Jessie Dewey Cutting (Richardson)

by Madge Richardson Walsh, 2001

Jessie Dewey Cutting was born in San Francisco on November 5, 1895, in the apartment building her grandfather Cutting built next door to his home (both were still standing in the 1980s). Jessie was the third of five children, with two older sisters and two younger brothers. Her parents were not particularly happy at having another girl; when her proud father had rhapsodized in the family Bible over the birth of the first two girls, endowing them with lovely names — Marjorie Adele, Ida Mary — number three was recorded simply as "another girl." No mellifluous name for her, either: she was named Jessie after her mother. 

The Cutting home was in Honolulu, where her father, Eugene Cutting, worked as a sugar broker. When Jessie was about 11, and after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, they moved permanently to the mainland. Her mother had made regular visits to San Francisco to have her children; all these trips except the last were made in sailing ships.

In the Bay Area, they had a house on Nace Avenue in Piedmont, and Jesse went to the Piedmont Avenue School. 

Another disappointment developed: Jessie was born with congenital bilateral hip dysplasia in which the hip fails to make a socket for the thigh bone, and could not walk until a specialist operated on her when she was three. For one hip, the operation was successful; the other was not so, and she always walked with a limp. In her later years, arthritis compounded the pain, and her movements were restricted and she tired easily.  

This was not a period where women were encouraged to go to college, but Jessie persuaded her parents to let her attend what was then the California School of Arts And Crafts. This was during the tenure of Frederick Meyer, of Perham Nahl, and Xavier Martinez. Despite little support for her work, she did finish school, and did her practice teaching in art at University High School in Oakland, and then went into commercial art. She illustrated such new clothing fashions for Capwell’s department store sale brochures. 

Capwell's Advertisement, Oakland Tribune, Oct. 13, 1922

We have two of her oil paintings, one a still life exercise, the other the tawny hills and oak trees in the Piedmont uplands. While her active art career was brief, she remained a wonderful teacher, as her patience was infinite.

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Jessie died in 1984; in a gesture of his deep love for her, Russell established a scholarship at her alma mater, which is now known as the California College of the Arts. The Jessie Cutting Richardson Memorial Scholarship is awarded annually to 1-3 full-time students who are either U.S. citizens or eligible noncitizens and who demonstrate financial need and academic merit at CCA. Her family continue to donate to the fund so that her memory may remain alive in the hearts and hands of its many recipients.

Richardson Family Papers: An Introduction

In the early 1980s, Madge Richardson Walsh, as the self-nominated family historian, started pulling together family stories and letters with an eye to publishing them for family members. Two volumes of the Richardson-Smith-Street Family Papers were self-published by Madge. In the days before computers and internet, Volume I (1983) entailed photocopying photos and typesetting on an electric typewriter; Volume II (1991) was assembled using an early version of Microsoft Works. The first volume was embellished with poor quality photocopies; the second with photographic prints hand-pasted onto the correct pages, and hand bound, much to the chagrin of her family, who lived for months with a dining room transformed into an assembly line of signatures (groups of pages sewn together) and hardboard being covered with matching quaint cotton print (brown on white for Volume I, white on brown for Volume II), each completed book being pressed by bricks on a sheet of plywood as they dried. Each volume was hand-numbered; at least 31 copies of each were made and distributed to family members. 

With these small successes, and empowered with increasingly powerful computers and software, she outlined a total of five volumes: Volume III was to be her father Russell's memoirs and wartime letters, as well as a charming story written by Florence Grinsted Richardson; Volume IV was to be dedicated to George Owen Richardson's Autobiography and a Memoir by David Fay Richardson. The pièce de résistance was to be Volume V: Recollections of My Life Work, a transcription of the Journal George Warren Richardson's (GWR), the Richardson family patriarch, which spanned a key part of this country's history.

By the time of Madge's death in 2015, the various pieces of these and other writings were scattered throughout her disorganized home: the Alzheimer's that ravaged her brain also stole her organizational ability. Some of the pieces were found in their entirety on one floppy diskette (Volume II), others printed out at 50% in several copies (Owen's journal transcription abruptly ends mid-sentence), and even more were just snippets on disk in outdated software formats or individual hard copy pages. Many family artifacts were passed on to her nephew, who has published the story of GWR's Journal as The Abolitionist's Journal; Most of the cartons of letters that she refers to are now lost to time, but the photographs and other items are or will be professionally digitized, and the most historically significant will be housed in a world-class library.

In 2000, she writes about her progress on the project in a letter to her nephew James Richardson:

As you know, I’ve been working up the family tree, aiming toward printing GWR’s autobiography for the family. I practiced by starting with my father’s generation—but after the first two little volumes, I got bogged down, because when I started on Dad’s memoirs, I discovered he had saved every family letter he had ever received, for over 60 years—cartons of them. Mother kept the letters he wrote to her, and in return she had written to him every day when he was on the USS Gridley.

It was so overwhelming, I decided to skip to their parents’ generation, as both David Fay Richardson and George Owen Richardson had written memoirs, and the younger two boys and Emma are mentioned in them. David Fay unfortunately wrote only a few chapters, with tantalizing remarks about what he was going to write about, but never did. Still, with the letters and a bit of research in the county deed records in Roseburg, Ore., there is enough, and Ruth and Florence both already had told quite a bit about him.

Uncle Owen (as he was usually referred to) wrote a whole book. I’ve transcribed it all, and am annotating where it seems to need it. Since he was very close to his father, and was associated with him particularly during their ministry in Texas, there are passages you may find very illuminating. There is much to read between the lines. It is also intriguing to read about the same incidents as told by GWR and then by Owen.

What has held me up on this book has been some of the annotating, as well as the format—this volume will not be hand-bound! that’s for sure, and I’ve been trying to learn to use a scanner so I can incorporate photos with the text...

As a way to preserve these stories, I offer up the pieces of this project that I have or can reconstruct with the aid of fellow family historians, and will add pieces as they come. 

Next: Table of Contents

My Mother's #MeToo

When the school called my mother because I was wearing pants instead of a dress, my mother stood up for me.

When the school counselor (also the pastor's wife in our small town) called my mother because I signed up to take wood shop in 7th grade, my mother stood up for me.

When I got my driver's license, my mother told me how the day she got her own car, she discovered what freedom really was.

I heard about her successes: the undergraduate degree that wasn't an MRS, the graduate degree and academic honors in a time when women didn't do that sort of thing.

I heard about the time the bank wanted her husband's signature to open an account in her name. The bank manager heard about that too.

She endured what we now call micro-aggressions--those subtle and not-so-subtle reminders that a woman wasn't welcome in a traditionally male realm.

She knew it was happening, and she didn't remain silent, even in a time when feminism wasn't a word in everyday use. Even something as innocuous as her sorority scrapbook, full of theater programs, matchbooks from clubs and restaurants, and wedding announcements from her sorority sisters, there is a piece of paper pasted in with her note.

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I had to park in the lot behind the KA house one day -- this is what I found under the windshield wiper when I came back:

Little Miss Chi O,

There are certain prerequisites you must meet before obtaining a semester pass to park in this lot. Certain measurements, little acts of ---, etc. Never having seen you in our house president's room, I realize only too well that you have not qualified for a pass to park here. Therefore, if you are interested in a semester pass to park in this lot, drop around anytime - someone will give you your test.

The Masked Marvel
KA

Grammie, or a DAC Parliamentarian

On this day in 1941, my Grammie, Ruth Neely Thompson Walsh became a widow. They had been married 17 years, and her son (my father) was only 13. With what would have been termed moxie at the time, she picked herself up, and soldiered on, running the Biltmore Hotel in San Francisco on her own. Her integrity got her written up in the newspaper more than once, but that's a story for another day. After she retired, she plunged headlong into a rich social life of playing bridge, having coffee with friends, and researching genealogy, which led her to hold many offices in groups like the DAR and DAC.

In March 1960, she pens the following letter to her son and daughter-in-law, who have just had their first child. She writes chatty letters, but this one, posted from room 640 of the Statler Hilton in Los Angeles provides a window into her unflagging energy and focus. At the time she wrote this, she was 75 years old.

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Saturday P.M.

Dear Madge & Bert,

I meant to send a card before this but haven't been able to find time. We started with a Board meeting before we got unpacked Wed and Thurs and Friday were full days with luncheons-dinner Thurs and a 7:30 breakfast on Friday. I am going to tumble in as soon as I mail this and try to catch up on sleep as I haven't had enough any night since I arrived.

Our flight was pleasant but then we had to circle over the airport for almost a half hour on account of fog and smog.

Next week won't be so strenuous as I have no responsibility and can skip meetings if I wish. The State Board put Marjorie up for a National Office for D.A.C. She did a good job of presiding on the whole. I had to sit up by her as parliamentarian and I wished she had left out a few things she said but on the whole it was all right.

Much love to you both and to my grandson.

Ruth - Mom

Ruth Thompson Walsh ca. 1955

Recipe: Crab stuffed sole

It was a staple on my grandmother Jessie Cutting Richardson's elegant table: crab stuffed sole, moist and delicious. Jessie was talented in the kitchen, preferring simple dishes with fresh ingredients. Her daughter Madge, however, was an intellectual, and like her father, needed a recipe to follow--slavishly.

In my childhood, I can remember the moist dish when eating at Grandmother's, but at home, it was dry and rubbery. I finally figured out why in 1986. My parents were moving from Portland, Oregon back down to Redding, California for their retirement, leaving us, their adult children, behind. Moving day was predictably hectic, and the plan was that after the van pulled away, they would come stay the night in my apartment. I would provide a well-earned shower, dinner and a bed. My mother handed me $20 and a copy of the recipe for crab-stuffed sole and said, "why don't you make this?"

The recipe in Madge's book

 A careful reader of the recipe will note that the method doesn't say what to do with the wine, so I added it before putting it in the oven so the fish would poach. At dinner, my mother was near tears as she noted that it was as delicious as when her recently-deceased mother had made it--and what did I do differently? We went through the steps, and when I said I added the wine, she exclaimed, "You added it? I always just drank it!"

While cleaning out her home last year, I found my grandmother's recipe box. Turns out those years of baked fish can be traced to a copying error. Use this version.

The recipe in Jessie's card file

Merry Christmas 1947

Christmas card from Bert T Walsh, 1947

The SS Matsonia rounding Diamond Head

On Armistice Day

by Madge R. Walsh, Nov. 11, 2008

My father, my brother, and my husband all were veterans of the US Navy.

Ensign Russell D Richardson

My father volunteered in World War I, and was sent to Mare Island Naval Station on San Francisco Bay, where the USS Gridley (a four-stack destroyer) was being built. As a “landsman,” he was to be trained as an electrician, but the class was full so there was a long wait until the next class. Half a dozen of these “landsmen” got bored with nothing to do, so they hired tutors and studied to get their commissions as officers – and did. (It was a relief not to have to sleep in a hammock anymore!). My father was assigned to the Gridley as an ensign; during the builder’s trial runs, it got pretty rough – green water over the bow at 35 knots – but my father didn’t get seasick, and never did (I wish I could say the same for myself, but I can’t.). The day the Gridley sailed out of San Francisco Bay was the day the Armistice was signed.

One of the highlights of that first voyage was the passage through the Panama Canal, recently built; another was that the Gridley was one of the ships stationed at intervals across the Atlantic to report on the flight of the four Navy seaplanes across the Atlantic, and if necessary, rescue any that didn’t make it. The Gridley did have to rescue the pilot of one plane; another destroyer tried to tow it, but the seaplane was not built for that kind of treatment, and sank.

David C Richardson

After the war, my parents married and had my brother, who served in World War II. He was in college, Naval ROTC, and managed to graduate (University of California). He was immediately sent to New York for midshipman school at Columbia. The Navy then sent him off to the South Pacific. He had a small sailboat on San Francisco Bay, and the Navy put him on a small ship, a wooden APc originally designed for mine sweeping, etc. They had the not unpleasant duty of exploring the remote islands & atolls to check up on the presence of any Japanese (didn’t find any); but then were part of the Philippine invasion. At Luzon, his little ship was attacked by a kamikaze, but another US ship shot it down, so they were not damaged. From there, they faced the imminence of invading Japan; but were “saved” from that by the atomic bomb, and the subsequent Japanese surrender. People decry the use of atomic weapons, but at least in this case, my family is grateful that the invasion did not take place, and my brother was not killed.

After his tour of duty was done, my brother was assigned as captain of an oceangoing tug launched in Portland, Oregon; he was to take it to Honolulu. It had a small crew, only 2 officers – my brother and a navigator. The poor navigator was seasick all the way to San Francisco, so my brother did the navigation. As they approach the pilot boat at the entrance to San Francisco Bay, the fog lifted – my brother said if he kept on going, it would’ve run right into it. Since he’d sailed the San Francisco Bay and knew it well, he was darned if he take on a pilot, and took the tug into the bay himself. After delivering the tug at Pearl Harbor, he was released from the Navy. He continued to sail in small (and larger) boats, even in the Midwest, whenever he could find a lake to sail on.

Bert T. Walsh

My husband was also in the Navy, during the Korean “conflict.” He served on an LCd; once he showed me a photo of the hold – the “dock” – loaded with wounded men on stretchers, being evacuated. Before that, growing up in San Francisco, he had been a Sea Scout, and made lifelong friends – I still have a photo of their sailboat, the “Corsair,” and its “pirate” flag is brought out at every reunion. He attended the Maritime Academy at Vallejo, now part of the University of California system. He sailed on oil tankers and also for Matson, to Honolulu. I recall the time after we were married and had our son, we were walking along San Francisco’s Embarcadero, and he told our little boy how to get on a board a liner as a stowaway! But he had taken advantage of the G.I. bill, went to college and eventually became a licensed mechanical engineer. For a man who really didn’t enjoy traveling, his work took us to quite a few places, in the US and Canada. After we “retired” to Northern California, he even had a small sailboat on Whiskeytown Lake. Our son has missed our latest embroilment (now too old). I’m hoping my grandsons – and their contemporaries – never again have to face such situations.