Tales from a Tiny ‘Mansion’

1304 Norvell St., March 5, 1936: It’s about the only house you can see in the picture, with the bare hills in distance. Karen Stoneman photo

In a city rife with ordinary houses, the gabled and formerly clapboarded house at 1304 Norvell Street comes across as more ordinary than most. Yet it has been a beloved house, and a house with several tales to tell, as are so many structures in our city, with tales of small-town life, hardworking people, families and friendship.

There’s even a bit of wife swapping in this tale, husband swapping too, though as our storyteller tells it, it seems to have been done with the blessing of the justice of the peace.

All too often as people grow old and die, and pass their belongings onto their children, things disappear, including old photos. Or they continue to exist, but without their stories. Antiques stores and ephemera dealers everywhere offer piles of potentially historic photos, people smiling, holding dogs, sitting in cars. But who are these people? What are their stories?

Passing the stories along
Thanks to Karen Stoneman, who grew up in 1304 Norvell, the historical society now holds a trove of photos of her family, showing their lives in Montana and Victoria, B.C., and later in El Cerrito. And these pictures come with stories, many involving her parents William Stoneman and Hedvig Marie (Sorensen) Stoneman, who was known as Marie.

Four siblings at 1304 Norvell St.: Marie, Odin (Ed), Eve and Anne, circa mid 1930s. Karen Stoneman photo.

The home on Norvell, which her parents called “the mansion,” was no way station. It’s been in the family since 1926. Karen sold it in August 2023 for just over $800,000.

Realty records date the home to 1925, though it looks several years older. The home went through several remodels, including one in 1929 that added a front section.

“At one time, according to mother, because she told me all this stuff, it was a one room shack,” Karen said in an October 2022 interview. She described subsequent changes: a bedroom was added, the location of the front door changed from south facing to north facing, the second floor addition. A standalone garage that retained her dad’s tools until recently was an early structure.

One sign of its owners’ affection for the simple house is an inscription on the back of one very early shot: “Marie’s dream house.”

Besides the photos, Karen’s donation to the society included her mother’s certificate on graduating from eighth grade at Garfield School in Berkeley and a pamphlet from the funeral service for her grandfather, Jens Peter Sorensen, who died in September 1939 at his home, just a few doors away from Karen’s parents on Norvell Street.

There is also a first day cover – the first day that a certain U.S. stamp was used -- in this case one honoring the Overland Mail, from the Court of Flags Motel in El Cerrito, October 1958. And a few Portola Toro yearbooks from the years Karen attended Portola Junior High at the start of the ‘60s.

Not only is Karen the sort of person who preserves old documents, she pays attention to family through genealogical research and by staying in touch with members of her family, which is rooted in Denmark and Norway (her mother), and Cornwall, England (her dad’s family).

“I've still got relatives in Victoria I'm in touch with,” Karen said. “I keep in touch with all my mom's Norwegian relatives. I keep in touch with my English relatives.”

El Cerrito, where several members of the Sorensen clan arrived in the mid-1920s, was a small town at the time. Karen’s mother arrived with her parents at age 5 or 6.

“I mean, my mom remembered when she moved here as a girl in 1926, she remembered nothing down on San Pablo,” Karen said. “San Pablo Avenue was a mud road and cows were all over the place. And she could see wagons being pulled by horses on San Pablo.”

Marie married her first husband, Robert Markley, in 1926 which is when the house at 1304 Norvell came into the picture. “She and her first husband, Robert Markley, bought this house and they moved here when she was 16 after they got married,” Karen said.

The couple had a baby boy who died in infancy. The marital switcheroo happened not long after.

William and Marie Stoneman in Oakland in the 1940s. Karen Stoneman photo

Marie met and took a fancy to a married gentleman named William Stoneman, whose wife took a fancy to Robert Markley, who did not object.

“The two women and the two men switched partners,” Karen said, adding that the matter attracted the attention of the local press. “I have a newspaper article where there was some trouble, and the police came,” she said.

The news article, alas, is not one Karen could put her hands on for the benefit of the historical society.

“The two women went to Reno, got a quickie divorce,” Karen said. “The two men stayed down here and worked. Markley was a tugboat captain out in the Bay for the Red and White Fleet, and my dad worked for Southern Pacific.”

Despite some initial tension, Karen said, Markley and Stoneman and their families remained close in later years, often socializing together. “They were one big happy family.”

William Stoneman, who had a good job with the SP as a building and bridge supervisor, was born in Britain to a mining family in Cornwall, then spent years working as a miner, following in his dad’s footsteps. When William was a young man, his dad worked mines in the Dakotas, Montana, Canada, finally moving to Oakland. “They came to Oakland because they heard of jobs at the Southern Pacific,” Karen said.

William’s job at Southern Pacific came with responsibilities and required that he be away from home most of the week. Karen recalled getting letters from her father “with the insignia of a hotel on it.”

“He said, you know, ‘Take care of Mommy. Daddy loves you and I'll be home Friday.’ He used to come home on Friday night and leave on Sunday night.” When her dad was home she remembered him motoring with the family in a green Chevrolet.

Marie and William Stoneman alongside their home at 1304 Norvell St. Karen Stoneman photo

Karen’s father died in his early 50s, when she was 8 years old. The death appeared to be work-related.

“They think he died of because he was in the tunnels when the trains went through, and in those days the train was putting out smoke and everything. They think he got something wrong with his spleen.”

“My mother was relying on that source of income, so she had to go to work,” Karen said.

“She started out in the school cafeteria up at Portola (junior high). And then I think she went to different schools to work in the cafeterias. Then she finally went to Berkeley Adult School and got her nurse's aide certificate. She worked at Richmond Hospital, then she got a job down in Central Supply where they sterilized equipment. And she retired from there when she was 65.”

Karen, who was an only child, regrets criticizing her mother for trying to economize.

“If there was food left over” from the school cafeteria, Karen said, the cafeteria workers “could bring it home. But I would complain. I would say, ‘Ah, we had that at school for lunch and now we’re having it for dinner. I don't want to eat that. I just had it for lunch, you know.’ And she was kind of hurt, I guess, because she was working hard to try to feed me.”

Still, life was good on and around Norvell Street in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Karen Stoneman rides her tricycle in front of her family's house at 1304 Norvell St. in 1949. Karen Stoneman photo

Marie loved animals, cats, dogs and more. “The chickens, everything,” Karen recalled. And Marie wanted the place to look nice. “My mom always had flowers and they had a little crisscross fence,” Karen said. Relatives lived on the same street and they often had them and friends over to the house.

And El Cerrito, which in the 1950s still had many vacant lots and open space, was a great place for kids to play. Karen remembers playing with her friend Jeannie outside the TEPCO plant, which manufactured ceramic dinnerware and related items.

TEPCO, whose former site is occupied today by the DMV office at Manila Avenue and Kearney Street, sat alongside a railroad track that serviced the plant. (Today it’s the Ohlone Greenway.) The area was a magnet for kids.

Karen remembered a pile of rejects alongside the plant.

“They would throw their dishes in there, whether they were rejects or whatever. And I'd bring them home. I've still got TEPCO cups here that I brought to my mom. She drank coffee until the day she died.”

“And we used to play in the sawdust pile, throw sawdust at the trains when they went by. I mean, we’d lay on the tracks.”

When Karen was 2, a new family moved from former Richmond war worker housing into the home across the street, a dad and mom and two boys. Richard, who was 3, soon became a best friend.

“We played together all our lives. Oh, he walked me to school. He’d walk me to junior high, walk me to high school. But then in high school, I went my way with my stuff, and he went his way.”

Karen’s stuff included three years in the Army, stationed in Hawaii with stops in wartime Vietnam and Japan. Then she spent 10 years in computer operations with Mason-McDuffie Real Estate in Berkeley, then spent time as a stay-at-home mom raising her son.

For 18 years Karen worked as a civilian at Mare Island Naval Shipyard in computer operations – the graveyard shift, to have days free for her son.

She’s lived 50 years in Vallejo, but remained linked to her former El Cerrito home because her mother remained there. Her son spent much time in El Cerrito as he was growing up, and in her mother’s later years Karen provided care-giving in the Norvell Street home.

Karen, who took over the home in 1997 after her mother died, soon became reacquainted with her childhood friend, Richard, who had also returned to his childhood home.

“His wife just died two years, two or three years ago,” Karen said in 2022. “I've lost partners, and we're together.”

The house at 1304 Norvell as it appeared in recent years.

By Dave Weinstein. This article appeared in the June 2024 issue of the Forge.