The Prodigal Son

Margaret and Norman. Norman is in full Masonic Regalia. It’s funny, the Presbyterian Church was not in favour of its members also being Masons, yet, Norman, a Presbyterian was a Mason. And he paid hefty fees to stay in the brotherhood. Practicality. All the important men of the town were Masons. In 1912, the Order of the Eastern Star comes to Richmond and Marion joins, as does Edith.

What do I know about Herb Nicholson before 1908?

He likely attended St. Francis Academy, and, from the school fees paid by Norman, he likely graduated.

He went to work for a local doctor in 1901, but it sounds like a summer job. A letter from one of Margaret’s sisters, Christy, suggests that Margaret and Norman were hoping he would become a doctor.

Instead, he went to work for the Eastern Townships bank.

In 1905, when Marion was living in town and going to McGill Normal School, on Belmont (which would be somewhere under Place Bonaventure today) Herb was in town.

Marion wrote many letters from Normal School and talked about seeing Herb occasionally. I guess it was his reluctant duty to see his sister. From her letters, he was not keen on visiting friends in Montreal.

Herb wrote well and if he worked in a bank he likely was good with numbers. His fatal flaw, he was one of these people who thought he was smarter and better than anyone he worked for.

Working in a bank, back then, as a clerk was probably no picnic. Indeed, he describes what it is like in his letters.

He also describes curling, watching a speed skating event in Montreal, going to a sugaring off, and to the brand new Dominion Park, where he rides a roller coaster but calls it a train. These are the kind of social activities he can talk about to his mother. No doubt he took part in other kinds.

He doesn’t mention his love life at all. Again, in a letter Christy suggests he is ‘a ladies’ man’.

In 1905, when he is in Montreal, he mentions he hasn’t written because he has been too busy visiting friends in Westmount and then later in the letter he says “Don’t be surprised if I get married.”

He does not mention the names of these friends. The Nicholsons have no ‘connections’ in Westmount. It is very possibly B.S.

So he’s hinting that he is going to marry a girl from a wealthy family, without saying it. That is the only time he mentions anything about his love-life in all the letters from the era.

Well, as future chapters of Flo in the City (my novel in progress based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ ) will show, Herb goes out West in 1910 – and under sleazy circumstances. He does eventually marry, twice. And he ends up in California, where he dies in 1967. He is the only Nicholson not to be buried in St. Andrew’s Cemetery in Richmond.

Henry Watters, the doctor cousin from Boston, who is everything Herb is not, is buried there, however.

This is not to say Herb doesn’t have his qualities. His letters are interesting. He is opinionated, like all the Nicholsons, and he has some interesting things to say about life out West.