Amy FitzSimons memoir: meeting Puck, USC commencement, malarial fever, engagement
Book 2, Page 59 ·1907–1908
Transcription
I don’t know just when we began dating.
I know I was going to Columbia for the commencement dances at U.S.C. — I had dates with Douglas McKay. Puck — Harrell and Henry Lawrence went up on the train with me too. When we got to Columbia I went to stay at Uncle Kit’s. My Columbia friends took charge of Puck — and on the [that] unforgettable occasion when he climbed a tree in Capital Square after a squirrel — I don’t remember if he was able to get to the dance that night or not. But the boys were delighted over what they had done.
We became engaged in June. I had malarial fever that summer — so was sent up to Brookland. Puck used to come for week ends whenever he could. This picture was taken in the woods that summer.
The following winter Puck was sent to Fla. under Mr. [McHardy]. He stayed with the [McHardy]'s. We were to be married in the fall of 1908. The
AI Notes
Handwritten page in blue ink on ruled album paper, continuing Amy FitzSimons’s memoir. A sepia photograph of a dark-suited man standing on a path is mounted at the lower left; text wraps around it to the right. Page covers Amy’s courtship with Puck: the U.S.C. commencement at Columbia where she dated Douglas McKay and Puck travelled up with Harrell and Henry Lawrence; the squirrel-in-the-tree-at-Capital-Square episode; engagement in June; Amy’s malarial fever that summer and her recuperation at Brookland; the photograph taken in the woods that summer; and Puck’s transfer to Florida the following winter under Mr. McHardy. Amy stayed at Uncle Kit’s (Christopher FitzSimons Jr., her paternal uncle living in Columbia). The summer episode is her malarial fever, which prompted her recuperation at Brookland. Mr. McHardy’s surname remains uncertain in the original hand.
A sepia photograph of a man in dark suit standing on a tree-lined path is mounted at the lower left, with the surrounding text wrapping around it.
Page ends mid-sentence; continues on page 60. Uncle Kit = Christopher FitzSimons Jr. (b. ~1856), Amy’s paternal uncle (brother of her father Samuel Gaillard FitzSimons Sr.), a Charleston-born civil engineer who in 1907–08 was working in Columbia as district manager of the Southern Cotton Oil Company. The McHardy surname is uncertain in the manuscript hand and may render the railroad official Puck reported to in Florida; left as written.