Grandpa

"Good old grandsire ... we shall be joyful of thy company."

William Shakespeare

Jules Leonard. My father’s father. Jules emigrated from Belgium at a young age. Born in Brussels, he came to Canada in 1906 at the age of 3, and his family settled in Saskatchewan. You’ll have to forgive any errors I make, my father was not the most curious of creatures, certainly not in the case of his family’s history, so I’m threading together the few facts I know, just about all from my Grandmother when I’d grown older, and asked her about her past (Gramma, was always brief about such things; I wonder if she thought that the past not something to dwell on, the present and her family always her primary concern), a couple from my mother, from what little she knows and related me over the years.

Jules worked for the railroad when he was a young man, and at some given time within those younger years, he attended a cotillion. That’s a French country dance for we young’uns. And as fate would have it, he met a young lady there, a young woman named Blanche, and though he managed to dance a couple times with her, she insisted that she be escorted home by the gentleman she’d arrived with, and not by Jules. But persistence wins the prize. Jules set his eye on Blanche and began to court her, and a while later, the two settled in Timmins, Ontario, where Jules worked at the MacIntyre Mine, along with his brother-in-law Frank, and Blanche set about bringing 6 kids into the world: Lorraine, Laverne, Ronald, Jerome, Edgar (my father), and then, after a brief span of 9 years, Derek.

Jules worked underground for about 10 years (total guess), Frank in the bit shop. Both decided mining was a death sentence, as it was in those days, it was—most miners bled out into their lungs and drowned in their own blood by their early 40s from silicosis, black lung, as they liked to call it.

Frank bought a motel in North Bay, never had any kids, but embraced his sister-in-law Blanche’s, and her grandkids, as his own, as much as anyone could.

Jules struggled to make ends meet. Five kids (as there were then) were financial burden enough, but he also had to contend with Blanche wiring money back home to Saskatchewan, back to a brother who’d been caught red-handed embezzling from his company and had only been spared prison under the promise to pay back the amount in full, money he apparently did not have.

Jules eventually moved to Cochrane, and re-entered into service with CN, and pulled more than his share of overtime while with them. Blanche had taken ill upon the onset of her change of life, and had been so ill that she’d received the last rites in her 40s. Times were tough. The future dire.

Enter Mec Gauthier (Poppa). Poppa sold medicine to Jules at a hefty discount, and told Jules that he had to get out of the house they were living in. There was an open sewer running alongside their property, not a particularly healthy place to live. So, when my parents married, and moved to Toronto for a brief period, Jules bought their house on 16^th Avenue, the much beloved house I remember as theirs. Blanche remained in poor health, always had need of medication, even after Jules had retired. But she did improve. I remember her suffering headaches, Jules never too far from her side.