Ivan Thorpe Branson

Ivan Branson, last of the five children of Alvin Thorpe Branson and Mary Eliza Simmons, was born 9 November 1901 at a rented cabin (called the Gan House after its owners) in the town of Mariposa, Mariposa County, CA. He came into the world at the end of an exhausting labor lasting two days. Apparently he was a huge baby. His sister Maude, who helped with the birth, wrote in a reminiscence in 1961 that he weighed thirteen pounds. This seems likely to have been an exaggeration, but he was certainly large enough that his mother hemorrhaged and required an operation to deal with the trauma, leaving her recuperating for fifteen months. Grandmother Martha Jane Ousley Branson was on hand, the occasion being perhaps the last of dozens of times in her life when she served as a midwife. Inasmuch as Martha was seventy-three years old, the ordeal proved to be nearly as much as she could handle.

For all of that, Ivan arrived healthy. He was to be called Donald, a name chosen by Maude, who had been awarded the right to the naming because the baby’s arrival meant Alvin and Mary did not have the money to spare to send Maude off to business school, something Maude had greatly desired as an opportunity to escape Mariposa County and make something of herself out in the big, wide world. However, Grandma Martha declared the baby must be called something else because Donald was -- according to her -- an old Scots name, and she hated it. Alvin agreed in order to please his mother. Mary believed she had no choice but to comply, but made it known that once she chose an alternate, that would be that. Mary selected Ivan. Martha hated that even more because it was “too Russian,” but she was not allowed to interfere again. She later commented that she wished she had kept her mouth shut.

Ivan’s childhood was spend in various parts of Mariposa County. If things had gone better, he would have had just one home, the large cabin Alvin had built next to his “Last Chance” claim along the Merced River at Exchequer, just east of the Merced County line and not far from Alvin’s birthplace of Phillips Flat, where Ivan’s grandfather John Sevier Branson and his partners had successfully dug and sluiced for placer gold from the late 1850s to the late 1860s. Alvin had deduced that the course of the river had changed thousands of years earlier, and the prehistoric gravel bed -- which in theory should have contained ample amounts of gold dust and flakes deposited in those ancient times -- had not been worked by Gold Rush-era miners. Over many seasons beginning in 1897 Alvin dug a trench and then a tunnel into that layer. Some gold did turn up -- Ivan himself found four hundred dollars’ worth over a four-day span as a boy -- but the hoped-for bonanza did not materialize. Each year Alvin would have to quit after a few weeks or months in order to earn money at whatever sort of temporary jobs he could find, to keep the family fed and to come up with the hundred dollars needed for the annual filing fee to retain the rights to Last Chance. These jobs were becoming fewer and fewer in Mariposa County in those days. Sometimes Alvin worked at Mount Ophir near the town of Mariposa. Sometimes he went back to his 1880s stomping grounds at Quartzburg. Occasionally he worked in Hornitos. He was a miner, a blacksmith, a carpenter. Ivan therefore did not get to known what it was like to have a steady and settled home life, because as Alvin moved from one employment locale to another, the household shifted, too. When Alvin was at Mt. Ophir, spending his nights in the miners’ barracks, Mary Eliza and the kids resided at Gan House in Mariposa, about seven miles away. The proximity meant it was practical for Mary to take clean laundry and other necessities of life to Alvin on weekends. While at Quartzburg, the family often stayed at “Grasshopper Ranch,” the long-time home of John and Martha Branson, or (especially after the death of John and Martha) at the large ranch of Alvin’s brother Joseph. Ivan grew up with a broad familiarity of the region. His affection for Mariposa County, and particularly for its history, remained steady all his life, even though he would never live within its boundaries as an adult.

Ivan would develop into an educated and, one could say, scholarly individual. This is a minor miracle given the inconstancies of his upbringing and the attitude among the sons of pioneers that a little bit of readin’, ritin’, and ’rithmetic was all a boy needed. Some of his contemporaries -- including his brother Jim -- never graduated eighth grade. However, Ivan did get a certain amount of primary-grade schooling in Mariposa and at Quartzburg District School near Grasshopper Ranch (in a newer building than the one in which his mother and father had been pupils). When he was nine years old, his elder sister Florence became his teacher. By then the family was residing mostly at Exchequer. This isolated speck of the gold country, once home to thousands of Gold Rush miners but which by 1910 had become quite empty, possessed no school until four local families, including the Bransons, pooled their resources, put up a simple one-room structure, and contributed enough cash to pay an instructor’s salary. Florence did not have a teaching credential. She had in fact not even finished “normal school,” the two-year course of secondary education that was the closest thing to high school known in the foothills in that era. (Ivan’s other sister, Maude, was the only immediate family member who held that distinction.) Nevertheless, the kids needed a teacher, so Florence taught two terms, Fall 1910 and Spring 1911. Both sessions were abbreviated.

The county arranged a more formal school at Exchequer for the following academic year, and a qualified teacher was hired. At thirteen, Ivan was the institution’s second graduate, preceded a year earlier by Horace Meyer. (Horace Meyer would later become a preeminent cattle rancher of the Hornitos area. Along with other property Meyer would eventually acquire a half-interest in the cattle ranch Joseph Branson had owned during his lifetime.)

By now it was 1914, and Ivan was in need of more serious education. And by now, Alvin -- who had in the previous few years defended his claim at gunpoint -- was prepared to concede it was foolish to pin the family’s hopes on the promise of Last Chance. In June, the household -- by now reduced to Alvin, Mary, Ivan, and Ivan’s brother Walter, the others having spread their wings -- was reestablished in Stockton, a town which possessed a high school. About half a year later, finding their initial mortgage loan terms to contain a nasty balloon payment, Alvin and Mary bought a different house at 420 Monterey Avenue (with traditional mortgage terms). This property remained in the family over many decades, passing to Ivan’s brother Walter after Alvin and Mary were dead, then to Maude, then to Maude’s daughter Doris, and then was purchased by Ivan from Doris in the 1970s.

Ivan arrived in Stockton distinctly undersized for his age, but soon a growth spurt granted him a dose of the strapping body type characteristic of the Branson men of Mariposa County. Being an enterprising young man and knowing from his father’s life experience how hard a person might have to work to scrape together a few nickels, he began taking jobs at once. He convinced his father it was worth investing in a bicycle, and with it Ivan began delivering meat from Fulton Meat Market to customers throughout town. Other jobs followed, from newspaper delivery boy to cigar-maker’s apprentice to low-level jobs at Clark Hotel and the Hotel Stockton, such as bellhop, hat check clerk, and elevator attendant. Then, setting the stage for greater things, he began working full eight-hour shifts from 4pm to midnight as a messenger for the local Western Union office.

At Western Union, Ivan quickly saw the potential in a telegraphy career. At this point in the Twentieth Century, telegraphy was a vital part of information flow. Not only did people depend upon telegrams to reach the many individuals -- and even the many geographical regions -- that were not yet served by the telephone industry, but messages by wire were the means to conduct such essential business as long-distance monetary transfers, newspaper wire dispatches, and law enforcement. The role of the telegrapher, to listen to and decipher the transmissions, was vital. Consequently, the pay was superior to many other wage-earning positions. Ivan realized he might earn some serious money if he developed the right skills -- a solid command of English vocabulary and grammar, superior typing ability, an ability to concentrate, and most specific, an understanding of Morse Code. He was already taking care of another aspect of winning one of the coveted jobs by chatting up his employer and supervisors, impressing them with his earnestness and his willingness to acquire the necessary learning on his own time.

Becoming a telegrapher was not a trivial goal for someone of Ivan’s roughshod, foothills background. He was unaccustomed to regular attendance at school, and his life was very full for someone of his tender years, allowing only a limited number of hours in a week during which to do all his coursework. He did well in English, typing, bookkeeping, and woodwork, but found algebra and other academically essential subjects a huge chore. At first he had only a pipe-dream level hope of rising up the ranks at Western Union. For the time being, he remained only a messenger boy.

His grades were not in keeping with his ambitions. They were in fact so bad that his father, who had temporarily gone to work for Standard Oil at the booming refinery complex in Richmond, CA, convinced him to come to Contra Costa County and take a summer job, with the idea of moving into a permanent position. The area was replete with earning opportunities thanks to busy ports and the great shipbuilding efforts going on as a consequence of World War I. So Ivan came to Berkeley in 1917. He found the job at the refinery very much not to his liking -- and Standard Oil found him very much not to their liking, resulting in a career lasting three days. Ivan did linger in Berkeley for the summer, though. He became a streetcar conductor, working ten-hour shifts at 28 cents an hour. Sometimes he was off for as little as twenty minutes before working a second shift. When he could, he went down to the local Western Union office to get to know the staff there and to hone his chosen-career skills.

When the next school term began, he returned to Stockton to give his educational efforts one last push. In later years he would characterize his teachers as his saviors, coming to his rescue and completing his transformation from poor country bumpkin into a person sophisticated enough to craft a secure place in a rapidly changing America. Meanwhile prospects at Western Union became more promising. He rose from messenger to delivery clerk -- the person who dispatched messengers. And then, in the spring of 1919, the seventeen-year-old was presented with an opportunity he could not pass up. A discovery of a large deposit of silver ore had spurred boomtown conditions in the area of Tonopah, NV, a place that lacked telephone service. The Western Union office at Tonopah urgently needed more staff to handle the increased business. Thanks to the recommendation of the Stockton-office Western Union manager, Ivan was soon on his way across the Sierra Nevada range to take a job as a junior -- but full-fledged -- telegrapher.

By November of that year, the Nevada miners realized that the deposit they hoped would rival the Comstock Lode was in fact modest in potential. Soon Western Union had no need of Ivan at Tonopah. But by then he had proved himself to be a good telegrapher as well as a person who could interact well with the public, and so he was offered a position at one of the company offices in downtown San Francisco. Ivan accepted at once. He saw little point in returning to Stockton, particularly now that Helen Farnsworth, the girl he had been sweet on over the previous few years, had found another suitor. (At right is a snapshot of Ivan and Helen in the fall of 1918. This was taken during the great flu epidemic. Note the face mask dangling on Ivan’s shoulder.) Within a year or so of settling in San Francisco, he changed jobs, becoming manager of the Postal branch at California and Sansome Streets, followed by a few months at the Oakland branch. Though he was still chiefly a telegrapher and was still earning about the same amount of money as at Western Union, the change in employers opened up better opportunities for advancement.

At the Oakland job site, the pay clerk was named Marion Christian. She had been born in Denmark 30 November 1895. Her name had originally been Maren Christensen, but it had been Americanized when she had come to the United States in 1914. Ivan and Marion hit it off and soon one thing led to another. They were married in San Rafael, Marin County, CA 28 January 1922. The ceremony was small and quiet because in those days, a young man needed parental permission to wed before the age of twenty-one, and Ivan didn’t want to risk letting his parents object to him marrying a “foreigner” six years senior to him. He lied about his age and the deed was done. Given the ups-and-downs of the marriages of Ivan’s siblings, Alvin and Mary Branson had little to complain about in their youngest child’s choice of mate and the steadfastness of the union.

One of the big employers of telegraphers in the 1920s was Associated Press. Ivan worked his way onto their payroll by filling in for vacationing regular staff. The people he replaced worked in different parts of California, from San Jose to Modesto to San Luis Obispo to Stockton, which was less than ideal, but the inconvenience was forgotten when, as hoped, Ivan was offered a permanent and full-time position. Unfortunately, the position was in Yakima, WA, where the climate did not suit Ivan at all. Luckily he only had to endure one inland Pacific Northwest winter. Another A.P. position opened up in downtown San Francisco. He and Marion found a place to live in Oakland, an easy ferry commute to and from his workplace.

Ivan enjoyed the work with Associated Press. Aside from the regular salary, he could fill the time and earn some supplemental income by composing freelance “filler” articles for syndication. His contributions included humorous anecdotes and short pieces of historical and topical interest about the Mother Lode region. He stayed with A.P. for a number of years during the mid-1920s, but he was always conscious of bettering his career and pay situation. The dream job for telegraphers at that point was working for a stock brokerage house. The work required only the highest grade signal men, and the level of activity was so intense an operator seldom worked more than ninety minutes at a stretch before being relieved. Ivan began to obtain part-time shifts with the A. W. Coote Company, and when that company went out of business, he succeeded in getting on at E.F. Hutton. The money began to roll in.

It was, however, not a secure era for telegraphers. Teletypes were replacing human Morse decoders. Young men were now increasingly unable to enter the industry as Ivan had, and veterans were beginning to struggle to keep existing jobs. As president of the local union, Ivan had to call strikes on three occasions to keep his colleagues employed, a tactic which only succeeded because the economy was robust. Then came October, 1929 and the big stock market crash.

Ivan was laid off at once. He knew his union background would make it impossible to find a telegraphy position elsewhere. His answer was to agree to step in as a partner and owner of a sandwich delivery business that had recently been started by a man and wife, the Vincellios, whom Ivan knew through E.F. Hutton connections. The other founding partner of the business had just run off with the cash box, leaving the Vincellios a note apologizing but explaining that his wife was catching up with him, so the small sum Ivan and Marion had in their savings represented a much-needed infusion of funds to keep the fledgling operation going. Ivan and Marion and the Vincellios called their new joint venture Morning Glory Sandwiches and Catering. For a brief time, the sandwiches were made right in the downtown San Francisco apartment where Ivan and Marion were living at the time. Soon the operation grew and a staff of four partners was not sufficient to keep up with demand. An hourly-wage employee was hired and a proper storefront was leased.

Soon a large new large-scale customer presented itself -- the Pacific Fleet, whose ships were soon due in port. The Vincellios didn’t want to contribute the capital necessary to gear up to make so many sandwiches for so many sailors. They saw Morning Glory as a stopgap venture until the stock market improved. Ivan was willing to invest in its longterm future. Soon he and Marion went separate ways from the other couple, dividing their existing customers and wishing each other well. It was one of the best decisions Ivan ever made. Morning Glory prospered. In the next few years the crew expanded to a dozen and more. When Prohibition was repealed, demand for sandwiches boomed because the new laws regarding serving of liquor in public places required that food be served with it. During World War II, the military side of the customer base required up to 65,000 sandwiches a day. By its height in the early 1960s, just before Ivan began to withdraw from and sell the business, the number of employees on the Morning Glory payroll exceeded three thousand. (Among the employees over the years were other members of the Branson clan -- Ivan’s niece Melba Branson and her husband, and his cousin Henry Branson’s daughter Betty and her husband.)

Ivan had found his niche. He was a success. He worked hard to keep it so. He played hard, too, constantly finding another social group or fraternity or business association to participate in. He was at various times the president (and founder) of the San Francisco Caterers Association, vice president of the San Francisco Lion Club, state president of the national Exchange Club, a thirty-year member of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce (including three terms as a director), president of the Royal Order of Jesters of San Francisco, Potentate of the Islam Shrine Temple of San Francisco, member of Draft Board #88 during World War II, and member of the California Alpine Club. He belonged to two Masonic lodges plus Knights Templar and was for twenty-five years part of the Stanford (San Francisco) parlor of the Native Sons. Later he would be historian of the Golden Chain Council of the Mother Lode (the oldest road association in California) and a member of the board of directors of Nevada County Farm Bureau Association. As for formal religious faith, he was Presbyterian. He golfed. He collected coins. Even his vacations were ambitious, including travel to most parts of the continental United States, as well as to Alaska and Australia. He hiked to the tops of countless mountains, took photographs of scenic places of the West, and collected mineral specimens. He was living the “prime of his life” through the middle decades of the Twentieth Century, and he did not waste it.

At left, Ivan gives away bride Beverly Flowers at her wedding in 1949. (Beverly was not a relative.)

There was one fly in the ointment of his contentment. Marion’s health was precarious. Tuberculosis had damaged her lungs, and a prolonged high fever had weakened her heart. One reason Ivan drove himself to make money, above and beyond the characteristic fiscal urgency of a man who had grown up dirt poor, was that medical bills for Marion’s care could build up suddenly and deeply. This is not to say Marion was frail -- when at her best she appeared to others to be downright robust. In the early years of Morning Glory she put in grueling workshifts. She took part in many of Ivan’s hiking excursions. Among her accomplishments was becoming the first woman ever to climb the north face of Mt. Hood volcano east of Portland, OR. Some family members were not even aware of her compromised condition. Nevertheless, Ivan could never be free of the worry that she might take a sharp turn for the worse.

Marion’s ill health was a key reason the marriage had not been blessed with children. Doctors had made it clear that Marion was not strong enough to risk a pregnancy. This was an aspect of the union from the beginning and Ivan accepted it. He never wavered from his devotion to her. That said, it is easy in hindsight to see that by 1950, his childlessness was on his mind. He mentioned in more than one piece of correspondence that he had become aware how doomed the Branson name was among his close kin. And indeed, that very thing appeared to be happening. He had no offspring. His brother Walter had never married and it was obvious he never would. His brother Jim, already dead by then, had fathered only a daughter. Among the greater clan the prospect looked much the same. Three of his uncle Reuben’s sons had sired no male heirs. His uncle Thomas’s sons were by then all dead and none had become fathers. His uncle Joseph’s sons had -- so he thought -- produced only girls or had no children at all. His uncle John’s sons had produced daughters, one stillborn son, and a lone surviving son, Beverly Orwin Branson, but as of 1950 Beverly Branson’s family looked to be complete, consisting of one daughter born in the early 1940s.

In fact, things were not quite so bleak. Reuben’s son Robert Lee Branson had fathered two sons who in turn were becoming fathers of sons right at that mid-century point. Joseph’s son Eldridge had male heirs. Ivan would later learn of these developments, but at the time he had not seen Robert Lee Branson since the day this older cousin had by chance come into the telegraph office in Tonopah while Ivan was working there, and Ivan had not seen Eldridge Branson since his boyhood in Mariposa County. Robert lived in extreme eastern California in the Inyokern region, while Eldridge and his clan lived far to the south in San Bernardino. Ivan was very much aware when Beverly Branson -- somewhat of a neighbor inasmuch as Bev lived in the San Francisco peninsula town of Pacifica -- became a father of sons with his second wife during the 1950s. The Branson name would persist after all. In the meantime, Ivan had been inspired to consider family legacy. He began to gather material intended to preserve a record of the family that had sprung from John Sevier Branson. Perhaps Ivan was worried that no one after him would have the necessary motivation to complete a proper tribute, as if female-line descendants could not trouble themselves to do so. In a sense, Marion’s ill health may well have been a gift to the Branson clan. The gift eventually took the form of Ivan’s book, Bones of the Bransons.

The irony is, Ivan would have natural heirs. He is not to be faulted for thinking that at age fifty his turn at fatherhood had passed him by, but fate had other things in mind for him.

Marion kept her grasp on life throughout the 1950s. These were good years. Morning Glory continued to prosper. Ivan and his wife had enough money that he was able to begin to act upon his dreams of retirement. He had never lost his affection for the gold country and had long planned to come back to it once his twilight years were upon him. He chose a particularly lovely part of it, the Grass Valley region east of Sacramento, not far from Coloma, where gold had first been discovered at Sutter’s Mill. He purchased over 1700 acres near Rough & Ready and built a cabin, with the intention of erecting a large estate house, or even a mansion, when the time came to move there permanently. In the meantime, he used the land partly as a ranch, raising beef, eggs, and poultry to supply the Morning Glory employee commissary, where the number of meals sometimes rose as high as four thousand served per day.

In 1961, Ivan and Marion visited Denmark. It was Marion’s first trip to her country of origin since before she had married Ivan. Having been an orphan at age ten, she had never felt the pressure of needing to go back to visit parents. However, she still had cousins living near Randers and enjoyed reconnecting with them. The excursion took place just in time. Marion passed away 9 March 1962 in San Francisco, only a matter of months after returning from Europe. In light of her health problems, it is remarkable she was able to last as long as she did -- the better part of seventy years.

Ivan had lived a workaholic life and filled his time with myriad activities, but the loss of his spouse made his existence feel empty. Into that void stepped a new acquaintance, a widow in her early forties recently come from Minnesota. (Her name is omitted here for privacy reasons.) By the end of summer, 1962, she and Ivan became husband and wife. They wed at a small ceremony in Stockton, honeymooned at the cabin near Rough & Ready, and at Yosemite Valley, and then at the Seattle World’s Fair. On the way home, passing through Redding, CA, Florence Branson (at that time known as Florence Dumont) and many of her progeny got to meet the new Mrs. Ivan Branson.

And then the miracle. Ivan was sixty-one. His bride, mother of a son and a daughter with her first husband, had already reached an age when most women have stopped being capable of bearing a child. But in the summer of 1963, nine and a half months after the wedding, son Walter Thorpe Branson was born. And slightly more than two years later, James Ivan Branson was added to the family. Ivan, long reconciled to childlessness, was now a biological father of two, and stepfather (and adoptive father) of two others. (At left, the first Mrs. Ivan Branson in the early 1920s. At right, the second in the early 1980s, at the wedding of one of the couple’s sons.)

What was to have been a quiet phase of retirement in the foothills became a very active period indeed. In addition to childrearing, Ivan as ever found all sorts of things to occupy himself with. He adeptly divested himself of Morning Glory under good terms. The family made the full-time shift from San Francisco to Nevada County in 1965, where Ivan soon completed his mansion, which he called Mariposa Manor. He ranched. He hiked with the Alpine Club. He erected dams on his property, forming a quartet of small lakes, next to which he created a huge picnic area suitable for the parking of numerous RVs and vacation trailers. This lakeside expanse became the venue of frequent gatherings of the Shriners, a group he had joined in 1944 but had been aware of and interested in since boyhood, when he saved a party of Shriners from death by arranging a warning after noticing that the bed of the railroad track had washed out near the Exchequer cabin, just before the chartered train of Shriner tourists was due to pass by on their way back from visiting Yosemite Valley. Ivan also welcomed local school groups to his ranch, and helped the children learn to identify native plants and wildlife. He organized Branson reunions, some of them featuring tours of Mariposa County. And after having gathered genealogical data and notes and writing letters and biographical sketches of family members for many years, he settled down to write the bulk of the material that evolved into Bones of the Bransons. By this time his niece Melba Branson Sharp and her husband were dwelling nearby, and they owned and operated a printing and graphic design business, Golden Sierra Printing Company. With Melba able to handle production aspects, the long-anticipated project reached fruition. The book was published in 1982.

Bones of the Bransons was not quite the comprehensive look at the whole family of John and Martha Branson that Ivan had once planned. He had gathered a wealth of birthdates, birthplaces, etc., along with biographical sketches contributed by a number of family members. He did so intending to do justice to the whole gang, but in the end his time grew too short. In leaving it to Melba to oversee the final stages of its creation, a great deal of the coverage of the modern-day family was omitted. Ivan was so disappointed in this state of affairs that he refused to accept money for the finished work and gave away copies at the publication party in Hornitos. The book in its final form was more of a memoir than a genealogy, a paean to pioneer times and to the legacy of Bransons in history, and a portrait of John Sevier Branson and his five sons. The text almost entirely ignored the five daughters of John and Martha and their families and was lacking in specifics on others. However, it was full of anecdote and color and Ivan’s characteristic humor (which could take a ribald quality at times). All in all the book was a remarkable achievement for a man who had passed his eighieth birthday. He was no doubt wise to distribute the book even in its compromised form, because mortality caught up with him. Ivan passed away at home 5 November 1984, succumbing to prostate cancer. This date was just shy of his eighty-third birthday and the event came only two years after the publication of Bones. His body was cremated.

By the time Ivan died, the Branson clan had long since scattered far and wide. The family connections had grown frayed and in some cases had dissolved. The early years of Ivan’s generation represented the last stage when the group as a whole was tight-knit, most of that generation having been born and raised in either Mariposa County or nearby in the town of Merced. If Ivan had not begun to collect genealogical data while the majority of his siblings and first cousins were still alive and alert, it would have become extremely difficult if not impossible to assemble an equally worthy archive later on. Without his cache of material to serve as a foundation, this website would not exist. Thank you, Ivan.

Children of Ivan Branson

Note: The widow, children, and step-children of Ivan Branson are living. Most details concerning them are withheld for privacy reasons, though his two biological children have their own pages in this website, linked below. By now his line has expanded to include two grandchildren, two step-grandchildren, and two step great-grandchildren.

Walter Thorpe Branson

James Ivan Branson

For genealogical details, click on each of the names.

To go back one generation, click here. To return to the Branson/Ousley Family main page, click here.