An interesting article about a pilot Harry Mason who was shot down and about letters to /from Sadie Arbuckle.
WWI love letters: Sadie Arbuckle a mystery no more as family reveals her life after Harry Mason
Descendants of Sadie, whose letters to a soldier killed in the war nearly a century ago are part of an Ontario Archives exhibit, explain what happened to her afterward.
By: Katie Daubs GTA, Published on Wed Feb 26 2014
Sadie Loucks would have had a real hoot over her classification as a mystery woman.
“That really would have appealed to her; she liked a good mystery movie,” says her granddaughter, Wendy Loucks Smith.
Sadie’s letters to First World War Lieutenant Harry Mason were recently featured in the Star, after the Ontario Archives released the letters between the soldier who unabashedly proclaimed his love for Sadie Arbuckle, and the Toronto girl who wasn’t quite sure how she felt, but wanted Harry to come home.
Mason’s plane was shot down in 1917. The Ontario Archives had many pictures of Mason, but none of Sadie. Archivists didn’t know what became of the Toronto woman. On their website, they posted pictures of women of the era: “She may have been a lot like these young women.”
“I kept thinking, no, no, no,” Sadie’s daughter-in-law Mary Loucks says of the women seated near pianos, picnic tables, and in portrait.
Sadie was just as lovely as Harry Mason wrote in his letters, a meticulous lady with neatly pinned brown hair, who knew how to bring an outfit together with just a scarf. In her 20s during the war, she eventually married, had a son and grandchildren, and in later years, a black and white cat named Timothy was a constant companion.
“He was a lovely cat, he hated most people. He loved her,” Wendy says. “She used to warm his food up on the stove. I remember watching that and thinking, you’re strange, Grandma.”
Sadie’s story begins in Coboconk, Ont., a small town in the Kawartha Lakes area. Her father, George Arbuckle, had been an orphan indentured to a farmer in town. George was unhappy and left when he was a teenager to work for a company building bridges in Toronto. He married, had three children, and bought a shoe store at 930 Queen St. E. for his two boys, Fred and Herb, to run when they came back from the war. The family lived comfortably upstairs, and that’s where Harry Mason’s letters of the terrible conditions in the trenches found Sadie. (He had been introduced to Sadie in 1913, when he worked in Alberta with a friend of hers.)
The only girl in the family, Sara Elizabeth Arbuckle — known as Sadie — studied piano under Boris Berlin and was sent to Loretto Abbey for school, although the family wasn’t Catholic. During the war, she was a volunteer nursing assistant in Whitby.
Harry Mason was not a subject brought up at the Beach home where Sadie lived the rest of her days, but her family knows some details.
Mason gave Sadie a friendship ring before he went overseas. They weren’t engaged; they were more like “good buddies,” and he was courting her by mail, explains Mary Loucks.
“After he was killed, I suspect Sara just kind of went to pieces, and she went off to Scotland and stayed at a place called Montrose, north of Edinburgh. She stayed with her cousin for six months,” Loucks says.
(The family has planned a trip to Scotland to trace Sadie’s path after the war.)
She married in 1925, at the age of 32 — “which of course, in those days, she would have been a ‘spinster lady,’” Loucks says.
Frederick Loucks, a dental surgeon about 10 years her senior, was a nice guy who liked golf. Everyone called him “Doc.” The couple had one son, Donald, whom Sadie “loved to pieces,” along with her grandchildren. Donald died in 2003.
Wendy remembers her grandmother as a cool lady who let Donald raise pigeons in the backyard.
“One of the things I really remember about her: before we’d go out anywhere to catch the Queen car, she’d always have to put her face on,” Wendy says. “She would take me to the Arcadian Court at Simpson’s.”
Her relatives can only speculate how Mason’s presence in Sadie’s life and his death in the war affected her, before she moved on to marry Doc and start a family.
“I found the box (of letters) when I was closing up the house after she died,” Mary Loucks says. “Harry had always been around. He was up in the attic, all through the years.”
After Sadie’s death in the early 1970s, Loucks gave the box of letters to her brother, an archivist. For decades, they sat at the Ontario Archives, until the anniversary of the start of the First World War, and the launch of a year-long exhibit.
The family is keen to help the archives fill in the blanks on Sadie’s story.
“We’re just really excited because Sadie’s story has been so interesting and so engaging for so many people. It’s great to put more context into who she is as a person,” says archives curator Stewart Boden. “The more I learn about her, the more I’m fascinated with her whole life.”
Granddaughter Diane Loucks, who lives in Florida, says the letters introduced her to a different side of her grandmother.
“I knew about Harry; I didn’t know it like this,” she says. “I didn’t know that woman.”
Posted:
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/02 ... mason.html