Elmo Collins 13S2

 "In this city (San Francisco), December 5, 1953, Elmo, dearly beloved father of Mrs. John (Bud) (John Cecil) Smith, loving grandfather of Jane Ann, Robert, Michael and John Smith, loving brother of Witney and Arthur Collins; a native of Kansas City, Missouri.

"Funeral Wednesday, December 9, at 9:15 a. m. from Earl J. Currivan's Chapel of the Sunset, Irving at 26th Ave. (Sunset District), thence to St. Cecilia's Church, 17th Ave. and Ulloa St., where a Requiem High Mass will be offered at 9:45 a. m.  Internment will be at Holy Cross Cemetery. Rosary Tuesday evening at 8:30 o'clock."

San Francisco Examiner December 7, 1953

Elmo lived a full and interesting life.  He was born on March 13, 1880 to Richard Collins and Elmira Norris Collins. At one time or another he claimed to have been born in Caldwell, Kansas, Kansas City, MO, Kansas City, Kansas, Mexico, and California. Because of the odd specificity of it, I assume the true location was Caldwell.  His confusion is understandable, however, as his brothers are born 16 months and five hundred miles apart from each as the family heads slowly, but reliably west.

As a young man in Phoenix, he meets a well traveled and experienced woman, 51 year-old Lucy Abell, with two husbands and four children under her belt, and despite his being merely 22, he marries her. Lucy had been the dutiful wife of a county accessor in California who'd dumped her over for an older woman; Lucy had been 17 years his junior, and Susanna was merely 8 years.  Lucy had traveled through multiple states and at least one marriage in the previous 14 years, but now she would move to Glitzy San Francisco with a husband younger than all four of her children.

A decade later, the couple decided to adopt a girl they named Virginia and Elmo worked steadily as a planer in a saw mill.  In 1923, Lucy died, and eventually, his sickly parents move in with them.  Considering that Elmira Collins dies in 1929 and Richard Collins in 1931 and Helen Frazee Collins begins divorce proceedings from Elmo's brother Arthur just after Richard's death and she and Elmo then marry March 31, 1932.  It isn't too great a stretch to imagine that they would have wanted to be together sooner had not his parents objected, perhaps as early as 1923 when Lucy had died.

Whether true or not, the couple endured until her death in 1944.  After that, like any old man wanting to move out to pasture, Elmo found a way, moving from San Francisco to the Straus dairy ranch on Tomales Bay, in Marin County.  In a romantic story, that's where his life would have ended, but in 1951 his first granddaughter, Jane Ann is born, and perhaps that pulled him back into his family's life because it was in busy San Francisco, rather than dusty Tomales Bay where Elmo died on December 5, 1953.