Community and Coke …

The CBC News Magazine had a couple of interesting pieces this week: on the Almanac they featured COKE, which they said was 125 years old. (Not much of an anniversary, but hey!)

They mentioned that the original coke had a trace of cocaine but that ended in 1903. They did not mention the Pure Foods Act of 1903, but the Almanac is a short feature.

That act happened to cause many patent medicine companies to move to Brockville Ontario. And these companies advertised a lot in the Richmond Times Guardian.

Canada did not have a Pure Food Act. The bureaucrat in charge of such things was more concerned with honesty in advertising than with taking all the inpurities, alchohol, and preservatives out of foods as was the US official in charge. If a product said it was Pure Whiskey, it had better be pure whiskey.

Anyway, I have to figure out if the sodas Flo drank in 1911 had any ‘medicinal’ products. I am certain their cough medicines did. I will deal with that in Edith’s part of the Flo in the City Trilogy.

Sunday Morning also featured a bit on the happiest places in America. (Always a bit of a silly subject and a subjective subject.) Boulder Colorada has come out on some scientist’s list as the place with the most contented citizenry.

It seems everyone can live amid Nature’s startling beauty and still be 5 minutes from the small city.

“People want to go back to a pre-industrial world,” I told my husband. Because that was the essence of the story.

A world where you live near nature and enjoy a sense of community. (I live in the burbs. I am surrounded by Nature and beauty of a sort but it’s a ghost town really. No one around.)

Flo in the City, is about the 1911 era when people were leaving small towns like Richmond Quebec for the big city. The fun part of living in a small town is evident in the letters. The downside too.

Of course, there was a downside for all this, as I show in the book, there were no secrets in the small towns. And a citizen had to stay in line or suffer the disapproval of all. (Margaret Nicholson tears into a married man who is showing affection for her sister in law’s sister. Another time, she says So and So is seeing another man, ‘he might as well through himself into the Salmon River.”

So, it follows, there were many dark secrets. In the Nicholson’s case, their son had stole from the Bank. How many others knew of this, I wonder.

And on a more everyday note: Mrs. Montgomery, a kind hearted but nosey neighbour, forced Margaret one day to put pesticide on her potatoes when she really didn’t want to.

And people had cliques, as my Flo in the City shows. I have Flora hardly know any French people, except merchants and she shuns the French Canadian milliner at the end.

I know from the letters that their friends were all the local ‘elite’ Prebyterians. They hardly mention a French Canadian name, yet the Census shows that many French Canadians lived nearby.

The Merchants of Richmond 1910

What Mr. Wales was selling in 1910. Hmm. Motoring suiting… Interesting. Also motor veils. I wondered what they were then I remember Natalie Wood’s character in the Great Race.

As I write Flo in the City, my story about a girl coming of age in the pivotal 1910 era, based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ a ‘main character’ looms over my girlish tale, the TOWN of Richmond, itself. And that town is made up of tradesman and more importantly shop keepers. My tale is a tale of the new consumerism ushered in by the industrial age, as reflected in the social standing of the local merchants in this smallish town.

Seems to me, if you were a merchant in Richmond in the 1900-1910 era you were doing very well.
You were a community leader. (Since the Nicholsons left behind a number of invoices from 1900-1914 era, and talked a lot about the stores in their letters, I had a pretty good idea of who they were before I saw this Richmond Times Guaridan from 1910.

Mr. Wales, whose store sold the above material, to thrifty, nimble-fingered women like Margaret Nicholson, was the town tycoon. He had the first auto and sometimes came around to take Margaret for a spin. His chauffeur drove. I guess she didn’t buy from the Eaton’s catalogue: no need to.

Another merchant, J.C. Sutherland, the owner of the pharmacy and a leader of St. Francis College posted a notice in the same paper where I found this ad for Wales, saying that H. Bedard was taking over his business. (Herbert Nicholson refers to ‘the Bedard gang’ so I think Bedard was Mayor.)

You see, in 1911, Sutherland was appointed Superintendant of Protestant Schools, a very lofty post, second only to the Minister of Education.

Herb Nicholson remarks upon this appointment in a letter to his dad. He says it is a patronage appointment, in thanks for talking up the Liberal Party in his store. Maybe so, but Sutherland went on to have an illustrious career, and I suspect he helped Marion Nicholson along in her Union Career.

Shopkeepers had power. They had the power to Introduce new products to women customers. Crisco Shortening in 1915, was introduced by McCrae grocers. They had the power to chat up politics too, to the men…. And then the women, after the women got the vote in 1918.

Remember, there was no radio or television! “The local news” as Edith wryly refers to it, was passed around by mouth.

Anyway, this is just another link (an oblique one) between women’s fashion and power. The men who sold material to women made money and had political clout.

Summertime 1907- and the living is people-oriented

In Tighsolas Garden. Left, Edith Nicholson.Right: May Watters.

Ah. I woke up at 6 and broke the coffee pot half-sleepwalking in the kitchen. I knocked it against the pots and pans I’d left soaking in the sink overnight. There’s a message here somewhere for me.

I feel Chapter 1 (Just a Change of Colour for my book Flo in the City adapted from my Tighsolas website) taking form, although it hasn’t really taken any hard copy or digital form yet. That first sentence is the hardest, right?

Still, I have a tangible sense (oxymoron) that it is about to appear, that I am about to give birth to it.

Anyway, two days ago I went bananas-berzerk trying to remember where I put Marion Nicholson’s 1907 diary,

My husband, Blair, and I turned the garage upside down looking for the little volume. I rummaged (or rampaged) through all of my giant Tupperware bins of Nicholson documents only to find the diary, hours later, in a bin I had brought up months ago and stored behind my big comfy chair in the living room.

In 1906-7, Marion was teaching in Sherbrooke, Quebec and in the summer hanging around Richmond. (She would decide in September to take work with the Montreal Board, a decision likely prompted by the Nicholson’s sudden financial woes.)

She writes: “Ed says it is very crazy to keep this diary but maybe someday I will want to remember what I did and how I spent my 19th year.” Hmm. I bet she never could have guessed this….

In the winter months, the diary details her dating escapades on the skating rink. The usual stuff of teenage love. Men who are too persistent bug her. Men who aren’t persistent enough bug her. There’s a certain G. N. E. she really likes. Sometimes she sounds like Scarlett O’Hara: “Went to a card party and dance at Mrs. Griggs’. Had a grand time. Played cards with Mr. Watson, danced with Mr. Avery, had supper with Mr. Davidson and Mr. Sampson came home with me.” (Marion was very popular, but I wonder if this is because it was still generally believed the Nicholsons were well off.)

The summer months are mostly spent visiting friends and neighbours in Richmond and playing croquet, tennis and attending ice cream socials. Marion goes to church, sometimes twice a day. She goes for ‘drives’ in the countryside to neighbouring towns like Melbourne: that would be in a horse drawn carriage. When the Nicholson women go in a car, it is a big deal and called ‘motoring’. She sometimes plays cards on the verandah with her cousins, the Peplers,who live across the street.

Strolling ‘downtown’ to get the mail also breaks up the long summer day. Dufferin Street, in the ‘posh’ area of town, is but a short distance from downtown Richmond, with its many shops and garrulous, politicaly savvy, French and English shopkeepers. And Marion often walks to the train station to meet friends arriving from the big city or other points in the Eastern Townships. Sometimes she meets her brother Herb, 21, who , it is clear from the diary, gets stir-crazy when back at Tighsolas.

The Town of Richmond exists because it was a key train stop between Montreal, Quebec and Portland, ( think).

Marion sometimes goes ‘berrying’.

When it rains she reads, (Shelley is very favourite poet) plays piano, takes ‘crazy’ pictures, sometimes plays solitaire or mends her stockings or trims a hat.

Marion rarely ever mentions helping her mom cook and clean. (Once or twice all summer.) I think as a ‘working woman’ contributing to the family finances, she was spared much of this domestic drudgery in the summer. A earlier diary entry in the winter (when she was home on the weekend) says “I worked hard as Mother is sick.”

Oh, she did mow the lawn in summer. (Typical of her. She loved to do ‘men’s work’.) And if a neighbour does call, she must stay at home and help entertain her.

Flora, it is mentioned, has some friends over for tea on an August afternoon, as well – and she visits Sherbrooke, the large town not too far away, where Marion teaches. (Her diary mentions getting a bursary in August. I believe teachers were rewarded for good performance.)

The biggest event of Marion’s 1907 summer seems to be when some new born kittens escape a barn and she has to go chase them down. Oh and this: Wednesday, July 3. Lovely day. Lily Lyper nearly murdered. Great excitement.