Eva George Letters
Mary Siegfried Letters Hulda Material 
Our parents, Jim and Tedi Craig (born James Craig Stumpf and Henrietta Halliwell Strashun), were known to us throughout our lives as "Jimmy" and "Tedi" -- an option of their own choosing based on the unusual theory that children and parents should treat one another as equals, rather than living in some sort of subordinate relationship -- an interesting philosopy which was practiced with varying degress of success during the various stages of our lives and which worked perhaps more to our advantage than to theirs! They were, of course, both children of the Depression, Tedi having been born in 1906 and Jimmy in 1907, so that they were in their early twenties when the stock market crash of 1929 occurred, bringing the normal progression of their lives to a long and rather painful pause. As the history books tell us, the Thirties were a time when people began to question the very fundamentals of the Capitalist system under which our country had up to that point flourished, and many formerly prosperous people (who suddenly found themselves without work and standing in lines at "soup kitchens" just to feed themselves) began to question the very fundamentals of the existing social hierarchy. Socialism, and even Communism, became a part of the dialog of those times, and our parents were certainly swept up in the headiness of such a potential "revolution" (hard to believe that one's parents were once young, but apparently that was, in fact, the case!). All of this certainly played a role in our parents' choosing to have us address them in a rather egalitarian fashion -- something that over the years I have never encountered in any other family of my acquaintance! Many years later, in about the ninth grade in our school in Marietta, Georgia, a school "chum" named Coy overheard me addressing my mother as "Tedi" and said (once we were out of earshot of my sainted mother), "Were I to waltz into the kitchen and say to my mother, 'Hi, Carol, how's it going?' she would probably slap me across the room!" I smiled at that, of course, but it has always reminded me of the peculiar social circumstances that sometimes ruled our immediate family -- not necessarily bad, but certainly different!
Neither of our parents had any formal education beyond high school. Tedi, in an apparent fit of rebellion against her parents, left high school before graduating and entered into a series of apprenticeships while taking courses in various small commercial schools to learn the art of making and designing clothes. Jimmy was forced to switch high schools from Lodi, California to Los Angeles in 1923 (between his junior and senior years) due to his father's asthma -- a condition which had originally prompted his family's migration from Uniontown, Pennsylvania to Lodi back in 1914. His father died just as Jimmy was finishing his senior (and only) year at Glendale High School in 1924, and he was forced to forego accepting a scholarship to Stanford University in order to support his mother while still living in Glendale -- something he did from 1924 until the time he and Tedi married (apparently during a quick weekend trip to Tijuana!). The first seven years after his father's death, Jimmy ran a newspaper delivery route on his Indian motorcycle, after which time he apprenticed as a "printer's devil" for the local Glendale newspaper. During this time he studied with a private teacher in the hopes of becoming a concert pianist(!), while at the same time (and perhaps more practically) taking a series of night courses to learn the skills associated with surveying and drafting. An interesting picture from 1924 shows Jimmy in the stands of the Lodi High School stadium (extreme upper left) along with the rest of his Lodi graduating class -- of which he was, of course, no longer a formal member, having moved to Los Angeles the previous summer. Eva George Letters
Mary Siegfried Letters Hulda Material
Apparently, when he showed up for the occasion his teachers and/or classmates insisted that he be in the picture, since he had grown up and spent almost all of his school years in Lodi with the other kids in the class. He was, of course, dressed in his motorcycle gear, having just made the ride from Glendale to Lodi on his Indian motorcycle to attend the ceremony, and he probably made many of his male compadres quite envious with his devil-may-care, sleeves-rolled-up appearance at the otherwise quite formal graduation ceremony. Many more pictures available of Jimmy at Jim Pictures and similarly for Tedi at Tedi Pictures ....
(The following is extracted from another web page ( http://skylondaworks.com/family/history/jt_craig/jtc_nar_jtcraig.pdf ) and is included here for continuity and convenience in reading ...)
Jimmy was born James Craig Stumpf on May 13, 1907 in Uniontown, PA ( Jimmy when young ). It appears that his grandfather, John Rowe Stumpf bought land in Lodi in 1907 with the intention of moving out here to grow grapes, but never did. In 1914, Jimmy’s immediate family of three -- himself, his mother Rachel (Babinger) Stumpf, and his father Craig Edgar Stumpf – moved from Uniontown, PA to Lodi, CA, and then in August of 1923 made a second move to Glendale, CA, where Jimmy spent his senior year at Glendale High School. The moves were apparently prompted by Craig Edgar’s asthma, who had gone to Glendale earlier (in February of 1923) to look at the weather before moving the family there between Jimmy’s junior and senior years in high school. Unfortunately, he died in 1924, only a year after their move to Glendale, forcing Jimmy to withdraw his application to Stanford University. Jimmy lived with and supported his mother Rachel in the Glendale area for the next 14 years (until 1937), during several of which he delivered newspapers on his Indian motorcycle. Because of this, he never had the chance to pursue a college degree as a full-time student, but spent much of his time going to school part-time to fill in the gaps in his education.
Tedi was born Henrietta Halliwell Strashun on January 3rd, 1906 in Chicago, Illinois (Tedi when young ). Her father, Leon Isadore Strashun, immigrated in 1893 to America from St. Petersburg, Russia, where he had studied violin with Leopold Auer, one of the leading violin pedagogues of his day (and to whom Tchaikovsky had dedicated his violin concerto, subsequently withdrawing the dedication after Auer declared it unplayable!). Tedi’s mother, Henrietta Martha Foy, was an opera singer from Whistler, Mobile, Alabama, who met and married Leon, apparently while working in an opera company in which he played first violin. They moved frequently from place to place as his job as violinist and conductor demanded, living for varying periods of time in Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, Honolulu, and Los Angeles, where they finally settled. Tedi left home at an early age without having finished high school, although she did attend Polytechnic High School in San Francisco (on Frederick Street across from Kezar Stadium). In 1924 she married a man named Harold Teale Berry, whom she divorced in 1936. Her mother died in the late 1950s and her father in the early 1960s. Tedi’s use of the name Tedi Barri was partly from her admiring the actress Theda Bara (the “vamp”) and partly from the name of her first husband, Berry (at various times, she alternated between using Tedi Barri and Tedi Berri).
Tedi and Jimmy met in one of S. McDonald Wright’s life drawing classes in Los Angeles in the early 1930's. According to Tedi’s passport application, they were married in September of 1936 in Tijuana, Mexico. They had lived for a period of time with Jimmy’s mother, Rachel, in a house at 1600 Landa Street in south Glendale, but parted with her on February 9, 1937 – probably the result of a combination of at least two conflict situations – the fact that Jimmy’s involvement with Tedi meant he could no longer fully support Rachel, along with a dispute about the propriety of a purportedly Catholic person (Jimmy) marrying a divorced woman (Tedi). Jimmy and Tedi bought a house at 357 Mavis Drive in North Hollywood in January of 1937. Jimmy worked in a print shop from 1939 to 1942 as an “oiler” and “wiper,” eventually advancing to “pressman,” then “press foreman.” Because of the war, he then took a job with the Army Corps of Engineers working on the Pan American highway in Central America from September 1942 to December of 1943. After the termination of that project, he worked at Lockheed-Burbank from January 1944 to shortly after V-J day on May 8, 1945. With defense layoffs imminent, he and Tedi started a dress-making business, known as Kim’s of California, a project that Tedi had been planning for a year or so prior to that. The business continued for 3 years until May 1948, when it went bankrupt, apparently due to an inability to obtain dress materials, along with their being unable to procure a line of credit which would enable them to smooth out the ups and downs of seasonal variations in dress orders. The business was originally run out of a top-floor loft in the Pan-American Building at 253 So. Broadway in downtown LA (just a few steps from the Million Dollar Theater, the Central Market, the Angel’s Flight funicular, and the old Red Line Terminal!). In an attempt to procure needed materials, they formed an unfortunate partnership with another dressmaker, Joe Pizer of Lurrie Pizer, and moved the business to 943 South Wall Street, also in downtown LA. Pizer had promised he could get them materials, but the partnership turned into a disaster, since his apparent intent was simply to put them out of business, rather than help them. They had rented out the 357 Mavis Drive house in late 1942, at which time Tedi moved to 626 N. Arden Blvd. in Hollywood within easy walking distance of Paramount Studios where she was working. At some point, 626 N. Arden was sold to a veteran who evicted them so he could move in, and they then moved into a house owned by an old friend (Al Taliaferro from Glendale High School, who was one of the early animators at Disney Studios) at 254 E. Chevy Chase Drive in Glendale. The house they owned at 357 Mavis Drive was sold on September 8th, 1943 for $1600.
After the failure of Kim’s of California in 1948, the family took to the road in their trusty 1937 Chevrolet (a Town Sedan (!) according to the registration), loaded on the top with camping equipment lashed down by tarps and ropes, looking somewhat like an Oklahoma dust-bowl family headed for California, only going in the other direction. We eventually ended up in Santa Fe, New Mexico in about June of 1948, where we lived briefly in a rented house at 22 Bauer (Apt. B), and then in another rented house at 503 Calle Abeyta. While in Santa Fe, Tedi started up a custom dress business initially called Southwest Derivitives (sic) at Manderfield Plaza, 428 College Street and eventually moved the operation into the second story of our house on Calle Abeyta as rental and maintenance costs at Manderfield Plaza became too high. In about November of 1950, a combination of Jimmy’s discouragement with the backwardness (and ethical comportment!) of the New Mexico Highway Department, friendly Texans, square-dancing opportunities, and the possibility for Jimmy to get an engineering degree at Texas Tech caused the family to make an ill-advised move to Lubbock, Texas. We remained in Lubbock only about 6 months, living at 3 separate addresses, although mainly at 1408 Avenue M. Problems began to surface over the ethics of the engineering consulting firm (Hasie and Green) that Jimmy had gone to work for (Jimmy's Catholic upbringing had apparently instilled in him a strong sense of right and wrong, even though while still a young man he had rejected Catholicism!). Fortunately, a telegram arrived in the nick of time from an old friend of Jimmy’s (Chuck Wilson) from his wartime Lockheed days in Burbank, suggesting he take advantage of a ground-floor opportunity to work in a new plant Lockheed had just opened in Marietta, Georgia. The plant had been used by Bell Aircraft to build a total of 668 B29s from 1943 to 1945 (the Bell ‘bummer’ plant, see Lockheed/Georgia History , but then closed until 1951 when it was re-opened by Lockheed to build B47s for use in the Korean conflict. Jimmy took the job, found it interesting and challenging and worked there for the remainder of his life (at its peak in the late 1960s when Jimmy was still there, Lockheed employed around 30,000 people!). We lived in Marietta for about 3 years, from 1951 to 1954, living first on Barnes Mill Road (RFD 2) in rural Marietta for about a year, then at 405 Lawrence Street in downtown Marietta for 2 years. In 1954, we bought the house at 643 Norfleet Rd., NW in Atlanta and moved there, which remained the family residence until 1961, when Tedi and Jimmy bought the house at 521 Spring Valley Rd., NW, where they remained until their deaths, Jimmy’s in 1967 and Tedi’s in 1992. The house at Norfleet was bought in April of 1954 for $14,200, the house on Spring Valley in September of 1961 for $18,750.