I am writing a book based on family letters from 1910. The book is about my husband's Aunt Edie, who lost her great love in a Cornwall Ontario hotel fire and who never married.
It's a follow up to Threshold Girl, about her sister Flora, who attended Macdonald College in 1910.
Well, it's like a puzzle, where I have only a few pieces, in the form of surviving letters from 1910 - and some pictures too.
Edith and her man, Charlie, had a flirtation in the summer of 1909. She showed him to her father who mentioned nothing about it to anyone. In other words, he didn't approve. So the couple didn't get married. In those day, you needed money to marry as a women had to give up her job at marriage.
In the middle class, anyway.
And Charlie, her beau, was only a bank teller.
Well, the next mention of Charlie is in a letter from September. He has gone to Mexico, and the flirtation is over. Her mom says so.
Mexico? Why Mexico?
But I checked online and realized there was a serious hurricane in Monterrey Mexico on August 31st. A famous Canadian industrialist, William Mackenzie, had a Water and Power Company then.
It is possible that a few young men from Canada were brought down by Mackenzie to aid in the recovery.
Why else go to Mexico? A bank teller. They made little money. I know because Edith's brother was also a bank teller.
So now I can figure out a way to make my story a bit of a thriller.
1909 apparently was the first year of the Mexican Revolution. Zapata and all that. So things were volatile down there.
Charlie desperately needed money to marry. So what did he do that might have gotten him into trouble? I can think of something relevant to Edith's story: he imports some opium
Opium for smoking was still legal in Mexico in 1910. And, at least according to a huge article in the New York Times of 1911, US had lax laws concerning the drug (one out of ten pharmacies dispensed it) and an enormous amount of addicts (many of whom, supposedly, were women like Edith, being prescribed medicine for 'heart' conditions. The Prozac of 1910.
The US Opium Czar, a McGill educated doctor, claims that he has no stats of imports from Mexico. He is more concerned with the Phillipines and Hong Kong.
