Child of the Sit-Downs_ The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger - Carlton Jackson [12]
Genora’s grandfather, Jarvis Albro, a young man with a Scandinavian background, arrived in Flint in the 1840s. He became a farmer, a county supervisor, and a drain commissioner; later he served as an officer during the Civil War and became forever afterward known as “Captain Jarv” or “Silver Tongue Jarv” because many times he had defended people in court who could not afford an attorney. A shortage of licensed attorneys kept him busy in litigation. Famous for his political independence, he refused to run with the pack. Inheriting the trait, perhaps, from her grandfather, Genora liked to tell friends that “non-conformity is a strong tradition in our family.”6 As one might imagine, Jarv became a powerful influence in Flint and, indeed, the entire county of Genesee. In national politics, he was a Greenback and Populist and then a strong supporter of Socialist Eugene Debs. In 1913, the year Genora was born, he voted, much to the chagrin of many family members in Flint, for Socialist mayor John Menton.7 By the 1930s, Genora lamented, there were no remnants in Flint of the old Debsians. “I could never find any old Socialists from that period.”8
Jarvis Albro married a woman named Carpenter (Carpenter Road in Flint was named after her family) and, being a religious man, was a founder of the Court Street Methodist Church just after the Civil War. Here his granddaughter, Genora Gertrude Albro, taught Sunday school. Later, Genora attended the Unitarian Church on Clifford Street in Flint.9 She became attracted to the Unitarians in part because of their propensity to discuss problems of the contemporary world rather than those of biblical times in the way of most other churches.
Raymond Albro, Jarvis’s son, was born in Flint but, as a young businessman, went to Three Rivers looking for a place to open a photographic studio, and there he met Lora Fuller. Their friendship became serious, and he persuaded her to return with him to his hometown, just to see what it looked like. Around 1910 the automobile was already transforming Flint from a village to a boomtown. Its citizens argued, “Oh, Flint is going to be on the map of the world.”10 Lora got a job making spark plugs at the Albert Champion (AC) factory. She was probably still single, for at that time society in general, and in little villages particularly, looked askance at a married woman working outside her household.
Genora’s maternal grandparents, the Fullers, who had New England antecedents, settled in Three Rivers. Adai Bine Fuller could repair anything mechanical. Everything broken was saved for him on his periodic visits to the Albros in Flint. Adai was Genora’s favorite grandfather. “She loved his northeastern accent.”11 Alice Elizabeth Lane Fuller was her favorite grandmother. Alice Elizabeth bore nine children, was one of the first women in Three Rivers to bob her hair as a sign of modernity, and, worse yet, she drank beer!12
There was talk of Native American antecedents in Genora’s ancestry, from a tribe in New England, on her mother’s side. Perhaps, some said, this was partly why Genora always seemed to be interested in minority struggles. An admirer said that she “never thought much of having a family that dated back to the pre-American Revolution. It was as natural as breathing for Genora to accept people for what they were rather than for their origins.”13 Alice Elizabeth frequently told Genora and the other grandchildren that “somewhere in the family tree” was a French Jew.14 This information