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 into the winter of January and February 1918.
I asked my AI Assistant Anthropic Claude to tell the story of Emily and Lyle in January and February 1918 (I offered helpful suggestions...):
(AI Google NotebookLM Infographic: January-February 1918)
Emily and Lyle’s Story: The Rhythm of Ordinary
Days -- January and February 1918
January — A Good Routine
There is a particular kind of happiness that doesn't announce
itself. It arrives quietly, through repetition — the same walk
taken enough times that your feet know the way without consulting
your mind, the same face seen often enough that its absence would
register before its presence does. January 1918 was that kind of
month for Lyle Carringer and Emily Auble.
Every Thursday, without exception, Lyle was at Hawthorn Street by
nine o'clock. Emily was always ready — had always been ready,
though she would not acknowledge that she'd been watching the street
from the parlor window since eight forty-five. Georgia would appear
briefly in the hallway, confirm their plans for the evening with one
or two precise questions, and return to whatever she had been doing
with the air of someone whose schedule was entirely her own.
The walk to the waterfront took twenty minutes at an easy pace,
which they took, because January in San Diego was not a month that
demanded urgency. The harbor was always busy — supply ships, the
Navy's growing presence, the particular wartime industry of a port
city that understood its own strategic importance. They would stand
at the seawall for twenty minutes or half an hour, watching the
water, talking about the week just past, and then find their way to
the café on Broadway for lunch.
The café had settled entirely into their routine now. The
waitress who called them both "honey" had recently begun
calling Emily "dear" and Lyle "the Marine," which
they both found precise and fair. The chicken salad was reliable. The
pie changed. They always ordered it anyway.
After lunch they would walk downtown for a while — sometimes
with purpose, window shopping or running an errand, sometimes
without, just moving through the city they both knew and loved. Then
the trolley to 30th Street, where Austin and Della were always glad
to see them both in the specific way that parents are glad when they
can see that things are going the way they'd hoped.
January dinners at 30th Street had their own particular character.
Austin was deep in winter work at Rockwell Field — training
programs accelerating as America's need for pilots grew more urgent —
and brought his stories to the table with the organized mind of a man
who spent his days troubleshooting. The Jenny biplane, he reported in
the second week of January, was performing well under routine
training conditions but had a documented tendency in cold
temperatures to— and here he would catch himself, remembering that
he was at the dinner table and not in a debrief — to behave in ways
that required experienced handling.
"In ways that required what?" Lyle asked.
"Experienced handling," Austin repeated, with finality.
"He means it goes sideways," Della said, serving the
potatoes.
"Aeronautically sideways," Austin said. "Which is a
different category."
Emily asked questions about the aircraft with the genuine
curiosity that Austin found irresistible — not social questions
designed to extend a conversation but actual questions about how
things worked, what the training protocol was, how you taught someone
to respond to a machine that was misbehaving at altitude. Austin
would sit forward in his chair and explain properly, using the salt
and pepper shakers to model relative positions when words got
complicated, and the dinner table would become temporarily a briefing
room, which everyone found more interesting than the alternative.
Abbie Smith contributed to January dinners from her chair in the
parlor — she had developed the habit of remaining in earshot while
the younger people ate, participating in the conversation when it
interested her and ignoring it when it didn't. On the third Thursday,
she asked Emily, without preamble, whether she had any opinions about
the New York approach to winter.
"I was born in Illinois," Emily said. "We had
opinions about winter."
"Illinois winter is a different category from New York winter," Abbie said, which was, Lyle reflected, exactly the kind
of thing his grandmother would say, and exactly the kind of thing
that was entirely correct.
Georgia was always waiting at Hawthorn Street when they returned
from 30th Street, with dessert ready and the table already set. She
had discovered in November that Lyle preferred his coffee strong and
that Emily took hers with a small amount of sugar, and she produced
these without being asked, which was the highest form of hospitality
Georgia offered. The dessert changed from week to week — bread
pudding one Thursday, apple cake the next, gingerbread when she felt
the week had earned it.
On the second Thursday of January — the seventeenth, a year and
two days after the high school dance — Emily brought it up as they
walked back from the trolley stop.
"A year ago Thursday," she said.
Lyle calculated. "Almost exactly. The nineteenth was a Friday
in 1917."
"The nineteenth," she corrected herself. "Frank
Morrison. The gymnasium. You stepping on my toes."
"Once," Lyle said. "I stepped on your toes once."
"Twice," Emily said pleasantly. "But the second
time was debatable. The floor was uneven."
He took her hand on the dark January street. "Are you glad I
came?"
She looked at him with the expression she wore when a question was
beneath its own answer. "Are you?"
"Every day," he said.
She squeezed his hand and didn't say anything, because some things
are complete without an answer.
At Hawthorn Street, Georgia had made gingerbread, which told them
she had known what the date was and had planned accordingly. She set
it on the table without comment, poured the coffee, and sat down with
them in the warm kitchen while January moved past outside.
"One year," Emily said, looking at her cup.
"One year," Lyle confirmed.
"Good year," said Georgia, which settled the matter
entirely.
Rhythm At the PX
At the PX, January had its own rhythm. The holiday rush had
subsided into the regular tempo of a military base in winter — the
money orders still moved steadily, men sending home what they could
after the Christmas gifts had been posted. Lyle had taken on more
responsibility in the inventory and ordering side of the operation,
working with Corporal Briggs on supply projections and tracking the
patterns he'd been noting in his leather notebook since August.
The notebook was half-full now. He'd developed a system — daily
tallies on the left page, anomalies and observations on the right. He
had identified three recurring discrepancies in the supply chain that
suggested either a counting error at the warehouse or a systematic
problem in the requisition process. He had written a careful, factual
memo about these discrepancies and placed it on Briggs's desk in the
second week of January.
Briggs had read it, made no comment, and forwarded it upward.
In the third week of January, Lyle was called into a meeting with
Briggs and Lieutenant Goss, the base supply officer, who asked him to
walk through his findings in detail. Lyle did so from his notebook,
speaking clearly and specifically, the way he'd learned to present
figures at Marston's — no editorializing, just the numbers and what
they indicated.
When he finished, Lieutenant Goss was quiet for a moment. Then he
said: "How long have you been tracking this?"
"Since August," Lyle said. "When I first started."
"And you didn't report it until January?"
"I wanted to be certain," Lyle said. "Four months
of data is more useful than two weeks of suspicion."
Lieutenant Goss looked at Briggs. Briggs looked at the middle
distance with the expression he wore when he had already known
something and was waiting for everyone else to confirm it.
"Carringer," the Lieutenant said, "do you know what
a staff sergeant makes?"
"Yes, sir," Lyle said.
"You might think about it."
Lyle thought about it, on the trolley to Hawthorn Street that
Thursday, and decided that thinking about it was exactly the right
amount to think about it for now.
February — The Stripe
The promotion came on the fifth of February, issued with the brisk
efficiency of an organization that moves paperwork when it has
decided to move paperwork. Private First Class Lyle L. Carringer,
USMC. The stripe on his sleeve. The additional eight dollars a month
in pay.
Hennessey shook his hand and said he'd seen it coming since
October. Corporal Briggs made a notation in the duty roster and said
nothing, which from Briggs was a ceremony.
Lyle wrote to Emily that evening, in the Waterman ink on the
Christmas paper:
My Darling Emily,
Private First Class. The stripe is on my sleeve and the
mathematics have changed. Tell your mother I'm making progress.
Thursday. I'll explain further.
All my love, Lyle
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Emily read the letter Tuesday morning at the breakfast table and
showed it to Georgia, who read it, set it down, and poured herself
more tea.
"Good," Georgia said.
"That's all?"
"What else is needed?" Georgia said, returning the
letter. "He was always going to be promoted. Now he has been."
Emily folded the letter and put it in the pocket of her skirt,
where she would move it to her bag and then to the drawer in her room
where she kept all of them, in order, in the small cedar box that had
once held Georgia's correspondence and had been repurposed without
ceremony.
At Marston's, she told Gladys.
"Pay raise?" Gladys asked immediately.
"Eight dollars a month."
Gladys performed a rapid mental calculation. "And he's been
saving since August," she said. "For the you-know-what."
"He hasn't told me the amount."
"He doesn't need to tell you the amount," Gladys said.
"You know the amount."
Emily had, in fact, calculated the approximate amount herself,
which she felt was reasonable behavior for someone who intended to be
a bookkeeper. "Around May," she said.
"June," Gladys said. "He'll want it to be June."
Emily said nothing, but she thought about the date her mother had
mentioned once, the date on the marriage certificate that lived in
the cedar box alongside Lyle's letters — June 19, 1898, when
Emily's parents had married in Milwaukee, twenty years before.
Valentine's Day, February 14, 1918
The Tivoli on a Thursday in February was its winter self —
warmer than outside, the old bar gleaming under the gas lamps, the
room populated with the particular mix of San Diego's evening crowd
and the Navy's off-duty population that had become characteristic of
the city's downtown establishments since the war began.
Lyle arrived at Hawthorn Street with a paper cone of red
carnations from the flower concession near the base — the florist
hadn't had roses in February, and carnations were, Lyle had decided,
underrated by people who associated them with funerals and had never
looked at them properly. Georgia accepted them on Emily's behalf, put
them in water before Lyle could explain that they were for Emily, and
said they would last longer this way.
"Thank you," Lyle said.
"Don't thank me," Georgia said. "I did it for the
carnations."
Emily came down the stairs in the deep green wool dress — her
second-best, the ivory being reserved — and found Lyle in the
hallway holding his cap and looking like a man who has been presented
with a carnation situation beyond his control.
"She put them in water," Emily said.
"She moved very quickly."
"She always does." Emily kissed his cheek.
They walked to the Tivoli in the February evening, the city around
them in its wartime quiet — less traffic than before the war, more
uniforms, a different quality to the street life that everyone had
adjusted to without quite deciding to. The gas lamps along the
Gaslamp streets made the night golden, and the Tivoli's corner
entrance was bright and welcoming in the way of places that have been
welcoming people for thirty years and know how it's done.
The Boston bar gleamed its customary welcome. They found a table
near the back, ordered the roast beef as tradition now required, and
settled into the easy companionship that a year of Thursday lunches
builds into two people.
"Private First Class," Emily said, touching the stripe
on his sleeve with one finger.
"Since the fifth," Lyle confirmed. "Eight dollars
more a month."
"Gladys says June," Emily said.
Lyle looked at her. "Does she."
"She calculated. So did I."
"I see." He was quiet for a moment, turning his glass.
"She's not wrong. June was what I was thinking."
The dinner arrived and they ate, and the Tivoli moved around them
in its February way — a table of Navy officers nearby, two older
couples, a group of young men who were clearly on liberty and equally
clearly not yet old enough to handle it with complete composure.
It was over the apple pie that Lyle said what he had been
composing in his mind for two weeks, since the promotion and the
mathematics had changed.
"I want to talk about the wedding," he said. "Not
the ring yet — that's still a few months. But the wedding itself."
Emily set down her fork. She gave him the full attention.
"I've been thinking about what makes sense," Lyle
continued. "Given the war, given the cost, given that we both
have people who matter to us but not in the hundreds." He looked
at her. "I was thinking small. Family. The Reverend Crabtree.
Central Christian. A dinner somewhere modest after."
"I was thinking the same," Emily said.
"Georgia's lemon cake?"
"Obviously Georgia's lemon cake."
"Then we agree on the structure." He looked at her.
"What about the date?"
Emily had been thinking about this since Gladys said June, and
since she had gone home and looked at the cedar box and taken out the
marriage certificate. She looked at Lyle now with the directness she
brought to things that mattered.
"My parents were married on June nineteenth, 1898," she
said. "It would be their twentieth anniversary this year."
She paused. "I don't want to replace what they had. But I think
a date that carries something with it is better than a date chosen at
random."
Lyle was quiet, thinking about this with the seriousness it
deserved. He thought about Emily's father, who had died before Lyle
had met Emily. He thought about what it would mean to carry a date
that already held something.
"June nineteenth," he said. "1918."
"If you can get the liberty."
"I'll get the liberty." He looked at her steadily.
"Emily, I'm going to say this clearly, because I said it last
time in the dark outside a pavilion and I think it deserves saying in
proper light." He reached across the table and took both her
hands. "Will you marry me on June nineteenth, 1918?"
Emily looked at him. Around them, the Tivoli went about its
business, entirely unaware that something important was happening at
the table near the back.
"Yes," she said. "I will."
The roast beef was done. The apple pie was finished. The gas lamps
did what gas lamps do, which is to make everything look warmer than
it is. Outside, San Diego was still February, still wartime, still
uncertain about a hundred things that wouldn't be resolved for years.
Inside the Tivoli, Lyle Carringer held Emily Auble's hands across
the table and both of them knew that June was coming, that a date had
been chosen, that a future had moved from possible to planned.
"We should dance," Emily said.
They had discovered in December that the Tivoli had a small
cleared space near the back on Thursday evenings when the crowd
thinned, barely large enough for two people, where the sound from the
corner musician's guitar was good enough for the purpose.
The guitarist was playing something slow, the kind of melody that
knows it's February and accounts for it.
Lyle stood and offered his hand. Emily took it.
They danced in the back of the Tivoli on Valentine's Day, 1918, in
the light of gas lamps that had been burning since before either of
them was born. They danced slowly, because the music was slow and
February deserved slowness. And when the song ended and another
began—quicker this time, the guitarist finding a different
gear—they danced quickly, because that was also who they were: the
kind of people who could do both, together, without losing each other
in the change.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Postscript — written that night at the barracks:
My Darling Emily,
June nineteenth.
I'm writing it down so it exists in the right ink on the right
paper.
I'll get the ring before May. I'll get the liberty for June.
I'll speak to Reverend Crabtree on the next Thursday we pass
by the church.
The rest — the cake, the family, the day itself — I leave
to you and Georgia, because you will do it better than I could plan
it, and because the day should be yours before it is mine.
One hundred and twenty-five days. I have written it in the
notebook.
I love you, Emily. I have loved you since January 1917, and I
intend to love you until considerably after that.
Yours entirely,
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.
==========================
- 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
==============================================
Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver
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