Once upon a time, a little boy about seven years old ran away from home.
His name was Frank. He was one of thirteen siblings and had been living somewhere with his aunt. Frank got hungry, and hopped off the train, and, as my uncle Dave says, he ended up on one of the ranches. “Apparently he was found wandering around the walnut orchards.”
Dave learned this from the wife of his Santa Barbara area dentist, who told him that this particular Frank — Frank Donald Carter Sr. — was her grandfather.
“He jumped off the train because he was hungry,” she told Dave. “That location was Hollister Ranch. He ate green walnuts and became ill. ‘Old man Hollister’ found him and took him in.”
She added that, Frank “lived with the Hollisters until he enlisted in the army at 17 or 18 years. He worked with the Army corps of engineers, met his wife, Ellen Clair, in Bosman, Montana and lived in the Seattle area for awhile. He had three kids.”
In this story, it appears this individual was raised in one of the Hollister households, for about a decade, until he came of age around the First World War or between the wars. Given these dates, he could have been brought up by any one of “us,” at that time — Jim, Jack or Harold Sr.
According to initial internet searches, Frank Carter Sr married a woman named Ellen Clair Kelly (born 1893), lived in Seattle area for awhile and one of their children, Frank Donald Carter jr was born 1934. Ellen Clair Kelly died of cancer in 1946.
According to Frank Sr’s granddaughter, Frank promptly moved back to the Santa Barbara area, where he worked as an electrician, and worked on the Coldsprigs bridge. That bridge, on an unrelated note, has been in the news in Santa Barbara where it is known not just for its spectacular views, but also for the number of people who have jumped from it.
As I understand it, Frank Donald Carter Sr died in 1959, 60 or so. The Coldsprings bridge was finished by 1962.
We have no reason to say that Frank Donald Carter, the grandfather of Dave’s dentist, could have been Frank Hollister of San Onofre, who worked with Dave’s father, Clinton. But it is not uninteresting to note that Frank Hollister, the one known to those around in the late 1950s, had disappeared by 1961-1962.
And as I prepare the attached transcription of Clinton’s diary entry for April 30, 1956,
I see that Clint writes, “Frank Hollister told me that the deer are eating the walnut buds off the new trees.”
The conclusion, so far, is simple. Frank Hollister and Frank Carter had at least one thing in common:
They both knew a thing or two about walnut buds.
Drake Station 