>> Amy Draves: Thank you so much for coming. My name is Amy Draves and I am so pleased to welcome Amy Stewart to the Microsoft Research visiting speaker series. Amy is the award winning author of 6 books including: The Drunken Botanist and Wicked
Plants and she has taken her first foray into fictionalized history with her book: Girl
Waits with a Gun, Girl Waits With Gun, I added an “a” there sorry, in which she explores a true story of one of our nations first female deputy sheriffs. She is also the subject of our first foray into book clubs. So if you haven’t signed up, but would like to join us we will be meeting next door following this meeting. We will spend time chatting with Amy as well as appreciating her culinary skills as we serve the signature drink of this book,
The New Jersey Automobile. Please join me in giving Amy a very warm welcome.
[Applause]
>> Amy Stewart: Thank you. Hey guys, thank you so much for having me. In case you are tempted by the promise or the threat of a cocktail in the middle of the day let me tell you what it is and how it came to be. My last book, The Drunken Botanist was a book about all the plants that we turn into alcohol. So pretty much at every book tour event we would serve cocktails, it made total sense right. I found out that when you serve drinks people totally show up to your events and I thought, “This is brilliant, I am just going to do this for every book from now on. It doesn’t matter what the book is about we are just going to do this.”
So for this book there is not an obvious drink that is apart of the book, but I wanted to find something that was from the 1910s that maybe if I got lucky had a name that connected to the themes in the book. It definitely had to be made from ingredients that were available in the 1910s if nothing else. I also wanted to make it something that is easy to mix up in the stockroom of a bookstore. So half a bottle of this, half a bottle of that, stir, no flaming orange peels, no muddled cucumbers, you know nothing too messy or complicated. So I found this drink in a 1910s era cocktail guide called The
Automobile, which I thought was perfect because this book begins with a car crash.
The Automobile is equal parts gin, sweet vermouth and scotch. It is horrible, don’t ever do that, but I thought I think I can improve this. So what I did is I replaced the scotch with Apple Jack, which is a New Jersey spirit. It is very tasty and I added a spoonful of jam. Jam and cocktails is very trendy right now, they weren’t putting jam in cocktails
100 years ago, but they had jam 100 years ago so I think it counts. Then it is topped off with champagne because I everything is better with some champagne. So that’s why it is the New Jersey Automobile and that is what we are going to be drinking if you are interested. If you can’t make it, it’s on my website. It’s actually a pretty good drink to make for a crowd because you can actually batch it ahead of time pretty easily.
So let me tell you a little bit about how this book came into being. I was just finishing up the Drunken Botanist and I was doing research into a gin smuggler named Henry
Kaufman. I just wanted to find out if Henry Kaufman had done anything else interesting before I put him in the book. So I went to the New York Times archives and I found this article, oh wait, this is actually not a picture of Henry Kaufman, but it is a picture of a

bootlegger and I put it in here because as someone who as employees myself, I own a bookstore I cracked me up that someone needed to make a diagram of how bootlegging works. Like do I have to write it down for you? Look, it comes in off the boat, we are going to put it in the car, and you are going to drive that car, anyway.”
So that’s Henry Kaufman and that’s bootlegging, but the story that I found was in the
New York Times in 1915, so exactly 100 years ago, about somebody named Henry
Kaufman. I never could figure out if it was the same guy, but this Henry Kaufman ran his car into a horse and buggy being driven by these 3 sisters named, Constance, Norma and Fleurette Kopp. They got into a dispute over the damages. The Kopp sisters just wanted payment for the damages to their buggy, he refused, the conflict escalated until pretty soon Henry Kaufman was harassing them, threatening them, firing shots at their house, sending kidnapping threats and they were basically they were just under siege in their little farmhouse in the New Jersey countryside for almost a year because of this guy.
So it’s just one article. I didn’t even know if it was the same Henry Kaufman who was the gin smuggler I was trying to put in the Drunken Botanist, but the story was really interesting and for the rest of the afternoon, rather than do my work that I was supposed to get done, I got sucked into looking for more and more about this case. I found the original article about the accident itself and a little civil penalty that was imposed on him.
Henry Kaufman owned a silk factory in Patterson, New Jersey which meant that he was really one of the powerful, elite of the town. This came out of an episode that happened a few months later where they went to the sheriff for help in dealing with this guy who was harassing them and the sheriff actually issued revolvers to the 3 sisters.
Can you imagine today you go to the police, you ask for help and they say, “Okay, well here is what we are going to do: I am going to show you how to shoot and if these guys come back this is what you are going to do.” That’s actually what happened. You know law enforcement was very ad hoc, most police officers and sheriff’s deputies were volunteers, they didn’t have uniforms, they didn’t have a lot of rules to follow and they had no training. It was very common for the sheriff in those days to literally round up a posse if he needed help catching a crook. He would go around, knock on doors, find able bodied men and say, “Get your lantern and your gun and we are going to go after this guy,” and off they would go. So it is amazing that was just 100 years ago that a thing like this could happen.
The newspapers had a field day with this story. They thought it was kind of hilarious that these 3 women were standing up for themselves and did all these silly newspaper headlines about the case, which went all over the country. There were articles about them out here on the west coast at that time. This is the title of the book, “Girl Waits
With Gun”. I love this headline, I love the part about, “Miss Kopp annoyed for months,” like you don’t want to annoy Miss Kopp because look what can happen. This article refers to an incident where Constance participated in a sting operation with the sheriff.
They received a threatening letter that basically said, “Pay us a thousand dollars or we are going to kidnap your youngest sister and burn down your house.” So she went and stood on a street corner in the middle of the night to make the money drop hoping to catch the

guy. There were a lot of reporters who covered the story. So it was yet another moment when they were really in the news a lot.
So this all happened in one day, this was just like 1 days worth of research where I got side tracked from what I was supposed to be doing and this happens to writers all the time. You stumble across something when you meant to be looking for something else and you find it sort of intriguing. So you go, “Oh that’s interesting, I am just going to throw this in a folder and hang onto it,” but in this case I was already kind of falling in love with these 3 women just in the course of the afternoon and seeing what an interesting book it could make.
My husband came home, we own a bookstore, and he runs the store. He came home from the store, it’s usually our habit to sit down, have a drink and talk about what our day was like. This is exactly what we look like every night at home. We dress for cocktail hour and he said, “You know we have an ancestry.com account at the bookstore. We can look them up and find them in the census records, birth certificates and things like that.
So that’s exactly what we did all evening and I was able to really start putting a family tree together for them, figure out in the census where they were living and when. They really started to become real, living people to me and not just names in a newspaper article.
Now I had to get back to my work. I had to finish up Drunken Botanist, but when I had time I would spend a few hours here and there searching for more information. It really did take on the feeling of a little treasure hunt and like all good treasure hunts it even had a map. I found this old land map and here they are. This is the plot of land that they owned. When you read the book you will see that there is a creek that runs behind their house and that Fleurette got shot at when she went down to the creek. So I was very excited to see the creek on the map and then when I found modern math, was able to overlay it and figure out where this was I saw that the creek was still there on modern maps.
So as soon as I could I got on a plane, went out to Patterson and Hackensack, I stood in the creek and it was such an amazing feeling. I have to tell you by this time this was already starting to live in my imagination as a possible novel and I was starting to write some scenes and to imagine how this might work as a book and it might come together as a story. So to actually be able to physically go and stand in the places where the story that previously only lived inside my head it was such an incredible feeling. I went to the street corner where the girl waited with the gun. And this building might have been there in the 1910s. It looks maybe just old enough and I found myself kind of walking around the building and sort of touching the bricks with my hands and thinking, “Constance could have touched these bricks,” like no one has ever been so excited to go to
Hackensack, New Jersey as I was.
It was just amazing to be able to follow in their footsteps and go to all the places where these events took place. I dug around in the court house and I found the indictment against Henry Kaufman, which means that I got the text of the threatening letters that he

sent to the women. So when you read the book you will see that those letters, many of them are word for word, what he actually sent them. And this is something that was not really printed in the newspaper or otherwise available, but they still had it on microfilm thank goodness.
Henry Kaufman’s factory, I mentioned that he owned a silk factory. Patterson at that time was a city of silk industry, a very industrial city. He owned a silk dying factory. I went to the address of his factory, it’s actually right next door to this building and it’s a vacant lot, but this is a silk dying plant and it was right next door. So addresses can sometimes change, it’s possible that his was his. At the very least it’s very much like where he worked. So the scenes where Constance goes to the factory to confront Henry
Kaufman and try to get payment, those scenes were all base don being able to go and kind of poke around in the weeds of this old abandoned building and get a sense of what it would have been like when this was a very busy industrial part of the city.
I also went to the jail where Sheriff Heath, sort of the good guy of this story, where he lived and worked. Now Sheriff Heath is right here, he’s behind the wheel right here. He lived in an apartment. The sheriff at that time was expected, with this family, to move into the jail. So he lived right in here. The jail was brand new at the time he took it over in 1912 and you can see that it looks like a mid evil dungeon. They had this idea at the time that if a jail looked terrifying enough people wouldn’t commit crimes so that they wouldn’t have to go there. You can see how well that worked out.
But I showed up at the jail unannounced. It is no longer being used to house inmates, but it is under historic preservation. It looks pretty much like this right now and the insides are exactly the way that they were in 1915. I showed up with no appointment and tried to talk my way in, explain what I was doing and finally they sent out the public relations officer who deals with the public and he was very suspicious of me until I mentioned
Robert Heath, the sheriff. And he said, “Heath, I know that name, Robert Heath?” I said,
“Yeah, yeah,” and he said, “Come here, come here, come with me,” and he had all these photographs, many of which Sheriff Heath took himself or were of Sheriff Heath. I know this because I have newspaper clippings of Heath going around giving slide shows to try to win public support for his very progressive ideas about how a prison ought to be run.
They were probably like those grass lantern slides at the time and they had scanned all of these pictures.
So it was amazing for me to get to see what the jail looked exactly in the day that
Constance was involved. There is a scene where the Kopp sisters go inside the jail, they are inside his apartment and I have been in his apartment. So that was absolutely remarkable. And of course I also went to the Patterson cemetery to pay my respects. It was just the most amazing thing in the world to go and to stand. They don’t have their own markers, but I have a little map. I know where everybody is buried right there and just to stand 6 feet above where my characters are buried. And I have so many questions for them. I’m like, “Could you wake up for 5 minutes? Get up, get up, get up, I need to talk to you,” but anyway there they are. It’s weird that I can actually go and visit them in real live anytime I want to.

So one of the coolest things about of course was getting to see these people in real life and getting to know them. So let me introduce you to them. This is Constance Kopp, she was the oldest sister, she was 35 at the time this story began, 6 feet tall, weighed 180 pounds. She would have towered over most men at that time. She was unmarried, still living at home. She wanted a career, but didn’t really have a way of getting one. Her mother had sort of prevented her from getting any kind of useful education and there weren’t a lot of jobs for women. You know I read the newspapers of the day and on this side of the page are jobs for men and over here is a little column of jobs for women. You could be a housekeeper, a stenographer, like a secretary or you could do factory work and that was it. So she was kind of stuck. It’s not clear to me what would have happened to her if Henry Kaufman hadn’t come into her life.
This is the youngest sister, Fleurette who is 16 when the story begins. She in real life was a very accomplished seamstress. She sewed all her own clothes. She probably made all of Constance’s clothes too, given that Constance was 6 feet tall. She probably couldn’t find anything to fit her. She was very theatrical; I have newspaper clippings of her entering singing competitions in Patterson. So, she really was the sort of dramatic, theatrical, fashionable creature how I have her in the book. Now the middle sister,
Norma I have never been able to find a picture of and it drives me crazy everyday that I don’t know what Norma Kopp looks like. Someone has a photograph of this woman in their basement or in their attic somewhere and they need to give it to me. It’s mine and I don’t know why I don’t have it. If I ever turn up her picture you all are going to know about it because I am going to scream so loud that everybody is going to hear it at once.
What I did know about Norma though because I was able to track down some family members is I know she was an extremely difficult person to get along with. She was very hard, she as judgmental, she was harsh on people, she held grudges. She was a very blunt talker; she said whatever was on her mind and never apologized for any of it. When I heard that I thought, “You know what I know women like that, like there are women like that in my family.” We all have that aunt who shows up at the hospital when you have your baby and tells you that she doesn’t like what you named her baby. But she is there, she is always there, she always shows up.
So that’s the kind of woman Norma was. She was disliked by just about everybody that she ever met and I thought, “You know the thing about women like that is that they may not like people, but very often they like animals, like they have got a little dog or something like that.” And I didn’t want to give Norma a little dog, but I wanted to give her something to humanize her. So a fictional piece of this is that Norma is very interested in carrier pigeons, technology of the future. The thing about carrier pigeons at this time, and this is Norma’s position, but it was the position of many people in real life, is the telephone is infeasible as a form of communication because we can’t possibly string wires across the country and the operator is always listening in so you can’t have a private conversation. Telegraph, same problem, there is two operators, one on either end, reading every word you write. So the only secure, reliable form of communication is messenger pigeon, obviously. Weirdly this may still be the case today, we don’t know.

So she was very interested in this idea, she had carrier pigeons and it becomes a big part of the book. It will become an even bigger part of her life down the road. You can see here this is Constance and Fleurette together, so you can see that Constance really was a very substantial woman. Fleurette was about 5'2" in heels, always petite and adorable.
One of the coolest things that happened was that when I was able to connect with some family members I got a letter that Constance wrote to one of the deputies during the events of this book where she was thanking them for their help. So I was able to see what her own words sounded like and how she signed her name, which I love. I think when you can see someone’s handwriting you sort of get to know them a little better. So I actually had it made into a rubber stamp. So if you want Constance can sign your book today as well as me.
This is Sheriff Heath; again he is just a doll. He was a very reform oriented, very progressive minded guy. He advocated for inmates to have medical care. He was the first one to offer church services in the prison there. He wanted them to get an education.
He wanted to get at the root causes of poverty and crime. He was very progressive and saw something in Constance that no one else saw and was willing to take a chance on her and really get her involved in this investigation. Even some of the minor characters I feel like I know better because I have pictures of them. John Corder is the county prosecutor who first refused to help them and I turned up a picture of him on microfilm.
The funny thing is I was in New Jersey about a week ago talking about this book, I showed this picture and a woman came up to me afterwards and said, “You know my husband’s name is John Corder and he is named after his grandfather or great grandfather and I wonder if it’s the same guy.” I said, “Okay, well let’s swap e-mail addresses and I will tell you everything I know and let’s figure out if your guy is the same as my guy.” I said, “But I have to apologize in advance because he is the villain in this. He is the guy who only cares about himself and isn’t about to be bothered to get up off his lazy butt and go help these 3 women. He is pretty corrupt and pretty horrible.” She said, “No that sounds about like my husbands family. I think he’s one of ours.”
So John Ward is an attorney who shows up kind of late in the book. In real life John
Ward and Sheriff Heath had a lot of dealings and there is a lot more to come between
John Ward and the Kopp sisters. So I have him a fictional cameo in this book just to get to know him early. When I got these pictures from his family I just loved them. From his face I thought, “I know what kind of guy this is.” That by the way is his soon to be ex-wife Flora. He had a lot of ex-wives.
Now he had a law partner named Peter McGinnis and even though Peter McGinnis has a very small part in the book I wanted this duo to kind of make sense. I knew that
McGinnis had been a judge and a senator later in life and I had a very serious, somber picture of him as an old man in his judge robes, but I couldn’t get a handle on him as a young person. So I went to ancestry and looked to see if his family had posted any pictures of him when he was younger. I couldn’t find one, but I turned up this picture of

another guy named Peter McGinnis and I just fell in love with him, look at that face, do you not love that face? I just want to squeeze those cheeks; he is so adorable.
So this became my Peter McGinnis in the book. I know that someday I am going to be showing these pictures and somebody is going to say that’s my great grandfather that you hijacked for you novel, but I love him. So the pictures really meant a lot to me in terms of understanding the characters. The Kopp sisters even have an older brother Francis who’s always urging them to move in with him, because you can’t very well have unmarried female relations just out living by themselves. It wasn’t done in 1915 and
Francis had a wife named Bessie. Bessie is very young in the book, but the family gave me this picture of her when she was much older and I just loved it. She reminds me of my own grandmother a little bit and I even got a better sense of what kind of woman she was just from being able to look at one picture of her. I thought this was kind of a great image.
I never did get to see a picture of Henry Kaufman, but even this directory listing gave me an idea. I knew he was in business with his brother, but I didn’t see another Kaufman on here and I thought, “Maybe it was his brother in law, maybe it’s his sister and his sister’s husband.” So in the book you will read of Marian Garfinkel who’s his sister who is fed up with him. He is a drunk, he is a bad seed, he has always been trouble from the day he was born, he is just spending his dad’s money, making a mess of the factory, making a mess of his life, riding around in his fast car with his group of thug friends. He is just nothing but trouble and she has had it with him, so that all came out of that.
Now let me just kind of wrap up by saying a little bit about the history of the place.
Because I have written 6 books of nonfiction I am a crazy researcher and I can spend months researching something that’s only barely going to make it into a book. But in this case I knew that the history of Patterson at the time would really inform the story. So here’s what it looked like, total factory town, very kind of dirty and polluted and also somewhat corrupt. The police, the judges, the courts, everybody was in the pockets of what they called the “silk men”, the silk factory owners. This is what a silk dye shop would have looked like. So I don’t know if this is Henry Kaufman’s shop, but the scenes that I wrote inside the factor were based entirely off of this photograph.
In 1913 right before my book begins the Patterson silk strikes erupted, because factory owners demanded that workers work longer hours for the same pay and that they operate
4 looms at a time rather than 2. The workers were no idiots, they realized that their employers were going to be much wealthier, much more profitable, but they weren’t going to get to share in the profits. I realize that this has no resonance today and probably can’t connect with anything happening in the news right now, but that is how it was 100 years ago. Tens of thousands of workers went out on strike and this was a huge moment in the history of the American labor movement. So a lot of famous people were there. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, early suffragist and labor activist was there organizing.
Margaret Sanger, another suffragist and early advocate for birth control and labor organizer, she was there and Jack Reed. So if you saw the movie Reds you remember
Warren Beatty’s character, Jack Reed, he spent most of his time in jail, but he wrote

some amazing dispatches from the Patterson jail that talked about what the strikes were like.
Now one thing that happened during these strikes, it went on for 6 months, the workers couldn’t afford to feed their children and the union set up relief tents so the workers could come get food everyday, but the tents were always running out of food. The kids were starving so the union organized for the children to be sent into New York City to lives with families who were sympathetic to the cause and willing to take in some kids for a few months. So here they are with little notes pinned onto their coats with their names, going off to just live with complete strangers. Can you imagine having to do this today, to send your kids off to live with total strangers because you can’t afford to feed them?
So that’s what happened. Here they are being rounded up in a truck that looks like it’s meant to haul horses around, going off to New York. And one little just sort of footnote to this story is that some of these kids didn’t come back. And you could see how this could happen in those days. You know a kid who was 10 or 12 years old was able to go get a job, go work in New York City and people moved around a lot. It was very common for kids to sort of just get dropped off somewhere. So some of those kids, for whatever reason, never came back and that gave me an idea to create a fictional character named Lucy Blake who works in Henry Kaufman’s factory, get’s caught up in the events of the Patterson children’s evacuation and Constance literally runs into her in the factory and they end up getting caught up in each other’s situation, so that’s sort of where that came from. Yeah?
>>: What’s the W and W mean, the star?
>> Amy Stewart: IWW is the Industrial Workers of the World. At the time they were called the “Wobblies” and they were a bunch of Bolsheviks. These were radical labor organizers and with World War 1 coming there was a lot of fear and mistrust of these communist, socialist, Bolshevik, whatever you want to call them, union organizers. The
IWW had the idea that there should only be one union all over the world and that all workers should belong to it. So if the plumbers went out on strike the electricians would go out with them, as would the writers, as would the waiter’s, everybody. Yea, no ir really was a fascinating time for American politics.
So I had this big story. I had this crime and in some ways it’s a novel about a crime, but for me it was really a novel about this family. You know these 3 women, 3 sisters living by themselves and I just wondered, “What has kept them together all these years? What might ultimately tear them apart? How are they going to make their way in the world as women who aren’t interested in marriage, but really have very few avenues open to them?” And this car accident literally changed the course of their lives and sent them off in an entirely new direction. I got so sucked into their story and so attached to them I have never been able to stop the research. I have hundreds and hundreds of newspaper articles of them and thousands of other little bits of related information. I have this giant
Evernote collection of stuff about them and with any luck I will get to write several more

books and tell their story, because it’s a fascinating story, most if it is true and what happens next for them is kind of even more amazing than what happened in this book.
So the next book is just about finished. It will be out a year from now. It will be out in
September of next year. And you know the thing for me is –. Oh and the pigeon’s, sorry
I forgot about the pigeon’s. The thing for me is you know when I stumbled into this story at the time I had a pretty successful career writing nonfiction and I was really enjoying myself. I had always wanted to write fiction and there are several failed novels in drawers that nobody will ever read, but these women started to mean so much to me.
They started to seem like my own great grandmother, someone who I didn’t personally know, but who I thought about and wondered about a lot.
What I realized is that they had been completely forgotten about. No one has written a thing about them, there is no book, there is not a pamphlet at the historical society, there is not a Wikipedia page, there is nothing about them anywhere and I thought, “You know
I’m the one who found them, like anybody could have found them, but I’m the one who did.” I thought, “A lot of the books I have written, even the Drunken Botanist which is a totally fun book that I loved working on, but it’s a book about the plants that get turned into booze.” Someone was going to write that book. That is a cool idea that’s out there in the culture. Nobody else is going to do this. I don’t know that anyone else could have dug up exactly the things I dug up and connected with the same people and made the same discoveries.
So I really felt called in a very big way to do it. I was 45 when I started working on it, or about 45 and I think that’s the age where you start looking around going, “You know if there is something really important you want to do in your life now would be a great time to get started. I’ve got lots of energy, I’ve got lots of ideas, don’t put it off another 10 years.” So I’m glad that I stuck it out. Their story continues to mean a lot to me. It has been great fun being on tour, getting to connect with people who have something to contribute. Usually when I am finished writing a book it’s over and done with. So if someone raises their hand and has an idea I’m like, “Well thanks a lot, where were you 2 years ago? I can do nothing with that now, that does not help me. “
But because this is an ongoing project for me it has been great fun. A few nights ago I was in Brooklyn and someone had a question about Sheriff Heath. I have never been able to track down his family. So I said, “You know one thing I hope is with all the media attention with this book maybe some family members will start to come out of the woodwork and I can finally track down the people I couldn’t find. And that night I got home and I had an e-mail from somebody who met Sheriff Heath when he was young and is best friends with his two grandsons and put me right in touch with his great grandsons.
So suddenly I have someone I can talk to about one of my characters whose going to be a very big deal in the next book. So it has been just an amazing thing to keep opening up this story and to have it keep going and then for me to be able to go home and do something with all of that rather than wish I had know about it 2 years ago. That has been terrific.

Well thank you all so much for letting me come. I want to tell you we will take questions in a minute, but in case I forget I want to mention that I brought you something. I have temporary tattoos if you want one. These have been super fun, before I left on tour I put them on my parents, so put them right there on their arms. My folks are kind of in their early 70s and they have never put on a temporary tattoo before and they were like, “Wow it looks so cool,” they were so into it. Then my dad said, “Okay you are going to leave a couple more of these for me because I am going to put these on a part of your mother’s body that you don’t want to know about.” And I am like, “Oh okay, I’m good, I’m out, goodbye, thank you for that image.” So if you can manage to put them on a part of your body that’s photographable there is a like a little hashtag contest thing on the back you can do if you want to. You can win a book, but you don’t have to. I know can you believe that? Does anybody have a question or a comment?
>>: So around that time with a lot of famous people in that area, like in the future will you have them come across, whether it’s William Carlos Williams or Albert Einstein?
>> Amy Stewart: So I don’t know if I am going to be able to sustain this, but for the first and second book there are these Easter egg characters. You know my thought about it was that although they are famous now, they weren’t famous in the same way when they were just living their lives, being who they were.
>>: Right, but they could have gone to him as their doctor.
>> Amy Stewart: Right yeah. So for instance Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Margaret
Sanger are very briefly name checked in Girl Waits With Gun, but not in a way that if you are not like into them it might get right past you and there is something similar to that in book 2 that you can watch out for. So yeah, if I can keep it up I am going to. I like the idea of dropping them in, in a really casual way and seeing who picks up on it. Yes?
>>: I had a question about –.
>> Amy Stewart: Oh and let me say, real quick I am going to stop you right there because
I just remembered, I have learned that I need to make an announcement before I start questions which is that there is a family secret at the heart of the book and not everyone has read the book, so I have to ask people not to ask questions that might be a spoiler. I found this out the hard way in Boston; I almost got eggs thrown at me. People want to know how I found out the family secret and I can tell you that, but we have to do it not in front of people who haven’t read the book. Anyway, I didn’t meant to interrupt you, but that was just in my head, go ahead.
>>: I think it was a spoiler question.
>> Amy Stewart: Okay, then I am glad I did that. You can ask me later. What else?
Yeah, go ahead.

>>: So did any family members then get interested in their own genealogy after you started this?
>> Amy Stewart: Yes, so what happened is I tracked down the cop’s sister who had an older brother Frances, Frances had kids, I tracked down France’s grandson through ancestry, because he had started a family tree, but hadn’t gotten very far. So I was able to give them their complete genealogy, because I had thrown some resources at it. I not only geeked out on ancestry and got that piece done, but then I hired a genealogist to go get all the things that you had to go someplace physically to get. So I had not just the names, but the marriage licenses of like their great, great grandparents and traced them all the way back to Austria and all of that stuff.
So that was cool; I mean it was cool for them to get all that stuff and it was incredibly cool for me to hear just the family stories that got passed down. Then I also met
Fleurette’s son. So Fleurette being the youngest and she had kids a little later in life, her son is now in his 80s and living in New Jersey. It took a long time to find him, but I finally did and he not only had amazing stories to tell about his mother, but he also remembers his aunt Norma from when he was a little boy and she was an old woman and she lived with them for a little while. So everything I know about Norma’s personality comes from him.
And again, it is the weirdest thing in the world to know that there is a human being right now, alive on the planet who can answer questions about my characters. It is such a bazaar thing and there is only 1. I don’t think there is anyone else who knew them like he knows them. So I have been to see him a few times, we talk and stay in touch and I send him stuff anytime I turn anything up with his mother’s name it, pictures or whatever. I of course send them right off to him. Yeah?
>>: Did he know the spoiler?
>> Amy Stewart: Yes, so it’s hard for me. We will talk about it later, sure.
>>: So now everyone’s lives are sort of documented in social media or whatever, all this stuff would be trivial to find. Is this sort of the last group of people where it takes such effort to get the information and find it? I mean isn’t that going to change things?
>> Amy Stewart: I actually question how easy it will be to do these 100 years from now about you and me. I question whether something like Facebook is going to be so carefully archived that what I post today is going to be findable 100 years from now.
>>: Well just the sheer number of photos that it exists is just seems like –.
>> Amy Stewart: It could be, it could be. What’s interesting is that paper is remarkable durable. For instance as an author I am married to a rare book dealer and he brokers famous people’s papers to university archives sometimes. I don’t have a single piece of paper correspondence with any publisher I have worked with. I have got e-mail and I did

go to the trouble and it was kind of –. Oh, I shouldn’t say how hard this was to do. I am at Microsoft right now, anyway I did try to get all of my e-mails as PDFs so that I could save them when I migrated from one type of e-mail to another and it was surprisingly hard to do. It took a long time. Not everyone is going to do it.
So that correspondence, if it’s interesting to somebody 100 years from now is only going to exist if I hold onto that PDF and either manage to print it or someone, after my death thinks to get into my Mosey account and get my stuff out of there. I think it’s actually easier for stuff to get lost. My newspapers are surprisingly durable, microfilm get’s kept.
I really wonder about that and letters, I think the fact that we are not writing letters is very interesting. I am going to be writing about World War 1 pretty soon with these women and a lot of what we know from World War 1 is because they wrote letters home and today our service men and women over seas are Skyping, text messaging and emailing with their families and I don’t know if we are going to have that same real-time living document of what life is like in war that we had when people were writing letters and those letters were saved, cherished and treasured. I don’t know, that’s an interesting question.
>>: I am curious about your knowledge that she was one of the first deputy sheriffs that was female. Do you have any information about others that were happening?
>> Amy Stewart: Oh yes, I have gotten way off into the history of women in law enforcement. So here is the test: the test is, “Did she have a badge, a gun, handcuffs and arrest authority?” In other words, “Was she able to chase a man down on the street, put handcuffs on him and place him under arrest?” There were a lot of women working in law enforcement at the time who were kind of like social workers. They were there to deal with the women and children who came into the law enforcement system, which was very necessary and very important and sometimes dangerous work, but there job duties were not the equivalent of a male. Constance, which you will see in the next book, it’s only hinted at here, but it is coming soon, did have the equivalent job duties of a man, which is very unusual.
So there are a few women who lay claim to being America’s first police woman. When you look at it you realize they were really a police matron, which meant more like social worker or even a stenographer or an office person, something else. So I am gathering up newspaper clippings of other women who were deputy sheriffs or police officers at the time to see, “Did they have arrest authority?” Very rarely do you see anything in 1915 about a woman arresting a man. That is not an event that happened very much. So she was pretty remarkable, but I will not say that she was absolutely the first. Even going back into the late 1800s when a lot of cities didn’t really even have such a thing as a police force or a sheriff, it was sort of just barely even existed. You will see women sometimes they were the widow of the sheriff or the widow of the police chief. They get involved somehow, but our roles were not yet solidified and as you probably know, even as late as the 60s and 70s, women police officers didn’t have full parody in terms of their duties. Yes?

>>: I am curious about the character of Mrs. Heath. In reading the book it seemed like of all the characters who were so well developed and you have an opinion and you understand the context which was represented, but as a reader I found her to be a little bit mysterious, like as somebody who was reading this I had to draw my own inferences as to why she reacted the way she did in certain scenes. I was just wondering if you had anything to fill out about here and your vision of what role she played in the book.
>> Amy Stewart: Yeah, what do you think?
>>: Well I am a little embarrassed to say because of course it is your own. I was guessing it was probably trying to explain, you know how, when you have a couple and one person is really involved in social justice issues, that takes time away from the relationship or the household, that it was sort of like that maybe. She was just tired that her husband was working so hard all the time and she had to live in this stupid jail.
>> Amy Stewart: Right.
>>: See I thought she was jealous that he was spending so much time with Constance and
I was going to raise my hand and ask the question, “Did you think there was a potential budding romance there and if so are you nervous about writing about that for fear of offending the children if it’s not an actual fact of what happened?”
>> Amy Stewart: Oh I love, yeah wow, okay no these are very interesting questions. In real life, on Constance’s side of the family there is debate over whether she and Heath ever had a thing. Some people say yes and some people say no. To my surprise a lot of the reader response that I have gotten has been, “I am so glad there is not a romance in this, like screw romance. Why can’t they do something other then get boyfriends? This passes the Bechdel test.” I am like, “Yeah,” so I kind of love it that people have that response. And Cordelia Heath, the wife is an interesting character to me and I deliberately gave her a very small role. I mean she does have a very small role in the first book. We only barely see her once or twice.
My thinking on it is that first of all it would have sucked to live at the jail. I mean you saw that picture; there was no playground for the kids. It was bleak and awful, it was in an industrial corner of town, and it would have just been a crappy, crappy life, hard to raise kids there. She did not have the option of getting the job and going and doing something interesting. She had to be a wife and a mother and not that, that isn’t interesting, but she didn’t have a choice. It wasn’t a choice; it was a thing that she had to do. And Heath, as much as he is this great progressive guy, that does not really extend to the role of his wife. He expects a sheriff’s wife to kind of tow the line and I think that would have been very true of progressive men of that time and it is still somewhat true of progressive men today. I mean we still have a situation where as much lip service as we pay to equal everything at home women end up doing more than men do.
So you know I think they have a difficult marriage. I think that Cordelia is worried about a lot of what’s going on. I think it’s tough to be a cops wife. There is no reason for her

to like Constance, why would she? So part of it too is there are so many women in this book and I really sort of had to go through, count and go through like, are there even enough men doing anything and do I have enough men who are good characters? They all seem to be kind of bad. It’s all like good women and bad men. So I thought it would be nice to have a woman who doesn’t like Constance. It would be nice to have at least 1 woman who isn’t like, “Go get them girl.” So she is kind of that person, but she does have a much bigger role in book 2.
So it has been very interesting to hear what readers think, because I have got 3 weeks at home where I can still tinker with this before it is out of my hands. And somebody the other night said, “You know she’s an unhappy wife and unhappy wives are very complicated,” and he was speaking from experience. I thought, “Ah that’s interesting, yeah an unhappy wife that is a hard person to write.” Yeah, so I am working on Cordelia.
What else, anything else?
>>: Is there evidence from your research that led you to believe that they weren’t interested in marriage or was it just simply the fact that they weren’t married?
>> Amy Stewart: Oh there’s plenty of evidence. Constance, the wonderful thing about doing this research is that sometimes I would be wondering about something and I would go home and that night I would turn up a newspaper interview with Constance where she answers that very question. So she said out loud in her own words that she doesn’t want to be married and have kids. And in those days there was only 1 kind of getting married for women. There was the kind where you quit your job if you had one and you stayed home and did the domestic thing.
So she definitely said out loud that she didn’t want to. When I asked Fleurette’s son why
Norma never got married he just laughed. He just said, “No one would marry Norma, hardly anyone could stand to be in the same room with Norma. That was out of the question.” So yeah, that is the deal with them. I mean Fleurette; she is the young pretty one. She wants to go out and do different things with her life and she is keenly interested in boys. She just doesn’t have much access to them yet, so more to come there. Did you have a –?
>>: I am curious about the fictionalization of it in terms of when you have now been learning things, as you go along and especially even after you have even published the book, if there was anything that you sort of looked back and thought, “I didn’t really get that right”?
>> Amy Stewart: Oh well the fictionalization, my goal was there is a lot of gaps in the historical record. There are months that pass where I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why people did what they did necessarily. I don’t know what they talked about at home. So everything that really happened is in the book and I filled in the gaps with fiction. So that’s how I did it and as for anything I got wrong there are a few things that I more or less got deliberately wrong in that it was making me crazy trying to make the story conform to a few things.

So geography is a little weird, if you live there you are going to be a little puzzled about how they get from point A to point B sometimes. I was living in Austin when the movie
Slacker came out and it cracked me up to watch people walk out of a movie theater, I knew right where that movie theater was and in the film they would walk out and they would go around the corner and they would be half way across town. I was like, “Oh of course movies must do that all the time. It’s just I know this town really well.” So there are some things like that.
Transportation, I mean I understand how transportation more or less worked. There were a lot of street cars; there were a lot of trolleys. I knew horses and buggies and automobiles. I knew what the roads were made of and how the cars were tearing up the roads. I mean you want to talk about disruptive technology, like they had to find a completely new way to build roads and they weren’t sure, like is this car thing even going to stick around because we are going to have to rebuild all of our roads.
I knew all of that, but when Constance needed to get on a train there was just a train. I didn’t get so sucked into, “Oh on Sunday the train time tables didn’t, blah, blah, blah,” I didn’t do that. The other place where I was deliberately kind of sloppy was in court room procedure. There is very little that happens in a court room and it is not a court room drama. If anything the court room stuff is almost for comic effect or for some other purpose other than the outcome. I just decided to write those scenes the way they came to me.
At one of my events in New Jersey a Bergen County judge came to the event and he was keenly interested in the inner workings of all these real people who were his predecessor’s there in Bergen County and he bought a big stack for all of the judges and prosecutors and I said, “All right, listen I have got to tell you something, I don’t want you to think I don’t know better; I do know better. I just decided I was going to write these scenes the way I wanted to write them and not worry too much about procedure.” But you know judges, I mean look at Law and Order, they are so used to being misrepresented on screen that it was nothing to him. He was like, “Nah, don’t even worry about it; its fine.” But he wants to swap Bergen County history with me. So those may change in future books. Yeah?
>>: I am kind of going off of Amy’s question. There was an article that had the girls swooning and fainting and as they read it with kind of curled lip, was that your character take on them or is that something you found out was actually true about them?
>> Amy Stewart: Oh that had them fainting? Yeah right, one of the newspaper articles about one of the nights when they were under attack had I think Constance fainting and that’s a real newspaper article. I just thought it was absurd. I thought, “She is not going to faint, look at her, what?” It just seemed like the stupidest thing I had ever read and by then I had already figured out that newspapers of that era were highly inaccurate. They made up so much stuff. They made up quotes wholesale. The reason I know that is because I can compare 10 different articles about the same event and put that together

with what else I knew and I can see the lies and distortions. So yeah, newspapers back then had a lot of fun, but no fainting, please.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Amy Stewart: Well it is true now, but the interesting thing back then is that the media was very overtly and deliberately partisan. So the Hack N Sack Republican was the republican newspaper and they were completely 100 percent partisan from page 1 to page
36, which was hilarious and so much fun to read. Yeah it was great, they hated Sheriff
Heath. Anything else?
>>: Can you talk more about the sister’s relationship about with their mother and her mistrustfulness of the world? Did you invent that or was their evidence that she was really like that?
>> Amy Stewart: Yeah, well the sisters relationship with their mother. So in real life the mother was actually alive. She didn’t die for another 4 or 5 years. I killed her off early because 4 women under 1 roof just seemed like too much for me to handle. I was like,
“I’m sorry Mrs. Kopp, but we are just going to put you in an early grave and move on.”
So we only know about her in flashbacks. She really was from Austria; she really did come to this country after the revolutions of 1848 that swept across Europe. You know when you think about revolutions you think about the victors, but there are always winners and losers. In this case the Jews got to move out of the ghettos and live wherever they wanted to live. A lot of people who had been sort of kept down suddenly had a place in the world and there were a lot of middle and upper class people who didn’t like that and wanted to get out.
So Constance’s family, her ancestors came as part of this wave of educated middle class people who didn’t like the new changes in Europe and ended up in Brooklyn as so many people did. They were anti-Semitic, I know this in real life and Mrs. Kopp’s mistrust of strangers and just generally just wanting to keep her daughters kind of hidden is fiction, but you know she came to this country when she was 16 and Brooklyn must have just looked like a very strange place to a teenage girl who was used to living sort of a privileged life in Austria and suddenly they are immigrants. And this happens to so many immigrants to moving to this country. At home you were an engineer, doctor or whatever and then you find yourself running a restaurant or driving a taxi cab here and it’s very strange.
So I was also drawing on my own German grandmother who was very mistrustful of strangers and suspicious of everyone. So she was sort of a composite of a few people I knew in real live and just some guesses I made about what somebody in that situation might have been like. All right. Well thank you all so much, this was fun.
[Applause]