Tuesday, January 4, 2022

Carringers in the News -- The Lyle L. Carringer Gardens in San Diego in 1935

It's time for another edition of "Carringers in the News" - a weekly feature from the historical newspapers about persons with the surname Carringer (my mother's maiden surname) that are interesting, useful, mysterious, fun, macabre, or add information to my family tree database.

This week's entry is from the San Diego [Calif.] Union newspaper dated 24 March 1935:

The transcription of the article is:

"Carringer Gardens, Model of Beauty,
Have Also Wealth of Entertainment
By Ada Perry

"Mr. and Mrs. Lyle L. Carringer, 2130 Fern st., are never bored with their garden.  They have four fish pools in it filled with finny pets that are always on the move.  Sometimes they move out on the grass but the Carringers chalk this up to playfulness and continue to enjoy the aquatic aspects of their home.

"The Carringer place is distinctly in the livable small garden or outdoor living room class.  The pools are strategically located to invite folks outdoors for pleasure and relaxation.  One pool, the smallest, is placed near the rear door of the house as a starting point.  From there to a sunny larger pool planted to lilies and overhung with shrubs is a natural step.

"Other parts of the garden planted to flowers, cacti and succulents and several fruit trees are easily accessible from the second pool and then the Carringers and their friends naturally gravitate to a lath house furnished with chairs and tables.

"There are sources of amusement in the lath house.  The remaining pools are located there.  One is a rill in the heart of a pretty rockery and the other a shadowy oval presided over by a rice plant with curving stalks topped with laves like giant hands.  Directly above the pool a tree fern rests apparently on the water.  The invisible stand which holds it up represents some clever household ingenuity.  It was formerly a piano stool.

"A grill is built at the end of the lath house on a rock structure.  The grill space can be filled with a decorative potted plant when not in use although the Carringers have found it a consistent entertainer.

"Next the grill in a glass house annex is a surprise feature.  On shelves are aquariums filled with tropical fish, paradise, moons, guppies, and other fancy swimmers weaving about in grassy water jungles; blinking, gobbling and raising families in the most distracting style.  The glass house is heated for them and each aquarium has individual radiators and thermometers for perfect comfort.

"Tropical aquariums are often kept indoors but the Carringers have theirs handy to the pools where fish life from goldfish to guppies can be observed.  Certain of the tropicals are moved to the goldfish pools at favorable times for variety."

The source citation is:

"Carringer Gardens, Model of Beauty,Have Also Wealth of Entertainment,San Diego [Calif.] Union newspaper, Sunday, 24 March 1935, page 18, columns 5-6, Lyle L. Carringer garden article;   GenealogyBank, Newspaper Archives   (https://www.genealogybank.com : accessed 3 January 2022).

Lyle L. Carringer (1891-1976) and Emily Kemp (Auble) Carringer (1899-1977) are my maternal grandparents.  The built the house at 2130 Fern Street in San Diego in 1920, and resided there for about 30 years.  My mother grew up in that house and garden.  Lyle loved to build things and was very creative.  Emily was a horticultural expert and loved the gardens.  My guess is that building and maintaining the gardens, the pools, the lath house and the glass house were evening and weekend projects for the whole family.  I have very distant memories of playing in the lath house and glass house and recall the goldfish pools as a young boy.  After 1946, my family lived in the building on the south side of the gardens.  They sold this house in 1950 and the new owner built a fence to wall off his property.  

There are hundreds of Carringer "stories" in my family tree - and this was one of them. Life happens, accidentally and intentionally, and sometimes a newspaper article provides more detail about your very close family.  I am glad that I can honor my grandparents, Lyle and Emily (Auble) Carringer, today.

You never know when a descendant or relative will find this blog post and learn something about their ancestors or relatives, or will provide more information about them to me.

                                  =============================================

Disclosure: I have a paid subscription to GenealogyBank.com and have used it extensively to find articles about my ancestral and one-name families.


Copyright (c) 2022, Randall J. Seaver

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1 comment:

Lateboomer said...

Happy New Year, Randy!

Thanks for sharing this clipping! I love gardening, and enjoyed reading this write-up on the Carringers' garden. The report mentions ponds, and I wondered if you had any family photos of your grandparents' backyard at all from this time period?