William Roy Tanner (Father of Millard Tanner)

William Roy Tanner b. 1882

William Roy Tanner was born August 4, 1882 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to William Tanner and Helen Clarissa Finch.  William was the fifth of seven children and sometimes was known as Willie and later just Will.

Tanner Family Bible listing births of their children.

William grew up in the house his father built on 1424 5th Ave. During part of his youth his Aunt Francis Finch lived with them.  (More pictures of him and his siblings can be seen on his father's post)
For college, he attended first Lombard University in Galesburg, Illinois where he was studying to become a minister. Lombard University was started by the Universalist Church. Here he was studying too hard though and had a nervous breakdown, causing his parents to send him to live near relatives in California.  He enrolled in the Old Normal School to get a teacher's certificate, then went to Stanford University in Palo Alto to get his Master of Arts Degree.  His thesis is still available in the Stanford Library.

William met his future wife, Hazel Devereaux Call, at the Universalist Church in Edendale, California and most of their courtship was done through the mail.

 When Will graduated from Stanford, he went to Santa Paula for a year to teach, though his vacations were spent in Los Angeles.  In May 1910 he is listed on the federal census as living in Santa Paula, teaching and his Aunt Francis is living with him.  In Los Angeles, Will and Hazel were always together, their likes and dislikes being similar. After that year, he applied for a teaching position in L.A., got it and they were married July 9, 1913. They spent their whole summer in Palo Alto for their honeymoon.

When they returned to L.A., they rented a furnished three room apartment near the Universalist Church for $25 a month.  After about a year, Will got a permanent teaching job at Roosevelt Junior High in East Los Angeles and they rented a large "flat" on Chicago Street within walking distance of the school.  They lived there until 1915 with Hazel's mother and step-father. That summer they went back to Minneapolis to visit his parents and family, spent the whole summer there and had a wonderful time.  On their return, they stopped for a week in San Francisco to visit the World's Fair.

When they returned to L.A. they borrowed $500 to put down on their home on 4th Ave. It was all new and they paid $3,000 for it. While they were in Minneapolis, Hazel's mom purchased a lot of land in the Santa Monica Canyon where she later built a "cottage" and they spent most of their summers there.  The "cottage" was actually a four bedroom two story house with a basement. It was quite unique as it was built on the side of a very steep slope. To get to the basement you had to climb two sets of steps above the level of the street, then twenty or thirty more to the first level.  The bedrooms were on the top floor and there was a large chimney in the middle of the house which really warmed all the bedrooms in the winter time.  The hillside was so steep that you could step out the back window of one of the bedrooms right onto the ground.

On March 12, 1919 William Devereaux (Bill) was born in Los Angeles.  Devereaux was Hazel's mother's maiden name. Around this time Will was transferred to Manual Arts High School in the English Department, which he could get to by a short street-car ride. He was there until he was promoted to the Assistant Supervisor-Vocation, Education Section (Forestry Division) in the Los Angeles City Schools.

Sometime before January 1920, Hazel's Aunt Damaris (May) Palmer also came from Maine to live with them.

On October 26, 1920 Millard Edwin was born in Los Angeles.  Millard was named after Hazel's father Millard Call.

Millard, Hazel & Bill Tanner
About 1923

As mentioned before, they would spend most of their summers at her mother's house in the Santa Monica Canyon.  Millard described their summer house, "This house was about a half a mile from the beach on the side of a hill in the canyon." Early in the morning, when the tide was low, Will, Bill and Millard would go down to the rocks along the shore and gather mussels from the rocks. During a calm spell between the big waves, they would scurry down the slippery rocks to scrape off a few mussels with a stone before the next big wave came. When they collected enough of them for a meal, they took them home and steamed them for breakfast. For awhile they lived part of the time at the canyon and part of the time on 4th Ave, renting out one house or the other. One year Will went back and forth to Manual Arts from Santa Monica on the Big Red Cars, because they loved it at the beach so much.  When Bill approached the age of Kindergarten they moved to their house on 4th Ave, as they were not near enough to a grammar school at Santa Monica.

When they first went to 4th Ave there were only a few houses around them and farther out towards the Baldwin Hills there was only the Japanese gardens and fields. The car line was about 3/4 of a mile from their house.  There was one house on one side and a vacant lot on the other where they planted different kinds of berries, flowers and vegetables. In the back of their garage were two small sheds where they kept some chickens and the children later used as club houses. Across the street was a monkey tree.

In 1923 Hazel's aunt died and left her some money which they used to buy their first car, a 1921 Buick Sedan. Their lives changed and they drove everywhere, using their car for all their traveling.

Tom Barnard, William R. Tanner, Bill (the little kid), Helen Barnard, Ruth Ensign?, Helen C. Tanner, Anna Cundiff, (hiding in the back, probably Velzora Call Brown), baby Millard Tanner, Hazel Tanner (holding baby), Fred Barnard
picture probably taken about 1920

Their other two children were born in 1924 and 1928, but because they are alive I will not put more details about them now.  When their youngest was about a year old, William had his first stroke.

Back row: Millard, William, Hazel, and Bill
Front Row: son & daughter

Bill and Millard Tanner

As part of Will's job as a supervisor in the Board of Education, he worked in the Sierra Madre Mountains taking students from different schools up into the mountains teaching them forestry and fire prevention. They had one school truck which they transported the students up into the mountains. The truck was red and built by the White company. As their son remembers, "the horn button was down low on the driver's side and when the man driving the truck wanted to tease you, he would poke you in the tummy and press the horn at the same time." Millard recalled one time," It was on a Saturday that my dad decided to take Bill and me up to camp. We started out in the old White truck toward Montrose, which is just the other side of Glendale at the foot of the mountains. From here we started winding up into the mountains on this private road. As we traveled on, we kept getting higher and higher until the canyon below us seemed miles away. The first time I went up there and looked over the side of the truck, it gave me a sickly feeling. Then we crossed the divide and started down the North side toward the camp. As we rounded the last bend and beheld the camp, I didn't think it was so very wonderful because it was then only a small house, a bunk house, and a nursery with small trees and shrubs in it. There was no electricity so we had to use candles for light and wood stoves to cook on. We didn't have a telephone then but one was put in later on. We always had to take up our own food because the camp was quite hard to get to and nobody else was there to supply it. Sometimes we would get there and find that we had forgotten something, then we would have to go without it until we got back in the city. At night we slept in bunks out under the stars and listened to the frogs and other animals making different noises and moving around near by. When the sun was about to set in the evening we would go down the road a ways to a place where we could see the whole Big Tujunga with the mountains fading out in the distance and watch the sun sink slowly in the distance making everything look red. When the sun had settled out of sight it gave me the impression that the day was over and I might as well go to bed. We would walk slowly back to the house and eat our supper and turn in. In the morning when we woke up and finished our breakfast we had to get busy and do at least two hours work during the forenoon. Our job was to take small pines trees out in the brush and plant them so that in time the mountains would be covered with them. Many times we had to get out with the pick and shovel and build trails from one place to another. During the rest of the day we climbed the mountains or went down in the valleys where there was running water."

William Roy Tanner

When that division closed he went to Washington High to teach. During this time he became ill due to pressure and tension and only taught there a short while. On January 21, 1937 in Los Angeles, William passed away.

William Roy's Death Certificate

The official diagnosis was cerebral arterioscterosis, which is a result of thickening and hardening of the walls of the arteries in the brain, which caused a cerebral hemorrhage.  He was buried on January 23, 1937 in the Inglewood Park Cemetery.