Oral History
Elsie Whitaker Martinez
Elsie Whitaker was the daughter of writer Herman “Jim” Whitaker, who arrived in Oakland, California in 1895.
She married Xavier Martinez, a painter, in 1907.
“Some years ago, in search for first-hand reminiscences about Jack London and about early Carmel — I was working on Jack London and the Klondike and The Seacoast of Bohemia concurrently — I went to call on Elsie Martinez and was richly rewarded. In her little house on the corner of 17th and El Carmelo in Carmel she greeted me with enthusiasm. Her blue eyes sparkled and her face lit up with much of the charm that had made her a favorite with the San Francisco and Oakland Bohemians some fifty years before, when she was dubbed “The Blessed Damozel” by one of the early timers, although she had much more fire and spunk than we associate with Rossetti’s golden heroine.
During my first visit and later, she helped me most generously, never growing tired of my persistent questioning and freely aiding me not only with her memories but her papers and scrapbooks. At one time, I helped interview her for the Regional Oral History Office at her daughter’s home in Piedmont during one of the taped sessions which, with her sedulously made manuscript corrections, created the present document. This is a record in which she has at last accomplished the task she had always set herself — to write a book about her experiences with California writers and artists.
As an accomplished raconteur, Elsie, like Mark Twain, is prone to remember more than what happened. She loves a good story and is fond of giving it color and a dramatic turn; occasionally the story is closer to myth than to fact; often it is a story which has reached her second hand; and sometimes it is a yarn which has been told about other characters than the ones she remembers. Part of a large body of legend which often comes closer to truth than the fact, such items as her assertion that she and her brothers and sisters on the farm in Manitoba were so nearly starving that they were fed by passing around a bit of meat tied to a string so that it could be savored by all, are indigenous to frontier lore and repeated over and over. But in spite of these reservations, I believe her account to be accurate in most details.
| Jack London |
| Socialist Period and the Strunskys |
| The Writers Group |
| Bessie and Charmian |
| Snark Anecdotes |
| Death |