The Story of Mildred and Betty

Posted: September 15th, 2009 | No Comments »

As I mentioned in a previous post Betty Crow, the daughter of Carl Crow, escaped my investigations when I wrote Carl’s biography a few years ago but what happened her had always nagged at me, not least because people kept asking. Then, out of the blue, I received an email from a lady in Reno, Nevada who was the eldest daughter of Mildred Elizabeth “Betty” Crow. She told me the story of her grandmother Mildred (left), Betty and what happened to them…and here it is in précised form.

In 1911-1912 Carl Crow, not long in Shanghai fresh out from Missouri to work on the China Press newspaper in the International Settlement, married Mildred S. Powers, a woman who was a sometime work colleague on the paper and had already been in Shanghai some time. How exactly Mildred got to Shanghai I’m not clear – she had already been married to a man named Cummings and had been working as a secretary in the “Indian Territories” of the western United States around 1905. She had then married a man, Paul Powers, in Portland, Oregon. Carl was her third husband. It seems Mildred had travelled to China in 1911 for ‘her health’ but ended up staying for 35 years becoming a columnist on the China Press under the name ‘Betty Harlan’.

Just after the outbreak of the First World War in Europe Carl and Mildred moved to California for a time and lived on a fruit ranch outside San Francisco. The fruit farming life didn’t take apparently and after America entered the war in 1917 Carl (after trying but being too old to enlist) returned to China with Mildred. This time they arrived with their newly adopted daughter Betty who had been born in San Francisco on December 4, 1916 (she is pictured left aged 7). It was the adoption that had thrown me off the scent and was new information.

Much of Betty’s early years were spent in China with her adoptive parents Carl and Mildred. They lived in Shanghai where Carl had established his own advertising agency and Mildred became a dealer and trader in Chinese antiques and objets d’art. Carl’s business prospered as did Mildred’s by all accounts. She apparently represented many US galleries and collectors and maintained a courtyard house full of antiques, rugs and various treasures in Peking. They cleared holidayed as a family as the picture of Betty that was taken on the beach at Beidaihe, a popular holiday resort in China for foreigners, shows (left).

In 1925 Carl and Mildred divorced. Both remarried swiftly – Mildred to Norris G. Wood (left), an employee of the Standard Oil Company of New York (SOCONY) who was apparently a wonderful adoptive father to Betty. Norris had arrived in China in 1911 too. Carl also remarried and had no contact with Betty after the separation. The Woods lived in Shanghai, Peking and Tientsin over the years as Norris’s job involved him moving around and Mildred remained a keen and successful dealer and collector of Chinese antiques and objets. Ceertainly Norris and Betty look happy (and he proud) in their portrait taken at the Shanghai St Andrews Ball held at the French Club in 1935 (below_.

For her part Betty attended and graduated from the Shanghai American School and then left China to go to college at Stanford University where she graduated in 1938. Of course Japan invaded China in 1937, the year Carl left to return to America. It also seems that Mildred left China before the Japanese invasion but Norris stayed on and was unfortunately briefly interned by the Japanese before being repatriated on the famous Gripsholm evacuation ship. Sadly Norris died in New Hampshire in 1948.

Mildred moved back to Santa Barbara, where she died in 1954 but not before establishing a wonderful museum and house of antiques and curios in New Hampshire town of Fitzwilliam known as the Chinese Museum.

In a 1952 edition of New Hampshire Profiles magazine Mildred is described as, ‘…one of the most discriminating collectors and authorities on Chinese art’ and as a ‘handsome, imposing woman with pure white hair, clear blue eyes and an unlined complexion for her 73 years.’

The Chinese Museum does indeed look a fascinating place ad Mildred was apparently more than willing to take visitors on a personal tour*.

Meanwhile Betty, graduated from Stanford, had been doing her bit for the war effort. She had also fallen in love marrying Russell W. McDonald, in 1945. They had met in San Francisco where Betty was working as a stenographer for US Naval Intelligence; Russell was in the Navy and also working for Naval Intelligence after his return from the South Pacific. They eventually moved to Reno after Russell finished law school at Stanford as his family had been in the state since the 1850s. Betty returned to China with her husband in 1980 to see the country she had grown up in.

And so that’s the story of Mildred and Betty that never made it into my biography of Carl. It nagged at me for a long time, but now I know it and, wonderfully, it seems all turned out well for everyone concerned. Mystery solved. Many thanks to Stephanie Merchant of Reno, Nevada – Betty’s daughter – for contacting me and letting me know what happened and showing me her photographs – very much appreciated.

NB: I have no idea what happened to the Chinese Museum in Fitzwilliam, which was technically part of something called the Rodman Gallery. If anyone knows Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire they may care to have a look – it was apparently on Jaffrey Road.

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