On Her Own: Journalistic Adventures from San Francisco to the Chinese Revolution, 1917-27

Journalistic Adventures from San Francisco to the Chinese Revolution, 1917-27

Milly Bennett, A.Tom Grunfeld

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315492353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Born in 1897, Milly Bennett lived an extraordinary life that led from her native San Francisco, to Honolulu, to China for the revolution, to the Soviet Union on the eve of World War II, to the Spanish Civil War, and home again, a journey punctuated with many love affairs, triumphs, and disappointments. This memoir of Milly's early years through her extended stay in China, places the current political turmoil there into a broader historical perspective. Nominally an autobiography of a remarkable woman and her brief time in China, it goes beyond the narration of an individual life by contributing details of a period of great instability, as well as exploring the sensitive topic of the involvement of foreigners in the internal politics of China.

1

MY MOTHER was born on a lively day in San Francisco in 1880 in one of the three-story brownstone houses around the square at Russ Street and into a well-respected, prospering Jewish-German family. Her father, Louis Goldmeyer, got out from under the government purges of the socialists in Germany in 1848, reaching San Francisco in a wagon in 1852.¹

Grandpa established a laboratory among the sand dunes. He was an industrial chemist and his specialty was perfumes. But the inhabitants of the roaring shanty-town went right past his door. What they wanted was liquor and beef, blankets, saddles, and pans and shovels for gold mining and not elegant, refined smells. To keep from starving to death, young Goldmeyer put aside his test tubes and lotions and installed a butcher block.

"Even your grandfather couldn't help making money in those days," my peppery-tongued Grandmother Goldmeyer would say.

When I was growing up, but still young enough for bedtime stories, my mother would tell me about the things that she used to do when she was a girl on Russ Street. "... And so my brothers buried the doll, she was dressed in red silk like Little Red Riding Hood and so tall that she stretched to my chin. They buried the doll in the garden at the back of the house. They said that a doll tree would grow, and I watched the spot for days waiting for the first green shoots of the tree that would be covered with dolls...."

"... My braids were long. I could sit on them easily, but I cut them because short hair was stylish. But when I looked at myself in the glass I burst out crying, I looked like a scarecrow...."

" ... Your grandfather arranged with the captain of a ship going to South Africa to give passage to your Uncle Sam; people said in those days that a long sea voyage was good for consumption. But the ship never reached port, and we never heard from Sam from that day to this."

When my mother talked about her father, a change came into her voice, a kind of tenderness so that I could feel, even as a small child, that she had loved her father dearly.

"Your grandfather was a poet at heart," she would say, "He was a butcher, yes, but he wrote beautiful verses in German and Spanish, and they were published in the newspapers."

I have among my books a worn copy of Bellamy's Looking Backward, which is inscribed in a flourishing German script, "to my darling daughter Miriam on her 16th birthday, January 19, 1896, from your father Louis Goldmeyer. 'The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.'"

Eventually a dishonest business partner and speculation on the mining exchange wiped out the fortune that Grandpa had accumulated in the butcher business, and he was able to sit back in his old age and enjoy himself in the way that he liked best, shmoozing with his cronies, selling a lottery ticket or two, and taking an order for coffee.

"Your grandfather never cared about the responsibility of business," said my mother, "he never put much value on money."

Once, after Grandpa was a ruined man, he won a thousand dollars in the lottery, and promptly his sons Abe, Isaac, and Alec gathered around with plans for investing the windfall so that it would bring Grandpa and Grandma a little income.

"He listened to everybody and then he went and paid a few bills that his thief of a partner had left standing," said my mother.

I remember what Grandpa Goldmeyer was like in 1904, the year that he died. He was seventy-seven then, a small man and lean, but rugged and straight as a ramrod. He had thick, snow-white hair and a snowy, spade-shaped beard. Piercing blue eyes looked out from under shaggy brows in a face that was filled with kindness and good humor. Every tooth in his head was sound, and he boasted, if you could call it that, that the way he kept his teeth good was to dip his fingers in wood ashes each morning and rub the ashes on his teeth and gums.

Grandpa was an energetic walker, his gait was a half-trot, and he ran my short, seven-year-old legs off when he took me for my afternoon airing in South Park.

"Never sick a day in my life," he would say, an amused eye on my grandmother who was several years his junior but forever complaining of her aches and pains.

Grandpa had a theory that the doctors willy-nilly murdered a man once they got him on the operating table and under an anaesthetic. It was enough to make the old man your enemy for life to suggest that he ought to see a doctor and have a thorough going over.

An old and painful rupture became unbearable at last, and Grandpa went to the hospital, fighting the "butchers," as he called them, every inch of the way. He watched the surgeon operate, he was adamant to the end about the chloroform.

"It's all right now," he called out to my mother as the nurses wheeled him away from the surgery.

"And he winked at me, big as life," my mother used to say, "remember how your grandpa used to wink when he wanted you to know he was joking."

Grandpa fell into a deep sleep from which he never awoke.

I was being shaken to wakefulness. I was stirring in the warm nest of blankets and my mother's voice was in my ear.

"Mildred! Get up! Get up, dear!" The voice was pressing against me. I was opening my eyes into a room that was entirely dark, and my mother was hauling me out of bed with her hands and her voice, out of sleep and out of the woolen blankets and into a wakefulness that was black, unnatural, and chilly. She was lifting me in her arms over the side of the child's bed, shoving my arms into the sleeves of my flannel wrapper and shunting me toward the front of the flat.

"Imagine! The earthquake did not wake my little girl," she was saying in her loving and comforting voice, "a little child sleeps through anything, I guess."²

My father³ was standing in the bay window of the front room, his back toward us, but he spun around fast at my mother's footfall.

"Min," he cried, "it's the Coast Range, the Coast Range has erupted."

The bay windows of our Rincon Hill house looked at the waterfront and northward at downtown San Francisco. I went over to where Papa was. Smoke was going up from many buildings, streaming straight up into the early, windless sky. Even as I watched, I saw smoke begin in new places.

"It's fire, Max, the city's on fire!"

My father's answer was to say that we must clear out, then. We had to get away from San Francisco.

There was no water in the taps. There was no gas in the stove. The earthquake had terminated these modern conveniences.

"We'll take food and go to my mother and sister Bertha," said Papa. These relatives lived across the bay in Oakland.

I saw my mother wince. I knew that it was her nature to give in to my father and without airing her views. On this occasion she had something to say.

"Let's stay home. Imagine the crowd that will be running to Bertha, Flora, and the children, Adolph, Huldah . . . .There won't be another earthquake. The big ones never come twice."

My mother was pleading, she was saying to my father that she could not desert her city when it was in trouble.

The sky was becoming darker with the smoke of the burning. I stood watching, reluctant to return to my room and dress properly, although my father had mentioned it a time or two.

Breakfast was bread and butter and an apple. The grownups had no coffee, the little ones no cocoa.

"We'll get dressed and see what to do."

The family of four, Mother, Father, Mildred eight, and Arnold six, got out on the street, down the long steps past the garden of coarse, rusty ivy and a dusty royal palm ... to where the neighbors were collecting and wandering. The Ponds, the Christys, the Jorgensons, the Semples. The Semples were old country Irish, and no lace curtains about it; Hugh drove a truck, Ellen and Mary Jane were in service, old mother Semple walked Harrison Street in her horny barefeet, and nobody, no thing could put the shoes on her.

"The Valencia Hotel fell in, it sunk in the earth to the second story and hundreds, their souls rest in peace, buried alive."

"The water mains bust and they are fighting the fire with dynamite, you can hear it, there... that's one!" It was a blunted thud, like a boxer's glove hitting bone.

I had noticed the little earthquake shakings going on all the while as the morning grew older and the sun was a round, rayless ball of fiery orange in the sky, but it was not scary, not for me, it was exciting, like the end of the world, which was an idea that was never far from my imagination.

It became unpleasant to breathe in the street. The air was becoming increasingly filled with bits of stuff, some of it still burning. It was hot, oppressive, chokey.

"We're getting a cart from Charlie's stable," I heard Mrs. Christy tell my mother, "and taking the children and the bedding to Golden Gate Park. It's the safest, I tell Charlie. No walls there to fall down on your head."

Mother and I went to the grocery store on the corner of First and Harrison to buy the supplies my father said we had to have.

The place was crowded with the neighbors. They all seemed to be shouting, and they all had stacks of groceries in their arms.

"Mr. Meiggs! Here, Mr. Meiggs!"

My mother was scowling over the piece of paper in her hand. She was unhappy over the long, unusual order.

Cans of peaches were stacked in a pyramid from the floor to the ceiling of the grocery. I saw this pyramid shiver, shudder, and then begin to sway.

I was out in the street under my mother's arm and all the other people were milling around, crying, "That was a lulu!"

"Heavier than the first one!"

I have no recollections of what that earthquake felt like under my feet, all I will know forever is the sight of the pyramid of cans beginning to move under the ceiling.

My father was with us. His face was furious, as if my mother had arranged the earthquake. My father was like that.

"We're going to my sister's," my little brother Arnold Victor was dangling on Papa's hand, "at least I'm going to Oakland, and I'm going to take my children."

There wasn't any argument left in my mother after that second heavy quake.

"I'll get the insurance papers, Max. I can put my hand right on them."

"Sure, go, go and let the house fall in on your head."

"Mother, my muff and fur, you promised, if we are going away, please, my muff and fur."

Once, earlier in the day, I had gotten on a chair, pulled the box with my Christmas furs from the shelf in my closet, and decked myself. The furs had been removed and returned to the dark blue tissue paper. "For Sundays," my mother said. I loved those furs more than I had ever loved any article of clothing in my life; a flat, white Angora collar with matching muff and a purse with gilt clasp on the top of the muff.

My mother went back up the stairs slowly, leaving my father to mutter, "I wouldn't go back into that house for a million dollars," while clutching me firmly by one hand and my brother by the other.

"I want to go with mother," I hollered, "I want my furs."

After a bit Sinbad, our ginger-colored cat, came tearing down the steps, flying up the street without aye, nay, or a nod. Arnold and I looked after him, bug-eyed.

My mother was standing there, stuffing some papers into her purse.

"I let the cat out, Max," she said, "I had to give him a chance."

Arnold began screaming for Sinbad, I remembered my angoras and gave him excellent support. Nobody seemed to hear us.

Sure enough, the Bremler relations were congregating at the Queen Anne shingle house in East Oakland that was Aunt Bertha's.

A score or more of family refugees had already arrived by the time we got there and were busy digging in.

Some were making up cots in the halls. Some were putting featherbeds over mattresses in Aunt Bertha's stable at the end of the grassy backyard where the sorrel mare and fringe-topped surrey were lodged. Some were organizing bunks in the garret under the steep Queen Anne roof.

Aunt Bertha was straw bossing the feverish activity. She was a short, plump, blondish woman with pretty features over which settled a perpetually cross and nagging expression. Aunt Bertha was what my mother called "crazy clean." Her sharp blue eyes were drawn to dirt the way a needle is drawn to a magnet.

I can hear Aunt Bertha's piercing lamentations through the halls of her home that eighteenth day of April ...