An elusive Fortean from California.
Bertram Taylor Stevens appears in historical records for the Great War. His draft card gives his birth date as 1 August 1890, and the place as Stockton, California. His father was supposed to have come the Golden State from either Illinois or Wisconsin, his mother from Wisconsin. Stevens started working around 1905, when he was fourteen. There’s no particular reason to disbelieve that information, but nor is there corroboration that I can find. I haven’t found a California birth record, or his name in the 1900 or 1910 censuses. Such things happen. It’s just worth noting. At the time he joined the army, Stevens, tall and gray-eyed, captained a dredger in Bay Point, California. Later, he would says that he served fourteen months overseas.
In 1920, he worked as a machinist in Pittsburg, California, not far from Stockton, and was living with a 59 year-old boarder, Robert Wilson. Apparently, Stevens had a short marriage early in the 1920s that ended with his wife’s death. The two had a son, and in 1930 B. T. Stevens, Sr., and Jr. were living in Antioch, California, still in the same general area, on the eastern edge of the Bay Area, near where the Great Central Valley begins. The elder Stevens worked at a paper mill and no longer owned his home—the two rented a house for $25. Within the next five years, the two Stevenses moved to a more rural part of Contra Costa County, where they still lived in 1940, at which time Sr. was working on his own account. He would say, “Now I am no financial wizard and it took much personal sacrifice for me to accumulate the small amount of capital at my command.” He only had an eighth-grade education.