When a 30-year-old spinster meets a wealthy man of 84
Friday, 21 May 2010 05:00
One hundred years ago, clippings from the newspapers of May 21, 1910.
Lindsay Post (May 20). “The story of the courtship and marriage of Mr. Michael Fraser, of Midland, a man of 84 years and worth about $100,000 [almost $2 million today], and Miss Hannah Margaret Robertson, aged 30, daughter of the Rev. William Robertson, formerly a Presbyterian minister, now editor of the Dundas Banner, was told before Mr. Justice Riddell, at Osgoode Hall [Toronto] Saturday.”
The case was brought before Justice Riddell by an application by Fraser’s family to have the marriage declared invalid because Fraser was claimed to be not mentally capable.
The court was told that Rev. Robertson, his daughter and other relatives and friends, broke into Fraser’s house, “armed with a marriage licence and a borrowed wedding rings. The happy couple was promptly married by the bride’s father, the bridegroom attired… in a shirt, a pair of trousers and slippers.”
A.L. Macdonnell, counsel for the Fraser family, had a question for Justice Riddell: “When a woman of 30 meets a man of 84 only twice in a fortnight, and then only in the presence of another man who has told her the man has money, may we not presume what is the attraction?”
“”Why not?” responded the judge. “When a woman gets to that age she is entitled to look after herself and think of her future.”
Racist mass murder foiled
Canadian Press. Canada’s fester racism, under which Chinese suffered for decades, came dangerously close to mass murder claiming 120 lives before an attempt to dynamite two railway cars at Vancouver was foiled. The Chinese had arrived on the SS Empress of China for a scheduled “trip across the continent.
“The plan to kill the Chinese was discovered by a CPR agent, who found a stick of dynamite inside the stove of each of the two cars.” Ham Woo, a cook, was preparing to light the stove in one of the cars. The stove had been stuffed with paper, and Mr. Ham, not knowing what it was, had a stick of dynamite in his hand, when C.L. Corning, the railroad agent, stopped him and took the dynamite from his hand. A 60-pound explosive cap was found attached to the dynamite. Another stick of dynamite was later found in the second car.
Living on a dollar a week
Montreal Star. Living on a food budget of a dollar a week for almost four years has left senior Harvard University student and star athlete E.V.M. Long with outstanding “physique, stamina and endurance… the third strongest man attending” Harvard, says the Star. Long stuck to his penny-pinching diet the first year “because he had to do it or give up his college course, and the other three because he found that the regimen was not only sufficient but health-giving.” Long claims that “ninety-nine people out of a hundred eat too much for their own good.
For three cents, Long buys a good breakfast of “plenty of bread and a cereal. For lunch, cream toast or some vegetable could be obtained for as much more. This leave nine cents for a good heavy dinner.”
Long explains his method:
“It is easy enough to live on 14 or 15 cents a day when you’ve worked it out to two things—system and habit. First a man has got to find out the greatest amount of nourishment that a given allowance of money will buy, and so arrange his diet that it will best fit his individual needs. That’s system. Second, he has got to get used to eating those thing right along and forget the saw that variety is the spice of life. That’s habit.”
Arctic nights in a tent
Peterborough Review. Nights in an Arctic tent are restless, says American polar explorer Robert Peary, said to be the first man to reach the North Pole, on April 6, 1909. An astronomer in 1988, however, claimed that Peary’s measurements were wrong.
“A man’s first night in a canvas tent in the Arctic is likely to be rather wakeful,” Peary writes in Hampshire’s Magazine, as quoted in the Peterborough Review. “The ice makes mysterious noises, the dogs bark and fight outside the tent where they are tethered, and as three Eskimos and one white man usually occupied a small tent and the oil stove is left burning all night, the air, not withstanding the cold, is not overly pure, and sometimes the Eskimos begin chanting to the spirits of their ancestors in the middle of the night. Sometimes, too, the new man’s nerves are tried by hearing wolves howl in the distance.”
There are two meals a day, breakfast and supper, but “Sometimes it is necessary to travel 24 hours without stopping for food.”
“Pounded ice” is melted in two pots on a double-burner oil stove. “One pot is used for tea and the other may be used to warm beans or to boil meat, if there is any. Each man has a one-quart cup for tea and a hunting knife, which serves many purposes. He does not carry a fork and one teaspoon is considered quite enough for a party of four. Each man helps himself from the pot—sticks in his knife and fishes out a piece of meat.”