AMHERST, N.S. — You never know what you’ll find at Frenchys.
Several months ago, Karen McKinnon, who owns Maritime Mosaic at Dayle’s Grand Market in Amherst, bought a tarnished silver cup from a woman who found it in a bin at a Truro thrift store. She cleaned it up and noticed the name William Howard Taft engraved on the silver cup.
She then realized its significance and spent weeks trying to find a descendant of the former president of the United States.
“The engraving on it was made it special. It said, ‘To Sylvia Howard Taft from her grandfather William Howard Taft’, who was the 27th president of the United States,” she said. “I held onto this cup for about three months, and I had several people make offers, but I kept getting this feeling that I had to at least try to find someone in the family before I ever went ahead and sold it. To me, it was about morals and karma.”
Taft was president from 1909 to 1913 and was the 10th Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, serving from 1921 until 1930, the same year he died. He succeeded Theodore Roosevelt and was defeated by Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 presidential election.
McKinnon worked with the Cumberland County Museum and also found the president’s family tree that showed his son, Charles Phelps Taft, had a daughter, Sylvia, who went from Sylvia Howard Taft to Sylvia Lotspeich. That Sylvia had a daughter, also Sylvia.
“The Sylvia, for whom the cup was made, had passed away several years ago, but I found her daughter,” McKinnon said. “I was trying to contact her son, who was listed in the genealogy listing but it was Sylvia who answered the phone. I told her how I found this cup and she told me it at least eight years since she last saw it. She didn’t know what had happened to it.”
The pair traded emails over several weeks with McKinnon restoring the cup by polishing it to remove the tarnish.
She later packed the cup and mailed it, along with stick of maple and a piece of Nova Scotia tartan, to Concord, Mass., where Sylvia Lotspeich Greene opened the package in front of family during U.S. Thanksgiving Dinner.
“It’s one of those things where I knew I had to get it back to where it belonged. If my great-grandfather had given something to my mother, I would want that. I knew they needed to have it back in their family,” McKinnon said. “I know when people see that cup, they’re not only going to see the cup, they’re going to see that there are people in the world who care.”
'I made it into a mystery story'
Greene is touched by McKinnon’s kindness, saying it means so much to have her mother’s cup back in the family.
“I held onto the package until the family was here at Thanksgiving and we opened it together and oo’ed and ahh’ed. Karen had sent me a photo of the cup before it was cleaned and it was very tarnished because it had been sitting in a box in my home for many years before it started on its journey,” Lotspeich Greene said. “When we took it out of the box it was just gleaming. It was quite a moment.”
Since then, she has shown photo of the cup to her children, her Taft cousins and her mother’s one surviving brother, who is 81 and lives in California.
“I made it into a mystery story. I told them the first part and told them to stay tuned to tomorrow when I’ll tell you the dénouement,” she said. “In the first email I sent them the photo Karen has sent me of the mug before it was polished and on the second day, I sent them a very touching photograph of my great-grandfather with my mother on his knee and the polished, gleaming mug beside it. It’s like a spiritually reunited photo.”
She said the photo of the president and her mother was likely taken in the early 1920s, after the Taft presidency when he was Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Her mother was born in 1920 in Ohio and she believes it was common practice at the time for families of a certain class to give silver mugs to their grandchildren.
When her mother died in 2008, as the oldest she was responsible for taking care and distributing her belongings. That’s probably when the mug came into her possession, but she didn’t know what it was.
In 2002, she and her husband separated amicably. Both she and he had boxes of family silver that was tarnished and they didn’t think was of any value. Somehow, the mug must have gotten into her former husband’s box and he asked their son to sell the contents or get rid of it.
“Neither (her son) Jeremy nor I remember how it got donated to a thrift store,” Greene said. “It was probably in a musty box and that’s probably how it entered the thrift store pipeline. A friend of mine said thrift stores will sometimes sell big batches of items to other thrift stores. That’s how I’m thinking it got to Truro and then made its way to Amherst.”
Lotspeich Greene said McKinnon is the real hero of the story.
“Karen was very persistent to follow up her feeling about this and then she was extremely kind and generous in our conversations together. I was shocked when I picked up the phone,” she said. “I'm at the age when 90 per cent of my phone calls are from someone from medicare or someone from social security. I almost didn’t pick up the phone and when I picked it up she asked for Jeremy Greene, who lives upstairs. I became a little leery and asked what it was in reference to and she said she was actually looking for Sylvia Lotspeich Greene. She said she had an odd story and then proceeded to tell me. I started to cry when she described the mug, not because I had been missing the mug, but I certainly miss my mother and I was so touched by her generosity and persistence. I imagine her as someone who enjoys a puzzle.”
Lotspeich Greene said she asked relatives if she should contact the Taft museum to see if it wants the mug, but her uncle – who is the only family member remaining from her mother’s generation – told her the mug belongs with her.
“It just goes to show there’s a lot of good in the world after all,” Lotspeich Greene said.
The story of the mug also reminds her of the book "Paddle-to-the-Sea," a 1941 children’s book by Holling C. Holling about a First Nations child who carves a wooden model of an Indigenous person in a canoe and carves the words “Please put me back in the water. I am Paddle-to-the Sea" and sets it free to travel to Great Lakes and make its way to the Atlantic Ocean, being picked up in a fishing net off Newfoundland, making its way to France where its long journey is written up in a French newspaper – a copy of which makes it way to a sawmill on the Nipigon River, where, by chance, the maker who is now a grown man sees the article and recognizes his handiwork without drawing attention to it.
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