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 on New Year's Eve (I offered suggestions...):
(AI Google NotebookLM Infographic: New Year's Eve, 1917)
Emily and Lyle’s Story: New Year's Eve, December 31, 1917
Lyle had requested the Liberty Pass with three weeks' notice and managed it through a combination of advance planning and the goodwill that eighteen months of reliable service generates with supervisors like Corporal Briggs, who never acknowledged such goodwill but consistently acted on it. The pass ran from five in the evening until one in the morning — enough time for dinner and dancing on the last night of what had been a year unlike any other.
He collected Emily at six. She was wearing the ivory dress.
He stopped when she opened the door, because the ivory dress deserved a moment, and because the sight of Emily Auble in it on New Year's Eve in a city full of wartime uncertainty was the specific kind of beautiful that requires acknowledgment.
"You wore it," he said.
"It was the right occasion," she said. She looked at him in his dress blues with the particular expression that she had never quite put into words but that Lyle had come to read as: yes. This. Right.
Georgia stood behind her in the hallway, wearing her good dress and her best brooch and the expression of someone about to spend the evening as she had decided to spend it. "I'm going to the Crabtrees'," she announced. "Several of us are gathering to see in the New Year in a reasonable manner. I shall be home before you."
"Mother," Emily said.
"I move efficiently," Georgia said, and found her coat.
The Tivoli
The Tivoli Saloon on Sixth Avenue was thirty-two years old in 1917, which in San Diego terms made it practically ancient. The original bar — a magnificent piece of Boston craftsmanship brought around Cape Horn by ship — ran the length of the room, dark wood polished by decades of elbows, behind it the original back bar with its mirrors and shelves of bottles reflecting the gaslight. The cash register near the door was one of the first installed in the city.
The room was full on New Year's Eve, a wartime crowd that mixed civilian San Diegans with Navy men and Marines in a democracy of occasion. The Tivoli served food at the long tables in the back — simple, honest food: roast beef, bread, potatoes, apple pie — and Lyle had secured them a table by arriving earlier and leaving his cap to hold it, which worked in 1917 as it works in most civilized establishments in most eras.
Emily looked around the room with open interest. "This is the oldest bar in the city," she said.
"Wyatt Earp drank here," Lyle said, as they settled at their table.
"Did he."
"According to everyone who was alive when he did, though the numbers of people who personally witnessed it seem to grow each year." He looked at the menu — modest, sensible, the prices fair. "Charlie Morrison says the roast beef is the only thing worth ordering."
"Then we should order the roast beef," Emily said, closing her menu, "and ignore whatever else Charlie says, as a principle."
The dinner was good — the roast beef exactly as Charlie had promised, the bread fresh, the apple pie the kind that suggests someone made it from a recipe they knew by heart. They ate without hurry, watching the room fill up around them, the noise level rising comfortably as the evening deepened and the year tilted toward its final hours.
They talked about 1917 the way you talk about a year you've survived together. The January dance that had started everything. The spring of the war coming. Boot camp, the PX, the Liberty Days accumulated like a small fortune. The birthday dress in August. The birthday party in November. Christmas.
"What was the best part?" Emily asked, over the apple pie.
Lyle thought about it honestly. "The first time I walked you home from Marston's," he said. "In February. When you said there was no shame in honest work. I knew then that you were someone worth knowing."
Emily considered this with the seriousness she gave assessments. "Mine was the dance," she said. "When you told me you'd been practicing. Being scared and doing it anyway." She looked at him. "That's still the best thing about you."
"Still scrawny and terrified?"
"Still brave," she corrected. "Same thing, different word."
The Balboa Park Pavilion
They took the trolley to Balboa Park, the city sliding past in the cool New Year's Eve dark, and walked from the stop to the Isthmus pavilion where the dancing was. The Exposition buildings still stood around the park, illuminated for the occasion, their Spanish Colonial architecture dramatic in the lamplight, and San Diego had come out in force to see 1917 off — couples and groups and families, uniforms and evening dress, the particular festive energy of a city determined to find joy on the last night of a very long year.
The band was already playing when they arrived — a ragtime number that the floor was already responding to, dancers moving with the quick, syncopated pleasure of people who know exactly how this music works. The pavilion was warm from bodies and hung with lanterns, the bandstand at one end draped in red, white, and blue bunting.
"Can you still do this?" Emily asked, with the slight smile of someone who remembers the high school dance.
"I have been practicing," Lyle said, with the gravity of someone who has had a full year to prove that statement true.
He could. They both could. A year of Liberty Day dancing — at parties, in parlors, at the occasional Sunday afternoon dance at the park itself — had given them a fluency together that made the fast numbers actually enjoyable rather than merely survivable. Lyle had learned to use his quick footwork where it helped and to trust Emily's lead on the turns where she was better than he was, which she was aware of and he had acknowledged without requiring extensive discussion.
The ragtime was bright and quick and they went into it immediately — Emily's ivory dress moving, Lyle's dress blues immaculate, neither of them counting steps because they didn't need to anymore. Around them, San Diego danced too. Navy men in white, officers in dress uniform, civilians who had made the effort of their best clothes for the last night of 1917. The band was good — a five-piece with a cornetist who knew what he was doing and a drummer who understood that the drummer's job is to make everyone else sound better.
Between numbers, they stepped outside briefly into the cool night air. The park stretched around them, the illuminated buildings pale against the dark sky, the bay visible in the distance. From somewhere across the city came the sound of other celebrations beginning — a distant brass band, the occasional firecracker, the accumulated noise of San Diego doing what San Diegans do on New Year's Eve.
"What do you think 1918 will be?" Emily asked, watching the bay.
Lyle considered the question as he considered most important things — not quickly, but with the attention it deserved. "I think the war will end," he said. "Maybe not by December, but it will move toward ending. Things can't hold at this pitch indefinitely."
"And for us?"
He looked at her. She was watching the bay still, her profile clear against the dark, the ivory dress pale in the lamplight from inside. She had asked the question with the directness she brought to everything important, and it deserved an answer in kind.
"For us," he said, "I think 1918 is the year we stop planning the future and start living it."
She turned to look at him then, with the full attention she usually reserved for things she wanted to understand completely. "Are you saying what I think you're saying?"
"I'm saying that I've been a Marine private for seven months and I know what I'm going to do when the war is over, and I know who I'm going to do it with, and I think it's time we stopped speaking of it in the future tense."
"You don't have a ring," Emily said.
"I know I don't. I had the same problem last time." He took both her hands, which were cool from the night air and familiar and entirely right in his. "Emily Auble. I am going to marry you. Not someday. After the war. With a ring I've been saving for since August. In the meantime I want you to know that it's decided, and not just by me."
Emily looked at him for a long moment with the expression he couldn't always read—the one that was too complex for a single name. Then she said: "I've known it was decided since February."
"Since February?"
"Since you told me there was no shame in honest work," she said. "I knew then."
The band started a new number inside — slower this time, the cornetist finding a melody that seemed to know it was nearly midnight. Through the pavilion windows, the dancers adjusted, finding the tempo, couples drawing closer.
"Shall we go back in?" Emily said.
"In a moment," Lyle said. He was not ready to let go of this particular moment yet — Emily in her ivory dress in the Balboa Park lamplight on the last night of 1917, the bay in the distance and the whole of 1918 ahead of them, undecided and full of possibility.
They went back inside to the music and the warmth and the final hour of the year, and they danced — slow and close to the slow music, quick and bright to the fast — until midnight arrived with the band playing and the crowd counting and San Diego making whatever noise it had available.
When the new year came, Lyle held Emily's hands and looked at her and did not say Happy New Year because that was what everyone was saying to everyone, and what he felt was specific. He hugged her tightly and kissed her deeply and longly, and she hoped it would never end.
Coming up for air, Emily said "Hello, 1918," as the crowd cheered around them.
"Hello, Emily," Lyle said, which was the same thing.
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New Year's Day, January 1, 1918. Written in the barracks, Balboa Park. Ink: Waterman's blue-black. Pen: the Waterman fountain. Paper: the good kind.
My Darling Emily,
I'm writing to you with the birthday pen on the Christmas paper. It writes the way you said it would—smoothly, without effort, as though the words were already there and the pen merely found them.
Last night was everything a last night of a year should be. The Tivoli, the park, the dancing—and the conversation outside, which I will not summarize here because some things do not require summarizing.
I kept my promise about the dancing, by the way. I didn't step on you once.
1918. Georgia's tomatoes have been joined, apparently, by ambitious plans for cucumber. I will look forward to hearing about this.
Write me many.
Yours entirely and 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
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