexican Land Grant Rancho’s. He had also invested in the nascent Oil business in Casmalia and the Orcutt area. He was a principle of the Pinal Oil Company and by the turn of the century had become not only a land owner but a private banker. Banks of the sort we are familiar with today didn’t exist then and most loans were made with a handshake. Uncle Pat was good at his work and scrupulously honest.

Pat and Sarah Moore had only one great sadness in their lives, they were childless and they loved children. Because Jennie Gray was Sarah Moore’s niece and by 1895 had seven living children, the Moore’s proposed that little Annie Gray, the second child come to live with them in Arroyo Grande. After some discussion a deal was worked out whereas the Moore’s would feed and cloth her, pay for her education at the California University at Berkeley, and upon passing, deed her a Quarter section of land and gift her a number of shares in the oil company. The custom of “Loaning” children out to relatives isn’t common anymore but was not unusual for the time.

In 1893 Annie came to live with the Moores. In the big house. On the Hill. She had, for the first time her own room on the second floor and servants to take care of her needs, It was quite a change. In the picture above, the two older girls on the left are the Tyler sisters. They lived with the Moore’s also. Their parents had both died within a year of each other and Sarah and Pat took it upon themselves to raise them too. It was always said by those who knew that the big house was always filled with the children of the town.

As Annie grew, these many friends shared their lives together as children and teenagers. The Kodak Box camera was invented just in time to chronicle much of their lives growing up. Annie was fifteen when the camera came on the market and we have albums of photos taken with what must have been, a marvelous new thing. They took pictures the way girls use their I-Phones today.

They chronicled all kinds of events, birthday parties, holidays or even any excuse to get together. Arroyo Grande was such a small town that you could walk across it in just a few minutes and like little places, everyone, they knew each other. One hundred and twenty years later most of the family names in her autograph books still reside here including my future grandfather whose beautiful copperplate signature is scattered throughout the pages of that little book.

As promised, Annie was off to Berkeley in 1904. She graduated from Santa Maria High School in 1904 in the same class with her oldest brother Robert Gray. Though she lived in Arroyo Grande with the Moore’s she would spend the week with her parents on their ranch on Guadalupe road, taking the narrow gauge railroad down on Monday morning and returning for the weekend. The high school in Arroyo Grande was not accredited for the university. It had a somewhat sketchy history and had ceased to exist for a few years as a group of wealthy ranchers refused to pay taxes to support a high school, deeming it an unnecessary level of education. “Boys need to go to work, not school, and girls need to marry and keep house,” said Harold Miossi. one of the ringleaders in the anti-school delegation. Daniel Donovan, big landowner and friend of Pat Moore was leader in defunding the school. The conversations between these and the other town leaders in the bar at the Ryan Hotel on Branch Street must have been interesting. According to family lore, uncle Pat and his crony’s could put it away in vast quantities and the arguments were detailed in the local papers. My grandfather Jack Shannon and his friends including “Ace” Porter, George Clevenger and Frank Bardin all ended their formal education at eighth grade. They all prospered in spite of going to do a grownups work at fourteen.

Pat and Sarah Moore were decidedly against the no-school crowd and not only sent Annie of to college but paid for the schooling of several of her friends including the girl below pictured in her high school graduation picture. She returned to Arroyo Grande and taught school. She was so well liked that a grammar school was named for her. She was my grandmother good friend and spent many hours in the big house just up the hill from her own next to Pig Tail Alley on old Bridge Street..

Berkeley was a far different school in 1904 than it is today. Girls had only a limited series of choices in which to study and like my grandmother, most would graduate with a Baccalaureate degree in Liberal Arts. There were few careers open to educated woman. The School of Architecture was founded only in 1903 by an endowment from Phoebe Apperson Hearst who was already championing women’s education, particularly women in Architecture. Mrs Hearst was a supporter of Julia Morgan, famously the architect of Hearst Castle. Morgan, herself was a woman of many firsts. She was one of the very first female graduates of the Engineering School at Berkeley and the very first woman to graduate from the prestigious French Ecole Nacionale Superiuere des Beaux-Artes. She was also the first licensed woman architect in California in 1903. In Annies sophomore year, The world famous Bancroft Library was added to the Universities collection that year and in 1905, Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt endowed the school with funds to build a permanent building for the School of Jurisprudence.

The famous “Big C” was built in march of 1905, Annies 2nd year at Cal. Her classmates of ’07 and ’08 formed a human chain to haul the blocks of sandstone uphill in a heavy rain. The “C” represents the peaceful end of the Charter Hill Rush held between the freshman and sophomores. It is a symbol of peace and unity. The Sophs were in charge of keeping it in good repair and each year, “The Deed to the C” was transferred to the next years sophomore class in a ceremony each spring.

The “Big C” was and is considered legitimate game for opponents of California Athletics, particularly the private school boys of Stanford. Each year before the Cal/Stanford football game it is lit and guarded through the night by members of the Sophomore class.

During the time Annie was a Cal there were no dorms or sororities for women. Girls boarded in homes around campus and she was no exception. She had a room in the home of Doctor Arvan Meeks and his wife Minna, a well-to-do dentist practicing in Berkeley. He and his wife took in a number of boarders from the school each year.

As young girls still do, she chose her nickname or it was chosen for her by friends. Why Nita, no one ever said but she carried it from early girlhood until she finished at the University. A short name or nickname is a sign of intimacy, trust, and friendship. We see Nita in her autograph book which dates back to the 1890’s and even in a letter written to her by her friend Mamie, another nickname, from her old folks home in Washington state when they were both in their early nineties. It had staying power. Likely because they were childhood friends and raised together they never called each other anything else. Nita is a diminutive for Anita or Ana if you speak Spanish. It could have been either one or as is sometimes the case just a way to distance themselves from names they didn’t themselves choose. I never heard anyone call her anything but Annie, not Anne or Anita. Annie was her given name. Perhaps they though Annie was too much like a servants name or something she would say all of her life; “Thats Shanty Irish”, styling herself as the Lace Curtain kind. They were raised in style.

Whatever the reason it set the tone for the early part of her life. Born to a wealthy first generation Irish family, raised by a rich first generation Irish family. A good start.

Michael Shannon is a writer, teacher, surfer, and world traveler. He resides in Arroyo Grande California.

Coming next, Nita the second part.