Archive for Maggie Gilmour

How I put myself through school by writing to two of the richest men in Canada

In September 2005, I left Toronto for grad school in Berkeley. In my bags, along with a copy of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem and several pairs of regulation California flip-flops, I had two cheques totalling $26,000. The cheques were from Canadian millionaires I’d never met. They’d promised to send me money to pay for grad school, provided I write to them once a month. They also asked me to keep the arrangement confidential.

I kept half of my promise.

What follows is the story of how one girl (me) put herself through school by writing to two of the richest men in Canada.
April 2005. I was at my friend Rachel’s house, sitting at her kitchen table with Shuah, her lovely bespectacled friend. It was a spring day in Toronto.

I needed money. Not for an abortion or a car or anything ghastly like that. I’d just applied to one of America’s most expensive graduate schools and had gotten in. They were offering me $5,000 in scholarships, which would cover the cost of coffee and sunscreen for a few months. I needed more, and I needed it fast.

“Who has money?” I asked, into the air.

Rachel and Shuah looked at me. “Rich people have money,” Rachel said.

We didn’t have any money, that was for sure. Rachel was dating a soft-hearted grad student from a poor town in the Maritimes and Shuah was law-school-thousands-of-dollars-in-debt-poor. Me, I was still paying off student loans from my undergrad years at McGill.

My mother worked a government job at an arts agency, and though she would have given me her last cent even if it meant she’d have to live in a tent across the street, she couldn’t spare much. I needed $40,000 at least. My dad was a full-time writer. He’s also pretty successful, but he’d just gotten married and bought a house and I knew every cent was headed in that direction. I needed to widen my contacts. I needed rich people.

“Okay, so how do I get money from them,” I said.

We mulled it over.

“I suppose you could just ask them,” said Rachel.

A scheme started to take shape. I knew I could write a funny letter if I needed to. I also knew from reading magazine profiles of millionaires and from watching Annie that rich people were often eccentric. I did some creative visualization, Shakti Gawain style: I pictured a big man sitting in a chair, reading my letter, and reaching for his chequebook. I pictured him calling out to his secretary: “Put this in the mail, Gladys. This girl’s got spunk.”