How We Got Here
How our mother came to Halcyon
Our grandmother, Ebba Victoria Stromberg, grew up in Quinsigamond Village, a Swedish neighborhood of Worcester, Massachusetts. She married a man named Axel Emanuel Stenquist, an accountant at American Steel and Wire Company, and they raised their children (Bob and Louise) in a nice home on the other side of Worcester, very close to Elm Park.
Some years later, Ebba caught her husband having an affair with his secretary, so she sought a divorce and decided to move out to Halcyon, California. She departed in early September, 1928, and her children Bob and Louise left Worcester five months later to join their mother in California.
As their train departed the station on January 1, 1929 that was the last time that Louise would see Worcester for over 40 years. It took them five days to cross the country by train. They traveled alone. They were 11 and 13 years old. That is how our mother and her brother came to be in Halcyon.
How our father came to Halcyon
Our father was born and raised in Lake Huntington, New York. His father owned and operated a drug store right on the shore of the lake. His mother died from the Spanish Flu when he was only one and a half years old, and he was raised by his stepmother, Mae Mahony, a strict Irish Catholic. After completing high school in 1933 at the age of 15, Herb went to live with relatives in New York City for a couple of years. He worked at the New York Public Library until joining the U.S. Navy in June 1935. After he left New York he wouldn’t return to his hometown until 1973.
Eventually Herb would be stationed in San Pedro, California, from December 1935 to September 1937. During that time, on three separate occasions, Herb hitch-hiked up the coast to visit his brother Bernard who was living in Halcyon, California. On one of these trips to see his brother, during what Herb referred to as a “magical three days in September” Herb and Louise met, fell in love, and were engaged to be married.
The Halcyon Connection
One of the most interesting things about the story of our parents is that there seems to be one single entity that was the nexus of their meeting, and that was the intentional community The Temple of The People, or just “The Temple,” in Halcyon, California.
When Ebba Stenquist decided to divorce her husband and leave Worcester, she came to Halcyon because of The Temple, and of course our mother followed. She had learned about The Temple growing up in Massachusetts. Three years after she arrived, she married Fred Whitney, a Temple Priest, and much older than she.
Bernard Lentz learned about The Temple in his early twenties. He came to Halcyon in 1930 at age 27 to join in the Temple work.
Our father came to Halcyon because Bernard was there. The rest, as they say, is history.
Lentz-Stenquist Family History 