Institution

Storied City: Early Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers imagines a fictitious 1923 dinner party in which 12 real writers (Maxwell Bates, Elaine Catley, Bob Edwards, Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, Nellie McClung, P.K. Page, Isabel Paterson, Winnifred Eaton Reeve, Laura Goodman Salverson, Robert J.C. Stead, Arthur Stringer and Flos Jewell Williams) gather at Lougheed House, a home where Calgary culture was often celebrated and fostered via parties, performances and salons hosted by James and Isabella Lougheed who built this House in 1891.Through the imagined party, visitors to Lougheed House explore our city’s enchanting but largely unknown literary heritage via this group of colourful writers who mined Calgary as our post-WWI community faced an uncertain future. The writers’ fiction, poems and essays revealed the hidden intimacies of the city they helped create and chronicle.The exhibit included literary works, photographs, biographies, literary excerpts, National Film Board videos, an annotated literary map of 1920’s Calgary, artifacts (including a framed broadsheet of E. Pauline Johnson’s poem Calgary of the Plains), ephemera about writing and the writing life (including a 1920’s typewriter), and an interactive soundscape of contemporary Calgary authors and storytellers reading historic writers’ works.

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My name is Shaun Hunter, and along with Caroline Loewen, I am the co-curator of Storied City: Early Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers, an exhibit at the city's historic Lougheed House. In the spirit of social distancing, we'd like to take you on a virtual walk through the Lougheeds' literary neighbourhood. Today I am sitting in my home office, but let's pretend we're walking through a few blocks of the Beltline and Lower Mount Royal. We'll visit eight stops, and at each one I'll share a few stories about its literary connections. You'll also see some photography and you'll hear some sound bites. So, off we go!

Introduction

In the spirit of social distancing, we'd like to take you on a virtual walk through the Lougheeds' literary neighbourhood. Let's pretend we're walking through a few blocks of the Beltline and Lower Mount Royal. We'll visit eight stops, and at each one we'll share a few stories about its literary connections. So, off we go!

Storied City: Early Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers imagines a fictitious 1923 dinner party in which 12 real writers (Maxwell Bates, Elaine Catley, Bob Edwards, Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, Nellie McClung, P.K. Page, Isabel Paterson, Winnifred Eaton Reeve, Laura Goodman Salverson, Robert J.C. Stead, Arthur Stringer and Flos Jewell Williams) gather at Lougheed House, a home where Calgary culture was often celebrated and fostered via parties, performances and salons hosted by James and Isabella Lougheed who built this House in 1891. Through the imagined party, visitors to Lougheed House explore our city’s enchanting but largely unknown literary heritage via this group of colourful writers who mined Calgary as our post-WWI community faced an uncertain future. The writers’ fiction, poems and essays revealed the hidden intimacies of the city they helped create and chronicle. The exhibit included literary works, photographs, biographies, literary excerpts, National Film Board videos, an annotated literary map of 1920’s Calgary, artifacts (including a framed broadsheet of E. Pauline Johnson’s poem Calgary of the Plains), ephemera about writing and the writing life (including a 1920’s typewriter), and an interactive soundscape of contemporary Calgary authors and storytellers reading historic writers’ works.

Our tour starts at the Lougheed House. Built in 1891 by James and Isabella Lougheed, two prominent citizens of early Calgary, this grand sandstone mansion became a home for the couple and their four children*. The Lougheeds were a family of readers. As a girl, Isabella Hardisty read literary works at Wesleyan Ladies' College in Hamilton, Ontario. James became an avid reader as an adolescent growing up in Toronto's Cabbagetown. In 1892, a year after they built their Calgary home, James Lougheed was made honorary president of Calgary Literary and Debating Society. The Senator was known to quote Shakespeare, and the Lougheeds often gave the works of the Bard as a wedding gift instead of the more customary china and crystal. Their library contained ten thousand volumes. There were bookshelves on every floor of the house, and in 1907, the Lougheeds expanded the house to include a formal library on the lower level. Before the first public library opened in Calgary in 1912 a couple of blocks east of Lougheed House at Central Memorial Park, the Lougheeds' library was used as the city's reference library. After Lady Lougheed died in 1936 their library was dispersed and sold at auction. We know of at least one of Lady Lougheed's books, an inscribed novel by Winnifred Eaton Reeve, otherwise known as Onoto Watanna. This book found its way into the Special Collections at the University of Calgary. That book, that signed book, was the inspiration for the exhibit Storied City. The Lougheeds and their house were also represented on the literary page. The house is mentioned in Isabel Paterson's 1916 Calgary novel The Shadow Riders. She calls it "that quaint old baronial castle uptown." In the 1930s an unpublished story by Winnifred Eaton Reeve mentions a family modelled after the Lougheeds. Here is a bit from that story called "Tough Girl": <blockquote>"The Catherwells were highly respected and important people in the city of Graytown. Mrs. Catherwell, whose personality dominated so many social and welfare clubs of the city, was credited with having 'made' her husband. Besides being an esteemed ornament of the legal profession, Norman Catherwell was a member of numerous lodges, fraternal societies, and organizations."</blockquote> That's an excerpt from the story "Tough Girl" by Winnifred Reeve. A woman much like Lady Lougheed shows up as the protagonist in Flos Jewell Williams' 1950 novel Fold Home. In that story, the narrator is the septuagenarian widow of a senator, has Indigenous ancestry, lives in a grand home, and like Lady Lougheed, is facing economic and hard times. Flos Jewell Williams was a novelist who started writing in 1920s Calgary, and she had a special interest in exploring women's lives on the page. Fold Home is a very interesting novel about this elderly Calgary woman modelled on, I believe, Lady Lougheed. [audio transcript] *The Lougheeds actually had six children: Clarence, Norman, Edgar, Douglas, Dorothy, and Marjorie.

We begin our tour at the home of James and Isabella Lougheed, Beaulieu, built in 1891, and now running as a museum called Lougheed House.

Lougheed House

We’re at the McClung House at 15th Ave and 7th St Southwest, a couple of blocks away from the Lougheed House. This house was built in 1907, in what was then a comfortable middle-class neighbourhood, filled with wood-frame houses, much like Nellie McClung's. Nellie moved here in 1923 when her husband was transferred from Edmonton. She was 50 years old, mother of five children, and an Opposition Liberal MLA. She was also an established and celebrated author. McClung lived in this house for almost 10 years, from 1923 to 1932, and these were really productive writing years for her. In her second floor bedroom, she wrote five works of fiction, many articles, and essays. She was also an active member of the Calgary literary community, serving on the executive of national and local branches of the Canadian Authors Association. She often hosted executive meetings and literary gatherings in her home. She forged lasting friendships with local writers like novelist Laura Goodman Salverson, who lived in Calgary in the mid-1920s, and the poet Elaine Catley. McClung also belonged to the Calgary Women's Literary Club, and of course that's a famous organization founded in 1906 in Annie Davidson's living room a few blocks east of us on 13th Avenue, near where the Hotel Arts is now. McClung was a member of that group and that literary club still continues to this day in contemporary Calgary. Nellie's church was Wesley Methodist, a block or so away from her home on 7th Street. That building is now the Mamdani Opera Centre. At Wesley, she was a leading member of the Good Cheer Club. Fifteen years after Nellie died in 1951, club members honoured her role by donating sixteen of her books, many of them signed, to the Glenbow Library. If you're ever doing research at the Glenbow Library, now located at the University of Calgary, ask to see a few of Nellie McClung's books and you might find one that's signed by her. McClung left Calgary for Victoria in 1932, but she returned to this house, this Calgary house of hers, in her 1945 memoir The Stream Runs Fast. I want to talk a little bit before we leave her house about McClung Avenue. Perhaps you've been wandering around this part of the Beltline and have seen the street signs. I'm going to tell you the story about how this came to be. In 1951, the year McClung died, the city rebuffed a proposal by local writers to name 15th Avenue in McClung's honour. The city cited its policy, to quote, "to name things only where they are not straight and cannot be numbered", and there was no budging off of that policy. In the 1970s, the house was saved from demolition by its owner, a reader named Bessie Smith. As a child, Smith read McClung's classic prairie novel, Sowing Seeds in Danny, and she was fiercely protective of McClung's house. Her efforts paid off. In 1979, the province dedicated the house a Provincial Historic Site. Fast forward to a couple of years ago, then poet laureate Derek Beaulieu campaigned to name a few city streets and alleys after deceased Calgary authors. He was successful on one account. In 2018, the city added Nellie McClung Avenue to street signs near the author's home. It's only one of a very small handful of literary markings in the city. At least, literary markings to my knowledge. All of the ones I know of are in East Village, so next time you are walking around, head for Loft 112, there you will see the Rosemary Griebel Bookmark that was just unveiled a few months ago in the fall. It connects Calgary to Project Bookmark, Canada's national literary trail. At the back entrance to City Hall, look down into the sidewalk and you will see a bronze plaque featuring a passage from a poem by Micheline Maylor, who was poet laureate a few years ago. And, if you walk over towards the skipping bridge and look down again into the sidewalk, you'll see a very large circle in pavement, and that's called The Wheel of Women, featuring 30 women that made a significant contribution to Calgary society and culture. There are eight writers included in The Wheel of Women. Winnifred Eaton Reeve is one of them. We talk much more about her as we go along in this walk. Curiously, Nellie McClung is not featured in The Wheel of Women, but she does have a visible legacy in Calgary in her home on 15th Avenue, and now on the street sign on 15th Avenue. The replica of her home is at Heritage Park, the Famous Five Centre, and of course there is Nellie standing across from the performing arts centre with her colleagues in the sculpture Women are Persons. So, that's Nellie McClung. [audio transcript]

Here we are at the corner of 15th Avenue and 7th Street Southwest, the former Calgary home of Nellie McClung.

Nellie McClung House

On the southwest corner of Royal and 7th Street you can still see house number 801. This was built by the American diplomat, journalist, and author, James R. Davidson, around 1907*. Davidson was known around the world for a book he wrote before he moved to Calgary called The Island of Formosa, Past and Present, published in 1903, and is still consulted to this day for people who are interested in learning about Taiwan. Davidson made his mark in Calgary not as an author, but as a Rotarian; a man who came to be called "the Marco Polo of Rotary". If you're interested in that story, I suggest you read Fred Stinson's 2014 History of the Rotary Movement in Calgary. A little literary trivia with James Davidson: in 1907, the world-famous rockstar writer Rudyard Kipling came to Calgary on a whistle-stop tour across the country. He was met at Calgary Station by an entourage including James Davidson, who was driving the car. It was a very fancy touring car with new top. Davidson took Kipling and his wife on a breeze through Stephen Avenue, up Centre Street, stopped the car at the top of Rotary Park, and took in the view of the city. That is where Rudyard Kipling declared Calgary "the wonder city of Canada". So now you know who was driving the car. But I really brought you to Royal Avenue to talk about Winnifred Eaton Reeve, then known as the world-famous novelist Onoto Watanna. Reeve and her husband lived in this house at 801 Royal Avenue from 1939 until the mid-50s. Now that was her second Calgary chapter. I'm going to talk more about that at the stop in front of the Barnhart Apartments a few blocks away. Right now I want to give you a little background and tell you about Reeve's first Calgary chapter that was between the years 1917 and 1924. In 1917, Reeve moves to Calgary with her second husband, Frank, and they are intent on becoming Alberta ranchers. They start out on a farm near Beddington - not the neighbourhood we know now, but a little further north and east. Soon they have purchased 10,000 acres near Morley - they bought the Bowview Ranch and moved out there full-time. Winnifred Reeve is in her early 40s, and the mother of three school-aged children. She is a prolific Montréal-born New York City-based novelist of Chinese descent, known to her regions of fans as Onoto Watanna, the author of many Japanese-American romances. She is considered one of the first Asian-Canadian writers. Her life story is phenomenal, and if you're interested in her, there is a wonderful biography written by her granddaughter, Diana Birchall. I highly recommend that fascinating read. When Reeve arrived in Alberta, she was looking to shed her Japanese persona. She jumped with both feet into her life as an Alberta rancher. She put away all her manuscripts in a trunk she called her morgue. By 1920 though, she could no longer ignore the itch to write. She rented a writing pied-à-terre in Calgary, and she dashed off a novel in five weeks. The Calgary press welcomed her with open arms as the city's celebrity author. It was as if Danielle Steel had moved to contemporary Calgary, it made such a splash. Reeve became part of the city's small literary community. She served as branch president of the Canadian Authors Association, she gave speeches about the importance of Canadians writing Canadian stories, and she spent a lot of time talking about paying authors for their work. Reeve organized a week-long book festival in 1923 in Calgary featuring Calgary authors. She hosted local authors at her home and she read their work. And she also had a literary feud with a young Calgary-based novelist Laura Salverson in early 1924. That feud played itself out in the pages of a national literary journal. It was a classic tale of literary ambition and jealousy. Reeve wrote three novels and several short stories while she was in Calgary during her first chapter. There is a scene in her novel Cattle, published in 1923, that has particular resonance for us today. It is set in the Morley area on a ranch, but the story touches down in Calgary during the outbreak of the Spanish flu during October 1918. I'd like to read you a little bit from that scene: <blockquote>"Calgary might have been likened at that time a beleaguered city. A city of sunlight and optimism was now a place of pain and death. Scarcely a house escaped the dreaded visitor. A haunting sense of disaster now rooted over the city: hospitals, schools, churches, theatres, and other public buildings were turned into houses of refuge. No one was permitted on the street without a mask: a piece of white gauze fastened across the nose and mouth."</blockquote> That's from Winnifred Eaton Reeve's novel Cattle from 1923. It is really the only piece of Calgary literary that I can find that describes what was happening during the Spanish flu epidemic. By 1924 Winnifred Reeve was facing hard times. Tariffs on cattle and grain were forcing Frank Reeve to foreclose on their ranch. Winnifred was also frustrated professionally. As money got tight in their household, she felt increasingly far from the literary centres where she knew she could make a living. And the small provincial atmosphere of Calgary in 1924 felt more and more restricted to her. So, after a few short years in Alberta, Winnifred left Frank and headed back to the United States, eventually to Hollywood where she tried to make her living as a screenwriter. She stayed away for seven years, having in 1931 returned to Calgary and to Frank. But that is chapter two of Winnifred Reeve's Calgary story, and I'll tell you more about that at a later stop. [audio transcript] *James W. Davidson

Here we are at Royal Avenue and 7th Street Southwest at the foot of what was once called American Hill, before the name was Canadianized to be Mount Royal.

James Davidson House 

Here we are at 2003 8 Street Southwest, just as 8th Street climbs up the hill to Mount Royal. We are going to be looking at the home on the southwest corner [of] that intersection. This is the Bert Stringer residence, a 1909 house Calgarians used to call "the queen of Mount Royal". She is a beautiful house [and] continues to be a beautiful house. Bert Stringer was a Calgary developer and booster in the city's Age of Optimism in the years before the Great War. He owned land in Mount Pleasant [and] he was a co-owner of a cohort trying to build the Centre Street Bridge so that people would buy his lots in Mount Pleasant. He also owned a Springbank ranch. Bert Stringer was a big spender, and spent $10,000 to build the queen of Mount Royal, back in the day when a 10-story building downtown cost around $18,000 to build - so no expense was spared on his home. Bert Stringer was also the brother of the prominent Canadian novelist and poet Arthur Stringer. Arthur visited Calgary, he never lived here, but had several family members who lived in Calgary: his brother Bert, his sister Mary [who] was married to one of the Lougheed sons, and his father had also come west from Ontario. There is some risk being related to a novelist - there's a good chance they'll put you in one of their stories, and this is what happened to Bert Stringer. When the Age of Optimism in Calgary came to a crashing close in mid- to late 1913, so did Bert's fortunes. Now, Arthur Stringer was watching his brother's trajectory, and he thought it was pretty good fodder for fiction. He wove bits and pieces of Bert's story into his 1922 novel trilogy called Prairie Stories. The narrator of those stories is a New England socialite married to a man who wants to make it rich as an Alberta rancher. There were a lot of people who wanted to make it rich as Alberta ranchers in those days. In the final volume called The Prairie Child, the narrator's husband forces her to move to Calgary from their ranch into a Mount Royal mansion he has picked up for a song. Probably the result of a bankruptcy, that mansion came complete with a household staff, driver, butler, gardener - it was a house Stringer describes in his novel as looking oddly palatial on its opposing slope of rising ground. Clearly this house is the queen of Mount Royal. In The Prairie Child, the narrator explores Calgary, its geography, its boom-and-bust economy, and its psychology with a kind of critical detachment. It gives us a fascinating snapshot of Calgary during the Age of Optimism and over the course of its bumpy aftermath. So, we have no idea what Bert Stringer thought of Arthur popping his house and little bits and pieces of his story into a bestselling Canadian novel. I'll keep my eyes out for it but for now, we have the story and we still have this beautiful house you can stroll by and admire. [There are] a couple of other pieces of trivia around this house that I want to tell you about. Arthur Stringer and Winnifred Reeve were friends, and Stringer visited her at Bowview Ranch in the early 1920s. Another piece of trivia: the beloved Calgary librarian Louise Riley lived in an upstairs apartment in the Stringer house in the 1930s. So that's a lovely connection to Calgary's landscape - of course, Louise Riley has a library branch named after her on the north hill. [audio transcript]

Here we are at 2003 8th St Southwest, just as 8th Street climbs up the hill to Mount Royal. We're going to be looking at the home on the southwest corner of that intersection: this is the Bert Stringer residence.

Bert Stringer House 

We're in the west end of Tomkins Park, at the intersection of 8th Street and 17th Avenue Southwest. In 1914, this land was donated to the city by Henry William Tomkins, and in 1919, Imperial Oil proposed to build a service station here, but at the city's request, it was never completed. In the 1920s, Tomkins Park was a wide empty boulevard, nary a tree to be seen, and this is how the young Calgary girl who would become the acclaimed Canadian poet known as P.K. Page would have known it. P.K. was born in 1916 and she moved to Calgary with her family in 1920. By 1922, they were living in the Beltline in a bungalow a few blocks from here at 7th Street and 14th Avenue, one block north of the Nellie McClung house. For a few years, Nellie McClung and P.K. Page were neighbours - I'm wondering if P.K. Page ever kicked a ball into Nellie's yard. P.K. was also growing up in the blocks around the Lougheed house, a place that the young P.K. called "old Lady Lougheed's stone castle." P.K. went to private school, St. Hilda's School for Girls, on the site of what is now the Beltline Safeway. At St. Hilda's, she was known as a bit of a troublemaker, an independently-minded student who bumped up against school rules from time to time. By the time she was in high school at St. Hilda's, the family was living in Elbow Park, so every day [she] made the daily trek back and forth from Elbow Park, up over the hill on 8th Street, and down to school through this intersection at 17th Avenue and 8th Street where we are standing. She and her friend would often stop at the corner store and buy a package of Buckingham Cigarettes for a dime. Now, P.K. was fifteen or so, and her father knew she was smoking, and I guess he thought that was all right, but one day the girls were spotted smoking on this street corner. They were wearing their school uniforms of course, tunics and Black stockings, so they did announce to all who passed by that they were from St. Hilda's School. Of course, they were reported to the headmistress - one more infraction for Patsy Page. When you pass through this intersection, you can think of P.K. Page and her school crimes and misdemeanors. Calgary was really important to P.K. Page's development as a poet. As a teenager, she spent hours at the public library in Central Memorial Park, reading everything she could about the lives of artists, because increasingly that is what she wanted to become herself, an artist. At seventeen, she wrote her first poems in a friend's basement on Riverdale Avenue. But it was her childhood summers on the southwest outskirts of town that left a profound impression. As a child, she camped with her family at what was then called Sarcee Camp, a military base on the Tsuut'ina Reserve where her soldier father participated with exercises with Lord Strathcona's Horse. There during those childhood summers, P.K. absorbed the light and landscape that would later inform her poetry. At Sarcee Camp she also encountered Indigenous peoples, and those meetings shaped her view of this place and her own way of looking at the world. You can easily find a film about P.K.'s life on the National Film Board website made in 1990, and she is talking about those childhood summers and what impression they made on her. So, P.K. Page and her Calgary childhood at Tomkins Park. [audio transcript]

We're in the west end of Tomkins Park at the intersection of 8th Street and 17th Avenue Southwest.

Tomkins Park 

Here we are at Central Collegiate, the current headquarters of the Calgary Board of Education. This beautiful sandstone building was built in 1908, and when it opened it was considered to be the city's academic high school. Now, its literary connection. Today I would like to talk to you about Maxwell Bates, the Calgary boy who would become Canada's foremost expressionist painter in the mid-20th century. Max Bates went to high school here and was a graduate of the class of 1924. Maxwell Bates became known to the world as a painter, but in Calgary he is also remembered as the architect who designed the new St. Mary's Cathedral in Mission in the 1960s. Bates was also a writer. In mid-life he also wrote essays for Canadian art magazines. He had a lot of opinions about society and art. He also wrote poetry. He started writing poems as a teenager, around the time he was a student at Central Collegiate. He continued to write poems throughout his life. A couple of his adolescent poems feature the urban landscape of his hometown. I'd like to talk just for a minute about Maxwell Bates' literary education in Calgary. He grew up across the street from the Lougheed house, just west of the Ranchmen's Club. I'm going to talk more about his childhood home when we get to the Ranchmen's Club stop. According to Bates' biographer Kathleen Snow, Bates' real education was gained at the public library. Early on, the library had played a really important part of the young Maxwell Bates' life. The Calgary Public Library opened in January 1912, around the time Bates was going to elementary school at Haultain School. Haultain School is kitty-corner to Central Memorial Park Library. There was a larger building that is no longer there, but the little bungalow is still there. As Max Bates walked home from school, he would often stop off at the library and hang out in the children's section. Now the children's section of the library was a really important initiative of Alexander Calhoun, the city's first chief librarian, and this is what he said: <blockquote>"If the children of Calgary do not have access to good literature, and are not guided in its choice, we shall have in future a population that does not read good literature."</blockquote> And in 1912, when Max Bates was stopping in at the library to spend time in the children's section, Calgary and Toronto were the only Canadian cities offering children's library services. Very foresightful on Alexander Calhoun's part, and an important part of Maxwell Bates' education. When Bates was in high school here at Central Collegiate, he continued to visit the library several times a week, and he continued to do this well into his early 20s. He read all the libraries books on art, he read literary criticism, he read psychology, philosophy, poetry, and the Russian novelists, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. So, the Calgary Public Library was a mecca for Maxwell Bates, much as it would be for his family friend, poet P.K. Page. [audio transcript]

Here we are at Central Collegiate, the current headquarters of the Calgary Board of Education. This beautiful sandstone building was built in 1908 and when it opened it was considered to be the city's academic high school.

Maxwell Bates at Central Collegiate

We’re at the Barnhart Apartments on 6 Street and 11th Avenue. Now, in the early 1930s, this was one of Calgary's newest and most luxurious apartment buildings. I've often wandered by the Barnhart Apartments, there's no sign that I can see, but I've often wondered and thought "this is a very pretty building, and it looks historic, and I don't know anything about this place." When I got digging last week, I found some very cool things about the Barnhart Apartments, and of course I found a literary connection. Inside the Barnhart Apartments, beautiful interior finishings, kitchens with the latest electric and gas fixtures, a vacuum steam-heating system - I do not know what that is, but it sounds like a state-of-the-art thing, was also home to prominent Calgarians, including one of the Lougheeds' sons. It was also home to Mr. and Mrs. Francis Reeve. Now, we talked about Winnifred Reeve's first Calgary chapter when we were at Royal Avenue and 7th Street, and now I'd like to talk about her second Calgary chapter, which begins at the Barnhart Apartments. To recap: 1924, Winnifred leaves town and her husband, and she heads back to the United States. 1925, Frank is forced to sell their Bowview Ranch near Morley, and he switches lanes. He goes into the brokerage business, which was a pretty good call for Frank Reeve. It put him on a track to becoming one of the richest men in Calgary. Now, this sudden turn of fortune sounds like it comes from a novel, but it's true, and there's more from this story that sounds like it's made up, but it's all true. So, fasten your seatbelts. While Winnifred is living in Hollywood, scratching out a living as a screenwriter, Frank is in Calgary, making a lot of money, and having an affair with the young, pretty, well-connected widow Mrs. Hill. Well, in 1931, Mrs. Hill convinces Frank to file for divorce, and Frank heads off in his car for Reno, Nevada - Divorce City. While he's in Reno, he says "well, I'm going to make one last visit to see Winnifred in Hollywood", and so he drives there and they reconcile. So, August 1931, the Calgary Herald reports: <blockquote>"Mrs. Francis Reeve, known by her writings as Onoto Watanna, and who has been residing in Hollywood, California, for several years, is a visitor in Calgary."</blockquote> But Reeve wasn't just visiting; she was here to stay. She was fifty-six years old, and in the middle of massive personal upheaval. The couple moved into the Barnhart Apartments in 1932; they lived here in 1933, maybe a little bit longer, I still have some digging to do in Henderson's Directories. Winnifred Reeve was clearly preoccupied with her personal life, and she had a lot to do to repair her marriage. She was also intent on settling a score with her husband's lover, Mrs. Hill. Part of this she did on the page. She wrote two short stories about her husband's affair and her near divorce from Frank. One was called "Second Honeymoon", which was never published, and the other was called "Because We Were Lonely", which appeared in an American magazine called True Story in April 1933. Now, "Because We Were Lonely" is a curious story because Winnifred decided to write it from the point of view of "the other woman". You're reading the story, it's all about a fictionalized Mrs. Hill and why she set out to hook Frank Reeve, how she fell in love with him, and then how he changed the plan and decided to stay with his wife. It's a very strange story. So I want to just picture Winnifred Reeve here at the Barnhart Apartments - there she is in this beautiful suite, with all of her state-of-the-art kitchen appliances. She was a two-finger-typist, so you can just see her hunched over that Remington typewriter. According to her daughter, she used to wring her hands between scenes and talk to herself as she wrote. You can just see that happening here at the Barnhart Apartments. The stories she wrote here offered a window into her life of course, but they also give us an insight into Calgary in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Population just shy of 100,000, it was a small provincial city, with as Reeve describes it in one of the stories, "clubs, social cliques, and organizations." Society people played bridge together, they played Mahjong, and of course they talked about each other. In 1920s-30s Calgary as Reeve described it: <blockquote>"Everyone in the social world knew the affairs of everybody else. And if you departed from convention, you faced social ridicule and ostracization."</blockquote> This was the city Reeve left in 1924, because she thought it impossible to survive here as a professional writer, and yet here she was in 1931, back in Calgary, for better or worse. She wrote out her revenge in those stories, and she contemplated writing a novel called "Boom City" about a married woman in Calgary who is afraid her husband is seeing his mistress again. You can find the notes for this novel at the University's Special Collections [in] the Winnifred Reeve fonds. The story Winnifred wrote will coil around the fortunes and careers of several well-known people of the city, while all of the oil companies and the seething electrical feverish atmosphere of an oil boom will prevail. So in that unwritten novel, "Boom City", there would be a marriage breakdown, adultery, there would be internal strife among oil men, there would be dishonesty and graft involving the building of the Glenmore Dam in the early 1930s, and the catastrophic collapse of that dam. Now, wouldn't you have liked to have read that novel?

We’re at the Barnhart Apartments on 6 Street and 11th Avenue. In the early 1930s, this was one of Calgary's newest and most luxurious apartment buildings.

Barnhart Apartments

We're at The Ranchmen's Club, across the street from the Lougheed House. Now, this gentleman's club was built in this location in 1914, on property that James Lougheed arranged for the club to buy. Before that, the club was a wood-frame house situated on three lots on 7th Avenue downtown, where The Bay parkade sits now. This iteration of the club has a cameo in a Calgary novel by Isabel Paterson. Isabel Paterson lived in Calgary from 1905-1910. She was a young, single, working woman and she was working at the heart of the action at the Lougheed-Bennett law firm on Stephen Avenue. She worked side-by-side with R.B. Bennett, a future prime minister of Canada. The narrator of her 1917 Calgary novel, The Magpie's Nest, is also a young woman like Isabel Paterson, living in booming Calgary before the Great War. Here is what she sees when she walks past the Ranchmen's Club on 7th Avenue: <blockquote>"For instance, the Round-up Club. It was the club, as yet there was no country club, this was a purely masculine affair. A group of the men who had made money had organized, bought a little house, and were wont to sprawl on the verandah of it, smoking ostentatious cigars, and imbued with a terrific air of superiority. One could not doubt they felt superior, because they sat on that particular verandah. The verandah was also sacrosanct because they sat on it. This led nowhere, it was funny, but perplexing. Also, the Round-Up Club! The name alone - they were mostly fat and tubby gentlemen who would have been more than ill at ease on the hurricane deck of a bronco."</blockquote> That's from Isabel Paterson's The Magpie's Nest, published in 1917. As a footnote, Isabel Paterson died in 1961, thirty years before the club admitted women in 1993. I want to end with the building just to the west of the Ranchmen's Club, The Estate, the condominium tower that rises up next to it. Now, this was built in the early 1980s on the site of Maxwell Bates' childhood home. That house was an art nouveau-inspired building built in 1907 by Bates' architect father William S. Bates. William S. Bates designed many buildings in Calgary, including the Grain Exchange down 1st Street West and 9th Avenue, kitty-corner to the Palliser Hotel. So just a little bit about Bates' childhood neighbourhood here on 13th Avenue. When the Lougheeds built their house in 1891, this was the outskirts of town, and they were the only folks on 13th Avenue. But soon, super-wealthy Calgarians like William Roper Hull, Patrick Burns, and many other affluent citizens followed the Lougheeds' example, and this stretch of 13th Avenue for several blocks was dubbed "Millionaire's Row". Now today most of those homes are gone, of course Lougheed House is still standing, the Birkenshaw is still there, but this street would have been lined with beautiful homes like that, including the Bates' home. It was probably on the more modest scale on Millionaire's Row, but it was nonetheless a very striking and beautiful home. We can still peek inside that house thanks to P.K. Page. Page often visited the Bates in their home. As a child her family and the Bates were good friends. She writes about the Bates and their house in an 1988 essay. I'd like to read you a little snippet from that essay. <blockquote>"It was the living room of the house that I remember especially. It was a long room, the entire end of which was a diamond-paned bow window, overlooking in summer a stretch of green lawn and a perennial border. It was in the bow window that tea was served, and my mother and Auntie Mae and Auntie Kit [Auntie Mae was Bates' mother, Auntie Kit an aunt] with their recently shingled heads, cloche hats, short skirts and cigarettes, sat among the cups and saucers - flappers. The green light from the garden dappled the three of them, the thin bread and butter, the caraway seed cake, and the two voluptuous white Persian cats that moved to their own slow music."</blockquote> That's from an essay by P.K. Page called "Max and My Mother: A Memoir". This excerpt from P.K.'s essay is a good place to wrap up our tour. Her essay reminds me that writers can take us beyond the city's surfaces into its interiors, back into its history, that they can add layers to our own experience of this place in the present. So thank you for joining me on this virtual tour of the Lougheeds' literary neighbourhood. Please stay safe and be well. Goodbye!

We're at The Ranchmen's Club across the street from the Lougheed House. 

Storied City Literary Walking Tour

Introduction

Introduction

Images

Backstory and Context

Sources

Additional Information