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 mid-November 1918, and the world becomes a different place.
I asked my AI Assistant Anthropic Claude to tell the story of Emily and Lyle celebrating Lyle's birthday and the Armistice of World War I in mid-November 1918 (I offered helpful suggestions!).
(AI Google Notebook Infographic -- Mid-November 1918)
Emily
and Lyle’s Story: Lyle’s Party and an
Armistice, Mid-November
1918
The Party, at Last
The quarantine lifted on Saturday the ninth of November, and Emily
had the notes in the mail that same afternoon. Birthday supper,
Sunday the tenth, six o'clock, the Carringer home. Better late than
never, she wrote at the bottom of each card, in a hand that showed
she meant it.
Everyone came. Charlie Morrison arrived first and loudest, having
apparently been waiting by the door. Gladys came behind him with a
tin of cookies and a stack of newspaper clippings. Eddie Hartwell and
Frank and Dorothy Yamamoto arrived together, and Ruth Clemens came
straight from a shift at the telephone exchange in a state of
cheerful exhaustion, announcing that she had not heard an unrelated
sentence in three weeks. Robert and Florence Teague came with a book
for Lyle and a bottle of cider for the table. Davey and Amy arrived
with Maybelle, who at sixteen was now considerably taller and had
opinions on aviation and motion pictures that she delivered in equal
quantities. Matie came with a pie, Edgar with a stack of newspapers,
and Abbie, who had been placed in the best chair before anyone else
reached the house, accepted the arrival of each guest as her due.
The talk in the parlor kept returning to the same subject. Several
days earlier, on the seventh of November, the newspapers had run wild
with a report that the war was over, and the city had gone briefly
mad with bells and whistles before the report was found to be false.
The real armistice, everyone agreed, couldn't be far behind. The
German government was said to be in collapse. The Kaiser was said to
be wavering.
"I'll believe it when the whistles blow twice," Charlie
declared. "I've had my celebration once already this month, and
it was premature."
"It was embarrassing," Gladys said. "I hung out of
the window at Marston's and shouted."
"At what?"
"At Mr. Peterson. He was passing underneath. He took it very
well." She paused. "He's since been avoiding me."
Abbie, from her chair, informed the room that she had lived
through the Civil War and wished to note that the end of a war was
always more complicated than its announcement. "There will be a
good deal of fuss," she said, "and then everyone will
wonder what exactly they're to do next."
"What are you going to do next, Lyle?" Eddie Hartwell
asked, perhaps more directly than he intended.
The room quieted slightly. Lyle looked at the cake, which Georgia
had that moment carried in with the ceremony it had earned, and then
at Emily, who gave him a small steady nod.
"Wait for orders," he said, "and then do as I'm
told. That's all a Marine knows how to plan. But I have a house to
build after that, if I'm lucky, on Fern Street. And a wife, and a
mother-in-law to keep fed. That's a good deal to be going on with."
"I'll keep myself fed, thank you," Georgia said, setting
the cake on the table. "But I take your point."
The party that followed was the best Lyle could remember, which he
realized with some amusement that he had also said about his previous
two birthdays and every Thanksgiving. The cake was cut, the toasts
offered, and Charlie's rendition of "Happy Birthday"
remained loud, enthusiastic, and mostly in the right key. Maybelle
took charge of the phonograph, and after a certain amount of
persuasion, there was dancing in the cleared space between the parlor
and dining room: Eddie with Ruth, the Yamamotos together, Gladys
partnering Charlie with a firmness that left him little choice.
Near the end of the evening, with the plates cleared and the
family gathered in the parlor, Lyle took out the Kodak and organized
them for a group photograph: Austin and Della in front, Abbie
enthroned between them, Edgar and Davey and Amy and Maybelle behind,
Georgia standing a precise six inches to the side of everyone as if
to show she was there but not in any way required, and Emily at the
center with her hand through Lyle's arm, until Charlie took the
camera from him and said, firmly, that the photographer had to be in
the picture too.
"Hold still," Charlie said. "All of you. Hold very
still."
They held still. The shutter clicked. And for a moment there was
an entire family in one small rectangle of light: grandparents and
parents, uncles and cousins, a new wife and her mother, a young
Marine in a borrowed civilian jacket with his arm around the woman
he'd danced with in a high school gymnasium twenty-two months before.
Monday, November 11 — The Whistles
The first whistle blew a little after midnight.
Emily woke to it, a long, rising note from somewhere down toward
the harbor, and lay listening in the dark. Then another joined it,
and another, until the whole waterfront seemed to be shrieking at
once, ships and factories and locomotives all pulling their cords
together. Church bells began, though the churches had only just been
allowed to open again. Somewhere nearby, somebody was banging a pot
with a spoon.
Lyle was already sitting up. "That's not the same sound as
last week."
"No," Emily said. "It isn't."
Georgia appeared in the bedroom doorway in her nightgown and a
shawl, her gray braid down her back. She did not look alarmed. "The
war is over," she said, as if confirming an appointment.
They never did quite get back to sleep. By morning the street
outside was alive with people. Mrs. Alcott came out in her nightcap
and then retreated and came out again in her hat. Neighbors who had
barely nodded to one another for months were embracing in the road.
Lyle dressed in his service uniform by lamplight, aware that his
liberty day was about to disappear, and a boy on a bicycle confirmed
it before he'd finished buttoning his collar: all Marines were to
report to Balboa Park immediately. The base was sending a detachment
downtown.
He kissed Emily at the door. "I'll find you," he said.
"I'll be on Broadway," she said. "Look for the one
waving."
"There will be forty thousand people waving."
"Look for the one who's waving the hardest."
Marston's, it turned out, did not open that morning. By the time
Emily and Georgia reached downtown, the department store had put a
sign in its door, Closed in honor of the Armistice, and its
employees were pouring out into the street. Gladys found them at the
corner of Fifth and Broadway, hatless, her hair half undone, laughing
and crying at once.
"I've been here since seven!" she shouted over the
noise. "Isn't it wonderful? I've kissed a sailor!"
"Several, I hope," Emily said.
"Three. I've lost count after that."
Broadway was a river of people. They filled the sidewalks and
spilled into the street: shopgirls and sailors, bankers and newsboys,
mothers with children on their shoulders, old men in Grand Army caps,
soldiers from Camp Kearny, civilians in masks that were mostly
forgotten around their necks. Flags hung from every window. Paper
fluttered from the upper stories. The Navy ships in the harbor,
dressed in bunting, kept up a steady chorus of whistles, and from
somewhere came the blare of a brass band that couldn't quite decide
which song it wanted to play.
Georgia stood on the curb in her good hat with her cloth bag in
both hands, unmoved by the chaos and entirely present in it. "I
came to this country in 1889," she said, almost to herself. "I
was the first person in my family to be an American. I never thought
I'd live to see them need one in a war."
"Mother," Emily said.
"I'm all right." Georgia's chin lifted. "Look. Here
they come."
The Marines came first, marching down Broadway in the dress
uniforms they had been told to put on without notice, their boots
hitting the pavement together in a rhythm that cut cleanly through
the noise. After them came the sailors from the Naval Training Camp,
thousands of them, their white hats bobbing in lines that never
seemed to end. The crowd roared for all of them, though none of them
had been to France, though none of them had fired a shot at an enemy.
They had been trained and ready and waiting, and they had done
everything asked of them. The cheers did not seem to care about the
difference.
Emily saw him in the fourth rank of the Marine detachment, a
slight man in dress blues, marching in step with his eyes straight
ahead and his face set in the disciplined blankness of a man who was
trying very hard not to look at the crowd. She didn't wave. She did
something Gladys later told her was more effective: she stood
absolutely still, her hand pressed against her mouth, and let him
find her.
He found her. His eyes moved for half a second, the only break in
his stride, and then returned to the front. But it was enough. In the
line of marching men, in the roaring river of Broadway, Lyle
Carringer smiled.
Evening
They were home by dark, the three of them, tired in the particular
way that joy makes people tired. Lyle arrived at eight, his uniform
dusty, his voice hoarse, and Georgia had a plate of warm stew waiting
without having been asked.
"The Corporal let us go at six," he said, eating. "Half
the base is still downtown. I think Briggs may have been seen
smiling."
"You're making that up," Emily said.
"I'm not. Hennessey swears to it. He says it lasted two
seconds."
They sat together in the front room afterward, the three of them,
with the window open to the sounds still rising from the city.
Whistles and bells and singing, the long, happy noise of a place that
had held its breath for a very long time. Lyle took out the notebook
and then put it away again, since there was nothing in it that seemed
to need recording.
"What happens now?" Emily asked, quietly.
"I don't know," Lyle said. "The war's over. But I
enlisted for four years, and the Corps hasn't said anything about
that. Some men will be sent home. Some will be kept. Nobody's told us
anything." He turned his hands over in his lap. "I'll go on
at the PX until someone tells me otherwise."
"And then?"
"Then the house on Fern Street. Work. Whatever comes."
He looked at her. "That's all any of us can plan for."
Georgia, who had been listening from her chair by the window, set
down her knitting. "The house will be warm," she said.
"Whatever comes. I shall see to that." She said it without
any particular emphasis, as though she were reading from a household
list, and returned to her work. But Lyle and Emily looked at each
other across the lamplight, and neither of them found it necessary to
say anything more.
==============================
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
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Monday People -- July and August 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: September to Early November 1918
==============================================
Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver
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