Eva Desilets and Robert Poling In their 1913 wedding photo. They married in the pulp and paper town of Cloquet, Minnesota, eventually moving on to the Ontario mill towns of Sault Ste. Marie and Port Arthur after the Great Fire of 1918 destroyed much of Cloquet.
Robert Lee wanted nothing to do with religion or Prohibition or people who called smoking a disease of the devil. John Barleycorn was a frequent and welcome guest in his house and later the houses of his sons and grandsons. Any preaching done under this branch of the family tree would be over a few cold beers or a couple of glasses of Seagram’s, or maybe both. His good wife later helped Robert find religion, but it was religion backed by a strong shot and a good smoke, and it took a back pew to his greatest love, the outdoors. Like his West Virginia ancestors, Robert Lee Poling was a man wild for the bush and he taught his kids the joys of packing canoes, landing trout, and knocking down autumn-fat deer with an old. 38-55, a rifle he said was so powerful it killed them, cleaned them, and packed them out of the bush.
Robert Lee Poling was born in Georgia but moved to Canada to work in paper mills in Sault Ste. Marie and Port Arthur. He was mill boss at Abitibi in Port Arthur when he retired in the 1950s.
In the Soo, he supplemented his mill income by operating a souvenir shop out of the Windsor Hotel and used it as a base for a guiding business. Americans flocked off the ferries near the hotel’s back entrance, and a lot of them were looking to experience the joys of the great pastimes of the day, fishing and hunting. Robert Poling guided them into the bush country north of the Soo and established himself as someone as at home on the northern lakes as a loon. The two older boys followed the old man much like two loon chicks paddling beside their mother.
When the family spilled into Port Arthur, Robert Poling already had arranged the house at 331 Van Norman Street. It was on the south side of the first Van Norman Street hill, and backed on the large houses on Arthur Street, later named Red River Road. From the backyard you could see between the Arthur Street houses to the Cenotaph in the park, below the grey stone façade of Port Arthur Collegiate Institute. At the tip of the park were Central School and the start of downtown.
The four bedrooms on the second storey of 331 Van Norman Street and the small apartment on the third made it a good fit for a large family. Especially a family with such a wide age spread. Bob was twenty-three, Ray twenty-one and the others — Eileen, Jack, Theresa, Zita, and Len — were all a couple of years or so apart. There also was a baby, Gerry.
The family settled quickly into the community, installing the younger kids at St. Andrew’s School and joining St. Andrew’s Parish. Bob and Ray found work, the former as a welder and latter as a chauffeur for the Greer family who owned the turreted mansion on Court Street overlooking McVicar Creek. They also got extra work fighting forest fires, a hazardous job that almost cost Ray his life. They were hiking out of one fire area, Ray bringing up the rear, when the crew stopped for a break. Someone noticed Ray was missing. They backtracked twenty minutes before finding him passed out in bush. He suffered an appendix attack and by the time they got him out of the bush and to a hospital, the appendix had ruptured.
Veronica passed the house at 331 Van Norman Street daily, no doubt craning her neck to catch a glimpse of the fellow she had seen from the Chester’s living room window. It was inevitable that they should meet and they did — down the hill at the St. Andrew’s youth group. The church hall had pool tables, a snack bar, and bowling alleys and was the meeting place for an active group of young people.
It didn’t take long for Veronica to fulfil her prophecy. She got the guy who she had seen coming out of the house at 331 Van Norman Street. They joined the Port Arthur Catholic Young People’s 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