Chapter 3

The roommates, I thought, later that evening after I’d had dinner.

When Jerusha arrived in Hollywood, she rented a room in a boarding house, living there for a couple of years. In 1939 or 1940, she moved into a bungalow court, sharing a house with a series of roommates, all of them aspiring actresses. I remembered her stories of how small the place was for the four of them. It was a cottage really, originally with two bedrooms and one full bathroom. The tiny back porch had been enclosed and converted into a third bedroom. The master bedroom, a decent size, was partitioned and occupied by two of the roommates. The second bedroom, much smaller, had room for one person. The most recent arrival always got stuck with the back porch. Though it had the benefit of proximity to a tiny half bath with toilet and sink, the porch was cold, damp and drafty in the winter, and it didn’t have a closet, just a makeshift rod and some hooks, hidden by a curtain. Grandma chuckled as she described how elated she felt when she’d been promoted from the porch to a real bedroom. It was warmer, she said, and it had a closet.

Jerusha had lots of roommates during her Hollywood years, first in the boarding house and later in the bungalow. But she’d kept in touch with some of them. Every now and then she’d talk about receiving letters from the girls who’d shared her quarters. That would lead to the stories I enjoyed so much as Grandma reminisced about those Hollywood years. But who were they? What were their names? Try as I might, I could not dredge them from my memory.

Now I wished I could get my hands on those letters. But they were probably long gone. Grandma had been dead for several years now. I recalled my father and his siblings clearing out her house in Alameda. Those possessions that Grandma had not already given to her children and grandchildren had been divided among family members and the house had been sold. Had anyone kept Grandma’s personal papers and correspondence?

I called my father at his condo in Castro Valley. He had been a history professor at California State University in Hayward. Now he was retired and enthusiastically enjoying a new passion, birding. While walking for exercise, he became interested in the birds he was seeing and bought a book. That led to more books and a beginning birding class. Then he joined the local chapter of the Audubon Society, going on their field trips. I had accompanied him on several of his own excursions to East Bay parks and a bird walk at Abbott’s Lagoon in the Point Reyes National Seashore in Marin County. Now he was planning to attend a birding festival later in June, the Mono Basin Bird Chautauqua in Lee Vining, the site of Mono Lake in the Eastern Sierra Nevada. I envied him his trip. The most direct route was over Tioga Pass Road, which wound through the beautiful high country of Yosemite National Park.

“You should come with me,” Dad said. “I rented a cabin at the Lakeview Lodge in Lee Vining. I know you like hiking in Yosemite and it’s not that far from Lee Vining to the east entrance of the park. You could go tramping around Tuolumne Meadows.”

“It’s tempting,” I said, and it was. “I’ll check my calendar. Say, Dad, what do you know about Grandma’s time in Hollywood?”

“Only what I remember from the stories she used to tell. She worked with some big stars and a lot of people we’d never heard of. She really enjoyed those years, but after she met Dad, she was ready to give it up and settle down.”

Unless something had happened, something darker, like a murder. Something that propelled her to leave Hollywood. I pushed away that thought as my father asked why I was interested in Grandma’s years as a bit player.

“Just curious,” I told him. “There’s a new movie memorabilia shop in Alameda. Cassie and I stopped for a look. I bought a couple of title cards from two of Grandma’s old movies, The Women and We Were Dancing. Both starred Norma Shearer.”

“Norma Shearer,” Dad said. “Mom thought the world of Norma Shearer. Said she was a real lady.”

“I know. I wished I’d recorded some of Grandma’s Hollywood yarns while she was still alive.”

“Water under the bridge,” he said. “You did record her oral history about working at the Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond during the war, and that was important.”

I’d made the recording about the time they were building the Rosie the Riveter National Monument up in Richmond. Digital versions of the oral history recordings were now available through the Oral History office at the University of California’s Bancroft Library. “Here I am in my welder togs,” Grandma used to say when she showed off the picture that now stands framed on my desk at home. The photograph was taken in 1944 at Kaiser. Grandma’s welder togs were a pair of coveralls that hung on her slender frame. She also wore a mask pushed back to show her short blond hair and a big smile. That was her life after she’d married Grandpa. It was the Hollywood years that nagged at me now.

“She kept corresponding with a couple of her roommates. Maybe they’re still alive. But I don’t remember their names. Did anyone save any of Grandma’s letters?”

“I don’t know,” Dad said. “You should check with your Aunt Caro. She took a lot of Mom’s personal papers.”

Dad and I chatted awhile longer. After I hung up, I looked up the phone number for Aunt Caro, my father’s younger sister Caroline. She and her husband, Neil, lived in Santa Rosa, up in Sonoma County.

“I kept a lot of the letters,” Caro told me. “Mostly the letters Mom and Dad wrote to each other when he was overseas during World War Two. She kept his, of course, and Dad carried a packet of her letters with him all through the war. I thought that was so romantic.”

What we keep and what we throw away. It was logical that Caro would preserve her parents’ wartime correspondence. And just as logical that she would winnow out what looked like chaff, the letters from people who were not family members. These days we’re drowning in paper and clutter. We can’t keep everything. So we make those choices of what to keep and what to throw away.

I wondered what this would mean to future historians, the people who rely on personal correspondence to reveal the lives and characters of historic figures. Somehow scrolling through e-mails doesn’t have the same cachet. And electronic communication is so easily disposed of, gone in the click of a mouse, dumped into a symbolic trash can.

“She could have mentioned her roommates in those letters to Grandpa,” I said.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Caro said. “Mom wrote really newsy letters. I enjoy reading them. They’re such a time machine, back to the United States of the forties. Come on up to Santa Rosa. You’re welcome to look through them.”

I looked at my calendar and Caro looked at hers. We set a date for getting together, the following Saturday. We were about to end the call when Caro said, “You should go see Aunt Dulcie, too. She and Mom were always close. They wrote each other lots of letters and I did keep some of those. But I know Dulcie keeps everything. After Uncle Fred died and Pat moved Dulcie in with her and Bruce, I remember Pat saying her mother refused to throw out any of her letters. I’ll bet Dulcie remembers things from Mom’s Hollywood days. And her letters would be a treasure trove.”

“That’s a great idea.” My grandmother was one of four siblings. Her older brother, Woodrow, stayed in Jackson and became a mining engineer. Her younger brother, Jacob, had been a Central Valley farmer. Dulcie, the youngest, had also been a Rosie, working at the Kaiser Shipyard. On a blind date she met a guy in the Army Air Forces, Fred Pedroza, home on leave before going overseas. One thing led to another, letters were exchanged, and when the boys came marching home from that war, Dulcie and Fred got married and began contributing to the postwar baby boom. Fred decided to stay in the Army. Then in 1947 the Army Air Forces became the Air Force, a separate branch of the service. Fred spent thirty years in the service, moving his family all over the United States, Europe and Asia. Great-uncle Fred’s last duty station had been Hamilton Air Force Base, in Novato, at the northern end of Marin County. He and Great-aunt Dulcie had retired there, surrounded by children and grandchildren.

When Fred died, Dulcie stayed in her house for several years, then age and medical problems led to her decision to stop driving and change her living situation. She’d moved in with her daughter and son-in-law in Graton, in western Sonoma County.

Caro was right. Aunt Dulcie would be a great resource. I looked up the number and reached for the phone. A few seconds later my cousin Pat answered. When I explained my mission, she said, “Come on up. We’d love to see you. How about brunch on Saturday?”