Flo in the City - A Work In Progress

Capone and Edward VIII and Edward Beck

2012-01-29T09:10:00.001-05:00

Well, I found something interesting, looking up "Al Capone + Montreal" on the Internet for my play Milk and Water about Montreal in 1927, during the era of American Prohibition, using my grandfather, Jules Crepeau as a character. He was Director of Services in Montreal all through the 1920's.

This pic is a still from a YouTube film. (The original movie, Chicago, aired in 1927, you know, the story of Roxy Hart, is it, that inspired the popular musical a while back.)

In early July, 1930, a few months before my grandfather, Jules Crepeau, was forced to resign by Houdists on the Municipal Council, the Gazette published an article comparing Montreal Crime with Chicago crime.

It's not an example of stellar reportage. Indeed, I wonder what it was really all about.

Apparently, a Chicago judge, passing through Montreal, claimed to a local reporter that "Chicago is not a healthy city to live in."

Then an anonymous person, upset by the criticism, wrote a letter to someone and this someone showed it to City Council and asked for their opinion, and it was published in the Gazette.

This anonymous Chicagoan said that he has seen more racketeering in Montreal than in Chicago. That there is more open gambling in Montreal than in Cicero (Al Capone's hangout). And as for immorality, Montreal makes Chicago look like a village."

Chief Langevin of the Montreal Police Corps was asked to answer to this anonymous letter, and said the usual, that they are always closing up gambling houses and houses of ill-fame, but they needed the addresses first.

He said "We have no gangsters in Montreal. We have officers at every train station looking for suspicious characters and many have been deported."

Alderman Bray, Chairman of the Executive Committee says that the criticism does not come from a Montrealer, but from a Chicagoan, who is upset by a remark from another Chicagoan criticizing his city. True enough.

A silly article, that shows that Al Capone was known in Montreal circles. Again, I have to wonder: wonder what was purpose and who "planted" it in the Gazette.

Oh, let's say it was crusading reporter Edward Beck...(I have no idea.) Beck died in October of this year, a month after my grandfather got 'let go' so he got some revenge in the end. He hated my grandfather and McConnell apparently.

I might write a story based on his life, it would be interesting.

Now, in a 1985 article, Tommy Schnurmacher wrote a piece about Montreal night life and opened with the line that "Montreal has been famous for its nightlife ever since Al Capone came down from Chicago to party all night." It's just a lead, so means little...I must go back over my Montreal Then and Now. If there is a Montreal/Capone story, Edgar Andrew Collard would have written it I think.

His book is where I got the VERY USEFUL info about the Prince of Wales, David, Edward VIII, that he liked to party with Mederic Martin.

Don't Blame Us Boomers, Blame Consumerism!

2012-01-28T09:00:00.003-05:00

Horse and carriage, Richmond Quebec. Turn of the Last Century. This is likely the carriage that took Finance Minister Peter Mackenzie around Richmond Country during the 1912 provincial election.

Well, there's been an awful lot about Quebec's budget in the News, what with Mario Dumont saying that without equalization Quebec is as badly off as Greece (without the 24/7 blue skies and cheap wine.). And now one of his advisors, the 42 year old Eric Duhaime is blaming Mom and Dad. In a new book L'État contre les jeunes: Comment les baby-boomers ont détourné le système

Read more: http://www.montrealgazette.com/Boomers+selfishness+leading+bust+author/6059130/story.html#ixzz1kl892VxV

(Hey, when you cut and paste from the Gazette article it automatically puts in the link. Cool!)

Apparently, he says we're spending too much on health care and not enough on education.

Well, well. Be careful Monsieur Duhaime. If the Boomers don't have health care it's the Boomers' kids who are going to have to take care of them. Hey, even with some reasonable health care, you are going to have to take care of them. Believe me. I've been there. Of course, there's always euthanasia. Not a bad idea: I'm considering it for myself, after having watched my mother suffering due to incompetent medical care at the end of her life in a pricey privatized Rest Home.

Considering the fact everything might be privatized when the time comes (a representative of one of those American Rest Home Corporations warned me that will be the case) and I won't have 10,000 a month or more for my end of life care, a little pill seems the smart thing to do. Hey with Harper's Social Security cuts I may have no choice. Especially since, we live privatized lives these days, a by-product of consumerism. (Don't blame us boomers, blame consumerism, I say.)

Now, I do think I have a unique (if not a blanket) perspective on things budgetary, having researched and written Threshold Girl. I know what it was like for 'an average family' in 1900 in Quebec. An average family under economic stress. If you read the ebook, you will too.

Margaret and Norman Nicholson, two respectable and very frugal people who did everything right all their lives, would not have survived - in old age - but for financial support from their kids and all kinds of other support from friends and community.

There was a reason Norman always paid his Masonic fees, which were considerable, even when totally broke!

Norman worked until the day he died at 72. Doctor's bills were always a problem. A lot of people couldn't pay them. In fact, Norman made extra money working as 'collector' for a couple of doctors. I have the documentation. Lots of bills of 10 dollars, some as high as 35. In a day and age when 100 dollars a month was a good salary, but few made that.

Want to see what it cost to live in 1900, for a typical Quebec Family. .A List for the Laurier Era

Anyway, I just happen to have on hand the 1912 Quebec Budget. Norman Nicholson kept it. I think it must be from the Montreal Witness. Of course, my eplay Milk and Water is about Montreal in 1927 and the emergence of the Quebec 'welfare' state.

Here's a summary of the budget

Quebec Provincial Budget Speech, 1912
(From insert in Richmond Times Guardian - Nicholson Family copy.)

Hon. Mr. P S G Mackenzie, Provincial Treasurer, Shows Splendid Financial Standing of Province - $905 910,04. (Mackenzie was the Liberal Member of the Legislature for Richmond - re-elected in 1912, with the help of the Nicholson carriage.)

I have transcribed excerpts relevant to certain web site themes: the automobile, the temperance movement, education, forestry.Comparison of results:
Recalling that the last Conservative Administration were in office from December 17, 1891 to May 28, 1897, when Mr. Marchand assumed the reins of power for the Liberals, he compared the results of the two regimes…

The Treasurer then went on to say that he had seen, from the time the Liberal party took office in 1897, up to 30^th of June, 1911, not only had the public debt been decreased from every point of view, and the interest charges diminished and equilibrium restored, but the party was able to say that it had largely increased expenditure for pubic instruction, agriculture, rural roads and colonization.

The ordinary receipts for the the past year paid out of ordinary revenue consisted of: Legislative and departmental buildings, painting roof and repairs, construction of new library, Jacques Cartier Normal School furniture, iron bridges, Normal School Quebec purchase of land, Dairy School Ste Hyacinthe, repair and construction of farm buildings.

Assets and Liabilities: The honorable gentleman explained that during the 1910-1911, the government had increased the assets of the province, a sum of 21,009,941.12. The funded debt stood at 25,661,284.15

For the current year, among the items that had increased expenditures beyond the estimates, he mentioned 10,000.00 for the committee of organization of the French Language; 6,405.77 for the reception of Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, 40,000 for farmers' clubs, 80,000,00 for rural roads. The Quebec Bridge Subsidy:
Referring to this matter, he recalled in 1900 there was voted to the Quebec Bridge Company the sum of 250,000 to be payable 30,000 per annum for eight years. At that time it was contemplated that the bridge, in addition to being a railway bridge would provide a highway for vehicles and pedestrians. The bridge collapsed in 1907.The Last Census
The honorable gentleman also touched upon this subject. In the 1901 census the population of Quebec was 1, 648,898, and under the census of June last it was 2,005,805. The Dominion subsidy to the Province of Quebec based on population, were annually 959, 252.80 being based on moribund census of 1861. Thanks to the persistent efforts of he Prime Minister in leading the successful demand made by the provinces for an adjustment in terms, provided by the BNA Act, the subsidy was increased.

Lands and Forests. Referring particularly to this source of provincial revenue, he said that he receipts for 1910-11 from the Crown Lands Department had exceeded the receipts for 1909-10 by 79, 181.81. Estimated results for the current year, 1,410,000.00Licenses: (See: temperance: page 4)
Under this head the honorable gentleman remarked that if we are to judge by the revenue returns, the conclusion would be that the people were drinking to the health of the nation. The revenue from this source last year was 983,663.00 an excess of 88,664.00 over the estimates.

Education The Treasurer devoted a good deal of remark to this important question. He explained that there would be a further increase of 150, 646,70 in the estimates for 1912-1913 over those of 1911-12. The total vote for the latter being 1,065,950.40 as compared to 1, 16,596.0 for the latter. He gave the details of this increase and about 125,000 for distribution among the school municipalities, which paid all their teachers annual salaries of not less than 100 dollars to increase that to 130 dollars and later 150 a year, the object of the Government being to encourage the payment by local effort of a higher standard of salary as well as the employment of qualified teachers. (EDITOR: In 1910 Quebec's teachers were the lowest paid in Canada.) Referring to Laval and McGill Universities he commented on the great services they had paid in building up the state. In the past they had been mainly sustained by public munificence. Now, however the time had come when a united public demanded that the state should aid their great and good work . A substantial subsidy was also provided to Bishop's College in he estimates. Agriculture and Rural Roads (the impact of the auto) In consequence of the amendments to the law relating to automobiles, last session, by increasing the duties, there had been a significant augmentation of revenue from that service. He had no doubt that this source would increase from year to year, until it reached a very considerable amount, as it was obvious that improved highways would greatly increase the number of automobiles. He thought the automobilists deserved to be regarded as pioneers of the good roads movement. They had more than any other class drawn attention to the wretched condition of our highways In conclusion the honorable gentleman spoke as follows: Wise expenditure, within the limit of revenue, is in my opinion the truest economy. Let us all patriotically bear our share of the Burdens of the state, and encourage every movement toward the development of our resources; to uplift the moral and social conditions of our people; to make them happy and contented at home; and admired and respected abroad.


	Tighsolas \| The Nicholson Family Saga \| Canada 1910 \| Historical Terms \| 1908 Letters \| 1909 Letters \| 1910 Letters \| 1911 Letters \| 1912 Letters \| 1913 Letters

Buttering up the Future King! O Canada!

2012-01-27T08:07:00.000-05:00

Edward VIII, as prince of Wales, in a butter sculpture at the 1925 British Empire Exhibition. Library and Archives.

Geez! Apparently, the Prince was honored by this sculpture, that was a promotion of both the dairy and refridgeration industries in Canada.

You know, I might stick this in my story,Milk and Water. The story is about Montreal in 1927 and centers around a visit by the Royal Prince for the country's Diamond Jubilee.

Apparently, this was the only representation of anything to do with Native Canadians at the Canadian Pavilion.

At the beginning of the movie the King's Speech, Bertie, the Duke of York, is giving a speech at the closing. I have the Official Guide of the 1925 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. It was a two year event.

I bought it off eBay while writing another play, Looking for Mrs. Peel, which takes place in 1967 and goes backwards. 1967 was the year of Expo67, my favourite year, so I have a thing for Exhibitions.

Now, it was while researching the 1900 French Exhibition that I discovered, to my amazement, that the Canadian Pavilion contained an exhibit of Pelee Island wines from Ontario.

I was surprised, since I had only heard of Pelee wines lately. (I often go to Hawkesbury to buy them at the local LCBO as the SAQ doesn't carry them.) Could it be? Was Canada into winemaking in 1900? And would they dare to presume to sell it to the French? Well, yes, so it seems.

Today, I wondered, out of the blue, if Canada exhibited Ontario wine at the 1924 and 1925 exhibitions, considering that the US was under Prohibition and Ontario had strict regulations concerning wine and hard liquor.

So I consulted the Official Guide and it appears, NO. Only Cypress and Australia were showing off their wines. "Australia is specializing in wine and proclaims of the day when she will be able to compete with France for the trade of the world. True enough.. France and Italy and Spain and Chile and California and Canada and, and, and, and.

Canada had tobacco products on exhibit and fish and forestry products too. And dairy of course. In the Official Guide, in the Canada Section it says "You must not miss a two tonne silver nugget and a butter model of the Prince of Wales and the story of 'a shanty man's life.'

The Official Guide has full page portraits of the King and the Queen and the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of York and Colin Firth. Ah...And some Princess they left out of the King's Speech. Princess Mary, a patroness of the Women's Section. I wonder if she handed out pamphlets at the kiosk of the Women's Total Abstinence Society. It was situated in Clean Way, on Quality Street. The Duchess of York was also a patroness of this Women's Section, but from what I've read about the future Queen Mom she probably has a seat reserved in the Australian Pavilion, beside the wine exhibit. Had I been alive, I would have met her there!

The Pelee Wine Exhibit, 1900 Paris Exhibition. Canadian Pavilion. Oh La! La!

I found an ad for 1913 for Pelee wines, saying that comparatively few people know of this wine, that it is "Canadian Port" containing a low percentage of alcohol and of a red, rich colour. (I found a bit fro 1912 saying that it was a banner year for grapes.)

$1.50 a gallon!

Hmm. I wonder how much alcohol, likely 5 percent or less. Of course today, the wine is 12 and 13 percent, the usual.

Another article I found from 1883 said that vinyards at Pointe Pelee were established in 1866 by a Brantford guy, a Mr. Hamilton. He built a three storey stone winehouse.

They produced dry and sweet catawba, isabella, claret, port and sherries. Hmm. And communion wines and invalid wines. Wine was often prescribed for ailments at the turn of the last century. I have some family letters where people speak of this. Lucky for them, as most of the correspondents were Presbyterian, adherents to temperance. Being 'an invalid' was an excuse to drink.

Today, we need no excuses! Especially since Ontario wines have come into their own.

This same article says that Ontario wine is being introduced in the West Indies and Great Britain. But in 1900 they brought it to Paris, and along with Edison's moving sidewalk, it didn't really catch on.

Boardwalk Empire Montreal -Milk and Water

2012-01-26T08:13:00.003-05:00

Crepeaus in Atlantic City 1927 ish.

The other day we went to Hawkesbury to buy wine. This, apparently, isn't strictly legal. So I'm a bit of a bootlegger. I used to think the LCBO's wine was cheaper than the SAQ's wine, but I've done more research and it isn't really. According to wine afficonados who have checked. But they do have Ontario wines, which I like. The SAQ doesn't carry much Ontario wine. Hard liquor is more expensive in Ontario.

That makes the trip to the LCBO worth it. Also, it's easier to drive West these days with all the traffic into Montreal - and BIG BONUS_ the LCBO's beautiful promotion magazine Food and Drink was out. What a gorgeous thing! And free. There isn't a recipe in in I don't want to try.

So, I'm a bit of a bootlegger, but I doubt I would have been as brave as May Wells, in 1927. Defying the American authorities like she did. My story Milk and Water explains.

Here's the beginning of Milk and Water my prohibition era e-play about Montreal City Politics based on TRUE events. Click on the link for the entire eplay on pdf. The play explains the beginning of the roots of the SAQ and LCBO, of government control of alcohol. In 1927, a 17 dollar case of whiskey cost 56 after taxes, according to a source I read.

Milk and Water

1927 wasCanada’s Jubilee year, the 60^th anniversary of Confederation. Tocelebrate, 2 Royal Princes, David (the future Edward VIII) and George (the futureDuke of Kent) took a month long tour of Canada. Upon arrival, at the beginningof August, they were feted, along with UK Prime Minister Baldwin, at MontrealCity Hall. A public ceremony was held in front on the steps of the recentlyrefurbished Hotel de Ville, with Mayor Mederic Martin standing in state in his longpurple robes. My grandfather, Jules Crepeau, Director of Municipal Departmentsand his eldest daughter, my Aunt Alice, watched from a perch higher up on thesteps.

The RoyalPrinces would stay in Montreal only 36 hours, then travel across Canada, to returnto the City on the St. Lawrence at the end of the month for four days of restand recreation before returning to England.

This setting of this play, Milk and Water,takes advantage of this fact.

In 1927, theCity of Montreal was at the peak of its influence, a bustling industrial andtransportation centre, even if someTorontonians disparaged the city, claiming that, although happily situated forbusiness, it was corrupt to the core, French and “so hopeless.”

In the1920’s the Americans had Prohibition and reportedly many crime bosses headed upNorth to control their empires from Montreal.

Montreal hadno Prohibition, although the sale of hard liquor was controlled by a ProvincialLiquor Commission. Liquor licenses were handed out primarily to taverns, aswell as to restaurants and hotels. According to the Coderre Inquiry into PoliceCorruption, conducted in the city in 1924 and 25, there were about 1,000establishments in Montreal serving hard liquor without a license, not speakeasiesin the traditional sense, but still operating outside the law.

Montreal,Quebec, September 2, 1927.

A warm autumnnight.

The Mayor ofMontreal from his office at City Hall: Allo. Mr. Crepeau.

C’est Mayor Martin.Vous etes rentrer chez vous. Bien.

JulesCrepeau (from his home at 72 Sherbrooke West): Comment peux je vous aider,Monsieur le Mayor.

Mayor:Monsieur Crepeau. I will speak in English as I have a representative of theRoyal Prince in my office.

Jules: D’accord.Your Worship. So will I answer in English. What is the problem?

Martin. Problem?No problem. I have a personal favour to ask of you, on behalf of our esteemed Royalguests. All in the strictest confidence, of course.

Martin: Do you remember that Westmount bloke with the bottled wat

Jules: CommeToujours. As alwayser company, the one withthe bullshit name?

Jules: Thomas Wells? What’s bullshit about the name?

Martin: Notthat name, the name of his company. Laurentian..ah

Jules: SpringWater.

Martin: Yes,the company that sells water it pumps from under Craig Street. Near our giantsewage collector. Not from the Laurentian Mountains. So, bull shit.

Jules: Yes,well, I believe I have met him just recently at the Royal Reception.

Martin: He’sthe short older man with the very very tall young wife.

Jules: Oh,yes, the amiable man with the very tall and very thin and very outspoken youngwife.

Martin: Thesame man.

Jules: Whatabout him?

Martin: Well,we need some of his bottled water delivered tonight to a certain dance club inthe midtown.

Jules: Why?

Martin:Because the Royal Prince might turn up there later on.

Jules: Iunderstand.

Martin. Thething is, I would like 3 gallons delivered, merely as a precaution of course,but no one is to know. No one except this Mr. Wells – and you.

Jules: So heis to deliver it himself. Alone? The President of this company?

Martin: Yes.Discretion is of the utmost importance.

Jules; Isee. But how am to reach him on such short notice.

Martin: I’vealready taken care of. The thing is, ah, I would like you to meet him at 11.pmin front of the Mermaid Cafe.

Jules: 11.pm. The Mermaid Cafe? But, I just got in, myself. There was a meeting of the City ImprovementLeague. And you know how those ferociousPresbyterian ladies never let you go home.

Martin : Unfortunate.Do you know the address of the Mermaid?

Jules: Howcould I not? It’s got a (clears throat)certain widespread reputation.

Martin: Well,well. You are speaking about the excellent dance music, I presume. But thePrince will not show up until after midnight. He is tied up at some stuffy dinnerparty at the top of the hill, probably at Ravenscrag.

Jules: May Iask, with all due respect, why can’t His Royal Highness get his own people tobring the water. The Ritz Carleton has hundreds of bottles stored in thebasement, I’m sure, what with this latest typhoid scare. The Radnor People ofThree Rivers are the Official Suppliers.

Martin: Thething is, this, ah, is not an official kind of outing. The Royal Prince ishoping to slip away from his handlers for a few hours.

In fact,this is a personal favour he is asking me, as a personal friend. Don’t worry, I will send over one of our moreambitious young police officers, un grand gaillard, to perform the heavy work.

All you andMr…ah…Wells, is it? have to do is can stand outside with the water and wait. Youdon’t even have to go in. The Prince and his party will enter by the side door.Only then do you have the jugs delivered.

Jules: Ifit’s after 12am, everyone enters by the side door, I imagine.

Martin: Well,be that as it may. Apparently, there’s avery good Jazz band playing tonight, the Harlem Kings or Kings of Harlem. The Prince is young. He has a keen interest inmodern forms of music.

And you recognizeall the city reporters.

Jules: Butthey recognize me, too, as the person who, just a year ago, announced to theentire Montreal Press Corps the firm new closing hour of midnight for dance clubs.

Martin:Jules. It’s the Royal Prince. Que voulez-vous?

Jules: Yes,of course. I understand.

Martin: Youwill be pleased to know, he specifically asked for you. His people thought youdid a wonderful job organizing the official reception at City Hall a month ago.

Jules: Youmean where we invited about 1,000 too many guests and where the Prince keptglancing at his watch and yawning between handshakes. I’m still fielding angryletters from society matrons who never made it into the reception line.

Martin: Well,yes, yes, That’s done then, I can count on you.

Jules:Certainement, Your Worship. (He hangs up the phone.)

Toujours quelquechose.

Little Girl:Papa?

Jules: Tu esencore debout, Marthe? Ou est Maman?

Girl: Elleprie dans le salon, avec Florida and Cecile.

Jules: Tudois prier aussi.

Girl: Jen’aime pas prier. C’est ennuyeux. Peux-tu me raconter un histoire?

Jules: No,Il faut que je sorte.

Girl: Justeune courte. Je pars pour couvent demain, tu sais.

Ah, Je nepeux pas ma chouette.

Mais je veuxque tu restes. S’il tu plait.

Jules: Nousavons eu de bons temps à Atlantic City, il y’a deux semaines.

Marthe:Tu n’étais presque jamais avec nous autres. Toujours des meeting.

Jules: (Hekisses his daughter). Les rendezvous. Bonne nuit, ma petite. Je promet de t’ammenerau couvent moi même demain.

Slam ofdoor.

Setting: Outsidea dance hall, Montreal somewhere South of Ste. Catherine, east of Universityand West of St. Lawrence Boulevard.

Two men, similar in age and body type, both 60 ish, both about 5 foot 8 inches.Both with trim, athletic builds. Both sporting tall bowler hats.

Under his tallbowler, one man has thin black hair and a deep receding hairline, and under histall bowler, the other man has a healthy head of curly almost wiry hair that isreceding only slightly but greying most noticeably.

Both men arewell dressed, in white shirts with high-necked collars and dark blue flannel business suits. The balding man’s lapels are notched and thin,to match his tie. The curly hair man’s lapels are peaked and wide- also to match his cravat.

The baldingman’s outfit is a more conservative cut, but the style worn by the anglobusinessmen of his circle. The curly man’s suit more a la mode, as they say, althoughstill very appropriate for a man of his age of his stature.

These aremen of the Upper Middle Class. One English Canadian originally from Ontario. One French Canadian born in Laval.Both men live with their bossy wives in three storey townhouses in tony sectionsof Montreal, one on Chesterfield in lower Westmount, one on Sherbrooke Streetjust a little West of St. Lawrence Street, or St. Laurent.

The Englishman is Tom Wells, a businessman and President of Laurentian Spring Water. TheFrench man is Jules Crepeau, a high-ranking City civil servant, the Director ofMunicipal Departments.

Crepeauarrives in a taxi. A Black Lasalle. He exits the car quickly without paying. Wellsdrives up in a Bentley, its back seat holding three giant clear glass bottles,the front passenger seat a stack of yellow boxes.

The two menmeet and shake hands on the curb in front of The Mermaid Café and Dance Club.

Tom: Ibrought the bottles myself, as the Mayor Instructed. But I can’t lift them, youknow. Sciatica. Curling injury.

Jules: Aconstable is to arrive shortly.

The frontdoor of the cafe opens and out pour two dozen or so patrons, mostly young menand women, the women in form-fitting flapper dresses with flying fringes andcolourful cloche hats, and young men in shiny high-waisted suits with baggypant legs.

In thebackground, a song is plays on a Victrola. It is Hello Montreal by Willy Eckstein.A trio sings:

GoodbyeBroadway, hello Montreal.

Yamo, yamo, I think I want a drink; Yamo,yamo, there’s water in the sink.

The sink, the sink, the sink, the sink, thesink;

The good old rusty sink;

But who the heck wants water when you’re dyingfor a drink?

Oh, “We Won’t Get Home Till Morning” Is thebest song after all,

Goodbye Broadway, hello Montreal.

There’ll be no more Orange Phosphates,

You can bet your Ingersoll,

Goodbye Broadway, hello Montreal.

The front doorcloses as the last couple straggles out, just as a tall young policeman indress blues, broad-shouldered and burly, arrives on foot. He crosses the streetand walks toward the older men standing in front of the big black Bentley.

Jules walksup to meet him a few paces from Tom and whispers a few words to the cop.

He returnsto stand beside Tom. The cop takes up position beside the front door a fewyards away, standing at ease with his arms behind his back and legs slightlyapart.

Tom: Howlong do we wait, then?

Jules(shrugging) As long as is required.

I have somecrates, then, in the trunk. For us to sit on.

Jules nods.

He waves theconstable over. Instructs the young man as to the matter. Tom gives him somekeys. The Cop goes to the car, opens the trunk, grabs a medium-sized browncrate in each hand and carries them past the sidewalk, and places them oneither side of the café’s front door.

The copresumes his position a few yards away. The older men sit on the crates.LAURENTIAN SPRING is written in upside down green lettering on the crates.

The morethan middle-aged men squirm and fidget, turning away each other, turningtowards each other. Tom examines the streetlights, Jules the road directly infront. Tom adjusts his hat, Jules his tie. Then the two almost identicallooking men turn to face each other – but obliquely.

Betweenthem, the café front door opens and two 30ish women, looking the worse forwear, exit on wobbly ankles.

A voice frominside: C’est l’heure de fermeture. Rentrez chez-vous, mes Pitounes.

Anothervoice, more drunk sounding: Go home flour lovers.

The two men inspectthe women as they might a stray cat or dog, without any perceptible change intheir expression.

Then a lockon the front door is banged shut and a sign goes up window over Jules’ head:CLOSED! Over Tom’s head: FERME!

There’s a longpause as the men adjust to this slightly uncomfortable situation. Thenfinally….

Tom: Yankingat his tie knot. Too hot for an autumn night.

Jules: Somelike it hot..What does it mean, flower lover?

Tom: Toomuch make-up. Flour as in face powder. (He makes a motion with his right hand,as if powdering his cheeks and as he does this he purses his lips.)

Jules: Ah.(Afteranother long pause) So, you are the one who put that crazy advertisement in thenewspaper?

Tom: What advertisement. What do you mean?

Jules: Theadvertisement that said “Don’t drink filthy germ laden city water. LaurentianSpring Water is always the same, pure and wholesome. Do not wait until you aresick to drink it.”

Tom: My sad Aunt Sally. That particular promotion wasplaced over 4 years ago. You can’tpossibly remember it word for word.

Jules: Iremember it perfectly, believe me. This is my special gift.

Tom: Well, then,you must certainly be aware that we haven’t run anything quite like it since.

Jules: Theletter from the City’s Avocat en Chef might have had something to do with yourchange of heart.

Tom: No. The fact is, we’ve changed our advertisingpolicy, right about then. We started pushing our new line of soft drinks. (He pulls out a bottle from each side-pocket andshows them to Jules.)

Jules:(inspecting labels) Soda water and Sweet Ginger Ale.

Tom: No sir,we certainly didn’t cave to the threats from over at City Hall. (He returns thebottles to his pockets.)

You know, we’veonly ever received one lawyer’s letter from you people. Ever. And we’ve run aslew of newspaper ads along the same lives over the years in promotion of ourbottled water. No, the most trouble ever we got, before that letter, were acouple of huffy phone calls from Dr. Laberge’s department.

Jules: Ofcourse, The Health Department

Tom: Your guys couldn’t catch us on anything.

Jules: Yes,all your clever wordplay. “What chances you take if you don’t drink Laurentianwater.” “The Safest plan is to drink Laurentian Spring water.” Never quitelying, never quite telling the truth. Not slander, not in the legal sense. Butslippery lies are lies just the same.

Jules: Eventhe name of you company is a sort of lie. Laurentian Spring Water. Your aquiferis under Craig Street. Right downtown in the business district. And there areunderground springs all over the city.

Tom: Sure,but our well has the purest water, it’s a proven fact. The scientists atMacdonald College tested back it in 1909, the year of the last typhoidepidemic.

Jules: Pure, Purer, Purest. Mere words, once again. What does the word “pure” really mean,exactly?

Tom: Now, what’swrong with the word Pure? It’s a greatword. A beautiful word. Everyone likes it. Everyone uses it.

Jules: That’sprecisely what’s wrong with it. (Pause) A word that everyone uses can’t be agood thing. A word like that means too many different things to differentpeople. And if something is pure, then something has to be impure.

The Devil's in the Details: Milk and Water

2012-01-25T07:27:00.002-05:00

Aunt Flo and Mom circa 1927.

I just added a bit to my eplay Milk and Water, about my Aunt Flo, who was 'plucked' from the city streets in and around 1912 to live with my grandparents. Milk and Water is about Montreal in 1927, and it's a Two Solitudes type story, about political corruption and the power of words.

It's in the section where the two men compare families: yesterday I added detail about the death of Morris, Thomas Wells's second son. He died in South America, on a job. I assume he worked for the Canadian Industrialists who were setting up big POWER projects in Mexico and South America in the 1910 era. William Mackenzie, McConnell.

In Milk and Water a powerful French Canadian, Jules Crepeau, and a Westmount Businessman, Tom Wells, have a long talk.

Tom: Three,really, I’m on my fourth marriage. Between us, my wife and I have been in sevenmarriages.

Jules (NowJules appears dumbfounded.) C’est vraiment vrai?

Tom: I’vebeen widowed 3 times and my wife, well, let’s say, she’s had her adventures.She married her first husband on a dare. No children though, so no harm done.She told the Minister she was a widow so we could get married. (He snickers andmakes a jabbing motion toward Jules with his elbow.) I had to grease his palmso there’d be no publication of banns.

Jules: Maybe30 years is too kind. I have one wife,of 26 years, and one son, 25 years, and three daughters, well four, if I count sweetFlorida, the adopted girl. As a young child, she came begging at our door allthe time, around 1912. My wife would feed her, give her a clean new dress andsend her home. She’d return a few days later in rags, so one day, we just tookher in for good. And I had a young sonwho died as an infant. At 3 days old.

Tom: I have3 daughters and 2 sons. Three, if you count my second son, Morris. He died, inthe prime of life really. On his first job as an Engineer. Way down in SouthAmerica. He drowned, they said. An accident. But he had been a top competitive swimmerat Lower Canada College. And at McGill. So I’ll always have my doubts. Myeldest son survived the Belgian Front without a scratch and my second son diedon his first job building a dam in Brazil, for Mackenzie’s big concern downthere. With McConnell. I got him the job. Through my Rotary Club connections.

Jules: Myson, too, is a McGill Engineer.

A while back, I think I found Aunt Flo's family on the 1911 census. The father was a City Worker. So he would have known about Jules and maybe found out where he lived.

William Fong, Edward Beck, Financiers and Fuddy

2012-01-24T08:38:00.001-05:00

Fuddy and May, Thomas Wells and Mary Hardy Fair Wells, my husband's grandparents.

All things are connected, that's for sure.

I am editing Milk and Water my e-play about Montreal in 1927, the Roaring Twenties, the era of American Prohibition, Al Capone, and Elliot Ness (was he real?) and I've found yet another connection between this Milk and Water Story and my Threshold Girl story about 1910 Montreal.

In a bit of dialogue where Fuddy is telling Jules Crepeau, (Director of City Departments and my grandfather) about the death of his youngest son in South America, I decided to get specific.

So I consulted my FONG biography of McConnell to remind myself what South American concerns the Toronto Industrialists were involved in...

Brazil!

So I have Morris Wells die in Brazil. My father in law can't recall exactly where. (Why else would he have been down there? He was an engineer who died on a water power project.)

And I have Thomas opine (is that the word?) that he got his son the job. This likely happened. He was Director of the Rotary for Eastern Canada!

Odd, I'm also working on "The Diary of A Confirmed Spinster" that is the follow up to Threshold Girl. It tells the story of Edith Nicholson and how she lost her great love in a hotel fire.

In this story, I am fiddling around a bit. In real life, her boyfriend disappeared to Mexico in late 1909. I figured out why. They'd had a typhoon in Monterrey and that's where a Mr. William Mackenzie, Toronto tycoon, had a Power Company.

I'm taking guesses here, but I think they are educated guesses. Good guesses.

In Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, I'm fiddling a bit with the story, turning it into a murder mystery involving the opium trade.

Anyway, I noticed that the Fong bio of McConnell mentions Edward Beck, Journalist! He says that Beck is McConnell's biggest enemy journalist. Oh my. So Beck hated McConnell and my grandfather! And McConnell was involved with the Forget's, my grandfather's relations. HMMM. This is much more complicated that even I can figure out. Alas!

I guess I must thoroughly read Fong's Chapter on the Water and Power situation in 1910....
Oh, I did and it's still complicated. In a footnote to the chapter, No. 42. Fong says that Beck probably wasn't a reliable journalist as he lost a defamation suit in 1915. I think he is referring to my grandfather's suit. He 'sort of' lost... he only had to pay 100 dollars.

Hmm.

Ironic SOPA PIPA

2012-01-23T09:32:00.001-05:00

An ad for Edison's Phonograph. He's trying to get Moms to let them into the home.

Sopa and Pipa. Can't say I'd heard about them, until last week.

I know that similar laws are being passed in Canada.

I'm sitting in my living room, surrounded by my DVDs and some VHS's I'm reluctant to toss.

My husband and I have some titles on VHS, DVD, AND Blue Ray.

I can't feel sorry for Hollywood somehow.

So my husband and I tend to buy our DVD's, since we have no idea how to download them. Sure, I sometimes watch old British TV programs on YouTube. I just watched the first episode of the Duchess of Duke Street.

If I decided I want to watch it all, I'll probably buy the DVD.

Anyway, Sopa and Pipa are slowed for the moment. Wikipedia's efforts played a large part. I never realized how much I used Wikipedia until last week. I kept falling on the site, looking up this, looking put that.

Ironic. My story Threshold Girl is based on letters from the 1910 era. To write this ebook (which I offer free online, although it is copyrighted)I did a lot of research. This was the Nickelodeon Era, the birth of the film medium.

It's Ironic that Hollywood is behind these Sopa and Pipa bills, because the reason Hollywood exists is because certain creative types "escaped" far away to the desert Los Angeles to avoid patent issues with the ALL POWERFUL Edison. He had a patent monopoly, back then. He also wanted to focus on Educational Films.

As least that is how I understand it.

But Hollywood style movie making is what people wanted. Sex, Violence, underdogs winning, bad people losing. Prat falls. LOVE LOVE LOVE.

Here's a bit from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica about the Cinematograph.

An apparatus in which a series of views representing closely successive phases of a moving object are exhibited in rapid sequence, giving a picture which, owing to persistence of vision, appears to the observer to be continuous motion. It is a development of the zoetrope or 'wheel of life' described by W. G. Horner about 1833, a cylinder rotating on a vertical axis with slots through which one sees a succession of pictures. E. Muybridge about 1877 obtained successive pictures of a running horse by employing a row of cameras, the shutters of which were opened and closed electrically by the passage of the horse in front of them.
The modern cinematograph was rendered possible by the invention of celluloid film on which the serial pictures are impressed by instantaneous photography, a long sensitized film being moved across the focal plane of a camera and exposed intermittently. 16 to fifty pictures may be taken per second. The films are developed on large drums, within which a ruby electric light may be fixed to enable the process to be watched. A positive is made from the negative and is passed through an optical lantern , the images being thus successively projected over a distance onto a screen. The Cinematograph enables living or animated pictures of such subjects as armies at march or an express train at full speed to be presented with marvelous distinctness and detail. Machines of this kind have been devised in enormous numbers for the purposes of amusement under the names of bioscope, biograph, kinetoscope, mutograph,etc, formed chiefly from the Latin words for light and movement.

Valentine's Day Poem 1880

2012-01-23T07:28:00.000-05:00

Young Margaret's Masonic Autograph. I know her future husband Norman Nicholson was a Free Mason. I didn't know her dad was. Her family's story is told in threshold girl

May your cheeks retain their roses

May your heart beat just as gay

Til some manly voice shall whisper

Maggie, dear, name the day.

1877 Facebook?

2012-01-22T19:54:00.003-05:00

Young Margaret McLeod from Kingsbury, near Richmond Quebec. Born 1853.

They didn't have Facebook in 1977, let alone in 1877. But in 1877, they had something else where friends could send each other messages - autograph books.

I have the one belonging to Margaret, and it contains entries from 1877 to 1884, a year after her marriage. Margaret is described in my ebook Threshold Girl

A Young French Canadian in Victorian Age

2012-01-20T14:22:00.001-05:00

My grandmother, about 16?. So since her birth certificate says 1879, it's about 1895. Her future husband, Jules Crepeau of Milk and Water.

I was not able to find her dad, Louis Roy, boucher in the 1901 census. He was a maitre-boucher when she married in 1901, and he gave her a terrific dowry. I think she was the only surviving daughter. A sister had died.

Mary Georgiana. And she had a uncle Philias Roy who was a hotellier. And this birth certificate is from 1950.. and she died a year later.

So off to the Census.

Well, it took a while.. an hour or so. First I found a list of marriages and saw one where a

Jacques DESLAURIERS

Francois DESLAURIERS Katheryn RAWLEY

Feb 22 1897 Sacre-Coeur, Montreal, Quebec

Eugenie ROY

Louis ROY Melina GAGNON

Ok. So I was wrong. Maria had sisters.

Then I looked up this Deslauriers fellow and, what do you know, in 1901 the young couple were living with the Mom, Melina widowed and all the her kids who are registered INCORRECTLY as Deslauriers. They are Roys.

Maria's birth year is a year off, but the date, November 30, is right. Maria gets married this year. Her brother Louis Jr. 30 is a boucher, so he took over the dad's business.

They live in South Central Montreal, so, until she moved to NDG (Harvard)she always lived in the center of town.

What's Wrong with this Picture? Kodak goes bust.

2012-01-19T15:41:00.002-05:00

What's wrong with this picture, or lack of same? Or more to the point, what's wrong with this ad? It's an advert for Kodak film and it has no pictures! It's from the World's Work of 1910... a magazine aimed at men. Full of important stuff.

Funny, the magazine is one quarter advertising, and all the other ads have pictures. Or at least drawings or cartoons.

You'd think a company this dumb about selling itself would have gone out of business long ago.

Well, no. Kodak lasted the century and today the company asked for bankruptcy protection in the US.

I have a lot of magazines from the 1910 era and many have advertisements for Kodak. One full page ad has two boys skiing, and capturing 'the wonders of nature' on film. There's a pocket Kodak advertised in a 1911 Delineator, I put the pic in my story.Threshold Girl. The protagonist of my story, Flora Nicholson, my husband's great aunt, is flipping through a copy of the Delineator and thinking "Magazines sure make you want things."

The Nicholsons bought a KODAK in 1906, for 5 dollars (a large sum, actually) because it is written in Norman Nicholson's account book. I have accounts from 1883 to 1921 and never is 'Film" written in, so it must have come out of the children's money. They took pictures in the 1910 era, with this kodak, most likely, and many of them are on this website, Flo in the City.

In Marion's 1907 diary, during her summer off from her first year of teaching, she writes about 'fooling around taking pictures'.

It's relatively rare to see pictures of 'ordinary' citizens -casual snaps - from that era. You don't see many on Flickr. But I have quite a few: this picture actually is from the family album and is a detail of a tiny 2 inch photo of Margaret and the girls taking tea outside their house in Richmond, Quebec, with Marion, seated demurely in the corner in her white dress. Photos can be deceptive. Marion Nicholson was anything but demure: she was funny, and active and focused. She became President of the Teacher's Union.

I fiddled with it, using the "Impressionist" thingy on Photoshop. Then I fiddled some more using Corel: and I didn't spend a cent on 'film' because it was all done digitally. I purchased photo paper and printer ink for this - oh, and a digital camera.

This picture is up on the wall in my new "art deco" bathroom. Facing the water closet, as they called it in 1910. I can 'sit' and watch Marion, my husband's grandmother, have tea in 1910. Don't you think they could have used this photo to illustrate the 1910 World's Work advertisement?

The Guardian, today, in an article about Kodak's demise, said that the company originally advertised to women.

Or Moms, I guess.

Of course, people were wary of early cameras, for every day use. That they would be used for, well, inspecting nature, but of a more intimate kind, not landscapes, that's for sure

I guess this is why this ad doesn't have the picture of a beautiful young woman, the image that through the century has been used to capture the attention of both male and female readers.

Here's the advertisement for the pocket Kodak, from August 1911 Delineator. (I can't find the magazine with the skiing boys. It's somewhere.)

Marion Nicholson's First Day as a Teacher

2012-01-18T18:44:00.002-05:00

Marion Nicholson, my husband's grandmother with teachers of Sherbrooke Academy 1908.

Well, January is a depressing time of year, I think. Last year I spent some time cheering myself up by putting video of car rides in sunny Malibu on the Big Screen.

This year, in February my husband and I are going to California and we're going to drive with my cousin to San Fran. It may be coldish and raining at that time, but it beats this 20 below I'm experiencing. I'm not a winter person. Who is these days? Marion Nicholson, above, spent her off time in winter skating, I have her diary from 1907. The skating rink was where you met men and her diary is all full of nonsense related to dating. Nothing about teaching, even though she was a most serious career girl. I do believe the rules of courtship were more relaxed in small towns. The Nicholson letters suggest that a girl in Montreal could not go skating at the MAAA unless with a beau.

I am writing Edith's story now, the follow up to Threshold Girl about her sister Flora. It's making me more depressed, because her story centers around the loss of her 'great love' in a fire, the Rossmore Hotel Fire. April 1910. That happens a week before King Edward VII dies, so I have her walking the street on that day in an opium-induced daze. She's in Westmount, a place that no doubt went berzerk when the king died. The week before, Marion and she had bought big hats at Ogilvy on Ste. Catherine.

And then I backtrack to 1907 when Edith is at a small company town near Three Rivers and Marion is at Sherbrooke Academy. Edith will be jealous of Marion as her younger sister is having fun in Sherbrooke, going to dances and skating. Sherbrooke was a fairly big town. Still, Marion ended up taking work in Montreal, in 1908, because the pay was much better. 50 kids, mostly very poor. Luckily, the Nicholsons had friends there, for finding a place to live was a very difficult thing for a young woman in 1910.

Rural school were not easy places to teach either.. In 1907, Marion is offered a job as a principal of a rural school. The man offering her the job, says the boys can be rough... In another letter, she says an older boy and the principal (of Sherbrooke Academy?) had a fist fight. So no wonder she doesn't take the position as principal.

Here's a letter she wrote after her first day of teaching in 1906. She liked the little ones. In a letter from Normal School she talked about an incident while she was practice teaching. Apparently, she said an ungrammatical sentence to a young student and asked him to tell her what was wrong with it. He replied. "T'aint grammer." She thought that very cute. I'm going to use that in her own story, when I get around to writing it.

Sherbrooke Quebec
September 10, 06

Dear Mother,

Have just finished my first day at school and it is not half as bad as I expected. But most of my pupils had never been at school before and their mothers had to come with them and tell me their particular troubles so that I would take particular care of them and I did not know one from the other after they had gone. Had 38 pupils today. Pretty good for a start, don't you think. Expect I will have more tomorrow. Mr Gruel came up today to hear me teach. I think he was very mean to come so soon. He might have waited till I was really settled down to work. The Phonic system is not half as bad as I thought it would be, although I have a lot to study up yet. Sat Mill Long and her cousin Irene, Ruth and I drove to Lennoxville and had a fine time. Don't know if I will send my wasting home or have it done here. Will see what it will cost first. I think that if you have not started to make that green dress, that I will have shirt waist suit and a short coat. Wish I had that black skirt. I feel like a kid among all the old maid teachers. Wish you could see them, they almost beat the Rd. ones. Wore my red and white shirtwaist suit because it was the longest one I had and I thought I would look more dignified and more like a school marm.

Iron Lady, Bosses and Montreal 1927

2012-01-16T08:09:00.000-05:00

Maria Roy Crepeau, Florida Crepeau, Marthe Crepeau, 1927ish.

Well, it's definitely Atlantic City. La Victoire Restaurant in the background.

I wonder if Jules is taking the picture, or if he's, ahem, busy elsewhere.

That's a premise or at least a suggestion in my play Milk and Water about Montreal in 1927.

In this play, I have my grandfather, Jules Crepeau, Director of City Services, have a long talk with my husband's grandfather, Thomas Wells, the President of Laurentian Spring Water, as they wait outside a dance club (sort of a speakeasy) waiting for the possible arrival of the Prince of Wales, that would be David, the future Edward VIII.

I watched the Golden Globes last night, most of it, and saw that many of the most critically acclaimed TV programs are about Political Intrigue: Boardwalk Empire, Boss and Throne of Kings.

Throne of Kings, I noticed, as my husband was watching it, has lots of beautiful naked people to boot.

Kelsey Grammer, won a Golden Globe for his role in Boss, which is about a Mayor in Chicago. I'm not sure what decade, must check. From what I saw on IMDB the theme is pretty much the same as my play Milk and Water except that this BOSS, this Mayor has power.

In Montreal in the 1920's the Mayor was a figure head more than anything, due to the new City Charter of 1921.

My grandfather had lots of power. Or did he? I leave that open to interpretation.

Anyway, my husband and I went to see Iron Lady this weekend. I had no preconceptions, as I had read no reviews or articles....That's a good thing, really. The movie was pretty full, 3 pm showing Saturday. All older people. Then I went home and read the reviews and saw that some British Reviewer called the film despicable.

Most reviewers, however, said that Streep was terrific, the movie not so much.

I agree, I think it was Streep's best performance ever (that I've seen) and she won the Golden Globe last night, so others agree. I'm not sure if I liked the movie or not, but I am very happy I saw it. (And that's a weird thing.)

My problem, I am no fan of Thatcher, and seeing a Conservative Woman portrayed as a feminist hero kinds of bugs me, although they hinted at the inherent hypocrisy in that.

I liked the editing though, thought a lot of the movie was stylish. The film was a bit of an historical hodgepodge (put together with news clips, like The Queen). Interesting, though to be reminded of the IRA and the damage they did, considering so many ordinary god-fearing American citizens funded them.

I can see why Thatcher's fans hate the movie, as it portrays her at her weakest hour, as it were. But that also does a disservice to her enemies. She did a lot of nasty stuff.

Funny that both Reagan and Thatcher got Alzheimer's. Reagan was in power while suffering from the disease, apparently, a well-known fact, although it's not a widely publicized fact.

(Makes you wonder about the post of President. Is it mostly figurehead?) This Iron Lady movie suggests Thatcher was kicked out just in time, too.

As someone who knows Alzheimer's all too well, as my Dad died of it, I found the portrayal sympathetic, but we'll never know if this portrayal is anything like the real thing. And the flashbacks,well, would an Alzheimer patients flashbacks make any sense?

In the movie, Iron Lady, Thatcher's only delusion is of her dead but loving husband. A sweet comforting delusion. My father suffered delusions (he once phoned me up asking why I was weeping at the end of his bed) but later the delusions became frightening. He'd mix me up with his mother and ask me why I was raped by the Japanese. She had been interned at Changi, the subject of another play I have writtenLooking for Mrs. Peel

Madonna, who had on a nice dress, promoted her movie when she won for best song. Considering the reviews, it was a brave thing to do. I will try to see it though. WE is about Wallis Simpson and Edward. My play, Milk and Water, takes place just before he meets her.

I know a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales

2012-01-14T07:45:00.001-05:00

My Aunt Alice in the 1920s. She sat on the steps of Montreal City Hall in August 1927 and watched the Prince of Wales.

Well, they had Schwartz's the Musical this summer at the Centaur Theatre with music by Bowser and Blue, which I enjoyed. It had Montreal history and some good-natured (as they say) Toronto bashing.

So why not Milk and Water the Musical?

It's not like they haven't done great musicals about Prohibition. Chicago for instance. (I saw that the first movie based on the story of Roxy was produced in 1927.)

Well, a musical that tells the story of a tragic theatre fire can't happen....

But I've already got music in the first draft of Milk and Water. Willie Eckstein's Hello Montreal.

Its lyrics fit beautifully in with my main theme, Water Supply.

A musical based on sewage management. Hmmm? But there could be some Toronto bashing, or Ontario bashing.

Still, I've been listening to a lot of Big Band on the satellite and I checked and many of the famous 20th century songs were written about then.

Ain't she Sweet, My Blue Heaven and Potato Head Blues, (which I mention because in the Movie Manhattan, Woody Allen's character mentions that song as performed by Louis Armstrong as one of the reasons to keep living. I know because I watched that movie yesterday.)

1926 saw Baby Face, Bye Bye Blackbird and Blue Heaven, and I'm only in the B's.

My play Milk and Water takes place outside a Montreal dance club in 1927 where my grandfather, Jules Crepeau and my husband's grandfather, Thomas Wells are awaiting the possible arrival of the Prince of Wales.

Funny, in 1927 there was another popular song, I danced with a man, who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales... You can find in only YouTube. They used it as the opening and closing song for a story called Wallis and Edward about you know who. The Prince of Wales, David, eventually to be King for a short time, Edward VIII was at his height of popularity apparently. Good for my story. (Hard to believe, with the bashing he took in the King's Speech. Madonna's WE is supposed to be kinder to him. )

Hm. Her title is the same as the TV TITLE, just uses initials, clever as their memory is indelibly intertwined.

I am thinking of having that song playing in the background at one point in the story. Through a window...It would be ironic, wouldn't it?

Too Bad: Mack the Knife came out in 1928. But they already put that in a great play. I guess that means Three Penny Opera opened a bit earlier. Must look it up. Maybe I can make an allusion to that play in my play.

Do Virtual Friends Help You Out When you Need It?

2012-01-12T09:43:00.002-05:00

Some things change and some things stay the same.

Last night, wanting to take a break from my work writing Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, about Edith Nicholson in the 1910 era, and my work trying to publicize Threshold Girl about Edith's younger sister Flora at Macdonald College also 100 years ago, I visited TED.com.

I listened to two talks: one about the global power shift, by Paddy Ashton and one about the Quest to Understand Consciousness by Antonia Damasio.

Paddy Ashton claims social upheavals happen about once every 100 years. No surprise to me, as I have been researching and writing about the 1910 era in Canada for about 5 years. And the 1910 era was a time of social upheaval, of paradigm shift.

My Threshold Girl story is relevant to today because it describes a time of great change, much like today.

Nothing he said surprised me particularly, the negative part. We all know times of change are times of peril. My Threshold Girl story takes place but a few years before WWI. And today we have nuclear weapons.

And the fact that the POWER BROKERS today (CEOs and banksters) hold no allegiance to any one country, have no stake in any one country's lifestyle and values is pretty awful. Just look at our tar sands, now renamed the oil sands? What do Canadians get from the oil? 3 dollars a barrel is one figure I've heard. What do they lose, their habitat?

(I guess what comes around, goes around. Time for the Third World to exploit us.)

But all times of change are times of opportunity too. (As my Tighsolas website reveals.)

Ashton claims today, this globalization has an upside: We will all have to work together or perish together. We are all one big tribe, now.

And he claims that "networking" is the key to it all, networking on all levels, the personal, the governmental. Involving yourself with people with very different values and lifestyles, as a practical measure. Not staying within your clique of like-minded folk.

I'm a little confused with this, being a pretty typical middle class person, who lives a pretty typical 'privatized' existence. I work at home, see friends occasionally, go out often with my husband to movies and a meal where we sit among strangers. And I talk with my kids and other relations on Skype.

Over the 20th century the North American family has become more and privatized, as in self-sufficient. Right wingers in the US will claim this has always been the norm, but of course it hasn't. It's the norm for a consumer society, because the so-called nuclear family living alone in its own house costs a lot for upkeep, a most expensive form of human group.

The nuclear family spends money to survive, big time. But many of these families are one or two paycheques away from being destitute. A job away from welfare, where there is welfare.

My Threshold Girl story takes place in 1910 in a town in Quebec and community is still important. It was a very social time. It was a time before radio and TV. Nickelodeons were only in the big city. The auto was just being introduced and was considered a kind of toy. Letters and telegrams were used to keep in touch with far-flung friends and family, although phone could be used for long distance to the City, but it was too costly to use except for the most exceptional event.

Yes, the Nicholsons went often to church, but not only for the sermons (which were entertaining) but for the social life. Norman Nicholson, the father was a Mason and he paid his dues even when broke because it was very important to be a Mason, to be part of the CLUB.

Friends were everything: without friends in the city the Nicholson women could not have moved to Montreal to get good paying jobs as teachers. But their friends were all just like them, middle class Presbyterians.

Today, their great great grandchildren have radio, tv, dvd's of all their favorite movies and tv shows, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, oh and TED.com.

Lots of virtual "friends" but will these friends be there when they are out of work to give them a leg up - or a meal or a place to sleep. That I wonder.

Here's Flora's January 1912 Letter from Macdonald College, in Ste. Anne de Bellevue.

Macdonald College

Jan 7, 1912

Dear Father,
I am trying to keep to my promise and write to you first. I arrived here safely Wednesday night, Where did you and the girls go after you left me at Central station? Did you go up town and have supper?

Mabel came back Saturday night about 5.30 pm. I wasn't expecting her until the evening so she gave me quite a surprise. One of the girls, Helen Buzzel, stayed with me nights. Her roommate was away also but is coming back tonight. A great many of the girls are not back yet unless them come to-night.

I don't know what excuses they are going to give but I guess they can make up something. It was really no use in coming Wednesday for we have not done a thing but I suppose they are so fond of our company they couldn't possibly get along any longer without us.

One of the girls, Gladys Lefebvre, sister of a Miss Lefebvre that taught at the college, had a feed this afternoon and invited us down. We had a great time. There were eleven of them so it made quite a nice little party. My cake was pretty well squished when I got here but it didn't spoil the taste of it. All our good things are finished, it doesn't take long in a place like this for things to disappear. Nothing ever has a chance to get stale.

I noticed in heading the letter that tomorrow will be the eighth, your birthday. I only wish I could send you some little remembrance but perhaps this letter will express my wishes for many happy returns of the 8th.

Lovingly,

Flora
Macdonald College

Sink Holes of Corruption and my grandfather

2012-01-11T09:20:00.001-05:00

This is from the Gazette. 1928. Mederic Martin pleads for Anglo Voters.

In my play Milk and Water about Montreal City Hall in 1927, I start with a telephone conversation IN ENGLISH between Mederic Martin, the Mayor of Montreal, and my grandfather, Jules Crepeau.

Not likely, but I needed to do it.

The device I use: I say that the Mayor has a representative of the Royal Prince in his office...I make it a matter of respect. The Mayor and the Prince liked to party, apparently.

Now I wonder if the Prince spoke French to the Mayor. He no doubt could speak French.. But then, this is a representative and not an official one, a friend.

Oh,well.

Once again I stumbled on something interesting on the Internet while looking up something else. I found a 1914 Canadian Review that summed up the Montreal Municipal Election of 1914.

Now, up until that time, there had been a policy of rotating French and English Mayors. Martin, an alderman and a Member of Parliament, said "Poop to that" and ran for Mayor anyway, appealing to French voters' sentiment.

A lame English candidate was parachuted in to run against him. (Many highly qualified English Montrealers weren't invited to run for the candidacy.)

The 'lame' English Candidate, who also spoke French and German, wanted to put in a Central Library with branches and perhaps a subway. Imagine!

Anyway, apparently both the English and French Presses were against Martin, but he won the election anyway. Montreal Tramways supported him. (They are the monopoly owned in part by the Forgets, my grandfather's relations.)

Anyway, Martin won and immediately started grabbing more power for himself. (There were only 3 anglo aldermen elected in that council.)

Martin already had a reputation for being shady, so this article said. Anyway, I guess that's why in 1921 the City Charter was amended. An Executive Committee was put in lieu of a Board of Control and almost all power taken away from the Mayor.

And a new powerful position was created, Director of Municipal Services. My grandfather's post.

Perhaps that's why, in August 1921, one month before my grandfather got his job as Director of City Services, the Financial Post in Toronto ran a story by a writer under a silly pseudonym, the Make-Up Man, condemning the institutionalized corruption at City Hall and saying they 'create jobs for their friends.'

I suspect the author is one Edward Beck a former (short term) managing editor of the Montreal Herald and the Montreal Star.

Edward Beck was a journalist who, in 1914, tried to entrap my grandfather into accepting a bribe in a sting operation involving Burns Detectives and a wire device called a detectaphone.

Beck almost did bring my grandfather down, but no cigar. My grandfather salvaged his good name in court.

(Beck and some others had taken down three Quebec legislators using a similar scam earlier in the year over bribe-taking in 1913. He must have felt confident he could get my grandfather.)

It must have burned Beck no end that, in 1921, my grandfather went on to fill this new powerful post of Director of Municipal Departments.

Of course, in 1930, my grandfather himself was brought down by Camillien Houde and who knows who else. That was just one month before Edward Beck, now a PR person for the Pulp and Paper Industry, passed away in Montreal. He got his satisfaction, I guess.

Beck's obit says Edward Beck started his crime tabloid Beck's Weekly (where he wrote about my grandfather is vicious terms) in 1914 and ended it due to the outbreak of war.

It was in the first edition where he tried to take down my grandfather, calling him the worst kind of grafter.

"The City Hall is a sweet-scented sink hole of pollution if men like Crepeau speak the truth. Their greedy official hands take toll of contracts, levy tribute on ordinances, and prey upon the poor city labourers. Graft, graft, graft is written over the doorways, the lintels and on the doorposts."

Hmm. 1914 is where my Tighsolas stories Threshold Girl come together with my Milk and Water story.

Marion's Story (untitled) will end in 1913 October when she marries Hugh Blair, a Scottish/French Canadian from Three Rivers with a Cree grandmother. Marion didn't get to vote, but Hugh Blair probably voted for the English Mayoralty Candidate. Or did he? They lived in NDG in 1914, on Marlowe I think.

(PS. I used three different terms for my grandfather's job, because the newspapers of the era also did.)

Milk and Water: Scene 11

2012-01-10T18:36:00.000-05:00

Setting: Outsidea dance hall, Montreal somewhere South of Ste. Catherine, East of Universityand West of St. Lawrence Boulevard.

Two men, similar in age and build, both 60 ish, both about 5 foot 8 inches. Bothwith trim, athletic builds. Both sporting tall bowler hats.

The baldingman’s outfit is a more conservative cut, but the style worn by the anglo businessmenof his circle. The curly man’s suit more a la mode, as they say, although stillvery appropriate for a man of his age of his stature.

These aremen of the Upper Middle Class. One English Canadian originally from Ontario. One French Canadian born in Laval.Both men live with their bossy wives in three storey townhouses in tonysections of Montreal, one on Chesterfield in lower Westmount, one on SherbrookeStreet just a little West of St. Lawrence Street, or St. Laurent.

The Englishman is Tom Wells, a businessman and President of Laurentian Spring Water. TheFrench man is Jules Crepeau, a high-ranking City civil servant, the Director ofMunicipal Departments.

The two menmeet and shake hands on the curb in front of The Mermaid Café and Dance Club.

Tom: Ibrought the bottles myself, as the Mayor Instructed. But I can’t lift them, youknow. Sciatica. Curling injury.

Jules: Aconstable is to arrive shortly.

In thebackground, a song is plays on a Victrola. It is Hello Montreal by Billy Eckstein.A trio sings:

GoodbyeBroadway, hello Montreal.

(Listen on YouTube)Hello Montreal

Yamo, yamo, I think I want a drink; Yamo,yamo, there’s water in the sink.

The sink, the sink, the sink, the sink, thesink;

The good old rusty sink;

But who the heck wants water when you’re dyingfor a drink?

Oh, “We Won’t Get Home Till Morning” Is thebest song after all,

Goodbye Broadway, hello Montreal.

There’ll be no more Orange Phosphates,

You can bet your Ingersoll,

Goodbye Broadway, hello Montreal.

Jules walksup to meet him a few paces from Tom and whispers a few words to the cop.

He returnsto stand beside Tom. The cop takes up position beside the front door a fewyards away, standing at ease with his arms behind his back and legs slightlyapart.

Tom: Howlong do we wait, then?

Jules(shrugging) As long as is required.

I have somecrates, then, in the trunk. For us to sit on.

Jules nods.

He waves theconstable over. Instructs the young man as to the matter. Tom gives him somekeys. The Cop goes to the car, opens the trunk, grabs a medium-sized browncrates in each hand and carries them past the sidewalk, and places them oneither side of the café’s front door.

The copresumes his position a few yards away. The older men sit on the crates.LAURENTIAN SPRING is written in upside down green lettering on the crates.

Betweenthem, the café front door opens and two 30ish women, looking the worse forwear, exit on wobbly ankles.

A voice frominside: C’est l’heure de fermeture. Rentrez chez-vous, mes Pitounes.

Anothervoice, more drunk sounding: Go home flour lovers.

The two men inspectthe women as they might a stray cat or dog, without any perceptible change intheir expression.

Then a lockon the front door is banged shut and a sign goes up window over Jules’ head:CLOSED! Over Tom’s head: FERME!

There’s a longpause as the men adjust to this slightly uncomfortable situation. Thenfinally….

Tom: Yankingat his tie knot. Too hot for an autumn night.

Jules: Somelike it hot..What does it mean, flower lover?

Tom: Toomuch make-up. Flour as in face powder. (He makes a motion with his right hand,as if powdering his cheeks and he does this he purses his lips.)

Jules: Ah.(Afteranother long pause) So, you are the one who put that crazy advertisement in thenewspaper?

Tom: What advertisement. What do you mean?

Jules: Theadvertisement that said “Don’t drink filthy germ laden city water. LaurentianSpring Water is always the same, pure and wholesome. Do not wait until you aresick to drink it.”

Tom: My sad Aunt Sally. That particular promotion wasplaced over 4 years ago. You can’tpossibly remember it word for word.

Jules: Iremember it perfectly, believe me. This is my special gift.

Tom: Well, then,you must certainly be aware that we haven’t run anything quite like it since.

Jules: Theletter from the City’s Avocat en Chef might have had something to do with yourchange of heart.

Tom: No. The fact is, we’ve changed our advertisingpolicy, right about then. We started pushing our new line of soft drinks. (He pulls out a bottle from each side-pocket andshows them to Jules.)

Jules:(inspecting cans) Soda water and Sweet Ginger Ale.

Tom: No sir,we certainly didn’t cave to the treats from over at City Hall. (He returns thebottles to his pockets.)

Jules: Ofcourse, The Health Department

Tom: Your guys couldn’t catch us on anything.

Jules: Yes,all your clever wordplay. “What chances you take if you don’t drink Laurentianwater.” “The Safest plan is to drink Laurentian Spring water.” Never quite lying,never quite telling the truth. Not slander, not in the legal sense. Butslippery lies are lies just the same.

Tom: Sure,but our well has the purest water, it’s a proven fact. The scientists atMacdonald College tested back it in 1909, the year of the last typhoidepidemic.

Jules: Pure, Purer, Purest. Mere words, once again. What does the word “pure” really mean,exactly?

Tom: Now, what’swrong with the word Pure? It’s a greatword. A beautiful word. Everyone likes it. Everyone uses it.

Milk and Water: the ebook

Boardwalk Empire Montreal and MacArthur Relations

2012-01-08T00:03:00.000-05:00

Off to the Hunt. Hmm. My grandmother. I got this picture off a negative, by developing it in the printer using my own technique. Well, and Corel 'negative' changer. You have to scan with a big dpi and leave the cover up letting in the light, the more the better.

Jules, casual wear. He's on that hunting trip with the aldermen. So , my first draft of "Boardwalk Empire: Montreal" or as I call it Milk and Water is finished and up online.

You see, if I put it online, I will work on editing it. That's my method.

You see, it was only after watching the PBS program, Prohibition, that it struck me: "Those pictures I have of Grandpapa and Grandmama strolling the Boardwalk in Atlantic City in the mid twenties had more significance than I thought. So the plot of MILK and WATER thickened...

PS. I made an error! When my grandfather was fired in 1930 (or forced to resign by Houde and his cronies) his job was taken over by a lawyer, Honore Parent. In earlier posts I remarked that Honore Parent has a big street named after him, whereas my grandfather has a little street and a park (in Ahunsic) Well, I erred. I just checked on Google Earth and there is no Montreal Street called Honore Parent. I wonder where I got that idea.

There is a Camillien Houde Street, right across the top of the mountain.

Anyway, too weird. Weirder still how I discovered rue Jules Crepeau. It was in the early 80's and my husband and I were going to buy our first computer... and, get this, apparently there was only one store selling computers in the City. In Ahunsic. (Probably one of a handful.) So we drove to St Laurent, but got lost.

I got out of the car to see where we were, and I saw Rue Jules Crepeau. "That's my grandfather," I said to my husband. We went home and came back to take a picture.

Another story, my grandmother was, ahem, full-figured. But this is the way men liked them back in 1900, apparently. Well, one day early in the century my grandparents were taking a train somewhere and Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier was on the train, and apparently, his eyes almost bugged out of his head when he saw my grandmother. Family story. Family myth. I couldn't figure out how to get this into my story.

The point of my story: the men are the same, the wives are different. And the biggest difference was in size. Thomas Wells wife was 6 foot and thin like a reed. She liked clothes. She was the first cousin of General Douglas MacArthur. Through the Mother, a Hardy from Virginia. MacArthur supposedly got his military brains from his father and his sense of style from the mother.

She was very dark. I have a book that describes MacArthur's grandmother, saying she is very slim and very dark, perhaps descended from Pocahontas. So they are saying they have Indian Blood, or implying. Has anyone ever said MacArthur had Native Blood. I doubt it.

Anyway, I have pictures of two of McArthur's uncles. I put it on Flickr and it is very popular. One of my sons resembles these men. I resemble my grandmother, her face anyway. Except I'm thinner :)

And here's a picture either of MacArthur's Aunt or his mom. The mom had a hook nose, but the photo is taken at a discreet angle or air-brushed. Now, I just went online to see the only extant pic of Mary Pinkney Hardy in an engraving and frankly, unless her sister was identical to her, this picture below is, indeed, of Mary Pinkney Hardy. So I have the only one, maybe, because all of MacArthur's family stuff was destroyed in a fire in Manilla. I wonder where I put it.. In my story, Milk and Water I have my husband's grandmother, MacArthur's cousin, try to push her way into a receiving line for the Prince of Wales, David the future Edward VIII, saying she's the relation of an American General. It didn't happen... but she was very brash, so it could have happened. And I read in the newspaper of the time that some of the women invited to the reception tried to push ahead by saying they were personally invited by the Prince.

Redemption, CTV - A New Show with a Point

2012-01-07T09:22:00.002-05:00

Window at Notre Dame Basilica in Montreal, the one sponsored by my grandfather, Jules Crepeau, a devout Catholic.

Well, surfing the Web today I found a news item that made me laugh Apparently the man who produces the CTV program Dragons' Den, Kevin O'Leary has another show in the works, Redemption, where ex-cons (mostly drug dealers) get a second chance to employ their savoir-faire in business.

O'Leary is quoted as saying that if you are a successful criminal you have what it takes to be a successful businessman. Gee, who woulda guessed? The Bronfmans maybe.

Who can dispute that? SUCCESSFUL criminal being the keyword. (These ex cons are not that successful in that they got caught and paid time. I suspect most very successful criminals don't get caught, and many are in business - or politics Well, all of them.)

Anyway, my story Milk and Water about Montreal City Hall in 1927, the era of US Prohibition circles around the topic of what constitutes criminal behavior. My point: It's all about class, really. Especially when it comes to illegal booze or illegal drugs.

My grandfather, Jules Crepeau, was the Director of Municipal Departments in Montreal from 1921 to 1930, and he is the main character, and I have him talking to Tom Wells, my husband's grandfather, a Westmount businessman.

Tom tells my grandfather about his cousins, the Townsends, who made enough money to retire on in one year, with a mail order booze business in the early 1920's. They weren't breaking the law, they found a loophole in it.

The two more than middle aged men also discuss the Montreal Water and Power purchase, where Lorne Webster the industrialist and his consortium, the flip the profitable utility company that has been 'a thorn in the side of the city' for years, making 4,000,000 in a few months. All at the expense of the Montreal taxpayer. My grandfather is the one who pays for that savvy -or suspicious - business deal, depending on point of view, with his own job.

There's a philanthropic aspect to O'Leary's show: he knows how hard it is for convicted felons (even those who went to jail providing the middle class and upper classes with their recreational drugs) to get back into society as they can't get a job or get credit.

My daughter in law, who is a criminologist says, the penalties for selling crack are higher than for selling cocaine? The same product. Why, because the very rich do cocaine the very poor do crack, I guess

Family Album, Milk and Water, 1927 Montreal

2012-01-06T08:35:00.000-05:00

La Fete de la St. Jean from my grandparent's house at 72 Sherbrooke West in Montreal. 1929 picture as it is written on the back of the photo.

Lionel Groulx wrote a letter to my grandfather in 1927, complaining that 4 important French Canadian holidays weren't being observed. It was just one of the issues my grandfather, the Director of City Departments, had to tackle during that difficult year.

I have written my first draft of MILK AND WATER and posted it on my website.

Today, I might scan Terry Copp's famous book The Anatomy of Poverty and another academic paper on Hygiene in Quebec in the 20's and 30's (which I discovered yesterday as I put away my Jules Crepeau papers.)

I am trying to figure out just who got to vote in Montreal elections. It was claimed in the 20's that the city had 'universal suffrage' but I think this meant only men. But not only home-owners. I found a report of a debate from the 1930's, where some people were arguing for the repeal of Universal Suffrage in Municipal elections. Bums shouldn't vote, they say. Opponents reply that just because a man is unemployed, it doesn't mean he is a lazy bum. Many honest men with families are also looking for work....So renters got to vote in municipal elections, although home-owners got to vote on more issues...Hmm. (All men are created equal, but some more equal than others.)

Besides, it is stated in the 1930's debate, very few Montreal families own their home, about a fifth.

My grandparents, Jules Crepeau and Marie Roy on the Boardwalk of Atlantic City. My story Milk and Water takes place in 1927, the era of American Prohibition.

Mayor Mederic Martin, who lost the 1928 election to a newcomer, Camillien Houde. The only election issue was the purchase of a utility, Montreal Water and Power. My grandfather would be forced to resign over the issue.

Mary Hardy Fair Wells, my husband's grandmother, who I have insult Mayor Martin in my story. She says the trim on his robes looks tacky. Sometimes you have to make things up.

Her husband, Thomas Wells, who spends the play talking to my grandfather about politics, booze and the power of words.

My grandfather, Jules Crepeau. in his power pose.

The Laurier Palace theatre on Ste. Catherine E, after the infamous 1927 fire, that looms large in my play.

The Prince of Wales with Mederic Martin in his robes trimmed with sable..at the very bottom.1927 visit. Diamond Jubilee of Canada. I think the man sitting at top in boating hat and the woman below him are my grandfather and perhaps one of my aunts. Only officials could get on the steps. I use this event to kick-start my story.

My grandmother and mother and aunts and one cousin in front of 72 Sherbrooke West.

Sleuthing History, Milk and Water, Montreal City Hall 1927

2012-01-03T10:50:00.000-05:00

Herbert Ames.
From Wikipedia Public Domain picture.

Well, well.

I have pretty well completed by first draft of Milk and Water my free ebook about Montreal in 1927. I just have to re-type the edits I've made on my hard copy. They are more like chicken scratches so I had better do it soon.

Anyway, I went to the Web to check out some background for a paragraph where my grandfather Jules Crepeau, Director of Municipal Departments, mentions Herbert Ames and his 1997 book, the City Below the Hill, where it is written that Montreal still has many homes with privies, that is holes in the ground for poop.

(This Ames has sort of gone down in history as the PRIVY GUY. That's how Pierre Berton sums him up in Marching As to War, or some other of this books. And maybe that's all he deserves.

Ames was a rich Presbyterian, born of American parents, who tried to 'clean up Montreal' in late 19th century, figuratively and literally, Civic Politics and Privies.

He became one of the few Anglo Aldermen of the period (it had been a long while since Anglo Industrialists bothered to run for Council, preferring to pull strings in other, more profitable, ways.)

In 1904 (around) Ames become a Tory MP in Ottawa and in 1928 he went to work for the League of Nations. Prohibition was his great cause apparently.( Hmm. That's one year after 1927, when at least one of his Tory Cronies, Senator Lorne Webster, made 4,000,000 on the Montreal Water and Power Purchase.)

ANYWAY, looking up info on this man, I stumbled upon something that was most peculiar..

...an August 1921 article in the Financial Post, ostensibly a profile on Ames, that waxes hyperbolic about the corruption at Montreal City Hall.

I had read similar stuff before, by a man named Beck, who in 1913 founded a short-lived Montreal tabloid, Beck's Weekly. As it happens, the first (and only?) issue of Beck's weekly contained an expose of my grandfather, then Assistant City Clerk, who supposedly had been caught in a set-up accepting a bribe. My grandfather sued Beck's Weekly for libel, and won, if only symbolically, as Beck was ordered to pay my grandfather but 100 dollars.

Beck's Weekly stopped publication, and Mr. Beck, who had previously worked as an editor at the Montreal Standard and Montreal Herald, went on to work for the Pulp and Paper Industry in PR.

So he left the profession. Or did he?

His obit in the Gazette (1937, if I recall) claimed he stopped publication of Beck's Weekly due to the outbreak of war. Yea, right!

HMMMMM. Suspicious.

I double checked, and the author of this Financial Post article, published just one month before my grandfather got his job as Director of City Services, was "The Make Up Man."

I strongly suspect the author of this piece to be Beck. (I'm pretty good at deconstructing literary style.)

He appears to idolize Lord Athlostan. Or is it Atholstan. I never can remember. Hugh Graham of the Montreal Standard and Star, the guy whose rants against the Montreal Water and Power purchase brought down my grandfather, obliquely, or not so obliquely. (Beck no doubt was ecstatic when my grandfather got guillotined. Beck died a year before my grandfather, as it happens. Death evens all scores.)

So here's (potentially) a failed reporter with a major ax to grind, describing Montreal as "a convenient sea-wharfing spot for industrialists, but otherwise a French city and so hopeless."

I mean the man could write: he should have gone to Hollywood.

On the inside front page of this Financial Times out of Toronto, there's a blurb promoting this biographic feature: "Montreal is ruled in a business way by a relatively small faction of financiers and business leaders who all live in another city -Westmount and which is ruled by the great French majority who vote a solid French ticket for the City Hall. Thus the people who pay the biggest taxes have little say in the spending of them. It has been with efforts to bring about something better that Sir Herbert has been closely identified with."

My GOSH. Were they serious? Great fodder for my next draft of Milk and Water.... I already have Tom Wells mention the cronyism at Montreal City Hall and my own Grandfather answer, "And you don't have your cliques? Your clubs? Where you give jobs to all your friends and their children?"

I did see that Ames in 1915, supported a English business man for Mayor, a Mr. Macdonald.

Milk and Water Scene I

2012-01-02T13:29:00.000-05:00

Jules Crepeau, as a boy. My grandfather, Director of Municipal Departments of the City of Montreal between 1921 and 1930, started at City Hall at 12. At 15 he was message boy in the Health Department, which is very useful for my play, Milk and Water about Montreal in 1927.

Here's The First Draft of the First Scene: All Rights Reserved Dorothy Nixon 2011 (Whoops, 2012)

Montreal,Quebec, September 2, 1927.

Scene One.

Mayor fromhis office at City Hall: Allo. Mr. Crepeau. C’est Mayor Martin. Vous êtesrentrer chez vous. Très bien.

JulesCrepeau (from his home at 72 Sherbrooke West): Comment peux je vous aider,Monsieur le Mayor.

Mayor:Monsieur Crepeau. I will speak in English as I have a representative of theRoyal Prince in my office.

Jules: D’accord.Your Worship. So will I answer in English. What is the problem?

Martin. Problem?No problem. I have a personal favour to ask of you, on behalf of our esteemed Royalguests. All in the strictest confidence, of course.

Jules: CommeToujours. As always

Martin: Doyou remember that Westmount bloke with the bottled water company, with thebullshit name?

Jules: Thomas Wells? What’s bullshit about the name?

Martin: Notthat name, the name of his company. Laurentian..ah

Jules:Spring Water.

Martin: Yes,the company that sells water it pumps from under Craig Street. Near our giantsewage collector. So, Bull Shit.

Jules: Yes,well, I believe I have met him just recently.

Martin: He’sthe short older man with the very very tall young wife.

Jules: Oh,yes, the amiable man with the very tall and very thin and very outspoken youngwife.

Martin: Thesame man.

Jules: Whatabout him?

Martin: Well,we need some of his bottled water delivered tonight to one of the mid-town dance clubs.

Jules: Why?

Martin:Because the Royal Prince and friends might turn up there later on.

Jules: Iunderstand.

Martin. Thething is, I would like 3 gallons delivered, merely as a precaution of course,but no one is to know. No one except Mr. Wells – and you.

Jules: So heis to deliver it himself. Alone? The President of this company?

Martin: Yes.Discretion is of the utmost importance.

Jules: Isee. I'll do my best. But I'm not sure I'll be able to reach him on such short notice.

Martin: I’vealready taken care of. The thing is, ah, I would like you to meet him at 11.pm in frontof the Mermaid Cafe.

Jules: 11.pm. The Mermaid Cafe? But, I just got in, myself. There was a meeting of the City ImprovementLeague. And you know how those ferocious Presbyterian Ladies refuse to ever let you go home.

Martin : Unfortunate.Do you know the address of the Mermaid?

Jules: Howcould I not? It’s got a (clears throat)certain widespread reputation.

Martin: Well,well. You are speaking about the excellent dance music, I presume. But the Prince willnot show up until after midnight. He is tied up at some stuffy dinner party at the topof the hill, probably at Ravenscrag.

Jules: May Iask, with all due respect, why can’t get His Royal Highness get his own peopleto bring the bottled water. The Ritz Carleton has hundreds of bottles stored inthe basement, I’m sure, what with this latest typhoid..ah.. problem. The Radnor People from Three Rivers are the Official Suppliers.

Martin: The thingis, this, ah, is not an official kind of outing. The Royal Prince is hoping toslip away from his handlers for a few hours.

In fact,this is a personal favour he is asking me, as a personal friend. Don’t worry, I am sending over one of our moreambitious young police officers, un grand gaillard, to perform the heavy work.

All you andMr. Wells, have to do is can stand outside with the water and wait. Youdon’t even have to go in. The Prince and his party will enter by the side door.Only then do you have the jugs delivered.

Jules: Ifit’s after midnight, everyone enters by the side door, I imagine.

Martin: Well,be that as it may. Apparently, there’s avery good Jazz band playing tonight, from Kings of Harlem or Harlem Kings. The Prince is young. He has a keen interest inmodern forms of music.

And you recognizeall the city reporters.

Jules: Butthey recognize me, too, as the person who, just a year ago, announced to the entire Montreal press corps the firmnew closing hour of 12 am for dance clubs.

Martin:Jules. It’s the Royal Prince. Que voulez-vous?

Jules: Yes,of course. I understand.

Martin: Youwill be pleased to know, he specifically asked for you. His people thought youdid a wonderful job organizing the official reception at City Hall a month ago.

Martin: Well,yes, yes, That’s done then, I can count on you.

Jules:Certainement, Your Worship. (Hangs up the phone.)

Toujours quelquechose.

Little Girl:Papa?

Jules: Tu esencore debout, Marthe? Ou est Maman?

Girl: Elleprie dans le salon, avec Florida and Cecile.

Jules: Tudois prier aussi.

Girl: Jen’aime pas prier. C’est ennuyeux. Peut tu me raconter un histoire?

Jules: No,Il faut que je sorte.

Girl: Justeune courte. Je pars pour couvent demain, tu sais.

Ah, Je nepeux pas ma chouette.

Mais je veuxque tu restes. S’il tu plait.

Jules: Nousavons eu de bons temps à Atlantic City, il y’a deux semaines.

Marthe:Tu n'étais presque jamais avec nous autres. Toujours des meeting.

Jules: Les rendezvous.(Kissingsound). Bonne nuit, ma petite. Je promet de t'ammener aucouvent moi-même demain.

Slam ofdoor.

Montreal Civic Politics 1927 - and my grandpapa

2011-12-31T09:43:00.001-05:00

Jules Crepeau, Director of Municipal Departments. (That's how is title is generally written in the newspapers, but not always.

Well, I'm 3/4's of the way through the first draft of my play, Milk and Water, about Montreal in 1927, and I'm still figuring things out. Important things. Like exactly why did my grandfather get pushed out in 1930.

As my play takes place in 1927, it's not essential that I know, but it helps because these forces are looming over him at that time.

I went back and read the speech Camillien Houde gave in the National Assembly in March 1927, with respect to the Montreal Water and Power Purchase.

He ran off at the mouth a bit, I think, being a new politician, so that speech contains some clues, I think.

Houde says that Alderman Brodeur, Chairman of the Executive Committee from 1921-27 has absolute power in the Civic Government, but that he is under the control of a well-known politician.

Hmm.

Houde also says he wants all those who benefited from the Montreal Water and Power Purchase, "pursued like criminals."

I suspect the man he is naming is J.L. Perron, (who is at this time either Minister of Transportation or Minister of Agriculture.) It was naive of Houde, as you don't pursue your own.. even if they are political adversaries.

J.L. Perron was a prominent lawyer and had worked with McConnell and Lorne Webster.

Looking Perron up on the Net I see he died in early 1930!

So Brodeur died in November 1927, Perron in 1930 and then my grandfather is forced to resign over the Montreal Water and Power Purchase in late 1930 -although he clearly had nothing to do with it and although the voters didn't know him from a hole in the head

Houde lost his Provincial seat in the May 1927 election - and he contested and eventually won it back. (Electoral fraud). While he was waiting for the judgement he also ran for Mayor and the rest is History.

Houde was a most interesting politician, as everyone knows. He used 'modern' technique sticking to simple buzzwords to engage the populace. Joking a lot. He invoked Montreal Water and Power over and over in his speeches, for years, keeping a cloud over the former Martin Administration (despite the fact it was a worthy, necessary and even a landmark purchase with respect to the evolution of City Services) and he did the same with the Laurier Palace Fire.

These were two of the era's Hot button issues, which he kept hot by keeping the memory of them in the minds of voters. Sound familiar??? He kept doing this despite the fact that a Juge had ruled that the Laurier Palace fire was no one's fault.

He kept doing this despite the fact that the MWand P purchase was a boon to the poorer citizen.

Mederic Martin was so incensed over the MWandP innuendo, he eventually called for an inquiry of his own to 'clear his name.'

I also dug up another interesting article in a Financial newspaper. In early 1926, the shares of Montreal Water and Power were worth 78 dollars, a healthy amount, said the article, and this was because the company was likely to be purchased by the City. (The company also made healthy profits the year before.) Lorne Webster offered 85 dollars a share for the company in November 1926.

So in early 1926, it was common knowledge that the City was about to finally get around to buying/expropriating the MWP.

Why? It is because the National Assembly amended the 1921 bill (permitting expropriation) allowing the City to Purchase to purchase shares of said company. I can't easily find the exact date of this bill because the 1926 session isn't online.

Gee, years ago I attended a Books and Breakfast affair where a writer, William Fong, was promoting his new book, J.W. McConnell, Financier, Philanthropist and Patriot.

I bought it, thinking it might be useful for the project I was then working on about the Nicholsons of Richmond.

It's much more useful for this project, Milk and Water....My grandfather, Jules Crepeau, was a big fish in the small pond of City Politics and a small fish in the Big Pond of the Power Brokers and Industrialists.

Not surprising, since he is related to the Forgets of Montreal Tramlines.

"Mon Oncle Rodolphe" as my mom called Senator Rodolphe Forget.

Cliques, City Hall and Politicianing

2011-12-30T10:02:00.003-05:00

Mayor Mederic Martin of Montreal, earlier years, 1915 circa

Even though Juge Boyer declared no one to blame for the Laurier Palace Theatre Fire in 1927, after his exhaustive inquiry, Mayor Camillien Houde milked it for all he could in the 1930 era.

He made a 'clique' speech in April 1930 (five months before my grandfather, Jules Crepeau, the Director of Services was forced to resign over the Montreal Water and Power purchase). The speech was reported in both the French and English press.

And it gives the real reason why my grandfather, the top ranking City Civil Servant, was forced to tender his resignation after 42 years of service at City Hall.

I am writing a play Milk and Water about Montreal in 1927 that features my grandfather.

Houde said he wanted to get rid of the cliques at City Hall. When people accused him of just wanting to replace one clique with another he said "Mine is not the clique that has done the damage at City Hall. Mine did not favour the Montreal Water and Power Deal. My clique is not responsible for the typhoid epidemic or the Laurier Palace Fire. Nobody calls for vengeance against us." (This was spoken in French, no doubt and translated by the reporter from the Montreal Gazette.)

Ah Politics. As ridiculous and nefarious then as it is now. Of course that's why I am writing Milk and Water, a play about 1927 Montreal using my grandfather and my husband's grandfather (Thomas Wells, President of Laurentian Spring Water) as main characters.

A few months later, during the Council Meeting where my grandfather's letter of resignation was debated, a rowdy session, Houde also managed to make reference to the Laurier Palace Fire.

Of course, ridding Montreal of the established cliques wasn't that hard. The Chairman of the Executive Council since 1921, Alderman Brodeur, died of a heart attack in November 1927 (in New York, in a car sitting beside Mayor Martin) so that probably paved the way for Houde's surprise election win. I'm only guessing.

This Brodeur deemed the most powerful man in Montreal, in his obit. It is likely he who my grandfather served.

The Cross on Mount Royal

2011-12-29T16:33:00.002-05:00

The Crepeaus 1928 ish

Well, there's a cross on Mount Royal, as every Montrealer knows, but I just learned that it was erected in 1924, during the tenure of my grandfather Jules Crepeau as Director of City Services of Montreal. I am writing a play about him called Milk and Water

According to Sarah Schmidt, author of Domesticating Parks and Mastering Playgrounds, a McGill University History Thesis written in 1996, this was no random act. Years before, the Protestant elite of Montreal had rejected a plan to have a statue of the Virgin Mary on the Mountain as against all they believed in. No goddesses on Mount Royal.

Schmidt says that the tramline to Mount Royal, completed in 1929, was the next step in a process where the French of Montreal re-claimed the mountain for themselves.

She said the French newspapers saw this tramline as a coup for the French working class. She mentions Mayor Martin and Camillien Houde as both being from working class backgrounds. Martin was Mayor off and on in the 10's and 1920's. Houde was mayor from 1927 to 53 (I think) on and off too.

Odd, because just today while I was looking on the National Assembly website's historical pages for something else, I found a speech by Camillien Houde where he denounced the tramway line. He said working class parents would never send their children way up the Mountain. He thought it was a money grab by the tramway people. He wanted local parks set up for the kids to play in.

Funny... Houde was speaking commons sense here. Working class people did not have the time to spend with their kids for long trips in the park. Houde seems to be acknowledging that kids from large families often were raised by older siblings and went out without their parents.

My point exactly with respect to the motion pictures. The mothers thought it safe if an older child brought a younger child to the cinema, which would be nearby, in their neighborhood. Until 1927.

My play, Milk and Water, where I have Jules Crepeau my grandfather have a long talk with Thomas Wells, my husband's grandfather will try to make sense of this... Thomas Wells was a founding member of the Rotary Club and very involved in "the boy problem." (The Montreal Rotary established Weredale House and Shawbridge Boys Farm.)

He, himself, being a busy upper middle class man, hardly spent any time at home. And his wife liked it that way, or so said my father in law, who was raised by an aunt.

There's a joke in the family. My father-in-law at 5 or 6 had a bad dream and he went to the top of the stairs and cried out for "ANYBODY." He had no special person taking care of him. Indeed, his mother didn't like boys.

I decided to write Milk and Water when I found a card of condolence sent by Houde to the widow of Thomas Wells, May the boy-hater, in 1951 or 52. Can't recall exactly. "Hey," I yelled to my husband. "Camillien Houde knew your grandfather."

Houde sent my own grandfather packing in 1930... for a dubious reason. He was blamed for the sketchy circumstances around the Montreal Water and Power Purchase in 1927.

That's what I was looking for on the National Assembly Website: a reference to the 1926 amendment allowing the City of Montreal to buy stocks in the Company, rather than just expropriate it. Because a short time after, Lorne Webster, the Industrialist, offered to buy Montreal Water and Power from the majority stockholders and he flipped it, making 4,000,000 in a few months when the Montreal City Council finally got around to OKing the purchase in a secret session on February 14, 1927. My grandfather's personal Valentine's Day massacre. Got it?

I wanted to see who promoted this amendment. I wanted to see if it was the Honorable Perron, the Minister of Transport, who was a business partner of Webster's. (According to the Fong biography of McConnell.) Alas, I couldn't find it.

All very well, so typical.. except I doubt my grandfather had anything to do with this flip.

This was all a cause celebre in the press, a scandal some said, but few people in the National Assembly or on the Bench, dared accuse Webster or his cronies of any wrong doing. Business is business they said. Everyone is allowed to make money, even at the taxpayer's expense. (Houde was an exception, at the beginning, but even he had to relent against the big guys. ) But the people wanted a scapegoat. Or Houde said they wanted 'vengeance' for this purchase, ah, and the Laurier Palace Fire, and the typhoid epidemics of 27. They got it, my grandfather. A person the voters hardly ever heard of....

I'm going to have my grandfather say something like "The industrialists are the gods, the puppet masters, and we are the puppets, dancing for their pleasure or something like that... In September 1927 he won't know what's going to happen with respect to the suspicious actions around the purchase/expropriation, but he'll have a sense someone is going to pay for it.

Spies and Civil Servants.

2011-12-26T23:42:00.002-05:00

The Jacques-Cartier Window in Basilique Notre Dame Cathedral Basilica, Montreal.

I am writing a play Milk and Water about Montreal in 1927, based on events in my grandfather's life. He was Director of Municipal Departments.

Well, my mother didn't bring me up to be religious, being a lapsed Catholic herself, but she did tell me something: that a window at Notre Dame Cathedral Basilica 'belonged to her father' Jules.

Now, this church is a huge tourist attraction and I've been there many times over the years, usually with friends or relations who are visiting.

I noticed the last time I went there that the three Jacques Cartier themed windows were surrounded by a glass enclosure, a special little room reserved for more private prayer.

It's too bad, not many of the many many thousands of tourists who come to Notre Dame Basilica will ever see this window close up. Or my grandfather' s name, on the bottom.

I doubt this is what was intended back in 1929 when my grandfather, Jules Crepeau, Director of the City from 1921 to 1930, co-sponsored this window, which would have been the first window as you entered.

There it is.... Jvles Crepeav...

This tryptic shows Jacques Cartier reading the gospel to natives.

I took these pictures despite the fact a sign indicated that cameras were not allowed in this little chapel. Too bad for them.. But I was discreet.

I know my grandfather was Church Warden of La Paroisse Notre Dame, because I have his obit from 1938. Jules Crepeau: "hardworking Civic Servant who worked his way up from message boy in the Health Department to become the first Director of Services for the City."

The obits say he was a dedicated, even brilliant, civil servant, who took some hard knocks in his career, but survived them. A little known man who had a huge impact on City Politics. Hmm.

I am writing a play, Milk and Water, which features Jules as one of the two main characters. Thomas Wells, my husband's grandfather is the other main character. The play takes place in 1927 (during US Prohibition) outside an after-hours night club.

My grandfather and my husband's grandfather are awaiting the possible arrival of David, the Prince of Wales, and some friends.

They are delivering fresh water. It is the year of yet another typhoid epidemic.

Still, Montreal in the 20's was a city at the height of its prestige and influence.

The summer of 1927 was a very busy one for my grandfather. He was porte-parole for the City Council and Executive Committee and there was an inquiry, started in April, completed end of August, into the Laurier Palace Motion Picture Theatre Fire.

Some people, most notably Hugh Graham of the Montreal Star and little known MNA Camillien Houde, were calling for another Inquiry into the recent Montreal Water and Power purchase, where some well-placed industrialists made millions in the space of a few months speculating on said purchase, and all at the expense of the taxpayer. (They feel, anyway.)

My grandfather would lose his job over the Montreal Water and Power business, despite not benefiting one iota. (From what I can figure.)

He had little, if anything, to do with the purchase. He didn't even attend the Council Meeting where the motion to buy passed, but, alas, that is politics. He would be forced to resign in 1930, although with a huge life pension, In 1937 he would be run over by a City Constable and die of complications a year later. No more pension! The 1938 obits don't mention the car-accident, which makes me somewhat suspicious.

While unemployed in the Depression Era, my grandfather, by all accounts a workaholic, frittered away his time in goofy business ventures and went bankrupt, despite his excellent pension. All goes to prove he was no savvy businessman, only a dedicated civil servant in a rather shady time and place.

He knew so much, having a 'prodigious memory' you'd think we would have become 'a consultant', but perhaps that is why they gave him a huge pension, to keep him silent.

I saw the contents of his City Hall file: I found no secret contract to keep him quiet. Maybe it's in Camillien Houde's file :)

Outside the Basilica, Boxing day. Beautiful day. A Monday, too, so there was free admittance to the place. Otherwise it's 10 dollars for adults.

Here's a picture taken in 1933 for a book on the Windows of Notre Dame Basilica, of the Jacques Cartier window, before they obscured it with an alter and hid it in a prayer room. It is Window No. 1. And my grandfather and two other church wardens sponsored it.

But I lit a candle for 2.50.

I just rushed in to to snap the pics as my husband circled in the car. We were wanting to make a 1.05 showing of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy at Atwater AMC.

Good movie, but we should have hung around Old Montreal instead. Sunny warmish day. And that movie is moody, shot in very bleak tones. No Mamma Mia, that's for sure, even if it has a Philby-esque Colin Firth character. Gary Oldman and Mark Strong are very good. Mark Strong played along side Colin Firth in Fever Pitch I recall. He played a goof. Not here.

One thing they have done, improved the parking in Old Montreal. There are signs everywhere showing where to park and how many parking spaces are available at each venue.

Sketchy Obituaries 1938.Milk and Water

2011-12-26T07:58:00.002-05:00

I have these two obituaries, for my grandfather, Jules Crepeau, the former Director of Services of Montreal. Useful to me, as I am writing a play, Milk and Water based on his character. Apparently, he attended the Sacred Heart College and also at College Mont St. Louis..But he did start at City Hall at 12 years old and it was three years before he started work as a message boy in the Health Department, 1888. So maybe the 'family myth' is correct and he started at City Hall sweeping the floors.

(This is very useful to me, as my play is about WATER, and health, and social welfare.)

The fact he was church warden for La Paroisse Notre Dame is important to my story: in fact, the first window on the right at L'eglise Notre Dame or Notre Dame Cathedral in Old Montreal, is co-sponsored by him. I must get down there with my digital camera and take a picture. That particular window, I recall, is inside a glass enclosure, a special prayer room, but the public still can enter. Maybe I'll go today, boxing day.

Upon his fortieth year at City Hall, in 1928, the papers ran a few testimonials, too.

The thing about these obits, they claim he died after a long illness, but don't mention the car accident he had a year before, which precipitated the illness. He was run over by a City Constable. This accident was reported in the Press. The obits also fail to mention that he was forced for retire, by the first Houde Administration. And the obits don't mention his brother Isadore, who died falling out of his office window.

Le Devoir printed a longer obit the day after the first obits.

(Translated off the top of my head.) “Yesterday, upon his death, the newspapers published some rather dull obituaries of Jules Crepeau, none of which give a just account of the exceptional role the man played in Montreal politics…. Jules Crepeau was intelligent, ambitious, and proactive.His education was rudimentary and didn’t give him a background in culture, unlike his successor Honore Parent. (Crepeau finished his studies at night) But this affable man turned all his considerable intellect and curiosity and energy towards the work at hand. From the start he comprehended the importance of the municipal administration, its vast complexity and its workings and he had a sense of being part of something grand and of great import. He started out as an intern in the Health Department and rose steadily, especially after going to work under L O David in the Head Clerk’s (Greffier)Office…

He rose in the ranks, slowly at first, then more quickly until all the Municipal Councillors and the aldermen had only his name on their tongues. He became the first Director of Services in 1921. Jules Crepeau was too passionate, too uncompromising not to have taken sides in disputes, so he made enemies and he took some hits, some of them nasty.

But it must be stated that no accusations against him stuck. On the outside, his reputation got larger and larger. In Quebec, before the Committee of Private Bills, it was his opinion that held the most weight. He was the one people went to for information because they knew that information would be succinct and exact. I once knew a banker who had thousands of safety deposit boxes in his bank, but if a client showed up he knew exactly which box to open. Jules Crepeau was like this man. The Administration is made up of many many boxes, or more precisely, articles and charters, rules and regulations, and if you wanted to know about any one of them, you called Jules. He had a prodigious memory and you could trust it. It remains only to say that this venerable and brilliant civil servant is an example to all, for his sense of service, his zeal for his work and the pride he took in serving the public.

Hat Mystery 1927

2011-12-25T10:00:00.000-05:00

Montreal Alderman, circa 1927. My grandfather, Jules Crepeau, Director of City Services. In the big hat.

Well, odd. Jules on the right is wearing a style of hat that I can't find anywhere on the Internet, a kind of bowler top hat.

The exact same style Thomas Wells is wearing in this picture... Is it a Montreal Style? Probably not. I'll have the men both wearing this hat in my play, Milk and Water: good symbolically.

They are essentially the same man, one French, One English, one a Civil Servant, one a Business man.

The Quebec Liquor Law 1927

2011-12-24T07:54:00.000-05:00

Aunt Alice.

In the late twenties my Aunt Alice was married and living in New Jersey. Hmm. But she isn't in any of the Atlantic City pictures of the Crepeaus.

I awoke last night thinking I have a picture, somewhere, of Jules talking to another man on the Atlantic City Boardwalk.

Must find it..Then this morning, I'm not as sure as I was last night that such a picture exists. But I think it does. The man he's talking to is much much taller, as I recall.

As I write Milk and Water, my play about Montreal in 1927 (still an era of Prohibition in the US, but not so much in Canada) I found an advert in the July 1, Dominion Day Montreal Gazette where the Quebec Liquor Commission is congratulating itself on its sensible policy.

THE QUEBEC LIQUOR LAW

"It is noteworthy that with all the liquor laws enacted in the different provinces in Canada, in all the last few years, the Quebec liquor law has not been materially modified.

It stands today, after six years of the most severe trial, exactly as it was when first put into operation in 1921.

Other laws have been challenged and overthrown, losing favor from year to year until they had to be abandoned altogether.

Severely attacked at its origin, the Quebec Liquor Law has seen its enemies lose in number and in vigor until at the present time it has come to be surrounded by almost unanimous approval by the population of Quebec...." and so on.... in absolutely lovely English. Oh, and with with special credit extended to the Premier of Quebec and his colleagues "who had the courage and foresight to break away from the apparently irresistible trend of prohibition."

Hmm. Interesting. Of course, if this were 100 percent the case, there would be no need for this newspaper PR exercise.

But even W.E.Raney, the former Ontario Attorney General, who testified to the US Congress in 1926 against Quebec's Liquor law, using second hand info from the 1925 Coderre Report on Police Corruption totally out of context, agreed that it was useless for him to go to Quebec to complain, as no one there listened to him. (Quebeckers are DIFFERENT he explained to the Americans. )

Raney (or Coderre) singled out my grandfather, Jules Crepeau, saying he controlled the Chief of Police in Montreal, but the transgressions cited had nothing to do with liquor. They had to do with Motion Picture Houses.

(Raney quoted from a Montreal Star story on the Coderre Inquiry Report. That story claimed my grandfather forced police officers to turn a blind eye to theatre owners who admitted under age children without guardians. My grandfather supposedly tore up 'actions' against these theatres' and fired policemen who complained. In truth, the cop in question was fired for bribery. Phew. Complicated.) My grandfather's brother, Isadore, was the VP of United Amusements, a chain of 16 motion picture theatres.

1927 was Canada's Diamond Jubilee Anniversary, 60 years since Confederation and the rest of the newspaper was filled with grandiose patriotic promotions, much like in 1967.

My mother told me that her family, the Crepeaus had a huge party on St Jean Baptiste day and then left for summer vacation in the US. That is, everyone but Jules.

Oh, and another article that summer, related to the inquiry in the Laurier Theatre Fire, claims that Labour people had complained in 1926 to the City about crowded theatres and underage patrons.

And yet my grandfather's name didn't come up in the Boyer Report. He testified at the inquiry, indeed he was the first, but he was there to explain why the theatre was operating without a license.

Of course. Thomas Wells' cousins, the Townsends, made a fortune one year, mailing hard liquor from Quebec to the rest of Canada, using a loop hole in the law. I wonder when this was, before 1921, or after.

They had a huge operation, employing many young women to open orders around the clock, apparently. The Townsend brothers, 2 of them, made enough in one year to retire for life.

Thomas will mention that to my grandfather in my play. My grandfather, around then, was working with Montreal Greeks, on an import business. All kinds of Mediterranean goodies. Too before its time. He would have been jealous to hear about how easy it was for the Townsends to make money.

Olives are lovely, but olives in vermouth and gin are better for business. I guess I have to use that line now :) I just read that the martini was invented in around 1910 but that with Prohibition and bathtub gin it become the most popular drink.

1927 Life in Montreal

2011-12-23T07:15:00.000-05:00

The Crepeaus in 1920's..6 or 7. Atlantic City probably. (Well, I can see exactly what Jules wore in the Summer of 27..)

As I write Milk and Water, my play about 1927 Montreal, that uses my grandfather and my husband's grandfather as main characters, I've decided to flip through some era Gazettes.

You see, I have reached the point where I need to print out the draft to do an edit - and I don't have any paper.. and it's Christmas madness in the stores.

Lots of interesting stuff in the paper. The Gazette had plenty of ads for Scotch Whiskey and such. Also lots of ads for theatres and gambling as in the races, horse and greyhound. And the fashion ads are lovely, the era styles being so enduring in their appeal.

One summer editorial revealed to me that J.L. Perron, (one of the men who benefited from the Montreal Water and Power purchase by the City of Montreal) was Minister of Roads.

He is cracking down on speeders in 1927. I read somewhere else, in a McGill Thesis I think, that cars in the city increased tenfold during the decade.

Cars and horse drawn vehicles were at war. The horse lobby (livery lobby?) held a giant parade in 1927, where cart horses used in industry were showcased. As in "SEE HOW IMPORTANT HORSES STILL ARE." Mederic Martin attended.

Laurentian Water in 1927 still sent its water around by horse drawn vehicle.

Another article that has relevance to my play: In 1927 they the Parks and Playground people opened a new park and playground for children in Point St. Charles. "If we are to have a strong and virile nation" we need parks like this for kids, said on of the officials presiding over the opening.

"Kids need a safe place to play," said another. "to get them off the streets." "There is scarcely a day when children playing in the streets aren't knocked down-sometimes fatally."

Apparently, someone has promised to pay to have a drinking fountain installed in the park. (Important!)

So, Mothers were afraid of cars in those days...So no wonder they felt good when their sons were safely in motion pictures houses...even if the moralists did not.

And now, with the Laurier Palace Fire, children were to be banned from movie houses. Well, at least they had playgrounds, although not that many. Montreal famously had (has?) far fewer playgrounds than most North American cites.

But it had the Mountain, right? Except the mountain was for rich anglos mostly.

Anyway, I do believe my grandfather was on the Park and Playground Committee. Many social activist Protestant types were on this committee, feeling that green spaces rehabilitated the poor, as long as the poor were kept from behaviors typical of their class.

Water fountains in parks were good, then Dads didn't have an excuse to take off to the tavern.

Today, parks are 'dangerous' places, what with perverts and monkey bars. It's much safer for kids to stay cooped up in the house and garburate media and junk food.

..
Also, I found an ad for clothes. Morgan's I think. Remember the era of corsets and lace, the ad read. Well today it is all simple lines, brief skirts and boy-like tendencies.

Another article talked about the women's movement. Curious and Restless women (as they were called in the 1910's) were now the norm, although when it came to the vote, women were more conservative than men. So the article said.

Social activists were referred to as 'busy women.'

1927 Tidbits, American Radio and Ste.Helene's Island Baths

2011-12-22T07:49:00.002-05:00

Thomas Wells, unknown place and time. The twenties? Must check the car. The hat is unusual, in that I can't see one like it anywhere on the Internet. Half bowler half top hat.

The baggy coat? Is it in style, or an old style.

Anyway, as I write Milk and Water, my play using my grandfather Jules Crepeau and my husband's grandfather Fuddy Wells as characters, I have a problem, in that the play takes place outdoors in the city on September 2.

They'd both be wearing hats and coats, maybe.

I just checked the temperature. Low 58, high 80. No need for coats. But they'd still be wearing hats.

And then as I checked the weather report in the Gazette I saw something on the same page that was extremely important to my story. Radio programmes came in from the States. They advertised them in the RADIO SECTION.

This didn't happen in my day. Only Canadian stations aired in Montreal and if my brother wanted to hear the Yankee Broadcast he hoped for a clear night and fiddled with the short wave band.

So there you go. That's why the Quebec government was freaked by the arrival of talkies. (At least that's my hypothesis for the story.) They were certainly freaked by American Influence.

Needless to say we all are familiar with the garb of the era. We just have to watch Star Trek, the City on the Edge of Tomorrow. Fedoras were big. They became gangster wear.

Christmas is coming and just as I am getting in the swing of things. Too bad. I scanned the 1890 Sanitary Department Reviews for Montreal (where my grandfather is listed as office boy.. I will have him impress Wells by remembering what's in the reports..) And the City Below the Hill, the 1897 report by social reformer Herbert Ames, where he says there are still too many privies in the City.

My grandfather will argue that the City had been actively removing them, where possible, except they were always playing catch up, because the City kept taking in more suburbs.

In 1890 there are already three public baths, Ste Helene's Island, Wellington and Hochelaga.

Gee, I just read about Ste. Helene's Island. That park was "the Mountain" for poorer French Canadians. SO I realized that when Expo67 was held on those islands, it had an extra special meaning to the French Canadian Community.

My cousins brought me there once a a little girl. Big swimming pools, I recall. But since I could not swim, the pools scared me.

Soda and Water and Wine and Whiskey, 1927 Montreal

2011-12-21T09:54:00.000-05:00

An ad for Laurentian Soft Drinks 1927.

As I write Milk and Watermy play about 1927 Montreal, using my French Canadian grandfather Jules Crepeau and my husband's anglo grandfather, Thomas Wells, as characters, I've had to adjust a key element.

The play takes place outside a 'dance club' after hours, that is after midnight. The two are awaiting the possible arrival of the Prince of Wales, David...

Tom, the salesman, has brought some of his company's sodas. He explains to Jules that mixed drinks are all the rage now, due to Prohibition.

But yesterday I visited the site of the Quebec National Assembly, where in 1926, someone asks about the number of liquor licenses given out in Montreal in 1925.

The figures, 309 app. 255 taverns, a 50 hotels and 4 restaurants.

And then it hit me, dance halls didn't have licenses. Or cafes. That's where the illegal trade in Montreal happened. That's why you could have the morality squad confiscate liquor from a club in the morning and sell it back in the evening at a big mark up.

The liquor control board did its own marking up. From an article I read (NYT) a 17 dollar case of whiskey ended up costing 56 dollars to the buyer. (Oddly, the board was trying to start up their own restaurants. An MNA asks how this is going: the answer, very poorly. The Restaurants (4 of them) were losing money big time.)

Even in Quebec, public drinking was a MALE thing, taverns for the working class, private clubs for the wealthy.

It was until the 70's, when they started up brasseries.

Of course, women in Quebec were allowed to drink at home. At dinner parties. As Jules' wife, Maria Roy, did. (There always has been a stigma about women 'drinking alone.' At least until Bridget Jones. Well, even Bridget Jones.) I think Tom's wife, May Fair, poured herself booze whenever she felt like it. She was a big drinker. Or she sipped her whiskey out of flasks, otherwise tucked into her bedclothes.

I have on hand part of the Crepeau's crystal collection. I use the giant water glasses for my wine, which I often drink while alone, snuggled up on the couch with my dogs and cats watching Bridget Jones Diary... because the wine glass is pathetically small. (I only had four water glasses to start, and I've broken two already, and one other is slightly cracked. That's what happens when you use heirloom stuff.)

Hey, it just occurred to me. I'm probably drinking out of glasses Mayor Martin, and other important civic figures, drank out of. This was their fancy set.

In the 20's, women drank 9 percent wine from tiny glasses. Today, we women drink 13 percent wine from huge glasses. ( A looming health issue, some say.) The tiny glass is for sherry I guess.

(PS, in a 1926 Canadian Jewish Times I see that a German Restaurant had a grand opening with a 10 course meal served to 100 guests, including my grandfather and grandmother and Mayor Martin and wife.)

The News Media and Ethics, 1927 Montreal

2011-12-20T03:24:00.001-05:00

Jules Crepeau and daughter Alice, 1916 or so.

I guess I have to go downtown sometimes soon and visit the Webster Library of Concordia in the McConnell Building again and look at the microfilms of the Montreal Star for April, 1927.

How Ironic!

I need to look up the article where the Star accuses Montreal Aldermen of taking bribes from Senator Lorne Webster, to agree to push through, in hasty and secretive fashion, the purchase (or expropriation) of the Montreal Power and Water Company, after 12 years of procrastination on the issue.

It seems, from a Montreal Gazette account, that the City Council suddenly decided the purchase had to be made, a day after Webster had purchased a majority share of the company's stock through a New York based concern, The Family Trust.

A while later, the Council, using one alderman, sued the Montreal Star for slander and won.

And yet, according to the Fong biography of McConnell, Hugh Graham of the Gazette kept up the pressure on the issue from April to August of the next year, probably making Mayor Martin lose the next Municipal election.

Now, I don't understand the stock market business... but it was business as usual, even if a first time MNA from Sainte Marie, a certain Camillien Houde, had called for a royal inquiry into the 'shameful hold-up.'

This young man of the people lost his seat in the National Assembly in May 1927, and while contesting the loss he ran for Mayor of Montreal, with this Montreal Water and Power purchase being the only real issue, and won, big time.

Houde dressed in crumpled suits during the campaign and kept mentioning he was ' a poor man.'

Mederic Martin, also a self-made businessman, but someone who enjoyed the trappings of wealth ( he always dressed dapper, and the hair, oh my!) didn't convince the electors (universal male suffrage) that the Montreal Water and Power had to be purchased right then and there, that evening, so that "poor people wouldn't have their water turned off" by a cruel for-profit monopoly.

Most aldermen were returned in that October 1928 election, however. (Mr. Brodeur, Chairman of the Executive Council since 1921 and the most powerful man in the city, had died of heart attack in November 1927.)

No one disputed the necessity of the purchase. The fact that the purchase was pushed through at a unofficial Council Meeting, on February 14, 1927, a day after Webster got possession of Montreal Water and Power, and that a certain procedural rule was suspended to allow for this to happen, is suspicious, indeed. (All documents were supposed to be filed at the City Clerk's office my 10 am the day of a meeting. In this case, that didn't happen.)

The Gazette article says that there was a precedent for this, "that 24 other bills were passed at that same meeting, suspending the rule." (Excuse me! That isn't saying what it claims to say! That's not an example of a precedent.)

Oddly, my grandfather did not attend this session - and it was part of his job description to attend all Council Meetings.

The alderman won the case for slander: The judge wrote in his ruling, "The functions of a newspaper should be, above all things, to present the news of the day fairly, fearlessly, and without prejudice. It's primary function as the name implies, is to present the news.

When the editor presents an opinion it should be based on facts in order to influence public opinion around right lines. And when the editor of a newspaper indulges, for motives known to himself, in attacks upon individuals, rather than an action, he is not upholding the highest tradition of British (sic) journalism."

(And SIC for so many reasons.)

My grandfather was the man 'who taught aldermen their jobs' according to a 1937 Gazette article, and he knew exactly how City Hall was supposed to run. I imagine he didn't like something about this business...He had worked for a long time as Assistant City Clerk.

Anyway, I've got to figure out what happened to write Milk and Water, my play. I'll have Mr. Wells ask Jules if this rule had been waved before "You should know, you were Assistant City Clerk" and Jules, well, he won't answer...so that will be the answer.

My grandfather was forced to resign, by Council, over his part (or lack of part) in the purchase. Houde claimed he should have advised the Council against the purchase, even though the Chief Engineer of the City, who was also fired, supported it.

As if my grandfather, a civil servant, was supposed to tell aldermen how to vote on issues. Very weird.

It was, however, my grandfather's job to explain to aldermen (and the press, and the public) about the rules of governance. And maybe he did just that -in this case - and maybe that's why he didn't show up at this meeting.

My grandfather did not testify at this hearing into the slander charge, as far as I can see..Hm. And you'd think he'd be just the one to ask about procedure at Council Meetings. Since he was he expert. Curiouser and curiouser.

The Puzzle gets Pieced Together.

2011-12-19T08:07:00.001-05:00

My smart-alec Brother, Mark, circa 1952 * When Camillien Houde was still Mayor I think.

I decided to write this play Milk and Water, using my grandfather Jules Crepeau and my husband's grandfather, Thomas Wells, as main characters a few years ago, when I found a card of condolence sent by Houde to my husband's grandmother, May Wells, upon her husband's death. 1951 or 2 or 3.

"Hey, Houde knew your grandfather," I shouted to my husband.

I've been writing about my research into Milk and Water on this blog. The other day my older brother Skyped me to say he's been reading my blog and it's full of typos etc.

"Oh, so you're the one," I said.

"I don't understand what you mean, half the time," he said.

"That's because as I am writing the posts, I am trying to figure out what I mean. OK.Give me an example."

"Well, I can't tell whether Montreal had Prohibition in 1927 or not."

"That's because in earlier posts I wasn't sure, myself" I replied. "I now know. Well, sort of, because it's all rather confusing. The laws were intended to be confusing, I think."

The short of it is: These posts are 'my process'. It's taken me a while, but I've figured out that since 1923, hard liquor in Quebec was controlled by a board and in 1927, Ontario allowed beer and wine to be made and purchased.

(That's why in the early 1920's, my husband's relations, the Townsends, made a fortune selling hard liquor to the rest of Canada by mail order. A loophole in the law. Hard liquor wasn't controlled in Quebec then. In one year they made enough to retire on. I must put this in the play Milk and Water.)

There are a lot of sticky pieces to this puzzle that I am assembling to write Milk and Water. It's becoming easier: I wrote a fair bit of the play this morning, because I have most of the pieces I need.

But then I realized I didn't know the year Houde came on the political scene.

Easy to look up. He came on the Municipal scene right then and there. Indeed, In early September 1927, he was in-between jobs. He had lost his seat in the National Assembly in May 1927, but not before causing a commotion about the Montreal Water and Power purchase in the April session. He wanted the people who benefited brought to justice.

He is elected Mayor in 1928 by 22,000 votes. The Montreal Water and Power Purchase played a large part in Mederic Martin's ouster and Houde's landmark first elevation to the Mayoralty.

I learned Houde was a neophyte MNA in 1927, in other words, he wasn't a force to be reckoned with in early September 1927. He first got elected in 1923 at 28 years of age. So, my grandfather had no idea he was going to be shot down by this funny looking little man of the people, a banker, who would become a political legend in Quebec, even going to jail in 1940, for his 'treasonous' views on the war. Well, he was interned, which made him a martyr - as well as a celebrity. He made the cover of Time Magazine that year!

I stumbled upon another article of interest this morning. The New York Times ran a long article in 1928 about the ever- increasing US motor tourism to Canada.

The new controls on hard liquor hadn't stemmed this Northward tide of American motorists, said the article, but liquor tourism wasn't strictly the cause, either. Canada's natural beauty was the main attraction, after all, as many tourists were going to Ontario. (Of course, you could now drink and buy beer and wine in Ontario.)

Apparently, some magazine or newspaper in the US had run an article warning that Montreal hotels were so full many American tourists were left to sleep in their cars. (I wonder if this article was generated by Prohibition supporters.)

Well, that's not the problem anymore. The traffic mostly is heading South, these days, what with the passport rules (your average American citizen doesn't have a passport) and the exchange being what it is.

This is interesting, considering that in 1926, a W.E.Raney testified at US Senate Prohibition hearings and described Montreal as SIN CITY. His testimony was given full page treatment in the New York Times. Hmmm.

And tourism only skyrocketed.. IMAGINE THAT. So it goes.

Water and POWER and my grandfather Jules

2011-12-16T08:17:00.000-05:00

As I write Milk and Water, a play about Montreal in 1927, I am learning about my own family.

I am learning about Montreal History and I am learning about the part WATER played in the socio-economic history of Montreal. That is, the providing of fresh water to citizens and the removal of their waste.

There are many scholarly articles available on the subject, and I've read many of the era newspaper articles, but the clearest account I found, by happenstance, in the McGill Thesis Archives.

It was a thesis by Kathleen Lord, "Days and Nights: class, gender and society on Notre Dame Street in St. Henri, 1885-1905.

I downloaded it because I am interested in such topics, not thinking it would help me with this book, but perhaps with another book I am writing about the 1910 era.

Well, was I wrong. Lord explains in clear accessible language the part Montreal Water and Power, the private company, played in the development of the city. And she also explains the part that company plays in the the typhoid epidemics of 1904 and 1909.

My grandfather, Jules Crepeau, Director of City Services between 1921 and 1930, a time when Montreal was thriving, a great and important city in North America and the World, was fired by City Council (or forced to resign) over the purchase of Montreal Water a Power.

The new Mayor, Camillien Houde, wanted him out!

My grandfather negotiated a huge life pension and then, a few years later, he was run over by a city constable. He died the next year from complications, bone cancer from all the X Rays, probably.

My mother said the family fielded a lot of death threats, against her dad and her older brother, over the years. Yet, she believed his death to be a total accident. "The constable was very very sorry."

Houde decried the purchase (Lord calls it an expropriation) first in the National Assembly, where he wanted the 'criminals' who profited brought to justice, and later as Mayor of Montreal. (He was voted in largedly due to the perceived scandal over the purchase.)

And yet the purchase of Montreal Water and Power in 1927 was probably one of the most useful and necessary motions ever voted by Council. And instantly profitable. In the early 1930's, ousted Mayor Mederic Martin called for an inquiry into the purchase to clear his own name.

Water socialism, as Lord describes it, was the way to go for cities and one of the key reasons why other large cities in the world didn't have the water-borne health problems Montreal did back then.

There was an issue, however, over the timing of the purchase, but even then, my grandfather didn't have anything to do with that.. almost certainly. He didn't even attend the Council meeting where the motion to purchase was passed.

A handful of industrial elites profited handsomely, though, from a quick flip of the company in 1926. And all legally, it seems. Lorne Webster, Honorable Mr. Perron and an Allison and Beausoleuil shared a 4,000,000 profit.

So there you go.

And, yet, it seems to me, if Houde wanted to find an excuse to get rid of my grandfather, one was readily available....the Laurier Palace Business. Indeed, at the rowdy debate on Sept 30, 1930 City Council over whether or not to accept my grandfather's resignation, Houde 'randomly' tosses in a mention of the tragic theatre fire that had occurred a few years before. Just a spur of the moment whim? I doubt it. I'm sure Houde knew what he was doing. He was a savvy politician.

Hmm.

Eye and Ear Candy for Christmas -Downton Abbey

2011-12-15T09:00:00.000-05:00

My Downton Abbey Series Two, UK format -whatever it 's called.

Back in the day, I learned that you could buy the British CDs off Amazon.co.uk and play them on the Computer and then through the big screen TV. I watched many of Colin Firth's littler films that way.

So this year, as soon as the Second Series of Downtown Abbey came out on DVD, in mid November, I bought it.

For some reason it took a month to get by Customs (when normally I get these videos even quicker than ones sent from Toronto), so I only beat Masterpiece Theatre's January debut by a month.

Anyway, the first season Downton was a delicious treat, if not a little soap opera-ish, I thought. The second season is major soap opera-ish, though, I just discovered.

Except when you have production values that lavish and actors that good, soap opera becomes a kind of parody. Still, eye and ear candy par excellence. And a good portrayal of WWI (You see I've read Testament of Youth, so I'm an expert.)

The writing isn't quite as good as last year, I think, some of the sub-plots a bit too predictable, some of the characters have become too set in their schticks. ( Not Maggie Smith's character, though. The Dowager was the best character in the first series and continues to be in the Second. Hugh Bonneville, still very good.. Ah, it's really subjective, which character you like or don't - for whatever reasons.)

There's a Christmas Special coming out in the UK. I hope I can see that by the Spring.

This second season has a sub plot that is most weird, featuring a Canadian element. As a Canadian, I found it interesting, especially as Montreal is mentioned as the city of interest and not Toronto.

In those days, 1910 Montreal was the only Canadian city of worth. Toronto a mere backwater. It was pretty much that way in 1927, the year my play, Milk and Water, is set. Not any more.

This sub-plot may re-emerge. However weird it is. I didn't know a person could pick up a Canadian accent in a few years. Well, actually, apparently, my County Durham dad lost his British accent almost immediately upon arriving in Canada for good after WWII, so there you go!

Another subplot, where Daisy the scullery maid has to pretend she loves a footman (who is off to war) to please her boss, seems very realistic to me.

Indeed, I have war letters to Flora Nicholson of Threshold Girl from a certain Herb Tucker in Belgium.

He seems to think she's his girlfriend and yet when he returns with nothing but a broken finger, there's nothing more written about him.

The Tuckers are family friends.

Flora marries only much later in life, a poor uneducated man, a railway guy. A man some feel below her station. (My father says he was the nicest guy ever!)

From the 1910 Nicholson letters, I can tell she likes a certain Ross Cleveland, the son of another family friend in Montreal, Dr. Cleveland the dentist.

And I have a cut out from the Montreal Gazettte, about 1927, describing Ross's marriage to the niece of Sir Montague Allan - one of the most prosperous men in Canada.

Sir Montague even gives the bride away at the marriage. (I just checked and this man lost both his own daughters on the Lusitania, 1915.)

So real life is a bit of a soap opera sometimes. Poor Flora!

In my novel Threshold Girl (which the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe/Harvard has accepted for their collection on early women's lives - and which the National Library of Canada will catalogue as soon as I have the final draft completed.) she invites Ross to a dance at Macdonald - but he only dances one waltz with her.

I know, I have the dance card!!

Oh, and the plot where the youngest Crawley daughter runs off with the chauffeur. Cliche you say?

Well, frankly, my grandfather was a footman in Yorkshire (Helmsley I think the place was) and the story goes, the daughter of the Earl of the manor fell in love with him, so the Earl packed him off to Malaya to work in the rubber industry, a bribe of sorts, as those positions normally went to the sons of the Upper Classes...so again, a realistic plot line here in the 2nd season of Downton, even if it seems a tad cliche or soap opera ish.

Of course, this family story may be a myth too. Some old aunt told it to my father. Maybe she was a Romantic.

Movie Palaces and Silly Accidents

2011-12-14T09:18:00.002-05:00

Cinema V building on Sherbrooke, originally the Empress Theater built in 1927-28.

In College in the 70's, this was the repertory theatre that showed 'artsy' films, cheap too, so we went there a lot. No popcorn and soda, just coffee. One student in my Communications class in college wrote a paper on movie houses, showing how they made their profit from popcorn and soda, not from ticket sales, per se, so no wonder Cinema V went under.

Well, as I write Milk and Water, my story about Montreal in 1927, using my grandfather Jules Crepeau, and my husband's grandfather, Thomas Wells as characters, I find myself being drawn deeper and deeper into the motion picture business... so to speak.

As I've written in earlier blogs, my grandfather's brother was Isadore Crepeau, V.P of the United Amusement Corporation, a theatre chain, and that he died falling out of his office window in 1933, something I just learned.

Isadore, I figured out from the story of the incident in the Gazette, got his job just before my grandfather, his brother, was made Director of City Services, a key and powerful post.

And he died, in a very silly accident, if the newspaper accounts are true, two years after my grandfather was forced to resign over the Montreal Water and Power Purchase - and NOT over the part he is alleged to have played (in the 1925 Coderre Inquiry Report) in allowing movie theatres to flout the child protection by-laws.

Now, the setting for my play, Milk and Water, is in early September 1927, a day or two after Juge Boyer has come out and exonerated everyone in the fatal Laurier Palace Movie Theatre Fire, but also recommended that no children under 16 be allowed to attend movies in the future.

In a few months the Tachereau government will pass a bill to this effect (and there goes my childhood, so to speak.)

Now, Boyer's reasons for this new legislation really make no sense. If movie houses are fire-traps they are fire-traps for everyone...although in the case of the Laurier Palace fire only one adult died and 78 kids..which allowed the judge to assert that the situation was only dangerous for kids.

The fact is, mostly kids were in the balcony. It was mostly kids, mostly boys, who attended films, across North America, many sneaking in without a guardian, and era statistics can hardly reveal the numbers of kids who sneaked in.

Although a huge cross section of society attended the movies (one of the reasons some people were wary of it.)

So his law makes no sense, but it makes sense when considering that movies were soon to have sound. the talkies! (Well, they already did, the Jazz Singer.)

Now, after Boyer's ruling and before the Tachereau government passed the Bill that changed the entertainment landscape for all kids in Quebec for 40 years, the Theatre Companies threatened to take all their business out of Quebec. A hollow threat, obviously.

Two huge movie palaces were about to be built, the Granada and the Empress (the Cinema V in my day).

(The 1920's was Montreal's era. The City was a bustling manufacturing, commercial and financial center. Probably the second most important city in North America after New York with 1,000,000 inhabitants by the end of the decade. It was also a city of contrasts, with a great many poor and unemployed. The population was more than 2/3rds French. New citizens were arriving from Eastern Europe and England, and from rural Quebec.)

Anyway, United Amusement Corporation issued a public offering of bonds that year, so I can see that it had 16 movie houses, 14,500 seats, mostly downtown, and had been in the business since 1908, the beginning of the nickelodeon era.

(Famous Players owned a share of them.)

Their admissions in 1925 totaled 3, 683, 396, with receipts of 791, 200.
Their admissions totaled 4, 049, 970 in 1926, with receipts of 867, 999.
For the ten months ended June 16, 1927 admissions were 3, 531, 527 and receipts were 810, 486
(the law forbidding under 16's to go to movies hadn't been enacted year.)

With 2, 635,000 in assets, land, building, equipment.

Now, in 1928, since they were a public company we can see their net profits.. 485, 765.

Then in 1929 they went up again, 543, 126.

They claimed these figures didn't reflect the increasing patronage due to sound as the majority of their theatres only got equipped for sound in the summer of 1929, which caused suburban patrons to venture into the city.

Anyway, it is clear that sound saved the day for the Motion Picture Companies back then, although sound movies may have been the main reason The Tachereau government banned movies to kids under 16. (I assume it is.) To protect the French language.

And of course the kids found ways around it. My husband's mother, born 1917, said she and her friends just dressed up like older women to go to the movies...and they behaved well once inside.

Boys of course can't fake being older like girls can, but my husband's father, born 1920, and living in Westmount, said he had to take a bus to Verdun to see movies. So at least one motion picture palace on Wellington was breaking the rules. I imagine. Or had a back door no one surveilled.

Anyway, in 1927 they were still fighting over the Sunday Showings business, too.

Power, Religion, Cinema, and PhD Theses

2011-12-13T10:03:00.000-05:00

Ouimetoscope from Wikipedia. Public Domain

Hmm.

In my short novel, Threshold Girl, about my husband's great aunt Flora Nicholson in 1912, I have Miss Gouin, a French Canadian worker at Dominion Textile, ask Flora if they can go sometimes to the Ouimetoscope, as textile workers have Sunday off.

Flora says NO. Miss Gouin walks away.

As it happens, the cinema theme connects Threshold Girl and the play I am currently working on Milk and Water, about Montreal in 1927.

Had I not spent 5 years researching the Nicholson family letters from 1910 and learning about the Presbyterians in Montreal, I would not fully understand the context of the Laurier Palace Theatre Fire, that in 1927, was a game-changer with respect to movies in Montreal.

I found this excellent PhD thesis online, A Screen of One's Own, Scott MacKenzie McGill 1997.

Mackenzie describes the contempt the Catholic Church had for the cinema since the earliest days, a contempt tainted with prejudice, he claims, against Jews in particular.

He quotes a Roman Catholic official as saying that the motion pictures are worse than gambling, drink or opium.

He claims that some in the Catholic Church were incensed when the Supreme Court deemed it OK for motion pictures to stay open on Sundays.

All useful to me, as I assumed that Church didn't care that much about the cinema, at least,not in the way the Presbyterians did.

What Mackenzie doesn't seem to know or acknowledge, is that the Protestants, particularly the Methodists and Presbyterians, had a very different view of the Sabbath than the Catholics.

I learned this by studying the mission of Edith Nicholson's school, Westmount Methodist, where Catholics were converted to "The Way."

Catholics didn't know that the Sabbath was a day for quiet contemplation and nothing else. They played cards and played pitch and catch and such on Sunday. Oh My!

It was a strange coalition of the Presbyterians and Big Labour that brought in the 1908 Lord's Day Act.

But the Catch 22 was immediately apparently. If you give people a day off, they need something to do, preferably something social, fun and cheap. The motion pictures fit the bill.

Mr. Ouimet said he couldn't close on Sunday, as that was his best day. At least half of the other motion picture houses stayed open too.

Presbyterians were generally wealthy, middle class or more. Like the Nicholsons, they went to theatre and opera on Saturday. French Canadians were mostly working class.

(My upper middle French Canadian grandmother, a pious Catholic, did not let her daughters go to the cinema. Although they might have gone behind her back. Despite the fact Jules brother, their uncle Isadore was a VP with American Theatre Amusements. She gambled, herself, though, at cards and on the horses.)

That's why Flora can't say "yes" to Miss Gouin's invitation. It isn't necessarily snobbery on her part, or shame at being seen with a working class girl.

Oddy, in the mid twenties, it was the age of the luxury cinema and two such cinemas were being built, the Empress in NDG, that had an Egyptian Theme and the Granada (I think.)

To outlaw movies entirely would have meant to stop construction on these grandiose buildings, so iconic of the era, and most of which are now gone.

I wonder what happened to those outdoor movies at Sohmer Park, also established to separate the cinema experience from its dingy, dirty and dangerous store-front setting.

Were under 16's still allowed to see movies there? Probably not. Indeed, I read, in another McGill thesis about City Parks by Sarah Schmidt, 1996, that in 1927, a group of 5 young couples (teens) were brought in front of the magistrate for having sex in the park. Not sure what degree of sex. They blamed it on the film they had just seen, that it aroused them too much.

I have to get this into my story.

Boardwalk Empire Montreal - Corrupt Police and Racial Stereotypes

2011-12-12T12:31:00.002-05:00

His Majesty's Theatre in Montreal.

As I write Milk and Water the free Ebook my story about Montreal in 1927, using my grandfather, Jules Crepeau and my husband's grandfather, Thomas Wells, as characters, I can't keep myself from looking up more info on the city in that era and THAT can be dangerous, considering the wealth of info available at the mere touch of a keyboard.

Usually I just want to answer a question, a fine point, for my story and I find info that leads to more questions, etc.

The best thing I found: a 1999 McGill History PhD Thesis called Broadway North, about musical theatre in Montreal in 1920. It's by Marc Charpentier.

That's because this thesis sums up Montreal in 1921, socially, economically, etc.

Just what I need, since 1921 was the year my grandfather got his new post of Director of Services.

The thesis also contains a first person quote, from someone who had been rich and anglo in the 20's and who enjoyed Montreal's night life to the max.

This man basically says that it is only after midnight where the real partying got going - and that is because (I sort of assume) that the dance halls closed legally and the demure people went home and the partyers stayed on.

The Social Moralizers, as in Juge Coderre and W.E Raney said that only LOW life came out after 12... the seedy types, the predators, the social parasites, the inveterate sloths.. But not true.

The Beau Monde came out too. The rich, the young and the gay (as they used to call them, and not call them.)

So the central premise of my Milk and Water Story... where I have my grandfather and my husband's grandfather, hanging outside a dance club , after hours, awaiting the Prince of Wales, who has mentioned he'd like to visit this club as it has a jazz band he's heard a lot about.

Perfect premise, all considering. If I say so myself.

Now, I will have my husband's grandfather say he saw Shuffle Along, a very popular jazz dance review that came to His Majesty's theatre twice, the second time in 28.

According to the Gazette Shuffle Along is a Big Joyous Musical Furore...and then describes the show in what we would call today 'stereotypes.' I think I read Josephine Baker played in the show at one time.

But the real talented Jazz musicians will be at this dance club.... That is open after hours...And cutting edge stuff attracts the young...always has, always will.

Anyway, as I looked around, I found another bit describing police corruption during the Prohibition era (from decades later)... Booze was delivered to clubs in the morning, confiscated by the morality squad in the afternoon, sold back in the evening at a 30 percent mark up.

The sale of hard liquor was controlled by a liquor board in Quebec in the 20's. In 1924, the New York Times ran an article with statistics showing how having controls on hard liquor has caused arrests for drunkenness and other criminality to plummet, while bringing a LOT of revenue - with a lot of these bucks coming right out of the pockets of American tourists.

This kind of article really pissed the Temperance types, who loved it when Canadian W.E. Raney in 1926, at a Senate hearing on Prohibition, quoted from the 1925 Report of the Coderre inquiry, describing institutionalized sin in Montreal...the commercialization of vice, he called it, in very descriptive terms. "The octopus of sin has its tentacles in every aspect of city life."

Oddly, this Coderre inquiry was aimed at eliminating prostitution, and the illegal drug trade, not booze, but all the vices are bad because in the end they compromise women's virtue. That's the ULTIMATE result of vice. If if taken on their own, drinking, gambling, flirting, dancing aren't that bad. But they allow for the corruption of young women....

That's how I deconstruct the thinking of the era. (It is really about control.. control of women and control of lower classes and especially of those scary immigrants with their scary ways.)

So opium is outlawed in 1910, not because the Chinese use it to relax, but because they use it to entrap our women into white slavery. But it's ok for school marms like my husband's old aunt Edie to take tonics for their heart conditions (a.ka. their sad love lives) that contain opiates.

And marijuana is outlawed around 1923, because black people are gonna get your girls, same ole, same ole.

So it's OK for the powerful rich men to drink all they want in their private clubs as they are not a threat to the social order - as they ARE the social order.

They are not a threat to women, except perhaps for forcing them to work as cheap labour in factories, but that is good honest work, right?

(Except that the girls often have to resort to unsavory activities to supplement their meagre incomes. But that's caused by their 'love of luxury'...a personal failing.)

I found a very funny story from 1903, where the City of Westmount is mad at the St. Georges Club for getting a license for hard liquor, when the town doesn't normally allow such things. (Mr. Wells belonged to that club, but only later on. GREAT for my story.

In 1903, the club members including Hugh Graham of the Montreal Star (who got my grandfather fired, more or less, with his campaign against the Montreal Water and Power Purchase) and Mr. Greenshields, of Tighsolas fame, soon to be Chief Justice of Quebec and a Mr. Allan, likely the same guy who kept rooms in his house for when Royalty visited. Anyway, the argument they gave : It's a PRIVATE club with its own RULES.

.....
The best line I've read yet. A man testifying to the US Senate on behalf other Quebec Liquor Board describes "temperance' as something opposed to the excess consumption of alcohol. Which is what is it, literally.

Temperance doesn't mean abstention, but was described as such, for a long time.

In the same way, chaste doesn't been celibate, it means faithful.

MILK and Water the Ebook (Play)

Boardwalk Empire (Montreal) and the Social Evil 1927

2011-12-11T09:40:00.001-05:00

My grandfather Jules Crepeau, Director of City Services.

Well, I've drawn up the first draft of the first part of Milk and Water, my free ebook, a play about Montreal in 1927.

SO I've covered the Laurier Fire and Coderre and I am starting to get into the Montreal Water and Power Purchase, which is key to my story, since my story is about WATER... and Power..

But as I re-read the Coderre Report from 1925, where my grandfather, Jules Crepeau was named outright, as someone who interfered with the police chief... I found a interesting point, that I have to stick into the Laurier Theater Fire discussion.

Coderre claims that many pimps are 10 years of age and around.

10?

So, the point I put in Jules' mouth, that many working class mothers, in 1927, feel movie theatres to be the safest places for their sons, gets support here.

It was mostly young boys who went to movie theatres unattended and it was mostly boys who died in the crush during the Laurier Palace Fire in 1927.

The Presbyterians always wanted theatres closed to boys, for they considered the cops-and-robbers type movies (Keystone Cops?)a bad moral influence.

Mothers, as usual, were smarter. They understood that the movies were a good place for boys to 'idle' -maybe even safer than home.

And this safe haven was taken away with this fire and I think it had more to do with 'talkies' coming in than protecting children. There were theatre fires in the US and they didn't ban the movies to children, despite the political clout of the morality types.

And the Catholic Church in Quebec had not railed against movies (the Protestants) in the 1910's and early twenties. Mr. Ouiment of the Ouimetoscope fame says nuns brought their charges to his movie house.

The judge who made the recommendation to ban children from theatres in Quebec, also deemed that they were NOT immoral - therefore they could stay open to adults. After the fire, the Archbishop of Quebec joined with the Presbyterians to claim movies are immoral. (Now that movie houses were being built in towns, they were a real threat to church, stealing their customers.)

This recommendation, which was followed through in the National Assembly, was a compromise of sorts, to the Church and to the Government and to the American owned Theatre Operators.

Anyway, the Coderre Report says the usual about prostitution, the same ole they say today. Coderre describes rich prostitutes "who flaunt their wealth and get to visit the best parts of Princely Houses", and the low rent prostitutes, the slave cast ones, indentured to their pimps, addicted to drugs.

They are both equally as bad, he seems to think. A woman acting above her station in life is as bad as a woman living below her station (which is already rock bottom, but factory work is not slavery, it's wholesome or something... Of course, many prostitutes were factory workers, supplementing their meagre incomes._)

I have to figure out what my grandfather thinks of all this. He's bourgeois. His uber-religious wife (the uneducated daughter of a master butcher, with connections in high places) doesn't let his daughters wear makeup or attend movies... She always says "You talk like a girl from de Bullion street." when her daughters do something a little out of line, like swear or wear fashionably sexy clothes.

I know, because my mother, in turn, said the same thing to me when I swore. (She didn't care about my micro minis.) Except I had no idea, until lately, what that meant exactly. De Bullion Street was just a slummy area of town. Today, I wouldn't mind being a girl from de Bullion. I'd have an expensive city home.

French Canadian or English Canadian, the middle class were very self righteous. The Upper class were hypocrits in general and the lower classes were people who used common sense and street smarts to survive. That's what G B Shaw mocks in Pygmalion. Middle Class Morality.

Has it changed?

Opium Wars and Sad Women 1910

2011-12-09T21:09:00.001-05:00

Edith Nicholson (on Opium)

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.

Cleanliness, Godliness and Montreal in 1927

2011-12-09T14:08:00.001-05:00

The Crepeaus in say 1918. Jules far left.

Now, the idea that bathing in water cleanses more than the body wasn't invented in the 1920's. It's obviously archetypal, hence Christenings and Baptisms.

But it did reach a kind of apogee in the first part of the 20th century in North America, as large waves of immigrants came to Canada and the US - and muddied the social water, so to speak.

As I write Milk and Water, a play about Montreal in 1927, the Prohibition Era (where I use my grandfather Jules Crepeau and my husband's grandfather, Thomas Wells, as main characters) I have to somehow synthesize all I know about this subject.

I think the three quotes here sum things up:

The first is from Food and Cookery Magazine, 1911, and I used it to preface my ebook Threshold Girl

Give us a healthy home full of intellectual activity where the homely virtues prevail. Where complete honesty and frankness have free expression. Where the lungs expand with pure air, and the brain quivers with wholesome aspiration and sincere inquiry. Where souls bask in contentment and the sunshine of purity and peace..

Then I found this quote, from a New Yorker who advocated public baths in 1900.

.."bodily cleanliness is the first essential. By comparison, religion, education and morals could be dispensed with and even crime tolerated for the present. If this reform could be retained, with it crime would soon disappear and the reign of religion morals would be supreme."

Another similar quote: The foundation of general cleanliness is bodily cleanliness. Until a human being appreciates the latter he will not insist on the latter. Thus it is filthy streets and houses are tolerated. It is idle to expect that people will observe habits of personal cleanliness until the facilities are provided.."

And then there's Dr. Boucher, of City Hall speaking at a meeting of the City Improvement League: Measures of personal cleanliness should not be neglected. They are a daily necessity, especially the washing of hands."

Hmm. French Canadians officials didn't equate the cleanliness with the godliness thing. (Despite the fact my grandmother used to chase her kids around and sprinkle holy water on them, when they did bad - which I will put in my story.)

And French Canadians obviously had good reason to be wary of the 'hygienist' movement, considering these quotes.

Well, I gotta work this out. I gotta figure out what Jules will say to Thomas and Vice Versa.

Thank Goodness, in the 1927 session of the National Assembly, the one where MNA Houde brought up the Montreal Power and Water purchase, calling for an inquiry in the sale so that 'the criminals' who benefitted could be brought to justice (the motion was declined) they also debate Hygiene.

(I guess the typhoid epidemic of 1927 had something to do with it.)

An MNA accuses the government of doing little to protect public health. And public health is important to prevent disease, and epidemics and human capital. No mention of washing away the sins of the masses with clean water. No mention of PURITY. Or even water.

Yet Montreal had 15 or 16 public baths in 1927, and The City had just opened a showcase facility on Amherst with great public fanfare. (It's an eco-museum now, a tribute to the working class.)

Public baths were also swimming pools in Montreal.

Vaccination programs were held in this public baths, I discovered.

They had a City Clean Up Day in Montreal in the 20's. My grandfather was Chairman and treasurer of the 1927 Campaign.

Aping my Dad, Chuck Heston

2011-12-07T01:04:00.001-05:00

The Crepeaus play with a Monkey on the Beach, perhaps Atlantic City in the 20's. I'm writing a book, Milk and Water, about Montreal during the Prohibition Era, using my grandfather Jules Crepeau (top) as a character.

Well, I am continuing to watch the Simpsons to improve my spoken French. It's an excellent exercise because the show is vocabulary rich, due to the wide range of cartoon plots. (I wonder why mothers banned their children from watching the show in the 90's... some mothers. Not me. )

I'm up to season 8, though I missed season 6. I only had seasons 1 to 5. I have to buy them now.

I take back an earlier post where I said the French Simpsons are sometimes better than the English. The acting is excellent and some jokes are 'localized' instead of translated, say a French Canadian personality is mentioned rather than an American. But the writing is not as good. (I put on the English subtitles which appear to be the dialogue verbatim.) Jokes are not translated to be equally sharp. Generalizations made where clever specifics are in the original dialogue. Say a character picks up a tie and calls it a 'noose' whereas it is translated as 'tie.' (Of course there are mouth flaps to consider: French is a longer language than English.)

Anyway, in season 4 or so, in the episode where Homer becomes an astronaut, there's a joke on the movie Planet of the Apes. (He FINALLY gets the significance of the final scene at a press conference at NASA.) So I got a hankering to see that movie again, the original. I've only seen it one or two times on VHS since I saw it in the theatre in 1968.

And what do you know, my husband and I found the Blu-ray version on sale at a Walmart in Messina New York, about an hour away, where we went just for fun and to see if food in the US really is cheaper. (Answer: yes and no.)

Then we watched the movie that evening.

You know, it occurred to me, that this excellent, iconic movie could have turned out to be the silliest film every put on screen. After all, it features a grown man prancing around naked or half naked the whole movie. And actors in Ape Heads.

Why is the movie so good? I assume because Rod Serling penned the original script, which got messed around with (another reason the movie should have tanked.) And good acting.

Just like Twilight Zone episodes, it's a concept movie, and even the set is an idea. Like most people, I haven't read the book, by Pierre Boulles, who also wrote The Bridge on the River Kwai that was turned into another famous movie.

( I did try to read a less famous book Boulles penned about Malaya during the Communist Emergency while I was researching my play Looking for Mrs. Peel about my grandmother at Changi Prison in WWII. It was not a great novel by any means.)

Now in 1968, at 15, I recall I went into the movie with no preconceptions and was pleasantly surprised. I recall the "Get you filthy paws off me," line the most - the audience cheered of course.

The fact that Charleton Heston pranced around naked the whole time didn't stay in my head. That sort of surprises me, but then Heston was my father's age in 68, so it's a good sign that I wasn't totally grossed out by the sight.
Girlish - looking men like Peter Noon of Herman's Hermits and David M. (Illya of The Man from Uncle were still more my style)... I was a little girl, after all.

My husband thought that Heston doesn't look like 'an action hero." I said "But he WAS an action hero, in the old style. One of the first."

He said, "But he doesn't run well, like, say, Tom Cruise."

I said, "Just because you have a perfect physique, doesn't mean your are athletic."

I looked him up on the Net. Heston worked as an artist's model as a young man. Not a surprise. He was in the military. But there's no indication he did athletics, so it might be true that he wasn't athletic. But he was 45 when he filmed this movie...or maybe the directing was such...

Nonetheless, at my more-than-middle-aged vantage point, it still doesn't gross me out to watch the famous actor run around near naked (albeit with a lack of grace of gait) for an entire film.

In fact, it's kinda fun.

And the movie still is relevant, if a little 'slow' for modern tastes.Still relevant? Well, duh. Or should I say DOH because that statement is worthy of Homer Simpson.

The Planet of the Apes is a statement on human nature. If the movie were no longer relevant, it would mean that human nature does indeed change and human beings actually learn from their mistakes and then....my head hurts. I want a donut.)

Oh,yes, a later season of the Simpsons has another joke on Planet of the Apes. Troy McClure, his career revived due to a sham marriage to Selma, I think, stars in a musical version of the movie, with the song "You can't Make a Monkey out of Me."

I haven't seen the Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but it comes out on DVD and likely satellite in a few days. My son liked it, my husband not so much.

My husband watched it one day, when I went to see THE HELP in the same theatre. That's coming out soon, too.

Complicated Politics of City Hall in 1927

2011-12-05T15:35:00.001-05:00

My grandfather Jules Crepeau, young. This is the same pic used in Michele Dagenais's book about Montreal City Hall in the first half of the century. Des Pouvoirs et des Hommes.

I scanned the book a while back and just took another look, as I write Milk and Water the free ebook about Montreal in 1927, using my grandfather, Jules, Director of City Services and my husband's grandfather, Thomas, President of Laurentian Spring Water as main characters.

Well, I dunno.

According to Dagenais, my grandfather's position was created in 1921 as an answer to Civic Corruption, patronage, pork barrel politics, I think they call it.

My summary: Elected city officials always used their influence over the budget to buy votes, but by the end of the 1800's this was bugging some people, because the City had grown hugely as had its budget - and it had grown toward the East (because of WATER supply) and now the City Council was more French than English. Another problem, there was a turnover of elected officials every election, causing a problem of continuity of infrastructure projects. (Like all this has changed, eh?)

So reformers, led by Mr Herbert Ames (the privy guy and author of the City Below the Hill, about Montreal poverty in 1887) pushed for a change. A compromise was reached and another level of bureaucracy was created, an Executive Committee with a liaison guy, the Director of Services, my grandfather.
Hmm.
So then in January 1923 (I got the date wrong in an earlier post) a Committee of 16, a lobby group launched post war, and only concerned with PROSTITUTION, decided they were getting nowhere lobbying in the usual way, so they started talking about the drug problem among prostitutes and had a Montreal doctor give a speech before the Canadian Club, condemning City Hall and the Police, saying they not only tolerated this addiction, but promoted it.

So that launched the Coderre Inquiry, where my grandfather was specifically named by Juge Coderre as someone who controlled the Chief of Police and who forced policeman to turn a blind eye to by-law infractions. Coderre seems miffed that my grandfather's job exists at all. He sees no job description in the Charter. The Chief of Police says Jules is his boss.

(So it's a bit complicated? Isn't it. Maybe Coderre, a former Alderman, wanted the system returned to the old way.)

And then a W.E. Raney, Prebyterian, anti-alcohol, anti-gambling, anti smiling on Sunday, you name it, goes to give testimony to a Senate Hearing on Prohibition and re-reads a report from the Montreal Star about the Coderre Inquiry Final Report.

My grandfather forces cops to let underage kids into theatres.. that's what my grandfather is guilty of.

Well, I just gotta figure out what my grandfather thought about his job... (for he'll be defending it to Mr. Wells, a founder of Montreal Rotary Club - one of the members of the Committee of Sixteen.)

For my first book, Threshold Girl I've did a lot of research on Ames and on the Social Evil (and how it informed the lives of 'good' girls like Edith and Flora and Marion Nicholson...For instance, working women had a hard time finding a place to live in the city as they couldn't live alone or in groups. And rooming house matrons wanted references and they lorded it over these grown women lest they be accused of running a bawdy house. (Disorderly House, they are called here.)

As far as I can see, there is no street named after Herbert Ames in Montreal, but there is a little street and a little park named after my grandfather, in Ahunsic.

From what I can see (and I've already written this into my play) the only result of this Coderre Inquiry was to have the lawful closing time of dance clubs moved back to 12.am...Raney certainly believed all bad stuff happened after 12.am.)

Meanwhile, I'll have to get in my grandmother's famous line to her daughters (passed on to me through her youngest." "You look like a girl from de Bullion Street.

Up until recently I didn't even know what it meant, exactly. It meant you look like a whore.

The Powerless Mayors of Montreal 1920's.

2011-12-05T09:42:00.001-05:00

Letter head 1921 Montreal City Hall

Comme le loi exige que le directeur des services n'exerce aucune autre fonction ni emploi et qu'il consacre tout son temps durant les jours ouvrables au services de la Cite, je donne pare les presentes ma demission comme Greffier-Adjoint de la ville. November 30, 1921.

Well, well.

As I write Milk and Water, about Montreal in 1927, using my grandfather, Jules Crepeau and my husband's grandfather, Thomas Wells, as characters, I am seeing things more clearly.

The Coderre Inquiry into Police Corruption, 1923, 24, plays a big part in my story, even if my focus is WATER, as in the evolving beliefs about the right to healthy drinking water in the city, which (in itself) shaped the city.

But my grandfather himself was named in the Coderre Report. Juge Coderre expressed confusion over his post and his duties. He claimed the position Director of Services wasn't a part of the City Code or whatever it was called. Charter. (There was a new one written up for 1921.)

Yet here's my grandfather in November 1921, giving up his post of Assistant City Clerk to be Director. He was making 5,000 a year as Assistant Clerk, one thousand less than the City Clerk, but his new salary would be 8,000. Big jump. Just as they were expecting another baby, my mom.

Now, Michele Dagenais, who wrote about Montreal Civic History, claims in her book that the position was created due to the size of the City and that fact that each city service was an little empire in itself. (If I recall. The book is downstairs. Must go re-read it.)

OK. According to the book, Des Pouvoirs et des Hommes, I have just figured out that the Executive Committee level of bureaucracy and the position of Director of Services was created in response to calls of corruption at City Hall from mostly businessmen, worried about patronage and pork barrel politics at City Hall by the elected members. It was a kind of compromise.

(And then in January y 1923 the Committee of 16, a one-issue advocacy group trying to stamp out the Social Evil, Prostitution, demands an inquiry into Police Corruption, claiming that the City Hall allows for, even encourages, the drug trade by turning a blind eye to prostitution, which results in the Coderre Inquiry of 1923 and 24, where Juge Coderre specifically outs my Grandfather, asking Who the Hell is this Guy and what is his job and why does he have power over the Police? (Talk about weird!)

A certain Alderman Brodeur became Chairman of the Executive Committee in 1921. Then he died of a heart attack in 1928, just before Mayor Martin was ousted by Camillien Houde (well, by voters) and my grandfather lost his job, too, under bizarre circumstances.

I dunno, maybe the Executive Committee used my grandfather to buffer them from the press.

You know, from what I see, that was a main thrust of my grandfather's job. He was porte-parole, because he addressed all issues in the city, from dance halls to expropriations. Coderre directly accused him of controlling the Police Chief. I dare say he was doing this for someone else. The Executive Committee. Or Brodeur, described at his death as the most powerful man in Montreal. The Mayor had little power, or so complained former Mayor Duquette (1923-24). I suspect this is what Houde didn't like about the system, so got rid of my grandfather.

I had to laugh. A few posts ago I transcribed the Montreal Gazette report of the Council Meeting where my grandfather's resignation was accepted after a rowdy session. (September 29, 1930.)The report was funny. Apparently Mayor Houde's false teeth popped out while he gave a speech. Well, today, I went through the photocopies of my grandfather's City Hall file (for the pictures here) and found a short article from a unmarked French newspaper claiming that Houde was most upset by the Gazette report, especially by two things: the fact the reporter wrote that the people in the audience pulled for the Opposition (for my grandfather) and the fact he mentioned the teeth business. Houde was such a comedian himself, you think he might have appreciated the humour in that image of false teeth falling out... (Nabokov uses it in PNIN)....but no. He turned the story around to suit him, using humour.

He said: "J'ai lu l'article de la Gazette..."Quant a ce qui concerne mes fausses dents et le role public que leur a fait jouer, lors de cette seance memorable, le zele journaliste de la Gazette, je dois avouer publiquement une autre infirmite, un hernie.

I'm guessing that no other paper talked about Houde's false teeth popping out at the session. He caught them 'deftly' (says the Gazette report) and put them in his pocket.

Textile Workers then and now - Magog

2011-12-03T06:46:00.001-05:00

The C.S. Brooks company in Magog.

A E.T. Research Website that just came online had some nice era pictures of the Dominion Textile plant in Magog Quebec, so I decided to 'take a trip' on Google and find it... It wasn't hard. I just went along rue Principale til I got to the easterly area of town and there it was.

I could tell immediately by the architecture.

A company called C.S. Brooks is in the building now and according to the Internet it is Dominion Textile by another name. Still does the bleaching, screen printing and dying.

I wonder if, like in 1911, everyone there works 60 hours. The Canadian Census shows that. I guess that was the legal limit, so the employees were told to say that to the Census man.

Even the 'odd jobbers' worked 60 hours.

I found some girls of 12 working there in the 1911 Census, too. Underage.

Well, in my book THRESHOLD GIRLabout Flora Nicholson, my husband's great aunt who attended Macdonald Teachers College in 1911/12

I created a fictional character, Miss Gouin, who is from Magog, who works as a milliner's assistant in Richmond and who goes to work at Dominion Textile in Montreal and takes part in a strike march where Flora meets up with her, again.

I visited Magog only a few times in my life. Just a few years ago I spent a day at a house on the Penfield compound and when I was 2 or 3 my parents vacationed there. It was the worst vacation ever, as we kids got sick and my parents liked to tell us the story of cleaning our bedsheets of vomit and such by trailing them behind the motor boat in Lake Memphremagog.

Magog is much larger than Richmond. It's a vacation town. Maybe we'll go there next year.

Love and Death and Mourning 1910

2011-12-02T08:32:00.001-05:00

I have written Threshold Girl about Flora Nicholson, as student in 1911, based on family letters.

Edith Nicholson 1884-1977 and her 'unofficial fiance' Charles Gagne 1883(?) - 1910. This picture is likely 1909.

Edith Nicholson, my husband's great Aunt, never married. She told her nieces and nephews and great nieces and great nephews that she lost her Great Love in a hotel fire. They weren't 'officially engaged' but they had 'an understanding'.

In 2004, I found the Nicholson letters in an old family trunk - and in a letter dated May 3 1910, Edith writes of this loss to her mother.

Your letter received this am. It was so good to hear your voice over the phone. It was quite natural. Oh, how I wish I could talk over everything with you. It seems terribly hard to think it all for the best, when there are so many that are of no use living on and others that are held in esteem cut off in a moment. One thing, I am very thankful for that he wrote me. No doubt one of the last things that he did. I can't express my feelings. I never felt so badly in my life. But I suppose there are few who have had so pleasant a one as I have, and trouble comes to all.

It took me a while to figure out, but her beau was a Charlie Gagne.

(She mentions many young men in her letters, sometimes only with initials.) It seems Edith and Charlie had an on-again off-again type relationship through 1908-1909. In the summer of 1909 I have proof that he spent time stepping out with Edith as I have a few pictures of the couple on outings in the Eastern Townships.

Like the one above.

In September 1909 her mother Margaret writes her father Norman and says "Charlie has gone to Mexico. So that flirtation is over."

In October 1909, Edith writes her Mom saying she hasn't heard from Charlie G and that she has no intention of trying to contact him. "He could still be in Mexico, for all I know."

In February Edith writes that she is taking medicine, for her heart has had a jolt.

Then there's NOTHING but the May 3 letter. Edith writes that she is looking at his picture in the Montreal Star and that "it does not do him justice."

About 5 years ago, I tripped over to the McGill Library to check out the May 1910 Star. I found a story about a Cornwall fire, where a Charlie Gagne, bank clerk, perished.

No picture though - so I was confused.

I found the Nicholson family album a little later and saw these pictures. Could this man be the Charlie of the letters? I wondered. But, again, I couldn't prove for certain.

Then Google News archives came online and I saw that the Rossmore Fire happened on April 29!

Yesterday, I ventured down to Concordia's Webster Library to check out the January-April Reel of the 1910 Montreal Star. Sure enough, the Cornwall fire was front page news on April 29 as the Star was an afternoon paper. The next day's issue had a back of the newspaper follow up article on the fire with a picture of Charlie Gagne, Levis born bank teller at the Bank of Montreal.

The picture was of a sober-faced Charlie, but it was without a doubt the man of the family album. (I didn't have a library card so could not buy a photocopy of the picture.)

Mystery over.

Right now I am heavy into writing Milk and Water, my story of 1927 Montreal... but I've already plotted out Edith's Story, "The Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, Militant Suffragette Sympathizer and Inadvertent Opium Addict." It's a follow up to Threshold Girl www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf ..the story of her sister Flora in 1911/1912.

It's told from the future, perhaps from her death bed in 1977.

She starts with the news of the death, on the Saturday, April 30. (She won't have heard of it the day before.)

She is at Westmount Methodist Institute - a boarding school, where everyone, teachers, students, has Saturday afternoon off.

She is planning to go to see an art exhibit at Phillip's Square.

She is going to wear her new hat, she just purchased on the 19th of April for 7.50 at Ogilvy's(a huge amount of money for a teacher making 200 a year) a big black shape with pink flowers and a black velvet bow.

Dr. Villard, the principal tells her of the death. She takes to her bed, in the boarding school.

Dr. Villard Right. Edith second from left on grounds of French Methodist Institute.

She is given strong medicine. She sleeps for a few days and then wanders around the school in a fog for a few days.

Edith on Opium

The Next Saturday she awakes and takes double or triple the amount of tonic she is supposed to. She puts on her white dress (not appropriate for street wear) and new hat and drifts out down the stairs of Ecole Methodiste and up Greene Avenue to the streetcar, going east.

Then down Sainte Catherine to Phillip's Square and the Montreal Art Association Building and the Art Exhibit.

Ste Catherine and Peel

But before she gets out the door of Westmount Methodist, though, a young male student tells her the big news:The KING is Dead.

She wanders in to the exhibit, of modern Canadian artists. The Streetcar is abuzz with talk of the King's death and new King, George V. She gets confused. She wonders why the King is so upset about her beau's death.

At the Art Association Exhibit, Edith is keen on seeing a painting by Coburn, the E.T artist from Melbourne. A painting of a red sleigh in winter being pulled by a happy white horse. She is homesick for the Eastern Townships.

She wanders into the next room and sees, front and center, the painting Maternity by Riter-Hamilton - of a woman breastfeeding, and it occurs to her, all of a sudden, that she will NEVER MARRY and never have children. So, she faints.

Dr. Villard's daughter rouses her and takes her home. She has been with Edith all along, following her, knowing something is not right. But Edith hasn't been aware of it....(First Chapter.)

In Levis, in 1901, according to the Canadian Census, there is only one Charles Gagne, 17. A French Canadian Catholic.

If this is the Charlie, and I think it is, he must have converted. Edith works at a school where French Catholics are 'brought up to the light' as Dr. Villard says in a book he writes a decade later.

A statue of Edward VII, the Peacemaker (I think he was called) was erected in Phillip's Square soon after. In 1910, the Phillip's Square area was considered a good place for women to go. The square park had no benches, so no leering men to make you uncomfortable, nor could a woman be tempted to rest. Proper women kept moving in the City.

And Birks Jewellers was there at one corner. As was Henry Morgan's Department Store. And a church at the other corner. See, a Woman's Place, for department stores in the 1910 era were also considered safe havens for women in the city.

Birks

Despite making 200 a year, (she got a 25 dollar raise the day before she wrote the May 3 letter) she was on Birk's mailing list.

A Proper Woman was a good consumer, but not a product to be consumed, by men and such, as was usually the case, as in the Social Evil.

Even though an unmarried woman of a certain age was certainly "ON THE MARKET".. Hmm. Edith will effectively take herself 'OFF THE MARKET" at this pivotal moment in her life.

Edith Wharton's the Age of Innocence, taking place in NEW YORK CITY, encapsulates the situation in the era for woman. As do about a billion other era novels.

Do Gooders and Bootleggers and Corrupt Politicians

2011-11-30T11:29:00.001-05:00

Mayor Mederic in his ceremonial robes.

OK. Time to get to it. Because I just found the missing puzzle pieces to my story Milk and Water, about Montreal in 1927.

The Coderre Inquiry into Police Corruption in Montreal, fingered my grandfather, Jules Crepeau, at least as someone who could tell the police what to do.

During the Commission someone claims that Alderman Brodeur, the Chairman of the Executive Committee is "Spiritual Director of the Police Department."

It is likely he was only taking instructions from the Executive Committee at City Hall.

This Commission was called because in January 1923, a doctor from the Montreal General Hospital gave a speech before the Canadian Club and said Montreal was the SIN CAPITAL of North America and blamed Civic Management.

Within a short while a Committee of 16 was struck (representing different social groups) and they held a closed session in City Council, mid January.

One of the groups in this Committee, the Rotary Club. Kiwanis was another. There was a French Cathoic Priest, but most Committee members appear ANGLOPHONE.

Anyway, Juge Coderre (himself once an alderman tainted by accusations of corruption (TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE) held his inquiry.

His report came out condemning the Police and the Executive Committee. (Ald Trepanier, my grandfather's 'friend' gave some damning testimony). The Report made the papers. It was republished in books by Temperance Types. And parts of it was repeated to the Senate Hearings on Prohibition by a W. E. Raney. And then it was forgotten. At least according to a history site of the University of Sherbrooke.

(City Hall's own site says that Mayor Charles Duquette affected some changes.)

I believe the scholarly site. Why? Because it makes more sense. That site claims that the Executive Committee saw this Commission as a ruse to get them out of power.

Anyway, so perfect. Here I have T. G. Wells, a founder of Rotary in Montreal, selling his soft drinks to bars, often bribing the bartender. (My father in law says that.)

Rotary Members were supposed to have 'honest' companies, and what's more honest and pure than water. But they got into the soft drink business in the mid twenties, when, ironically, soft drinks were starting to be used as mixers, because bootlegged boozed didn't taste too good.

My grandfather will have fun with that.. and the fact Wells' wife, my husband's grandmother, smuggled booze into the US on train trips, hiding it under her children's pillows. "Don't disturb the kids."

That's the truth. I add some fiction, when I have him and my grandfather sit outside a dance club, after hours, waiting for the Prince of Wales to show, to make sure he has pure water to drink.