My father Vern and I drove up to Arlington, Washington, on September 12, 1985, at my request to see my uncle Charlie and aunt Ethel a few days before I left Seattle to get married in New York and move overseas. I had wanted to get some first-hand testimony from Charlie, who was the last surviving child of the original five which had included my grandfather, W. S. (Bill) Robison. I was pretty sure (and was right) that this would be my last opportunity. The result of this meeting was a few pages of handwritten notes taken at the time; a few historic photos I borrowed and copied; and a couple of pages in my journal that evening.
I remember on the occasion being somewhat annoyed and frustrated at my father who, although he was happy and even eager to accompany me on a trip to see his uncle, kept interrupting my line of questioning with jokes and extraneous remarks while it was happening, then asked me later in the car-ride home about details of Charlie’s story he couldn’t recall. “If you had taken notes instead of talking,” I said, “you’d know the answer to your questions!”
Charlie makes reference in my transcript of the conversation below to The Great Conflict, a book W.S. Robison’s father-in-law, William Alphaeus Bass wrote and had printed in 1925. In the introduction to that book, W. A. Bass had written that “after years of study” he entered the Methodist ministry, which he exercised for 16 years. He then became a Presbyterian minister for 14 years before returning to the Methodists and retired as Elder in Puget Sound M. E. Conference. Bass then wrote in his introduction:
From 1909 to 1914 I passed through a most trying ordeal, which drove me into what is commonly called avowed infidelity. This led me into the realm of free thought, where I cut every cable and drifted out into the rolling sea of research.”
It was probably this period of the “trying ordeal” that Charlie is referring to below. W. S. Robison became W. A. Bass’s son-in-law in 1911, right in the midst of this period. The two men seemed to have been on friendly terms, in spite of the event Charlie describes here. Bill married Mabel, W. A.’s daughter, in W. A. Bass’s parlor on Brooklyn Avenue, and the Basses lived with the W. S. Robison family for years.
Bill [i.e., his father, W. S. Robison] paid to have The Great Conflict published. Bill used to joke that Bass “had decided to rewrite the Bible.” This was after Bass had been kicked out of his church in Fremont by his congregation. Dad [W. S. Robison] took me to the meeting at the church — this is the only time I know him to have gone to church, ever! The superintendent of the Sunday school got up and made a remark that could have been taken to be offensive by Rev. Bass. Bass jumped up and went over to the guy — his name was Conn — and shook his fist in his face and said “you want me to smash your face?” The congregation threw him out, with Dad laughing the loudest of them all. Bass tried to form another church around the corner, at 42nd and Evanston. The building is still standing, but that only lasted for about a year.
According to Charlie, Bass was hot tempered and didn’t get along easily with people.
Bill [W. S. Robison] bought a farm for him [W. A. Bass] east of the lake, but he never lived there. The Basses lived in a basement apartment of the house on Brooklyn, which Bass had owned but lost to Calhoun, Denny & Ewing, the holder of the mortgage. Bill got it back by reading the contract carefully and finding a technicality the real estate people didn’t observe. Calhoun, Denny & Ewing were always out to get Bill after that, but they never did.
[Calhoun, Denny & Ewing, which had started in Seattle in the 1880’s, had already been incorporated as Ewing & Clark in 1900, but must have been well known under its old name, which Charlie used. The Ewing & Clark website claims that they’re now the largest brokerage firm in Washington State. So Robisons: beware, they still might be out to get us!]
Charlie said that his father William O. had been a carpenter, framing houses and so forth, and had had a shop in Carthage, Missouri, where he specialized in making coffins. He remembered a black walnut one with an oval top, “carved by Wm. O.,” which took a month to make and for which he charged $40. He said that his father’s Civil War pension (after President Cleveland) was $37 every three months. (President Cleveland served two, non-consecutive terms: March 4, 1885 – March 4, 1889, March 4, 1893 – March 4, 1897. My guess is that the pension amount cited by Charlie was from Cleveland’s second term. But I don’t know.)
Charlie speculated that the family may have moved from Carthage to Seattle in part for the health his brother Bill (W. S. Robison). Bill had had typhoid in Carthage, he said, possibly from drinking water from a cistern. According to my notes, Charlie also said that W.S. went to “B. F. (Benjamin Franklin) Day School” in Fremont. (That school, at 3921 Linden Avenue North, is still in service and is the oldest continuously operating public school in Seattle). W. S. also worked, said Charlie, at a conveyor belt in a saw mill in Freemont, and had learned the upholstery business. He also said that Bill “went to see George (his older brother) in Arkansas for a year.” When would that have been? It must have been after the summer of 1900, when George (at age 19) had married Florence (age 21) but were both living as newlyweds in the Robison household in Carthage, but before 1906, when W. S. launched himself in the real estate business in Seattle.
“Bill had all the ambition,” Charlie said of his brother. He noted that he was always helping out members of the family.
In speaking of his mother, Charlie said that Sarah J. Victor’s brother “Ali” was killed by Quantrell’s Rangers, a notorious gang of Southern sympathizers, which terrorized great swaths of Missouri and elsewhere before and during the Civil War. “Ali was caught and killed near Carthage when it became known that he intended to enlist in a Union regiment.”
(This was apparently a favorite MO of Quantrell’s people: find out which young men in a neighborhood were said to be thinking of enlisting with the North, then raiding the area and killing them before they could report. I have not been able to confirm that Sally Victor had a brother named Ali or something resembling that. Charlie, as the baby of the family, was close to his mother, and this is clearly a story that Sally told and made an impression on Charlie, but it requires more research.)
Charlie also told me that his mother’s mother had been Mary L. Monroe, a distant (2nd or 3rd) cousin of President James Monroe. Her family had had to wait for the Mississippi to freeze before bringing their wagons across when she came West with her family. Charlie showed me a daguerrotype of Mary Monroe taken in advanced old age. Monroe’s husband, Samuel M. Victor, died while Sally was young, and she remarried a man named Robert Nichols. Sally had a half brother Walter Nichols from this union. Walter later came to Seattle and worked for W. S. in some capacity. The relations between Sally and her step-father Nichols were not good, I was led to believe.