Society, a social club based at St. Andrew’s, offering wholesome fun for men and women eighteen and over. For a $2 annual membership, they could join outings, spaghetti suppers, and twenty-five-cent dances such as masquerade balls. Ray and Veronica and friends from the club often went on hikes to Mount McKay and spent Sundays where so many other Port Arthurites did — picnicking at Boulevard Lake, the recreation area created within walking distance from downtown by the damming of the Current River. When a car was available, they also motored down the east highway to MacKenzie River to fish a foamflecked trout pool below rapids created by the river’s fall toward the Big Lake. They double dated, often with Ray’s brother Bob and Veronica’s childhood friend Doris Shaw.
Veronica and Ray did much of their dating in the outdoors. They took fishing trips to MacKenzie Falls just east of Port Arthur, plus hikes to Mount McKay, overlooking Fort William. Here they are pictured at Kakabeka Falls, a popular Sunday drive destination from Port Arthur, now called Thunder Bay.
While life was quiet at the LaFrances, it was bedlam at the Polings. With eight kids ranging from a preschooler to grown men, every room at 331 Van Norman Street bulged with constant action. Eva was always in the kitchen, which was impossibly small for feeding such a large family had it not been for the huge summer kitchen off the back. There, kitchen supplies could be stored among the gun racks, fishing rods, and camping gear. When the action went beyond control, little Robert Lee waded in and restored order. One day, he was repairing the kitchen ceiling when Bob and Ray began to fight. Both were big boys, each over six feet tall and lean and stringy. Robert Lee was standing on a cupboard counter when the battle began. He leapt from his perch, landing with a hand on the back of each combatant’s neck. He banged their heads together and knocked them both cold onto the kitchen floor.
Neither Bob nor Ray was one to fight, but most brothers do have occasional differences. Both were quiet to the point of being shy, the tall quiet types for whom minding your business was a virtue. Both were open books. What you saw was exactly what was there. Ray was one of those rare individuals whose smile would broadcast ten thousand watts of trust and confidence. He was what was known back then as a genuinely true guy. He had that lanky Jimmy Stewart look with the dark wavy hair that was a Poling trademark. He dressed immaculately and to see him walking downtown in a three-piece suit and polished white bucks you would never imagine he could break trail with the best of bushmen.
He and Veronica made an attractive couple, though mismatched in size. Veronica was petite with a distinct French-Canadian beauty. Her facial features were delicate except for prominent cheekbones that rode high below brown eyes often filled with amusement or mischief. Dark hair swept back behind her ears accented the playful look. Her mother had written in her baby book that Veronica was a happy child. She carried that happiness into adulthood. If there was a party, you knew she was in the centre of it. Everything in her disposition gave the appearance of a woman who was an open book, but she wasn’t. At times she exhibited a quietness that gave her an aura of mystery.
There was no question about love at first sight. In 1938, not more than a year after Ray moved to Port Arthur, they were engaged. On November 30, 1940, a bitterly cold day even by northern Ontario standards, the LaFrances and Aquins from Chapleau and Sudbury and North Bay gathered with the Polings and Desilets from Port Arthur and Minnesota under the high arches of St. Andrew’s as Isidore made the long walk down the aisle with Veronica on his arm. Waiting in front of the gilded white Gothic altar among the groom and groomsmen and dressed in celebratory robes was a familiar figure. Father Romeo Gasçon of Sacred Heart Church in Chapleau opened his book and began the wedding service. Father Gasçon still had a habit of showing up at important times, so no one would have been shocked to see him there as the presiding priest. The shock arrived decades later when I sat in St. Andrew’s storage vault with the musty 1940 marriage register cracked open and saw what Father Gasçon had added to the record that day.
The marriage had a rough financial start. Ray found full-time work at the Provincial Paper mill and it looked like he would follow his dad in the papermaking trade. A runaway lift truck ended that plan. It pinned Ray against a wall, mangling his left arm. The doctors put it back together the best they could but said the nerves were dead forever and suggested amputation because that would allow him to apply for a disability pension. He refused to give up the arm for a pension and began working with it, exercising and lifting weights. It recovered. He always carried a rubber ball in his left hand, which he squeezed to build strength in his fingers. Later he got seriously into fly-fishing, using the rod left-handed to work the injured arm.
It is not known if Ray Poling knew Veronica’s secret when they married on November 30, 1940. Ray’s eldest brother Bob said no one in the family knew, and his brother never mentioned it to him. The priest who married them did know because he had an important role in the secret.
There was little money coming in while he struggled to gain full use of the arm. Both the Polings and the LaFrances helped out, and many of the groceries were put on credit at Wilmott and Siddall, the neighbourhood grocery store across the street from Port Arthur Tech. Never once did Ron Wilmott or anyone else at the store push for payment. For years after, the Poling families refused to consider buying groceries anywhere else. Eaton’s downtown location had a grocery section and prices were cheaper, but Ray ordered that all groceries be bought from Wilmott no matter how much the bigger stores cut prices.
Ray got work as a pitman doing minor maintenance for the city transit system. He worked on the street railway cars, then the electric buses. He later got a job selling life insurance, which suited him perfectly. He was personable, an impeccable dresser, and had an interest in people, and did well at it.
The early years of marriage also brought another misfortune. A boy, named Richard, died at birth, and there was some concern that other children would not be possible. A couple years later, in February 1943, Ray, still an American citizen, walked beaming into St. Joseph’s Hospital and planted a Stars and Stripes at the bedside where Veronica was showing off their first child — me. The flag fulfilled his belief that a child born under the U.S. flag could claim American citizenship. That was nice, but he forgot to register me the with the U.S. government, an omission that no doubt saved me from having to dress in combat gear and wade through the rice paddies of Vietnam some twenty years later.
Isidore and Louise LaFrance, originally denied children by fate, gave thanks for a grandchild who was joined by Barbara Ann in 1947 and Mary Jane in 1953.
4 — McVICAR CREEK
Water was life in Port Arthur. It floated the long ships that carried off western grain; it made the shipyards ring with activity and supplied liquid for the chemistry that turned logs to pulp and then paper at the mills crouched along the waterfront in spaces where the grain elevators did not sit. It nourished life with the jobs it provided and soothed the spirit with its beauty. Every path led to water. Every piece of water led to a larger piece of water that eventually found its way to the biggest piece of freshwater of them all, Lake Superior, the Big Lake. The Current and Mclntyre Rivers, McVicar Creek. In the lowlands of Port Arthur’s flat-chested and homely twin, Fort William, the Neebing River and the Kaministiquia, which divided into the McKellar and Mission Rivers, all paid homage by ending their journey at the Big Lake.
Water was central in many local legends. The Three Sisters, or Welcome Islands, off the Port Arthur waterfront, are said to be three Ojibwe sisters turned to stone and cast into the water after they killed their younger sister out of jealousy.
West of the Big Lake at Kakabeka Falls, some say that on certain days you can see the figure of Green Mantle, an Ojibwe maiden, in the mists of the falls of the Kaministiquia. Legend tells of the young maiden misleading a war party of Sioux enemies to their
