My paternal grandfather was Dr. Charles Albert Brandstater, son of Emanuel Brandstater Sr. I’ve learned that the “original” Australian family always referred to him as “Albert”. But here in the Golden State he was called Charles by his wife (Margaret Minerva Kessler), friends and fellow members of the Seventh-day Adventist White Memorial Church in East Los Angeles. He and Margaret married in 1899 in the state of Georgia.
Charles was born in 1875 in Hobart, capital of the island state of Australia. Of the eight siblings, Charles Albert was the first to be born to the new immigrants after arriving in Hobart. I know nothing of Charles’ early life in Tasmania, nor how he came to know and marry his wife, Margaret. There is a peripatetic rhythm to his early adulthood. First, as a male nurse in Battle Creek, Michigan, he came to know Sister Ellen White. She encouraged him in a career path I find somewhat odd. That was as a colporteur (a peddler as it were) of religious books. This “mission” returned him to Tasmania – not just once, but twice.
Two of Charles’ sons were born in Tasmania: Oliver in 1903 and then Kenneth in 1909. The global shuffle resulted in that my father, Glenn, was born June 10, 1905 at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. My father took savage delight in pointing out he was the only one of three sons who could be elected President of the United States – since he was the only one born in America.
Lacking certainty, I believe Charles earned his Doctor of Dental Surgery (DDS) degree in 1912 or 1913 from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Given that Charles died in 1940 and I was born in December, 1947, I know very little about him. For whatever reasons, neither my father (Glenn) nor two uncles (Oliver and Kenneth) rarely discussed their father. My grandmother Margaret offered no insight either. So I am left with only three anecdotal stories about Charles:
First:
From seventh through twelfth grade (1959 to 1965), I attended Glendale Union Academy (now Glendale Adventist Academy, three blocks east of Glendale Adventist Medical Center). My schoolmate and best friend during those years was Gordon Adams Jr. whose father was also a dentist.
Dr. Adams told me that as a boy he attended the White Memorial Church in East Los Angeles where Charles was also an older member. He recalled Charles 1) as having a fine baritone voice singing in the church choir and 2) watching him drive away from church following Sabbath services in a fine luxury automobile. I learned, years later, that the car either would have been a Roamer (called the “poor man’s Rolls-Royce”) with other Roamer owners including Oscar Wilde and Mary Pickford – or a Duesenberg.
Charles’ relative “wealth” was not due to the practice of dentistry. Rather, the margin of his income provided the opportunity to invest in real estate, mostly in East Los Angeles. Like so many others, the Depression of the early 1930s largely eliminated his largess and enjoyment of the “Roaring 20’s”. Debt and bank foreclosures wiped out much of his investments as a lease holder for the huge Sears/Roebuck warehouse in East Los Angeles, as well as the ownership of the parking lot of the famed Carthay Circle movie theatre on San Vicente Boulevard, just east of Hollywood.
Nonetheless, in spite of an adverse American economy, Charles managed to pay the undergraduate and dental college tuition for all three of his sons at the University of Southern California.
Second:
At my tenth prep school reunion from Glendale Academy, a man I’d never met, Robert Haglund (father of one of my classmates, Thomas), approached me with an interesting question:
“Could you be related to Dr. Charles Brandstater, the dentist?” Of course I replied, “Yes, he was my late grandfather – but he died several years before I was born.”
Mr. Haglund explained that as a young boy in Los Angeles he had terrible, crooked teeth. His father was a janitor and the family was quite poor. Mr. Haglund’s father took his young son to Dr. Charles for corrective treatment (this would have been about 1930) for braces and regular return appointments for examination and tightening over months. The total bill was $100—an impressive sum at that time—and the father asked Dr. Charles if he would permit him to pay $8 each month on the account. “Yes, of course” Mr. Haglund told me was Charles’ reply. His father then sent the first eight-dollar monthly payment. The next month’s statement came by mail with Charles’ hand-written notation: “paid in full”.
This Christian spirit foreshadows and exemplifies the giving and charitable deeds of other Brandstater family members that I’ve come to know.
Third:
Soon after building a new home at 401 W. Wilson Avenue in Glendale, Charles opened his dental practice a few blocks away on the corner of Brand Boulevard and Broadway, the major business intersection of the quickly growing city. In the 1920s it was claimed that Glendale was the fastest growing city in America. True or not, its growth required new streets, new schools, new houses and new telephones.
I became a member of the Glendale Kiwanis Club in 1980. Soon after, an older member, Professor Burnell Yarrick (teaching botany at Glendale Community College) told me he grew up a few doors west of the Brandstater home on Wilson Avenue. Yarrick, then a young boy, related that he was walking up Wilson Avenue one afternoon with his father and encountered Dr. Charles in the front yard. His father knew that Charles was an investor in the original Glendale Telephone Company (then part of the original Bell System) and complained he had been waiting for months to get a telephone installed at his home, without result. Supply simply could not satisfy demand. The next day the Yarrick family had a telephone installed!
It’s not so much that, at that point, Charles had “money”. Rather an indication of the old axiom: “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”.
Now, I back-peddle. Shortly after becoming a dentist, Charles and Margaret moved to San Francisco. In a few years they moved to Glendale, California in 1917. All three sons attended and graduated from Glendale Union High School. Maintaining his Glendale practice, Charles also rented a suite of dental offices at 7046 Hollywood Boulevard – the Hollywood Professional Building. So, in the early to mid-1930s, there were four Brandstater dentists: Charles and three sons: Oliver, Glenn and Kenneth.
Charles died at age 65 of a sudden heart attack. He was buried at Forest Lawn, Glendale, where later his wife, Margaret, was also interred. Not far away is the burial location of my father, Glenn Allen Brandstater, very close to the burial plots of my maternal grandparents (who raised me), Earl Client Trimmer and Lauretta O’Hara Trimmer.
Three sons, three dentists
1. Oliver Albert Brandstater
Oliver was the eldest of Charles’ three sons, was born in 1903 in Hobart, Australia. I know very little of my Uncle Oliver, other than he was married five times yet had no children. His first wife was Hazel Elizabeth Jones, whom he married in 1929. His last wife, my aunt Barbara, was an extremely attractive and comely redhead and an excellent cook!
While Dr. Oliver’s practice and home was in Hollywood for many years, I only can remember visiting his home at 81492 Helen Street in Indio. He and Barbara moved there in 1959 or 1960, where he re-established his dental practice in the Coachella Valley.
There is at least one “black sheep” among the flock. A two-column headline appeared on July 18, 1950 in the Los Angeles Times:
Husband Gets Reno Divorce
“Leonard P. Milano obtained a divorce in Reno yesterday from Mrs. Wilna Wyllie Milano, 35-year-old office nurse, who last Friday was accused in a local court action of misconduct with a Hollywood dentist. “The Nevada divorce, reported in wire dispatches, superseded a similar suit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by Milano last May 1 but was never brought to trial.
“Mrs. Milano was named in court records regarding a divorce complaint brought here by Mrs. Eileen Brandstater, 38, against Dr. Oliver A. Brandstater, 47.”
The same extra-marital dalliance also made a Hollywood newspaper article, describing his then-wife as discovering him “in a state of undress with his nurse.” Ah! How delicate was the phrasing of journalism in those years. I believe Eileen Brandstater was wife #3. His divorce however was indelicate, since Oliver soon-after departed the environs of Hollywood.
Oliver was quite tall – 6’4”, very slender and spoke with a slight stammer. My limited encounters with him recall his intellect, good manners and keen ability at fifty-cent poker stakes which we learned one night at his home with my cousin, Will (Kenneth’s second son). Will and I were both 13 or 14 at the time. We lost the poker game to Uncle Oliver, but he refused to collect, being a good sport and telling his two young nephews “my money comes more easily than yours.”
Sybaritic pleasures and enjoyment were not confined merely to the opposite sex. My first visit to his Indio home in 1959 found a new Cadillac Fleetwood four-door sedan in his driveway, approximating the length of the HMS Queen Mary. He also owned a speedboat docked at the nearby Salton Sea. A lifelong smoker, Oliver died of lung cancer in 1970, preceding his mother’s death by one year. He is interred at the Hollywood Cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard, at last returned to Hollywood – gone, but certainly not forgotten.
2. Glenn Allen Brandstater (my father)
The only “natural born” citizen of the United States of his generation of California Brandstaters, Glenn was born at the Battle Creek Sanitarium on June 10, 1905. As a very young child he, father, mother and older brother Oliver, moved to Tasmania with his Seventh-day Adventist parents, where they briefly continued SDA church work. It was there his younger brother, Kenneth, was born in 1909. Soon after Ken was born the family returned to the United States.
Apparently they lived for a few years in San Francisco, and then moved to Glendale in 1917, where Charles and Margaret built a new house on a double lot near downtown Glendale. While attending Glendale Union High School (John Wayne, the famed actor, was two years behind him) he met my mother, Valera Madeline Trimmer (born March 22, 1906). She and her parents lived seven blocks north at 419 Patterson Avenue, where the Trimmers had built their new home in the same year.
Even though a good student (and a gymnast), Glenn left in 1923, after his freshman year from undergraduate studies at the University of Southern California (USC). A rebel at heart, he’d grown weary of parental strictures, especially parents who were faithful and observant Seventh-day Adventists.
He returned to San Francisco, where he worked as a batboy for the San Francisco Seals, a “Triple A” team in the Pacific Coast League. At the urging (or threat) from his father, he returned to Los Angeles and re-entered USC in 1926 to complete his bachelor’s degree. He married Eleanor C. Thorn (later Treathaway) on August 14, 1928 – just as he was entering Dental School at USC, from which he graduated in 1931 with his DDS.
His first marriage did not last long, nor did he have children with Eleanor. In spite of the Prohibition era and the 18th Amendment (1920-1933), his introduction to parties and alcohol conveniently ignored legal confinement. He sadly became an alcoholic, which ultimately caused the termination of his marriage to my mother (Valera, also an alcoholic). Subsequently he endured an arduous and difficult adult life until his last drink on December 22, 1955.
Even during those difficult years, he somehow maintained a dental practice with his father (Dr. Charles) in Hollywood. Then, one month after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Dental Corps of the U.S. Army in January, 1942, commissioned as a lieutenant and later a captain during World War II. Those intervening years witnessed divorce to his first wife, as did those same years saw the divorce of my mother to her first husband, Louis Hennig of Anaheim. Louis and Valera had one child, my half-sister, Colette Marie Hennig (Foster), born on November 8, 1928.
Years after being schoolmates in Glendale, my father and mother were married in Reno, Nevada in May, 1942. Three years of active duty in the Army, and only stateside, took my parents to numerous Army posts in the continental United States. It included a demanding schedule during days, when my father performed dental work on thousands of young soldiers from across our nation. Most of them had never visited a dentist. Many of them didn’t know how to use a toothbrush!
Shortly after Glenn was honorably discharged from the Army, he and my mother purchased a home at 3233 Oakshire Drive in the Hollywood Hills – from radio stars (later television stars) Ozzie and Harriet Nelson.
But my parent’s heavy drinking continued without abatement. I was born at St. Vincent’s Hospital (just two miles west of downtown Los Angeles) on December 9, 1947. That my parents somehow managed to conceive me earlier that year must be equidistant to the Immaculate Conception. Police calls, physical fights and alcohol induced haze on the part of both my parents led to their separation early in 1950, when I was a toddler. My mother left and took both of us to live with my maternal grandparents, the Trimmers, in the Glendale home where my mother was raised.
The sacrifice of my mother’s parents is an entirely different story. But for two people then in their late 60s, I would have been a foster child, juvenile delinquent – or worse. My grandfather was superintendent of the huge May Company warehouse south of downtown Los Angeles. Neither rich nor poor, we were middle class. I didn’t always have what I wanted, but I also had what I needed. The most important parts were rules, standards, examples and love. After a long separation, Glenn and Valera officially divorced in mid-1964. My mother never remarried and died in Carpentaria in late 1991.
Glenn recovered from alcoholism in 1955 and rebuilt a substantial dental practice on Vermont Avenue in East Hollywood. I do not recall seeing my father until I was twelve years old. While I remained living with my grandparents, my father saw to it that my financial needs were always met: tuition at Glendale Academy, then USC; a new Mustang when I entered college, and credit cards to satisfy the financial wants of a young man in Southern California. This, indeed, was and is to his credit.
After a long relationship with his “significant other”, Mary (“Pinkie”) Rinehart, the two of them finally married early in 1970. Even though he had quit smoking several years before, Glenn died of emphysema on May 28, 1973 at La Vina Hospital in Altadena, California.
His son, Allen, was married November 26, 1988 to Lynn Bourdon Brandstater, born May 1, 1958 in Muskegon, Michigan. They have no children and have lived in their home on Oak Circle Drive, Glendale, since their marriage. Allen is a publicist and political consultant. Lynn is a mental health professional and an adjunct professor of Social Service at one of the California State Universities.
3. Kenneth William Brandstater (Uncle Kenneth)
Kenneth was also born in Tasmania on February 9, 1909. Concurrently and obviously, Uncle Kenneth trailed with the rest of Charles and Margaret’s family, leading them to Glendale when he was about eight years old. He also attended Glendale schools and was an undergraduate and then earned his DDS degree from USC’s School of Dentistry, I believe in 1933.
Unlike his “problem child” two brothers, Kenneth was a gentleman on the straight and narrow. He was tall, erect, well-mannered and both an excellent husband and devoted father. Kenneth served in the U.S. Navy, also as a commissioned officer in its Dental Corps. His fortuitous enlistment concluded just months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, so he was spared wartime service.
He had continued his profession with his father, Charles, in their dental practice. After his father’s death in 1940, he established his own practice in Hollywood, then North Hollywood, then Chico (in Northern California) then finally to Burbank, California, where he retired in the mid 1980s.
One of his patients was the young and very attractive Mary Gaylord, born in Stowe, Ohio. Mary had been captain of the women’s volleyball team at Kent State University and a successful model when she first moved to Los Angeles. Dentition led to marriage, which I believe happened in 1937 or 1938. Kenneth and Mary first lived in a second-floor apartment building above a war surplus store. A modest house or two followed, when in 1951 they purchased a beautiful house on Allview Terrace, close to the world-famous Hollywood sign, with a majestic view of much of Los Angeles.
In 1956 or 1957 they moved to Chico in Northern California. Kenneth’s practice, newly established, suffered financially due to a fair number of patients who could not – or would not – pay their bills. Aunt Mary was not pleased with the environment, so after a few years, they moved back to Southern California. They owned two homes in Toluca Lake and finally purchased a splendid, new, two-story condominium at 4222 Kling Street in Burbank. Mary passed away from a sudden stroke in August, 1968. Two later and successive marriages did not bode well for Kenneth. Wives #2 and #3 (Peggy and Midge) revealed a greater interest in Kenneth’s home, new cars and bank accounts. Kenneth and Mary had two sons: Albert Stanley Brandstater (born in 1942) and William Thomas Brandstater (born July 24, 1947).
I knew Albert only remotely when I was a young boy. He was a favorite of our grandmother, Margaret. Al graduated from Hollywood High School and in the course of his life held several jobs, notably as a stenographer in England’s Parliament. Albert never married. In the early 1970s he changed his surname to his mother’s maiden name – Gaylord. He died in Mexico City in 2008.
Will attended early schools in Hollywood, North Hollywood, briefly at Glendale Adventist Academy and then several colleges to earn his bachelor’s degree from California State University, Stanislaus.
He served on active duty with the 1st, 3rd, 7th, and 11th U.S. Army Cavalry regiments in Germany, Korea and Austria. He was then a U.S. Army drill instructor at several military installations, serving our country for more than 27 years. Will met his wife, Sharen, in Glendale. After their marriage and his active duty service, they moved to Turlock, California where they raised four children: Thomas, Grace, Mary and Stanley. At last count, Will has eleven grandchildren and now lives just south of Denver, in Castle Rock, Colorado.
Author: Allen Brandstater, son of Glenn Brandstater and grandson of Charles Brandstater
