Before Amelia Earhart

Baroness de la Roche, early aviatrix from an article in 1910 Technical World Magazine.

I'm interrupting my posts on the TITANIC to bring you some info about early aviation. You see, Hillary Clinton's State Department is helping to launch a new inquiry in the 1937 disappearance of aviatrix Amelia Earhart.

It's a breaking news story.

Researching my story Threshold Girl I learned a lot about early aviation. One point of especial interest: in the early days of aviation it wasn't necessarily considered a man thing to do. Well, no more than anything else.

Remember, 1910 was the age of the New Woman and the magazines and newspapers liked to play up the 'new freedoms' of women, especially young women.

It was only after WWI that flying was considered probably too dangerous for women.

Here's a retro spread from a 1937 Marie-Claire showing aviation dress in the period.

According to the copy on this page, in the first days of flying, women just gathered up their skirts and hopped into the plane. Then they decided more coverage (of a decidedly unfeminine kind) was necessary.

My Transportation Page on Tighsolas has a lot about aviation, including an article where Alexander Graham Bell claims flying is too dangerous.

And a story about Women and the Motor car. Yes, women can drive. It's by Dorothy Levitt a female race car driver.

And an article called Speed Madnessabout the Titanic's sinking.

One has to imagine that the amazing, almost daily advances in aeroplane and automobile technology, that allowed them to go farther faster, in leaps and bounds,  is one reason the Titanic sank. Boats were an old technology and they wanted to appear 'sexy' as compared to the new.

Here's an excerpt from the article Flight School from 1910 Technical World. Women were signing up in droves to learn to fly the article said.

If you would learn to fly, first master the art of propelling a bicycle. The would be aviator must be possessed of a keen sense of equilibrium; he must know how to balance himself as he would were he riding a bicycle or some other vehicle whose successful operations was dependent on perfect poise of the rider. At the Wright School of Aviation at Dayton, Ohio, established and maintained by the famous brothers, this principle is one of the fundamental precepts. Let the aviator budge from the space prescribed for his personal comfort while soaring aloft and the smooth operation of the craft is at once retarded. If he moves a few inches from his seat in any direction, the chance of an accident is increased tenfold. The ship may turn a somersault and tumble to earth.  Another requisite that looms large is courage. If any mishap befalls the aeroplane while he is spinning through the air, unless the operator have an abundance of nerve, he is more than likely to destroy the poise of the car and cause a swift descent. An intimate knowledge of mechanics is not a requirement. A pupil may learn in a few days enough of the mechanism of a machine to operate an aeroplane with success.  Aviation pupils possess one large advantage over students of other institutions in that in a few weeks and rarely longer than a few months, of study, they are prepared to earn money for themselves for exhibition flights. Before learning how to fly, it is advisable, and almost necessary to learn how to glide.
Anyway, I have no reference to aeroplanes in Threshold Girl  - although many references to the automobile. But maybe I'll put one in my follow up story, Diary of a Confirmed Spinster. Maybe Edith Nicholson, the protagonist, will see an aeroplane buzzing around the sky in her opium haze on the day the King Dies. There was an airshow in St. Hubert in that year or around. I found a lovely painting of it.

Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay

Well, this magazine Moneysense has release its annual list of Best Places to Live in Canada, and Montreal is low, low on the list at 149.

And I can't find Western Suburb of Montreal on the list. I guess the entire island was considered as one.

Toronto's low on the list, although not as low as Montreal, but Burlington is high, and that's a surburb. An ugly suburb as far as I can remember, but Hey.

The magazine explains its methodology on its website: it's about economics/vs quality of life, health, crime, community,etc.

It's doesn't matter to me. This morning I'm sitting on the dock of the bay, gazing out from a patio on Belvedere, California.  Someone is selling an Italianate villa with a million dollar, no billion dollar view. I stole the View. I captured Beauty.  And if I play the image on a giant HD screen, it feels as if I am right there on that billionaire balcony. Looking out at what might be the Best Place to Live in the World. (Except for Quakes.)

I guess the pic belongs to Sotheby's.

Anyway, this Moneysense list claims Ottawa is the best place to live in Canada. My son and his girlfriend live there, on a tree-lined street near the Market, where students, the wealthy in their condos and the drug-addled down and outs freely mingle. Ottawa is a big sprawling place, a place that technically includes a lot of 'burbs and farmland.

My son says some rampaging students ripped the railing off his balcony on St. Patty's Day. So bad behavior by students wasn't confined to London, Ontario.

My son is a chef at one of Ottawa's high end restaurants. He sees citizens and tourists everyday experiencing the Good Life of the Capital.

His girlfriend is a criminologist who works in support of local at-risk youth. She would say  Ottawa is a nice place to live, for sure,  but not necessarily for everyone.

Ottawa is an hour away and my husband and I visit often. Yes, it's a beautiful place and it belongs to all Canadians.

Kingston,Ontario is high on the Moneysense list. That is where I lived in 1982 (I worked at the radio station) and where I met my husband and where I conceived my firstborn, in a slummy lower apartment in a two story duplex, a few blocks away from Princess, on the wrong side of downtown. The place reeked as if there was a dead body in the basement. We joked about it and held our noses.. It was probably only the garbage, come to think about it.  I often visit Kingston in the summer, but it's a 2 and a half hour drive away. Along the seaway. Still very pretty, along the water, although a much bigger city today. Our old area has been gentrified, of course.

My niece lived in Kingston (fourth on the list, I think)  for while in the 90's  (married) and hated it, she lived on the wrong side, you see, being a poor student.  She moved to London, Ontario, 47 on the list I think,  and now lives on the right side.

You see, if you have money, almost any place is a great place to live.

Montreal West is a gorgeous community, a peaceful enclave. Westmount.  The Plateau. NDG. There are gorgeous, exciting places to live in the City. (And I would happily move there from this Western Suburb if I could afford it.)

But, it's very true. The cost of living has risen greatly in Montreal. especially the cost of  FOOD. A basic.

I find myself shopping at the gross grocery stores, where the meat is not nicely packaged and actually looks like DEAD animal. I dream about having a Whole Foods out here. The closest I can get is Adonis.

I can't wait for the markets, Atwater and Jean Talon, to open.

 All things considered, Montreal deserves to be higher on the list of places to live in Canada. Even if there are no jobs, not for anglophones.

Threshold Girl is a story I have written about Montreal in 1911/1912 the Titanic Era.  It takes place in Montreal, Westmount, Richmond, Quebec and Ste. Anne de Bellevue. Montreal in that era had the worse slums in the Western World, so it was believed. I think in 1910, Richmond Quebec might have made the top 50 of nicest places to live in Canada.

Milk and Water is my eplay about Montreal in 1927, the  era of US Prohibition and a typhoid epidemic.

Montreal was always a place of contrasts, with  bad bits and good bits. Cities are like that. That's why people like to live in them.

The Cost of Cars 1912 - The Titanic Era

The Everett 1912

As I write The Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, the follow up to Threshold Girl (about a colllege girl in 1911/12 based on real letters) I thought I'd write a post about the Cost of Living in the Titanic Era, but a Dayton Ohio newspaper beat me to it.

My Tighsolas website has all the info, though. (Tighsolas is about the Nicholson Family of Richmond Quebec in 1910, but they kept house accounts from 1883 to 1921!) Many students come to my website for the Cost of Milk in 1900!

So instead I am showing you the Cost of Automobiles in 1912.

These car ads from 1912 are also on the website Transportation in the Laurier Era. 

If you want to read about these cars,the copy and there's plenty of it, check this page out. All About 1912 cars

A few models of the 1912 Abbott-Detroit.

Of course, from 1908-1913, Ford got his Model T rolling off the assembly lines. Just 690 dollars! Most cars cost between 1500 and 3000!

The Marion

Hey, they had Rambler's in the 60's.

Here's a page from the Nicholson Store Book 1910 entry. A quart of milk, 5 cents.

Of course, the cost of living means nothing without a mention of the salaries of the era.

Norman Nicholson made 100 a month on the railroad, (hard work far away in the bush) and that was cut to 50 dollars. Marion Nicholson made 650 a year as a teacher, with four years experience, in the city with diploma. Her sister Edith made 200 a year (with board)teaching in the city without a diploma.

It was said that a Montreal family needed 1500  a year to live decently. From the 1911 Canadian Census, few families made that much, even with the mother and father both working.

Bricklayers, I saw on the census, made good money, for the working class, 1200 a year or so. Stenographers, a growing job area, made about 700 a year.

Very rich men didn't put their salary on the census. My husband's grandfather, Thomas Wells, President of Laurentian Spring Water made 7,000 a year according to the census! That made him quite well off. He's the subject of my eplay Milk and Water.  My own grandfather, Jules Crepeau, was Assistant City Clerk at City Hall in 1911, making only 3,000. Maybe that's why he got caught in bribery trap mounted by  journalist, Edward |Beck, who used Burns Detectives with wiretaps (detectophones). Jules also figures in Milk and Water.(He won a slander suit against Beck and rose to be Director of City Services.) My play takes place in 1927. Jules is now making 10,000 a year.

Factory workers in Magog, Quebec, The Dominion Textile Factory all worked 60 hours (sic) and made between 460 and 700 a year  if you believe the entries. That plant wove cotton (filiature coton).

Someone appears to have doctored the document, a big no no, but that business had clout.. My story Threshold Girl has a subplot about child labour in 1911 at that particular factory.

Why Do We Need Hard Copy Books?

This is Edith Nicholson's copy of Middlemarch (pt 1.) It was published in 1884, the year of her birth. 

She didn't likely get it as a birthday present, although her parents, Norman and Margaret, were big into books. 

I have an entry in their store accounts for 1894, "Book for Flora." Flora is their youngest child, born in 1892! They gave a book to a 2 year old. Very modern of them, don't you think? They understood that the earlier they got a book into their daughter's hands, the earlier she would start mimicking the act of reading, turning the pages of the book with her little pudgy hands, and the better reader she would become.

Threshold Girl is about Flora's year at Macdonald Teachers College in 1911/12, the year the Titanic Sank.

Well, for the illustration for this blog post, I wanted to take a picture of my Kindle (older, almost outdated version) perched upon this vintage volume, perched upon another hard copy of a softcover book Fall On your Knees. But I can't find my digital camera and I don't quite know how to take a picture and send it to myself with my phone, which is a plain DUMB phone anyway. I'm a dinosaur, all right.

Right now I am reading The Art of Fielding on my Kindle, (I reached half way through last night, YEA! 52% it reads on the bottom) and I read a few chapters of the very fat (which translates into long) Fall on Your Knees, which is also about Canada in the Titanic Era, the beginning part anyway. (The author makes a error! She calls Harper's Bazar Harper's Barzaar! I know she's wrong because I have a cover of a 1913 Harper's Bazar, which I purchased to research Threshold Girl. Threshold Girl  contains many colourful fashion plates from the Delineator of the Titanic Era. We live in a visual day and age, after all.)

And I've been trying to read Middlemarch, as I don't recall reading it all the way through, ever - a real oversight.

But I find it hard. The Print is SO SMALL and the language so, well, intricate. (Not that this ever bothered me in the past. I've read all those great big Victorian Novels like Vanity Fair. I'd plough through them,  ever so often checking to see how far I had got, a third, half way, three  quarters, just a few pages, I'm gonna make it! And if I really liked the book, loved the book, say East of Eden, I would cradle the tome in my hands for minutes at a time, as I gave my eyes a break, and wonder in astonishment, my heart hurting almost "All this wisdom in my hands." 

Today, I rely on a digital reading to tell me how far I've gotten, just as I rely on the Weather Network to check the temperature outside, instead of just poking my head outdoors.

So there you go. 

Yesterday, I dug out a CD of a little book I co-authored a while back, a literacy guide for an education association and I read the excerpts on LIBRARY. (I've written a great deal about media in my day. That's my area of  interest, if not expertise, but, MY, how quickly things are changing today. A new iPad came out yesterday, my 400 dollar Kindle I (reluctantly) purchased last year is ancient technology.

I included a snippet from the 2005 Literacy Guide called 'Why Do We Need Books' . Reprinted in full.  

"Books are beautiful and intimate objects. They were once as valuable as gold, copied by scribes, decorated with hand-drawn illuminations and owned only by the wealthy. Books are still considered valuable enough to be housed in dedicated public buildings where the public has the right to use them freely, under the careful scrutiny of watchful librarians.

The concreteness of written and illustrated books is of special value to young learners who need to hold and manipulate real objects and make tactile connections as they learn. Cuddled up for bedtime stories told in the intimate voices of family, telling and retelling familiar stories, playing with words and conversing about the text, provides more warmth, more contact and more human interaction than any form of technological communication.

Reading is a sensory experience. We lean up against our loved ones, feel the weight of the hard cover edition of Alice in Wonderland, smell the binding and the inks, hear the reader's voice, see the richness in the illustrations and revisit them like an old and valued friend.

Why do we need books? To learn to concentrate, to think, and to imagine… to encounter another person's thoughts...to study the forms and structures of the creative process. As readers, writers, illustrators, parents, and teachers we need to value books in our lives and ask our schools to continue to value books as an important part of the education of our children.

From essay Why Do We Need Books: Rhian Brynjolson, in Read This! Why Books Matter. J Gordon Shillingford.2003. Reprinted with permission of the publisher."

This page is brought to you by Quebec Federation of Home and School Associations Inc.

That's who I was writing for, the QFHSA.  Funny, I wonder if hard cover books for children, are going the way of the skipping rope? I don't know what the latest wisdom is, and things are changing so quickly. I wonder what will change and what will stay the same with regard to the act (and art) of reading.

Is the writing already on the wall or should I say 'on the cloud.'?

Stock Market Ethics and 1929

Montreal Aldermen, Mayor Mederic Martin and my grandfather in light hat with band on some 'bonding'  excursion in the 1920's.

Gee, I'm reading a special feature in today's New York Times: Does Morality have a Place on Wall Street?

It's a Room for Debate Feature.

"If you took the greed out of Wall Street there'd be  nothing left but pavement," writes contributor Robert Reich, the Former US Secretary of Labour. Nothing wrong with that though. The problem, he says, is abuse of power and trust. He brings up the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

Here's the Link

I'm anxious to read the rest of this feature, the other points of view. I wonder if any of these illustrious people will say what I think. "If Wall Street is immoral (or amoral) and Wall Street STEERS the US, then the US is Immoral or Amoral."

I'm don't work in that milieu and have known only one person who did. This person's moods yo-yoed up and down with the stock market and he claimed that this was the case with all the traders in his office. He thought himself a moral person, but admited he would invest in ANYTHING to make money. He laughed at the concept of  'ethical investing.'  And he got a lot of freebies to concerts and shows. Great front row seats, every time.  (That's why the rest of us can't get tickets to see the big shows, you see, even if we stand in line for two days.)

And something I heard on BBC Four a couple of years ago stayed in my head:  A man was speaking, apologizing for the Bond Street brokers who brought down the economy, apologizing for their huge salaries and bonuses. "They work very hard," he said. "They never see their wives or children."

AND THAT MAKES THEM GOOD? I wondered. (I guess that's why the use of Prostitutes in London doubled in the 1990's (according to the Guardian).... That came into my mind too. )

Anyway, my story, Milk and Water is about business and ethics in "Corrupt" Prohibiton Era Montreal in 1927, two years before the BIG CRASH.

It features a discussion between Jules Crepeau, my grandfather, the Director of City Services between 1921 and 1930 and Thomas Wells, my husband's grandfather, a Westmount businessman and President of Laurentian Spring Water.

As it happens, my grandfather's career crashes with the Stock Market, new Mayor Camillien Houde throws him out, but he doesn't suffer too much as he negotiates a huge life pension.  Lorne Webster, the industrialist, figures in my grandfather's demise too. And I believe I have dug up new Info on the infamous Laurier Palace Theatre fire.  My grandfather was implicated in that too.

Thomas "Fuddy" Wells, 1920's or 30's.

Going to the Mail in the Titanic Era

A Pile of Nicholson Letters


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, yesterday, 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 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.)

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, 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.) I strongly suspect blogging is, judging from the number of visitors here.

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.

Libraries, Librarians and eBooks (or is it Ebooks?)

The Main Building at Macdonald College, Ste. Anne de Bellevue, many moons ago.

There's been a great deal written in the press lately about e-books, supposed price-fixing between Amazon's adversaries, Apple and some others, being the biggest story.

Last week I read an article about how digital books are changing how reading is done (while texting and watching video and uploading to Pinterest) and just yesterday I read a (related?) article claiming that Digital Books are making reading sexy again, well, I read the title of the article.

 I just downloaded three or was it four digital books on my (already outdated) Kindle. 3 Man-Booker winners and a book recommended by the New York Times Review of Books. The latter book is about college baseball and even though I am in the middle of reading it, I can't recall the title or author.

(Unlike with hardcover books, you don't see the title every time you 'pick up' the books.) It's a nice book with very well drawn out characters.

And then there's my own e-book story, Threshold Girl,  not yet widely discussed, except by me, on this blog....

 Radcliffe/Harvard, Cornell, and now OISE, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

These are places with libraries that have added my e-bookThreshold Girl into their collection!

Radcliffe/Harvard has a digital collection, and OISE printed out the e-book for inclusion in  their stacks (even thought it is still a draft) and asked me to inform them when the final draft is completed.

Library and Archives Canada will add Threshold Girl to their collection when the final draft is completed.

Library by library I plug away promoting my e-book, the first in a trilogy about young women in Canada in 1910, based on real letters.

I've made sporadic attempts at getting the attention of librarians.I read up on how University Libraries acquire books and the iffier topic of DIGITAL acquisitions.

Harvard is on the forefront of the digital age, with respect to university collections, no surprise. Most other libraries are in a kind of  limbo.

Years ago, I worked for a e-book publisher, in Montreal. It was an experimental concern - and I can't write anything about it as I signed a three inch thick confidentiality agreement. (Really too bad.)

It just goes to prove that I've been thinking about e-books for a long time now, although, as a reader, I'm not totally won over. I don't feel SEXY reading an e-book. And my right thumb seizes some times, clicking the pages through :)

My story Threshold Girl isn't yet in proper digital format, just pdf. But then some American University librarians surveyed said they still preferred this format.

I tried to make my ebook 'sexy' by adding beautiful plates from the Delineator.

Yes,  Radcliffe, Cornell, and now the University of Toronto have accepted my history-inspired e-book, Threshold Girl for their collections. I should be inspired. You can't get more prestigious than that!

I should be inspired. Inspired to finish Edith's Story (the Diary of a Confirmed Spinster) which is already plotted out and for which I have already received publicity in the Cornwall Ontario Press.

Inspired to contact more university librarians.

You'd think Macdonald College or McGill would like a copy of Threshold Girl. The story takes place at Macdonald in 1911/1912 and is set in Montreal. I sent them a notice and I noticed that McGill downloaded the e-book from my website. But no word as yet.

The Story of Flora Nicholson  is not new to them. The Education Department at McGill has been using the story of Flora to prepare students for their practicum. (Or at least it did in the past.)

Alas, maybe the book is 'too controversial' for a Quebec institution. That Two Solitudes theme.

Well, the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic is coming up. So I will put on my Publicist's hat and work on that angle.