The Crepeaus, 1922. Maria, Cecile, Jules, Alice and unknown beau.
Jules Crepeau, my grandfather, looks pretty stern here. He looks that way in most era photos. Maybe it's the light, maybe it's the pressure.
He's Director of City Services of Montreal in 1922 - a key and powerful position, newly created in 1921.
I write about him in my eplay Milk and Water. It takes place in 1927, during a visit of the Prince of Wales to Canada to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Confederation.
My grandmaman, Maria Roy, is cozying up to him here. I heard they were always fighting and that a lot of crockery was broken!
Well, I looked up the obituary of one Sir William Stavert, Montreal financier, who died in December 1937, just a few months after my grandfather was hit by a car on Royal Street in NDG, a car driven by an off-duty policeman. My grandfather would die of complications a year later.
Sir William was the man who set up the Financial Structure of the Quebec Liquor Control Board, established in 1921. The obit says this Liquor Board served as model for all others, in Canada and the US.
Sir William was the man who testified at the Senate Hearings on Prohibition in 1926, on behalf of the Anti-Prohibition forces. By this time he had stepped down as the head of the Board.
According to a YouTube video by Kevin Joynt, Stavert may have stepped down due to a scandal. Apparently, Joynt's grandfather, a newly-wed police informer turned Montreal Cop in 1922, was involved in a possible bootlegging scheme (perhaps on behalf of Liquor Board Personnel) and forced to go underground and live a life on the run in the US, first as a soldier in the US Army in Monterrey, California (where I just passed through on a wine-tasting tour to Sonoma- and where John Steinbeck was inspired to write Grapes of Wrath. My California cousin says that the Sonoma vinyard experience is more traditional since NAPA has become highly commercial.)
The story proves 'nothing is stranger than truth' and you can read about it here. (YouTube video).
Now I know that my grandfather and family visited Atlantic City all through the 20's. I have the photo evidence, with images of my mother, born in 1921, as a toddler and young child of 6 or 7 on the Boardwalk.
I have to wonder if Jules is on 'business trips' - hence the tense expression in these era photos.
William Stavert, Westmount Businessman, was knighted for his service to Britain during the war. He served in their Information Office. A spy! Obits say he lived a model life himself.
In a 1922 article (two full pages) the New York Times was already applauding the Quebec Temperance Law, as they called it. "Quebec's Temperate Law Solving the Liquor Question" reads the headline. That paper would publish articles to this effect all through the 1920's.
Americans were spending all their money in Montreal, overflowing the local hotels, so the articles claimed. Indeed, hotels were so full, some American tourists had to sleep in their car!
(Today, with our dollar at par and the need for passports at the border, the only American tourism to Montreal is gay tourism, it seems. Most of the tourist traffic goes the other direction, as my pleasure trips last year to New York City, Las Vegas, Ogunquit, Maine and Redondo Beach, California prove.
And booze is now WAY cheaper in the US than it is in Quebec.)
The people are behind the law, the 1922 New York Times article says about the Quebec Liquor Regulations. The law is observed. And there is very little graft and corruption.
Read Milk and Water.
