(8 July 1872-4 Dec. 1952), figure of legend. (Mrs Ishikawa, Mary C. Ishikawa) Born at Dunvegan, GC. Parents: Norman (“The Drover”) MacRae and his wife Mary McKenzie. Education: at Alexandria (the family had moved to Alexandria from Dunvegan), Whitby Ladies’ College, and the Cornwall business college. She is said to have been the first woman graduate of the business college. Mary MacRae went to Wisconsin to join her uncle, Duncan J. McKenzie, the lumberman, perhaps as his secretary or other employee. It was probably through the household and connections of McKenzie, a political figure whose distinctions included his election as railway commissioner for Wisconsin, that she met her future husband. She was married 15 Aug. 1901, at her parents’ home in Alexandria, to Gensemro S. Ishikawa (G.S. Ishikawa). In the wedding announcement in the Glengarry News, his Ph.D. degree was noted. The degree, obtained earlier that year, was from the University of Wisconsin.

     G.S. Ishikawa was not of the Japanese aristocracy, but he seems to have been of a family from the better ranks of society. After the marriage the young couple are said to have gone to Japan on a Japanese warship. From Japan, they travelled via the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Germany. In Germany, the Ishikawas lived in Hamburg, where G.S. Ishikawa worked for a Japanese company whose name is given as Nitzui, and was acting consul for Japan (beginning in 1903, he may also have been, though perhaps only briefly, in the Japanese consular service in London). When the World War began in 1914, the Ishikawas were interned by the German government. (Even in internment, she is said to have received every issue of the Glengarry News.) In 1915, when the Ishikawas were given 24 hours to leave for neutral countries, she returned to Madison, bringing her young daughter with her, and G.S. Ishikawa returned to Japan. By this time the marriage of the Ishikawas seems to have run its course and to have been effectively over, though it is not true, as has been so often reported, that they never met again after the interruption provided by the war. They met at least twice, in Madison in 1917 and in Montreal in 1920. His wife was unwilling to live in Japan, and though he was willing in principle to live in the United States (what the position was with regard to Canada is not clear), he was unable to do so except on a lowly immigrant basis which was unacceptable to him, and so they remained apart.

     They did, however, continue to correspond. He continued to send her money from Japan till she asked him to stop, pointing out that in Japan the sum was large but in Canada it was inconsiderable, and that she could support herself without it. Mrs Ishikawa moved back to Canada about 1919. In the 1920s and 1930s she ran a rooming house or boarding house in Montreal. Her kinsman Neil Donald MacLeod, of Maxville Manor, who looked back on her with great warmth, said in 1991 that he could still remember her Montreal phone number after 60 years, and testified, as others have done, that this generous woman had (in his comparison) “a heart as big as Montreal.” Her home was a favourite gathering place for girls from the GC area working as servants or at other jobs in Montreal. In April of 1934, 23 of her “many Glengarry friends” presented her with a “bronze and marble radio lamp.” The address of presentation stated: “We certainly have appreciated your kindness in placing your home at our disposal for our weekly gatherings during these long winter months… Our sincere hope is that this lamp will light your future days to continual health and happiness.” (Standard Freeholder 27 April 1934) A paid notice in the Glengarry News of 12 May 1939 read, “Mrs. G.S. Ishikawa, Montreal, has moved from 4110 Western Ave., to 4169 Dorchester St. West, corner Greene Ave.– St. Catherine and Windsor cars to Greene Ave., one block south to Dorchester–Phone Fitzroy, 7092.”

     It was evidently a factor in the breakup of her mariage to G.S. Ishikawa that the marriage was unacceptable to his relatives in Japan. It has also been reported that she married him (“on the rebound,” as people used to say) after an earlier romance had broken up. Neil Donald MacLeod remembered that Mrs Ishikawa always referred to her husband by the single name of “Ishikawa” when speaking about him. She tends herself to be remembered in the stories about her simply as “Mrs Ishikawa.” Legends grew up about Mrs Ishikawa, based in the first instance on the moderately strange story of her life, but based much more strongly (if one may venture the guess at this distance of time), on the warmth and magnetism of her remarkable personality. Mrs Ishikawa died at a nursing home in Lachine, Que., but she previously had lived for several years with a sister in Montreal. She is said to have been “in extreme poverty” at the end of her life. (Glengarry News 8 July 1992)

     The Ishikawa marriage produced one child, a daughter Maybelle, born in Hamburg, Germany, 4 April 1906. According to some reports Maybelle was slightly retarded. By other reports she suffered from the difficulties of deriving from two cultures (or three, if one adds Germany), and from the teasing of other children. She lived with her mother in Montreal, and the mother and daughter are remembered as being “big fleshy women.” Maybelle was in an institution in her later years, and died unmarried in Montreal late in 1990 in her 85th year. Maybelle Ishikawa and her mother are buried in Dunvegan Cemetery.

     It is said that once in George Eppstadt’s restaurant in Maxville, Mrs Ishikawa and her daughter were commenting in German, rather too freely, on the restaurant, and comparing it with restaurants in Germany, when Eppstadt overheard them from the back room and hastened to cut off further indiscretions by joining the conversation in his native language. In a famous story about the Ishikawas, when they were travelling through Russia to Germany, the Russian government provided them with an interpreter, in the form of an engineer called Macintoshsky. The interpreter politely asked Mrs Ishikawa where she came from, and she replied that she came from a little place he had never heard of, called Dunvegan–to which he replied that he knew it well, and was himself a native of Vankleek Hill, where he was the son of Dr MacIntosh. The Ishikawas do, in fact, seem to have met a gentleman in Russia of more-or-less this name, but he was from Scotland, not Vankleek Hill!

     G.S. Ishikawa has his separate claim to fame, in that he drew one of the first pictures of a game of basketball, the game having been invented in the United States in 1891 by James A. Naismith, a Canadian. The picture was done at the School for Christian Workers, a YMCA institution at Springfield, Mass. It has been reproduced a number of times, for example in Sports Illustrated, 31 Jan. 1955, p. 64. Also, G.S. Ishikawa is said to have helped to popularize the game of basketball in Japan. Research for the present biography has not recovered the date or place of G.S. Ishikawa’s death. Her obituary says he died in 1939, but other accounts merely represent her as losing trace of him before World War II.

Glengarry News 19 Dec. 1952 * death of Mrs Ishikawa, Kenyon Church Report 1952 (death of daughter not recorded in 1990 report) * marriage, GN 16 Aug. 1901, repr. Fraser Obits. 93 * information from Harriet I. MacKinnon, based on her own long-time, tireless note-taking and on MacRae family sources * conversations at Maxville Manor with Neil Donald MacLeod and Flora A. MacGillivray, Jan. and March 1991 *private information * materials on G.S. Ishikawa, collected and kindly supplied to the present author by the University of Wisconsin (Madison). This splendid collection is evidence again of the biographical wealth available in the archives of American universities and the generosity with which it is shared with researchers, but alas, it has not been possible for the present author to determine whether the G.S. Ishikawa and the other Ishikawas of the collection are the same person * [anon.], “Loyal Subscriber ‘Mary C’ Travelled with The News,” Glengarry News 8 July 1992, biographical article with fine portraits of Mr and Mrs Ishikawa * obituary (only a few lines) of Maybelle Ishikawa, GN 21 Nov. 1990