Eavesdropping on 1920s Calgary

by Shaun Hunter

Eighth Avenue in the 1920s (Photo: Peel’s Prairie Provinces)

Imagine it’s 1923 and Calgary’s Lady Isabella Lougheed is hosting a literary dinner party. Twelve writers of early Calgary have gathered in her grand home on Thirteenth Avenue West.

Lady Isabella Lougheed, a noted Calgary hostess, avid reader and champion of local culture

Guests include established international literary stars of the day, and writers starting out on their careers. Authors who were passing through town, and those who stayed. Writers who grew up here, and others who lived out their adult lives in Calgary.

What might the writers invited to Lady Lougheed’s fictional dinner party have been talking about in 1923?

Politics, perhaps.

In Ottawa, there was a young new Liberal prime minister leading a minority government, with no seats in Alberta (William Lyon MacKenzie King).

In Edmonton, a populist government had recently swept into power, intent on overturning its predecessor’s policies and resisting control by Central Canada (the United Farmers of Alberta).

A decade after the end of the real-estate boom, Lady Lougheed’s dinner guests may have been preoccupied by the local economy. In 1923, there was a general mood of pessimism about low commodity prices, stagnant development, high downtown vacancy rates, and municipal debt.

Calgary’s then Central Library. The Great War monument was unveiled in mid-1924. (Photo: Calgary Public Library Postcards from the Past)

Over at the public library, chief librarian Alexander Calhoun and his staff were coping with a one-third reduction in their budget – a situation that would impact city readers and writers.

Dinner guests might have been talking about the return of Guy Weadick and his plan to turn the city’s mood around with yet another comeback of the Calgary Stampede.

Weadick was quoted in the Herald that year, saying: “Every time I come [to the city] some fellow comes up to me and says ‘Oh, Guy, this is an awful country: everything is going to the dogs and eight thousand people have left Calgary this winter.’ That’s the kind of talk that is going on, but we have got to stop it and boost.”

This being a literary gathering, Lady Lougheed’s guests would probably be talking shop.

Who had a nabbed a spot in the Calgary Daily Herald or the Morning Albertan for a poem or an essay?

Who had been invited to read their work on the brand-new medium of radio – at the Herald’s CFAC studios downtown?

And who had picked up a copy of Calgary-based author Laura Goodman Salverson’s much-talked about debut novel The Viking Heart at Osborne’s bookstore on 8th Avenue?

People were chattering about this story of Manitoba Icelandic settlers across the Prairies, and as far away as Toronto.

Winnifred Eaton Reeve (aka Onoto Watanna), an international literary celebrity who called Calgary home in the early 1920s

Dinner guests would be talking to – and perhaps about – Calgary’s own celebrity novelist: Winnifred Eaton Reeve, a prolific author with an international reputation who now called southern Alberta home.

By early 1923, Reeve had become a vocal champion for Canadian writers and their stories. In her speech that year to the Canadian Club of Calgary, Reeve proclaimed: “Literary talent is a national asset, more important than mere gold… [Writers] are needed because no country can hope to achieve greatness without its dreamers.”

Reeve railed against stereotypes of cold and snowy Canada perpetrated by non-Canadian writers.

Calgary, Reeve noted, was also subject to a wide literary paintbrush. “[The city] has gone down to dubious fame as a small cowtown of the wild west type… Calgary itself has a personality all of its own, and teems with material for the writer. Who is going to write of this electrical city with its daily booms?”

And of course, when writers get together, they grumble about money. Poor compensation, unfair copyright laws, long waits for payment by publishers.

Plus ça change… the more things stay the same.

Lady Lougheed’s fictional dinner party is happening now until April 26, 2020 in an exhibit called “Storied City: Early Calgary through the Eyes of Writers.” And if the idea of a dinner party makes you hungry, combine your visit with a meal at the Lougheed House restaurant. Details? https://lougheedhouse.com

For a detailed introduction to the exhibit, check out Eric Volmer’s feature in the Calgary Herald