Grampa and the Gopher

This story based is on family lore that I heard from my mother. She was not present for these events, so I cant vouch for the accuracy of it all, but it is substantially what I heard. It is the first of an occasional series on my family history.


Florence Hayden Taft, was the matriarch of my mother’s family. She had married Max Taft in 1901 or so, and had spent most of the rest of his life regretting it. Max was a player, and Florence was the girl he always came back to.

Florence and Max were from old families that came west after the gold rush and were involved in retail merchandise dry goods. Dunham, Carrigan and Hayden was a hardware company in San Francisco, and Taft and Pennoyer was a dry goods company in Oakland. They had five children and lived in Oakland, but Max was never happy working in the family firm. He preferred the physical outdoors life, and apparently a fair amount of the physical life indoors as well. In 1910 they found a piece of property on the Truckee River that they purchased, according to family lore, for around $300 from the Floriston Lumber Co. This is where they built their house.

Max was born around 1880 and had a comfortable life materially, but at some point he began to feel constricted and dissatisfied. He became a drinker at college in Berkeley, if not before. He also became a “womanizer.” His youthful rebellion degraded quickly and he became the black sheep of the family. He married Florence 1901, but not before his family had shipped him off to Hawaii to try to straighten him out. He idolized Florence, but ran around with loose women and drunks.

From Hawaii Max wrote frequent and eloquent love letters to Florence. At the same time he kept a diary describing his drinking bouts and the time he spent with a notorious divorcee. He appears to have had a classic need to have simultaneously an Angel (Florence) and a harlot, and in those days one woman couldn’t fill both roles.

Over the course of their marriage Max and Florence had four girls and one boy and Max had several affairs and sunk even deeper into alcoholism. His diaries show a picture of an unhappy man tormented by his conflicts who eventually died early from his drinking.

The one place where Max seemed to feel at peace was in Truckee. He loved being in the woods. He camped and hunted and fished. He did most of the stonework on the grounds himself, he tended the lawns and the flowerbeds and he was very protective of his turf.

Florence was a good Episcopal Church Lady. Most likely she was a pillar. The Northern California diocese maintains an outdoor chapel in Tahoe City for summer services and the Bishop would preside at the Chapel in the Pines whenever he was vacationing at the lake.

Pillar that she was, Florence was naturally on friendly terms with the Bishop. So one summer after the house was built Florence invited Bishop Porter to the River for lunch. She also asked Max to attend.

Max was less a pillar of the church than a broken window, and he didn’t want to come. He wanted to lay in wait to try to catch a particularly destructive gopher that was tearing up the front lawn. Apparently there was some negotiation and a compromise, because Max eventually agreed to come -- on the condition that he be allowed to keep his shotgun with him in case the gopher showed up.

On the day that Bishop Porter came for lunch the family and their guests were assembled on the front porch, looking out over the river, and my grandmother asked the Bishop to say a prayer. The Bishop obliged, and as he was getting to the end, somewhere in between the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, a shot rang out from the porch.

Max had bagged his gopher.