Here is the latest chapter in the story of the courtship and early married life and times of my maternal grandparents, Emily Auble and Lyle Carringer, who married in June 1918. The background information and the list of chapters of their life together are listed at the end of this post. This is historical fiction with real people and real events, and is how it might have been.
And now we are up to July and August 1918, and life is settling into a new normal.
I asked my AI Assistant Anthropic Claude to tell the story of Emily and Lyle about their next two months in July and August (I offered helpful suggestions...).
(AI Google Notebook Infographic -- July and August 1918)
Monday People: July and August
1918
The New Liberty Day
The change came about through a conversation Lyle almost didn't
have. He'd been turning it over for the better part of a week in
early July — the arithmetic of it, the way Thursday liberty had
made sense when he was single and living at the barracks, but made
considerably less sense now that he had a wife who worked six days at
Marston's with Mondays as her only regular day off, and a Thursday
that landed in the middle of her week when she could least easily get
away.
He raised it with Corporal Briggs on a slow Tuesday afternoon,
framing it the way he'd learned to frame requests — plainly, with
reasons attached, no excess sentiment.
"Corporal, I'd like to request my liberty day be moved to
Monday, if the schedule allows it."
Briggs looked up from the ledger. "Any particular reason, or
is this a preference?"
"Marston's closes Monday for inventory most weeks. My wife
has it as her regular day off. Thursday, she's working."
Briggs considered this with the brief, total attention he gave
anything involving schedules, which he regarded as a species of
inventory in their own right. "Hennessey's on Mondays now. You'd
swap with him."
"I'd ask him myself, if that's permitted."
"It's permitted." Briggs made a note. "Ask him. If
he agrees, I'll approve it."
Hennessey, when asked, agreed within the length of time it took
Lyle to finish the sentence, on the grounds that Thursday suited his
own situation — a sweetheart in Coronado who worked weekends and
had Thursdays free — rather better than Monday ever had. The swap
went through within the week, and by the second Monday of July, Lyle
Carringer had a new liberty day, and he and Emily had, for the first
time since their marriage, a full day each week that belonged to both
of them at once.
"A whole day," Emily said, the first Sunday evening
after the change was confirmed, looking at the calendar with the
particular satisfaction of someone contemplating a genuine
improvement to the architecture of her week. "Not snatched
hours. A whole day."
"We'll have to decide what to do with it," Lyle said.
"We'll decide every week," Emily said. "That's
rather the point."
Georgia's Household
While Lyle and Emily worked their six days each — his at the PX
counter, hers among the gloves and accessories at Marston's —
Georgia Auble settled into the management of 2064 Harrison Avenue
with the same unhurried authority she brought to everything, and
within a month the house had become, in every practical sense, hers
to run.
She did the shopping each morning, walking the few blocks to the
markets along the trolley line with her cloth bag and her precise
sense of what things ought to cost, returning with whatever the day's
dinner required and a developing reputation among the local
shopkeepers as a woman who would not be shorted a single ounce on a
pound of anything. She did the cleaning on her own schedule, which
bore no resemblance to any schedule either Lyle or Emily would have
devised but which produced, consistently, a spotless house. She
cooked, as she always had, with the quiet competence that made every
meal at Harrison Avenue taste like something considered rather than
merely prepared.
She also, to Emily's mild surprise, made friends.
Mrs. Alcott next door, a widow of roughly Georgia's own vintage,
proved an early and durable acquaintance, the two of them discovered
one July morning comparing notes over the fence about the proper way
to stake tomatoes, a conversation that expanded over subsequent weeks
to cover most matters of domestic management, the war, and the
general deficiencies of the younger generation's approach to
housekeeping, a category from which both women carefully exempted
their own households.
"She agrees with me about preserving," Georgia reported
to Emily one evening, with the satisfaction of a woman who has found
a kindred spirit. "Most people around here can everything in the
heat of August and wonder why it spoils. Mrs. Alcott does hers in
smaller batches, properly timed. We've agreed to can together next
month."
The garden, meanwhile, became Georgia's particular province and
pleasure. The small plot behind the house — modest by comparison
with the elaborate bushes and gardens Lyle's parents had built at
their own home years before, but a proper garden nonetheless —
filled over July with tomatoes, beans, and a determined row of the
same variety of cucumber she'd attempted the previous summer with
mixed results.
"Four tomatoes already," she announced in late July,
with the exact note of competitive satisfaction that Della had
anticipated back in June. "I intend to beat Della's count this
year. She had a head start with established vines. I'm starting from
nothing and I intend to still win."
"It's not a competition, Mother," Emily said, though
without much conviction, since it had clearly been a competition
since approximately March of the previous year and showed no sign of
becoming anything else.
"Everything is a competition if you do it properly,"
Georgia said, and returned to her staking.
Sunday Nights at 2105 30th Street
The Sunday tradition continued unbroken through the summer, all
three of them now making the trip together to the Carringer house —
Austin and Della's table expanding each week to accommodate the fact
that their son's household had grown from one person to three, a
change that Della, in particular, seemed to regard as an unambiguous
improvement to her Sundays.
It was on one of these evenings, in the middle of July, with the
dishes cleared and the family settled into the parlor's comfortable
aftermath, that Della raised the subject she had evidently been
considering for some weeks.
"Lyle," she said, in the tone she used for matters she'd
thought through carefully before speaking, "your father and I
have been discussing something, and we wanted to raise it with you
and Emily both."
Lyle set down his coffee. Across the room, Austin had the
particular stillness of a man who has already agreed to whatever was
about to be said and was simply waiting for his wife to say it
properly.
"Fern Street," Della continued. "The block where
we've always talked about expanding — you'll remember, we've owned
those additional lots for some years now, since before the war. Your
father and I have no need of three lots beyond our own house. We've
been thinking you might build there. A house of your own — not
rented, built. Your father and Edgar could help with a good deal of
the labor, and between the three of you, I don't doubt you could
manage what a hired crew would charge a fortune for."
"Build," Lyle repeated, turning the word over.
"We'd deed you the lots outright," Austin said, speaking
now, his voice carrying the particular weight he reserved for things
he meant entirely. "You're our only son, Lyle. There's no one
else those lots would go to eventually, and no reason to wait for
eventually when you could use them now, while you're young enough to
do the building yourself and get the good of the house for forty
years instead of twenty."
Emily had gone very still, the way she did when something mattered
more than she wanted to show immediately. "Three lots," she
said. "That's — Austin, that's a very generous thing to
offer."
"It's practical," Austin said, with the particular
discomfort he always showed when sentiment threatened to overtake a
conversation he'd rather keep businesslike. "The lots sit idle
otherwise. You'd put them to use. That's all it is."
It was not, of course, all it was, and everyone in the room
understood this, including Austin, but the fiction of pure
practicality allowed him to offer something enormous without the
conversation becoming more emotional than he could comfortably
manage, and Lyle — who had inherited a good deal of his father's
instinct for this particular kind of deflection — let the fiction
stand without challenge.
"We'd want to think about it properly," Lyle said. "Not
rush into it. But Father — Mother — thank you. We'll consider it
seriously."
"Take your time," Della said. "The lots aren't
going anywhere. But Lyle — I'd like grandchildren raised close
enough that I see them more than once a week, if I'm honest about my
reasons for raising it now rather than later."
This drew a laugh around the room, Abbie's sharpest of all from
her chair, and the conversation moved on to lighter matters, but the
offer sat with Lyle and Emily through the rest of the evening and the
walk home afterward from the trolley, turning over between them in
the warm July dark.
"A house of our own," Emily said, as they reached
Harrison Avenue. "Built, not rented."
"On Fern Street," Lyle said. "On the block where I
grew up."
"Could we really do it? With just your father and Edgar
helping?"
"Father's built half of what's standing on that block
already, one way or another," Lyle said. "And I'm not
entirely useless with my hands, whatever twelve years behind a sales
counter might suggest." He was quiet for a moment, thinking it
through with the same careful arithmetic he brought to everything.
"It would take savings. Time. We couldn't start before next year
at the earliest, probably. But it's worth thinking about seriously."
"Everything with you is worth thinking about seriously,"
Emily said, though she said it with evident affection rather than
complaint, and tucked the idea away alongside the other plans
accumulating steadily in the household's shared imagination.
Emily's Nineteenth Birthday
August 19th fell on a Monday that year, which meant Lyle's liberty
day and Emily's birthday coincided for the first time since the
schedule change, a fact that Della declared providential when she
proposed, two weeks in advance, that the Carringer house host a
proper birthday party — not the quiet family dinner of the year
before, but something larger, with Emily and Lyle's own friends
included alongside the family.
"You're nineteen," Della said, when she raised it with
Emily the Sunday before. "Married a year — nearly. You should
have your friends around you, not just us old relations."
The guest list assembled itself readily enough. Charlie Morrison,
inevitable and eager. Gladys Nolan, who took personal charge of the
flower arrangements the moment she heard the party was happening, on
the grounds that she had done the flowers for the wedding and saw no
reason to relinquish the position now. Several of Emily's coworkers
from Marston's accessories and hosiery departments, girls she'd grown
genuinely fond of over two years behind the counter. A handful of
Lyle's old Class of 1913 friends, including Eddie Hartwell and the
Yamamotos, who arrived together and spent a good portion of the
evening catching Lyle up on a year's worth of news he'd missed while
occupied with boot camp and courtship.
Two new faces arrived by way of Gladys — a young couple, Robert
and Florence Teague, recently moved to San Diego from Pasadena, whom
Gladys had met through her church and pronounced "entirely worth
knowing," a verdict that proved accurate within the first half
hour of the party, Robert turning out to share Austin's enthusiasm
for aviation and Florence proving an easy, warm conversationalist who
fell into comfortable talk with Emily almost immediately over the
lemonade.
"She's a reader," Emily reported to Lyle later in the
evening, nodding toward Florence. "Properly — not just
magazines. She's lending me a novel next week."
"Another friend," Lyle said. "You're accumulating
them at an impressive rate."
"San Diego's full of people worth knowing," Emily said.
"You just have to let the party bring them to you."
Georgia's cake — lemon again, by now so thoroughly expected that
its absence would have caused more comment than its presence —
anchored the evening as always, and the singing around it was louder
and more enthusiastically off-key than any previous iteration, owing
to Charlie Morrison's conviction that volume compensated for
accuracy, a theory the assembled guests tested thoroughly and did not
conclusively disprove.
Austin gave a brief toast, Davey a considerably longer one
involving a story about Emily's mother that Georgia firmly declined
to confirm or deny, and the evening wound down well past dark, the
Fern Street lots mentioned more than once in passing conversation
among the family, the idea clearly taking root even before any formal
decision had been made.
Monday Outings
The new liberty day gave Lyle and Emily — and, more often than
not, Georgia alongside them — a standing weekly invitation to
explore the city and its surroundings in a way their Thursday
arrangement had never quite allowed, Thursday having always felt
slightly stolen from the middle of a working week, while Monday,
falling at the week's true beginning, felt like something given
rather than taken.
Austin's automobile became the vehicle of these explorations, lent
without hesitation most weeks, Austin himself increasingly delighted
by his son's growing comfort behind the wheel and Georgia's evident
enjoyment of the outings, which she approached with the same
thoroughness she brought to gardening and shopping.
Balboa Park remained a favorite early destination, the Exposition
grounds from the previous years now settling into their second life
as civic park space, still beautiful in the way Spanish Colonial
architecture ages well in a climate that never punishes it. They
walked the grounds on several Mondays through July, Georgia proving
an unexpectedly enthusiastic student of the botanical displays,
cataloguing ideas for her own garden with the same competitive
seriousness she brought to the tomato count.
Ocean Beach drew them twice in July and once more in August, the
routine by now familiar — the cold shock of the surf, the walk
along the pier, lunch at the diner that had become, without either of
them quite deciding it should, their place. Georgia came along on the
August visit and surprised them both by wading in to her knees, skirt
hiked with the same pragmatic efficiency Emily had always shown,
declaring the water "bracing" in a tone that made clear
this was high praise rather than complaint.
La Jolla's cove drew a full day in late July, the three of them
scrambling down to the tide pools, Georgia examining the sea anemones
and small fish with the focused curiosity of a woman who had crossed
an entire continent as a young immigrant and never lost her appetite
for seeing new things properly, up close, rather than merely glancing
past them.
Coronado filled an August Monday — the ferry across the bay, the
grandeur of the Hotel del Coronado's Victorian towers, a walk along
the beach on the peninsula's ocean side where the sand ran finer and
whiter than at Ocean Beach, and Georgia's considered verdict,
delivered over a late lunch at a modest café near the ferry landing,
that Coronado was "handsome, but trying rather hard about it,"
a judgment Lyle found so precisely accurate that he wrote it down in
his notebook that evening under the heading Georgia on Coronado.
The San Diego Mission in Mission Valley, visited on the last
Monday of August, offered something different from the beach outings
— the old mission buildings weathered and quiet, the history of the
place settling over all three of them with a gravity that none of the
beach excursions had carried. Georgia walked the grounds slowly,
reading every placed marker with care, and said, toward the end of
the visit, standing in the old mission garden with its established
fruit trees: "This is what a garden becomes, given a hundred and
fifty years and people who tend it properly. I'll be satisfied if
mine manages a tenth of this by the time I'm done with it."
"You have time," Emily said.
"I have some time," Georgia corrected, with the
particular dry honesty she brought to questions of her own mortality,
which she regarded as a fact to be acknowledged plainly rather than
avoided. "Enough, I expect, if I use it well."
The Question of Their Own Automobile
It was on the drive back from Mission Valley, Lyle at the wheel of
his father's automobile for perhaps the twentieth time that summer,
that he raised the thought that had been building in him since the
Fern Street conversation in July.
"We're going to need our own car eventually," he said,
as the familiar streets of home drew nearer. "Father's been
generous beyond anything we should expect, lending it as often as he
has. But if we're building on Fern Street next year, and if these
Mondays are going to keep taking us further afield — La Jolla,
Coronado, wherever else — we can't keep borrowing indefinitely."
"A car of our own," Emily said, turning the idea over
the way she turned over every significant idea, with careful
attention rather than quick enthusiasm.
"Not soon," Lyle said. "Not this year, certainly,
with the house to save for as well. But I've started setting a little
aside. A separate account from the house savings — small, for now,
but it adds up the way everything adds up if you're patient about
it."
From the back seat, Georgia offered her verdict without being
asked, as was her custom on matters she considered settled. "A
sensible plan," she said. "Though I'll say this much —
whatever automobile you eventually choose, make certain it has room
enough for three. I have no intention of being left behind on these
Mondays simply because the car seats only two comfortably."
"Noted," Lyle said, glancing at her in the mirror. "Four
seats, minimum. I'll add it to the specifications."
"See that you do," Georgia said, and settled back to
watch the last of Mission Valley's golden August light slide past the
window, entirely satisfied with the arrangement of her life as it
currently stood, and not remotely shy about saying so when asked.
To be continued ...
==============================
Here is the Video Overview of this story by Google Gemini Notebook (also on my YouTube channel here):
This is historical fiction based on the facts that are available for the life and family of my maternal grandparents, Lyle and Emily(Auble) Carringer. It is based on my research, social history and society norms at the time and place, and it is likely realistic. It might have happened this way.
Stay tuned for the next chapters in this family story.
==========================
- Emily and Lyle's Story: The Dance.
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: A San Diego Romance In 1917.
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: The Promise Made.
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Letters From Boot Camp – Part 1, May 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Letters From Boot Camp – Part 2, May-June 1917.
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Letters From Boot Camp – Part 3, Weeks 5 and 6, June 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Letters From Boot Camp – Part 4 (Weeks 7 and 8), Late June to July 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Coming Home -- Lyle’s Leave, July 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Lyle Carringer Starts Work at the PX
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Lyle’s First Liberty Day -- August 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Emily’s Birthday Gift, August 1917 (Part 1)
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Emily’s Birthday Gift, August 1917 (Part 2)
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Lyle’s 26th Birthday Party in 1917 (Part 1)
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Lyle’s 26th Birthday Party in 1917 (Part 2)
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Holiday Season, Thanksgiving to Christmas 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: New Year’s Eve, 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Ordinary Days, January and February 1918
- Emily and Lyle's Story: The Wedding Plan, March 1918 (Part 1 of 2)
- Emily and Lyle's Story: The Wedding Plan, March 1918 (Part 2 of 2)
- Emily and Lyle's Story: Wedding Preparations in April and May 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Wrapping Up the Remaining Tasks – Early June 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Parental Counsel – Mid-June 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: The Wedding of Emily and Lyle – June 19, 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: The Honeymoon and Back To Work, June 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Georgia Moves In, Late June 1918
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Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver
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