flowers. For longer outings, they would drive her to Boulevard Lake on the east side of town where people strolled the lakeside or sat and had picnics while looking out over the water.
Isidore walked down the hill from his house to the CNR roundhouse where his locomotives were kept. He could see the rising sun turn the skies above the Giant to the pink of the amethyst so abundant in the area’s rock. Then to a deeper pink purple and finally blood red as the sun lifted above the Giant’s feet. In the evenings, the setting sun sun made it iridescent, then sharpened its features until its cliffs and crevices became visible.
The joy the LaFrances felt at watching Veronica frolic at Hillcrest Park or beside Boulevard Lake evaporated unexpectedly one morning when she was four years old. Veronica’s get-up-and-go personality usually woke the household, but on this morning the house was quiet and there was no sound of activity in her room. Louise and Isidore found her in bed, unusually subdued and chilled and tired. When Louise helped her up, her legs didn’t want to hold her, and as the hours passed, they became more wooden. Within days her legs were paralysed. The doctor whispered the news: infantile paralysis — the dreaded poliovirus — crippler and sometimes killer of children and young adults.
The LaFrances were shattered. Their little family was a dream come true, a dream that had survived the greatest threat to human life of their time — the Spanish flu that in 1918-19 killed 50 million people worldwide. Isidore fell ill with that deadly scourge while on a road trip but recovered. His younger sister in Chapleau caught it and died. Now having narrowly escaped that outbreak, the LaFrances were visited by a new scourge that had appeared as a serious threat to children in 1916. Each summer after that brought new outbreaks that peaked in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Veronica lay in bed for more than two months, unable to move her legs. The only good news was that her breathing remained unaffected, and she was not trapped in one of the iron lungs that lined hospital wards, filling them with the eerie rhythm of velvet wheezing. The poliovirus attacks and destroys motor neurones, sometimes concentrating on the limbs, other times favouring the respiratory neurones. Veronica was fortunate; the virus hit only her legs.
The disease struck Veronica in 1921, the same year it caught Franklin D. Roosevelt, leaving him without the use of his legs. His case showed the world that the disease could strike anyone, and his struggle to regain the use of his legs set a courageous example for others. His legs never did return to normal, but Roosevelt pushed on and became U.S. president, leading the nation through some of its most difficult times.
Veronica recovered. Slowly her legs grew stronger. She began to walk again with the help of crutches and then a brace on her left leg. She learned to pitch the braced leg forward in an attempt to run with the other kids who lived in the Cornwall Avenue area. The leg brace and her drag-kick-and-hop walk were playground novelties when she entered St. Andrew’s Catholic schoolyard just days before her seventh birthday. Few kids had seen leg braces before, although they would appear more and more over the years.
St. Andrew’s was downtown, part of the Catholic institutional complex that covered most of the area bounded by Arthur, Court, Algoma, and Camelot streets. The school fronted Arthur Street, Port Arthur’s main drag at the time, along with the church hall, rectory, and church. Behind them facing Algoma Street were St. Joseph’s Hospital and the convent of the Sisters of St. Joseph. The extended block was a one-stop destination — schooling, health care, spiritual life, and social activities for the many Catholics who occupied the houses on the neighbourhood just above downtown.
The school was a two-storey, free-standing, red-brick block with a bell tower on the four-slope roof. It was a centre hall plan with front and rear double doorways where the kids lined up when one of the nuns in black-and-white habits appeared and clanged a heavy brass hand bell. The junior grades spilled into the lower classrooms while the older kids climbed the stairs. The classrooms occupied corners, each side of which had large rectangle windows through which outside light could spill.
The LaFrances moved to 28 Peter Street, which was only three long blocks up the hill from St. Andrew’s. It was walking distance for a kid with a leg brace and, although the LaFrances would change houses over the years, they stayed within the hillside neighbourhood bounded by Algoma, College, Arthur, and Dawson streets.
The disability did little to hold Veronica back. She was naturally gregarious, an expressive child. She wore her emotions on her face, with the expression of her big eyes, the shapes of her mouth, even the wrinkles of her nose transmitting her feelings. She loved to tell stories to the other kids and did so with the flourishes of a child actor. Other kids liked her because she was fun-loving and liked to laugh. Asked to describe her most memorable trait, most of her playmates would say her infectious laugh. Outgoing as she was, she liked to keep secrets. She teased friends about knowing something they didn’t know while they pestered her to tell them.
Other kids loved playing at the LaFrance houses — the McCuaig Block at College and Tupper streets, then 63 Peter Street, a couple doors north of Van Norman Street. As an only child, Veronica got the best of everything, including attention. Most of her friends were from large families and had to share everything with their siblings. Her best friend Doris Shaw often came to the house for sleepovers, and they would stay up late giggling and laughing and playing with Veronica’s little white Pomeranian.
After she recovered from polio, her childhood years took flight and soared to heights that every child should be so lucky to enjoy. Friends were numerous, money was not a problem even in the Depression years because locomotive engineers continued to work. Life at the LaFrance house was secure, warm, and comfortable.
Isidore made his regular runs east to Capreol and as far west as Edmonton, suffering the stress of delays, bad weather, and accidents. When he would return from a run depressed, Louise would know immediately what was wrong — his engine had hit a moose on the tracks. He always felt sorry for the animals, and he fretted that they would stand staring at his headlight while he wrangled to stop tons of locomotive pulling tons of cars.
Louise devoted her time to the church and politics. She became diocesan president of the Catholic Women’s League, an executive member of the women’s Liberal association, and an active member of the St. Joseph’s Hospital auxiliary. Church was a central part of her life, as it had been at Sacred Heart in Chapleau and briefly at St. George’s in Hanna. She could often be found changing altar cloths on the ornate altar at St. Andrew’s. Sometimes when an altar boy didn’t show for an early weekday Mass, she filled in even though it was not a woman’s place to be on the altar during Mass. Girls were not allowed to serve on the altar then, but either Louise LaFrance’s strong will or a progressive priest broke the rule on occasion. On Sundays, Veronica would stand beside her father in their favourite pew and stare up at her mother, framed by the impressive St. Andrew’s Church pipe organ, filling the small cathedral with the soaring notes of a soprano soloist.
Isidore’s rail pass allowed the family to travel to Sudbury and Chapleau to visit family. The LaFrances and the Aquins were large growing families in the 1920s and reunions were happy and hectic. Veronica grew to love visiting her cousins’ homes in Chapleau and Sudbury. Uncle Adelard, whose fur trading business flourished and expanded into actual manufacturing of fur garments, built a cottage on Lake Panache west of Sudbury, and it became the site of many family reunions. The Port Arthur LaFrances visited frequently and Veronica once confessed to a younger cousin that she loved the cottage during the day, but it frightened her at night.
Because she was an only child, Veronica loved these visits among her cousins. Her cousins also enjoyed her visits because she was lively and told outrageous stories and was quick to lead the others in singing. Her cousin Simone, Adélard’s youngest daughter, recalled watching her older cousin with wonderment, admiring how good looking she was. Decades later, she still remembers Veronica’s fine dark features and terrific smile.
Veronica’s lame leg strengthened,
