Canadian journalist and prolific writer, Blodwen Davies personally hand-set and
printed her book, A Study of Tom Thomson, in 1935. Perhaps, that explains why the book
lacks footnotes, references and bibliography – too much detail work. The highly-prized
copy I bought at http://www.alibris.com for $252.00 in November 2003 is No. 62 of a
special edition of 100 personally signed by Ms. Davies.
In Chapter III called “The Boy” she tells what she learned from Thomson’s family and
friends about the three years he spent in Seattle, Washington, from 1901 to 1904. Ms.
Davies never personally identifies any of them and offers no clue whatsoever for the
source of the brief mention she makes of Tom’s first girlfriend, who later biographers
would learn was Alice Elinor Lambert.
“One more event occurred that completed the cycle of experiences that Seattle had in
store for him. He fell in love. Friends and relatives knew next to nothing of the significance
of that brief and tragic romance,” she wrote. “Thomson was endowed with a depth of
feeling that would have been incomprehensible to the inexperienced young woman he
would meet in a west town coast thirty-odd ago (sic). Nobody knows exactly what
happened. Some say the lady laughed.”
When I first read this brief description, I was especially puzzled to understand why Ms.
Davies had concluded that, despite the fact that his friends and relatives knew enough to
“say the lady laughed”, they “knew next to nothing of the significance of that brief and
tragic romance” or even her name. Was that her awkwardly condescending way of saying
that she recognized what they failed to appreciate? A paragraph later, Ms. Davies
answered my question.
“This shadowy love affair was a very important event. Of the quality of the woman’s love
we know nothing, but the significant thing was Thomson’s love for her. It was the sort of
experience that might have turned him into an embittered man, if his love had been
selfish and possessive.”
In a following paragraph, Ms. Davies ends a particularly ethereal discussion of “love as a
cosmic force often used as a means of personal gratification rather than as intended for
the evolution of man into a creative being” by concluding, “Because of the results in
Thomson’s life, we know the quality of his love. He did not waste its force by blaming the
woman but to set to work to alter the currents of his life.”
This essay, written 91 years after Tom Thomson drowned in Algonquin Park’s Canoe
Lake on July 8, 1917, asks and tries to answer what significance this 1904 romance had
for Tom Thomson, age 27, and Alice Elinor Lambert, age 18. Much of what is known today
comes from the extensive research of Joan Murray, author of numerous books about the
painting and life of Tom Thomson. Born in New York, in 1943, Ms. Murray studied art
history at the University of Toronto, receiving an Honours B.A. (1965). After earning her M.
A. at Columbia University (1966), she returned to University of Toronto for her doctorate.
From 1970 to 1973, she worked as the first Curator of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of
Ontario. From 1974 to 1999, Ms. Murray directed the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in
Oshawa. Since then, she has organized more than 100 exhibitions and written many
books on Canadian art. For the last several years, she served as interim executive
director and chief executive officer of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinberg,
Ontario.
While waiting page proofs of Algonquin Elegy, I found a website, which re-published an
article about Alice Elinor Lambert from the Skagit River Journal of History and Folklore,
written and edited by Noel V. Bourasaw called and “Alice Elinor Lambert and Elizabeth
Poehlman and their quest for history and a special guest — painter Tom Thomson.” I had
learned much researching Lambert family history. Adding to my understanding was
additional genealogical work on the family of Pitt Pill and Mabel A. Shaw.
I knew that Tom’s younger brother, Ralph, and a Thomson friend, Horace Rutherford,
boarded at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Shaw in Seattle, where 18-year-old Alice had come
from Portland to stay on weekends over the summer of 1904 while she work as a
saleslady in a millinery shop owned by her aunt’s family. I had also learned that she
would finish high school in Seattle the following year. Finally, I’d read her romance novel,
Women Are Like That, which was published by Dell in 1934.
Some earlier biographers said Tom, too, was boarding with Mr. and Mrs. Shaw, when
Alice arrived from Portland. Others said he stayed at the home of Charles C. Maring, a
friend of his older brother, George Thomson. Joan Murray reported that Tom and Horace
Rutherford returned to Owen Sound in 1904. U.S. Census records verified that Ralph
Thomson married Ruth Shaw, older daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Shaw, in 1906.
In November 1971, when Alice was 85-years-old, she corresponded with Joan Murray,
telling a brief tale of her romance with Tom Thomson. Little of what Alice wrote is
possible to verify. “I recall him standing by the piano, while Mrs. Shaw . . . played . . . . One
of his favorites was ‘In the Shade of the Sheltering Palm.’ He would stand there tall and
dark and slender, singing in his clear tenor, and the other boarders, the family and I
would sit around and beg him to sing.”
Now, I thought, there’s something I should be able to double-check. All of the popular
songs that I found while researching the book that was written before 1904 simply did not
strike me as in anyway romantic or memorable. I decided that she was mistaken and
wrote the scene with another song.
While preparing notes for my summer book tour in 2005, I stumbled on a tune from a
musical comedy by Leslie Stuart, “Floradora” performed in London and New York at the
turn of the century to adoring audiences. Dolores, the beautiful and flirtatious heroine, is
being pursued (and spoiled) by a host of men, including the nasty villain. At the end of Act
One, the male hero sings “The Shade of the Palm.” The refrain is particularly romantic
and memorable.
Listen to a sample of the song from an old cast recording.
In my earlier research I first found two old drinking songs ill-suited to the Chapter 13
scene I was writing. The first is “Down at the Old Bull and Bush,” the first line of which is
“Talk about the shade of a sheltering palm” by Harry Von Tilzer. In 1903, Von Tilzer and
Andrew B. Sterling wrote “Under the Anheuser Bush.” It uses the same first line. These I
rejected.
I considered the possibility that Alice was remembering good times she enjoyed to
several songs not written until years later. They include “Down Among the Sheltering
Palms” by Abe Olman, James Brockman and Jack Yellen. Tommy Dorsey’s 1935 hit, “On
Treasure Island” includes the exact line, “In the shade of the sheltering palms.” Harold
Arlen wrote lyrics for a musical comedy, “Down Among the Sheltering Palms.”
I provide this excruciating detail not to illustrate whatever skills I have in using Internet
search engines but the extreme difficulty its depth, breadth and lack of context create for
historical period research. I was impressed to learn that a line from "The Shade of the
Palm" was used by James Joyce in his book, Ulysses. Moreover, the results I found
illustrate how a catchy phrase from a popular song can long survive its original writing.
I confidently conclude that Alice’s memory of the scene she described for Joan Murray
was not only factual but lovingly recalled. In her 1971 letter to Joan Murray, Alice describes
the last time she saw Tom Thomson. “. . .[I]t was at Alki Point. The street car stopped a
mile away from the settlement on Alki, and we walked hand in hand, seldom speaking,
my heart bursting with love – I have never felt toward anyone on earth as I did toward Tom.
We had ESP, hardly needing words, and I know he felt the same toward me. . . .The thing
that sent him East concerned me. A fellow boarder, I forget his name, told Tom I was
engaged to him. Tom packed him up and himself and went East to save me from
whoever that was.”
Chapters 13 of Algonquin Elegy fictionally re-creates their first meeting with a
spontaneous duet performed by Tom and Alice with Mrs. Shaw at her piano. The song I
chose was recorded for Victor Records by Irish tenor Frank Mcdonough in 1904. Sheet
music for the song was published in 1905. It was perfectly suited to what I was trying to
do – write a compressed version of what might have happened, which illustrated their
character and talents.
The song I decided upon, “I Love You All the Time” was used in some road productions
of the 1903 Broadway musical, “The Wizard of Oz.” Now, I grew up watching NBC’s
annual broadcast of the Judy Garland film. That original production is nothing like the
movie. I was hooked during a Sunday morning writing and research session at which I
first heard a recording of Mr. Mcdonough performance of the song that I found at http:
//www.hungrytigerpress.com/tigertunes/allthetime.shtml.
Chapter 13 of Algonquin Elegy also tries to re-create their last meeting with emotional
fidelity, at least, to what Alice said happened as well as a starkly different story told in a
1971 letter from Ruth Wilkins, daughter of Ralph and Ruth Thomson, to her cousin, Elva
Henry, a copy of which Joan Murray obtained in researching her 1994 book, Tom
Thomson: The Last Spring. In her letter, Ms. Wilkins said Tom proposed to Alice. The
effervescent Miss Lambert nervously giggled, she said, causing the very sensitive
Thomson to abandon marriage ambitions and return home to Owen Sound.
Considering who she was makes this latter scene certainly plausible. Alice came from a
highly educated and well-regarded family – her father had been president of Oregon’s
Willamette University. She was sent by her parents to Seattle to finish high school. She
was 18-years-old. Thomson was 26-years-old. In assessing what to make of this I
should disclose that I considered my own experience with four daughters and three step-
daughters, all 19 to 32 years old.
It struck me as remarkable that anyone except a very naïve young man with no female
experience would have expected any other reaction from such a bright and confident girl,
who was bound to work for her aunt’s family, graduate from high school and pursue lofty
educational goals before considering marriage even in 1904. Moreover, Tom Thomson,
I thought, lacked experience with adolescent girls.
Tom had three older sisters, Elizabeth, Louise and Minnie. He probably barely
experienced the turning from adolescence to young adulthood of Elizabeth, eight years
older. Louise and Minnie were four and two years older than Tom. The historical record
suggests that he may not have attended high school with either of them because he was
sickly and stayed at home. I concluded from what I knew that Tom fell into his romance
with Alice Elinor Lambert knowing next to nothing about wily adolescent girls.
A brief story about Tom Thomson is reprinted in More than a Cookbook published by The
Friends of the Leith Church in 2005. Pete Telford writes:
"My great-aunt, Euph (Telford) Fleming once regaled us with a story about the young Tom
Thomson. She said, 'Tom was five years ahead of me in school and never paid me much
attention. However, in the spring of 1901 when I was eighteen, Tom had just returned
home after attending the Canada Business College in Chatham and he invited me on a
date. Our evening out was the Wonderland Theatre on 8th Street in Owen Sound. Now, I
admire Tom for painting; but on a date he was a dull fellow -- he uttered not a word during
our walk to the theatre, nor on our walk back to my house!''
Therefore, proposing marriage struck me as going against Tom's shy character. I
concluded that Tom never made a marriage proposal but nobody will ever know. Alice
made no such admission and nobody ever quotes him as mentioning her again.
Noel V. Bourasaw’s article for the Skagit River Journal of History & Folklore traces Alice
Elinor Lambert’s later life and broadly confirms all of the conclusions I earlier drew about
her. He and I disagree whether she might have dated promiscuously before marrying
Joseph E. Ransburg in 1912, with whom she had two daughters, before divorcing in the
early 1930s.
I agree that Alice was an intelligent, vivacious, unaffected and determined woman, who
today would certainly consider herself a leading feminist. She worked as a newspaper
writer on the east and west coasts, lonely hearts columnist for the Heart San Francisco
Examiner, radio host, romance novelist and Depression era activist. An important part of
her struggle as a writer that is more than can be readily explained today is all that she did
during the Depression of the 1930s. Mr. Bourasaw touches on this period of her life:
“Alice wrote a book during her New York time called Hospital Nocturne (Passion in San
Francisco), which was published by Vanguard Press. Vanguard was a ‘vanity publisher,’
which printed books by self-published authors and then the author was responsible for
promoting it. She wrote two more books, Lost Fragrance and Women Are Like That, also
published by Vanguard in 1933 and 1934. All three were republished by Dell and can be
found on the Internet and in used-book stores. They are all what would be called
romance novels today. Linda Achimore quoted for us from Alice's divorce decree that the
principal reason for the divorce was Ransburg's disrespect of her writing and possible
derision, at least from Alice's point of view. We now know that her ex-husband helped
support her financially during the Depression years, as did her daughters.”
Since Alice self-published her books, as I did with Algonquin Elegy, I especially identify
with her struggles during the Great Depression. My own daughters have yet no full
understanding of what NBC’s Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation.” My
experience is from Depression-era parents, who vividly and often described to me and
my brothers what Asian children lacked at meals as we grew up.
Mr. Bourasaw reports that Alice settled in Darrington, Washington, where she died at age
95 in 1981. In Chapter 19 of Algonquin Elegy, I conclude that “[n]either Alice nor Blodwen
Davies probably reached the true story – these two artistic souls simply passed, mingled,
and departed on their separately destined paths of life.” From what I have learned since
writing the book, I stand firmly by those words. I do believe that Alice and Tom enjoyed a
very special summer romance, which sparked deeply sensuous and physical feelings in
her. Tom, however, was driven by the passion of an artistic genius whose creative
desires ached for release, which he would never find in the arms of a woman but rather,
beginning eleven years later, in painting the Canadian wilderness of Algonquin Park.
printed her book, A Study of Tom Thomson, in 1935. Perhaps, that explains why the book
lacks footnotes, references and bibliography – too much detail work. The highly-prized
copy I bought at http://www.alibris.com for $252.00 in November 2003 is No. 62 of a
special edition of 100 personally signed by Ms. Davies.
In Chapter III called “The Boy” she tells what she learned from Thomson’s family and
friends about the three years he spent in Seattle, Washington, from 1901 to 1904. Ms.
Davies never personally identifies any of them and offers no clue whatsoever for the
source of the brief mention she makes of Tom’s first girlfriend, who later biographers
would learn was Alice Elinor Lambert.
“One more event occurred that completed the cycle of experiences that Seattle had in
store for him. He fell in love. Friends and relatives knew next to nothing of the significance
of that brief and tragic romance,” she wrote. “Thomson was endowed with a depth of
feeling that would have been incomprehensible to the inexperienced young woman he
would meet in a west town coast thirty-odd ago (sic). Nobody knows exactly what
happened. Some say the lady laughed.”
When I first read this brief description, I was especially puzzled to understand why Ms.
Davies had concluded that, despite the fact that his friends and relatives knew enough to
“say the lady laughed”, they “knew next to nothing of the significance of that brief and
tragic romance” or even her name. Was that her awkwardly condescending way of saying
that she recognized what they failed to appreciate? A paragraph later, Ms. Davies
answered my question.
“This shadowy love affair was a very important event. Of the quality of the woman’s love
we know nothing, but the significant thing was Thomson’s love for her. It was the sort of
experience that might have turned him into an embittered man, if his love had been
selfish and possessive.”
In a following paragraph, Ms. Davies ends a particularly ethereal discussion of “love as a
cosmic force often used as a means of personal gratification rather than as intended for
the evolution of man into a creative being” by concluding, “Because of the results in
Thomson’s life, we know the quality of his love. He did not waste its force by blaming the
woman but to set to work to alter the currents of his life.”
This essay, written 91 years after Tom Thomson drowned in Algonquin Park’s Canoe
Lake on July 8, 1917, asks and tries to answer what significance this 1904 romance had
for Tom Thomson, age 27, and Alice Elinor Lambert, age 18. Much of what is known today
comes from the extensive research of Joan Murray, author of numerous books about the
painting and life of Tom Thomson. Born in New York, in 1943, Ms. Murray studied art
history at the University of Toronto, receiving an Honours B.A. (1965). After earning her M.
A. at Columbia University (1966), she returned to University of Toronto for her doctorate.
From 1970 to 1973, she worked as the first Curator of Canadian Art at the Art Gallery of
Ontario. From 1974 to 1999, Ms. Murray directed the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in
Oshawa. Since then, she has organized more than 100 exhibitions and written many
books on Canadian art. For the last several years, she served as interim executive
director and chief executive officer of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinberg,
Ontario.
While waiting page proofs of Algonquin Elegy, I found a website, which re-published an
article about Alice Elinor Lambert from the Skagit River Journal of History and Folklore,
written and edited by Noel V. Bourasaw called and “Alice Elinor Lambert and Elizabeth
Poehlman and their quest for history and a special guest — painter Tom Thomson.” I had
learned much researching Lambert family history. Adding to my understanding was
additional genealogical work on the family of Pitt Pill and Mabel A. Shaw.
I knew that Tom’s younger brother, Ralph, and a Thomson friend, Horace Rutherford,
boarded at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Shaw in Seattle, where 18-year-old Alice had come
from Portland to stay on weekends over the summer of 1904 while she work as a
saleslady in a millinery shop owned by her aunt’s family. I had also learned that she
would finish high school in Seattle the following year. Finally, I’d read her romance novel,
Women Are Like That, which was published by Dell in 1934.
Some earlier biographers said Tom, too, was boarding with Mr. and Mrs. Shaw, when
Alice arrived from Portland. Others said he stayed at the home of Charles C. Maring, a
friend of his older brother, George Thomson. Joan Murray reported that Tom and Horace
Rutherford returned to Owen Sound in 1904. U.S. Census records verified that Ralph
Thomson married Ruth Shaw, older daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Shaw, in 1906.
In November 1971, when Alice was 85-years-old, she corresponded with Joan Murray,
telling a brief tale of her romance with Tom Thomson. Little of what Alice wrote is
possible to verify. “I recall him standing by the piano, while Mrs. Shaw . . . played . . . . One
of his favorites was ‘In the Shade of the Sheltering Palm.’ He would stand there tall and
dark and slender, singing in his clear tenor, and the other boarders, the family and I
would sit around and beg him to sing.”
Now, I thought, there’s something I should be able to double-check. All of the popular
songs that I found while researching the book that was written before 1904 simply did not
strike me as in anyway romantic or memorable. I decided that she was mistaken and
wrote the scene with another song.
While preparing notes for my summer book tour in 2005, I stumbled on a tune from a
musical comedy by Leslie Stuart, “Floradora” performed in London and New York at the
turn of the century to adoring audiences. Dolores, the beautiful and flirtatious heroine, is
being pursued (and spoiled) by a host of men, including the nasty villain. At the end of Act
One, the male hero sings “The Shade of the Palm.” The refrain is particularly romantic
and memorable.
“Oh my Dolores, queen of the Eastern sea,
Fair one of Eden look to the West for me,
My star will be shining, love,
When you're in the moonlight calm,
So be waiting for me by the Eastern sea,
In the shade of the sheltering palm.”
Listen to a sample of the song from an old cast recording.
In my earlier research I first found two old drinking songs ill-suited to the Chapter 13
scene I was writing. The first is “Down at the Old Bull and Bush,” the first line of which is
“Talk about the shade of a sheltering palm” by Harry Von Tilzer. In 1903, Von Tilzer and
Andrew B. Sterling wrote “Under the Anheuser Bush.” It uses the same first line. These I
rejected.
I considered the possibility that Alice was remembering good times she enjoyed to
several songs not written until years later. They include “Down Among the Sheltering
Palms” by Abe Olman, James Brockman and Jack Yellen. Tommy Dorsey’s 1935 hit, “On
Treasure Island” includes the exact line, “In the shade of the sheltering palms.” Harold
Arlen wrote lyrics for a musical comedy, “Down Among the Sheltering Palms.”
I provide this excruciating detail not to illustrate whatever skills I have in using Internet
search engines but the extreme difficulty its depth, breadth and lack of context create for
historical period research. I was impressed to learn that a line from "The Shade of the
Palm" was used by James Joyce in his book, Ulysses. Moreover, the results I found
illustrate how a catchy phrase from a popular song can long survive its original writing.
I confidently conclude that Alice’s memory of the scene she described for Joan Murray
was not only factual but lovingly recalled. In her 1971 letter to Joan Murray, Alice describes
the last time she saw Tom Thomson. “. . .[I]t was at Alki Point. The street car stopped a
mile away from the settlement on Alki, and we walked hand in hand, seldom speaking,
my heart bursting with love – I have never felt toward anyone on earth as I did toward Tom.
We had ESP, hardly needing words, and I know he felt the same toward me. . . .The thing
that sent him East concerned me. A fellow boarder, I forget his name, told Tom I was
engaged to him. Tom packed him up and himself and went East to save me from
whoever that was.”
Chapters 13 of Algonquin Elegy fictionally re-creates their first meeting with a
spontaneous duet performed by Tom and Alice with Mrs. Shaw at her piano. The song I
chose was recorded for Victor Records by Irish tenor Frank Mcdonough in 1904. Sheet
music for the song was published in 1905. It was perfectly suited to what I was trying to
do – write a compressed version of what might have happened, which illustrated their
character and talents.
The song I decided upon, “I Love You All the Time” was used in some road productions
of the 1903 Broadway musical, “The Wizard of Oz.” Now, I grew up watching NBC’s
annual broadcast of the Judy Garland film. That original production is nothing like the
movie. I was hooked during a Sunday morning writing and research session at which I
first heard a recording of Mr. Mcdonough performance of the song that I found at http:
//www.hungrytigerpress.com/tigertunes/allthetime.shtml.
Chapter 13 of Algonquin Elegy also tries to re-create their last meeting with emotional
fidelity, at least, to what Alice said happened as well as a starkly different story told in a
1971 letter from Ruth Wilkins, daughter of Ralph and Ruth Thomson, to her cousin, Elva
Henry, a copy of which Joan Murray obtained in researching her 1994 book, Tom
Thomson: The Last Spring. In her letter, Ms. Wilkins said Tom proposed to Alice. The
effervescent Miss Lambert nervously giggled, she said, causing the very sensitive
Thomson to abandon marriage ambitions and return home to Owen Sound.
Considering who she was makes this latter scene certainly plausible. Alice came from a
highly educated and well-regarded family – her father had been president of Oregon’s
Willamette University. She was sent by her parents to Seattle to finish high school. She
was 18-years-old. Thomson was 26-years-old. In assessing what to make of this I
should disclose that I considered my own experience with four daughters and three step-
daughters, all 19 to 32 years old.
It struck me as remarkable that anyone except a very naïve young man with no female
experience would have expected any other reaction from such a bright and confident girl,
who was bound to work for her aunt’s family, graduate from high school and pursue lofty
educational goals before considering marriage even in 1904. Moreover, Tom Thomson,
I thought, lacked experience with adolescent girls.
Tom had three older sisters, Elizabeth, Louise and Minnie. He probably barely
experienced the turning from adolescence to young adulthood of Elizabeth, eight years
older. Louise and Minnie were four and two years older than Tom. The historical record
suggests that he may not have attended high school with either of them because he was
sickly and stayed at home. I concluded from what I knew that Tom fell into his romance
with Alice Elinor Lambert knowing next to nothing about wily adolescent girls.
A brief story about Tom Thomson is reprinted in More than a Cookbook published by The
Friends of the Leith Church in 2005. Pete Telford writes:
"My great-aunt, Euph (Telford) Fleming once regaled us with a story about the young Tom
Thomson. She said, 'Tom was five years ahead of me in school and never paid me much
attention. However, in the spring of 1901 when I was eighteen, Tom had just returned
home after attending the Canada Business College in Chatham and he invited me on a
date. Our evening out was the Wonderland Theatre on 8th Street in Owen Sound. Now, I
admire Tom for painting; but on a date he was a dull fellow -- he uttered not a word during
our walk to the theatre, nor on our walk back to my house!''
Therefore, proposing marriage struck me as going against Tom's shy character. I
concluded that Tom never made a marriage proposal but nobody will ever know. Alice
made no such admission and nobody ever quotes him as mentioning her again.
Noel V. Bourasaw’s article for the Skagit River Journal of History & Folklore traces Alice
Elinor Lambert’s later life and broadly confirms all of the conclusions I earlier drew about
her. He and I disagree whether she might have dated promiscuously before marrying
Joseph E. Ransburg in 1912, with whom she had two daughters, before divorcing in the
early 1930s.
I agree that Alice was an intelligent, vivacious, unaffected and determined woman, who
today would certainly consider herself a leading feminist. She worked as a newspaper
writer on the east and west coasts, lonely hearts columnist for the Heart San Francisco
Examiner, radio host, romance novelist and Depression era activist. An important part of
her struggle as a writer that is more than can be readily explained today is all that she did
during the Depression of the 1930s. Mr. Bourasaw touches on this period of her life:
“Alice wrote a book during her New York time called Hospital Nocturne (Passion in San
Francisco), which was published by Vanguard Press. Vanguard was a ‘vanity publisher,’
which printed books by self-published authors and then the author was responsible for
promoting it. She wrote two more books, Lost Fragrance and Women Are Like That, also
published by Vanguard in 1933 and 1934. All three were republished by Dell and can be
found on the Internet and in used-book stores. They are all what would be called
romance novels today. Linda Achimore quoted for us from Alice's divorce decree that the
principal reason for the divorce was Ransburg's disrespect of her writing and possible
derision, at least from Alice's point of view. We now know that her ex-husband helped
support her financially during the Depression years, as did her daughters.”
Since Alice self-published her books, as I did with Algonquin Elegy, I especially identify
with her struggles during the Great Depression. My own daughters have yet no full
understanding of what NBC’s Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation.” My
experience is from Depression-era parents, who vividly and often described to me and
my brothers what Asian children lacked at meals as we grew up.
Mr. Bourasaw reports that Alice settled in Darrington, Washington, where she died at age
95 in 1981. In Chapter 19 of Algonquin Elegy, I conclude that “[n]either Alice nor Blodwen
Davies probably reached the true story – these two artistic souls simply passed, mingled,
and departed on their separately destined paths of life.” From what I have learned since
writing the book, I stand firmly by those words. I do believe that Alice and Tom enjoyed a
very special summer romance, which sparked deeply sensuous and physical feelings in
her. Tom, however, was driven by the passion of an artistic genius whose creative
desires ached for release, which he would never find in the arms of a woman but rather,
beginning eleven years later, in painting the Canadian wilderness of Algonquin Park.
Alice Elinor Lambert
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