could have gone to Mills in the ’30s. I looked in the 1988 Mills College Alumnae Directory (the latest one I had) and sure enough found Joan David’s name, cross-indexed with Joan Brambila, class of 1939. Unbelievable! There was an address and phone number for her in Astoria, Oregon. But that, of course, was in 1988. She would have to be about 84 now. With some trepidation we called the number in Astoria—but no Joan David there. No one had heard of her. Well, I wasn’t about to give up yet. I called Reinhardt Alumnae House. Sure enough, they still had Joan David listed. Unfortunately, the address and phone were the same as in the apparently obsolete 1988 listing. I asked about her children. There were photos in the box of two, Carol and William. Carol would be about 60 now; did Mills have her address? They had no addresses, no Bent Twigs, although they had the names of four children. They noted that Joan had exhibited in art galleries around Astoria. Having majored in art myself, I thought perhaps the galleries might know how to find her. Amazingly, they did. I got the numbers of four galleries in Astoria, and the first gallery I called knew her and had her phone number at a retirement home. That had to be too easy! But there she was. She answered right away. So! Joan said she was in an assisted living home and her son lived nearby. She was very gracious on the phone and delighted to reminisce about Mills and the art professors we both knew. Best of all, she remembered her grandmother Ella and Ella’s best friend, whom she had Imogen Cunningham took this photo of Joan Brambila David while Joan was a student at Mills.
COURTESY OF THE IMOGEN CUNNINGHAM TRUST. USED BY PERMISSION.
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wish I could do something about these photographs. We can’t just throw them away; somewhere there is someone who cared about these people and would treasure these pictures.” This surely must have been the hundredth time David, my husband, had said this. And for the hundredth time he was picking through the boxes of family photos that his grandmother and his father in turn had carefully saved over the decades. He would say to me, “This box labeled ‘Ella Bates Misner Family’—there are some fine portraits in here from at least the 1870s.” And they obviously were special, almost all of them meticulously labeled with names and dates. Ella Bates was his grandmother Jennie’s lifelong best friend. And so, once again, David was going through the box piece by piece, hoping to find some clue, some way to find the Misners. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could find Ella’s descendants and give them the pictures?” David mused. Ella and Jennie grew up together in Wisconsin, and, when they each married, they moved to different states but kept in touch all their lives. Ella sent Jennie pictures and snapshots, each with a description on the back. Even without knowing the people, you could seemingly reconstruct their histories through these annotated photographs. Ella Bates Misner and Jennie Binney both died in 1949, and so the picture stories ended. But not quite. You see, Jennie saved more than the photos. She saved wedding announcements and odd bits of poems and papers. Among those papers was a small slip of paper—an amazing clue to the past, and a remarkable coincidence. David called out to me from where he was buried in boxes of photos: “What do you think of this?” I couldn’t believe my eyes! “Well, I’ll be darned,” I said. “What’s it doing in the Misner box? I didn’t put it there!” But it obviously belonged there. It was a blank telephone record labeled Mills College. The paper had been used to scribble numbers on the back. It read, in Ella Bates Misner’s handwriting, “Booth phone—Trinidad 9896, Regular college phone Trinidad 2700 until 9:30 p.m.” I recognized the mimeographed paper instantly. We were using them at Mills when I was there in the ’50s. The Trinidad exchange was also familiar. Judging by the type of phone numbers, I could see they were a little earlier than my time at Mills, but not much earlier—perhaps from the ’30s or early ’40s. So, who in all those photos went to Mills? Maybe we had the clue we needed to find the Misner family. David went through the papers and photos again and laid out a possible timeline. A wedding invitation showed that Ella had a daughter, Doris, who married Lieutenant Colonel Robert Brambila in 1917. Another invitation announced that Doris’s daughter Joan Brambila was to marry Edward David in 1940. Joan
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