Alexa Stirling

A L E X A S T I R L I NG | I V

Alexa kept her eyes open for new opportunities. In 1921 she diverted from golf into an entirely different world, the bond business. She worked in the New York office of S.W. Straus. She was only the twenty-eighth woman to sell bonds on Wall Street. The job may have come from contacts of friends in New York she had met in her travels. Because of her celebrity, her new position made the papers. An interview appeared in the New York City Mail: Miss Stirling, of the red hair and brown eyes, looked up from her list of six percent mortgages:

“[Alexa is] the twenty-eighth woman to take up this line of work in this city. Women in the business have formed a club which is to hold regular sessions, just as the masculine bank folk do. ... She has auburn hair, snappy brown eyes, and is full to the limit of pep. She can qualify readily as one of the liveliest recent ad- ditions to New York’s colony of bachelor girls.” NEW YORK ILLUSTRATED NEWS December 1, 1921

The successful businesswoman is today a person to be reckoned with. She manages her financial affairs like any man, often has a person or two to support, and must look to her future whether she marries or not, just as her brother does. The reason the place is so pretty (she waved her celebrated hand in the direction of a handsomely appointed reception room, reading room and dressing room with a neat little maid in it) is because women still love dainty things and tea and chintz and wicker, and always will, no matter how many bonds they sell or votes they cast or families they support with the work of their hands and brains (Beckley 1921). She had not won the American Amateur a fourth time the previous summer, or the Canadian when it was played at Rivermead Golf Club in Ottawa, but 1921 was an important year for another reason. She met her future husband at a dinner during the competition. Her daughter Sandra remembered her father saying, I first became smitten while watching this attractive, red- haired woman play from a bunker.

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Dr. Fraser was a Canadian doctor with the same specialty as Dr. Stirling, Alexa’s father, so they had more than golf in common. They were married in 1925 in her house at East Lake. The reception was across the street at the club. They settled in Ottawa, and she devoted herself to her husband and to raising their three children, Sandra, Glen, and Richard.

When she realized her life had become too busy to practice the violin, she stopped playing. But she didn’t quit golf. She and her husband enjoyed playing at the Royal Ottawa Golf Club. She won the women’s tournament there nine times. She won her second Canadian Amateur, her fifth national championship, in 1934 at age thirty- seven. She also never gave up her carpentry. James Barclay: Her children and grandchildren had watched her in her workshop in the basement of her home in Canada making furniture for their summer cottage. No nails — all tongue and groove. James would be pleased to know that in 2021, Alexa’s grandson, Ian Carwardine, said her twelve-seat dining room table was still in use at their cottage at Old Fort William, Quebec. The almost 100-year-old masterpiece has held up well. He also described her last visit to Atlanta in 1976, a year before her death at age seventy-nine:

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