The History & Psychology of a Family

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Non-Fiction

The History & Psychology of a Family
Non-Fiction by Mary Snowman

Chapter 4

Once Upon A Memory

As children, we are often surrounded by the stories of our parents’ childhoods. In these tales, we gain some information and ideas about the life our parents led and the subsequent way their lives affect ours. Usually these stories are told in fond longing to return to this place and recapture the moment and feelings that it evoked. As I proceeded to conduct oral histories with my paternal aunts and uncles, I discovered that their memories were often very different and that their childhoods were definitely affected by the order in which they were born. The five that I interviewed were born within a ten year span. My father, who died in 1992, was also born within those ten years. Two other siblings were born much later leaving a gap of 26 years between the first-born and last-born.

This seemed to break them into groups. The oldest three had different lives than the next three and the two youngest were raised with more security and fewer hardships. Each sibling had stories that revolved around events that were memorable to them, because they caused some emotional response within them. Their responses encompassed a number of feelings including happiness, sadness, fear, relief, etc., but the cultural and historical events that were a part of their heritage affected them all. Told with the benefit of histories, my memories, and the research I have conducted, here is the story of my paternal grandparents and their children.

Edward Arsenault, my paternal grandfather, was born in St. Hermengilde, Quebec on March 18, 1897. He was the second of twelve children born to Benjamin and Emilie (Dube) Arsenault. He came from a family of farmers who lived a relatively meager existence. His education consisted of one year of school in order to learn how to spell and write his name. Large families were a necessity for taking care of all the chores that were vital to sustaining the farm and the family income. It seems that farming provided a way to survive, not a steady income that brought financial gains. Edward and his three brothers built and repaired roads for the town in order to pay the taxes for the farm.

In the winter, many of the men and boys in his family would go to lumber camp to work. Edward’s maternal uncle owned a logging business which employed many family members. I am sure the extra money that Edward earned went to support the entire family.

Edward’s older brother Wilfred was given the farm. There was obviously not enough income to support more than one family and the eldest son was expected to be the family member to remain on the farm and take care of his parents in their senior years. Edward went to work in a factory (probably a hose factory) in nearby Coaticook. He married Marie Marier on May 22, 1922 in Coaticook, Quebec. Marie was born on September 2, 1904 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. She was the daughter of Onesime and Henriette (Mead) Marier. Onesime Marier worked for the railroad in Coaticook and transferred to Minnesota, probably soon after his marriage on June 24, 1883. All ten Marier children were born in Minnesota.

On June 1, 1917, Onesime and Henriette moved back to Coaticook with their three youngest children, Alfred, Marie (my grandmother), and Mathilda. The reason for this move is not really known, but I would presume it was on the occasion of his retirement from the railroad. The Marier children who remained in Minnesota had already left their parents’ home.

My grandmother had a difficult time adjusting to her new home. She attempted to continue her schooling but did not speak French. She couldn’t understand the teacher and the teacher couldn’t understand her, so she quit school and at thirteen went to work in a factory that produced union suits. She worked at a sewing machine. I thought that it was surprising that her parents did not teach her French. Her children all spoke French, but they did not teach their children French. I think that the retention of the language was more important to my grandfather and that is probably why their children were taught French.

Edward and Marie moved to Berlin, NH soon after their marriage. Two of Edward’s sisters and their husbands and one of his brothers also moved with the couple. Edward found work in the International Paper Mill and lived in an apartment, probably a tenement house in Berlin. Their first child, Rita Jeannette, was born September 8, 1923. She was followed by Roger Ferrier (my father) on December 31, 1925, and Ida Theresa on May 5, 1928. In 1929, the family moved to a home in what was known as Jericho, a part of the city of Berlin on the outskirts of the town. There is no registration of a deed for this house in courthouse records. The house itself was described as a “tar-paper shack” that became a catch-basin when it rained and required my grandmother to continuously mop in order to contain the water’s flow. I am not sure whether they moved to Jericho before or after Edward lost his job when the IP Mill closed at the time of the Great Depression. This was also the era of Prohibition, a time when it was illegal to make and sell liquor and even illegal to drink it. Edward and several of his neighbors supported themselves by bootlegging liquor in the late 20s and early 30s. During this time, Donald Raymond was born on October 7, 1931. Their home was put up for sale in 1933 for taxes owed to the town of Berlin, and my grandparents and their four children moved to a tenement house in Berlin. On December 31, 1933 Rene Maurice was born. My grandfather found work as a carpenter. It was a living but not enough to support a large family.

I stop at this point to reflect on the inner family that was created by these circumstances. Expressions of fear and uncertainty were vocalized in one of the oral interviews at the time the family lived in Jericho. The two eldest children spent much of their summer in Canada with their maternal and paternal grandparents and assorted aunts and uncles. These were remembered as happy times, times of reprieve from the hard work associated with being an older sibling in a house full of children with an unemployed father. Stories that portray the normality of childhood in the simple adventure of picking cranberries are counter-balanced by stories of fighting and drinking, not enough money or food. The joys of childhood intermixed with the hardship and dislocation created by the Depression. Within these stories, there was another side that became apparent. Cranberries that were picked until no more could be found and the clothing that was being worn had to be used to fashion bags to carry this abundance of fruit home, gives the impression that in their tomorrows there was no certainty of such bounty. The fear and uncertainty of those days are broken by the Wild Cat Beer story.

During the time my grandfather was making liquor, a wildcat fell into a fermenting container of beer hidden in the woods and was drowned. Unaware that the cat lay dead at the bottom of the barrel, the beer was bottled. At this point, my uncle elaborates the story by telling me that the men siphoned the beer from the container by sucking on tubing in order to start the flow of the beer. He emphasized that they kept getting hairs in their mouths. When the beer was completely siphoned from the tank, they discovered the wildcat. My grandfather and his fellow bootleggers contemplated the loss that dumping the beer would produce and decided to sell their illegal brew under the name of Wild Cat Beer for a nickel more a bottle. For every tear or fear that this era produced, there is also a smile or chuckle to remember and the feeling that this life was hard but not without its joy too.

My grandmother took in laundry and ironing for extra money. She made over 50 dozen glazed donuts every Saturday that were peddled by her children within the neighborhood for 55 cents per dozen. This was considered a large sum of money for a dozen donuts, but I am told they were the largest and best donuts and people considered them worth a little more money. During these years the family moved within the city several times, and my grandmother gave birth to her sixth child, Irene Emelie, on January 26, 1937. This would be the last child she would give birth to at home. It is a custom in the French-Canadian culture to say that “Indians” delivered the babies. It is their unique version of the stork. I was unable to discover its origin through my oral histories or research. My father remembered when his brother Rene was born on his seventh birthday. His Aunt Emma, my grandfather’s sister, put my father in the washing machine and told him that if he came out the Indians would get him. She also pounded on the lid with a wooden spoon to drown out the noises my grandmother was making during her labor and delivery. One of my aunts remembered being sent to the neighbors upstairs during one of the deliveries. She said that she was terrified she would encounter that Indian in the hallway leading up to the neighbor’s apartment. She also remembers seeing an Indian on the porch early one morning from her bed. She said it was soon after one of her brothers was born and she said to herself, “Oh no, we don’t need another baby!”

Throughout all of my interviews, there was not one who did not intone their mother’s attributes. She was considered the matriach who held the family together, who somehow found a way to survive the hardships, and who fought to make sure her children would receive an education. It seemed that she insisted her children go to public high school instead of Catholic high school. The public high school had more vocational courses to choose from and her children could learn a trade that would provide them with a good job when they graduated. Many of my aunts and uncles considered my grandmother’s desire to see her children provided with the best education available as a great sacrifice for her. They said that she fought for them to go to public school. Whom did she fight with? Their thoughts were that she had to fight with church doctrine. One of them told me that you could not receive absolution if you did not remain in Catholic school. The fight was probably with her desire to see her children provided for and to remain loyal to the church. Many of them did get good paying jobs because of their education. Four of the girls received jobs in the secretarial field and one of my uncles used his printing skills from high school to get a job in the printing industry that he remained in until his retirement. My grandmother’s leadership seemed to provide a stable and secure environment for most of her children. She had a very stubborn streak that many of her offspring also possessed.

My father started work when he was eight or nine. He sold produce with a local peddler from street to street. His pay went directly to his mother. His reward was a can of tobacco used to roll his own cigarettes. At sixteen, he quit high school to work in the paper mill known as Brown Company. This displeased my grandparents who insisted that their children receive a high school diploma, but they gave up trying to change his mind and accepted the money that he contributed. At seventeen, he again tempted their displeasure and enlisted in the Navy where he was promptly send to the South Pacific and the perils of war. My grandmother made a pact with God when my father left to have another child if her son came back alive. She would fulfill this promise and deliver Helen Rita on August 24, 1945.

I wanted to discuss my father with all those I interviewed. Because I was no longer able to ask him myself, I wanted their impressions of him. As the oldest son, he definitely felt a responsibility for contributing to the family income and that is why he quit school and went to work. His enlistment in the Navy was remembered as being strongly disapproved of by his parents. My grandmother had to sign for him to enlist because he was underage. She refused for a short time but finally relented when he said that he would lie if she didn’t sign for him. It is hard to imagine myself as a mother sending my son off to war at the tender age of 17, but these were different times and even in my imagination I am unable to relate and truly understand. In fact, there are some stories that actually disturb me. My father told me that when he was five years old he needed to have his tonsils taken out. He was given the money and sent on his way to the clinic where he waited alone for his operation. After the operation, he stayed until they felt he was able to walk home. There were no Popsicles or ice cream, no concerned and worried parents, only the need to grow up and face a hard world. As a mother, I have a hard time with this story but consider myself fortunate that I have never had to choose. I am sure my grandmother had no choice. She had others to consider.

My father was wounded during World War II. He was on a battleship, the U.S.S. Maryland. They were stationed in the South Pacific. My father was a boilermaker. He worked five decks down in the boiler room. He was wounded by shrapnel when the ship was attacked by the Japanese. Several of his fellow workers were killed. My father told me that he had his palm read several weeks before this happened and was told that he would be killed on the date of the attack. One of my aunts also told me that the day he was wounded, she had a terrible dream that someone had shot her in the mouth. She told her mother that she knew something had happened to Roger. The desire to see the future is common trait among many on this side of the family.

Each of my aunts and uncles went to work, usually in their mid teens. The money they earned was given to the family. When they married and left home, they contributed no more. They now had their own families to consider. One of my aunts told me that she never felt obligated to contribute. It was just something that her parents had done when they were growing up. When you lived with your family, you considered the good of all living with you. My uncle told me that he sent money home when he was in the service. His mother put it all in the bank and gave it to him when he returned. I think that she was able to do that because several members of the family were working at the time and contributing to the family income.

In 1949, my grandfather fell from the staging of a roof job. He landed on his feet shattering his heels and leaving him in a large cast and unemployed. At the same time my grandmother discovered that she was expecting her eighth child. One of my aunts remarked that this was the only time she saw her father cry. Another told me that her mother was sure she had a tumor for a while. When she finally went to the doctors, she told them that her tumor had arms and legs. Again, they were able to survive these hard times and Lillian Pauline was born on February 10, 1950. When she came into the world, she already had two nephews and two nieces.

The mid 50’s brought a prosperous period for the family when my grandfather got a job working on the buildings at the top of Mount Washington. His job was to take care of the tools and make sure that they were sharpened and ready for the workers. He was paid “big bucks” according to my family. After several years on this job, he went with this construction crew to build Moore Dam in Littleton, NH. For a man well into his fifties, my grandfather had finally found his “dream job.” His accident had left him with a painful limp and this job of sharpening tools gave him the opportunity to sit and enjoy something he was very good at. It also changed the circumstances surrounding the family. Irene, Helen, and Lillian remained at home. Irene worked and contributed to the family through her high school years, but the younger two had no idea of the numerous hardships their siblings had endured, and their income as teenagers would not be taken to support the family. In the late 50’s, my grandfather developed cataracts that left him with only minimal sight. He went on disability until he was eligible for the social security he had earned during his working life. He had several operations for his cataracts and did regain most of his sight, though he wore very thick glasses that made my eyes water when I tried them on. My grandfather learned to read and write working along side his youngest daughters and their school books. He became an American citizen in 1950. I am told it was not difficult because his wife and children were already United States citizens by birth. His reason for becoming a citizen after all these years was that non-citizens could not collect the social security.

When my Uncle Donald was transferred to Nashua, NH in the early 1960’s, he brought about another migration of sorts. Nashua was a growing area with many jobs. The paper and logging economy in Berlin was declining. Donald’s sister, Irene, and her husband left soon after to join my uncle and, in fact, lived in one of his apartments. His sister Helen joined them in the late 60’s and my grandparents soon after. Lillian and her husband lived near them when they finished serving their time in the Armed Forces in the mid 70s. And so my grandparents took on another change. They had four of their children near them and four that remained in the Berlin area. Like their Canadian migration, they didn’t come back to Berlin very often. In fact, I don’t remember my grandfather ever visiting after they moved. We saw them when we went there. My grandfather died on December 19, 1977 at the age of 80 and my grandmother on December 17, 1992 at the age of 88. They lived out their final years in another booming metropolis, a place where several of their children could find work and make a better life. Lillian continued the pattern when she moved from Nashua to Arizona. Here, too, she was drawn by the promise of an expanding job market and opportunities. My Uncle Donald’s daughter, Janice, would follow my aunt a few years later, extending the migratory pattern into the third generation. It is impossible to ignore the fact that some members of each generation were content in remaining near the place where they were born and raised, while others had the need to move, seeking a place where they could find what was lacking in their surroundings. When I began this story, I seemed to feel that my grandparents moved out of necessity, while the other generations moved to places that promised them a better life. I no longer feel that this is true. My grandparents could have remained in Canada as many of their siblings did and worked in factories or other jobs around Coaticook. They choose to come to America just as their descendants choose to move to Nashua and Arizona. It seems that this migratory bug infects some branches of my family tree while others remain immune to its effects.

Contact: mary_gd@yahoo.com
Copyright 2007 Mary Snowman
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Posted 5/29/2007