Thursday, April 23, 1925.. My mother.

My mother was born in St. Lambert, Quebec.

Last edition:

Wednesday, April 22, 1925. Thought police.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, 2020s, 2025, Disaster, Great Salt Lake, Japan, law, Republican Party, Utah

Tuesday, April 25, 1944. The Blood for Goods deal extended, Air disaster at Montreal, the death of George Herriman.

Joel Brand in 1961, age 55.

The Nazis offered Hungarian rescue worker Joel Brand an offer which has been termed the "Blood for Goods" deal.  It was an offer to free 1,000,000 Hungarian Jews, releasing them to an Allied country, save for Palestine (oddly) for goods.  The offer was extended through Adolf Eichmann to Brand, who was a pre-war Hungarian Zionist.

Brand carried the message to the Allies, making his way through Turkey to Egypt, where he was arrested by the British.  The British did not take the offer seriously and believed it was a trick. The US was cautious about the offer but less hostile to it.  British opposition to exploring it ended the matter, and the British press leaked it and termed it blackmail by the fall.

At this point in the war, members of the SS were not completely loyal to Hitler and there is some reason to believe that this was a camouflaged effort to open up communications with the Western Allies in order to advance a separate peace, a delusional prospect of that is what they were thinking.

Brand moved to Israel after the war and was haunted the rest of his life by the failure of the proposal.  He died visiting Germany in 1964, at age 58.

A Royal Air Force variant of the B-24, a Liberator B Mark VI crashed into the Griffintown neighborhood of Montreal after taking off from Dorval Airport. The crew and ten civilians were killed.

My mother lived in the St. Lambert district of Montreal at the time.  St. Lambert is directly across the river from Griffentown.  I'd never heard of this incident, but then, there are many such thing that my parents never mentioned to me on matters like this, and I suppose that's to be expected.  Casper suffered numerous air disasters during World War Two.

My mother, then 19 years of age, would have been working in the city at this time, so was likely on the Griffentown side of the river when the accident occured.

The first combat helicopter evacuation completed in the CBI:

21–25 April 1944

The Luftwaffe raided shipping at Portsmouth and Plymouth-Devonport in a nighttime raid.  The same night, the HMS Black Prince and three Canadian destroyers engaged German warships in the English Channel, sinking the T-29 and damaging the T-24 and T-27.

The T-39 series of German ships were torpedo "boats", but due to their size they were more in the nature of corvettes.

Allied forces landed at Humboldt Bay, New Guinea.

The British government announced that it had a £2.76 billion deficit, £89 million smaller than anticipated.

Service Club mural, Ft. Bliss, Texas.  April 25, 1944.

The United Negro College Fund was established.

George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat, died at age 63.

Herriman was creole and born in New Orleans, although he speant much of his adult life in Los Angeles.  The Creole are their own distinct ethnicity, with some noting that means by default that they are of "mixed race", something that a lot of non Louisianians don't realize as they confuse creole with Cajun, the two not being the same.  Under the bizarre rules of American culture, Herriman would have been regarded as "black" in some regions of the United States, although legally, and equally bizarrely, he could at the time choose to self identify as white or black, neither of which really describes his ethnic heritage.  He self identified as white, which makes sense, as to do otherwise would have hindered his career.

Herriman was a shy and gentlemanly man.  A Catholic, he married his childhood sweetheart and had two children, as well as a lot of pets, of which he wsa very fond.

Last prior edition:

Monday, April 24, 1944. Violating Swiss Airspace.

1940s, 1944, 1944 at the Movies, Brazil, Commandos, Munich Germany, New Guinea, Personalities, Prisoners of War, Royal Air Force, Special Boat Service, Switzerland, United States Air Force, World War Two

Industrial History: 1929 Jacques Cartier Bridge over St. Lawrence Rive...

Industrial History: 1929 Jacques Cartier Bridge over St. Lawrence Rive...: ( Historic Bridges ; 3D Satellite , 3,445 photos) Pont Jacques-Cartier, Pont du Havre (Harbor Bridge) Street View , Aug 2022 Street View , J...

Crossing over this bridge frightened me as a child. 

Blog Mirror: A Hundred Years Ago. 1921 Thanksgiving Menus

From the always excellent A Hundred Years Ago:

1921 Thanksgiving Menus

Note, the small servantless  house.  

I commented on that entry with this:

I’m struck by the “servantless” house comment. I wonder what percentage of homes actually had servants? Surely a small minority, but still its an interesting comment as the author expects that some of the readers will have them.

We don't have servants, rather obviously, and I don't know anyone who does.  I do know some people who have "cleaning ladies", which are women who will clean houses, but not a daily basis.

I know that my father's family didn't have domestics of any kind.  No doubt my grandmother had the laboring oar there, and likely my father's two sisters a bit after a certain age. But my mother's family did have them up until some point in the 1930s, when the Great Depression halted that and the female members of the household took over.  I also know that they were what my mother called "French", meaning Quebecois, which is interesting in that my mother was "Irish Canadian", which in her case really meant that she was mostly Irish, but also a little French (probably 1/4, if I recall correctly).  Irish Canadians mostly lived in the cities, as she did, and their position in Quebec's economic system, which was highly agrarian at the time, was different from that of the full Quebecois.  Having said that, almost all Quebecois near the cities were also somewhat Irish, as Irish orphans had been taken in right off the docks at one time through direct adoptions by the Catholic population.

The maids didn't live there, they came in, and I don't know how frequently.  They also didn't cook, that was my grandmother's job, and like my mother, she reportedly was not particularly good at it.

She wouldn't have cooked anything like this, of course.  American Thanksgiving is an American deal.

Early Days In St. Lambert

An interesting article, with interesting photographs, about my mother's family when they lived in St. Lambert, Quebec.

Thanks go out to my uncle Ed for forwarding this link to me.

Note the "Notary" sign on the porch, which has a different connotation in most Common Law jurisdictions than it does in the United States.