When they started as operators, Veronica and Audrey could walk to their jobs downtown. It was only a few blocks downhill through leafy streets where houses were not quite worthy of Better Homes and Gardens but certainly were neat and practical. Fewer people owned cars and walking to work could be a social occasion. It was almost impossible to walk down Arthur Street without meeting a friend or a relative. There was a malt shop just down from St. Andrew’s, and you could stop there for a soda or a milkshake and talk with others who strolled in coming or going from their business. Not only was there time to talk to people, stopping and chatting was expected.
If you tired walking up the Arthur Street slope, you could ride one of the streetcars that rattled and screeched along the iron rails imbedded in the Arthur Street pavement. You could hop on pretty much anywhere if you were swift and nimble enough to grab the handrail and swing onto the platform.
Audrey often invited her teenage girlfriends to her house on Van Norman Street. Mrs. Chester would play the piano and they all would sing along. Veronica was front and centre, singing and clowning and at the centre of attention. At one session, Veronica passed by the living room window and noticed a young man coming out of a house down the street. He was tall and skinny and wore a fedora cocked to one side of his head.
The girls began to take a special interest in 331 Van Norman Street, a two-and-a-half-storey brick house with a veranda off the second-storey main bedroom. The house was whistling distance from the religious property that held St. Andrew’s Church and School and St. Joseph’s Hospital. A young man came and went with another man roughly the same age. Sometimes a couple of girls close to their own age were seen coming and going from the house.
One day after watching the young man from behind the Chester’s curtains, Veronica announced to the group of giggling girls that that was the guy she was going to get. The girls believed her. They knew that when Veronica LaFrance made up her mind to get something, there was no questioning her.
3 — THE LOON PEOPLE
The polings arrived in Port Arthur in 1937 looking like the Joads on their move west from Oklahoma to California in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. The older boys were lean and wiry from the hungry days of the Depression just ended. They pushed up the front brims of their fedoras with their thumbs just like Henry Fonda in the movies. They arrived in a jalopy of the day, Eva Poling and all the kids and whatever they could carry jammed into the seats and the trunk. Bob, the eldest and Ray, two years younger, did the driving. Robert Sr. already had gone ahead to take up his job at the new paper mill built on the shoreline in Port Arthur’s extreme east end.
They had loaded up close to twenty years of living in Sault Ste. Marie at the east end of the lake and headed west through Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. There was no road between the Soo and Port Arthur, just a lot of spectacular bush scenery along Superior’s north shore. Travelling west meant going through the States, the first leg being the short ferry ride across the St. Mary’s River dividing the Canadian Soo and the American Soo.
The border didn’t mean anything to them. They had come to the Soo originally from Minnesota where the three oldest children had been born. The trip was an opportunity to visit relatives, including the Desilets, Eva’s parents, in Superior, Wisconsin. They also would visit the Cloquet, Minnesota area where they had lived before the Great Fire of 1918.
Robert Sr. had worked in mills in Cloquet and International Falls before crossing the border to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, the site of a new paper mill. No one could ever recall how Robert got into paper mill work. It certainly wasn’t because of his size. Mill work involved much hard labour in the early days, from wrestling logs in the mill ponds or yards to stirring pulp and pushing about rolls of finished product. Robert was tiny, under five foot nine inches, and boasted he was 110 pounds soaking wet. His wife and friends called him Tom, a nickname someone gave him after observing that he looked like Tom Thumb.
Nor could anyone recall how he got to Minnesota. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia, where his maternal grandfather Hiram Walker kept slaves long after the Civil War and Emancipation. The story was that most of them preferred plantation life to going out on their own. His dad, Isaac Elmer Ellsworth Poling, was a carpetbagger who wooed Hiram’s southern belle daughter Mattie. The marriage went bad almost immediately because Isaac turned out to be a shifty gambler, but not before there was a pile of kids who were shuffled back regularly between Ohio, Isaac’s home, and Atlanta. Ernie, a couple years younger than Robert, often recalled standing with one of his brothers on a railway station platform with tags on their coats, so they would not be lost on a trip to their grandparents’ plantation.
Robert claimed that the unsettled family life left him out on his own at age ten. Who knows if that was a bit of an exaggeration, but we do know that he was out wandering when he was quite young, loading bricks for ten cents a day. As a young man, he found himself in the northern Minnesota woodlands, where the forests provided much work for those with a strong back and an appreciation of solitude.
Isaac’s life of drinking, gambling, and shattered family life was an aberration in the Poling clan. The Polings were known as religious people from Manhattan through to New Jersey, Virginia, West Virginia, and Ohio as they had expanded and spread out. Isaac’s father, George Washington Poling, was a Salvation Army preacher in Ohio and part of a family branch that produced seven consecutive generations of ministers.
The first Poling to reach America’s shores was Thomas who arrived on the ship Scorpion at Lynn, Massachusetts in 1642. He had sailed out of Gravesend, England, leaving his home in Sussex. One of his sons, John, became associated with Lady Deborah Moodie, an eccentric aristocrat who fled England to escape religious turmoil. She was an Anabaptist, someone who believed that baptism is for adult believers only, not infants.
Lady Moodie found the religious climate in America even more severe under the Pilgrim society. Her Anabaptist views were heretical, and she moved again, this time to New Amsterdam, now New York City. The Dutch, who controlled Manhattan and the surrounding area before losing it to England, granted her and twenty followers, including John Poling, religious freedom and some land on Long Island.
The Polings thrived in what later became Brooklyn and then branched out to New Jersey and beyond. John’s great-grandson Jonathon was a Methodist circuit rider known to have galloped the Appalachians with a Bible in one saddlebag and a revolver in the other. He became the patriarch of a family branch that produced a remarkable string of seven consecutive generations of Protestant ministers. Three of his grandsons were Daniel Shobe Poling, an Evangelical Association circuit rider; William, an English Methodist preacher in Pennsylvania and later Wisconsin; and George Washington Poling, who joined the Salvation Army when it came to North America. Daniel carried on the family tradition of producing preacher heirs: a son, Rev. Charles Cupp Poling; a grandson, Rev. Daniel A. Poling; and a great-grandson, Rev. Clark V. Poling, who ended the string when he died a hero in the Second World War.
George Washington Poling had no such luck in raising priestly boys. In Isaac, George produced a son who in one short lifetime used up all the good works and prayers of those many generations of preaching Polings. One of Isaac’s many sins was to name his son Robert Lee after the great Confederate general. This had George spouting some distinctly unreligious words, which is forgivable considering he had fought valiantly for the Blue — even against his half-brother Wilson — and had named Isaac’s brother, Ulysses Grant Poling.
Robert met Olivia Desilets in Minnesota. She was the daughter of a French-Canadian family who lived near Rat Portage outside Kenora, Ontario. Robert and Olivia, called Eva, courted, then married, and had the first of three of their eight children before moving to Canada when Robert got a job at the paper mill in Sault Ste. Marie, leaving America and the American Polings behind. It was just as well. Leaving one’s native land and extended family is a terrible wrench, but these were tough times to be a non-religious Poling.