OK, I celebrated Gertrude’s birthday with a post in February and mine in March with a post, so now here’s to Alice B. Toklas who was born today in 1877!
As she wrote at the beginning of her memoir WHAT IS REMEMBERED:
“I was born and raised in California, where my maternal grandfather had been a pioneer before the state was admitted to the Union. He had bought a gold mine and settled in Jackson, Amador County. A few years later he crossed the Isthmus of Panama again and went to Brooklyn, where he married my grandmother. There my mother was born. When she was three years old, they went to Jackson.”
And then there’s Gertrudes’s take on Alice’s beginnings in THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS:
“I was born in San Francisco, California. I have in consequence always preferred living in a temperate climate but it is difficult, on the continent of Europe or even in America, to find a temperate climate and live in it. My mother’s father was a pioneer, he came to California in ’49, he married my grandmother who was very fond of music. She was a pupil of Clara Schumann’s father. My mother was a quiet charming woman named Emilie.”
Alice B. , circa 1878
