A. P. Allen and C. A. Beaver

Arthur Potter Allen, born November 6, 1892 in Flint, Michigan, was certainly an active ancestor.  He came to my attention as on January 12, 1928, he was elected as president of the San Pedro  Automobile Dealer’s Association.  In 1926, he and partner C. A. Beaver (no joke), bought Seaboard Motors, a Chevrolet dealership.

A.P. was not born into wealth, however, his father, Thomas, was a teacher, but Arthur was very studious, and received a degree from the Michigan College of Mines in 1914.  His first job, rather than at a mine, was as a cost accountant for the Buick Motor Company in his home town of Flint.

He then worked as an engineer at several small mines in Michigan, then to Ashcroft, British Columbia. He was working as a draftsman at Bunker Hill and Sullivan Mining Company in Kellogg, Idaho when he signed his draft card for WWI in 1917. Then to Miami, Arizona. Somewhere in there, he married Margaret Mansfield of Pasadena, a graduate of the University of Nebraska.

In 1922 he left mining and began work as a car salesman in Los Angeles County.  As a budding industry, there was frequent turnover, and as his story goes, he moves swiftly from the sales floor to community leader.

The couple raised five children in an ocean-view house in Palos Verdes while running the dealership: A. P. Jr. (WWII vet, career in the US Dept of State), Barbara (Journalist, editor Woman’s Day, social worker) Celia (clerk married a teacher)   David (Pilot Korea, Boeing Aerospace, County Planner) and (my favorite) Margery (Librarian).

During World War II Mr. Allen served as Vice Chairman of the region’s War Labor Board & postwar, he was a member of the Presidential Board of Inquiry in the maritime dispute of 1948. During the war years he had had considerable experience as a labor arbitrator.

From 1952-53, Mr. Allen served as chairman of the San Francisco regional office of the Wage Stabilization Board. He was the author of two books, Unemployment Insurance in California and Industrial Relations in the California Aircraft Industry. On July 21, 1955, he died suddenly.

Clyde Alton “C.A.“ Beaver was born, suitably for a business man, in Enterprise, Kansas, and he, like Mr. Allen, had many jobs in his life. He managed a lumberyard in 1910, by December 1927, he had departed Seaboard Motors, leaving it exclusively to Allen, and bought a competing service station in San Pedro. By 1930, he’d left car sales and was the manager of a gravel mine in Calaveras County, in the 1940 Census he is in Yavapai County, AZ prospecting for gold. In 1948 he’s a realtor

In 1907 C.A. Beaver married Solda Campbell.  Solda should have worked the dealership herself, her name made her a natural car saleswoman.