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 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 cafĂ© 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.
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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)
- 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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