Olive was the second Turner sibling, born Nov. 4 1867 in Surprise Valley CA. She is shown here with her husband Fred Toye; with her baby Adeline, her father, and her paternal grandmother; and with (we think) her second child Wilber.
She married Frederick Wilbur Toye, and they lived in Alameda. Fred Toye was from Nova Scotia, went to sea, and ended up in San Francisco. He built a house in Alameda in 1890, then married Olive on June 6, 1894. Their daughter was Margaret Adeline Toye Cox, whose oral history of the family can be found at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. (We have a digital copy.) They also had a younger son, Frederick Wilber Jr. For some period of time Olive's mother,
Adeline Martha Mann Turner, lived with them.
A living relative says of Olive: "She had an almost pixie-ish quality to her. She was very petite. She had the same kind of -- I wouldn't want to say restrained, but her laugh, it must have been the way they [Jessie and Olive] were brought up, they laughed very gently."
This is a closeup of her from the Turner Women 1931 picture:
The following pictures were taken at two separate family occasions (though Olive is wore the same dress to both) in the late 1940's in San Francisco at the home of her niece Elliot Jr (daughter of Wallace):
In the left-hand picture she is with Elliot Jr., her brother-in-law Fred Hurt, and her sister Jessie Turner Hurt. That's Jessie again in the right-hand picture:
Adeline Cox says of her mother:
My mother . . .
was working for the firm
in San Francisco. Another employee of the firm was married
and living in Alameda, about a block
down from my father s house.
My mother came over on weekends from time to time to spend
the weekend with this family, and that s how they
met.
My mother [had]
a sense of inferiority that
was terrible and partly was due to her size. I haven't mentioned yet: She was 4' 10". Her mother (my grandmother),
my Aunt Jessie, and my
mother had very thin hair, very
thin hair.
As the second oldest (and oldest
girl) in a family of six children,
she was perhaps early given responsibilities beyond her years, which
may have led to a feeling
of failure, Her father drank to excess.
This may have been one of the reasons
for leaving Jackson. When she
was working in San Francisco,
she often had to look
her father up, when he was on a binge,
and get him home on the ferryboat
to Berkeley, where they were then
living. She had girl
cousins in San Francisco, who were about her age and who worked in the
same office. Some of the
San Francisco and Berkeley relatives were also
in better financial circumstances. They were more buxom
than she, and were more sophisticated in
dress and manner. The
fact that her hair was so thin was a continual source of disappointment
to her. All of this tended
to increase what may have been an
innate shyness; at any rate she failed to assert herself. She was very close to her
mother, who was of a more dominant nature.
My mother and father, I think
lived for their children. I don t know that
they particularly resented the restrictions of money. Although my mother was conscious
of the fact that she had relatives who were "better
off" financially.
My father was a "parlor
pink." My father was a Socialist, in name only. My mother's brother-in-law [Jessie's husband Fred Hurt] had come
up through the business world and had
succeeded financially better than my family.
Why these two men kept
on arguing, I'll never know. By then (the 30s) the Berkeley
family (Jessie and Fred Hurt) had a car, an automobile I mean,
and they used to come over and
take my mother and father on picnics or even for overnight
weekend jaunts. The two women would
sit there while the two men argued,
you know, capitalism versus
socialism . . . My uncle was
very, very conservative.
My mother was a great
one for family connections. She enjoyed writing letters. She kept up with everybody,
with her letters. She was a little strict about Sundays. She wouldn't allow herself to tat on
Sundays, but she would allow
herself to write letters.
For many years,
since my grandmother and my
Aunt Jessie were living in Berkeley,
we went to my grandmother s for Thanksgiving, we came to our house
in Alameda for Christmas,
and we went to my
Aunt Jessie s for New Year s. By now there were
younger cousins than myself, you see. My Aunt Jessie and Uncle
Fred had three, and my Uncle Henry and Aunt Marie had three.
They were all younger than I. That went on for a good
many years, until all of the children
were getting a little too old
for that, at the adolescent age and no longer interested. But for,
oh, I suppose, five, six, eight years,
we always it was
understood that these family dinners would be one place for Thanksgiving,
one place for Christmas,
and then another place for New Years.
My mother and father, as I think I've indicated,
didn't have many expectations for themselves.
My father was interested in supporting his family and earning
a living. My mother was the seek-peace-and-pursue-it type who saw herself
as a housewife and a child rearer. When I or my brother
later began to do well in school, I think they put
all of their eggs into their children s baskets. They had no ambitions
for themselves. They were willing to make sacrifices for us. They were very proud
of us. Perhaps I ve
said we were not a demonstrative
family, but I don t recall
ever missing that or having
any idea in the world that they didn t love
me or weren't later proud of me.
When I would
go to these affairs [church activities etc.], my mother always said, "Don
t forget that you come of a long
line of ladies." I thought
that was a little
funny because I had always thought of ladies as being
on a higher economic level than we!
Olive died March 23, 1958, in Alameda.
