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.
I asked my AI Assistant Anthropic Claude to tell the story of Emily and Lyle planning the wedding in March 1918 (I offered helpful suggestions...). Part 1 of this story is in Emily and Lyle's Story: The Wedding Plan, March 1918 (Part 1 of 2). This is Part 2 of 2:
(AI Google NotebookLM Infographic: Wedding Plan, March 1918)
Emily and Lyle's Story:
Planning Everything -- March 1918 (Part 2 of 2)
(continued from Part 1)
The Reception
Austin and Della had offered the house before being asked, which was characteristic and made the conversation easy.
"Of course here," Della said, when Lyle raised it on a Thursday in early March, trying to frame the request diplomatically.
"We didn't want to assume—"
"Where else?" Della said. "We have the dining room and the parlor and the garden and I have been cooking for thirty years. What did you think I would say?"
"I told you she'd say that," Emily murmured to Lyle.
The reception would be simple: cold meats and bread and Della's rolls, vegetables from the garden as the season allowed, Georgia's lemon cake as the wedding cake, which Georgia confirmed with a single nod when asked. Lemonade and tea. A proper table, Della's best cloth, the good china that came out for occasions.
"It will be lovely," Emily said.
"It will be correct," Della said, which was a higher standard.
Matie, who appeared at the house on the Saturday after the plan was confirmed, announced that she would handle the flowers from the 30th Street garden — whatever was blooming in June, arranged in the way that someone who has grown things all her life knows to arrange them. Emily thanked her, and Matie said it was nothing, which meant it was something she had already decided to do and was glad to be asked about.
The Honeymoon
This was the question Lyle had been working on since February, in the leather notebook, in the margins of his supply projections, in the back of his mind during slow shifts at the PX counter.
The mathematics of it were this: a PFC's monthly salary, minus what he was saving for the ring, minus ordinary expenses, left a small but real reserve. The US Grant Hotel on Broadway — the finest hotel in San Diego, where they had eaten on Emily's birthday — had rooms at roughly three dollars a night for a standard room in 1918. Two nights would cost six dollars, plus meals.
He would get a 72-hour pass. He could manage two nights. He had been managing toward two nights since February.
"The US Grant," he said, on a Thursday evening when the planning was well advanced and this was the last major item on the list. "Two nights."
Emily looked up from the notepad. They were sitting in the Hawthorn Street kitchen, Georgia conspicuously present at the other end of the table, reading a letter from her sister in Chicago and paying no attention to anything else.
"The US Grant," Emily said. She thought about the dining room where they'd celebrated her birthday — the white linen, the silver, the cool September light. "Two nights in the hotel."
"You could see the bay from the upper floors," Lyle said. "I asked."
"You asked."
"I spoke to the front desk," he said. "In January. To see what was possible."
Emily looked at him with the expression she wore when he had done something that was ordinary and also exactly right. "You were planning in January."
"I've been planning since August," he said. "I just refined it in January."
Georgia lowered her letter slightly. "The US Grant has good breakfast service," she said. "I stayed there once, in 1912. The toast was exceptional."
They both looked at her.
"I'm not coming on the honeymoon," she clarified. "I'm merely noting the quality of the toast." She returned to her letter.
Emily wrote on the notepad: US Grant — 2 nights — June 19-21.
The Thursday in Mid-March — Everyone Together
On the third Thursday of March, Lyle arrived at Hawthorn Street at nine in the morning with a Liberty Pass and a plan. He had asked Della in advance. He had confirmed with Georgia the previous Sunday, by letter. The plan was: all of them together, at 30th Street, for dinner.
Georgia put on her good coat and her best hat, which she wore with the straightforward confidence of someone who does not require compliments on their appearance but is aware of it. They took the trolley — the three of them, an unusual configuration, the slight PFC in his uniform, the young woman in her green wool coat, the older woman with her cloth bag and her upright posture that the trolley's swaying did not compromise at all.
Austin and Della were both home. Edgar was there. Davey had come over with Amy, and Maybelle — who had grown half an inch since November and developed a new interest in aviation, traceable directly to Austin's dinner table stories — was full of questions before she'd even got her coat off.
The kitchen became, immediately, a joint operation. Georgia and Della had been evolving toward this — a mutual kitchen vocabulary built through accumulated visits — and they moved in it now with the quiet efficiency of two capable people who have decided to respect each other's methods while maintaining their own.
"Your stock is done?" Georgia asked.
"Since this morning," Della said.
"Good." Georgia set down her bag, produced two lemons from it without explanation, and began.
In the dining room, Austin was explaining to Maybelle the difference between a biplane and a monoplane in terms she kept insisting weren't simple enough, driving him to progressively more elementary comparisons until he had described a monoplane as "a bird that only has one pair of wings instead of two," at which point Maybelle said "oh, like a real bird" and Austin sat back satisfied.
Davey had news. His taxi business had taken on a second driver — a friend's boy just back from a training camp in Texas who needed work and knew the city from before his service. "He's reliable," Davey said, with the authority of a man who has driven professionally long enough to know what the word means in this context. "Knows every street south of Broadway and most of the ones north. Doesn't argue about routes."
"High praise," Edgar said drily.
"For a driver, it's the highest," Davey said.
After dinner, when the table had been cleared and Georgia's lemon cake from the previous Sunday had reappeared — she had brought half a one, preserved, because she was a practical woman — the planning talk came out naturally, the way it does in families when a decision has been made and the making of it has been accepted.
Della had found a dress pattern that she thought might suit Emily's ideas about the wedding, clipped from a magazine in February and kept in her apron pocket for the right moment. She produced it with the careful casualness of someone who has been waiting to produce it. Emily looked at it with genuine attention — it was simple, modern, the right length for 1918 — and said she would show it to Mrs. Hennessey as a reference.
"Franklin wrote back," Emily said, when the pattern had been passed around and assessed. She had the letter in her bag, brought because she had known this conversation was coming. "He can come. He and his wife both."
"Good," Lyle said.
"It will be a little strange," Emily said. "We haven't seen each other in two years."
"Weddings make things less strange," Davey said, with the authority of a man who has driven people to and from many of them, and experienced two of them. "Something about the occasion. People decide to be better than they've been."
"Not always," Abbie said from the parlor.
"More often than not," Davey said.
Abbie considered this. "Granted," she said.
Georgia was quiet through most of this, drinking her tea, watching the room with the attention she brought to things she had already assessed and found acceptable. When the planning talk had run its course and the conversation had moved on to other things — Maybelle's school, Edgar's report from a neighbor whose son had written from France, the general wartime business of a family managing uncertainty together — Georgia set down her cup.
"This will all be fine," she said, without preamble, to no one in particular. "June will be a good month."
The room accepted this, because Georgia said things she meant and everyone in the room had learned that by now.
Lyle walked them to the trolley stop at eight-thirty — Emily on one side, Georgia on the other, the March night cool and clear and full of stars over San Diego. On the trolley home, Georgia looked out the window at the city passing in the dark and did not say anything, which was Georgia's way of being content.
At Hawthorn Street, Lyle said good night to them both and turned toward his own trolley stop. He had a shift at seven in the morning. He had ninety-five days until June nineteenth.
He walked to the stop with his hands in his pockets and the planning notebook against his chest, and thought about a flat on Fern Street, or maybe in Sherman Heights, with three rooms and a garden and Georgia in it, and a wedding at Central Christian that would be small and entirely right, and two nights at the US Grant with exceptional toast.
He thought about Emily in the blue silk dress that Mrs. Hennessey was building from chalk marks and certainty.
He thought: ninety-five days.
It would not feel long enough and would not go fast enough and would be exactly the right amount of time.
Written the same night, in Waterman ink:
My Darling Emily,
Everything is on the list. I checked it against my notebook. We have not forgotten anything important.
Georgia's line about the toast is going in the notebook under "things that cannot be improved upon."
Ninety-five days.
Yours always,
Lyle
Here is the Video Overview of this story by Google NotebookLM (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.
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The AI-assisted biography of my maternal grandmother is in ABC Biography of #7 Emily Kemp (Auble) Carringer (1899-1977) of Illinois and California. I wrote a story about her life in 1916 in Ask AI: Describe Emily Auble's Life After the Death of Her Father In 1916.
The AI-assisted biography of my maternal grandfather is in ABC Biography of #6 Lyle Lawrence Carringer (1891-1976) of San Diego, California. I wrote a story about Lyle being a young working man in 1916 being teased about being boring in Lyle's Story: Finding Courage in 1916-1917.
- 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)
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