The Sweet Sixteen by Kay Linda;

Author:Kay, Linda;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

A Club Is Born

There seemed to exist between us a communion of ideas, of tastes, I dare say, of sentiments, which lasted until the end, and which, it seemed to me, embellished the beautiful days we spent on the trip even more.

– Léonise Valois, Le Canada, 9 July 1904

At seven o’clock the next morning, another joyous group of female journalists awaited the arrival of the Canadians as their train pulled into Detroit. Despite the early hour, almost the entire membership of the Detroit Women’s Press Club assembled at the station to greet the Canadians. Representatives of the city’s four leading newspapers – the Detroit News, the Detroit Free Press, the Detroit Journal, and the Detroit Tribune – were included in the entourage. Even though they would spend only a short time in Detroit that Thursday, the women from Canada would strike up friendships that, in some cases, would endure for years.

Founded by thirteen female journalists and literary writers in 1901, and simply called the Detroit Press Club at that time, the organization was now in the process of amending its name. In the spring of 1904, the women learned, much to their dismay, that their club name had been summarily hijacked by a newly formed group of 125 male journalists. In order to avoid confusion, they had inserted the word “Women’s” in their title.

Led by Pruella Jane Sherman, women’s editor for the Detroit Sunday News-Tribune and a founding member of the club, the contingent on hand to greet the Canadians also included Alice E. Bartlett, the club’s first president, a journalist for the Detroit Journal, and a celebrated novelist and poet who used the pseudonym “Birch Arnold.”1 A dozen or so other presswomen met the train as well, and the entire group piled into automobiles for a tour through the city streets and, ultimately, to Belle Isle, where they were transported by carriage around the largest island park in the United States, a recreational paradise bigger than New York’s Central Park and designed by the same man, Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed Mount Royal Park in Montreal.

“Nature seemed to have taken particular favour to this small corner of our world,” wrote Amintha Plouffe, “and our crossing the immense park has charmed me so much that if Montreal did not exist, it is there that I would want to live.”2 Belle Isle captivated the other presswomen as well. “It is a kind of Eden where the roses blossom in marvelous fashion,” Léonise Valois wrote.3 The city’s commissioner of parks showered the Canadians with as many roses as they could carry (plucked from forbidden fields in the botanical garden, according to Kate Simpson Hayes) and showed off a newly built conservatory patterned on Thomas Jefferson’s home in Monticello.

The group then left Belle Isle by boat for the return trip to Detroit. More roses awaited on banquet tables in the Wayne Hotel, where the Sun Parlor dining room sat at the very edge of the St Clair River, a tributary of Lake Huron.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.