One of the very interesting aspects of researching
the murder of Dr Cunningham and Nan has been the part played by what might be
called “meaningful coincidence”. For example, it was through coincidence that
we were led to former neighbours of Dr MacLauchlan.
To wit: after having learned that Dr MacLauchlan had
been married three times and that his second wife’s maiden name had been
Hambly, we further discovered, first through the archives of Variety
magazine (the Bible of American show businesses), that she had been a stage
actress in Calgary in the early 1920s.
Trying to find out more about her and the venues where
she had performed, I discovered that one showplace had been The Grand, a fine Calgary
theatre built by Senator James Lougheed in 1912. The definitive work on The
Grand had been written by Professor Don Smith, now retired from the University
of Calgary’s History Department. (Don is the author of several books on
Canada’s First Nations, including one on noted Native imitator Grey Owl.)
In search of
more information on Evelyn Hambly, we struck up an email correspondence with
Don Smith. The story does not end there. A few weeks into our correspondence,
Rod’s email in-box was graced by the subject line “STOP THE PRESSES!” The body
of Don’s mail went on to tell us, in rather excited terms, that his good
friend, retired lawyer Jack Pecover, had been a next door neighbour of “Doc and Evelyn” in the late 1940s! Contact
with Jack quickly ensued and from it we were able to get much information on
the everyday lives of Robert Henry MacLauchlan and Evelyn Hambly, his “toast of
the Calgary stage” wife.
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