From Dalhousie Archives
MS-2-202_31_1_13_access
By Thomas Head Raddall
https://findingaids.library.dal.ca/pinehurst-lodge
The lodge stands on the shore of First
Christopher Lake, near South Brookfield, and a private driveway leads to it
from the paved Liverpool-Annapolis highway at the point where the stream from
First Christopher runs into the west end of Ponhook Lake. It was built during
or before the First World War by a Queens County man named Byron Macleod, who
also acquired the stretch of fine pine and other timber-land between the main
highway and the lake.
Macleod had made a little money in the
States, and he built the lodge with the intention of operating a luxurious
hunting camp for well-to-do American sportsmen. At that time there was
excellent trout fishing and moose hunting in this region. During the 1920’s he
gave up the idea and offered the whole estate for sale.
In the winter of 1923-24 a Liverpool
man, Captain Laurie Mitchell, was employed as a sporting goods salesman by the
New York firm of Abercrombie & Fitch. There he met a whimsical bearded
customer enquiring about suitable clothing and equipment for a prolonged
hunting and fishing excursion in Canada. The customer gave his name as Lou Keyte (pronounced KEET) said he was going to Canada at once;
and that he wished to buy a comfortable sporting lodge, accessible by motor
car, and not too far from a town.
Mitchell described to him Pinehurst
Lodge in Queens County, Nova Scotia, and Keyte
declared it was just what he was
looking for. He persuaded Mitchell to obtain a fortnight’s leave from
Abercrombie & Fitch and accompany him to the spot.
They arrived in Liverpool in February 1924, and Keyte took a room at the Mersey Hotel. The
Annapolis road was deep in snow, passable only for horses and sleighs. (There
were no paved roads in Nova Scotia then, and no snow-ploughs outside the
towns.) Mitchell took Keyte
by horse and sleigh to see the
spot, and this eccentric American immediately bought the lodge and estate from
Macleod. Presumably he paid Mitchell a fee or commission, and that was that.
Mitchell returned to his job in New York.
Keyte spent the rest of the winter at the
Mersey Hotel, in Liverpool, making plans for a complete renovation and
refurnishing of the lodge, which could not be attempted until the roads were
fit for motor traffic, towards the end of April. He found time heavy on his
hands; he was obviously a city type, and the life in a small Canadian country
town, especially in winter, impressed him as very dull indeed.
He was an odd sight in Liverpool. A
middle-aged man, of pasty complexion, wearing shell-rimmed glasses, and with a thick black beard
covering his jaws and upper lip. The town barbers kept the beard trim in a
style like that of the British Navy. He was very dapper in dress, always wore
spats and usually a white waistcoat. He bought a fur coat to fend off the
winter air.
His invariable headgear was a bowler
hat. He was well spoken and affable in a suave sort of way. There was no trace
of foreign accent. He spoke the flat idiom of the American Middle West to
perfection. He mentioned casually that he had made a good deal of money in land
speculation.
At that time a group of Liverpool young
men had formed a small dance orchestra, calling themselves “The Bambalinas”
after the name of a fox-trot popular then.
The leader was Merrill Rawding, who
long afterwards became a Minister of Highways in the N. S. Government. He
played one of the saxophones. All these lads wore tuxedo suits on dance nights,
and they put on a dance every Saturday night in the Assembly Room of the town
hall. The dances were cheerful informal affairs but quite decorous. Anyone
could buy a ticket and dance, but these affairs were patronized almost entirely
by the better-class young people of the town, and even the strictest of Mammas
regarded them with approval.
Lou Keyte soon found his way to the dance hall,
got someone to introduce him right and left, and sent out to a restaurant for sandwiches,
confectionery and coffee for everyone. This made him popular at once. At the
next Saturday dance he did the same thing. And now he began to dance himself,
at first inviting only the plainer and older girls who could not get partners
for every dance. He was polite and smiling, and he was an excellent dancer. It
wasn’t long before he was dancing with the prettiest girls in the room. They
thought it rather a lark. Everyone knew by this time that he was a bachelor
millionaire. He told them that he had purchased Pinehurst Lodge and intended to
live there; and he talked of the fine dinners and parties he would give.
I met him at one of these dances. I was
working in the Milton pulp mill office, up the river, but I always went to town
on Saturday nights to see the movie and take in the dance. He was very affable
to me, as he was to all the young people. He deplored the lack of amusement
through the rest of the week and said he felt sorry for us. Then he invited
fourteen to a week-day dinner and dance at Bridgewater, thirty miles away. It
was now May and the roads were good, but of course Pinehurst was in the hands
of a swarm of carpenters and decorators and would not be ready for occupancy
for two or three months.
Keyte included two young matrons for
chaperones, and he engaged all the taxis in the town (six) to convey us to
Bridgewater and back. My partner was a Liverpool girl, and we were given a taxi
to ourselves. On the seat of each car was a box of expensive chocolates and
several packages of cigarettes. We had a private dinner at the Fairview Hotel
in Bridgewater. Keyte had selected the menu and had special menu cards printed
for the occasion. He had engaged a bedroom for the ladies’ use as a powder
room, and another for the young men, where (in spite of Prohibition) there were
bottles of whiskey and liqueurs.
At the dinner’s end, and before we went
on to the dance, I passed one of the menu cards about the table and asked
everyone to sign it, for a souvenir. All did — except Keyte. I insisted, however.
Finally, with an odd little grin, he took up the pen, went over the list of
signatures, and stopped at that of Roxie Smith, a handsome girl from South
Brookfield. Beside her name he wrote — or rather printed — “and Lou Keyte.” I
thought nothing of it at the time, but later on I realized two things about
that gesture. Keyte, a connoisseur of women, had marked down Roxie as a target.
(She disappointed him, however, then and afterwards.) And Keyte never signed
his name to anything. He printed it.
Even his signature at the bank in
Liverpool was done in this fashion, with a quaint style that at first sight looked
almost like handwriting. None of the letters were joined.
All that summer the work at Pinehurst
went on, and Keyte bought a flashy and expensive Franklin car and hired a
chauffeur to take him back and forth.
Apart from the changes in the lodge
itself, Keyte built a large boathouse and filled it with skiffs and canoes for
the amusement of his guests. He had tons of sand hauled from the coast to make
a bathing beach on the shore of the lake.
He hired a staff of secants, including
an excellent chef.
On a day in September, 1924, he gave a
grand house-warming party, inviting practically everyone he knew in Queens
County, male and female, old and young. I was one.
There was a smart orchestra, fetched
from The Pines hotel at Digby. A huge punch-bowl, constantly replenished. A
most elaborate supper. For those who wished stronger drinks there was a bedroom
in the north turret, stacked with assorted spirits and wines.
When we arrived we saw a beautiful
young woman, dressed in white from head to foot. She was seated at one end of
the big living-room. Keyte took us to her and said, “Let me introduce a dear
friend of mine, Miss ... Miss ... Miss White!” She made a little conversation
and seemed a quiet and intelligent person, but she kept in the background
during the party. She was an American, apparently from New York.
Everybody had a grand time at the
party, and several Liverpool business men got gloriously drunk in the turret
room. At 1 a.m. everybody sang “For He’s A
Jolly Good Fellow” and departed.
Everybody, that is, except Donald (now Senator) Smith of Liverpool, myself, and
two American girls, summer visitors at Mill Village, who had taken us to
Pinehurst in their car. Keyte said to us, “Don’t go. It’s a lovely night. Stay
and talk with me for a while.”
We sat on the steps looking out on the
lake for an hour after the rest of the party had gone home. “Miss White”
apparently had gone to bed. The talk was inconsequential, mostly about the
funnier incidents at the party. But as the hour drew late Keyte talked a little
about himself. He was diabetic and he drank very little if at all. I don’t know
what loosened his tongue. I know that he felt himself far up in the wilds of
Canada, an enormous distance away from home.
As nearly as I can recall it he said
this:
“I come from Chicago, and I made most
of my money in land deals. My first big profit came from a large area of swamp
land on the Mississippi. An Engineer looked it over for me, and said it could
be drained. The soil was deep and black, the very finest kind of soil for
rice-growing. So I raised the money to drain it, and two or three years later I
was able to sell it at a whale of a profit for myself and for the people who
lent me the money. Then everybody wanted me to find another piece of land like
that and make another haul. They pushed their money at me. Well, I couldn’t
find another place like that, anywhere in the States. However I did find one,
down on the Bayano River in Panama. After that I retired. I had enough, and I
didn’t want people pestering me any more.”
Soon after this house-warming party, “Miss
White” disappeared. Keyte said she had come up to Nova Scotia for a holiday and
was now back in New York. Later on, when we knew a lot more about Lou Keyte, we
realised that she was only the first of a succession of dear friends who visited him at Pinehurst. All of them
were good looking and most of them were show-girl types, but at least one was a
former waitress at the Green Lantern restaurant in Halifax. None stayed more
than a week or so. Perhaps the girls grew bored with solitude at Pinehurst, but
I think Keyte had a fickle and insatiable appetite for women. Sometimes a new “friend”
arrived while the “old” one was still there — but the old one invariably departed
promptly. No doubt she was well paid for her “holiday”.
Keyte had got enough of the small town
society of Liverpool and of the country villages at South Brookfield and
Caledonia. He made frequent trips by car to Halifax, staying at a hotel. With
his ingratiating manner and his lavish spending, he
soon made friends in Halifax society. He bought an expensive motor-cruiser yacht and
succeeded in getting himself a membership in the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht
Squadron.
He was now living at a furious pace,
dashing back and forth between Pinehurst and Halifax, giving parties and
dinners, and passing from one woman to another like a hummingbird in a flower
bed. Strangely, however, in the midst of all these activities, he maintained a
courtship of a country girl in
Queens County.
It had begun in the summer, when
Pinehurst was still in the hands of the carpenters.
In the course of his frequent visits to
North Queens County, he had made the acquaintance of the girl and her parents,
and often stayed at their home for a meal and the evening. Arabelle Lee (which was
not her name) had neither the face nor the figure of his usual fancy, but in a
certain way she was pretty and slim and avid for a good time.
At first she was amused at courtship by
this odd character; but she relished the gifts and attentions he lavished on her,
and her parents were flattered with the notion of Arabelle marrying a
millionaire. The girl went in the car with Keyte to Halifax, chose a trousseau
at his expense in a smart shop on Spring Garden Road (Mills Brothers Ltd.) and
stayed with him at the Halifax Hotel, at that time the leading hotel in the
city. There was talk of a honeymoon in the West Indies, where they would spend
the winter.
It was now late October. Keyte had
ordered several suits of clothing from Stanford, a Halifax tailor, and to make
sure of an exact fit of the jackets he had sent the tailor one of his own, made
by an expensive tailor in the States. One of Stanford’s employees, Frank Hiltz,
in going over the sample jacket, came upon a Chicago tailor’s name-band,
concealed in the usual manner inside an inner breast pocket. It also bore the
name of the tailor’s client, Leo Koretz, and the date the jacket was made.
Hiltz had a chum who worked in a
Halifax bank, and one evening he remarked on the odd difference between the
name of Stanford’s new client and the name as spelt by the Chicago tailor. As
it chanced, this chum had noticed that day a poster, circulated to all Canadian
banks by the U.S. Post Office Department. It was dated September 15, 1924, and
it offered $10,000 reward for the arrest and return to Chicago of one Leo
Koretz.
In detail it read as follows:
WANTED
For using the mails to defraud.
(photograph here)
Leo Koretz
(sample of handwriting here)
Nationality, Jewish; age 45 years;
height about 5 feet 10 inches; weight about 180 pounds; medium heavy build;
distinct paunch; shoulders slightly stooped; chest about 40 inches; waist about
34 ½ inches; hair light brown, thin on top;
eyes, light gray-blue; cannot get along without glasses, which are usually
shell rims; forehead high and wide; face round; complexion pasty. Is said to
have a scar or birthmark on palm of left hand; speaks German fluently; also
speaks Bohemian, and voice is low and suave. Suffers from headaches and has a
habit of removing glasses for a short time to obtain relief. Lawyer by
profession.
Koretz operated the Bayano River
Syndicate, Bayano River Trust, and Bayano River Timber Syndicate, at Chicago
and New York City. Obtained approximately $2,000,000 through the operation of
these schemes.
Indicted at Chicago for using the mails
to defraud.
Was last seen in New York City, where
he disappeared from the St. Regis Hotel on December 6, 1923.
The photograph on the poster showed
Koretz clean-shaven, but everything else about “Lou Keyte” answered the
description of Leo Koretz. Hiltz and his chum lost no time in notifying the
Chicago police, and a pair of Chicago detectives left for Halifax at once.
Armed with an extradition warrant, and accompanied by a Halifax detective, they
went to the Halifax Hotel, and found their man in a room with Arabelle Lee. They had just
returned from shopping.
Faced with the warrant, Koretz
shrugged. He had only one thing to say. He asked them to spare the girl any
publicity and to let her go at once. This they did, after some questioning. If
she still retained any hope of marriage with her whiskered wooer it was crushed
by news from Chicago appearing in the next day’s Halifax papers. Koretz had a
wife and children there. Poor Arabelle hurried home, but she did not stay there
long. The scandal was all over the countryside. She departed for the far air of
Oregon, married
a Jewish doctor there and
perished with him years later in a nocturnal fire that destroyed their house.
The
Halifax papers were agog over Koretz. It was the biggest story in years.
Apparently what Koretz told me at Pinehurst was partly true. He had made a
large profit for himself and his investors in an expanse of reclaimed swampland
on the Mississippi. He then promoted the Bayano companies, sucking in more and
more money, claiming that the Bayano soil would make rich farmland, that it
held a fortune in timber alone, and finally that his engineers had discovered a
huge oil field under the surface. While building up this airy castle he
proceeded to pay “dividends” out of new receipts, that old device of the stock
swindler.
He divided his time between Chicago and
New York, and between business and women. Undoubtedly most of the $2,000,000
was swallowed up in high living and in “dividends” between 1917, when he
started operations, and December 1923, when the police came to look for him at
the St. Regis in New York. Nevertheless he must have carried off a fairly large
sum. He spent $45,000 at Pinehurst, and detectives found sums of U.S. currency
tucked away in safety deposit boxes in Halifax in the name of “Lou Keyte”.
Rumor persisted that Koretz had hidden a lot of money at Pinehurst, and various
stealthy people dug holes in the grounds about the lodge — and found nothing.
After leaving the St. Regis hotel he
must have hidden himself in New York or that vicinity while his beard grew; and
in the following February he turned up, beard and all, in the store of
Abercrombie & Fitch, and met Captain Laurie Mitchell. That led him to Nova
Scotia.
Had he chosen to live quietly and
inconspicuously at Pinehurst he might have evaded capture for the rest of his
life. But Koretz was not equipped with the temperament for a quiet and inconspicuous
life. His retreat in Nova Scotia bored him after the years of gay living and he
struck a new frantic pace to make it bearable. As a diabetic he knew himself to
be a candle burning at both ends, and he tried to cram every possible pleasure
into the time he had left.
At his trial in Chicago he was
sentenced to a long term in penitentiary, but he cheated the law again, and for
the last time. When little more than a year of his sentence had passed he
succeeded in getting three pounds of sugar candy smuggled in to him. To a
diabetic that was poison, of course. He committed suicide as only a diabetic
can, by eating the whole three pounds. Before the prison doctor could do
anything about it Leo Koretz was dead.
The title to Pinehurst Lodge, its
furniture and the lands about it, were taken over with the other remaining
assets by the Chicago Title & Trust Company, trustee in bankruptcy of the
Leo Koretz estate. None of these amounted to much, and Koretz’s creditors and
dupes got little. A few years after the debacle the Chicago trust company sold
the Pinehurst estate to F. B. McCurdy, the Halifax financier, for a fraction of
what Koretz had spent on it. McCurdy and his wife and guests used it as a
hunting and fishing lodge for a few weeks each year. After McCurdy’s death his
widow continued to come there for a week or two each Fall. She was still doing
this in 1959.
The oddest part of the Koretz adventure
was his pose as a wealthy sportsman eager to kill fish and shoot moose in Nova
Scotia. By the time Pinehurst was ready for occupancy in the late summer of
1924 the fishing season had passed, so he was spared that. However when October
came his guides and retainers insisted on a moose hunt, and Koretz went along
in a canoe, dressed in his usual dapper way as if he were going for a stroll
down Madison Avenue. When they reached a swamp, and the head guide began “calling”
for moose, Koretz sat shivering in a fur coat and reading a small volume of
poetry. At last a big bull moose appeared in the swamp, and the guide hissed, “There
he is! There he is, Mister Keet!”
Keyte looked up. “Ah! So that’s a
moose, eh? Well, well!”
“There’s the rifle, sir. Shoot! Shoot!”
Keyte turned his eyes back to the
poetry. “Hell, I don’t want to kill the damned thing. Let him go.”
• • • • •
Jim Charles
Rock.
Was finally
found by noted Nova Scotia guide Watson Peck, Bear River, after 30 years of
searching. On a venture into the woods of southwestern Nova Scotia with friend
Stan Zimba, shown photographing the rock, Mr. Peck found the site of Micmac
Indian legend. (Photo by Watson Peck)
Search For Rock Over
EDITOR’S
NOTE - For 30 years, the legend of Jim Charles Rock, has fascinated noted Nova
Scotia guide and sportsman Watson Peck, of Bear
River. On a recent venture into the deep woods of southwestern Nova Scotia, Mr.
Peck found the rock he has sought for three decades. In the following article
he recalls the legend.
By
WATSON PECK
Not many miles from the new national park at Kejimkujik
Lake, and near the back of Digby County, lies a huge
granite boulder with a story.
It’s known as Jim Charles Rock — so named because a Bear River Micmac wintered it its
shelter a long time ago.
Big granites are not unusual
in that part of Nova Scotia. For example, there’s Boundary Rock or Junction
Rock as it is sometimes called. It’s a landmark located where Digby, Yarmouth,
Shelburne and Queens counties come to a point.
Nearby, there’s Flagstaff
Rock, the size of a barn — a rock atop a rock.
LANDMARKS
To the naturalist, these
rocks are a thing of beauty. To the hunter, they are landmarks and great spots
from which to watch game.
To me, Jim Charles Rock has
been a challenge for a long time
…unreadable…
some years and died without
revealing the secret of his mine. His body is buried beside that of his brother
at Bear River.
The story fired my
imagination. I wanted to see the rock. Over 30 years I have searched for it,
sometimes by air, without avail.
Finally, this fall — and
call it a centennial project if you like — I went on the hunt again. While
traveling with a friend, Stan Zimba, from Philadelphia, I found Jim Charles
Rock.
I lost track of the tall
pines I climbed to pinpoint the site, but it was several miles beyond where
others said it was.
It loomed high, like a two-storey
house. The cave shelter I’d heard about gave it away.
In it there was only one sign of human presence — an
old green bottle with the brand name well engraved — Galec Old Smuggler Irish
Whiskey.
The book, John Paul's Rock by Frank Parker Day, can be found at Lulu.Com. It is a fiction about the guide, Jim Charles. Search for it by author or title. /drf
