anyway. Frances was thus faced with one of the first big decisions in her life. She couldn’t just throw the cat away; it would probably come back, and her parents would punish her for having deliberately engineered it. So, rather than call the affair a complete loss, she sold the cat to a passerby for a nickel. Hey, a nickel was a lot of money back then. She was now a young titan of the business world. But in those early days, Big Business didn’t play an enduring role in her life; within a day or two she would drag home another cat or dog, hoping against all odds to be able to keep this one. When she eventually took control of her own life she was never without a dog and at least one cat, an unbroken series of heartwarming companions down all the years. But in those early days, within her family, her love of animals was a lonely passion.
Her father was five-foot-six, a stocky and powerfully built man. His hair, which he retained until late in life, was blond; all his children were blond. In appearance, Frances took after him; there was never a question of whose child she was. He was a determined, no-nonsense individual, firm in his opinions. As the only male child he had been spoiled by three sisters and became, as a result, unwaveringly self-centred. He was always right, never wrong. He expressed himself bluntly, and did not seem concerned if he offended. Once, when introduced to Russell Gage, a new acquaintance remarked, in the way one parent will with another, “Ah, yes, you belong to Frances.” Russell Gage was not the man to let that pass. “No,” he said, “Frances belongs to me.”
When her father was angry he would go out to the barn and beat the horses. This was incomprehensible to Frances. “But,” she said, “when you’re angry you take it out on whatever you’ve got, and he took it out on us, as well, when he was frustrated.” This behaviour coloured her life. She could never forgive, or forget, such treatment of an animal.
Her brother Robert, though treated as severely as his three sisters, was nevertheless the first-born, The Male. “He was the second coming of Christ,” said Frances. “He had the Gage name,” she added with a cold smile. Tragically, Robert’s only son was killed in a car accident at the age of twenty-seven. “So the name is gone,” said Frances. Then her voice rose. “But I’ve still got it!”
Her paternal grandparents were farmers, and had attempted to raise her father to be a farmer, too. He had no education, other than the basic elementary grade school, but through his own diligence he had rejected farming and become a self-taught engineer. Today, the idea of a self-taught engineer is akin to being a self-taught brain surgeon, but in turn-of-the-century communities it was possible to be self-taught in areas that would be unthinkable now.
Shortly after Frances’s birth, he lost his business. He’d had an automobile franchise in partnership with another man. The partner withdrew, taking half the company’s funds, and the business collapsed. But Russell Gage was ambitious. He would never be without a job, even during the Depression, and after losing the car dealership, he joined the Ford Motor Company, starting right at the bottom. Later he moved to General Motors and rose to mid-management level as an engineer.
Frances’s mother was very Irish: rosy cheeks, bright blue eyes, curly hair. Her disposition was gentle, most of the time, but she could suddenly blow up. If you were smart you learned to recognize the signs. She was a fraction of an inch taller than her husband, and somewhat portly. Her nose had a distinct aquiline cast — the “Celtic beak,” as Frances called it. She was a good cook, a characteristic that Frances did not inherit. Her major failing was a lack of self-confidence, again not inherited by Frances, who, despite her many claims to the contrary, never lacked conviction. Her mother’s want of self-assurance was not helped by her husband’s often blunt assessments. Once, when she remarked, with reference to her cooking methods, that she made up a lot out of her own mind, her husband snorted derisively. “Can’t be much left, then, can there?” In assessing her mother, Frances said: “She was just an unhappy woman who spent all her time looking after four kids.”
Frances’s feelings for her father were reflected in her relations with her paternal grandmother. She did not get along well with Grandma Gage. Once when Frances was a child she had a penny — one of the big pennies that were current in the twenties. She was playing in front of a store, considering how she might invest the penny in some candy, when it accidentally fell from her pocket and a tough kid put his foot on it and wouldn’t give it back. She rushed to her Grandma and cried “Help! He won’t give me my penny!” Grandma Gage coldly turned her back. “You have to fight your own battles,” she said. Frances mourned the loss of her penny and also felt a burning resentment toward her grandma; she had reached out for help and been rejected. In the end, Frances accepted the fact. “She was right. I had to fight my own battles.”
Frances claimed that she ran away from home when she was eight or nine years old. It was actually a visit to nearby cousins but, for a little girl, running away is much more exciting than visiting. Anyone can visit; it takes guts to run away.
Frances had cousins who lived on a farm in Ancaster, Ontario, just west of Hamilton. In Frances’s eyes the farm was a paradise of horses, cows, ducks, and pets. She loved it. So one day she decided to visit them … and walked. Of course, it took her most of the day because she inevitably met a friendly dog, and studied the petals of a flower, and watched an ant as it hurried along a dirt path; so many important and interesting things. When she neared Ancaster, she spoke to people at various garages and on the street, or homeowners standing in their driveways, and asked where Charlie Gage lived. Ultimately she arrived at the Gage farm.
“Why, hello, Frances!” said Charlie. He looked around. “Where are your parents?”
“In Hamilton.” Frances was busy looking for the horses.
Charlie was puzzled. “How did you get here?”
“Walked.”
The Gages were horrified, and immediately telephoned the Hamilton Gages. Uh-oh, thought Frances, now I’m in for it. “But my father didn’t say a word. I was gone all day and they hadn’t even missed me. That’s how treasured I was. Walked all the way,” she added with a certain pride.
Uncle Charlie and his wife had two children whom they cherished, a closeness that did not go unremarked by the adventurer from Hamilton. This is a sappy kind of family, she thought. They hug each other. But this sappy family also had equally beloved animals, and this was something Frances could understand. “I remember when they buried their old horse. They got a big shovel pulled by another horse — a sort of horse-powered backhoe — and they ceremoniously buried the old horse behind the barn, because they loved him so much. They were my kind of people.”
Frances’s love of animals was firm, enthusiastic, and openly expressed. Beneath the surface, however, there simmered another drive, unrecognized, unformed, but present. And it was growing.
Rebecca Sisler, author of Passionate Spirits: A History of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, 1880–1980, says that artists spring from every background, and that virtually all exhibit an interest in art from their earliest years. They do not appear to make a conscious choice of art over another profession. They gravitate to art unconsciously, as they would to breathing.
Recognition first came to Frances Gage in the summer of 1932, at the age of eight. On that summer day, Frances was sitting on her front porch working on a mud sculpture. In her critical eye it had a certain merit. When Mr. O’Connor, a neighbour, passed by, his interest was caught by the work-in-progress.
“That sculpture,” he said — and the words may have changed the girl’s life — “is very good.”
Mr. O’Connor took the little sculpture to Sovereign Potteries in Hamilton, where they fired it. But there are times when nothing goes right, and this was one of those times. The clay Frances had used was dirty clay from the nearby creek and
