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 preparing for the wedding in April and May 1918 (I offered helpful suggestions...).
(AI Google Notebook Infographic -- Wedding Blueprint - April-May 1918)
Emily and Lyle’s Story: Rings and Househunting: April and May 1918
Della's Birthday, April 11
Della Carringer turned fifty-six on a Thursday, which made the celebration simple to arrange — Lyle's Liberty Day and his mother's birthday fell on the same date, and nobody had to negotiate a schedule to make it work.
Emily had thought carefully about the gift. Della was not a woman who wanted for much and would have been equally content with nothing, which made the choosing harder rather than easier. In the end, Emily went back to the French kid gloves that Gladys had first mentioned in November — the good ones, soft grey, with the small pearl button at the wrist. Not the elaborate suggested for someone attending the opera. The practical, beautiful kind, suited to church and visiting and the ordinary dignities of a life well lived.
She wrapped them herself, without Gladys's assistance, and presented them at the 30th Street table after Della's dinner — pot roast, at Austin's request, because pot roast was what Austin always requested and Della always obliged.
Della opened the box and went still for a moment, the particular stillness of someone receiving something chosen with real attention rather than obligation. "Grey kid," she said, turning them over. "Emily, these are lovely."
"Gladys helped me pick the color," Emily said. "But I chose the gloves."
"They match nothing I own and everything I own," Della said, which was, Lyle thought, exactly the kind of thing his mother would say and exactly correct. She put them on then and there, at the dinner table, and wore them through the rest of the meal with the particular pleasure of a woman who does not often treat herself and has decided to enjoy being treated.
Abbie, from her chair, observed the gloves with an expert eye. "Good leather," she pronounced. "They'll last twenty years if she doesn't get them wet."
"I don't intend to wash dishes in them, Mother," Della said.
"See that you don't," Abbie said, and returned to her cake.
Georgia had sent along a jar of preserved lemon curd — "for the days when cake isn't enough," she'd said, handing it to Emily before they left Hawthorn Street — which Della received with the particular gratitude of one excellent cook recognizing the work of another.
Ring Shopping, Late April
The ring conversation had been circling for weeks before they finally addressed it directly, on the third Thursday of April, over lunch at the café on Broadway.
"I've done the arithmetic," Lyle said, which was how most important conversations with Lyle began. "We have enough for a modest ring and the first month's rent, with a small reserve. Not both a diamond and a gold band. One or the other, if we want it to be a proper stone."
"I don't want a diamond," Emily said, which she had been thinking about for some time and said now with the directness that made these conversations efficient. "I've always liked opals. Or a pearl. Something with color, not just brilliance."
"An opal has bad luck associated with it, traditionally," Lyle said. "I read that somewhere."
"I don't believe in traditional bad luck," Emily said. "I believe in good rings."
"Then an opal or a pearl." He was quiet for a moment. "I was thinking sapphire, if I'm honest. The color would suit you."
"You have an opinion?"
"I've had an opinion since February. I didn't want to impose it."
"Impose it," Emily said. "I'd like to hear it properly, not have it filtered through diplomacy."
"Sapphire," Lyle said. "Blue, set in gold. I think it would be handsome without being showy, and I think the color is exactly the kind of blue that would suit your coloring, and I have thought about this a great deal more than a Marine private ought to think about jewelry."
Emily considered this with real attention. "I'd have said pearl a month ago," she admitted. "But sapphire isn't wrong. Let's go and look, and I'll know when I see it."
For Lyle's own ring — a plain gold band, which he wanted and Emily agreed was correct — there was no debate at all. "Gold," Emily said. "No stone. You're not a stone kind of man."
"I don't know what that means."
"It means you'll wear it every day at the PX counter, and a stone will catch on things," Emily said, which was precisely the kind of practical reasoning Lyle found irresistible in her.
They went shopping that same afternoon, working their way down the jewelers of downtown San Diego with the seriousness of two people spending money they had worked hard for and did not intend to spend carelessly.
Marston's own jewelry counter was the first stop, out of loyalty and convenience, but the selection ran toward diamonds and larger stones meant for a different budget than theirs. The clerk was kind about it, showed them what they had, and suggested they might do better at one of the specialty jewelers downtown.
J. Jessop and Sons on Fifth Avenue was next, the shop with the tall ornamental street clock out front that had been keeping San Diego's time since before the Exposition, its gears and seventeen gemstones from the Jessop family's own mine ticking along the sidewalk while Lyle and Emily went inside. The clerk there showed them a case of sapphire rings — several set in gold, at prices that ranged from possible to well beyond possible. One ring, smaller than the rest, with a modest sapphire in a simple gold setting, caught Emily's eye immediately, though she said nothing and moved on to look at the others out of a sense that she shouldn't decide too quickly.
Schiller's, a few doors down, had a smaller selection but a kind proprietor who took real time with them, understanding within minutes that they were not customers to be rushed toward the most expensive option. Ernsting's, around the corner, had mostly diamonds and struck them both as slightly beyond their register the moment they walked in, though they looked politely at what was offered before thanking the clerk and moving on.
"The one at Jessop's," Emily said, once they were back out on Fifth Avenue in the April sun, the street clock ticking behind them. "The smaller one. I keep thinking about it."
"The one you didn't say anything about."
"I didn't want to seem too eager in front of the clerk. He would have raised the price through sheer enthusiasm."
Lyle laughed. "That's very cynical."
"That's very practical," Emily corrected. "I learned it at the gloves counter. Never show a salesperson exactly what you want until the price is settled."
They didn't buy that day — Lyle wanted to think about the numbers one more time, and there was value, they'd both learned from their retail years, in not deciding on the first pass. But when Della heard about the afternoon's shopping at dinner later that Thursday, she had her own suggestion.
"Have you looked in the Sears catalog?" she asked, over the roast.
"For a ring?" Lyle said.
"They carry rings. Wedding bands especially — plain gold, good quality, sold by weight and karat, and considerably less than what you'll pay a jeweler for the same gold simply because there's no shop window to maintain." Della had ordered from Sears for years and regarded the catalog with the unsentimental respect of someone who had found it reliable. "Your gold band, certainly. Possibly even the sapphire, if you're willing to order and wait for it rather than seeing it first."
Emily and Lyle looked at each other. "I'd rather see the sapphire," Emily said. "But the gold band — "
"The gold band, from Sears," Lyle said, doing the arithmetic in his head. "That's real savings. Enough to make the Jessop's sapphire possible without touching the rent reserve."
They perused Della's Sears catalog that week, found the wedding band selection — plain, honest gold, exactly what Emily had described Lyle as needing — and placed the order with three weeks to spare before June. The following Thursday, they returned to Jessop's, and Emily tried on the smaller sapphire ring properly this time, under the ticking of the famous street clock's cousin-clock inside the shop, and it fit her hand as though it had been waiting there since February.
"That one," she said.
"That one," Lyle agreed, and paid for it in cash he had been saving since the promotion, feeling the particular satisfaction of a man whose arithmetic has finally come out exactly right.
House Hunting, Mid-April Onward
Georgia and Della had been watching the rental advertisements in the San Diego Union since March, independently at first and then, once they discovered the overlap, in a kind of informal partnership conducted through Thursday dinner conversations.
"The Fern Street flat is taken," Georgia reported on the first Thursday of May, with the flat finality of someone delivering unwelcome but not devastating news. "I inquired Tuesday. Rented a week ago."
"There will be others," Della said. "Golden Hill has several. Sherman Heights too, though it's a bit further from the trolley in places."
The requirements, once they sat down to specify them properly, were straightforward: three bedrooms, one level — Georgia had said, without elaboration, that stairs were not a feature she intended to negotiate with daily for the rest of her life since her late husband had fallen before his death, and nobody argued the point — furnished, since they had no furniture of their own to bring, and within easy reach of the trolley line that would carry Lyle to Balboa Park each morning.
They spent the last three Thursdays in May walking streets in Golden Hill and then Sherman Heights, with addresses circled in the newspaper, Georgia's cloth bag over her arm, comparing porches and kitchens and the particular quality of light in different front rooms. Golden Hill offered handsome older houses, several with a room to let or a whole house available for families whose sons had gone to war and needed the income more than the space. Sherman Heights, a little further south but still an easy trolley ride, had smaller, plainer houses at correspondingly plainer rents.
The house they settled on was on Harrison Avenue in Sherman Heights — a single-story cottage, three bedrooms, furnished by a widow named Mrs. Halloran who was moving in with her daughter in Pasadena and wanted the house occupied by responsible tenants rather than left empty. She showed them through it herself on the last Thursday, pointing out the good bones of the kitchen stove, the decent size of the back bedroom that would suit Georgia, and the small garden plot in back that had gone to seed but could, she said, be brought back with attention.
Georgia looked at the garden plot for a long moment. "It could," she agreed.
The rent was fair, the trolley stop on Commercial Street two blocks away, and Mrs. Halloran seemed satisfied by Lyle's uniform and steady employment and by Georgia's evident competence, which she seemed to sense within minutes of meeting her. They shook hands on it that afternoon, with a deposit to hold the house and the lease to begin June 15th.
"Furnished," Emily said, on the trolley home, going through her mental inventory. "But furnished doesn't mean equipped. We'll need proper linens, kitchen things, the small items that make a house work."
"My kitchen has more pots than three people need," Georgia said. "And enough dishes for a small dinner party, which we are unlikely to hold in the first month. We'll bring what we have and buy only what's missing."
Emily made a note in the planning book: Move Georgia's kitchen goods, linens, silverware to Harrison Avenue by June 30th.
The Logistics of June
By the last week of May, the planning notebook had grown thick with lists, and the remaining items had sorted themselves into a clear sequence that Lyle, with his auditor's instinct for order, had arranged by date.
He submitted his request for off-base housing to Corporal Briggs in the last week of May, along with the marriage date and the new address on Harrison Avenue, effective June 15th. Briggs processed it with his usual wordless efficiency, though he did look up once, briefly, and say: "Good street, Sherman Heights. My sister lives near there." This was the longest personal remark Briggs had made in ten months of service, and Lyle recorded it in his notebook as a historic event.
The marriage license would need to be obtained from the county clerk on June 13th — close enough to the wedding to be current, far enough ahead to allow for any complication. Emily wrote it on the calendar in red ink, which was her method for marking things that could not be moved.
The wedding itself, June 19th, at Central Christian, with Reverend Crabtree already informed and the date entered in his book since March.
The honeymoon at the US Grant Hotel, June 19th through 21st, two nights, already arranged.
Occupancy of the Harrison Avenue house beginning June 15th, ahead of the wedding, so that Georgia could begin the process of moving some essential belongings — kitchen goods, the linens, the towels, and some of her own room's furnishings — over the days before the ceremony, settling in gradually rather than all at once. Georgia herself would complete her move by June 30th, giving Lyle and Emily their two honeymoon nights and a few days of settling in as a married couple before the household became, fully and finally, three. They would need Austin’s automobile for some of the bulkier items.
"It's a great deal of sequence," Emily said, looking over the notebook one Thursday evening at Hawthorn Street, the calendar spread between them with its red-inked dates.
"It's exactly the right amount of sequence," Lyle said. "Everything in its order. Nothing forgotten."
Georgia, from her chair, looked at the calendar over her knitting. "June fifteenth, house. June nineteenth, wedding. June thirtieth, me." She counted this off with evident satisfaction. "A good month, arranged properly."
"You keep saying that," Emily said. "That June will be a good month."
"I keep being right," Georgia said, and returned to her knitting, and outside the Harrison Street window, San Diego moved through the last of May into June, closer every week to the summer that all three of them were building, one careful arrangement at a time.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Written that night, Waterman ink, the good paper:
My Darling Emily,
The ring is in my footlocker, wrapped in a handkerchief, where I check on it more often than a sensible man should. The gold band arrives from Sears within the fortnight, according to the catalog's promise.
The house is arranged. The date is arranged. Briggs has approved the housing request and made the longest speech of his career doing it.
Eighteen days. I have started counting down instead of up, which Georgia tells me is a sign that the waiting has become the good kind.
Yours in every particular,
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. In this case, I don't know what their swedding rings looked like. I do know where they resided after their marriage.
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)
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