Recent News in Chile

SANTIAGO, Chile — Agustín Edwards died on Monday on his farm in Graneros, about 46 miles south of Santiago, the capital of Chile. He was 89. He was a Chilean media magnate who published El Mercurio, the country’s most influential conservative publication and the world's oldest Spanish language newspaper.

His grandfather, Agustin Edwards MacClure, who founded the newspaper in 1900, was the brother-in-law to Guillermo Errazuriz Vergara (Blanca De Saulles's brother).

https://nyti.ms/2q76Cit

Journey to Publication

Years ago, I sent query proposals to a number of small-press publishers. Not one of them said yes to the project. Discouraged, I put it all in a (large) box, archived the files on my computer, and moved on. Life... Work... Family.... Other things took priority.

A couple weeks ago, I happened to go out with a friend for tea. I happened to mention the incident and my research. She was fascinated and it re-awakened my enthusiasm. When I dug up the dusty box from the back of the closet today, I saw all of the work I've done.  Holy cow. The hours that I spent at libraries, on the internet, and corresponding with the Library of Congress. I am literally the only person who has collected all this stuff, from all these various sources, into one narrative. My MSWord doc has 10 single-spaced pages of bibliography and footnotes.

So it is with great excitement that I announce, I am pushing forward to self-publish the story. It will take some time to get the manuscript proofread, formatted, and prepared to upload to Createspace.

My goal is to have it available in time for the 100 year anniversary of the shooting - which is in August this year!

International Music Festival

Every year since 1960, Blanca's home town of Vina del Mar, Chile has hosted an international music festival.  Now celebrating its 55th consecutive year, the festival will be held on February 23 to 28, 2014 and will feature artists from around the world competing for the grand prize.  In the past, superstars like Elton John, Sting, and Earth Wind & Fire have performed here. 

To learn more about the LV  Festival Internacional de la Canción de Viña del Mar, click here. 

Football on Film from 1903

I discovered on the Library of Congress website a bit of film made by Thomas Edison. It records a college football game, Princeton vs. Yale, taken in November 1903. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/papr:@filreq(@field(NUMBER+@band(awal+2164))+@field(COLLID+workleis))

Jack "the kid" de Saulles had just graduated Yale the year before. In this year (1903) he was coaching football at the University of Virginia and contributing chapters to Walter Camp's instructional manuals. But even if Jack isn't in this film, it still gives you a good idea of how he would have looked on the field.

100 years

A century. It sounds like a long time, but some people live to be a hundred... so maybe it's not so long after all. People were not so different 100 years ago as they are now. They had come through the Industrial Revolution and had become accustomed to technology in their lives. They lighted their homes with electricity. They drove automobiles. They used telephones and typewriters and made clothes on sewing machines. They mail ordered all sorts of things from a catalog -- clothes, shoes, household tools, etc. They recorded their everyday activities in snapshots with Kodak cameras.

Sometimes I think about Jack and Blanca, and what they were doing exactly 100 years ago. She was a young bride with an 8 month old baby boy. Her husband struggled to transition from his college football glory days into the bigger game of international finance. Did he lose interest in his glamorous trophy wife after she became a mother? Not many details are known of this time in their married life, except when Blanca complained later of feeling neglected and lonely. She was only 19 and her family in Chile was half a world away.

Jack's Uncle Louis

John de Saulles had one other uncle – his father's younger brother Louis de Saulles Jr. He was the third of three boys, the rest being daughters, born in New Orleans in 1845/1846. He was about 8 years old when his father Louis de Saulles Sr. decided to quit the cotton export business at the peak of the “boom.” The family moved to New York and stayed for a few years, then relocated to a villa in the south of France.

Louis Jr. was about 13 years old and living in France when the Civil War broke out. His older brother Henry signed up for the Confederacy, and so did his second brother Arthur (who is John de Saulles's father.) Henry was killed in action, Arthur survived the war, but all the while Louis Jr. stayed safely in France with his parents and his sisters. I don't know if he felt frustrated or glad to be left behind, or if he would have lied about his age to enlist if he weren't living in France. I don't know if he admired his “war hero” brothers or if he condemned the foolishness of fighting for the losing side.

What I do know is that Louis Jr. returned to the U.S. after the Civil War ended, leaving behind his parents and sisters in the south of France. He married Miss Carrie Manwaring, daughter of Simon Manwaring, in New York City on January 4, 1870 (certificate #1688, LDS microfilm #1544275)

They lived for a while in Atlanta, Georgia where their only son Louis Manwaring de Saulles was born on Feb. 8, 1874. Then Louis Jr. followed in his brother Arthur's footsteps, also moving to Pennsylvania around the turn of the century to work in the developing steel, coal, and coke industry. His detailed obituary appears in Coal Age, a mining and engineering journal, that pays tribute to Louis for being part of a group that opened one of the first coke plants in Fayette county.

He is in the 1900 federal census of Uniontown, Pennsylvania living comfortably on E. Church Street with his wife Caroline, his son Louis M., and his two daughters Ella and Odele, ages 22 and 18. His occupation is listed as superintendent of the coke works, and his 25 year old son works as a bookkeeper.

Things would fall apart for Louis in the next few years. His daughter Odele died in 1904, his wife Carrie died in 1905, and he became mired in a lawsuit starting in 1906 to prevent the Percy Mining Company from ravaging his private property to excavate coal deposits. He won an injunction from the courts, but I assume it was a hollow victory without his wife to share it.

The 1910 federal census finds Louis de Saulles living alone, a broken man at the age of 64, renting a room in a home on Pittsburgh Street in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. He lived long enough to see Jack marry Blanca Errazuriz, but I don't know if they ever met.  

Louis deSaulles committed suicide on September 6, 1915 by shooting himself in the head.

  

The Scandalously Fabulous Joan Sawyer

When Jack and Blanca divorced in 1916, the grounds were that he had cheated on her. The “other woman” was a successful Broadway dancer named Joan Sawyer.

From about 1914 to 1918, Joan Sawyer was one of the country's most popular and successful dance stars. Her main competitors were the dance team of Vernon & Irene Castle who promoted their wholesome image as a married couple. Joan Sawyer – a single, unmarried woman – went through dance partners like satin shoes.

As a self-reliant business woman, she managed a New York nightclub called “Joan Sawyer's Persian Garden” and her business manager was also a woman. She marketed herself to a general audience beyond the vaudeville theater goers. She made records on the early Columbia label and published sheet music with instructions on how to dance her versions of the fox-trot, the waltz, or the maxixe heel step.

Sawyer used her fame to promote the cause of women's suffrage (the right to vote) though ironically her business manager Jeanette Gilder was anti-suffrage.

Pushing the envelope, Sawyer employed black musicians at her nightclub, calling them her “Persian Garden Orchestra” and would not perform without them. Under the direction of Dan Kildare (of the Clef Club) and later Seth Weeks, the orchestra earned rave reviews wherever they played. Sawyer's role in sponsoring talented black musicians in these early days of ragtime and jazz is mostly forgotten.

Sawyer is mostly remembered for being the one who gave silent film star Rudolph Valentino his first break into show business. Sawyer and Valentino danced on stage in New York, Philadelphia, and once did a performance for President Woodrow Wilson. Valentino left New York to pursue a career in silent films. On his job application to the Hollywood studios, he wrote that he was tired of ballroom dancing.

Joan Sawyer also tried getting into films when exhibition dancing fell out of fashion during the First World War, but her movie career fizzled. Eventually, she faded away into obscurity.