Читать книгу Waking Nanabijou - Jim Poling Sr. - Страница 12
Оглавление2 — LaFRANCE
All I knew about my mother was what I had observed growing up as her son and what she had told me. What she told people did not always match reality. Her storytelling often mixed fact and fiction. Who she said she was and where she came from turned out to be “faction,” a blend of fact and fiction.
Veronica enhanced real-life situations with dramatic imagery. One day she hauled me to an upstairs bedroom of the home we shared with her parents and balanced me on the windowsill. An inmate at the Port Arthur jail was to hang that morning. When they hanged someone back then, they lowered the flag atop the jail building as a signal that the deed was done. We had no hope of seeing anything — the jail was a good two miles away — but Veronica was a storyteller and by placing me in the window, she could tell a story of crime and punishment with more impact by urging me to look hard to see the flag being lowered. The hanging was real, but seeing the jailhouse flag was fantasy.
She had a flair for drama. Many years after the hanging, she presented me with a wrapped gift. I undid the wrapping to reveal a plastic Indian doll, a chief with removable headdress. She told me that this was the last toy she would ever give me because I was a man now and it was time to put away the toys of childhood.
Another time she took me by the hand and led me into the basement to her cherished cedar hope chest. She sat me down on it and said she was going to tell me the story of her family. The story stayed with me the rest of my life and became an important clue in my search to discover who she really was. She told it slowly and with the flair and expressions of a great actress.
Not long after Europeans first occupied Canada, a dashing young man in Normandy shot another man in a duel over a woman. He fled to the New World. The ship carrying him to Quebec City foundered in a storm and crashed onto the rocks. The young man was tossed overboard and washed onto a riverbank. He opened his eyes to see a beautiful Indian princess nursing him. She healed his injuries and restored his health and they married. So began the LaFrance family in Canada.
As with most of her stories, parts resembled the genuine history of the LaFrance family. Other parts were sheer fantasy. She took some facts and blended them with her fantasy, and the reason she did so became evident only long after her death, when I discovered who she was.
Her parents were the LaFrances, Joseph Isidore and Louise LaFrance, both railway people. Both grew up beside railway tracks, where the shrieks of steam locomotives and thumps of shunted cars were the sounds of life itself. Most people they knew had lived and died within earshot of the tracks, spending their lives devoted to ensuring that the trains ran on time. Their days were tied to arrivals and departures, frequent separations, and worry about accidents. Despite that, railway life was a good life that brought special privileges, respect, and good pay for a locomotive engineer.
Railway life brought Louise and Isidore together when the new century turned. Both their families had migrated to Chapleau, a frontier town carved out of the northern Ontario bush in 1885 as the Canadian Pacific Railway moved west to fulfil the national dream of a rail line from Atlantic to Pacific. Louise grew up in the rail camps along the Ottawa Valley and beyond — as construction crews pushed the rails relentlessly west. She and her sisters and brothers lived wherever their father Oliver Aquin, an immigrant from France, could find work building the railway as it moved along through places such as Black Donald Creek, Chalk River, Mattawa, and Nosbonsing. When the rails stretched west beyond Chapleau, Oliver stayed behind in the North Bay-Sudbury-Chapleau region with crews tending the track beds and switches and watering and fuelling stations.
Marie Aquin, Oliver’s wife, bore all her children in the rail country bush, and they grew up playing beside the tracks, sometimes finding their home was a converted rail car. There were nine of them, seven girls and two boys, and they built good lives by sticking together and helping each other. Their lives developed some permanency as Oliver advanced in the track gangs and became a section foreman. The family settled in Chapleau about 1902 and stayed there, Oliver dedicating his life to railway work until one evening one of the kids went to fetch him for supper and found him keeled over dead at sixty in his foreman’s shed.
Lambert LaFrance was a different piece of history. His ancestors were among the first to settle in New France. They had left France more than two centuries earlier, eventually settling at Bic, Quebec on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River where it begins to join the Atlantic Ocean. Life was good there, after the initial horrors of cold, starvation, and Native attacks. The land had been broken and settled to provide all the pastoral comforts of farm country plus the attractions of seaside living. Why Lambert would uproot himself is a mystery, considering the pain his ancestors suffered to create a little paradise there.
His Canadian family history did not begin with an Indian princess, as my mother told me, although Natives played large roles in the lives of the LaFrances. It began when Nicholas Pinel signed a contract on April 5,1645, to help colonize France’s settlement at Port Royal in Acadia, now part of Nova Scotia. He agreed to live in the new country for three years, working as a village carpenter. When the contract expired, he found himself still alive, unlike many others who succumbed to the weather, disease, or Native attacks. He decided to stay on in the New World and sent for his family.
A diffident French bureaucracy and wars with the British and Natives stunted Port Royal’s growth. The French spent little effort learning about their new territory. They were too busy basking in their own glory to develop a good understanding of North America. The Port Royal mission languished and Pinel moved to the Cap-Rouge River area near what later became Quebec City, but settlement also was difficult because of regular attacks by the Iroquois. He moved to Sillery, where more people offered more protection from the Native attacks and where the Jesuits established their first North American mission.
The Iroquois hated the French for siding with traditional Iroquois enemies, and their travelling war parties continued to make life difficult for the settlers even at Sillery. Nicholas Pinel joined a group organized to fight off their attacks, but his ten-year lucky run in the New World ran out in September 1655 when he was killed in a fight with a war party. His family carried on, later adopting the name Pinel dit LaFrance in the French custom, common in New France, of refining the identification of families. A Pinel dit LaFrance was one of the family of Pinels who originally came from France. Eventually the name became LaFrance, or Lafrance, meaning “of France” or “from France”. That history of the LaFrance family founding in North America is a mile off from Veronica’s rescued-by-an-Indian-princess tale. However, I discovered later there was a reason for introducing an Indian princess into the family.
The promise of opportunity tugged Lambert LaFrance west from the comforts of the south shore to the bug-infested forests along the Chapleau River. The CPR became the doorway to thousands of miles of unsettled territory in a massive effort at nation building and would lead to jobs and business prospects. Lambert and his wife of four years, Adele Roy, arrived when the town was a muddy slash line with seven or eight log cabins, some tents, and a boxcar converted to a telegraph office. The trains stopped seven miles to the east because that’s as far as rail construction had gone, so they made their grand entry into Chapleau on a rail handcart. They opened a boarding house for railroaders near the Chapleau tracks, and it became known as the best place to get an excellent meal in Chapleau.
The LaFrances had ten children, three of whom died young in the wild Chapleau bush country. For those who survived to adulthood, it was inevitable that they would become railroaders or marry railroaders. Isidore was mesmerised by the comings and goings of the black locomotive giants and was riding them as a CPR employee before his sixteenth birthday. His brother Adelard had more interest in the bush and the Ojibwe communities at Missanabie and Biscotasing, home for several years of the Englishman Archie Belaney, also known as Grey Owl. The railway settlements attracted the Natives looking for trade and Adelard, two years younger than Isidore, discovered trading could be profitable. He opened a trading post at Missanabie in 1908 and began buying furs from the Natives. He later moved the operation to Chapleau, then Sudbury, where it continues to operate today as the furrier Lafrance Richmond Furs.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Chapleau was a human anthill, a brushed-out busy speck in hundreds of square miles of threatening northern forest. It offered little in terms of natural beauty, plopped down on the lowlands beside the slow-moving Chapleau River, surrounded by swamps and tracts of funereal black spruce and emaciated jack pine. There were few of the granite outcroppings, hardwood hills, or patches of majestic white pine that made the bush country west, south, and east of Chapleau so richly picturesque. It was about as isolated as you could be in the lower half of Ontario. The closest towns of any consequence were Sault Ste. Marie, 180 kilometres south-southwest the way the crow flies, and Sudbury, 250 kilometres south-southeast in a straight line. There was no highway connecting the town to the outside until after the First World War.
The town went up in too much of a hurry to allow for any thoughtful planning or significant architecture. Most of the houses were wood-frame, two-storey boxes the shape of the hotels in a Monopoly game. Buildings usually were clad in clapboard because sawn lumber from the bush was more readily available than manufactured brick. Houses and businesses spilled along either side of the tracks, which were numerous because Chapleau was a divisional point where crews and equipment were changed. This required sidings for maintenance and repair facilities, supply depots, and auxiliary equipment. Aside from the bustle of railroading, it was a bleak place, especially during the long winters of snowdrifts, icy winds, and freezing temperatures that could kill anyone without heated shelter.
Time out from railroading focussed on home and church. Many Chapleau townsfolk were Roman Catholic, French and English alike, and built themselves what probably was the finest building in the town — Sacred Heart of Jesus Church, or Sacre-Coeur. They built it in 1885 the same year the CPR established Chapleau, but the church rapidly became too small for the growing population and a new one went up in 1891. It burned in 1918 and the brick structure with two bell towers, still active on Lansdowne Street, replaced it.
Church gatherings were a main entertainment outside the home, bringing together families such as the LaFrances, the Aquins, the Tremblays, and the Burnses. Sacred Heart Church developed a unique experiment in Canadian culture in Chapleau’s early days. The town was so small and so isolated that it was difficult for different ethnic groups to remain apart. Sacred Heart became a truly bilingual and bicultural parish out of necessity and still is, right down to the stained glass sacristy windows — St. Patrick on one side, St. Jean-Baptiste on the other. The church became even more a centre of town life in the years following 1911 when a young, energetic, and personable priest named Father Romeo Gasçon arrived. A born organizer, he threw himself into the community’s affairs and became friends with many of the townspeople, including the LaFrances. Their lives became part of his life.
The LaFrances met the Aquins when the latter moved into town in 1902. The meeting was inevitable — two large families in one village could not avoid each other. Besides, no one could miss Isidore LaFrance on the street. He seemed as tall as the trees, a kind-looking giant with a perpetual half grin and large and dark friendly eyes. He dressed sharply and always was well-groomed even when crossing the tracks in greasesmeared striped overalls and a big lunch pail under his arm.
Louise Aquin turned heads as well. She was tall, unusually so for a woman of her times, not far from six feet in her shoes. She had piercing eyes. They were clear, knowing, and persistent, and certainly in later life could quickly search out fibs that might float from the lips of a grandchild. She was talented in music and remarkably articulate for a young woman with little formal schooling. She was bilingual, speaking French and English equally well. She often sang solo at Sacred Heart, her soprano voice soaring to the ceiling and beyond. Anyone who ever heard her hit the high soprano notes of “O Holy Night” on Christmas Eve would never forget it.
They dated, mainly attending family and church and sporting events. Before long, Isidore and Louise were married in the old church in 1904. Sacred Heart was the scene of many such family weddings. The Burnses, Francophones despite the Scottish name, also met the Aquins, but the Burns boys found the LaFrance girls more interesting. Three Burns brothers ended up marrying three LaFrances, all sisters of Isidore. These were remarkable times of large family gatherings celebrating engagements, marriages, and births. Talk and food were the centres of the celebrations. If a piano was handy, there was singing and often the main voice was Louise Aquin LaFrance, principal soloist at Sacred Heart.
Louise and Isidore LaFrance in their thirties and childless after a dozen or so years of marriage. Both were tall for people of the times, Isidore well over six feet and Louise close to it.
Booze, not often openly used in conservative families, made an occasional appearance. One memorable appearance was during Christmas holidays when family celebrations were breaking out all over town. These people, their lives tied to the railway, knew all train schedules down to the minute and the contents of every rail car. One night, one of the Tremblay boys, who had married into the LaFrance family, led a party to the tracks with a brace and bit and several buckets. It was a bitter night with the white of one’s breath barely visible in the fog of blowing snow. One of the boxcars contained a shipment of fine Scotch whiskey that was headed west. They drilled through the boxcar’s wooden floor and into an oak keg and caught the whisky in pails as it drained through the hole.
Isidore had started work at the Chapleau rail yards in 1899 at age fifteen. He quickly worked his way into a locomotive cab as a fireman and in 1902 advanced to locomotive engineer. At nineteen years old, he was in command of a roaring locomotive beast thirty metres long and weighing close to three hundred tons. Being a locomotive engineer had its benefits: good pay, status, and the joys of exercising command and control in an important job. But it also brought sacrifice. There were long stretches away from home and family.
Railroading was dangerous work. Construction accidents were common, as were collisions resulting from inaccurate timing and crashes set up by Mother Nature. The LaFrances were not immune to the tragic consequences of railway life. In 1906, Lambert received word that his brother Napoleon had been hurt while working on a construction train carrying gravel west of Chapleau. The train pulled in to Chapleau with Napoleon, his leg severed when he had slipped between two cars. Lambert held him in his arms as the train travelled to Biscotasing where medical help was available. When the train reached Biscotasing, Napoleon was dead, having bled to death in his brother’s arms. His name is engraved on a workers’ memorial plaque near the Chapleau station.
Five years later, Isidore braked a locomotive as it rolled into Chapleau station when a small engine wheel broke off. The engine stayed on the tracks and no one was hurt. CPR bosses tried to blame the incident on Isidore, so he told them to shove the job and applied to the Canadian Northern Railway (CNoR), which was rapidly expanding out West. He and Louise found themselves far from the warmth of family life in Chapleau. They were stationed in Port Arthur, the main eastern terminus for the new railway, and Isidore began running the big engines in every division between Hornepayne on the east and Edmonton on the west.
The LaFrance-Aquin-Burns family circle mourned the move of the eldest LaFrance son and the eldest Aquin daughter. Louise and Isidore were key family players — sociable, friendly, and just nice people to have around. Free rail passes were plentiful in the family, however, and there was enough back and forth between Chapleau and Port Arthur to hold family ties intact. Then, in early 1918, the Chapleau families learned that Isidore and Louise had left Port Arthur. Inexplicably they moved west and were living in the unheard-of village of Hanna, somewhere out on the plains of east-central Alberta.
Then came news from the West of the arrival of a long sought after baby. Isidore and Louise, who’d been having trouble conceiving and were now into their thirties, finally had a child. Father Gasçon, who had a habit of appearing at important times in people’s lives, carried details of this miraculous child back to Chapleau. It had seemed somewhat odd, but this impoverished and busy priest had travelled west just to visit Isidore and Louise and reported them well settled into family life with their new daughter, Veronica Cecile LaFrance.
As quickly as they had disappeared out West, the LaFrances reappeared in Ontario, at Port Arthur. That, too, seemed odd. A year out West, then back to Ontario. But it was no secret that Isidore loved Port Arthur and people just assumed the LaFrances had not taken to the Prairies.
Port Arthur felt more like home to the LaFrances. Isidore relished running his locomotives along the Lake Superior shoreline. He was fascinated with the spectacular views. The Great Inland Sea dominated all views to the east for at least 180 points on the compass. From almost any hill along the waterfront, the horizon was filled with water. Water moving relentlessly eastward on an incredible journey to the Atlantic Ocean. Only a few island dots, and of course massive Nanabijou, interrupted an otherwise unbroken view of water that stretched from the Port Arthur waterfront to Sault Ste. Marie, 450 kilometres east.
Nanabijou is the Sibley Peninsula, a rocky spine roughly thirty kilometres long and ten kilometres wide that juts into Lake Superior from the north to form the vastness of Thunder Bay. Seen from the cities of Port Arthur and Fort William, amalgamated as Thunder Bay in 1970, it does indeed look like an Indian giant wearing full headdress, sleeping on his back with his arms folded across his chest. It is an amazing piece of nature that Canadians, in a 2007 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation(CBC) poll, voted one of the seven wonders of Canada.
The legend of the Sleeping Giant is myth, but the silver treasure is real. There have been attempts to mine it, the most successful in the 1870s and 1880s. Miners extracted tons of silver and Silver Islet became known as the world’s richest silver deposit, but Nanabijou constantly fought back, raking Lake Superior with vicious storms that made mining operations miserable. In 1884, a shipment of coal needed to fuel the pumps that kept water out of the mine did not arrive on time. The pumps fell silent, the mine flooded, operations ceased, and the mining families moved away. Nanabijou had succeeded in protecting at least some of his treasure.
Long before the silver seekers came, the mainland shore opposite the rocky peninsula was Native territory. The Ojibwe Natives lived along the shoreline where the Kaministiqua River joins Lake Superior, or the Big Lake, in what used to be Fort William. The North West Company built a fur trading fort there just after the turn of the 1800s, and it became a major rendezvous point for fur traders heading west or returning to Montreal. In 1868, Simon Dawson began building a road from the Lakehead waterfront to the Red River colonies out West. It ran straight up the hill from the lake, later becoming the forked road where Everest Funeral Home and St. Andrew’s Church faced each other.
Nanabijou, the Sleeping Giant, as seen from Hillcrest Park overlooking the part of Thunder Bay known as Port Arthur until the early 1970s.
Until the railway came, the road leading away from the water was the path used by settlers, surveyors, traders, and soldiers sent to put down the western Métis rebellion. Many a traveller leaving the waterfront from the Port Arthur side must have stopped along the road where it tops the hills to look back and absorb the spectacular views of the lake, the islands, and Nanabijou.
Isidore rented a house up that hill when he returned from the West with Louise and their new baby. It was near Hillcrest Park, a flat spot from which you could drink in the entire panorama of the Thunder Bay region. You could stand on the rock wall and look down at the brick-chimneyed rooftops of the houses that spill into downtown. These were the homes of the working class, the immigrants who melted into a Lakehead society that seemed less hyphenated than other parts of Canada. They were mainly Finns, Swedes, and Italians and the rooftops of their edifices poked up from below the hilltop — St. Anthony’s Catholic Church and the Scandinavian Boarding House. Everything looked so much smaller from up there. There was a sense of being airborne. The rectangles and squares of the commercial buildings of downtown were tiny. Even the gargantuan concrete tubes of the grain elevators that blocked access to the water’s edge appeared less significant. Only the Giant itself, despite being twenty-five kilometres straight out from the park, gave any sense of bigness.
The LaFrances’ house was a two-storey wooden place at 385 Cornwall Avenue on the hillside overlooking the lake. It was anchored to the rocks just below where High Street ran past Hillcrest Park, and if you craned your neck from an upstairs window, you could view the lake. It was a short walk over the brow of the hill to Hillcrest Park, with its flower gardens and a long rock wall with imbedded cannons pointed out over the harbour. On cool, spring days, kids climbed onto the cannons to feel the warmth that the black iron had absorbed from the sun. Opposite the park are some of the city’s finest old homes, built there long ago for the splendid view.
Hillcrest Park was a popular place to stroll. It was almost like a park in the LaFrances’ backyard where they could let Veronica loose to run and laugh and point at the flowers. For longer outings, they would drive her to Boulevard Lake on the east side of town where people strolled the lakeside or sat and had picnics while looking out over the water.
Isidore walked down the hill from his house to the CNR roundhouse where his locomotives were kept. He could see the rising sun turn the skies above the Giant to the pink of the amethyst so abundant in the area’s rock. Then to a deeper pink purple and finally blood red as the sun lifted above the Giant’s feet. In the evenings, the setting sun sun made it iridescent, then sharpened its features until its cliffs and crevices became visible.
The joy the LaFrances felt at watching Veronica frolic at Hillcrest Park or beside Boulevard Lake evaporated unexpectedly one morning when she was four years old. Veronica’s get-up-and-go personality usually woke the household, but on this morning the house was quiet and there was no sound of activity in her room. Louise and Isidore found her in bed, unusually subdued and chilled and tired. When Louise helped her up, her legs didn’t want to hold her, and as the hours passed, they became more wooden. Within days her legs were paralysed. The doctor whispered the news: infantile paralysis — the dreaded poliovirus — crippler and sometimes killer of children and young adults.
The LaFrances were shattered. Their little family was a dream come true, a dream that had survived the greatest threat to human life of their time — the Spanish flu that in 1918-19 killed 50 million people worldwide. Isidore fell ill with that deadly scourge while on a road trip but recovered. His younger sister in Chapleau caught it and died. Now having narrowly escaped that outbreak, the LaFrances were visited by a new scourge that had appeared as a serious threat to children in 1916. Each summer after that brought new outbreaks that peaked in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Veronica lay in bed for more than two months, unable to move her legs. The only good news was that her breathing remained unaffected, and she was not trapped in one of the iron lungs that lined hospital wards, filling them with the eerie rhythm of velvet wheezing. The poliovirus attacks and destroys motor neurones, sometimes concentrating on the limbs, other times favouring the respiratory neurones. Veronica was fortunate; the virus hit only her legs.
The disease struck Veronica in 1921, the same year it caught Franklin D. Roosevelt, leaving him without the use of his legs. His case showed the world that the disease could strike anyone, and his struggle to regain the use of his legs set a courageous example for others. His legs never did return to normal, but Roosevelt pushed on and became U.S. president, leading the nation through some of its most difficult times.
Veronica recovered. Slowly her legs grew stronger. She began to walk again with the help of crutches and then a brace on her left leg. She learned to pitch the braced leg forward in an attempt to run with the other kids who lived in the Cornwall Avenue area. The leg brace and her drag-kick-and-hop walk were playground novelties when she entered St. Andrew’s Catholic schoolyard just days before her seventh birthday. Few kids had seen leg braces before, although they would appear more and more over the years.
St. Andrew’s was downtown, part of the Catholic institutional complex that covered most of the area bounded by Arthur, Court, Algoma, and Camelot streets. The school fronted Arthur Street, Port Arthur’s main drag at the time, along with the church hall, rectory, and church. Behind them facing Algoma Street were St. Joseph’s Hospital and the convent of the Sisters of St. Joseph. The extended block was a one-stop destination — schooling, health care, spiritual life, and social activities for the many Catholics who occupied the houses on the neighbourhood just above downtown.
The school was a two-storey, free-standing, red-brick block with a bell tower on the four-slope roof. It was a centre hall plan with front and rear double doorways where the kids lined up when one of the nuns in black-and-white habits appeared and clanged a heavy brass hand bell. The junior grades spilled into the lower classrooms while the older kids climbed the stairs. The classrooms occupied corners, each side of which had large rectangle windows through which outside light could spill.
The LaFrances moved to 28 Peter Street, which was only three long blocks up the hill from St. Andrew’s. It was walking distance for a kid with a leg brace and, although the LaFrances would change houses over the years, they stayed within the hillside neighbourhood bounded by Algoma, College, Arthur, and Dawson streets.
The disability did little to hold Veronica back. She was naturally gregarious, an expressive child. She wore her emotions on her face, with the expression of her big eyes, the shapes of her mouth, even the wrinkles of her nose transmitting her feelings. She loved to tell stories to the other kids and did so with the flourishes of a child actor. Other kids liked her because she was fun-loving and liked to laugh. Asked to describe her most memorable trait, most of her playmates would say her infectious laugh. Outgoing as she was, she liked to keep secrets. She teased friends about knowing something they didn’t know while they pestered her to tell them.
Other kids loved playing at the LaFrance houses — the McCuaig Block at College and Tupper streets, then 63 Peter Street, a couple doors north of Van Norman Street. As an only child, Veronica got the best of everything, including attention. Most of her friends were from large families and had to share everything with their siblings. Her best friend Doris Shaw often came to the house for sleepovers, and they would stay up late giggling and laughing and playing with Veronica’s little white Pomeranian.
After she recovered from polio, her childhood years took flight and soared to heights that every child should be so lucky to enjoy. Friends were numerous, money was not a problem even in the Depression years because locomotive engineers continued to work. Life at the LaFrance house was secure, warm, and comfortable.
Isidore made his regular runs east to Capreol and as far west as Edmonton, suffering the stress of delays, bad weather, and accidents. When he would return from a run depressed, Louise would know immediately what was wrong — his engine had hit a moose on the tracks. He always felt sorry for the animals, and he fretted that they would stand staring at his headlight while he wrangled to stop tons of locomotive pulling tons of cars.
Louise devoted her time to the church and politics. She became diocesan president of the Catholic Women’s League, an executive member of the women’s Liberal association, and an active member of the St. Joseph’s Hospital auxiliary. Church was a central part of her life, as it had been at Sacred Heart in Chapleau and briefly at St. George’s in Hanna. She could often be found changing altar cloths on the ornate altar at St. Andrew’s. Sometimes when an altar boy didn’t show for an early weekday Mass, she filled in even though it was not a woman’s place to be on the altar during Mass. Girls were not allowed to serve on the altar then, but either Louise LaFrance’s strong will or a progressive priest broke the rule on occasion. On Sundays, Veronica would stand beside her father in their favourite pew and stare up at her mother, framed by the impressive St. Andrew’s Church pipe organ, filling the small cathedral with the soaring notes of a soprano soloist.
Isidore’s rail pass allowed the family to travel to Sudbury and Chapleau to visit family. The LaFrances and the Aquins were large growing families in the 1920s and reunions were happy and hectic. Veronica grew to love visiting her cousins’ homes in Chapleau and Sudbury. Uncle Adelard, whose fur trading business flourished and expanded into actual manufacturing of fur garments, built a cottage on Lake Panache west of Sudbury, and it became the site of many family reunions. The Port Arthur LaFrances visited frequently and Veronica once confessed to a younger cousin that she loved the cottage during the day, but it frightened her at night.
Because she was an only child, Veronica loved these visits among her cousins. Her cousins also enjoyed her visits because she was lively and told outrageous stories and was quick to lead the others in singing. Her cousin Simone, Adélard’s youngest daughter, recalled watching her older cousin with wonderment, admiring how good looking she was. Decades later, she still remembers Veronica’s fine dark features and terrific smile.
Veronica’s lame leg strengthened, and soon she was almost indistinguishable among the other kids in the schoolyard. The brace was gone and the drag-and-kick step faded into a limp that one had to watch for to notice. When the leg brace disappeared so did the long black ringlets, replaced by a shorter, big girl cut. She grew it back during her teens, letting it hang just above her shoulders or folding and tying it into a bun.
By the time she finished Grade 8 at St. Andrew’s and began to hike the Van Norman Street hill to the Port Arthur Technical School, the dark hair was longer and pushed back behind her ears. She was a beautiful young woman, petite and slim with a finely sculpted nose and mouth, high cheekbones, and dark, expressive eyes. She favoured pants because anyone who looked closely below her skirt or dress could notice the thinness of her left calf and ankle — the only visible trace of the polio.
Her teen years were not exciting times in the early 1930s. Young women went to school and returned home promptly. Dating was not allowed during the early teen years. Entertainment was going to a movie in a group on a Friday night or attending the young people’s club at St. Andrew’s Hall on Sunday evenings.
Veronica reunited with friends from the Cornwall Street neighbourhood when the Chester family moved onto Van Norman Street below Peter Street and just around the corner from the LaFrances. Audrey Chester and Veronica walked up to Tech School every day. After the high school years, they both went to work for the Port Arthur Public Utilities Company, which ran the city’s telephone service. They became operators, a job that perfectly suited Veronica’s happy disposition and voice.
Veronica at 19 looks pensive and reserved. In fact, she usually was the centre of attention with her hearty laugh and impish sense of humour.
You needed a sunny disposition to work as a Port Arthur telephone operator in the late 1930s. The work week was forty-five and a half hours and each of the thirty-nine operators handled 136 calls an hour during the busiest times. Port Arthur had roughly thirty-five hundred subscribers at the time, a drop from pre-Depression years when people had more money to spend. The girls sat at a long switchboard panel plugging and unplugging cords and asking: “Number, please.”
It was not simple work. They had to deal with all sorts of people and had serious responsibilities. Telephone operators took fire calls and reported them to the fire department. After alerting the firemen, the operator then called the pumping station nearest the fire to alert them to increase water pressure to the hydrant. They had to be coolheaded and precise. For all of this, they received roughly five hundred dollars a year wages for starting operators and eight hundred dollars a year after three years.
Despite the responsibilities, long hours, irritations, and low pay, they were not easy jobs to get. The telephone company had strict requirements, physical and moral. Candidate operators had to be eighteen to twenty-four years old, stand at least five foot five inches, and have a reach of three feet six inches. Veronica, at five foot two inches, seemed to have slipped past the height requirement. PUC operators required a high school diploma, good eyesight and hearing, normal speech, and clear enunciation. They had to be unmarried, preferably living at home with their parents, and had to remain unmarried to keep their job. They had to produce a medical fitness certificate once a year and could not use tobacco in excess.
It was a job suited to the times, a period of transition in Canada. Transition from a slower and simpler life to the fast pace that eventually led to the frenetic madness of today when people barely have time to think, and many of them don’t. The era of the telephone operator lasted longer in Port Arthur than many other places. Voters refused to approve autodial systems in the late 1930s and autodialling did not come into being there until 1949. No doubt it was coincidental, but much about life began to change at the same time.
When they started as operators, Veronica and Audrey could walk to their jobs downtown. It was only a few blocks downhill through leafy streets where houses were not quite worthy of Better Homes and Gardens but certainly were neat and practical. Fewer people owned cars and walking to work could be a social occasion. It was almost impossible to walk down Arthur Street without meeting a friend or a relative. There was a malt shop just down from St. Andrew’s, and you could stop there for a soda or a milkshake and talk with others who strolled in coming or going from their business. Not only was there time to talk to people, stopping and chatting was expected.
If you tired walking up the Arthur Street slope, you could ride one of the streetcars that rattled and screeched along the iron rails imbedded in the Arthur Street pavement. You could hop on pretty much anywhere if you were swift and nimble enough to grab the handrail and swing onto the platform.
Audrey often invited her teenage girlfriends to her house on Van Norman Street. Mrs. Chester would play the piano and they all would sing along. Veronica was front and centre, singing and clowning and at the centre of attention. At one session, Veronica passed by the living room window and noticed a young man coming out of a house down the street. He was tall and skinny and wore a fedora cocked to one side of his head.
The girls began to take a special interest in 331 Van Norman Street, a two-and-a-half-storey brick house with a veranda off the second-storey main bedroom. The house was whistling distance from the religious property that held St. Andrew’s Church and School and St. Joseph’s Hospital. A young man came and went with another man roughly the same age. Sometimes a couple of girls close to their own age were seen coming and going from the house.
One day after watching the young man from behind the Chester’s curtains, Veronica announced to the group of giggling girls that that was the guy she was going to get. The girls believed her. They knew that when Veronica LaFrance made up her mind to get something, there was no questioning her.
