Читать книгу Waking Nanabijou - Jim Poling Sr. - Страница 13

3 — THE LOON PEOPLE

The polings arrived in Port Arthur in 1937 looking like the Joads on their move west from Oklahoma to California in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. The older boys were lean and wiry from the hungry days of the Depression just ended. They pushed up the front brims of their fedoras with their thumbs just like Henry Fonda in the movies. They arrived in a jalopy of the day, Eva Poling and all the kids and whatever they could carry jammed into the seats and the trunk. Bob, the eldest and Ray, two years younger, did the driving. Robert Sr. already had gone ahead to take up his job at the new paper mill built on the shoreline in Port Arthur’s extreme east end.

They had loaded up close to twenty years of living in Sault Ste. Marie at the east end of the lake and headed west through Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. There was no road between the Soo and Port Arthur, just a lot of spectacular bush scenery along Superior’s north shore. Travelling west meant going through the States, the first leg being the short ferry ride across the St. Mary’s River dividing the Canadian Soo and the American Soo.

The border didn’t mean anything to them. They had come to the Soo originally from Minnesota where the three oldest children had been born. The trip was an opportunity to visit relatives, including the Desilets, Eva’s parents, in Superior, Wisconsin. They also would visit the Cloquet, Minnesota area where they had lived before the Great Fire of 1918.

Robert Sr. had worked in mills in Cloquet and International Falls before crossing the border to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, the site of a new paper mill. No one could ever recall how Robert got into paper mill work. It certainly wasn’t because of his size. Mill work involved much hard labour in the early days, from wrestling logs in the mill ponds or yards to stirring pulp and pushing about rolls of finished product. Robert was tiny, under five foot nine inches, and boasted he was 110 pounds soaking wet. His wife and friends called him Tom, a nickname someone gave him after observing that he looked like Tom Thumb.

Nor could anyone recall how he got to Minnesota. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia, where his maternal grandfather Hiram Walker kept slaves long after the Civil War and Emancipation. The story was that most of them preferred plantation life to going out on their own. His dad, Isaac Elmer Ellsworth Poling, was a carpetbagger who wooed Hiram’s southern belle daughter Mattie. The marriage went bad almost immediately because Isaac turned out to be a shifty gambler, but not before there was a pile of kids who were shuffled back regularly between Ohio, Isaac’s home, and Atlanta. Ernie, a couple years younger than Robert, often recalled standing with one of his brothers on a railway station platform with tags on their coats, so they would not be lost on a trip to their grandparents’ plantation.

Robert claimed that the unsettled family life left him out on his own at age ten. Who knows if that was a bit of an exaggeration, but we do know that he was out wandering when he was quite young, loading bricks for ten cents a day. As a young man, he found himself in the northern Minnesota woodlands, where the forests provided much work for those with a strong back and an appreciation of solitude.

Isaac’s life of drinking, gambling, and shattered family life was an aberration in the Poling clan. The Polings were known as religious people from Manhattan through to New Jersey, Virginia, West Virginia, and Ohio as they had expanded and spread out. Isaac’s father, George Washington Poling, was a Salvation Army preacher in Ohio and part of a family branch that produced seven consecutive generations of ministers.

The first Poling to reach America’s shores was Thomas who arrived on the ship Scorpion at Lynn, Massachusetts in 1642. He had sailed out of Gravesend, England, leaving his home in Sussex. One of his sons, John, became associated with Lady Deborah Moodie, an eccentric aristocrat who fled England to escape religious turmoil. She was an Anabaptist, someone who believed that baptism is for adult believers only, not infants.

Lady Moodie found the religious climate in America even more severe under the Pilgrim society. Her Anabaptist views were heretical, and she moved again, this time to New Amsterdam, now New York City. The Dutch, who controlled Manhattan and the surrounding area before losing it to England, granted her and twenty followers, including John Poling, religious freedom and some land on Long Island.

The Polings thrived in what later became Brooklyn and then branched out to New Jersey and beyond. John’s great-grandson Jonathon was a Methodist circuit rider known to have galloped the Appalachians with a Bible in one saddlebag and a revolver in the other. He became the patriarch of a family branch that produced a remarkable string of seven consecutive generations of Protestant ministers. Three of his grandsons were Daniel Shobe Poling, an Evangelical Association circuit rider; William, an English Methodist preacher in Pennsylvania and later Wisconsin; and George Washington Poling, who joined the Salvation Army when it came to North America. Daniel carried on the family tradition of producing preacher heirs: a son, Rev. Charles Cupp Poling; a grandson, Rev. Daniel A. Poling; and a great-grandson, Rev. Clark V. Poling, who ended the string when he died a hero in the Second World War.

George Washington Poling had no such luck in raising priestly boys. In Isaac, George produced a son who in one short lifetime used up all the good works and prayers of those many generations of preaching Polings. One of Isaac’s many sins was to name his son Robert Lee after the great Confederate general. This had George spouting some distinctly unreligious words, which is forgivable considering he had fought valiantly for the Blue — even against his half-brother Wilson — and had named Isaac’s brother, Ulysses Grant Poling.

Robert met Olivia Desilets in Minnesota. She was the daughter of a French-Canadian family who lived near Rat Portage outside Kenora, Ontario. Robert and Olivia, called Eva, courted, then married, and had the first of three of their eight children before moving to Canada when Robert got a job at the paper mill in Sault Ste. Marie, leaving America and the American Polings behind. It was just as well. Leaving one’s native land and extended family is a terrible wrench, but these were tough times to be a non-religious Poling. U.S. Prohibition was in place and the Poling clan was at the front of the battle against demon alcohol. Rev. Daniel A. Poling had documented in detail the evils of drink in his satirical book, John Barleycorn: His Life and Letters. He also campaigned against smoking and numerous other bad habits and sins.

Eva Desilets and Robert Poling In their 1913 wedding photo. They married in the pulp and paper town of Cloquet, Minnesota, eventually moving on to the Ontario mill towns of Sault Ste. Marie and Port Arthur after the Great Fire of 1918 destroyed much of Cloquet.

Robert Lee wanted nothing to do with religion or Prohibition or people who called smoking a disease of the devil. John Barleycorn was a frequent and welcome guest in his house and later the houses of his sons and grandsons. Any preaching done under this branch of the family tree would be over a few cold beers or a couple of glasses of Seagram’s, or maybe both. His good wife later helped Robert find religion, but it was religion backed by a strong shot and a good smoke, and it took a back pew to his greatest love, the outdoors. Like his West Virginia ancestors, Robert Lee Poling was a man wild for the bush and he taught his kids the joys of packing canoes, landing trout, and knocking down autumn-fat deer with an old. 38-55, a rifle he said was so powerful it killed them, cleaned them, and packed them out of the bush.

Robert Lee Poling was born in Georgia but moved to Canada to work in paper mills in Sault Ste. Marie and Port Arthur. He was mill boss at Abitibi in Port Arthur when he retired in the 1950s.

In the Soo, he supplemented his mill income by operating a souvenir shop out of the Windsor Hotel and used it as a base for a guiding business. Americans flocked off the ferries near the hotel’s back entrance, and a lot of them were looking to experience the joys of the great pastimes of the day, fishing and hunting. Robert Poling guided them into the bush country north of the Soo and established himself as someone as at home on the northern lakes as a loon. The two older boys followed the old man much like two loon chicks paddling beside their mother.

When the family spilled into Port Arthur, Robert Poling already had arranged the house at 331 Van Norman Street. It was on the south side of the first Van Norman Street hill, and backed on the large houses on Arthur Street, later named Red River Road. From the backyard you could see between the Arthur Street houses to the Cenotaph in the park, below the grey stone façade of Port Arthur Collegiate Institute. At the tip of the park were Central School and the start of downtown.

The four bedrooms on the second storey of 331 Van Norman Street and the small apartment on the third made it a good fit for a large family. Especially a family with such a wide age spread. Bob was twenty-three, Ray twenty-one and the others — Eileen, Jack, Theresa, Zita, and Len — were all a couple of years or so apart. There also was a baby, Gerry.

The family settled quickly into the community, installing the younger kids at St. Andrew’s School and joining St. Andrew’s Parish. Bob and Ray found work, the former as a welder and latter as a chauffeur for the Greer family who owned the turreted mansion on Court Street overlooking McVicar Creek. They also got extra work fighting forest fires, a hazardous job that almost cost Ray his life. They were hiking out of one fire area, Ray bringing up the rear, when the crew stopped for a break. Someone noticed Ray was missing. They backtracked twenty minutes before finding him passed out in bush. He suffered an appendix attack and by the time they got him out of the bush and to a hospital, the appendix had ruptured.

Veronica passed the house at 331 Van Norman Street daily, no doubt craning her neck to catch a glimpse of the fellow she had seen from the Chester’s living room window. It was inevitable that they should meet and they did — down the hill at the St. Andrew’s youth group. The church hall had pool tables, a snack bar, and bowling alleys and was the meeting place for an active group of young people.

It didn’t take long for Veronica to fulfil her prophecy. She got the guy who she had seen coming out of the house at 331 Van Norman Street. They joined the Port Arthur Catholic Young People’s Society, a social club based at St. Andrew’s, offering wholesome fun for men and women eighteen and over. For a $2 annual membership, they could join outings, spaghetti suppers, and twenty-five-cent dances such as masquerade balls. Ray and Veronica and friends from the club often went on hikes to Mount McKay and spent Sundays where so many other Port Arthurites did — picnicking at Boulevard Lake, the recreation area created within walking distance from downtown by the damming of the Current River. When a car was available, they also motored down the east highway to MacKenzie River to fish a foamflecked trout pool below rapids created by the river’s fall toward the Big Lake. They double dated, often with Ray’s brother Bob and Veronica’s childhood friend Doris Shaw.

Veronica and Ray did much of their dating in the outdoors. They took fishing trips to MacKenzie Falls just east of Port Arthur, plus hikes to Mount McKay, overlooking Fort William. Here they are pictured at Kakabeka Falls, a popular Sunday drive destination from Port Arthur, now called Thunder Bay.

While life was quiet at the LaFrances, it was bedlam at the Polings. With eight kids ranging from a preschooler to grown men, every room at 331 Van Norman Street bulged with constant action. Eva was always in the kitchen, which was impossibly small for feeding such a large family had it not been for the huge summer kitchen off the back. There, kitchen supplies could be stored among the gun racks, fishing rods, and camping gear. When the action went beyond control, little Robert Lee waded in and restored order. One day, he was repairing the kitchen ceiling when Bob and Ray began to fight. Both were big boys, each over six feet tall and lean and stringy. Robert Lee was standing on a cupboard counter when the battle began. He leapt from his perch, landing with a hand on the back of each combatant’s neck. He banged their heads together and knocked them both cold onto the kitchen floor.

Neither Bob nor Ray was one to fight, but most brothers do have occasional differences. Both were quiet to the point of being shy, the tall quiet types for whom minding your business was a virtue. Both were open books. What you saw was exactly what was there. Ray was one of those rare individuals whose smile would broadcast ten thousand watts of trust and confidence. He was what was known back then as a genuinely true guy. He had that lanky Jimmy Stewart look with the dark wavy hair that was a Poling trademark. He dressed immaculately and to see him walking downtown in a three-piece suit and polished white bucks you would never imagine he could break trail with the best of bushmen.

He and Veronica made an attractive couple, though mismatched in size. Veronica was petite with a distinct French-Canadian beauty. Her facial features were delicate except for prominent cheekbones that rode high below brown eyes often filled with amusement or mischief. Dark hair swept back behind her ears accented the playful look. Her mother had written in her baby book that Veronica was a happy child. She carried that happiness into adulthood. If there was a party, you knew she was in the centre of it. Everything in her disposition gave the appearance of a woman who was an open book, but she wasn’t. At times she exhibited a quietness that gave her an aura of mystery.

There was no question about love at first sight. In 1938, not more than a year after Ray moved to Port Arthur, they were engaged. On November 30, 1940, a bitterly cold day even by northern Ontario standards, the LaFrances and Aquins from Chapleau and Sudbury and North Bay gathered with the Polings and Desilets from Port Arthur and Minnesota under the high arches of St. Andrew’s as Isidore made the long walk down the aisle with Veronica on his arm. Waiting in front of the gilded white Gothic altar among the groom and groomsmen and dressed in celebratory robes was a familiar figure. Father Romeo Gasçon of Sacred Heart Church in Chapleau opened his book and began the wedding service. Father Gasçon still had a habit of showing up at important times, so no one would have been shocked to see him there as the presiding priest. The shock arrived decades later when I sat in St. Andrew’s storage vault with the musty 1940 marriage register cracked open and saw what Father Gasçon had added to the record that day.

The marriage had a rough financial start. Ray found full-time work at the Provincial Paper mill and it looked like he would follow his dad in the papermaking trade. A runaway lift truck ended that plan. It pinned Ray against a wall, mangling his left arm. The doctors put it back together the best they could but said the nerves were dead forever and suggested amputation because that would allow him to apply for a disability pension. He refused to give up the arm for a pension and began working with it, exercising and lifting weights. It recovered. He always carried a rubber ball in his left hand, which he squeezed to build strength in his fingers. Later he got seriously into fly-fishing, using the rod left-handed to work the injured arm.

It is not known if Ray Poling knew Veronica’s secret when they married on November 30, 1940. Ray’s eldest brother Bob said no one in the family knew, and his brother never mentioned it to him. The priest who married them did know because he had an important role in the secret.

There was little money coming in while he struggled to gain full use of the arm. Both the Polings and the LaFrances helped out, and many of the groceries were put on credit at Wilmott and Siddall, the neighbourhood grocery store across the street from Port Arthur Tech. Never once did Ron Wilmott or anyone else at the store push for payment. For years after, the Poling families refused to consider buying groceries anywhere else. Eaton’s downtown location had a grocery section and prices were cheaper, but Ray ordered that all groceries be bought from Wilmott no matter how much the bigger stores cut prices.

Ray got work as a pitman doing minor maintenance for the city transit system. He worked on the street railway cars, then the electric buses. He later got a job selling life insurance, which suited him perfectly. He was personable, an impeccable dresser, and had an interest in people, and did well at it.

The early years of marriage also brought another misfortune. A boy, named Richard, died at birth, and there was some concern that other children would not be possible. A couple years later, in February 1943, Ray, still an American citizen, walked beaming into St. Joseph’s Hospital and planted a Stars and Stripes at the bedside where Veronica was showing off their first child — me. The flag fulfilled his belief that a child born under the U.S. flag could claim American citizenship. That was nice, but he forgot to register me the with the U.S. government, an omission that no doubt saved me from having to dress in combat gear and wade through the rice paddies of Vietnam some twenty years later.

Isidore and Louise LaFrance, originally denied children by fate, gave thanks for a grandchild who was joined by Barbara Ann in 1947 and Mary Jane in 1953.