James "Bud" Stillman and Lena Wilson
Toronto Daily Star, 8 October 1926
A story that would have captured some interest in 1926 was the marriage of James "Bud" Stillman, heir to a fortune, and a young woman from Quebec named Lena Wilson, who had served as a helper on Mr. Stillman's mother's property. This is partly because Mr. Stillman's parents had recently had notorious marital troubles, but partly because the romance had the trappings of a fairy tale.
Here are photographs of the happy couple, from the October 8 1926 edition of the Toronto Daily Star:
Ms. Wilson was referred to as a "woodland bride" and an "untutored bride" in many newspaper reports. Another article in the same edition may have been intended to counteract this.
The article takes pains to point out that the future bride is "the picture of health and a comparative stranger to cosmetics".
A Google search revealed that the future Mrs. Stillman, sadly, died young: she passed away at the age of 43 in 1951. Dr. Stillman - as he eventually became - married again. He died in 1998 at the age of 94.
Created April 7, 2025.