Chapter Fifteen
In 1949, there were many Second World War veterans at university and it was almost impossible to get into Medicine directly. As I described in previous chapters, I went to the University of Toronto in the fall of 1949 enrolled in Physiology and Biochemistry and completed my Arts degree in 1953, starting my first year of medicine that fall. I first met Fran in 1955 on a blind date arranged by my friend, Don Crapper and his girlfriend, Marie Oyl. Unlike some of my friends, I had no aversion to blind dates so I accepted the offer. Fran was perhaps a bit shy but there was a certain warmth that I think we both felt. I discovered that she had personality as well and was able to speak her mind more than some of the other dates I had had recently. I decided to invite her out again.
I debated whether I should break off the relationship before my final year in medicine so I consulted with Hugh Geddes who advised me that if we loved each other, we should get married. I was torn. I really did not want to get married until after my internship but I felt that I really loved Fran and I asked her to wait for me over the summer and I explained that it would be a longish wait. When I got back from Europe in late August, I went to Toronto to see her and gave her my fraternity pin. “Pinning” your sweetheart was somewhere between going steady and being engaged.
I had the 1950 Vauxhall that my father had given me as a graduation present from Arts in 1953 and I had become quite expert at maintaining it. Fran and I grabbed time together whenever we could. Also we were meeting some new friends and our social life took on a rather more settled aspect. We seemed to spend a lot of time in the front seat of the Vauxhall parked in front of Georgina House saying good night. It was such an old friend to us both that Fran began calling it Betsy.
Francis Helen Taylor: Family Background
Frances Helen Taylor was born in the Plummer Memorial Hospital in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario on Queen Victoria’s birthday, the 24th of May, 1932. Her parents were George Douglas Taylor, steelworker and Margaret Helen Myers, housewife. She was an only child – as was I and so many other children of the Great Depression. She was named in honour of her grandfather, Francis Lawrence who lived on Neebish Island in the St. Mary’s River south of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. As a child at home, her mother called her Francie, a name she hated. Her uncle Ed, who lived across the river in Sault, Michigan, used to call her “Francie Hellie” to tease her. I always knew her as Fran.
The Sault
Sault Ste. Marie is an interesting city. It started as a trading post and way stop for the voyageurs on the great canoe route to the west. There was a portage around the rapids in the river that was replaced by a canal for freight canoes in the early 1800s. The site was visited by early French explorers in the 17th century who named the river and the rapids (“sault” in French) after the Virgin Mary; the townsite has a history going back over 200 years into the 18th century. It is the exception to the general rule for border cities that the American city is larger than its Canadian counterpart across the border. In 1958, the population of Sault, Ontario was about 75,000 while the American city (known as ‘The Soo’ by the locals) was only 18,000.
The Sault was a heavy industry town based on the iron ore that was mined near Wawa on the Lake Superior shore. Wawa (Wild goose in the Algonquian language) was originally called Jamestown in honour of Sir James Dunn who established the iron mines and the Algoma Steel Company in the Sault. He also built the Algoma Central Railway which ran north from the Sault through Searchmount, Montreal River, Agawa Canyon and Hawk Junction near Wawa and then up to cross the Canadian Pacific line at Franz. Eventually it extended north into the hinterland to the Grand Trunk Pacific line at Hearst. Prior to the establishment of the railway, the ore was taken by horse and wagon to Michipicoten Harbour on the Lake Superior shore and moved by ship to the big mills at the Sault.
Like many other major industrial centres, the Sault was hit hard by the Great Depression. Unemployment was over 20% during the ‘dirty thirties’ but improved later in the decade as the economy was recovering and the new-fangled automobiles demanded large amounts of steel. It continued to prosper throughout the Second World War and in the post-war period, but was hit hard again by the so-called ‘deindustrialization’ of the 1970s and ’80s, which created similar problems in Hamilton, Ontario and in the Ohio Valley. What had been known as the “Bible Belt” of the upper Mississippi became known as the “Rust Belt”. In many ways the Sault was a northern extension of this phenomenon.
The Taylors
George Taylor was born in Minneapolis on August 12th, 1900. The family moved across the border several times before settling in the Sault early in the new century. He was baptised at St. John’s Church in Sault Ste. Marie on March 20th, 1913. After finishing high school in the Sault he worked at various jobs until he got a job at the Algoma Steel Corporation in the mid-1920s. He married Margaret Myers from Sault, Michigan on his birthday, the 12th of August, 1930. The timing was not auspicious because about that time the Great Depression began to bite and he was let go along with large numbers of other employees. He worked in the woods north of the Sault and at other odd jobs until he was rehired by Algoma Steel in 1931 and was able to get a small house in town. His bride and soon-to-be-born infant daughter had been living with family in The Soo and down on Neebish Island, but were back in the Sault for Fran’s birth.
George’s father was Francis Edward Taylor, born 17th October, 1876 in Aston, Warwickshire, England. Aston has now been absorbed by the city of Birmingham. He came to Canada as a young man and moved to the U.S.A. for a while seeking work. In his later years he was a foreman at the Algoma Steel Corporation. In one of these forays he met and married Louise Riordan Dyke who had been born on the Mississauga Indian Reserve near Blind River, Ontario on the 27th of September, 1876.
Her father, John Dyke, was the factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post on the reserve. He had been born in Tuttington, Norfolk, England on 12th December, 1843 and had served in the army before coming to Canada and marrying Catherine Riordan in Montreal on the 13th of February, 1866. They then moved to Blind River as John was taking a position with the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Riordans were from County Limerick and County Kerry, Ireland and had come to Canada to escape the great Irish potato famine of the mid-1800s. They, along with many other Irish settled all along the St. Lawrence River. Fran was always very interested in her family tree and did a great deal of research on it. In the course of our travels, we visited many of the places of her ancestors.
The conditions of travel in those days were unimaginably bad. The sailing ships took about 6 weeks to cross the Atlantic and English, Scottish and Irish immigrants were packed into every nook and cranny of the old wooden ships. Many died of Typhoid fever and other maladies in the crowded conditions so that there were isolation camps, usually on islands in the river, at every one of the immigration centres along the Eastern Seaboard of both Canada and the United States. Immigrants were kept on the islands for long enough to determine that they were not infectious. Many, who had survived the long ocean voyage, died in the camps.
The Myers
Fran’s mother, Margaret Lillian Myers was born on Grosse Isle in the Detroit River on the 6th of July, 1908. She was the oldest with a sister, Edythe Jean, born, 17th June, 1910, a brother, James Edwin, born 13th March, 1912 and another brother, Edward Lawrence, born on Neebish Island on 17th April, 1914. Her father, Edwin James Myers was an engineer who was working on canals and navigation on the upper lakes and travelled around to various jobs. He had been born on the 9th of January, 1870 at Sandwich, which is now part of Windsor, Ontario to William Myers and Caroline McGee. Her mother, Margaret Helen Lawrence, was born 10th February, 1885 on the family farm on Neebish Island in the St. Mary River south of the Soo. She was the third of 13 children. Her parents were George Lawrence, born 9th October, 1850 in Forfar, Scotland, and Jane Pringle, born 23rd April, 1855 near Hamilton, U.C. The Pringle family came from Spott, a small village in East Lothian, Scotland. They were married at Barrie, U.C. in 1878 and pioneered a farm on Neebish Island.
Soon after James Edwin’s birth in 1912, the family moved to the Soo because her father had taken a job working on the new Soo Locks to replace the old original locks that were much too small for the larger ships then using the Great Lakes. When her mother was pregnant with a third child, her father was killed in an industrial accident at the locks. Apparently he was walking to work and took a short-cut through the rail yards adjacent to the canal. He was caught between shunting cars and killed instantly.
The family was bereft. There were no employee benefits in those days and the family had no means of support. They went to live with the Lawrence grandparents on Neebish Island and Edwin Junior was born shortly after that. His mother continued working at domestic jobs in the Soo to support her family while the grandparents raised the children on the farm.
Fran’s mother and her Uncle Jim took us on a tour of Neebish Island after we were married and showed us the old farm and where she had gone to school. I remember that Peter was only two that summer and Fran was in her seventh month of pregnancy with the twins. Fran’s mother worried about the rough roads and the effect on the pregnancy. She had vivid memories of her own childhood after her father died and the hardships she and her mother suffered during that time.
The family moved back to the Soo so that she could go to high school. After that, Margaret met and subsequently married George and moved across the river. Her sister, Edythe married Virgil Moore in Chicago in 1943 and subsequently lived in San Carlos, California. Aunt Edythe visited us several times both in Toronto and the Sault. She always told the story of her employment as a secretary in Pearl Harbour in 1941. After the Japanese sneak attack that started the Second World War for the USA, many civilian workers went back to the Continental United States, and she returned to the Soo for a while. They had one daughter, Margaret whom I visited on my trip to San Francisco in 1995.
James was in the U.S. Air Force during the Second World War and was subsequently posted to Alaska. He is the one who brought back the Alaskan sourdough which the family still uses for pancakes today. He had married Edith Hoch and they lived in the Washington, D.C. area until his divorce and retirement from the Air Force, when he returned to live in the Soo. He had a sailboat on the St. Mary’s River south of the Soo and Fran and I went sailing on it several times.
Edward was the youngest, born on the Lawrence farm in 1914. After his birth, Fran’s mother recalled that her mother went back to the Soo where she worked as a domestic for some years. Lillian, who was only 6 when Ed was born found herself looking after her sister and brothers, as her grandparents were very busy on the farm. Ed was the youngest and grew up as the baby of the family. He married Lois Barnes in the Soo on 9th September, 1946 and they had two daughters, Cindy and Ellen, both of whom were married and living in the Soo when I last heard from them.
Ed was in the Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan Police Force and was the Chief in the last few years before his retirement. He was an inveterate practical joker and used to tell sexist and racist jokes in public to the extreme embarrassment of his family. I can remember more than once when we were there for dinner that Lois was not speaking to him. Interesting dinner conversation!
Margaret used to tell about the time before the international bridge was built, she rode across the river on the ferry to visit Ed and Lois. Ed had picked her up at the immigration and customs shed near the ferry dock in his regular car. On the way back however, he took her in the police squad car and as they approached the immigration shed, he turned on the siren and flashing lights. As she got out of the car, Ed called out to her: “…and don’t come back very soon!!!” Margaret was mortified and slunk into the ferry terminal hoping no-one had seen her. However, several locals were smiling at her. They knew Ed and his tricks.
Fran’s mother always maintained close contact with her family and I can remember a visit to Uncle Jim, and Ed and Lois over the river on every trip we made to the Sault. As my parents were older, my grandparents died when I was very young and I have memories only of my mother’s mother who died when I was 9. Fran however, had both grandmothers alive when our children were young. She had a great-grandmother who had died only a few years before we met. I can remember when the twins were only two years old, Fran took them to the Sault and we have pictures of four generations on both sides of her family.
Childhood and Schooling
Fran remembered living in a very small house near the steel mill and attending a public school in the west end of the city before and during the Second World War. By the end of that time, her father was doing much better and they moved to a much larger and nicer house on Queen Street where she attended high school. She did not tell me about this very much but she enjoyed school and hoped to go on to university. However her father wanted her to stay in the Sault, get married and carry on the family tradition. She worked as a secretary-receptionist at Algoma Steel for a short time and then her close friend Mary (later McKay) said she was going to Toronto to get a job and perhaps go to school. Fran said that she had no desire to stay in the Sault and wanted some broader horizons, so when her mother supported her in this venture, she decided to go with her friend Mary to the big city. She had just turned 19.
She went to Shaw Business College in September of that year (1951) and took training as a secretary and legal stenographer. When she had finished this course the next spring, she got a job at a large law firm and worked for Tom McRae, a junior partner in the firm. Tom McRae developed acute leukemia while Fran was working for him and died after aggressive treatment was unsuccessful. She briefly met his younger brother Nicholson, who at that time was just finishing his articling and was about to join the firm.
When she first came to Toronto, she remembered living with Mary for a year at a residence for retired United Church clergy. She and Mary were the only young people there. Sometime later Mary had decided to move out of the residence; neither of them had been very happy there. From her mother1 and others, Fran had heard about Georgina House, the Anglican women’s residence on Beverley Street just across from the Grange and the Art Gallery of Ontario. She decided to move there and felt much more at home. Most of the residents were her own age and the atmosphere was much more convivial. Fran was living at Georgina House and working for another partner in the firm when I met her in the fall of 1955.
Things Get Serious
I finished my exams in May, and graduated in Medicine in mid-June, 1957. By this time my mother was very much aware that we were planning to get married and she quietly approved. But my father was firmly convinced that a doctor must not get married until he had completed all his training and was in practice and able to support a family. He kept making remarks like: “A man cannot serve two masters.” When he was more specific, he referred to the two masters as Aesculapius and Venus.2 I was very embarrassed when he wrote me a letter setting out his philosophy in some detail, but then he sent a separate letter to Fran explaining why I could not get married for another five years. This was not the easiest of times for both of us.
Fran was naturally pretty upset by my father’s interventions, but we agreed that we would be married at the end of my Junior Intern year. I spoke to my father but apparently not forcefully enough because he kept telling me that I should wait a few years longer. I argued that his situation was different in two respects, first, his pathology training was only five months in total and second, the First World War had intervened. But this did not seem to convince him. By then it was my turn to be upset.
Fran was Maid-of-Honour at her best friend, Martha’s wedding in late May. Martha was a physiotherapist, marrying Herbert Rogers who was in insurance in Toronto. Martha’s parents were both dead and she had been raised by an uncle and aunt on an old farm near Fonthill, Ontario. The wedding was at a nearby church and the reception was back at the farm. Fran had been staying at the farm overnight and I drove out there before the wedding on Saturday. This was when I got to know Herb and Martha who would be close friends of ours after that.
Fran and I had a week at the cottage with my mother before my graduation and a week with her parents in the Sault after it. I can remember that we flew up to the Sault on the old DC3s from Malton Airport to the Kinross Air Force Base south of Soo Michigan, because Sault Ontario did not have a commercial airport at that time. The old DC3s did not have tricycle landing gear so when they were sitting on the tarmac, the tail was on the ground and you had to climb up the centre aisle to your seat. Then when the plane was in the air, it levelled out so everything took on more normal proportions. The cruising speed of the plane was about 150 miles an hour so the 400 air miles from Toronto to Kinross took about 3 hours. We made that trip several times in the next few years.
I recall that we had supper on board so we had a pillow on our laps and the plates were placed on that. We had the soup and then as everyone else was served, we were missed out. When the stewardess came with dessert, we exclaimed that we had not had the main course. She checked but it was all gone. We were hungry by the time we landed, boarded the closed bus that took us to the ferry and aross to the Sault. Fran’s mother fed us well.
In that week I think that I met the whole extended family. We met Fran’s grandmother Taylor and several uncles and aunts. We saw all the sights from St. Joes Island to the end of the Trans-Canada Highway, which was still under construction at Agawa Bay. We visited Ed and Lois in the Soo as well as Grandma Myers. We drove down to the Mystery Spot in northern Michigan. We had a whitefish dinner at Batchewana. They pulled all the stops.
Juniour Interneship
We were then back to Toronto and I started my Junior Internship at the Toronto Western Hospital on July 1st, 1957. We had heavy days and were on duty every second night, so that I craved sleep just as I had in the navy on board ship. I was able to get some time off and we went to the cottage at Thanksgiving. We had also invited Robin Scott and his new girlfriend, Mary-Lou Mott and Brian and Eileen McLelland who had just been married in the early summer. There were a few problems because no-one liked Mary-Lou who was already talking wedding plans for Robin and even named a date in April. We were pretty sure that Robin had no plans for marriage at that time and we didn’t like Mary-Lou so several of his friends and I put pressure on him to break off the relationship. We noted that Mary-Lou did get married in April, but not to Robin.
The rest of the intern year was pretty much a blur. Fran went home to the Sault for Christmas. I only had a couple of days off so I went to Aldershot. Fran’s parents came to Toronto to visit her in the winter and I planned for them to have dinner with my parents because they had never met. My father invited us all to the University Club and he was a very gracious host. I began to feel that things were going to go more smoothly than I had feared earlier.
Wedding Plans
I had arranged a senior internship for the Queen Mary Veterans Hospital in Montreal to commence July 1st so we planned to get married in early August which would give me time to move to Montreal and find an apartment before the wedding. Fran’s parents planned a big wedding at the Cathedral for Saturday, August 2nd in the early evening with a reception to follow at the Windsor Hotel. I phoned my mother to tell her the news and asked her to tell my dad. She became very stern and said: “John, you will have to talk to him, I am not telling him.”
I said: “But Mom, I can’t get away, I am on duty almost every night.” She said: “You will have to come. He is not happy and I tell you, if you do not talk to him, he will refuse to go to your wedding.” I was shocked. This was more serious than I thought. I was not on duty the next evening so I drove over to Aldershot for a late supper. Dad and I had a long talk and I began to appreciate his concerns. Apparently at our University Club dinner, Fran’s father had been very enthusiastic about our marriage and had said to dad how wonderful it would be if I got a job in the United Steelworkers Union clinic and Fran and I could live in the Sault. I assured my dad that I had no intention of going into general practice either there or anywhere else. I fully intended to complete my specialty training and promised this to him. I spoke to Fran after that and she assured me that she did not want to return to the Sault and she was also supporting my further specialty training. I got my dad on the phone and Fran repeated this to him. Things went a lot more smoothly after that.
Wedding plans began to take shape. My cousin Jane Fletcher was marrying Reed Cooper on the 21st of June, exactly 6 weeks before our wedding was planned. I was an usher and the wedding was to be at All Saints Church in Hamilton, with a reception back at 99 Blake Street the old Trenaman family homestead. Fran was now quite close to Jane and Reed and she came with me to the wedding. Plans for our wedding were now complete. It would be in the Sault, Fran had invited Martha to be her Matron-of Honour, and her other friend from the Sault, Mary McKay and a Georgina House friend, Alice Briggs3 were her bridesmaids. I had asked Hugh Geddes to be my Best Man, with Robin Scott, Brian McLelland and Herb Rogers as ushers.
Montreal
I had a harrowing trip to Montreal and settled in to the intern’s quarters at the Queen Mary Veterans Hospital on Queen Mary Road. Over the next week, I got familiar with the hospital routine and began looking for an apartment. The whole part of Montreal north of Mount Royal was street after street of small walk-up apartment buildings. The monthly rent on some of them was as low as $65. I took a one year lease on a one bedroom apartment at 3096 Av. Goyer for $90 per month which was a cut above some of the others. Then I arranged to have mother send me some of the furniture that we had put aside, mostly from the old farm. My landlord would not redecorate for a one year lease but he did provide some paint. Over the next couple of weeks, I painted out the apartment and got all the small jobs done in setting up an apartment.
Hugh and Robin had set up a stag party for me in Toronto on July 19th. I took the train both ways on Saturday and Sunday. The other interns at Queen Mary Vets also put on a party for me and I arranged for 2 weeks off in August so that we could have a honeymoon. I booked passage on the Canada Steamships Lines ship which plied the St. Lawrence as far as Bagotville on the Saguenay. We planned to take the car on board and drive around Lac St. Jean. And father had reserved a week at the Chateau Frontenac for us on the way back. It looked as if I was all ready for the big day.
Fran had planned to give up her job in early July, move out of Georgina House and go home with her parents to prepare for the wedding. Her parents drove to Toronto and she packed their car to the gills. It was a 1953 Buick Roadmaster so it would carry a lot more stuff than my poor little Vauxhall. She described that her father loved driving long distances and liked to get up early. They set out at about 7:00 am on the highway north and Fran said that they were in Huntsville before they got him stopped for breakfast. I remember how proud he was of making it from Toronto to the Sault, a distance of 495 miles on the old road in just over 8 hours driving time. He was averaging about 60 miles an hour on the old 2 lane highways of the day. I said to him one time “Pop, that must be easy on your tires.” He replied: “How do you figure that?” I said: “Well, you’re only hitting the road every hundred yards or so.” He didn’t think that was funny.
Almost everyone was coming from out of town so we were all making arrangements to get there on Friday, the day before. My parents drove to the Sault bringing Madeline and Jane and Reed. Robin, Eileen and Brian flew from Toronto and Hugh drove from Windsor. Robin did not bring Barbara, a new girlfriend whom I had only met her briefly in the Spring. I flew from Dorval to Malton and then took the familiar DC3 to Kinross. Because our destination was Canada, we stayed in a bonded limousine from there, across on the ferry to Sault, Ontario. The old house on Queen Street was our focus of Activity. We had a rehearsal on Friday evening and a party afterwards at the house. I bunked in with Hugh at the Windsor Hotel where my parents and many other guests were staying.
August 2nd, 1958. The Big Day
The day dawned hot and dry – a beautiful summer day. My mother had a reception for the assembled company at lunch time and I remember that Fran and I were so tense that we got into an argument about some silly thing that I can’t even remember now. Someone raised the issue about whether the groom should see the bride before the service but we ignored that. The Service was scheduled for 7:00 pm so the guys of the wedding party headed out to the Point au Pins beach for a swim. The Lake Superior water was cold as it always is but that was refreshing because the temperature hit 92° in the city that day. Then we all piled into Hugh’s car and went back to the hotel to get ready.
The rest was a blur. I have some startlingly clear recollections. I remember Dean Knock whom I had met at the rehearsal being a steadying influence for all of us. He was to become the next Bishop of Algoma a few years later. I remember coming out to the chancel steps in the Cathedral with Hugh, my Best Man and making sure that he had the ring. I remember standing there for the longest time trying to see if Fran had arrived yet at the back of the church without turning around too much or making it too obvious. I remember the organ starting to play and then I could see Fran coming down the aisle on her father’s arm. I remember thinking ‘this is it’ and realizing that I did not have the cold feet that some guys have described. When Dean Knock pronounced us husband and wife together, I had a surge of emotion as if it was too good to be true and I couldn’t actually get my mind around it at first.
We then recessed down the aisle and got into the limousine that was to take us to the Windsor Hotel for the reception. I remember our wedding photographs taken in a suite of rooms on the top floor of the hotel. I remember that the air-conditioning didn’t seem to be working in our reception room and we were all peeling off jackets to try to stay cool. I remember a huge glass punchbowl full of punch cracking in half when brought from the cold refrigerator into the hot room. I remember my father chatting up the nice girls as he always did. He was ever his charming self.
Then we had toasts and champagne and I had to answer the Toast to the Bride and Groom. I told a story about when we got engaged. I was hesitant and shy and was anxious as to whether she would accept my proposal. Fran said: “Yes! But it has to be in the Sault.” This brought the house down. It was in the Sault. Then it was to change out of our wedding attire and leave on our honeymoon. We had a room at the Starlight Motel for our wedding night and Hugh had spoken to the others so we would not be disturbed. I can remember that Fran had brought along a Scrabble game which was our favourite in more normal times, but that night we could not concentrate on that.
The Honeymoon
The next day, we were both flying to Toronto and then to Montreal. Several of the wedding party were on the flight to Toronto with us so it almost seemed a continuation of the party of the night before. Soon other passengers got into the spirit of the occasion. At the Malton Terminal – at that time two Quonset huts joined together – we bid goodbye to our friends and climbed onto the flight for Dorval. I had parked the car at Dorval so we loaded everything into it and I gave an enthusiastic tour of the city as we went to our apartment. I was so enthusiastic about showing her our new apartment that I completely forgot about carrying her across the threshold and when she reminded me of this, it was too late – she was already across. Oh well! That was to be only the first of my missed opportunities.
It was about 3 o’clock in the afternoon when we got there and we were due to start on our honeymoon that evening. We drove down to the Canada Steamships Lines dock in the old Montreal Harbour and put our car on board the ship. We then had a leisurely dinner in the ship’s dining room and stood on the after deck to survey the scene. There was some mist and the sun was setting so that the crumbling docks and warehouses, and the detritus of the harbour seemed to be wrapped in gauze. It was our first relaxation in weeks – nay months. The ship sailed and we could see the outlines of the low islands and shores of the river in the deepening dusk. We both felt very close. We had made it this far.
The next morning we awoke to see the Cape Diamand and the heights of Quebec City through our porthole. We soon were passing Ile d’Orleans and as we sailed past the eastern end, the Basilica of Ste. Anne de Beaupre appeared on the north shore. By this time we were up and after breakfast, sat in deckchairs on the port side so that we could follow the ship’s progress up the north shore of the St. Lawrence. The ship stopped at all the major towns and villages along the way so we saw Baie St. Paul, and Ile aux Coudres. At La Malbaie, which we knew as Murray Bay4 we walked up the hill to the famous hotel, the Manoir Richelieu5 and walked through the lobby and around the grounds. We also stopped at St. Siméon and Tadoussac before heading up the Saguenay River. By the time we got to the famous cliffs with the statue of the Virgin Mary on top it was getting too dark for pictures so I determined to get the picture on the way back.
We docked in Bagotville about 10 o’clock and got the car out of the hold. We drove towards Chicoutimi and found a motel for the night. It was not very good and we were glad to be up and on the road the next morning. We had breakfast near the river in Chicoutimi and then drove past Arvida, Jonquière and Kénogami to Alma where the large hydro-electric development was centred. The Aluminum Company of Canada had large aluminum refineries6 all along the south shore of Lac St. Jean and since the refining process was electrolytic, it required huge amounts of power. We must have driven under high tension wires for most of the way to Kénogami, some 15 or 20 miles.
We then headed around the north shore of the lake into Maria Chapdelaine country7 from Péribonka to Dolbeau and Mistassini. This had become a major tourist attraction and we toured the church in Péribonka and had a snack in Mistassini. We then drove around the head of the lake to St. Félicien. I have a wonderful picture of Fran sitting on the dock by the Chamouchouane River which flows through the town. We got a very nice hotel there and enjoyed walking around the town. The next day we drove along the south shore and when we reached St. Bruno, we were back into the Aluminum Company of Canada development. It was still early in the day and we were not expected back on the ship at Bagotville until evening. So we drove down into Le Parc des Laurentides which reminded us very much of Algonquin Park and some of the large parks north of the Sault. We had a nice dinner at L’Étape, considered to be the half-way point on the road from Quebec to Chicoutimi. In fact, as we realized later, it was closer to Quebec City than to Bagotville. Then we headed back to board our ship which sailed from Bagotville after midnight.
When we got back to the statue of Virgin Mary, it was so foggy that we could not take pictures. I had to buy some in a shop and they were not as good as the ones you take yourself. The ship retraced its steps of the way up and by late afternoon we were docked in Quebec. We got our car from the hold and drove it up Rue de Montagne to the Chateau Frontenac. We had decided to call the car Sally, but somehow Sally never replaced Betsy in our hearts. Something about one’s first love.
We pulled into the main entrance of the Chateau Frontenac feeling rather grubby and tired after our trip. We were immediately accosted by liveried doormen and valets who loaded all of our belongings onto a cart and wheeled it through the lobby to the check-in desk. We must have looked like the Beverley Hillbillies in the rather grubby casuals we had been wearing on board ship. They gave us a rather elegant room on the Crown Floor, otherwise known as the 13th floor. We looked out on the river with Levis on the opposite shore.
Over the next few days we went to the Citadel and walked around the ramparts of the old city. We had dinner in the hotel and at several of the restaurants along Rue St. Louis. We toured Ste. Anne de Beaupre and drove around Ile d’Orleans. We drove over the Quebec Bridge and around to Levis and took the ferry back to Quebec. We walked the Dufferin Terrace and sat on the benches overlooking the river. We took a caleche ride around the city and down to the lower town. We walked over to the Basilique and around the main shopping district. We did all the things that we could think of that a tourist should do in Quebec. Finally the wonderful time was drawing to a close and it was time to get back to real life.
On the last Sunday, we drove along the north shore through all the quaint small towns, through Trois Rivières, on to Sorel and through the endless streets named after various popes in the east end of Montreal. Finally we were back in our apartment on Goyer. That evening, Robin Scott called us to say that he and Barbara had got married just a few days after our wedding and were on their honeymoon at his uncle’s place in Pointe Claire. We could have been bowled over with a feather. We had some visits with them over the next few days and then our honeymoon was over and our married life had begun.
Settling Down to Married Life
After we returned from our honeymoon we settled down to the beginnings of married life. Our apartment was about a mile from the hospital so I would often come home for lunch and was quite tardy in getting back in the afternoon. This caused a lot of snickering by the staff and some joking remarks. They called it “nooners”.
But I was concerned about money. I had cashed one of the bonds left to me by Uncle Eric but I could see that on a salary of $200 a month, this would not last long. Fran had been given some contacts in Montreal for law offices that would hire legal stenographers but in the flurry of early married life had not followed up. I finally plucked up the courage to discuss our finances because I sensed that Fran was avoiding it. She was very upset and irritable but she could see that the post-honeymoon could not go on so she began to follow up on the leads she had from her previous job in Toronto.
She got a very good job with a prominent law firm located on Place d’Armes. It was a very long bus ride from the apartment, taking her about an hour. But when she got her first pay cheque, we used it to pay off a small loan at the bank that I had been forced to take out. We also went out to dinner to celebrate. This became an institution. On Fridays after work, I would drive down to Place d’Armes to pick her up and we would go to one of the wonderful little restaurants in Montreal. This was an eye-opener for us after the very limited list of good restaurants in Toronto. Seafood was readily available including clams flown in from New Brunswick. In Toronto, seafood was sometimes available at the Savarin Restaurant on Bay Street but usually no-where else – at least at places we could afford.
We had only the most basic furniture that I had been able to round up in the old barn at Two Acres and a mattress and box spring that my mother had resurrected and had rebuilt for us. I bought a large sheet of plywood and started cutting it out to make a kitchen table and some other items of furniture for our apartment. I had obviously never lived in an apartment before because after sawing the plywood for a day or so, our neighbour who lived below us came up and asked indignantly: “Are you going to be finished sawing soon or should I have my ceiling reinforced?” I was almost finished and after he saw what I was doing he was rather nice about it, offering to let me use his garage space to finish the work. I gladly accepted.
This raised another anomaly about apartment living in Montreal. Unlike Toronto, there were only four garage spaces in a building with 16 units. Everybody parked on the street so that a small street like Goyer had parking on both sides and a rather narrow two lanes in the middle that grew even narrower as the snow piled up in the winter, making two-way traffic impossible. Every so often throughout the winter, the snow blowers would come and everyone was required to move their cars to another street while the snow was cleared back on both sides. More than once, I had my car towed because I didn’t move it quickly enough.
Life in the Metropolis
Montreal was the largest city in Canada at that time with a population over one million. Toronto was about three quarters of a million. Daily life was similar to Toronto in some ways but very different in others. There was a retail sales tax of 6% whereas in Toronto, this development was well in the future. The provincial government was Union Nationale, led by Maurice Duplessis. He had been in power throughout the Second World War and was opposed to Quebec entering the war or fighting on the side of Les Anglais. There were many dark aspects to his regime but he supported the old traditional ways that depended on the Church’s hold on rural Quebec. There was widespread corruption that did not surface until after his death in September 1959, only 3 months after we had moved back to Toronto.
At the next election in 1960 the Liberals under Jean Lesage won with a reform agenda: “Maîtres chez nous” (masters in our own house). This ushered in what became known as the quiet revolution. In 1957 Montreal had elected a reform mayor, Jean Drapeau who could be seen as a precursor of this change. But the old guard was still active as long as Duplessis was alive. At the next annual election a sycophant, Sarto Fournier was elected for one term. Shades of Tammany Hall. Jean Drapeau was reelected a year later and went on to a long tenure as mayor.
His eventual nemesis was the Montreal Olympics in 1976. There were huge cost overruns and again much corruption in the construction of the buildings which left Montreal with a huge debt, not paid off for about 20 years. Jean Drapeau had said that there is no more chance of the games having a deficit as he having a baby. A subsequent political cartoon by Aislin showed a very pregnant Drapeau contemplating his finest moment.
Driving in Montreal was an experience. Cars cut in and out, drove the wrong way on one way streets, parked wherever they stopped. I thought the Toronto drivers were very aggressive after driving in Hamilton but the Montreal drivers had them beat a mile. Accidents were all around us. I had three minor scrapes in my first two months until I adjusted to the faster pace.
Running red lights was endemic. Montreal had just instituted delayed green at all traffic lights so there was a delay of 5 seconds after the light in one direction turned red before the other direction turned green. Quebec was the only province in Canada that had never allowed a right turn on a red light and it was strictly enforced. But a caution light seemed to have no discernable impact on the traffic flow. The red light slowed it somewhat but it was not until after the green in the other direction that the flow finally stopped. Even after that you had to watch for the lone taxi coming through.
We travelled around the city and surrounding countryside at every opportunity. Hugh and Joan were getting married on October 4th in Windsor and I was Hugh’s best man. It was a rush. We flew to Toronto and got a ride to Windsor with my parents who were also invited. We arrived on Friday evening just in time for the rehearsal. The wedding was in the Walkerville Anglican Church and the reception was at the Windsor Golf and Country Club. This was very much the old world, old money ambiance that I had always associated with Hugh. Everything was done properly and with style.
On the Thanksgiving weekend, we drove to some of my favourite haunts in New England where I had been with my parents several years before. We went to Ausable Chasm, then across Lake Champlain on the ferry to Burlington, Vermont and on to the Vermont Capital, Montpelier. I remember the streetscape from previous visits and the old Pavillion Hotel right next to the Capital building where I had stayed with my parents many years before. We decided to stay there but it had certainly slipped since my previous visit. The carpets were threadbare, the huge wide hallways were musty smelling and the bed in our room was uncomfortable and squeaked most alarmingly with every move – most embarrassing for newlyweds. The rest of the weekend went somewhat better and we returned to our apartment determined to go to New England again.
Jeannine Maclay8 invited us to her apartment for dinner and we had a very good time. We invited her back to our simple apartment a couple of times throughout the year. My parents came to Montreal two weeks after Thanksgiving and took us out on the town. During that weekend, dad said that the daughter of a close friend in Hamilton had married about the same time as we had and was living in Montreal. They were Mary and Ed. Krucker. To our surprise, when we checked their address, we discovered that they were in the same building as we were, on the floor below. With my dad we went down and knocked on the door. We were greeted warmly if a little hesitantly at first and we exchanged visits throughout the year.
As I recall, Mary was not working at that time, but Ed, a man originally from Switzerland was the pastry chef at Ruby Foo’s Restaurant – probably the most prominent Chinese restaurant in Montreal at that time. We toured many restaurants that year and finally got to Ruby Foo’s as well. The only other incident of note was the day the furnace blew up. We were sitting in our kitchen table when we heard a loud ‘whump’ followed by the sound of breaking glass. The floor rose up an inch or so and settled down again. Fran reacted quickly but I had a more phlegmatic response and sat for a moment startled. She said: “What was that?!!” with a note of alarm. I said: “I guess I better find out.” Fran always said later that she really thought that I would reply: “What was what?”
Montreal Winter
The winter was harsh with huge amounts of snow that lasted from the last week of October until well after Easter. I usually drove the car to the Hospital but Fran had to take two buses to the downtown and it was really cold. Sally, our relatively new Vauxhall, didn’t like the cold at all and it seemed that it was in the shop every few weeks for something or other. Sometimes I took it in just to get it thawed out. I also could not plug it in on the street so I got very good at taking the battery inside at night so I would have a better chance of getting it started the next morning. Finally, the whole front fell out of my topcoat where the battery acid had been working on it all winter.
Fran had her problems too. She had a long bus ride with two changes. It took over an hour to Place d’Armes. One very cold day she got the backs of her legs slightly frostbitten. She was also subject to chilblains which I always interpreted as a sub-clinical Reynaud’s Syndrome. Her father had had a similar condition. This very cold winter was if anything colder than the Sault winters and she said she couldn’t wait to get away from them.
Because of all the snow and cold weather Montreal’s snow clearing budget was all used up before Christmas and they had to go into the next year’s budget. The condition of the roads was so bad that in one snowstorm cars got stuck on the Côte de Neige hill. Impatient drivers behind them pulled out into the next lane to pass and got stuck as well. This blocked the down bound traffic and soon there was a row of cars five across facing a similar row in the opposite direction. It took two days to get that mess straightened out. And it was followed by several other messes before the winter was out. The response of M. Fournier? Everyone must have snow tires or chains. By Easter there was a pile of snow 20 feet high the size of a city block near Côte de Neige and Queen Mary Road. It didn’t completely melt until mid-May.
Spring
It seemed like the winter would never end. We had had continuous temperatures below freezing since November. Sally was feeling it and required a couple of more bouts in the shop to thaw out. In spite of stuffing cardboard in front of the radiator, the heater still could not get the frost off the inside of the windows. Finally in late March we had a day when the sun came out and the temperature crawled up to 40º. But it was only a respite. Fran’s parents came down for a few days from the Sault. Pop said it was only slightly farther along Highway 17 to Montreal than it was to Toronto. We had oysters at a famous seafood restaurant and we showed them around the town.
At Easter we drove to Ottawa to visit Fran’s childhood friend Mary McKay whom she had moved to Toronto with in 1951. She was married to Barry; they had two children. Barry was in his final year of medicine at the University of Ottawa and was planning to do an internship in the States when he finished. We visited all the sites in Ottawa and I have pictures of all of us among the tulips at Rockcliffe Park. Then it was back to winter in Montreal.
By the Victoria Day weekend we planned another trip to New England. By this time the snow was all gone in Montreal except for a small grubby pile in the Côte de Neige and Queen Mary Road park. The grass was turning green and we were feeling much more optimistic about our year in Montreal. On Saturday we drove through the Eastern Townships to the New Hampshire border and down to Portland Maine. I remember a lobster dinner at Theodores Restaurant on the waterfront. The next day we visited the Desert of Maine and the ruins of Fort Popham Beach and went to Augusta the state capital that night.
It was the off-year for the state legislature and the town was so quiet that we could believe the old saws about shooting a cannon ball down the main street or rolling up the sidewalks at night. The best restaurant in town closed at 6:30 and we went to the Ma Quigley’s Diner next door. I ordered seafood and found that they only had scallops from a Birds Eye frozen package. When I complained to the waitress, she said that you couldn’t get seafood this far from the sea (60 miles). At least in Toronto they had the excuse that the sea was more than 60 miles away. The next day we drove north by Screw Auger Falls and into the White Mountains and Mount Washington. We got back to our apartment in time for a late supper.
As the weather became warm, we were much more active socially. Mr. Geddes, the office manager at Fran’s law firm invited us to a barbeque and told us how much she would be missed. There were several parties with people from the Vets and again I realized that we were very much part of the group. They were all encouraging me to stay in psychiatry at McGill. We also got tickets to the Montreal Symphony donated through the hospital. The Overture to Die Meistersinger was last on the program so even though it was late, I had to stay for that. We were almost beginning to regret our return to Toronto.
Plans for our return were by now well under way. I had saved a week of my vacation until the end so that we could have some time in Toronto to find an apartment and get moved in before I started my first residency year in pathology. I had the great idea that if we rented a trailer, we might be able to get all our furniture to Toronto without hiring a mover. This necessitated putting a proper trailer hitch on Sally and for about 2 weeks I spent all my spare time figuring out how to attach a strong hitch to a car that had never been designed for it.
Meanwhile, Fran was doing all the packing and organizing of our stuff and repeatedly asked me when I would be finished so I could help her. Finally when I had the hitch installed, I went around to the trailer rental and discovered that my little car would never be able to pull a trailer big enough for all our stuff. Crestfallen I went back to tell Fran. She was understandably furious with me. That just about ended it right there – and we hadn’t even been married a year yet.
Back to T.O.
The trip back to Toronto was uneventful, if somewhat frosty. We stayed with my parents for the week and were able to find a one bedroom apartment at 220 Eglinton Ave. E. that suited our needs. We then arranged for the moving company to move our stuff in and we spent a good part of July getting settled. I was also in contact with my friends again. Robin and Barbara had an apartment near Bayview and Hugh and Joan were back in Windsor. We were over at my parents’ place most weekends and up to the cottage whenever we could get away. I settled into a routine at the Banting Institute and Fran found another job with a law firm in Toronto that had close associations with the one she had been at before.
Jane and Reed had an apartment on Yonge Street just south of Lawrence. Reed was working for the Ontario Government and Jane was a librarian at the U. of Toronto. Reed had already started his painting and had an art show that fall. We bought a painting, a large abstract that he had entitled ‘Everglades’. We still have it along with several other paintings and silk screens that he had done over the years.
Fran was glad to be back with her friends. We visited regularly with Martha and Herb Rogers who had just moved to a new development in Etobicoke and were proud to show it off. I went skiing with Herb in the winter to several places in the Hockley Valley. Alice Briggs was completing her specialty training in allergies. Robin and Barbara were with us a lot. Robin was working with the Attorney General’s Department of Ontario.
Robin was into sailing and for a time had a funny little boat at Frenchman’s Bay. I had bought a snipe in my last year of medicine and had started to fix it up in the old barn at Two Acres. Then events overtook me and it was still sitting there when my parents moved to Toronto. Robin and I went back to have a look at it to see if it was fixable. We decided it was not and sold the hulk to a local guy who eventually did get it sailing.
New Arrival
We had had much discussion about having a family. I had always wanted children but not until I had completed my medical training. Fran had wanted 4 or 5 – two of each and a spare just in case. While we were in Montreal, the Cold War was at its height. A hydrogen bomb had been exploded on Bikini Atoll in 1954. The U.S. was building the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line of radar stations across Canada’s Arctic. The Soviets were making nuclear threats and testing atomic and hydrogen bombs in Siberia. We both read Neville Shute’s book On the Beach, a novel that described an Australian family’s coping with nuclear annihilation.
By this time, Fran was convinced she didn’t want children at all because we would be leaving them a terrible world – or possibly no world at all. When she missed a period then, we were in a panic because neither of us wanted children at that time. Her periods returned to normal the next month and we both heaved a sigh of relief.
In February 1960, Fran missed a period. She had had some irregularities before so at first we were not sure but by March when she missed another, we realized she was pregnant. She went to the family doctor, Dr. Porter who was able to confirm this, and based on her dates, gave and expectant date of October 5th. At that time there was no universal health care in Canada and we had a plan through the OMA called Physicians Services Incorporated and we had just taken out a Blue Cross plan that covered hospital only. There was a waiting period of 8 months for obstetrics but that would click in on September 1st so we felt it was alright.
Back in Toronto a year later in the spring of 1960 we were able to view this in a more sanguine way and began to actually look forward to our new arrival. We discovered that Martha was also pregnant and would be having her baby in September. Yet again I felt our lives entering a new phase.
Notes:
1 Fran’s mother was very active in the Anglican Church in the Sault and had been on the Executive of the Anglican Church Women (ACW) in the Diocese of Algoma for many years. They attended St. Luke’s Cathedral in the Sault, which was the church in which we were married.
2 Aesculapius was the Roman/Greek god of healing and treatment; Venus was the goddess of love.
3 I had met Alice Briggs during our courting days. Even though she was a year younger than I was, she had been a year ahead of me in Medicine because she had taken pre-meds in Saskatchewan and gone from there directly into Medicine at Toronto. At this time she had completed her internships and had started post-graduate training in medicine.
4 Named after the first governor of British Quebec, James Murray. During the regime of Maurice Duplessis, many place names in Quebec reverted to their earlier French names.
5 Named after Cardinal Richelieu who had granted the first charter for a colony to Samuel de Champlain in 1627.
6 The aluminum ore, called Bauxite, is strip-mined in Jamaica and shipped all the way to Arvida for refining. This is done because of the cheap power in the region around Lac St. Jean. Power is much more expensive in Jamaica so it would not be economic to refine it there. It is said the whole island of Jamaica is bauxite. When they run out of ore, there will be no more Jamaica.
7 Maria Chapdelaine was a novel by the French author Louis Hemon, written in 1913. It tells of the life of a girl born on the north shore of Lac St. Jean around the turn of the 20th century and describes the life of these habitants very well. Fran and I had studied it in high school as part of our French literature course.
8 We talked about Mme McLay in earlier chapters.