Leaders of the Pack

 

This is George Albert White, the patriarch of the White family and my mother Ruthe's father (my grandfather).  My mother adored him and talked about him all the time. He was born in Toronto Canada in 1881 the oldest of 4 surviving children. His father, George Charles White owned a string of butcher shops and apparently the result of hard work and hard drinking died at the age of 45 when grandpa was barely 12. Grandpa had to quit school and take a job driving a team of horses pulling a butchers wagon to help his mother Anna support the family. Grandpa eventually turned to the culinary arts and became a chef at a hotel in Toronto where he met his wife Rachel Evelyn Dean Major while she worked there as a waitress. My mother told me the story that Rae's roommates had dared her to go into the kitchen after hours and steal a roasted chicken for them to eat, and George caught her in the act!

This is Rachel Evelyn Dean Major White. I don't have any early pictures of her or information on her childhood. My mother related that Rae's mother Lydia had 13 children, and unable to care for them put all but the baby in a convent orphanage. There is not much information about her early years.   She and George married on October 10, 1905 and settled down in Toronto and had the first child Leola on January 10, 1907 soon to be followed by 4 more children born in Toronto, Fred, Anna Mae, Grayce and George Ernest (known as Ernie).

 George Albert's younger brother Ernest had moved to San Bernardino, California to work for the Santa Fe Railroad and was killed in a train wreck in 1912 at the age of 30.  When his mother Annie and her two youngest children, Walter and Edna came to Cailfornia for the funeral, they fell in love with the climate and decided to stay.  George and Rae followed two years later with their brood of 5 children.  The sixth child, my mother Ruthe, was born in San Bernardino January 23 1915, the only one to be born in a hospital ( St. Bernardines).

With the whole White clan now settled in San Bernardino, the two brothers with their own hands built three houses for the family in a small compound in the same southwest neighborhood near San Bernardino Valley College. Walter and George each had a house and one for their mother Annie.  Both brothers started working for the Santa Fe, with Grandpa again working as a chef.