September 5, 1889 – January 21, 1944. H.P. Meyer's first wife and Gram's mother — the previously unnamed woman at the root of this branch.
Edith Geddes Johnston was born in Long Beach in 1889, one of three Johnston sisters — Edith, Kathleen (“Auntie Katch”), and Mary. Their father, James Everett Johnston, was a periodic drunk forever chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, once as far as the Alaska gold fields; he ran a boarding-house “hotel” and couldn’t be counted on. Their mother, Mary Ellen Geddes, was a teetotaler who could, and did. Unable to rely on her husband, she sent all three girls to the Los Angeles Normal School — the future UCLA — for teacher training, with the lesson attached: a woman should be able to support herself and her children on her own.
Edith married H.P. Meyer in Los Angeles in February 1911. They settled in the Imperial Valley — Holtville, then El Centro, where H.P. ran Imperial Hardware — and had three daughters: Jeanie Kathleen, Marjorie (Gram), and Elizabeth “Bibs.” She died in San Bernardino in January 1944, at fifty-four, and was buried at Glendale. H.P. married again the next year.
One photograph survives: Edith in a white-brimmed hat and floral jacket, smiling, at some garden gathering in the late 1930s or early 1940s, cropped out of a larger family group.