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 early January 1919, and their life changes again.
I asked my AI Assistant Anthropic Claude to tell the story of Emily and Lyle experiencing the New Year's Eve and going back to work (I offered helpful suggestions!).
(AII Google Notebook Infographic -- Early January 1919)
Emily and Lyle’s Story – New Year’s Eve 1918 and Early January 1919
New Year's Eve, 1918
By the last evening of 1918, San Diego had decided to be happy.
The war was over, the Board of Health had lifted the order a week before, and the newspapers had begun to report, with an air of cautious triumph, that the influenza was in retreat. The theaters had reopened. The dance halls had unlocked their doors. And on Tuesday the thirty-first, as the winter dusk came down over the bay, the whole of downtown seemed to be moving toward Broadway with the same purposeful cheerfulness.
Lyle had a liberty pass until one in the morning. Corporal Briggs had signed it before Lyle finished asking, which Lyle decided not to examine too closely.
He wore his dress blues. Georgia had brushed them herself that afternoon with a stiff little clothes brush, standing in the front room with her mouth set in a line, working across the shoulders and down the sleeves until not a mote of dust remained, and had then inspected the result with the expression of a general reviewing a regiment.
"You'll do," she said, which was what she had said at the wedding, and which Lyle understood by now to be the highest praise in her vocabulary.
Emily came out of the bedroom in the ivory dress.
She had worn it only twice since the day Lyle gave it to her, once to the Tivoli on the last night of 1917 and once on a Sunday in the spring, and it still fit her as it had the first time, as though the dress and the woman had been waiting for each other. She had pinned her hair up, and Georgia had lent her the small silver brooch she wore to church. She stood in the doorway of the front room and looked at him in his uniform, and he saw her expression change, saw something warm and fierce come up behind her eyes.
"What?" Lyle said.
"Nothing." Emily came across the room and straightened his collar, which did not need straightening. "I'm proud of you. That's all."
"I haven't done anything. I've stood behind a counter."
"You've done exactly what you promised. You said you'd come home, and you did." She smoothed the front of his jacket. "I'd like to walk down Broadway on your arm tonight and have every person we pass see exactly what I'm looking at."
"I'll try not to disappoint."
"You've never once managed it," Emily said, and took his arm, and they went out into the evening together.
They ate at a small café on Fifth Avenue, one they had passed a hundred times in the course of a Monday and never tried. The room was crowded and loud and cheerful, with paper streamers on the ceiling and a waiter who had given up trying to take orders in sequence and simply brought what was available. They had roast chicken and a dish of creamed potatoes and a slice of apple pie that Emily divided with her usual geometric precision, and they ate with their elbows nearly touching the next table's, talking to the sailors on one side and a young couple from Los Angeles on the other, none of whom they had ever met and all of whom felt like old friends.
Afterward, they walked to a dance hall a few blocks away, one of those that the Board of Health had shuttered in October and that had reopened on Christmas Eve with a banner across the front that read WELCOME BACK. Inside, an orchestra of seven played fox trots and one-steps and waltzes with great energy and no discernible subtlety. The floor was packed with uniforms, sailors in white, soldiers in olive drab, Marines in blue, and women in every color of dress that wartime economy had allowed, laughing and spinning in the lamplight.
"Ready?" Lyle asked.
"You've been practicing," Emily said, with the smile that meant she remembered every step of the first dance.
"I've had two years."
"Then show me."
He did. They danced the one-step and then the fox trot, a pair of waltzes in the middle, a lively number that left them both out of breath and laughing. Around them, strangers danced with strangers, and at the edge of the floor a young soldier with one sleeve pinned up cut in on a girl in a green dress, and the crowd made room without comment. Emily watched him for a moment with her head on Lyle's shoulder. "Everyone here has been somewhere," she said quietly.
"Not everyone."
"Most of them." She lifted her head. "I'm so glad you weren't."
At a minute to midnight, the orchestra stopped in the middle of a waltz, the lights dimmed, and the bandleader announced that it was time. The crowd began counting down in unison, and when the count reached zero, the hall exploded into noise. Horns blew. Confetti fell. Somewhere a bell was ringing and a siren answered it, and the whole of downtown San Diego seemed to take a deep breath and let it out.
Lyle kissed his wife.
"Happy New Year, Mrs. Carringer," he said.
"Happy New Year, Private First Class," Emily said. She smiled up at him, the lights of the dance hall sparkling in her eyes. "Nineteen nineteen. I think it's going to be a good year."
"Georgia says so."
"Georgia is usually right."
They danced until one o'clock and walked home through streets full of people in no hurry to go to bed, arm in arm, her head against his shoulder, the ivory dress catching the streetlights as they passed. Georgia was waiting up in the front room with a pot of tea and a plate of gingerbread, and she did not ask how the evening had gone. She only looked at their faces and put the kettle on.
January — The Slow Winter
The new year opened in rain.
San Diego winters were mild but not dry, and January brought a week of steady downpours that turned the streets to mud and drove the trolley passengers into a state of damp resignation. On the base, the rain drummed on the barracks roofs and the PX counter went quiet, as it had gone quiet every day since the middle of November.
There was less and less to do. The recruiting stations were closed, the training companies disbanded, and the sound of drill that had filled the parade ground every morning since the previous spring had faded into silence. In its place came the work of undoing: the inventories of rifles and uniforms and bedding and boots, the thousands of pages of records, the long list of men whose names had been posted on the bulletin board and who left, a few at a time, by the morning train.
Hennessey's letter arrived in the second week of January, five pages in a flourishing hand. He had made it to Sacramento, he reported, in time to see his mother, and then promptly returned to San Diego, where he had married his Coronado sweetheart on the eighteenth of December in a ceremony attended by her entire family and a very large dog. The best decision of my life, he wrote, and I've made it on a Marine's severance pay. Tell Corporal Briggs I'm sorry about the counter.
Briggs read the letter when Lyle left it on the desk and gave it back without comment. But that evening Lyle noticed that the Corporal had pinned a small card to the wall above the register, a notice about the reorganization of shifts, and had added in pencil at the bottom, in his cramped hand: Congratulations, Mrs. H.
On Monday the thirteenth, with his liberty pass in his pocket and a letter from Lieutenant Goss folded inside his jacket, Lyle walked down Broadway to Marston's.
He had been thinking about it since Christmas. The Corps had not told him when he would be released, and it might not tell him for months, but the question of what came after had begun to take shape in his mind, and he did not want to wait for the answer until it was too late to plan. He had a wife and a mother-in-law to support. He had a house to build. He needed to know that there would be a place for him.
The store looked exactly as he remembered it: the broad staircase, the polished counters, the faint smell of floor wax and new fabric that had been the atmosphere of his youth. He stood for a moment in the main aisle and let it wash over him. Then he asked a clerk for Mr. Peterson, and the clerk, recognizing the dress blues, hurried to find him.
Mr. Peterson, the floor manager who had spent December patrolling an empty store with a feather duster, received him in a small office on the second floor. He was a tall, stooped man in his fifties with spectacles and a habit of tapping his pen against his knee. He shook Lyle's hand warmly and listened to the whole request without interruption.
"You want your job back," he said at the end.
"When I'm released, sir. I don't know when that will be. It could be spring."
"And you were a floorwalker before you enlisted."
"I was. But I'd like to work in the accounting office, if there's a place. I've spent the last year and a half doing supply and inventory records for the Marine PX." Lyle took the letter from his pocket and laid it on the desk. "This is from my supply officer, Lieutenant Goss."
Mr. Peterson unfolded it and read. It was a short letter, a paragraph and a signature, but it said, in plain military prose, that Private First Class Lyle L. Carringer had identified and corrected recurring discrepancies in the base's supply records, had served as acting bookkeeper for the Post Exchange, and was to be regarded as a man of exceptional accuracy and reliability.
Mr. Peterson read it twice. He set it down and looked at Lyle over his spectacles.
"I'll tell you something, Carringer," he said. "I have three men in the accounting office who have never once found a discrepancy that wasn't pointed out to them first. I've been wondering for a year how to explain to the owners that I need somebody better." He tapped the pen against his knee. "Yes. The job is yours. Accounting office, with a raise from what you were making before. You'll start the day the Marines let you go."
"Thank you, sir."
"Don't thank me. Come in and show me this letter is accurate."
Lyle walked out of the office with his hat in his hand and a lightness in his chest that he had not felt since Christmas. On the main floor he met Charlie Morrison, who was just coming off a delivery and stopped dead at the sight of him.
"You look like a man who's just won a prize," Charlie said.
"I got my job back."
"Of course you did. They'd have been fools not to." Charlie clapped him on the shoulder, hard. "When?"
"When the Corps lets me go."
"Then I'll see you in the spring," Charlie said. "And I'll tell you right now, I'm not going to treat you any better than I treated you before."
"I wouldn't expect it."
"Good." Charlie grinned. "Welcome back."
Emily at Marston's
Emily's hours increased in January.
The store, which had spent a month locked and silent, now filled from the moment the doors opened until the moment they closed, as if the whole city had been saving its money for a year and had decided to spend it all at once. Soldiers came home to find that their sweethearts wanted gloves. Sailors bought handkerchiefs by the dozen. Mothers bought dresses for daughters who had grown two inches in the past year. The January white sale, long postponed, drew a crowd on the first morning that stretched down the block, and Emily stood behind the accessories counter from eight o'clock until six, selling and wrapping and counting change, and at the end of it felt a sense of satisfaction so profound that it took her a moment to recognize.
"It's good to be busy," she told Gladys at lunch. "I didn't know how much I missed it."
"You were home six weeks with a textbook and your mother," Gladys said. "I think you'd have missed anything."
"I'm learning bookkeeping."
"I know. You've told me. Eleven times." Gladys sipped her tea. "How is it coming?"
"I've finished the second book. Mr. Peterson says there may be a place in the accounting office for a woman who can do double entry, if I want one, someday." Emily stirred her soup. "I'm not sure yet."
"Of course you want it."
"I want a great many things."
"I know," Gladys said. "That's why you're the most interesting person I know."
At home, the household settled into a rhythm that Emily found almost unbearably comfortable. Georgia was up before the others, as always, and the smell of coffee and toast was already in the kitchen by the time Lyle and Emily came in. She shopped in the mornings and cleaned in the afternoons and cooked in the evenings, and in between she tended the garden with the single-mindedness of a woman who has made a private bargain with the soil. The tomato vines were long since gone, and in their place stood rows of peas, lettuce, and chard, and a bed of sweet peas along the fence that Georgia had planted in November and that were already climbing in determined green ropes. Mrs. Alcott leaned on the fence most afternoons to discuss the progress. Georgia, who disliked being watched, allowed it.
"I'm told by Mrs. Alcott that I'm overwatering," Georgia said one Sunday at dinner. "I explained to her that she was mistaken."
"What did she say?"
"She said the peas looked well. I said that was my point."
Lyle, who was finishing his soup, caught Emily's eye across the table and looked quickly away, and neither of them said anything, because there was no point in laughing when Georgia was being serious.
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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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- 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
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Lyle’s Party and an Armistice, Mid-November 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: After the Armistice -- Mid-November to Early December, 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: The December Quarantine and Christmas 1918
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Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver
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