Milk, Water and Fire … Girls Imitating Women

Some Nickelodeon era motion picture houses in Montreal..

With the movie The Artist coming out to rave reviews (it’s a silent film,  a French romance directed by Michel Hazanvicius and starring Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo and some well known US actors) there’s likely to be renewed interest in the Silent Film Era.

I’ve written a great deal about nickelodeons in Montreal on this blog, as I wrote Threshold Girl, www.tighsolas.ca/page10. pdf.pdf

But you know, in my story Milk and Water, about Montreal in 1927, motion pictures figure more strongly.

In 1927, there was a fire in a Ste. Catherine E cinema (the Laurier Palace where 70 children died). My grandfather as Director of Services was somewhat implicated.

Because of that fire Montreal became the only jurisdiction in North America not to allow children in cinemas, until 1967.

Children had been attending motion pictures, attended and unattended, since the beginning of the era. I assume many parents felt these places safer than the streets, although the moral reformers did not.

From what I have read, in the Prohibition Era, children under 20 made up the largest proportion of movie patrons. And although there was a law against under 17′s watching unattended, plenty did.

Mostly boys as is it happens, and it is mostly boys who died in the Ste Catherine Street E Laurier Palace Theatre Fire in January 1927.

In Quebec, drive-ins were also banned, so I had to wait for our summer vacation in Maine to see a drive in movie.

Oddly, I also thought it was children under ten who couldn’t attend movies in Quebec.. and I was sort of right. There were special viewings for children over 10, family viewings. I vividly recall watching the MUSIC MAN in a church basement, ST. Malachy’s church on Clanranald. Probably around 1964, when I was 10.

I remember, because it was a HUGE EVENT, I guess.  I recall sitting on the cold concrete floor watching.

Anyway, there were killer fires in theatres in the US too (These places were firetraps in general) but no such laws were enacted.

This must have truly hurt the revenues of the theatre owners in Quebec.

(My late mother in law, born 1917, said it was common for girls to put on makeup to look older to go to the movie houses. They also had to behave older. She says she went to a movie in Ontario and was shocked at the bad behavior of the kids, yelling, eating popcorn. Hmm. This seems to be a case of the law of unintended consequences.  The social reformers didn’t want young people, especially women, being corrupted – so they pretended to be older…which made them even more attractive to men. There was no ‘teenager’ in those days.. I recently found a picture of her, dated 1929, and she was 12 but did indeed look grown up. Hey, as I write this my husband turns to Turner Classic Movies and Guess what movie is starting: The Music Man! It’s  a sign Hey, it looks like it takes place in the nickelodeon era.. Another sign “We got trouble right here in River City.” My gosh, how ironic! I wonder if any adults in that church basement say the irony in that song…

My grandfather’s brother, as it happens, was the VP of American Theatre Amusements…(Can’t recall exact name of company.) That company often fought in court with the Provincial Government over the Lord’s Day Act, even before 1927.

Conventional Theatres that showed plays with live actors had to close on Sunday, Movie Houses were exempt.

Anyway, my grandfather is accused by someone testifying in the US at Senate Prohibition Era hearings, of pulling the strings of the police chief, and of allowing theatres to stay open, even ones that let in children unattended. This is a few months before the fire.

Cops were given free tickets for their children to aid in this. I read that one Constable lost three children in the fire and that underscores the point.

Who went to movie houses. The kids of the middle class.

I will have Jules Crepeau and Thomas Wells discuss this in my play Milk and Water… Thomas Wells will say his older sons seldom went to movie houses as they were too busy with their school teams. They attended wealthy Lower Canada College.

And his younger children have been a few times, but always with their nanny.

I heard a Brit reminisce about early movie houses on BBC Radio Four. It seems that in many cases, kids were the only ones who could read, so their parents and grandparents wanted them there with them.

As is well know, 1927 saw the first Talkie, the Jazz Singer.

Today, Quebec has very lax laws. I don’t know if kids go alone..well, they do but in groups at the Cineplex.

I saw the movie Paul last year and I was astounded, because it was full of swearing, and a bunch of children sat in front of me and my husband.

Anyway, the Artist may have a trajectory similar to the King’s Speech. It starts out sort of Art House and builds to great popularity. Yesterday, as it happens, I watched this 1988 movie THE WOMAN HE LOVED, with Jane Seymour and Anthony Andrews about David, Edward VIII. On YouTube.

It was a very sympathetic view of the couple, no S and M, no Nazis. No George VI  at all. How could it not be a kind portrayal with those particular actors? Anthony Andrews played Baldwin in the King’s Speech.

Well, the King’s Speech made Prince David look like a Sadist, or at least a mean older brother.

I learned that he only met Wallace Simpson after 1928. So great. David, Edward VIII figures large in my story Milk and Water. It is because of him that my grandfather and my husband’s grandfather meet to discuss life, business, politics and ethics. He’s visiting Montreal, at the end of a long official visit. He is on his own time and I read he liked to party with Mayor Mederic Martin.

Milk and Water and Boardwalk Empire and Me

My mother and parents at Atlantic City in 1927?  Hmm. After watching the third part of PBS’s Prohibition, I have to wonder if  this was a ‘work’ vacation for my grandfather, the Director of Services for Montreal and the Mayor’s Right Hand Man. My mother, the little girl in the picture, who was born in 1921,  always had a prudish (see: judgemental) attitude toward alcohol, despite being Roman Catholic. She drank only a little wine in her old age.

 

I wonder if some ideas about prohibition imprinted on her in the 20′s. Very likely.

I now wonder what he’s carrying: sandwiches for the beach or a sack of money?

I have in my possession a little silver flask engraved with the initials EHF. These stand for Elizabeth Hardy Fair, my husband’s great aunt, born in Norfolk Virgina, a first cousin to General Douglas MacArthur, who married a Montreal banker and moved to the luxurious Linton Apartments on Sherbrooke. She was no Bonnie Parker, just a shallow southern belle socialite, but, like so many other ordinary law-abiding citizens she liked to imbibe.

Flasks were used to conceal alcohol, but you weren’t covering your tracks much when you put your initials on a flask. Such was the attitude toward the Prohibition laws among the young and well to do.

According to the series Prohibition, Harvard undergraduates brazenly made and distributed bathtub gin (and the privateYale Club had enough hard liquor stored in the basement to last 14 years) while poor black men with stills making 2 percent beer were going to jail, even though their customers might include the local chief of police.

 

All sounds very familiar…today…especially here in Canada where tougher drug laws are about to be enacted.

 

It sounds similar to the late Prohibition era when US lawmakers, realizing everything was out of control, with the likes of Capone and most of  the cops and public officials on the take, decided to toughen the Prohibition laws, rather than loosen them, so that a lovely young flapper with a silver flask tucked into her lace garter was in danger of going to jail for years and years.

 

Of course, BIG CRIME was all for Prohibition. That’s how they made their dough, huge sacks of it, enough to buy off anybody, even politicians, well, especially politicians.

 

And apparently, these gangsters came up to Montreal, where beer and wine wasn’t illegal, in order to control the flow of liquor into the States.

 

And here’s my grandfather, Jules Crepeau, Director of City Services for Montreal, and jack of all civic trades, strolling down the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, so care-free, in 1927?… yea, right.

 

(I haven’t seen Boardwalk Empire. I’m not big on Gangster stories. I haven’t yet seen the entire Godfather, believe it ornot,  and only a few Sopranos episodes, despite the fact my husband was once obsessed with that program. Maybe I should. I’m more a Downton Abbey kind of girl. Still I’m working on Milk and Water, the story of 1927 Montreal, during a typhoid epidemic… as well as The Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, which has Edith Nicholson a prim and proper Presbyterian teacher and suffragette sympathizer, hooked on the opium in her tonics.  It’s a follow up to Threshold Girl, www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf

 

 

 

 

Montreal 1888 Health

My Aunt Alice

Hmm. I was Googling Jules Crepeau, my grandfather again and found a new document: the report of the sanitary departement of Montreal for 1888, Dr. Louis Laberge, Head Medical Officer, Jules Crepeau Message Boy. My grandfather started out as message boy here and rose to be Director of Services.

This document is most interesting with respect to Flo in the City, my novel in progress based on the letters of www.tighsolas.ca.

If you believed this report, the Montreal Sanitation situation was well in hand in 1888, but not really. And it only got worse with the mass immigration around 1910.

In 1888, according to this wonderful document, there were 200,000 people in Montreal. Major diseases were diphtheria and typhoid. Pneumonia caught up in 1910, for some reason. There are some diseases I never heard of. What is dentition. (Bad teeth?)

Contaminated milk and water was a major issue in 1910, but in 1888 ICE was the problem. Bad water was being used for ice.

Privies, too. Those holes in the ground for toilets. Water Closets were being encouraged, but not all streets had sewage pipes.

Ethnic groups were Italians, Germans, apparently. French Canadians had twice the fertility rate of English Montrealers, but a much higher infant mortality as well.

Anyway, I just scanned the document. It will be interesting for my next book… Water and Milk. My grandfather had a terrific memory so he probably did not waste his time at the Sanitation Department.