Irony, Irony, Irony

Parc Jules-Crepeau in Ahunsic, off l’Acadie, near Henri Bourrassa.

It’s a tiny little park, the one the City of Montreal named after Jules-Crepeau. The street too is named Jules-Crepeau.

City streets are known for what exists on them,  not for whom they are named.

It’s ironic. Someone has posted a complaint on the Internet, saying that this area of town has fewer green spaces than the rest of Montreal.

But who uses parks anymore, except to walk dogs?

It’s doubly ironic. My grandfather, Jules Crepeau, the subject of the play I am writing, Milk and Water, was often on Committees that wanted more parks and playgrounds in the City.

In 1927, the date of my play, I notice, he was elected campaign chairman for the year’s Clean UP Week (coming up in May) when all citizens were asked to get up, get out and clean up. Mayor Mederic Martin accepted the position of Honorary Chairman.

This was an initiative of the City Improvement League.

Triple Irony. A certain doctor, Atherton, talked at the Press Conference/Launch about how this year it was especially important that the city’s bylaws  be enforced, what with the Laurier Theatre Fire and the Typhoid Epidemic. (At that point they didn’t know that the epidemic was caused by milk from a farm somewhere.) Atherton says that the  police should be instructed to carry out their duties with respect to the bylaws.

My grandfather was accused by the Coderre Commission in 1925 of hampering police in their duties, with respect to movie theatres. And he has just given testimony to the inquiry into the Laurier Fire.

Of course, Jules Crepeau was just the ‘Go-Between’ in the City. I could call my play just that, except L. P. Hartley got there first.

Dr. Boucher of the Health Department had something to say, deeply relevant to my play. “Measures of personal cleanliness should not be neglected. They are of daily necessity, especially the washing of hands. All young babies should be brought to clinics established for them. Mothers should seek there the teaching necessary for the good observance of health rules when it comes to nursing babies.”

Milk and Water deals with the delivering of clean water to Montreal homes. Once the City had done this (and it wasn’t a given throughout the century that homes had the right to clean water)then it was up to the individual to stay clean.

This typhoid epidemic was annoying, in that it put the blame back on the City.

One other initiative of the City Improvement League was school gardens. GEEESH. School gardens initiatives have been promoted since the beginning of the century,  starting with the Macdonald-Robertson movement. But they never get a foothold. Why?

I suspect that it’s a touchy feely program, no one can object to, so it is brought up again and again, but it either isn’t feasible, or it’s counter-culture…as in against the flow of industrialization.. or the Powers that Be really don’t like the idea…

Today, actually, while looking up stuff on archive.org, I unearthed a 1910 booklet about the Macdonald-Robertson Movement called Children of the Land. It was aimed at Americans. The M-R movement was about training children for rural occupations, moving them back to the country from the city. (Against the flow, you see.)

A very misguided notion of course. But the movement did promote the agricultural sciences. So now we have mega-farms with few employees providing food for the people of the cities.

In 1927, a US Department of Health group examined the typhoid epidemic, and traced it to one milk company. 1,200 to 1,500 farms supplied milk to this company, their report published in JAMA said, so it was hard for the scientists to trace the exact source of typhoid.

This fact helps support the plot of Milk and Water. The Americans were so concerned with this epidemic, they sent up their own people.  This epidemic didn’t help tourism, or exports. So my grandfather has a right to be mad at Thomas Wells, President of Laurentian Spring Water, who has spent 3 decades trashing the city tap water, so to speak, in his advertisements.

Macdonald of course was the tobacco tycoon so this health movement was funded on ‘iffy’ money. Or money derived from promotion of a  ’vice’ that causes illness and death. (And let’s not talk of the slavery, etc, involved in the growing of the plant.) So it goes.

Three Steps Forward, One Back

A picture of Edith with very possibly staff from Westmount Methodist Institut. Myabe Yvonne Villard is there.

Well, five steps forward, one step back.

I wasn’t finding much online about Westmount Methodist, so lucky, I thought, for the Preparing the Way document by Paul Villard. Only a few copies of this little pamphlett remain in existence, one supposedly at McGill and one copy at Westmount Library. And his other book, Up to the Light, contains only a bit on the Institut -because I found a French webpage that said as much.

I decided to check the Gazette archives and didn’t find much either, just a few graduation notices… and a strange article from 1960′s, about the actress Madeleine Sherwood, the Mother Superior, I think, in the television show The Flying Nun and also that very bitchy pitch-perfect Sister Woman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, one of the movies that should have won Best Picture but didn’t. (Did she play the same character on Broadway?)

It seems this Montreal-born actress’s grandfather was a certain McGill Prof, Paul Villard, who was also an MD and a preacher.

Could it be the same Paul Villard. I couldn’t be sure, until I found an article in the 1911 (YES) Westmount News about The Institut that claimed this Paul Villard was a doctor, too.

Too much of a coincidence. I couldn’t be 100 percent sure, until I found a bio for Ms. Sherwood that claimed her Mom was named Yvonne.

Well, that nailed it.

The Westmount News was so useful. I discovered a great deal of useful information for my first draft of Threshold Girl, the new title for Flo in the City.

The Horse Show was in early May at THE ARENA in Westmount. So I have to fix that. Westmount Park wasn’t referred to as Victoria Jubilee Park anymore, but The Westmount Park. So there, I have to change it back to what I had.

And there wasn’t a tram on Sherbrooke,not until 1913, like I had supposed. The St Catherine tram was cramped and crowded.

And the Merry Widow wasn’t playing (well, I knew that ) but Brewster’s Millions was. The Westmount News goes into great detail about What’ s On at the Orpheum and Princess… And in 1911, Sir Wilfrid bought some land in Westmount for his wife. And there wasn’t much crime in the city, (well, I saw that from the Yearbook) but a lot of ‘car’ accidents. The trouble is, ‘cars’ could be motorcars or tramcars.

And they were showing Kinecoloured films of the Coronation at the Princess.. with realistic colours.. so they wrote. So maybe I will have Marion go to this, instead of the same Somner Park show that Edith went to.

And one tidbit I will put in my story: a Laurentian Water horse ran amok in Westmount. Well, I write about runaway horses, in my story and Laurentian water was owned by my husband’s relations on the other side. I think I will have Flo and Edith witness this!! I want to put a bit about Laurentian in Marion’s story anyway. (Here’s a quote about the need for a children’s library in Westmount: “Pure water, effective drainage, fine sidewalks,beautiful parks, and the annexation of profitable lands are material things worth striving for, but the things of the mind, things that build charcter should not be overlooked,these build for time and eternity. It was a wise Jesuit who said, “Give me the first 7 years of a child’s life, and you can take the rest.” (This quote is similar to my “healthy home” quote at the beginning of Threshold Girl.”) Intellectual, physical and MORAL health were considered ONE AND THE SAME THING in 1910.)

But I also discovered something that messes me up a bit. In the article about Westmount Methodiste, Villard writes that Academy I graduates can enter the Model Course at Macdonald. Hmm. So that means Flora wasn’t in Academy III but Academy II, as she just took one year of the course.

I guess I have to change that. I wonder why Edith didn’t take the course, money I guess. Just like so many people, she didn’t have enough money to take off a year and to go school.

Oh, and another thing I read, wedding announcements in Westmount tended to describe the weddings as ‘quiet.’ Many of them. I figure this is to appease those who were not invited..

BUT DO THEY GET PAID? 25th installment

Marion and Floss 1910 era.

“Speak to Mr. Jackson and ask him to spend more time on the subjects Flora is failing,” wrote Norman to Margaret in early September. Flora, of course, was not surprised.

As usual, her father was acting as if she were the only student in the school. Flora was reading the words for herself now. She passed the letter back to her Mom somewhat sheepishly.

“I an inclined to think,” Margaret said slyly. ” that you are the one I should talk to.”

“I will do better this year, I promise. I have incentive. After my trip to Boston, I know that I do not want to be a nurse. So I must get into teacher’s college.”

“Why not nursing?” Margaret asked.

“Because nursing seems not much different from mothering. Nurses must clean sick rooms and lavatories, have a knowledge of dietetics and food preparation, of hygiene and heating and ventilation, and of the dispensing of drugs. They tend people with scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhoid and pneumonia, sometimes a combination of these. See?”

“I see your point,” replied Margaret who had done all these things in the past and would likely continue to in the future. ” And for this they get paid?”

“Well, yes.”
“Then there is your difference.”

Flora had learned all this from the nurses at Newton, only one of whom was a surgical nurse, with very special training in operating room techniques.

The others, for all their three years of training,including anatomy and bacteriology and physiology, were glorified cooks and maids, for all she could see. No, nursing was not a profession she would want to pursue, although the women were nice enough. And they certainly enjoyed their off- time.

At Jetties Beach they had swum in the ocean and collected sea-shells. And rated the fashion sense of the ‘superior’ women who strolled the wooden walkways down to the water under parasols in their summer frocks, enduring the 90 degree heat radiating off the plush carpet of sand around their feet with a demure stoicism.

Flora had brought a handful of shells home and they were amassed on the sill in her bedroom, a charming, pearly reminder of her all too short trip to Massachusetts.

For a souvenir, Flora also had a thick advertisement filled program from the Boston Theatre Stock Company, and that Wellesleyan Magazine.

On the train trip home, her nose peeling from too much sun and surf, she had read an especially interesting article out to May. It was titled The Old Order Changeth.

“Yesterday, the struggle was for the higher education of women; to-day,the struggle is for the opportunity to have a voice in moulding educational,social and industrial conditions through the one medium which makes this possible, viz: the right to vote for measures and for men. The new struggle rests upon the same fundamental principle upon which the demand for educational opportunity rested, the right of women as individuals to individuality of action, their right to full equality of opportunity with the other half of the human race. Resting upon the same principles of right and justice as did the demand for higher education, it is bound to meet with the same triumphant success. By all the signs, that success is not far distant. Never before have the position, the rights, the demands of women so occupied the center of the world’s stage. Where, even three years ago, there was one article or editorial dealing with the subject, to-day, there are a hundred such articles in the various periodicals ; and, one after another, these periodicals are joining in the demand that women be given their full and free share in moulding conditions in city, state and nation. The old order is changing so rapidly that one scarcely dares to make a statement setting forth the precise status of women civilly and politically lest tomorrow’s dispatches bring word of change.”

It all seemed so exciting to Flora. She saw herself in her mind’s eye travelling with the suffragists, town to town, giving speeches in front of large enthusiastic crowds. Except she was not a Wellesley woman, who were generally well-heeled and could purchase the furs and fine silks advertised in the pages in front of her. If lucky, she would like her sister Marion before, have to scrimp and save her way through teacher’s college. Except she wouldn’t live at the Y, because the Normal School had just moved to Ste. Anne de Bellevue, on the Macdonald Campus. May was expecting to go there next year, and share a dorm room with her friend Alice Dresser, a bright and vivacious girl, whose father had been Principal of St. Francis College.

Margaret, who was now folding and flattening linen place mats at the kitchen table, spoke again. “If you don’t like the idea of nursing, and I don’t blame you, then teaching is your destiny, and for that you will have to pass French and Latin. But don’t feel too badly. A person who has struggled herself at school is bound to be a more sympathetic teacher. She was offering Flora encouragement. Just like her. So, why wasn’t it working?