Chapter 1—A Kid in Moncton
Almost drowned
My
older brother Frank and I were the two surviving sons of Arthur Wellington
Steeves and his wife Adeline Steeves. Frank and I first saw the light of day
exactly eleven months apart in the Green House at the foot of Joudry’s Lane in
the city of Moncton, New Brunswick. Frank was the apple of mother’s eye, and
excelled throughout elementary school. At the age of sixteen, he graduated with
the highest honours from senior high.
My
father’s people descended from that hardy pioneering stock of German-Dutch
immigrant farmers who settled, with their scanty possessions, along the rich
farm lands bordering the Petitcodiac River in the year 1766. In 1966, the
resulting generations of the original seven Steeves’ sons in their
tens-of-thousands celebrated the family’s 200th anniversary at the town of
Hillsborough in Albert County.
During
my youth, Moncton was recognized as one of most important functional and
administrative citadels of our nation’s two giant railroad systems. It became
known far and wide as the hub of the Maritimes, with its myriad of steel
railroad tracks converging into the city’s railroad yards, much as do the
spokes attached to the hub of a wagon wheel. Day and night, passenger and
freight trains were constantly coming from and going to all parts of the
western hemisphere.
Joudry’s Lane was
named after my mother’s people—the Joudry’s. When I was a boy, her brother,
Uncle Larry, owned a mile of hayfields extending below the Green house to the
pumping station near Hall’s Creek—this creek’s adjacent forests, marshes, and
swimming holes served as an excellent proving ground in molding the character
of a nine year old boy gifted with the reckless and determined spirit that
compelled him in his manhood to pursue the pioneering heritage of his
adventuresome forefathers.
In addition to the
distinction of it being a railway center with a permanent payroll, Moncton was
important in other respects: it had its own whore-houses, gambling joints, and
speakeasies down by the river on Main and Pearl streets. The Petitcodiac itself
possessed a virtue because there was only one other like it in the whole world.
It had a tidal bore. People came from all over to see its tidal bore action
twice daily. From the city’s benches in the summer green parks with its
band-stand that bordered the river, tourists would watch in awe as the rising
spate of flood waters reversing the tides, swept tempestuously up around the
bend of the Petitcodiac River from the Bay of Fundy, churning the advancing
currents into a dangerous undertow.
The River also
possessed a dangerous vice—quicksand. Many a weeping parent could testify to
this fact. The boys I chummed around with in my neighborhood had a healthy
respect for the river, and were more interested in the swimming holes along one
of its tributaries, Hall’s Creek. During the fall and early spring months, the
tidal bore from the Petitcodiac flooded the mile wide marshes on both sides of
Hall’s Creek, and far across the rising escarpment to the blueberry plains on
the outskirts of the hamlet of Sunnybrae.
Beyond the city’s
pumping station and the marshes of Hall’s Creek—with its skyline of spruce,
maple, and birch—was the pipe-line path out to the reservoir’s three brooks.
There, as a boy, I caught hundreds of trout with my good friend Edward Magee. I
always called him Edwar and he called me Jimmy. His brother Val and my brother
Frank were inseparable. Edwar and I were each nine years of age then. Edwar and
I were always up to some mischief, and we often caused our parents considerable
anxiety, so much so, that there were times when we provoked them so much that
each of us would be punished with a good old-fashioned licking from our Dad’s
razor straps on our bare backsides.
When we were
9-years old, Edwar and I built a row boat and tarred its bottom to keep it from
sinking. Edwar’s father had a beautiful shot gun and our object in building the
boat was to shoot the geese and ducks, which each spring always fed in the
middle of the mile-wide marshes. In the early spring when the Petitcodiac
river’s tidal bore came surging into Hall’s Creek, these marshes became
drowning deep . To get even a single shot at our game, we had to shove off in
our row boat in the early dawn while it was still dark enough not to disturb
them.
On the high ground
close to the edge of the Creek just below the pumping station where we proposed
to launch our boat, we paused for a breather at the pumping station. This huge
building contained the turbines which pumped Moncton’s water supply from the
reservoir five miles back in the forests. Everyone kept on the best of terms
with Bliss and Scotty, the engineers. There was always an apprentice on their staff
who was employed in working on the huge revolving wheels of the tremendous
engines that generated the electrical power to run the turbines. We were
friends with everyone there, and they were intensely interested in what Edwar
and I were planning to do.
On winter evenings
we would use their comfortable quarters as a haven for putting on our skates.
After we tired of skating or playing hockey on the marshes in the daylight
hours, both Edwar and I frequently engaged in a game of cribbage or hearts
forty-five with Bliss and Scotty. At these two games, my constant companion and
I became experts. During our summer holidays, the pumping station was one of
our daily haunts.
I have often
reflected upon those memorable years as an adolescent boy in some of the far away
places I have traveled; reflected upon them with an inner smile and a
reminiscent glow in my consciousness. During our school holidays on those sunny
summer afternoons, after Edwar and I had returned from the swimming hole or on
our way back from fishing trout in the three brooks by the pipe-line, we always
stopped at the pumping station to while away the rest of the afternoon with our
engineer friends. Sometimes we were late for our evening meal because we were
reading their newest detective magazines—reading and listening to the constant
hum of the turbines pumping Moncton’s water supply.
Before dawn on
that morning’s jaunt, while carrying our row boat on our shoulders, Edwar and I
stopped at the pumping station to tell Scotty and Bliss what we proposed to do.
Their cheerful demeanor changed to fatherly concern, and both pleaded with us
not to go because they felt it was too dangerous to venture out in the marsh’s
dark waters amidst the floating spring ice. Completely disregarding their sound
advice, we continued on our way, and within half an hour had rowed our boat
into the middle of the mile-wide marsh. Just as the early light of dawn was
beginning to break, we were within shotgun range of the geese and ducks.
At this point,
unfortunately, our boat started to leak and rapidly fill with water. Edwar
bailed furiously with his cupped hands, while I stood at the boat’s stern, up
to my knees in water, shotgun braced against my shoulder. Just as I pulled the
shotgun’s double triggers at the geese less than fifty feet away, our boat sank
stern first. We both sank to the bottom as our rubber boots filled with water.
Kicking off the boots, we rose to the surface, striking our heads on the tarred
bottom of our sinking boat. Fortunately, both of us were excellent swimmers,
even with our clothes on, so we struck out for the blueberry plains almost half
a mile away.
It took quite a
while but, eventually, we both made it to the opposite shore of the marshes
and, completely exhausted, climbed up the escarpment to safety. Evidently, our
friends at the pumping station, were watching our progress with binoculars, so
they saw the boat go under with the two of us in it and, not seeing us emerge,
thought we had drowned. They immediately telephoned our homes and the city police
force. At the same time, Edwar and I were struggling up a path through the
bushes on the blueberry plains. While doing so, we thought we detected quite a
lot of unusual activity on the other side near Hall’s Creek Bridge by the
pumping station. Later, we were found out that it was the police with their
rubber rafts and grappling hooks vainly trying to recover our bodies that they
thought were at the bottom of the marshes.
At this time
however, Edwar was more concerned about his father’s expensive hand-carved shot
gun, which now lay somewhere at the bottom of the marsh. We also thought we
were in for a good licking from our fathers who when they saw that we were
building a boat, had warned us to stay away from the marshes. With our clothes
soaking wet, we trudged through Sunnybrae on our five-mile journey home.
Finally, we reached my house. But before we went in, we discussed the events
and decided that we needed each other’s moral support to face our parents. Our
plan was to go to my home first and then to Edwar’s which was near by, so we
both walked up the front path between the lilac bushes and entered my house
through the unlocked front door.
Our feet were very
muddy. In fact, to this day I still remember the footprints we left on my
Mother’s clean floors as we moved silently down the hallway and approached the
door that opened into our living room. We both stopped and listened outside the
closed living room door. Inside we could hear the grief stricken voices of our
people. When we opened the door, we saw all the women crying their heads off.
Beside my father and mother and Edwar’s mother, there was Mrs. Watson Lutz, my
mother’s best friend. At the time, Edwar’s father, who worked for a tobacco
company, was out of the city on business.
You can imagine the
picture we presented. Soaking wet and covered with marsh mud from head to toe.
With joyful exclamations of the sheer exuberance in seeing us alive, they all
started hugging Edwar and I and soon got the full story of our harrowing
experience. In turn they told us that when we arrived, they all had been
waiting for the Police to notify them that our bodies had been recovered from
the marshes. Both Edwar and I changed our clothes, while our mothers and Mrs.
Lutz prepared us a sumptuous repast of steak and onions and fried potatoes,
which surely tasted good after that icy swim and tiresome tramp across the
fields.
While Edwar and I
were gobbling our food down in the kitchen, my father looked at us with what I
believe was a glint of admiration in his eye—I think that this was probably the
first time he thought that both Edwar and I were capable of looking after
ourselves, despite our tender ages, in a dangerous situation when the chips
were down. Neither of us received a licking and when Edwar’s father returned
and was told about what had happened, he never faulted Edwar for losing his
prized shot gun.
A Visit to Aunt Maud’s
My father’s people
were farmers from Salisbury on the upper Petitcodiac River. They were a large
family, mostly boys, who in their prime were all over six feet tall and weighed
around two hundred pounds. After father’s parents died, the farm was inherited
by his brother Jim, who was both the eldest son and a courtroom Judge. After
that, my father moved to Moncton and got a job with the railroad. Eventually,
he married my mother and Frank and I were born eleven months apart. The house
that we were born in had been my mother’s family home. When her parents died,
her brother, Uncle Larry, gave her the house and some adjoining acreage as
mother’s wedding present.
One of my first
memories of the old Joudry home was that it was painted white. It was later
repainted green with white trim. We all thought that the new color blended in
nicely with its lawns and purple lilac trees on either side of our front
entrance. There was also a large poplar tree on the lawn; the hammock that we
used to swing on in summer time was attached to it.
During summer
holidays, when Frank and I were in our primary school grades, Mother would take
us to Campbellton on the Ocean Limited to visit Uncle Larry and our cousins
Elizabeth and Alice Joudry. Although both Elizabeth and Alice had graduated as
trained nurses, neither of them had pursued that profession. Their father was
well off and the girls ran the house for him. Uncle Larry’s wife, my Aunt, had
reputedly died of a broken heart after losing her only son, Jim, in the First
World War. At the time of our visits to Campbellton, Cousins Alice and
Elizabeth were about three times my age. This age difference was because my father
was over fifty years old when he married my mother—she was in her late forties
when she married Dad. I remember once telling my mother that if she hadn’t met
him, she would have ended up an old maid. This didn’t please her vanity very
much. Judging from the photographs in our home, mother was a very handsome
young lady in her prime.
I was nine years
old when we returned from visiting the Joudry’s that year—the same year that I
first met my best friend Edwar. It was also memorable, because during that
absence, Father repainted our house green and installed gas-heating. But what
made mother happiest was the newly installed indoor plumbing. The old woodshed
attached to the north end of our house that had enclosed the quadruple privy
had been dismantled and removed. In its place was an extension of my Dad’s
garden, and there I saw some gigantic pumpkins hidden behind gigantic pumpkin
leaves. Their size no doubt resulting from the garden’s plentiful human
fertilizer. Mother made some delicious pumpkin pies from those pumpkins.
My uncles, aunts,
and cousins on my fathers side were all farmers who either lived up at Boundary
Creek or even further up the Petitcodiac River, around Salisbury. There they
farmed the rich bottom lands along the river. On weekends, father would hire a
span of trotters from the local livery stable, hitch them to a covered carriage
with rubber wheels, and then drive up to Aunt Maud and Uncle Calvin Jones’
farm, ten miles away at Boundary Creek. This farm contained over two hundred acres
of the most fertile bottom land along the Petitcodiac River. Cousin Frank, and
Able and Minnie Jones were my other relations there on the farm.
Our family’s
visits to the farm at Boundary Creek were a cherished event. When we arrived on
Saturday evening amidst all the hectic activity at their farm house,
Father—with my help—would unhook the tugs from the carriage’s twin whiffle
trees and lead the team over to the watering trough; there we would remove the
harness and hang it up on the stable’s pegs, and then bed the horses down in
their stalls with straw, fill their mangers with hay, and their oat boxes with
a sizable feed of grain. When we finished, we would enter Aunt Maud’s spacious
kitchen and sit down to enjoy a delicious meal of brown bread and pork and
beans—with a generous slice of apple pie with home-made ice cream for desert.
They had that special dinner at my Aunt Maud’s every Saturday night.
Aunt Maud was my
Dad’s sister. She was big, buxom, and industrious, never idle a minute around
the farm, except on Sundays—the lord’s day—when both of our families attended
the morning service. On those occasions, my Dad always hitched up our rig and
we would follow the four seat carriage driven by Uncle Calvin, with Aunt Maud
beside him dressed in her Sunday best, and cousins Frank and Able in the rear.
Cousin Minnie remained at home to prepare the mid-day meal: on Sundays, after
attending church, we always had roast turkey with all the trimmings.
At church, there
would usually be about a hundred solemn-looking farm folk and their children
attending Sunday service. The local minister, a middle-aged man, wore long
side-burns and dressed in a black suit with a reverse white collar. For his
sermon, he would shout the wrath of God and the horrors of hell-fire at all the
sinners present; he delivered this with a powerful combination of conviction
and indignation. Right after he had finished, the deacons would pass the
collection plates.
One Sunday after
the Church service had finished and we were on our way back to Aunt Maud’s in
father’s carriage, closely followed by Uncle Calvin’s team, we stopped at the
gate of one of the neighboring farms. Inside the farm-yard, there was a big
yellow Guernsey cow pegged out on a thirty-foot chain. Though the cow was in
heat, she was doing her damnedest to avoid getting bred by a determined Jersey
Bull. After we had been watching this for a few minutes, my mother began urging
Father to drive on—“Arthur, think of the children”—but he ignored her; judging
from the big grin on his face, he was enjoying himself.
At that moment,
wearing a gingham dress, the neighbour’s wife appeared and approached the
Guernsey cow. When she was close enough, she carefully grabbed its halter shank
and used it to steady the cow’s shimmying rear quarters. The bull didn’t need
any urging and, sensing opportunity, immediately mounted the Guernsey and
plunged at her, but he missed the target and—deflected—shot a blast of semen
down the front of the neighbour’s wife’s dress.
My old man just
roared. I looked back at Aunt Maud and Uncle Calvin and they were laughing too,
so were my cousins. I wasn’t. In my nine years, I had never seen anything like
this. As we all watched the bull go at the cow again, pounding so hard that the
cow’s back knotted, I said innocently to mother: “Why is he hurting the cow?”
My mother replied firmly that I was too young to understand. Then, she gave my
father a dig in the ribs with her elbow and said, “Enough is enough! Let’s get
going. This is a fine spectacle for our boys to witness after leaving the house
of God.”
The Jones’ Farm
All my Jones’ cousins
were considerably older than Frank or I. In fact, we were just small children
when cousins Frank and Able were grown men who planted, plowed, and gathered in
the alfalfa crops with their father—my Uncle Calvin—who was a robust sixty
years of age at that time.
The farm buildings
were set apart at least a hundred yards from their large, attractive and roomy
house; it sat on the crest of a hill, commanding an unobstructed view of the rolling
rich farm lands, and of the Petitcodiac River in the distance. The whole Jones
family took great pride in their attractive flower gardens, which surrounded
the north side of their big white house with its red brick chimneys. Everything
was nicely landscaped, displaying that well-groomed look that comes with pride
of ownership.
From the sandy
road that meandered by my Aunt Maud’s farm and continued on towards Salisbury,
a casual observer couldn’t help but be impressed by the Jones farm’s fastidious
surroundings, so immaculately sub-divided by its three-tiered, white-line
fencing, containing romping mares with their foals. In addition, there were the
fenced-in cow-pastures with interlocking gates, which each opened to a
well-traveled cow path leading in a mile-long straight line from the River
below to the huge cow barn.
At the base of the
sandy road, an eight-foot high swinging gate, with its high arch designating
the identity of the Jones’ farm, one could see the big red hay barns with their
winches, pulleys, and tackles extending high up and out from where the pigeons
made their nests on the inside of the hay-loft roof runners. This practical
method of unloading the alfalfa into the hayloft bore mute testimony to the efficiency of the Jones’ profitable
operation.
On the lands not
used for pasture or alfalfa, many different types of root crops and fodder were
harvested and ground into silo feed for the fattening of the beef and hogs,
which were marketed in the city on week days. Scores of steers and hogs in the
outside feeder and finishing pens were continuously being readied for the city’s market.
My uncle was the
executioner, and in the killing room—as it was referred to—he severed the hog’s
jugular veins. After that, Cousins Frank and Able would force each pig’s head
into a large puncheon brimming with scalding hot water. It wasn’t a pleasant
sight to see or hear. Those poor hogs protested in unmistakable terms— on a
clear night you could hear them squealing a half a mile away.
One clear night, I
actually did hear their squealing from a half-a-mile away. That was the time my
cousin Minnie Jones asked me to go for a ride with her up to the post office to
get the mail. Cousin Minnie let me hold the reins while I sat on her lap. And
as a boy of tender age, I thought it very thrilling to be allowed to do so.
Minnie was in her mid-twenties and was a school teacher in the city during the
week. But on weekends, when she attended to many of the chores, she was
transformed into a very competent farmhand, . She was, also, as very
good-looking woman: beautifully proportioned and powerfully built, she had
luxurious golden hair that she combed up high. But, Cousin Minnie could handle
a pitchfork on a hay load with the skill of her older brothers.
From my point of
view it was on Saturday evenings at milking time that Minnie’s farming talent
reached their peak of excellent—I would join her in the barn, together with the
three Maltese cats. We all—those cats and I—greatly admired her dexterity when
milking time began: the efficiency with which she filled those brimming milking
pails, firmly clinched between her bloomered knees, drew the purring plaudits
of the farm cats, that Maltese trio who excitedly sat well within squirting
distance, with open-mouthed admiration as Cousin Minnie manipulated her nimble
fingers on the teats of the cow's udders, hitting the bull’s eye in the cat's
mouth every time.
When milking was
finished, the two-score pails brimming with milk were carried from the barn to
a meticulously clean adjoining out-building where the cream separators were
kept. Helping our three cousins, my brother Frank and I would turn the
handles, separating the milk into
cream, which was then placed into huge containers that Cousin Frank and Able
loaded into a buckboard. These containers were then hauled out to a raised
platform, where the city dairy truck picked them up and transported
them—together with others picked up along the route—to the Moncton Dairy. This
cream and milk was then delivered in pint and quart bottles to the people of
Moncton. The residue skim milk was greedily swallowed up by the hogs in the
feeder pens.
But the Jones'
farm was more that a dairy farm: my Aunt Maud’s pride was her large turkey
flock—and they could surely out run me most of the time. Usually, they would
run so fast with their clipped wings beating the air and the ground, in their
desperate efforts not to be caught, that some of the hens would commence
dropping big eggs while they ran. One Saturday afternoon, Aunt
Maud caught me chasing her turkeys. She hid in ambush and pounced on me from
behind the barn, just as I was ready to dive on top of the one that had the
biggest tail feathers. I wanted to take that big fan of tail feathers and hide
them somewhere in our carriage, and when I got them home, I was going to make a
real Indian head-dress, just like the one's that Indian chiefs wore, so I could
be the Indian chief when we played cowboys and Indians. But that scheme never
materialized, after Aunt Maud finished scolding me in loud angry tones, never
again did I bother my Aunt’s turkeys.
Typhoid Fever
The year that I
turned ten years old [1918] a flu epidemic spread through most of Moncton’s
schools. One afternoon, on arriving home from school, Mother said ”Jimmy, is
your school closed too? Frank’s is being closed because of the influenza.”
Frank and I went to different schools—mine hadn’t been affected yet. I replied,
“Yep, mine is too.” That lie almost cost me my life.
Later on,
mother—after realizing what school-closing implied—made a point of telling me,
“Jimmy, promise me that you won’t swim where the sewer empties into Hall’s
Creek.” I solemnly promised her I wouldn’t. The next morning, of course, I
headed across the hay fields to where the sewer empties into Hall’s creek.
When I got there,
several other kids were already swimming stark naked at a site we called Eel’s
hole; this was just below the place where the city’s sewer emptied into the
creek. In those brownish, turbulent waters, you would occasionally see stools
of human excrement swirling in the murky water’s undertow. The other kids were
playing a game that involved diving from a diving board anchored to the bank by
sand bags and seeing how far you could go under water before coming up for air.
After watching them for awhile, I joined in.
On about the third
or fourth time I did it, and after swimming a considerable distance under
water, I thought my lungs were going to burst, so in rushing to the surface for
air, I started swallowing water, and, unfortunately, swallowed a mouthful of
excrement. It tasted awful. Coughing, I crawled up the bank onto the shore, and
when I when I had my breath back, I started trying to vomit it up by putting my
fingers down my throat. This didn’t work. I suppose, someone who can swallow
feces without vomiting is going to have a tough time forcing himself vomit.
I was feeling weak
from all that, so I decided to put my clothes back on, and—it seems to me—that
I had just pulled my knee pants over my bare feet when I looked up and saw my
Mother. I’ve often thought since then that she had a sort of psychic intuition,
because she could practically read my thoughts at times. It was probably
through this inner sense that made her realize that I had disobeyed her and
gone swimming at Eel’s hole.
Mother gently took
my small hand in hers and walked me back to our green house on Joudry Lane. As
we crossed the fields, she kept repeating, “Jimmy, you promised me you wouldn’t
go swimming there.” Her unspoken fears came true the very next day—I became
awfully chilly—so she bundled me into bed under a pile of blankets. Also, she
filled our corked bean-crock with hot water, put it inside of one of my Dad’s
size 12 woolen socks, and placed it snugly under the blankets against my side.
By nightfall, the fever had worsened, so Dr. Price, our family doctor, was
called in. My temperature was 105. His diagnosis was typhoid fever. For the two
following months I was extremely ill and nearly died. In fact, Dr. Price called
in two consulting physicians and they both thought I was dying.
Cousin Elizabeth
Joudry came down to Moncton from Campbellton on the Ocean Limited to be my
nurse. She even slept in my bedroom to keep close watch on my temperature. Most
of the time I was in a coma. I remember, though, that sometimes I would wake up
and wonder if the fate the physicians were openly predicting for me was God’s
punishment; punishment for disobeying my Mother so often. When I was a child, I
firmly believed that there was nothing you did that God didn’t know about. For
example, I was certain He knew all about the sparrows I constantly knocked off
the electric wires with my sling shot. Yes, if the Bible was right, He knew
about every single one that I had murdered—scores of them, all done without
even once feeling a twinge of regret. The more I though about it the more I
began to believe that it would be a good riddance: not only was I a sparrow
murderer, I was an accomplished liar, and a petty crook.
In the evening, my
father would come home from the CNR, and I would listen for his heavy steps
coming up the stairs. When he came into my room, he would sit at the foot of my
bed and talk to cousin Elizabeth about me. Often, as he sat there, I would
notice big tear drops trickle down his cheeks into his dark beard. He too
thought I was going to die. If I was awake, my Dad always asked me if I had
taken my medicine—castor oil (I had taken a prodigious dislike to it). I would
nod my head and he would put a dollar bill under my pillow. After awhile I had
a bundle wrapped in an elastic band. In fact, I had about 40 dollars by the
time I got well, and learned to walk all over again. I used it to buy a new
bicycle.
I remember the
first time I got out of bed, pushing a chair for support. I made it as far as
the bathroom window across the other side of our upper hall. I remember looking
through that window and down into my Dad’s big garden. It looked so green and
had grown so much since I last saw it 2 months before. Looking down over our
hay fields, the pumping station, and then Hall’s Creek Bridge, I also saw
several deer and their fawns grazing on the marshes. It sure was a good feeling
to get well again, and I silently vowed to myself as I looked towards Hall’s
creek, that I would give that part of the creek a wide berth. I never swam
there again.
Stealing from my father
My father had
about twenty pairs of work and dress shoes. One time, I peddled one of the
pairs to a second hand store for fifty cents, so that I could go and see a Buck
Jones western. He never even missed the shoes, so I didn’t get found out. But
there was one time, when I was 10 years old, when he did catch me stealing—and
I had been getting away with it for about two years before I was caught.
Every Sunday after
attending church, my Father always left a bunch of silver change in the vest
pocket of the suit he wore. He always seemed to have about a dozen suits that
he kept inside a large clothes cupboard in his and Mother’s bedroom. On Monday
mornings I would go through his vest pocket, and sometimes I would get several
dimes, nickels, and quarters. He never seemed to miss them, and I always
concocted some story about, say, selling the greens I had picked on the
marshes, to give the impression that I had honestly earned the money. Even in
those days I was a good salesman; always able to sell the bucket of Marsh
greens I picked, even when the other fellows weren’t able to. My brother Frank
wasn’t much of a salesman (he made a better banker); the greens he picked
usually ended up mixed in with the boiled pigs feet and cabbage that we ate
during our summer evening meals. This was a meal that my Dad liked a lot.
Anyway, one Monday
evening after supper, my father went upstairs and a few minutes later called me
to come up to his room. When I got there, he looked me up and down and said, “You’ve
been stealing silver change out of my suits, haven’t you?” I didn’t say
anything. He waited awhile, looking straight at me, then he said, “Jim, you’re
not going to turn out to be much of a man if you keep that up.” That was all he
said, and then he sent me back downstairs. Though he didn’t spank me, what he
said registered in my mind forever, and believe it or not, I never stole
another thing after that.
The crow’s enemies
Along the leeward
side of our hayfield, was a four-foot wide hedge of wild raspberry bushes that
stretched almost a half mile to the pumping station. In the middle of the
hayfield were two fifty-year old spruce trees. That’s the age my mother said
they were, because her brother—my uncle Larry Joudry—planted them when she was
a young girl. About a dozen crows used to build their nests and hatch their
young in the top branches of these trees. Every year, the crow’s or their
descendants came back in the spring and, after some remodeling, moved back in
for the summer.
Edwar and I were
their enemies. Every opportunity we got, we would take a crack at them with our
sling shots, but they were almost always able to avoid getting hit. When their
lookout sentry spotted our approach, he would start cawing and the others would
quickly fly out of range of our sling-shots.
However, there was
one time when they got really brave and started dive-bombing us—that was when
Edwar and I stole their eggs. Before this happened, he and I often climbed up
their trees and looked in their nests at the green spotted eggs, or at the
homely little black crows that were hatching . We often sat in a crouch of each
tree, waiting to sling shot them with a pellet. We each had a little leather
bag of pellets that we got by taking apart Edwar’s father’s number ten shot-gun
shells. You could kill a goose at 200 feet with one of these. The crows were
aware of this, because several times we had knocked off the odd tail feather
even though they were flying high.
One evening, the
two of us were swinging in the hammock between the poplar trees on our front
lawn. My father and Watson Lutz came out the front door and sat down on our
front steps talking. Watson Lutz and his family—his wife, their teen-age
daughter, Dorothy, and elder son, Bill—were distant kin-folk on my father’s
side. They lived down Joudry Lane directly across from Mose Tracey’s big yellow
house. At his neatly kept four acres, with its pretty white house, crab tree
orchard, and vegetable garden, Mr. Lutz kept some geese penned up in
out-buildings. He was also a real horse trader, and that day was telling my Dad
about the fine pedigree geese that he had mated and whose eggs had recently
hatched. According to Watson, these geese were very special, and, if grain fed,
would turn out to be better eating than turkeys. While he was talking, Edwar
and I hatched our own little plan.
The next morning,
after Mr. Lutz had left for the market, the two of us snuck into his goose pen
and stole four of the prized eggs. We carried them carefully in our caps over
to the spruce trees, climbed up to the crow’s nests, and substituted the four
goose eggs for four crow’s eggs, an even trade. Not surprisingly, the crows
sensed what we were up to no good; in fact, I think they also sensed that we
were unarmed—we had left our sling shots at home—because while Edwar and I,
each in a different tree, were warily climbing down, the whole murder of crows
started diving and swooping down at us, cawing their heads off. We managed to
get down safely, then this time carrying crows-eggs in our caps, we ran along
the leeward side of the raspberry hedge and cut across my Dad’s cucumber patch
past our house; then we scurried over the several hundred yards of open field
behind Mose Tracey’s store; where, making sure no one was outside Lutz’ place,
we ran across Joudry Lane and climbed over the fence into the goose pen.
Inside the pen and
out of sight, we shooed the geese away and placed some crows eggs in each of
their nests. After that, we snuck out and eventually made our way back to my
house without being seen, casually walking up the path which led to our back
door and sitting down on the back steps. Hearing us, Mother came to the screen
door and remarked, “Jimmy, the crows have been making a terribly loud noise
this morning. Do you know what’s going on” I looked over my shoulder at my
Mother and nonchalantly said, ”Is that so? Maybe the cat was after them.” Then,
fearing that Mother might ask me where we had been for the last two hours, I
said, “I guess we didn’t hear the noise because we were in Edwar’s basement.”
That evening, we
were all sitting at the supper table when, through the side window, I saw a
hump-backed figure running along the path towards the back door. It was Watson
Lutz. Immediately, I thought: “How could he know? No one saw us near his goose
pen—and he was at the market all day!” His determined steps left no doubt in my
mind that I was in for licking from my Dad.
Mr. Lutz charged
through the screen door, through the kitchen, and, without any formalities,
came straight into our dining room. I was sitting across from my Dad; with
Mother and Frank at either end of the table. Before Lutz could compose himself
enough to speak—he was out of breath—I leapt out of my chair and in an instant
was standing behind my father and shouting at the top of my voice: “Dad, don’t
let him touch me, I never did nothing!” Angrily, Lutz told them about the
missing goose eggs and the unwanted the crow eggs. When he finished, I saw a
look of comprehension fill Mother’s eyes, as she remembered that morning’s conversation.
She looked over at me and loudly exclaimed—“Go to your room. You deliberately
lied to me when I asked you about the crows.” As I was leaving the room, I
heard Mother say, “I think I know where you’ll find your goose eggs.”
After I had gone
upstairs to my bedroom, I heard the kitchen screen door slam and, running to my
bedroom window, saw the three of them grimly head through Dad’s vegetable
garden and then down through our hayfield to where the crow’s nests were. A
little while later, they returned, but now they were laughing. Instantly, my
fear of another licking disappeared and, feeling quite confident, I slid down
the hall banister and boldly walked into the kitchen. There Mother was washing
the supper dishes, and my Dad and Watson Lutz were laughing about the escapade.
The spanking had been forgotten. Watson Lutz left through the kitchen screen
door, shaking his bowed head which receded from his hunched back, as if he
still couldn’t believe what had happened.
The Beaver Coat
Nothing else unusual
occurred in the summer of my ninth year—the year when Edwar and I were almost
drowned in the marshes. Except for that unforgettable licking I received from
my father for cutting up his expensive beaver fur coat.
When I was nine
years old, Tarzan of the Apes was my hero. Edwar and I had read every one of
Edgar Rice Burrough’s book, and Tarzan was who we both wanted to be. One summer
afternoon, instead of going swimming or fishing, Edwar and I decided to dress
up like Tarzan, and go into the woods on the other side of the marshes, where
we could climb the trees and play Tarzan of the Apes.
After mother went
shopping in the early afternoon, we began looking around for something that we
could wear that would make us look like Tarzan. We were browsing in my upstairs
bedroom, when the idea dawned in my fertile brain that we could take my Dad’s
beaver coat, cut it up with mother’s scissors, and then sew it back into a
Tarzan outfit using her darning needles. Then, when we played in the woods, we
would actually feel and look like Tarzan.
Edwar—of
course—thought it was a great idea, so we quickly went to my Dad’s room and got
the Beaver coat out of the back of the closet. Then we got some string,
scissors and darning needles, and headed across the fields past the pumping
station and over Halls Creek Bridge to the dike foot-path to the woods. We were
heading for the log cabin in the woods, where our parents sometimes allowed us
to sleep over during the summer time.
Within an hour, we
arrived at our cabin out by the pipe line near the three brooks. There, we
immediately set to work making Tarzan clothes out of my Dad’s fur coat. First,
we cut the arms off the coat, then, after considerable thought, we sewed the
cut up pieces into two Tarzan outfits. When we were done, we took off all of
our clothes and put the furry costumes on. They really did look like Tarzan
outfits. I mean they looked like the kind of outfit Tarzan would have worn if
he had lived in Canada—beaver pelt substituting for lion skin.
Wearing these costumes
really inspired us: for the next hour, we climbed trees playing Tarzan—you
could hear our exulting voices making Tarzan calls throughout the adjacent
forests. Finally, we tired and decided that we better go home, so we got out of
our Tarzan outfits and back into our summer clothes. We decided that we better
not leave the remnants of the coat around the cabin, because it might be
discovered by my brother Frank or Edwar’s brother Val. Frank would easily
recognize the beaver fur as belonging to my Dad, and then I would be in for a
stormy session. So we rolled-up the beaver coat into a ball; dug up a heavy
rock and then, using some barb- wire off a fence, weighed the ball of fur
down.. Then we threw it into Halls Creek—that was the last anyone ever saw of that
coat.
Everything went
smoothly until fall came with its colder weather. One evening at supper, I
heard Father say to Mother, “Get out my beaver coat and hat, so I can wear it
to church next Sunday.” After the meal, I went over to Edwar’s home and discretely
inquired if he had mentioned anything to his brother Val about our Tarzan
escapade. Edwar said that he had told Val that we had found some fur out by the
cabin; and that we had used it to dress up like Tarzan.
The next day
Mother said she couldn’t find the coat—all she had found was the huge beaver
fur hat with its sharp brim. Mother first questioned my brother Frank while he
and I were sleeping in the same bedroom that night about nine o’clock. She came
upstairs and said “Frank, are your sure you haven’t seen Dad’s beaver coat
around?” Frank assured her that he didn’t know where it was.
Mother then
mentioned that she had better ask Father if he might have left it at Aunt
Maud’s after we had Christmas dinner there last year. “I remember” she added, “while
we were driving home in the sleigh, your father remarked that it was an
extremely mild winter. So he may have left his coat there and wore only the hat
coming home.” She continued, “We had buffalo robes in the sleigh—and it was
much too warm to use them for knee coverings on that day.”
Mother left our
bedroom and went back downstairs to talk to Dad. After she was gone, Frank
immediately turned to me and said, “Boy, are you ever going to catch it when
Dad finds out what you did with his beaver coat!”
“I never touched
Dad’s coat!” I replied vehemently. But I could tell that he didn’t believe
me—evidently, he had put two and two together. I knew I was in for it.
The next evening
after supper, we were all sitting in the living room. Father was reading the
Moncton Transcript, the evening paper, when suddenly he looked up over the top
of his glasses and, addressing Frank, said “Was my beaver coat in the Attic
clothes closet with my other winter clothes?” Frank replied, “No it wasn’t
Dad.” Then, looking directly at me, grinning, he remarked “Dad, if you want to
find your beaver coat, you better look at the bottom of Halls Creek, near the
bridge crossing. Jim will tell you where it is—he and Edwar put it there.” “How
do you know about this?” asked my father. “Val told me” continued Frank, “that
Jim and Edwar were playing Tarzan last summer in the woods, and they took your
fur coat and cut it up for costumes.”
A strange look of combined anger and
amazement appeared on my father’s face. He got up from his chair and stood with
his feet wide apart, looking speechlessly at me. Without saying anything, heleft the room and I heard him ascend the stairs. When he returned to the living
room, he was carrying his razor strap, I was standing by mother, behind her.
Father had the strap clenched in his right hand and, glaring angrily at me,
said “Frank’s telling the truth, isn’t he. I can see it on your face. Come here
I’m going to give you a licking you will never forget!”
Then father
stepped forward and grabbed me, quickly pulled down my pants, and then, turning
me over his knee, gave me the licking he had promised—you could hear me yelling
a block away, every time he whacked me on my bare backside with this razor
strap. I couldn’t sit comfortably for a week—it was so sore. I even had to stay
home from school for a few days. But that was the last licking I ever got from
my father—and he never referred to the beaver coat again. Soon after that, he
went out and bought a beautiful dark-blue winter coat with a velvet collar. I remember
that he always wore a bowler hat with it, which was fashionable in those days.
Uncle Larry’s Present
Every summer and
winter my mother received gifts from Campbellton, New Brunswick—the home of my
Uncle Larry Joudry and his two daughters, Elizabeth and Alice. In the summer,
Mother always received a large salmon packed in ice that was caught in the
Restigouche River near Campbellton. In winter, around the middle of December,
Uncle Larry would send a substantial gift in money, as well as other Christmas
presents for the whole family—Frank and I would eagerly look forward to these.
Uncle Larry was
very well off. At one time, in his younger days, he sold watches and jewelry to
the lumberjacks at the lumber camps in the New Brunswick woods. Being a far-sighted
and prudent businessman, he had invested tens of thousands of dollars in real
estate—in fact, he became very wealthy. He owned the local theatre in
Campbellton, as well as other land and business investments throughout our
Province. He was a reasonably stout man of middle age, with a clipped short
grey beard —and was always immaculately dressed. On their periodic summertime
visits to our home in Moncton, the Campbellton Joudry’s always arrived in a
large MacLaughlin touring automobile. In those days, this was indeed a rare
sight to see, because horses and carriages were the main mode of
transportation—there were lots of livery stables, as well as watering troughs
and hitching rails for tying the horses' halter-shanks to. Garages for
automobiles, so abundant today, were unknown in my childhood years.
I remember very
well one particular occasion when Uncle Larry and my two young-lady cousins
arrived for a brief visit: Mother
happened to glance through the window and from several hundred yards down our
dusty street, she saw Uncle Larry’s big MacLaughlin touring car approaching.
Mother was a smallish woman, very energetic, but seldom excitable, but when she
caught sight of our relatives, she announced joyously, “Here comes Uncle Larry
and the girls!” Hearing that, we all
ran to the front door.
The big touring
car pulled up and stopped opposite our entrance. Uncle Larry, who always had a
cigar sticking out of the side of his mouth, was very courteous, so we watched
as he got out of the driver's side and walked around to the passenger's side
and opened the car door for his daughters, holding each of their hands as they
stepped from the running board onto the road’s sandy surface. Mother stepped
off the front porch, all smiles, and gave Uncle Larry and her two nieces big
welcoming hugs and kisses. Dad and Frank and I waved them all inside, and once
we got settled in the living room, Uncle Larry said “I have something for the boys in the trunk of the car.
"Addie," as he affectionately
called my mother whose maiden name was Adeline Joudry, "would you clear
the center piece and remove that bowl of lilacs from the table—I'll go and get
the present.”
Mother immediately
did as he asked. With a grin on his face, Uncle Larry turned to Frank and
I—who, when the Campbellton relatives
arrived, usually sat on the
living room sofa in awed, admiring silence—only answering when spoken to.
“Boys” he said, addressing Frank and I—both of us in knee high pants and bare
feet, “I want each of you to stand in a corner and face the wall," he
continued, "and I want you to do this, until I come back from the car and
tell you to turn around.” Frank and I
each picked a corner of the living room and turned our faces to the wall; in
the meantime, Uncle Larry proceeded out the front entrance to his car. We heard
the trunk slam shut and Mother and Dad, who were busily engaged in
conversations with my cousins, stopped talking as they heard Uncle Larry
re-enter the living room and place something on the living room table.
Uncle Larry—a top
rate salesman—began to speak in his flamboyant and enthusiastic manner: “All
right boys, you can now see the present I have for you.” He gestured towards the table with
outstretched hands—and there, sitting on it, was a red wagon with rubber tires on its wheels. It was the first one
I had ever seen—and it was brand new. Ecstatic, I rushed towards the table and
grabbed the handle, saying loudly,
“Let’s try it on the cinder side-walk. Frank—you can push! ” So
out we went with the wagon.
After we had been
outside for over an hour, each taking turns pushing the other, I started to coax Frank into coming with me
to the top of Joudry’s hill. The plan was that I would steer and he would jump
on the back after we got going. Frank agreed to go, and it was just a matter of
a few minutes running for us to reach the top of the 60° sloping cinder
footpath coming off Mountain Road into Joudry’s Lane. When we reached the top
of the hill, I got into the steering
position with my bare knees sticking straight up and braced against the front
end of the red wagon. I then said to Frank, “Give it as hard a push as you can,
then jump on and hold onto my shoulders. I'll bet we can travel clean down the
hill to Mose Tracey’s place."
Mose's place was
about 500 yards below the brim of the steep hill. So with that, Frank leaned
forward and started running and pushing the wagon, then he quickly jumped in
behind me and wrapped his arms around my shoulders. Within seconds, we were
going so fast that I though we were going to start flying—I was grimly holding
the steering handle as our wagon raced past the slough at the bottom. Finally,
when we reached the point where the hill began to level off—about 300 yards
down Joudry’s Lane—Frank’s hands slipped forward off my shoulders and became
firmly clenched under my Adam’s apple. By now, we were racing past Mose
Tracey’s cow pasture, about a hundred yards from his grocery store.
We must have been
going over twenty miles an hour, and I was nearly choking, but I didn’t dare
let go of the steering handle, although I knew I had to do something fast. On
my right side, there was the graded ditch; on my left was the soft grass of
Mose Tracey’s cow pasture. Tough decision—I quickly gave the handle a turn to
the left and, all of a sudden the wagon flipped side-ways: Frank went flying,
face first, while I did a couple of
somersaults, finally settling on my backside on the grass.
When I looked up,
the first thing I saw was Mose Tracey’s cow; it was snorting and standing with
its front feet widely spread apart at the very end of her forty foot tethered
chain hooked into her halter ring. The cow was scared out of her wits and stood
there with lowered head staring at the upset wagon. I looked over at Frank, who
was getting up onto his knees—and boy did I ever start roaring with laughter:
he was covered with cow shit, he had rolled into a huge pancake of fresh,
Jersey cow manure. He didn’t think it was funny and said, “Why didn’t you watch
where you were going!” I said “You almost strangled me.” Between bursts of laughter, I continued,
“Imagine what shape you’d be in if I'd swerved the other way. We'd have broken
our necks if we’d gone in that ditch.”
Suddenly, I heard a man’s
voice—it was Mose Tracey’s—saying, “Are you hurt?" He came up closer and
continued, "I knew you'd never make it going at the clip you were—from the
top of the hill.” Then, turning to
Frank, with a grin spreading over his moon-shaped face, he said, “It shouldn’t
taste too bad. Old Rags (his cow) is pretty careful about what she eats!” Then he said, “Come on up to the barn pump
and I’ll get a gunny sack you can wash with.”
I righted the red
wagon onto its wheels and trudged in my pigeon toed bare feet at their heels.
After Frank washed himself, he really didn’t look too bad. It was about nine
o’clock in the evening, and my Uncle and cousins would be sitting in the front
parlour waiting to say their good-byes. I said to Frank, “We’ll go in the back
way, then you can go up the rear stairs to the attic and come down the front
stairs and into your bedroom to change into some clean clothes.” Sure enough, the big kerosene oil lamp
sitting on the fancy middle-table in the parlour was lit up, and when we
quietly passed along the path to enter the back door, we could see through the
curtains that Mother and Father and Uncle Larry and my two cousins were all
sitting waiting for our return.
I had washed my
feet, hands and legs at Mose's, and I looked as good as when they had last seen
me, so I walked through the kitchen into the living room and stood leaning
against the open parlour door. Finally, they all looked over at me and Uncle
Larry said, “Well, how do you like your wagon?” “It sure runs nice.” I
said. Then he said “Where's Frank?” “He
had to go to the bathroom,” I replied, “He’ll be down in a minute.” Uncle Larry pulled out his gold watch, which
was attached to a gold chain spread across both best pockets and eyed the time;
then he said “Girls, we must get going as soon as Frank gets down here.” By this time, everyone except Cousin Alice
was on their feet and my Dad was getting Uncle Larry’s grey felt hat that was
hanging on the rack in the hall. Within a few minutes, Frank came down and put
in a perfectly groomed appearance. While we were saying our good-byes, Alice
who was still seated, said “Come here
Jimmy.” Then, taking me by my bashful
hands, she gave me an affectionate peck on the cheek, saying “My, what handsome
boy you are! But, always remember, ‘handsome is what handsome does.’”
Sometimes—down
through the passage of years—whenever I recalled my boyhood days, I would often
think of my nice Joudry cousins. Cousin Elizabeth, the elder, was an extremely
fine woman and, like cousin Alice, a registered nurse. The Joudry's had a very gay and sprawling home in
Campbellton; it had about 7 bedrooms, as well as an indoor bathroom. The house
wasn't far from Sugar-loaf Mountain, where Alice and Elizabeth would take
Mother and her two small boys fishing when we visited them during the summer
holidays. I can still remember being with Cousin Alice, when she was in her
twenties and I a score of years younger, walking over a great round log, to the
very middle of their wide trout brook and watching the speckled trout swimming
underneath us in the cold mountain-fed stream. I was particularly fond of
Alice. The last time I saw her, she would have been about 25 and I about 11.
She was beautiful, with natural golden reddish hair. Underneath those luxurious
tresses was a perfectly-contoured, always smiling face. Her sparkling eyes
brightened up the environment where ever she went.
But most of all,
when I think of those days, I think of my Mother—who loved her youngest son
despite his mischievous and reckless nature. And when I think of her, I'm sure that during all those years that I
was away from home serving in the Mounted Police or when I was an infantry
officer serving in the Second World War's combat zones, there was never a day
that she didn’t say a prayer to God—in whom she fervently believed—to watch
over the boy who was always so far away from the green house on Joudry’s Lane.
Chapter
2—Teen Years
Fighting a Bully
In my eighth
grade, my school-master’s name was Mr. R.G. Warman. He was a fine gentleman of
the old school. In fact, in my eyes, he was a Man’s man, because he had been a
captain in the First World War (I became a captain in the second). The first
morning I attended his classroom was a Monday, and I remember this solely
because, on the preceding day, I had had an argument with an older boy after
Sunday school. This fellow—I forget his name—was regarded by the other kids as
the best fist-fighter in the ninth grade at the adjoining Edith Cavel School,
situated less than one-hundred feet from the Victoria School, I attended. His
parting remarks that Sunday were that he would get me the next day at school.
The next day,
Monday morning, I rose early, so I could attend to my muskrat traps, which I
set out along the banks of Hall’s Creek. After that I headed for school; it was
about a half a mile from home. When I got there, I saw a large crowd of boys outside the side entrance of Edith
Cavel. A friend of mine stepped out of this crowd and approached me. He said,
“The bully-boy is telling all the others what he is going to do to you.”
I had forgotten
about Sunday’s argument, but I guess I must have been as eager as he was for a
showdown, because I quickly pushed my way through his supporters and faced him.
One of his chums placed a chip on his shoulder for me to knock off. As I
reached forward to tap it off his shoulder, he slugged me, blackening my right
eye and knocking me to the ground—I never let that trick fool me again. He had
hit me really hard. I actually remember seeing colored stars floating above my
head, and before I could get up, with
his crowd cheering him to finish me off, he kicked me hard in the side.
Those were the
only two licks he got in on me. I was on my feet in a moment and gave him a
one-two to the face, blackening his eye and splitting his lower lip. I really
slowed him up with those two punches, and seeing that he was dazed, I hit him
again, really hard—I broke the knuckles on my right hand—and flattened his nose
right over his face. He looked like hell. Then feinting with a right, I nailed
him on the point of his jaw and he went down and lay there. I stood there
looking at, rubbing my knuckles, and waiting for him to get up. I could tell he
was conscious, but he just lay there. After waiting awhile for him to get up,
it might have been 10 seconds, it might have been two minutes, I don’t know. I
walked away.
That fight gave me
a lot of prestige around both schools afterwards. It was also a big moment of
self-discovery for me— I found out that
I enjoyed fighting. I was good at it and I loved the excitement. In my future
life in the Mounted Police and the army—a life filled with fights that ranged
from the bar-rooms of the mining towns I policed to the pubs of Britain that I
patrolled as a Provost Sergeant, I figure fought over 200 fisted encounters
with some of the roughest and toughest, I came across in the Canadian army and
elsewhere, and I never emerged anything but the victor. It was part of my job
and I really enjoyed every minute of it.
The skinned cat
Our principal, Mr.
Warren, who had been a Captain in the 1st World War was a handsome man, well
liked by his students and faculty staff. One Friday morning he asked all the
boys in our class if they would attend
a science period on Saturday morning that was to be held in the school’s
basement dissecting a cat. During that class, we would be dissecting a cat. At
his request, a friend of mine and I snagged a large bronze Tom-cat that was
sitting on a nearby fence and carried him to school in a burlap sack.
The purpose of the
dissection was to examine its internal organs and become familiar with their
functions. The principal chloroformed the cat till it stopped breathing—it
looked deader than a door nail. Then with a sharp skinning knife, he proceeded
to remove cat’s bronze pelt. We were all standing around a long table in the
school basement watching the animal’s pelt being removed from where the cuts in
the hide were made along the rear inside legs and around its tail. Some of us
assisted the principal in rolling forward the pelt over the tomcat’s body until
every thing was skinned except its head and ears. At that point, the principal
started the autopsy. His surgical knife had just made a slight penetration into
the cat’s stomach when, with a horrible screaming meow, the big tomcat came to
life, jumped off the table, and climbed up to the basement ceiling to the astonishment
and—to be honest—the amusement of us all.
It then began to
race around the room screeching and bashing its body into chairs legs and human
legs. All of us tried to catch it, but no one could. I don’t think anyone
really wanted to touch it. Finally, one of the kids smashed it with a chair as
it was frantically trying to crawl up the basement wall. The owners never found
out what happened to their missing cat, and there were no repercussions from
the incident. I often thought, afterwards, that it must have weighed heavily on
our principal’s mind.
Working for Roy Ramey
This incident
happened around the time of our Christmas holidays, while I was in the eighth
grade. It was the first time I decided I would try to get a job and earn some
money, so I made the rounds of various grocery stores looking for a job. I was
twelve years old then—when I met Mr. Roy Ramey who operated several
merchandising stores throughout the province and in our city.
The first day I
walked into his grocery store on St. George Street in Moncton and applied for a
job, I was directed by a clerk behind one of the counters, to a tall,
dark-complexioned, good-looking man in his early 30’s, who was seriously
engaged in conversation with a very handsome woman of similar complexion. They
were standing some distance to the front of the service counters. They looked
like customers who were shopping, because they both were fully dressed for the
winter. I was later told that Mr. Ramey’s companion was his sister Bessie from
Fredericton. Roy and his sister were Armenians, and their whole family—several brothers and sisters who had their
homes in Fredericton—were all professional and business people.
I approached Mr. Ramey, still in short pants,
and said “Sir, would you give me a job in your store for the Christmas
holidays?” He looked me over for a
minute or so and, while he was doing this, his sister Bessie said “Roy, give
him a job. He has an ullet eye.” I was
to learn later that this means “full of life” in Armenian. Without any formalities,
Mr. Ramey said to me “What’s your first name?”
“Jimmy”, I replied. He left his sister standing there and turned on his
heel, saying “Follow me.”
I followed him to
the large warehouse adjoining the rear of the store. Where—pointing his finger
to a large puncheon barrel of molasses surrounded by dozens of gallon crock
jugs—he tersely said, “Fill these. Your pay is a dollar a day. Your hours are 8
AM to 6 PM, every day except Sunday.” I
finished filling about a dozen of the crock jugs with molasses from the huge
barrel, when one of the store-clerks opened the warehouse door and said,
“Jimmy, come with me. There’s another more urgent job that Mr. Ramey wants you to do.”
The other job was unpacking a number of cases containing fruit and
placing them on display on the shelves in the store. About an hour later, I finished and was told to return to the
warehouse and finish my original job. When I opened the warehouse door: there
was molasses almost a quarter of an inch in depth all over the cement floor of
the warehouse. I had forgotten to turn the puncheon tap off.
I thought: “Well,
that’s it, I’ll get fired for my carelessness.” But then I had a second thought: “I’ll go directly to Mr. Ramey
and tell him.” He was still in the main
lobby of the store talking to his sister. I walked right up to him and looked
him right in the eye and said “You will probably fire me for this, so you
better come to the warehouse and see what happened.” I turned about, followed by both him and his sister Bessie. He
looked the grim molasses situation over, and then, turning to me, said in a not
exactly pleasant voice, “Do something about it.” He showed me where the pails, mops, and water were, and about 4
hours later, just before closing time, I finished. The warehouse floor
certainly looked as if it had had a face lift. It was spotlessly clean, with no
evidence of molasses to be seen anywhere. For a boy of my age, 12 that
year, I did a good job of cleaning up
that molasses, and I had a feeling that
I might not get the ax after all.
After I had
carefully washed my hands, face, and bare feet—I had sense enough to remove my
shoes and stockings before starting that colossal job—I put my stockings and
shoes back on, and straightened out my hair. When I finished, I looked clean as
ever, but felt pretty tired. I thought, “I’ll go and tell Mr. Ramey I finished
the job.” I saw him sitting in his
upstairs office, overlooking the main lobby of his grocery store below. Without
any preliminaries, I walked up the steps two at a time and straight into his
office saying: “Mr. Ramey, it’s just about closing time, so before you pay me
the dollar I earned today—if I did earn it, after spilling all that molasses—I
want the satisfaction of showing you what a good job I did cleaning the warehouse.
Will you please come down and take a look.”
I turned about and
returned to the rear of the store. A couple of minutes later, Mr. Ramey came in
and after looking at the warehouse floor, turned to me and handed me a pay
envelope with a dollar in it, saying “Don’t be in such a hurry to get things
done. Think about what you are doing and you won’t have anything like this
happen again. Also, be back here at 8 a.m. Monday.” I thanked him and, when I got home, I told the whole story at supper to my Mother and Dad and Frank.
They didn’t think I had made a very good impression on my first day at work,
but Mr. Ramey told me sometime afterwards: I had appeared so eager and worked
so hard at other things, he had decided to keep me in his employ. From then on,
I worked every Saturday at Roy Ramey’s Grocery Store for the next two years.
At the age of
14, I both entered junior high school
and for the first time in my life wore long trousers. In fact, it was a very
expensive dark brown silky suit, which my friend Roy decided to make me a gift
of. It fit like a glove, and I was very proud of my natty appearance;
especially when I wore that suit with the patent leather shoes that Roy had
also given me. In my 15th year, Roy invited me to spend my two months of summer
holidays with him in Fredericton, up on the St. John River. Fredericton was the
capital of New Brunswick, and although a great many of Roy Ramey’s family and
relations were in business there, his own home was in Marysville, just across
the St. John’s River Bridge from Fredericton.
Roy was a
bachelor, and when he was away from his business, and at home in Marysville, he
would be busy early and late at his very profitable place of business in
Fredericton. Roy always kept me well supplied with money while I was visiting
him, and I always had a pretty good time courting the young Fredericton girls
with my new friend Tapley, whom I called “Tap.” We always had the use of either Roy’s car or one belonging to one
of his relatives. Living with Roy was like being rich: I had everything a
fellow my age could possibly want.
On my holidays, he
seldom asked me do anything for him at the store. I would ask him some
mornings, when I would visit him at the store, if I could do anything for him.
He would usually answer “How’s your money holding out? Here take this.” And he would hand me some bills to spend anyway I wanted. One
day, he sent me over to the ice-cream plant just across the street from his
confectionery, ice-cream parlour, and grocery store. The brother of the ice-cream
plant manager was visiting him from the States. He was a fight promoter in New
York.
When I arrived at
the office to place an order for several gallons of ice-cream for Roy, the
plant Manager was there and said “Roy Ramey tells me you are quite a
boxer!” Right then and there, he
squared off and said “Come on. Show me what you can do!” On making this remark, he slapped me hard
in the face with his open hand. I immediately went for him, big as he was, and
exchanged several blows with him, making his nose bleed. He lost his temper and
hit me a crushing wallop on the left side which knocked me down and cracked
four of my ribs. Realizing what he had done, he immediately drove me in his car
to the Doctor’s, and arranged to have my chest and upper stomach bandaged very
tightly.
After the doctor
was finished, he drove me back to Roy ’s store. On the way back, he kept
telling me that if he could get my parent’s permission, he would take me to New
York with him, where, under his supervision, I could become the lightweight
champion of the world. He was serious about this proposition—and I would have
loved to have gone—but my parents, who Roy telephoned, came up a few days later
and wouldn’t even consider entertaining the idea of me becoming a professional boxer.
Roy certainly gave
the plant manager’s brother a bad time over that incident, after he returned
from the Doctor’s with me. Roy threatened to lay an assault charge against him
for causing actual bodily harm, but I managed to talk him out of it. However,
Roy made me go and see the doctor every day, and the promoter gladly paid all
the doctor’s bills.
Pit-lamping Deer
Just before my
two-month holiday was over—about a week before I had to return home and go back
to school— the deer season had opened and Roy said that if I wanted to go
hunting, he would hire a guide. So, the next day, we drove out to the farm to
where the guide lived. Roy introduced me to him—if I remember correctly, his name was Johnny—and then headed
immediately back to Fredericton, leaving me there to stay.
Over the next few
days, Johnny and I went out hunting each morning, but we didn’t have much luck.
So one night, after we returned to his farm without managing to even get close
enough for a shot at a deer we had seen that day, Johnny, sounding a bit
frustrated—he really wanted me to bag something—said to me: “After supper,
we’re gonna take my Ford touring car and pit-lamp a deer in that orchard down
the road a mile.”
Late, after supper
was finished, and the shadows of the fall night had closed in, Johnny got to
his feet, tapped the remaining tobacco from his pipe on the kitchen range, and
motioned me to get the two rifles and the ground sheet over in the corner. Then
he attached a skinning knife to his ammunition belt. He remarked that if we
shot a buck, he’d have to bleed him right there to keep the carcass fit for
eating. He also said that we would have to remove the scent bags from the
buck’s upper-front fetlocks. I asked what he meant by “scent bags.” Johnny informed me that during the rutting
season male deer excrete a fluid from the pouches underneath the skin of their
front forelegs and that this attracts the opposite sex.
Johnny casually
remarked that after I’d gone to bed last night, he had taken a block of salt
and placed it in an orchard about a mile down the road. There was a deserted
farm house on it, and it was common for deer to browse and eat the apples
during the early morning. He went on to say that if his guess was right, and
the deer did find the salt, some of them would be back that night. “I’ve
selected a nice grassy spot, just outside the orchard fence, where we can
spread ground sheets to lie on. The salt is about 50 feet inside the orchard
fence, and the apple trees there are wide enough apart for us to get a good
shot at a buck, if we see one.”
“How are we going
to see the deer in the dark?” I inquired. From under the table, he pulled out a
wicker basket. Inside it was a car battery with a fairly large night-light
attached to it. He said, “watch what happens.” Then he blew out the kitchen’s kerosene lamp and flicked the
light-switch on. He directed the beam of the pit-lamp into my eyes, and it just
about blinded me, it was so powerful.
I had never heard
of pit-lamping; nor did I know that if you were caught doing it, the minimum
fine was about five hundred dollars. There was a hefty fine because pit-lamping
wasn’t fool-proof—at night, a horse can look like moose—and farmers didn’t like
having their live-stock shot by late-night hunting parties.
The game warden lived
a mile further down the road from this apple orchard. In fact, the game
warden’s cow pasture ended at the orchard fence line, just across the road from
the deserted farm and orchard. I was to learn a couple of hours later on that
evening, that the warden had a thorough-bred Jersey bull among his pure bred
herd, and that this bull liked to roam at will.
In any event, I thought pit-lamping sounded
like a much saner and easier method to hunt deer than did tramping through the
countryside in the daylight; during the day, the deer were on the alert all the
time and would usually spot us before we spotted them, so the only deer we saw
were the ones whose rear ends were quickly disappearing into the surrounding
birch and spruce trees.
Later on, when we
arrived at the place where Johnny had put the salt-block, we left the Ford a
good hundred feet away, turned around, facing in the direction of Johnny’s
farm-house. We did this just in case we had to make a hasty get-away. Johnny
led me to a soft grassy spot just outside the zig-zag, broken-down cedar
orchard fence. We spread tarps on the grass, and he placed the basket with the
battery and pit-lamp between us. Then we lay on our bellies, with our rifles on
either side of our bodies, safeties off, ready for immediate use if we saw a
deer.
While we lay there
on our ground sheets, I noticed how starry the sky was, and how quiet the night
was. During the first half-hour, there was no evidence of deer about. At one
point, we heard a cow bell quite some distance to our rear in the game warden’s
pasture. Johnny casually commented: “No sign of any of the warden’s stock
wandering around or we would have heard them.”
Just as he
finished saying this, he caught the sound of something brushing against the
branches of the apple-trees. Hearing this he reached over and touched my hand,
whispering “I think I hear a deer heading to where I put the salt.” I listened intensely, but I couldn’t hear
anything. After a few minutes, Johnny leaned over and whispered, “Get ready to
shoot! I’ll snap the pit-lamp on, but
don’t fire immediately—I want to make sure it’s a buck.” He continued, “Right after I flash the light, I’ll turn it off, and then when I
snap it on again, aim just above its front shoulders and fire.” I squeezed his hand to let him know that I
understood what he wanted me to do. Then I braced the rifle against my shoulder
and rested its barrel on the first tier of the crumbling fence.
Suddenly, he
snapped the light on. A big buck deer with an enormous spread of antlers lifted
its head from the salt-block he’d been licking, and looked directly into the
powerful beam of the pit-lamp. His eyes shone like two buckets of red fire. At
that moment, Johnny snapped off the light. Touching my outstretched leg with
his hand—which was the “shoot” signal we had arranged between us—he snapped the
beam on the salt block again. Sighting down the rifle barrel, all I could see
were fawn-colored front-quarters. I pulled the trigger, and immediately saw the
animal crash to its knees. That rifle-shot sounded like a canon going off, and
its reverberations echoed up and down the valley. Then the light went out. In
the dark, I could hear the animal
thrashing around on the ground, but by the time we were on our feet, the only
sounds we could hear were those of antlers breaking tree branches; it sounded
like something was violently crashing through the dense brush.
We listened for quite a while as the crashing
sound receded; until we couldn’t hear anything at all, then, in the stillness
of the night, Johnny said “Let’s move fast. You got him all right, and he is a
real beauty. I‘ve never seen a buck deer with an antler spread like that.
” I was, to say the least, as anxious
as he was to claim the prize. I thought, as we were climbing over the rickety
fence, won’t I have a tale to tell when I get back—and I’ll have proof.
When we reached
the block of salt, Johnny pulled the flash light from his hip pocket and
turning it on said “Hold this while I bleed him.” But when he shone the light on what we thought was the big buck
deer, to our amazement we stared at a huge, dead jersey bull, with a big bloody
hole through its back where the dum-dum bullet had emerged near the base of its
shoulders. We took one look and both of us turned and ran as fast as we could,
Johnny scooping up the block of salt in his arms.
Once we got over
fence and made it to the spot where we had put the tarps, Johnny tossed the
salt-block in the wicker basket and said, “Grab the rifles and tarps. Let’s get
the hell out of here!” When we started
the car, Johnny didn’t turn the lights. This was fortunate, because, just as we
were about to leave, we saw the lights of another vehicle approaching in the
distance . Seeing that, Johnny quickly drove along the winding road as fast as
he. We couldn’t see anything, but he seemed to be able to sense where the turns
were. I was too excited to be scared.
Finally, we
reached his farm, and he drove the car over to a hay field and hid it and our
equipment behind a hay stack. My friend said that the game warden is going to
suspect that it was him, right away. And if the warden came up to the house, he
might smell the fumes from the rifle barrel. Anyway, it was better not to have
any dum-dums around. That would be a dead give away.
I agreed that we should take all precautions
and appear as innocent as possible, and that if the warden came, we should tell
him that we had spent the whole evening at the farm house. So when we got to
the house, we took our things off and went to bed without putting the lamp on.
The next
morning—no sign of the warden as yet—we got up and quickly went to the car to
get the dum-dum bullets. Johnny disappeared with them and came back ten minutes
later, saying that he had buried them by a creek. Then we both headed back to Fredericton,
and, later that day, I took the train
home. Two weeks later, Johnny mailed me a copy of the Fredericton Chronicle,
therein was a $500 reward for any information leading to the conviction of
those who had that shot that bull.
I decide to quit school
My brother
Frank—who I must say was far more stable than I could ever be—graduated from
senior high school in his sixteenth year and entered the employ of the T. Eaton
Company in Moncton. Soon after he commenced working for Eaton’s, he naturally
had more spending money than I had. I often managed to borrow a couple of
dollars from him, but I never paid him back. In fact, he bought himself a real
nice wardrobe of classy shirts and suits. Quite frequently, after he had gone
out for the evening, and if I had a date myself, I had no compunction about
borrowing his nicest suit from his bedroom clothes closet and going out and
showing off how prosperous I was in such expensive apparel. It was a matter of
six months or so before Frank got wise and bought a lock for his closet; this
ended for all time, my ever using his personal clothes, which he always kept so
nice and clean.
After Frank had
bawled me out for converting his expensive apparel to my own highly
questionable night life, I made a decision. I wouldn’t bother finishing school,
I would get a better job than he had right now, and be as financially
independent as he seemed to be. I thought the best way to handle this was to do
it all first and then tell my Father and Mother about it afterwards; thereby,
avoiding any of their arguments in rebuttal about quitting school before
finishing high school. Yes, I would immediately institute the necessary steps
to secure a permanent position myself, and when I had been successful, I would
casually break the shocking news to them that I had decided to work for a
living, instead of sitting bored in one classroom or another.
My mind laboured
on these thoughts for the next few days. I considered various types of
employment where I might be acceptable, because I wouldn’t be sixteen years of
age until March 25th of the following spring [1924]. I was mature in physical
size for my age; around 5’ 10” in height and I weighed around 150 pounds. In
addition, I portrayed a very clean-cut
appearance as a virile young man, who was as sharp as a steel trap. I always
was articulate enou
