William Thompson was a very practical, honest, hard-working man. But he also had some some annoying personality quirks, friends and acquaintances weren’t impressed with his looks, and his children were scared to death of him. That’s the very mixed portrait of this great American pioneer that emerges from interviews done 80-odd years ago with the people who knew him. The sometimes snarky reminiscences […]
Archives for August 2010
Colonel Boyce Thompson Dressed Down in Senate Hearing
Called before a Senate Committee investigating campaign financing in 1920, Colonel William Boyce Thompson accused Democratic presidential candidate James D. Cox of “making his millions” on Wall Street. “Don’t forget that your candidate has his millions, and he got it on Wall Street,” the Colonel alleged, according to a September 23, 1920 article in the New York Times. At […]
Marie Rose Pickering Thought Her Housekeeper Was the Better Person
Marie Rose Pickering wrote in a Brisbane, Australia newspaper in the late 1930s that her black housekeeper, who came once a week to polish floors, was way ahead of her “in the development of character and personality.” Marie admired how hard her housekeeper, Daisy, worked after walking five miles from the “blacks’ camp.” Marie Pickering went to Australia after her husband, Julius […]
Newspapers Speculated on Mysterious Woman at Ernest Kruttschnitt’s Funeral
Of all the people who attended the viewing of Ernest B. Kruttschnitt’s corpse, none was more shaken than an unknown woman, bent with age, who sobbed uncontrollably at his casket. A report in the Daily Picayune on April 18th, 1906, failed to identify this woman, though it did say she had acted as his mentor. “She stood at […]
Hugh Simmers Thought His Mother’s Cooking Would Be the Death of Him
Hugh Simmers, III, thought his mother’s old-world cooking, which included time-honored classics such as Yorkshire pudding and standing rib roasts, would send him to an early grave. Simmers made these allegations in a letter written to an unidentified recipient on December 30th, 1996. In it, he takes his mother, Mabel McCullen Simmers, to task for using butter to cook nearly everything and his […]
Society Pages Describe Marie Gingras as French Down to Her Highly Polished Fingertips
Marie Gingras Pickering lived her life, warts and all, under the harsh magnifying glass of the San Francisco society pages, judging by the countless references made to her and her family in newspaper accounts during the early 1900s. A cursory search reveals that she hosted countless bridge and tea parties, always with elaborate flower decorations; served as a patroness of a […]