Alice, my maternal grandmother and the daughter of Adolf Silverman and Frieda Dinkelspiel, was born in San Francisco on October 13, 1897 (d. January 16, 1988 in Berkeley). Her older brother Harold Silverman was born in 1895.
Alice attended first the Pacific Heights school, then the Miss Murison School, in San Francisco, and was taught by its principal, Miss Elizabeth L. Murison. She studied at U.C. Berkeley, taking classes in philosophy, English literature, ethics, history, hygiene, biology, German, classics, critical writing and many more. She graduated with a B.A. with highest honors in English in 1918 and an M.A. and teaching credentials in 1919. She did additional graduate work in comparative literature and philosophy at Columbia and in comparative literature at the Sorbonne. She taught English in Southern California.
In her diaries she had expressed some ambivalence about marriage:
“I spoke with Miss Murison for a few minutes. She seemed glad to see me and was very kind. She told me that she had spoken to Aunt Beatrice and told her that now that Sophie was married, Aunt Beatrice should marry me off to the best man in San Francisco. It sounded ridiculous and I wanted to ask if there were any objection to Berkeley, but I know it was meant for my good for Miss Murison added tenderly, ‘for you must get married Alice’. I don’t like to hear talk however about being married off. It sounds like an auction.”
— October 25, 1917
However, Alice met Hugo Benioff at the Mt. Wilson observatory in 1923, and after five years of writing to each other, married March 2, 1928 and settled in Pasadena, CA where they had three children.
Hugo and Alice were divorced in 1953, and she moved to Berkeley, CA. She kept a diary for much of her childhood, was a poet, prolific reader and traveler, and had a radio program about poetry. She lived a quiet life in the North Berkeley hills, on Highgate road, with her two standard poodles, Solo and Suzette and her care giver.
Alice died, at the age of 90, on January 16, 1988.
In 1954, after her divorce (21 October, 1953) from Hugo, Alice went about finding work as an English teacher. These letters lay out her curriculum vitae.
Intro…
In the 1906 Earthquake and Fire that devastated San Francisco, the San Francisco City Hall lost most of its vital records. Alice’s birth certificate was lost in that fire. In late 1924, when she was in Europe, she requested a copy of her birth record and this is what they sent her.
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