Start of School 1909 and 1910

Dominion Park, postcard, colourized. The woman looking at the camera looks like Marion! Similar white dress!

This is one of my favorite letters from the Nicholson stash. Margaret is talking about being forced to buy a big hat…Hats were getting big in 1909. But the latest fashions are worn by young women. Trouble is, in towns like Richmond, in 1910, young women (like Edith and Marion) were moving to Montreal and buying their big fashionable hats at stores like Ogilvy. So the local town milliner had to push her hats on reluctant older buyers. (Seems that way.)

Anyway, Edith spends TWO days ironing to get ready for her work at Ecole Westmount Methodiste.

She starts later than Marion, who works on the Montreal board. I was just writing a scene for September 1909, when both Marion and Edith start jobs in the big bad city, and Marion has already gone in and visited Dominion Park.

Margaret warns her not to see Pauline. Pauline is a hypnotist.

Edith tells her mom that she has no interest in going to Dominion Park, but Marion had to go because their brother Herb has gone many times and told them all about it and Marion is not to be outdone.

Dominion Park was a thrill park opened in 1904 in the East End of Montreal. It had a fun house, an exhibit re=enacting the recent San Francisco quake and famously, the Infant Incubator exhibit, with real babies on display and nurses taking care of them. Shades of things to come with the Dionne Quintuplets.

October 2, 1909 Dear Marion, I had a letter today from Father written from the Queen’s. You saw his new suit, do you like it. He says it is all right. Also said he met Edith at the train. He did not say he met Charlie G. Of course, that is their last flirtation as he is going to Mexico. Grandma is here and we are not entirely alone but we feel lonesome. Father said you were well. You have got over your cold. I am glad that you are out of the church. Today we had Mr. Ross of Montreal as it was our Anniversary Service. Tomorrow we have our usual supper and entertainment. After seeing E off I went to Miss Hudon’s to cancel the order I had for a hat. She had already trimmed it, she did not wait for some trimming I was bringing. I think the hat too large. It would look well on you. Still, Mrs. Montgomery thinks it is becoming to me so I shall have to wear it. I met Edith McCourt at the church door with an immense black one on so I told her to come and sit with me. Mine would not look so large. So she did. So I guess it was all right. I don’t know whether Healy could see the Minister or not. We had a grand sermon, so I forgot about the size of my hat. I heard an old story that suited me about an old Scotch man who had two sons Jamie and Willie. Jamie went away from home to earn his living. The old man was praying that Jamie might be kept from all danger, sickness and evil temptations. But he said, don’t bother your head about Willie. I’ll keep him straight. I was telling them, that was like me, always worrying about the absent ones. Edith went away being tired. Just as you did, she ironed for two days. Have you heard from Herb? Write soon, Your loving mother, Margaret

You’ve Got Mail: Titanic Era

A Pile of 1910 era letters. I have 300 of them.

The more things change, the more things stay the same. Cliche, no kidding. True? You bet.

Right now I am trying to publicize my ebook Threshold Girl, a story about my husband’s great Aunt Flora and her year at college in 1911/1912.

No vampires, no lesbians. Just Presbyterian teachers in the Edwardian Era. All corseted up to keep their morals from spilling out at the seams. See the problem?

(The newswires were abuzz  (ancient metaphor) with a story about X Files actress Gillian Anderson. Apparently she had a lesbian affair in high school or something. “Boy is her career that much in the toilet?” I wondered.” Actually, I like her a lot and she’s been working in Britain. And she starred in a fine production of the House of Mirth by Edith Wharton.

Anyway, it’s coming up to the 100th anniversary of the Titanic Era,so I’m using that angle to get attention, to try to get some publicity.

But I’m not living in the past,  my pitch is more about trying to promote an ebook. Ebooks are “IN” right now, and even if Amazon and a few others are trying to get control of the whole ebook thing, it’s still pretty much up in the air, I think. At least, I HOPE.

So I’m pitching my Threshold Girl as both an ebook story AND a Titanic Story.

The trouble is, who do I pitch too?

Arianna Huffington posted an interesting article last week on her Huffington Post. She worries that the  ’traditional’ news media was caught up in a dubious habit of playing second hand rose to Facebook and Twitter by covering little but  ’top trending’ stories on these social media, as if  ’top trending’ means IMPORTANT.

Of course it doesn’t, it likely means just the opposite.

That or Crime Stories. That seems to be all the traditional press is covering these day. It’s cheap: it draws readers through titillation. It’s tabloid. It’s lowest common denominator, but it seems to be all we’ve got lately.

My Threshold Girl story IS NOT a top trending topic on Twitter. (And there’s no Dead-Young-Women in story for titillation. No the women it in are all very alive.) The book popular in a few classrooms in Canada and the US, that’s all. (The follow up to Threshold Girl about Flora’s sister Edith, Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, does have a love-and-murder theme. So I’m learning.)

The question is? How to make a story about teachers in 1910, Presbyterians at that, ‘sexy.’

A headline I read (somewhere online) last week claimed that ebooks are making reading “sexy” again.

(I don’t think it was ever considered sexy. I know. I read a lot in my teens and twenties.)

Another article, I scanned quickly, says that ebooks are changing how we read: while texting, uploading, watching videos. Sexy because it’s so chaotic, I guess, so unpredictable.

Reading is no longer this ‘sit by yourself under an old oak tree by a bubbling stream’ type of activity.

Yes, we’re going through a period of exponential change, similar to the 1910 era, when the motion pictures (and they’d only been around for a few years)  were becoming more popular each day, and when telephones were becoming widely used- although LONG DISTANCE was still very expensive.

The Nicholsons of Richmond Quebec wrote a LOT of letters in the 1910 era, because they couldn’t afford to use the telephone for long distance. (That’s why I could write Threshold Girl, I have hundreds of their letters from the Titanic Era.)

The Nicholson women wore off a lot of calories walking to and from the mail in their town, Richmond, Quebec. About a mile each way.It was a favorite thing to do, after going to church. (Radio wasn’t yet around, although wireless technology was, so sermons were their only daily entertainment. ) They got mail twice  day! Even on Saturday.

I am guessing that for a couple of centuries now walking to the mail has been the highlight of many a person’s day. (Or even just getting the mail at the home.)

I’m not guessing. I KNOW it has been.

And even if the mailman mostly brought bills, junk mail and bad news, the hope always was that on THIS DAY, it would bring something better!  Amazing News! Or merely good news. Or just an entertaining letter, a happy letter, from an old friend maybe. A long lost friend, perhaps. A letter to lift our spirits, to make us feel valued, loved and less alone in the world.

(In 1910 people often wrote letters to vent or to complain, (like Greg Smith at Goldman Sachs, yesterday) so many letters the Nicholsons received from friends and relatives were major downers. (And in those days they had things to complain about: typhoid, cholera, scarlet fever.)The Nicholson letters are written in a time of family turmoil, so they are not careful sometimes and write things they shouldn’t.) If one of them writes something nasty about a family member, BURN THIS LETTER is often written in large print at the bottom. I have a couple of those. )

So nothing much has changed in that regard. 100 years later. With email, and texting, and all the rest that is evolving so quickly whatever I write now will be obsolete before I finish typing the sentence. (Maybe TYPING is obsolete, I haven’t checked.)

No, little has changed, if considering the human heart, the human condition: We’ve just got so much more media to build our hopes and dreams on, that’s all.

What has changed dramatically, is how PRIVATIZED our lives have become.  Threshold Girl reveals how, in the days before media, people had to rely on each other much much more. Changes were abreast though.

In 1910 Richmond Quebec was losing citizens to the big city and the West. It was getting lonlier in small towns, especially for younger people.

Putting ‘a face’ on Marion’s Kids

Kids at Chapleau, boys playing cowboys and Indians. Some Black children who likely lived in the Royal Arthur Catchment area.

More children at Camp Chapleau, 1910 or 11, likely.

Marion did not write about the kids in her class, except to call them ‘very bad children.’ Very bad children who performed well, as Marion, their teacher, received a bonus at the end of the year in 1911. I assume these are English side children, as the Old Brewery Mission was an Anglo Institution. But I might be wrong.

I have used the 1911 Census to take ‘a snapshot’ of the children who likely attended Royal Arthur in 1910-1912, with respect to where their parents lived, what they did and what they earned. Not much… much less than the 1,500 a year supposedly needed to keep a family in dignity, unless dad was a bricklayer or some such other skilled labourer.

I recently found another Old Brewery Mission Fundraising Brochure, from around 1910, I guess. (I already posted images from the 1912 brochure on http://www.tighsolas.ca/.)

This brochure has more pictures: “Camera-ing The Old Brewery Mission Fresh Air Camp.. Chapleau. 65 miles from Montreal. 1.400 feet higher than the City.

582 gallons of milk. 148 bushels potatoes. 429 pounds of butter. 2 tons bread. 1 ton beef.

700 women and children last year.

Open July 28 to September 5.

(Families stayed for two weeks each. Unlike the other brochure, this one does not stipulate NO BOYS OVER 8, but I see few older boys in the pictures.)

Going to get a ‘beauty tan’ says the brochure. But wait! Coco Chanel was supposed to have made the tan fashionable, but much later on. She was just starting her hat shop in Paris in 1910. So why did they write “beauty tan.”

Lots of babies… and that was the problem.

Hat fashions of the poor.

“A typical family” says the brochure. Was there a dad at home, or was this camp for single families. I assume the first option. I put a frame around this picture. It is unlikely these people could afford cameras (5.00 for the cheapest and of course the cost of developing film)or photography studios.

The Nicholsons were not rich, but they sure took A LOT OF PHOTOS and formal ones, which I have posted here.

“THE BATTLE OF THE SOAP SUDS”

So says the brochure, with 3 pictures for this theme. This was the Age of Soap, Light and Water, the PURITY MOVEMENT. Washing these children was about more than hygiene, it was about washing away the sin of poverty.