10. Nellie Mary Chatfield & Edward Waldon McElhiney/Louis Lee Mote
5. Nellie Mary “Nellie May” Chatfield Mar 11, 1903: Rifle, Colorado: Two years after Roy was born, Nellie “Nellie May” Mary Chatfield came along. Nellie May was estimated to be two-and-a-half pounds when she was born, so teeny her mother kept her in a shoebox warmed by the wood stove. She was her fifth baby, but her first girl, and Nellie Chatfield molly-coddled her tow-headed wisp of a child. Nellie May and Roy were Nellie’s favorites of all of her children, and she spoiled them both, terribly.
It was in 1920 that Nellie May—at sixteen and the eldest Chatfield daughter—got a job working for the Diamond Match Company. Diamond Match paid good money for the day.
A clotheshorse as a young working woman, she had $5,000 worth of pearls and fancy brimmed hats, winter wool coats belted at the waist, calf-length plaid skirts and sashed tops tied to the side in streamers, cream-colored blouses with velvet ribbon running through the neckline, sheer ones cinched at the waist and coming down in a tunic, with a camisole underneath. Generous with her pay, she bought her sisters clothes too. (Ina never liked what Nellie May chose, but she wouldn’t complain as she didn’t want to seem ungrateful or hurt her sister’s feelings.)
Nellie May was a looker. Small boned and delicate, she was just over five feet tall. At twenty she entered a beauty contest, all the young women standing behind a curtain, showing only their legs. She won—the prize—silk stockings. In 1923 silk stockings were a rare luxury every woman appreciated.
There was a group of free-spirited beauties working at Diamond Match. Dressed in their uniforms, bloomers tucked inside their knee-stockings, hats protecting their hair, they stood together boxing matches. Before the final wrapping they carefully wrote their names on small white cards and inserted them inside. Men wrote back to them in care of the match company, enclosing photos of themselves and their friends. They were pen-pal letters, but some of these correspondences went on for some time, and some blossomed into romances. When they could the eligible young men arranged to meet the girls at the dance hall in Paradise, a half hour’s drive from Chico. Everyone danced at the dance hall in Paradise.
Letter from a Diamond Match pen pal, Chico, California:
Dear Nella May, Jan. 1, 1924
Sorry that I was unable to see you during my brief stay here, but thot I would write a little note of recognition if for no other reason than to let you know that I think of you and would have enjoyed seeing you very much, and am very sorry that circumstances would not permit it.
I hope you will write to me in Frisco and let me know what your address is, residence, I mean, as I understand you are really leaving the D. M. this time.
Well, wishing you worlds of luck starting today and continuing forever, believe me,
Your Friend, Pearl
P.S. How many good resolutions did you make this morning? I made three. I’m keeping them to myself until I make certain that I am loyal to them.
Nella May was a private person—good, true and kind. But times were changing. The Roaring twenties brought speak-easies, easy morals and easy money—the Victorians, Catholics, and Puritans rapidly losing ground to the Jazz age, flappers, political corruption and organized crime. Times were changing, and Grandma, along with the Pope and J. Edgar Hoover, did her personal best to stem the tide. However, Grandma was also losing ground. She ruled the house and her word was law—there was no question about that, but the more she tried to control her children—the worse things looked.
1926: Chico In April of 1926 Nella May Chatfield married Edward Waldon McElhiney, the first marriage in the family since her brother Howard married Evelene eight years before. He gave her a beautiful ring, a round-cut single-carat diamond between four inlaid rubies outlined by a ring of four deep-blue sapphires. McElhiney wasn’t Catholic so no mass was said at their wedding ceremony, a fact her mother never let Nella May forget. (Nellie wanted her children to marry in the Church even though she hadn’t. Grandpa Chatfield was a member of the Masonic Order but quit in 1923 after she demanded he convert to Catholicism. Maybe he thought she’d let him back in her good graces if he did. She didn’t.) Nella May was just getting started collecting black marks in her mother’s book.
Apr 24, 1926: Chico Newspaper, Chico, Butte Co., California:
SATURDAY, APRIL 24, 1926
Chico Girl is Bride of Truckee Man
CHICO—(Butte Co.) April 24,— Miss Nellie Chatfield. A member of a well known family in Chico, a graduate of the local schools and of the business college, was married on Sunday to Edward McElhiney of Truckee, where the couple will make their home.
The ceremony was performed by Rev. J.B. Dermod, of St. John’s Catholic Church, in the presence of the relatives of the bride, including her parents, Mr. and Mrs. C.H. Chatfield, her sister, Miss Verda Chatfield, and her brother, Gordon Chatfield.
The groom formerly lived in Miller, Neb., and is now employed by the Southern Pacific Company at Truckee.
Note: Nellie May, 23 and a graduate of Heald’s Business College, marries Edward at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Chico
Edward worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad in Truckee and from April through November they lived in a side railed boxcar. It was too cold to cook outside and his new wife tried to cook a chicken dinner in their makeshift living quarters. Edward Waldon McElhiney laughed at her. The romance of living in a boxcar in the middle of winter is one thing to endure, being laughed at is another. Sometimes it’s the small things that finally make a woman take flight. Eight months pregnant, she left her husband and moved back home to her mother’s where she gave birth to her firstborn, naming him after her older brother and after St. Joseph: Roy Joseph McElhiney. They called him Buster. Then word came to Chico that McElhiney was killed in a train coupling accident a short time after she’d left him.
In 1930 Nella May wanted to move to the Bay Area and lived on Chestnut Street in Oakland. She borrowed money from her brother Roy for the move and gave him her wedding ring from Edward McElhiney as collateral. She married a second time to Louis Lee Mote. It wasn’t until she was married to Mote that word came to her about Edward McElhiney. Turns out he hadn’t been killed after she’d left him. It was a case of mistaken identity; her first husband was still alive. Oops.
Nella May left her second husband soon after. He was a drinker and a man who slapped her around. When Buster got in between the two of them to protect his mother who was now pregnant with her second child and Buster ended up on the other side of the room from a swing from Mote, she knew it was time to pack up and leave.
Mote ended up in the Philippines where he had an eye put out by a broken beer bottle in a drunken brawl. His other eye went unsighted in sympathy and he spent the rest of his life somewhere up in Texas, or maybe Utah, in a home for the blind.
When Buster was eight or nine he was sick with a lung infection and spent a year in Del Valle Arroyo, a tuberculosis hospital near Vallejo. He didn’t have tuberculosis but he was quarantined the whole time he was there so he wouldn’t catch it. The year Buster was there not one person came to visit him not because they didn’t care but because he was too far away. In the mid-1930’s most people walked everywhere, to church, to school, to the shops; few people had cars during this time. Alone in his room, he spent his time reading, mostly volume after volume of the Wizard of Oz. After Buster had recovered, his Uncle Charley and Aunt Velma drove Nella May (she didn’t drive) to pick him up and brought him home to their house on 28th and Chestnut in Oakland. His mother had just had Beverly, her third child and second daughter, with no father in sight.
Buster was a handful and Nella May didn’t know what to do with a young boy. Left to fend for himself, he’d often be gone for two or three days, off exploring, sleeping wherever he could. His mother didn’t ask him where he’d been when he came home. It was even harder now for Nella May to raise Buster so Charlie and Velma took him into their home in Lodi for about a year and a half. He was happy there. Then one summer day when he was working in their fruit stand, bucking their authority he said, “You’re not my parents.” His Aunt Ina took him for a month or two after that.
Then a fourth child came along. Barbara was eight and a half pounds, a huge baby for someone as tiny as Nella May, and the birth did not go well. Nella May tore badly and was in a convalescent hospital with her new daughter for three months. Beverly, Mary Ellen and Buster stayed in a foster home until she could get back on her feet.
On Barbara’s birth certificate, Edward “Walter” McElhiney is listed as the father with Residence Unknown, his profession as Drug Store Clerk. Nella May was living on Chestnut Street in Oakland and was 35 years old with a son, three young girls.
Nella May kept her first husband’s last name and gave that name to all four of her children. She was on the outs with her mother for a long time and for years her mother was beside herself with her eldest daughter. But Grandma was beside herself with most anyone who broke the rules. Who Beverly and Barbara’s fathers were, no one knows. Maybe McElhiney came back into her life. A man turned up on her doorstep once, wanting to see her but she refused, saying he’d caused her enough trouble. Nella May never talked about the bad side of life including her own. When Beverly asked her mother about it once, Nella May’s response was, “What are you trying to do, give me a migraine?”
Twenty years later Nella May paid Roy back the money she had borrowed and went home to collect her ring. Roy had given it to Grandma for safekeeping. The ring didn’t get brought up until it was time to go and when Nella May and her daughters were ready to leave, she asked for it back. Grandma knew the ring was the reason her daughter had come and she’d hidden it in a pocket of her bloomers. Leaving the room to remove it in privacy, she walked back into the front parlor and plunked it in her eldest daughter’s out-stretched hand, snapping, “This ring has caused more trouble in this family than it’s worth.” Grandma may have been partial to Nella May as a child, but she certainly hadn’t any partiality for her since that fancy diamond, ruby and sapphire ring appeared on the scene.
As I Was Told:
It wasn’t a reunion when I met Howard and girls. I was about 11 or 12 years old, so that would have been about 1949 or 1950. Howard came over because my Mom was in town to visit Grandma and to get her ring back. Howard probably hadn’t seen my Mom in years. It was a very happy day. Bev, Mac (Roy, known by Buster as a child), my mother and I made the trip to Chico, my brother driving us up there. My sister Mary Ellen didn’t make it as she was married and living in Kentucky. It was during the summer and it was really hot.
Barbara (McElhiney) Clauson
On Nov 21, 1983, Nella May died at the age of 80 of a stroke in Martinez, Contra Costa County, California and was buried with her daughter in the Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Lafayette, Contra Costa County, California.