Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Life Before America 3

Chapter 2: Making a Home in Detroit 7

Chapter 3: Grade School Days 13

Chapter 4: Later Childhood 22

Chapter 5: Convent School in Quebec 30

Chapter 6: Family Matters 41

Chapter 7: Working in Detroit 46

Chapter 8: I’ve Been Working for the 52

Railroad

Chapter 9: Events After Marriage 56

You are now reading a slice of Kirouac family history. But it’s really only a thin slice. But it should whet our appetite for more, and I hope it does.

Throughout a good part of the mid-1990s, I used to ask my mother, Jeannine Gilberte Kirouac Pattison, if she would talk into her new cassette recorder and relate some family history. I suggested that she, as the youngest in her family, had the best chance to record some family reminisces. But, I cautioned, she could talk to her sister, Rolande Pickett, to get information that took place before my mother was alive. I even bought her a book about how to preserve family history on tape. She would usually beg off, saying that she didn’t know how to work the recording buttons. I’d try to show her, but it seemed the lessons never took. I tried cajoling, reproving; nothing seemed to work.

In late 1995, Jeannine got her grandson, Nicholas Pattison, to show her how to work the buttons on the tape deck. Even so, another year-plus passed before she sat down at the kitchen table for three mornings in January 1997 before she put her thoughts and memories on tape. She’d talk into the recorder for two 45-minute sides each morning before calling it quits for the day.

When we were cleaning out her apartment in Troy, Mich., in October 2002, my brother, Brian (Nick’s dad), found an old Jeepers sneakers shoebox of cassette tapes. Most of them were prerecorded, but there were three blank tapes, onto which Mom had taped some notepaper, each bearing a circled number: "1," "2," "3." I claimed the box of tapes as part of the stuff I’d deal with, since most of Mom’s stuff wouldn’t fit in her room at Brian’s house, where she’d be living. We had to throw a lot of stuff out. One of the things I tossed was that book I had given her about how to record family history.

Later that autumn, I put the first of the cassettes in; the first part was Mom showing Nick her relative mastery of the tape-recorder buttons, and asking Nick and his sisters Kellie and Rebecca to say something into the recorder for their Uncle Mark. Nick and Kellie complied, although it was a little forced. Rebecca, the youngest, either had nothing to say or knew better already than to try and say something. But then came Mom’s narration. This was the gold mine I thought we’d never tap!

This vein we struck is a narrow one. It’s only 270 minutes -- four-and-a-half hours. It’s Jeannine’s view of things, however rightly or wrongly anybody else may remember the same event. On the other hand, at the time she recorded her reminisces, there were six surviving Kirouac siblings. At the time they were discovered, that number had been reduced to three. To flesh out her memories, I interviewed her brother Gustave and her sister Rolande separately to see if their perspectives agreed or disagreed, or whether they could fill in any blanks. But, by and large, that’s all I interviewed them about. Their comments are interspersed throughout this book.

I told the leaders of the Kirouac Family Association about this discovery of my mother’s tapes. They thought it to be something just a little less than manna from heaven. The first excerpt from the tapes appeared in the Summer 2003 issue of Le Tresor des Kirouac, the association’s quarterly magazine. Further excerpts will appear in future issues, but they will focus generally on the Canadian portion of Mom’s tapes, which is less than 25 percent of this book.

I had thought putting together a book on the Detroit Tigers was hard, but it’s much more difficult to honor your mother’s memories and integrity when you take on a responsibility like this. That means I had to make some choices as I assembled this book. As you read, you’ll note a very, very light editing touch. I left in all of her straining for the word, the grammatical inconsistencies and the like. After all, this is how she talked, and you’ve gotta give her credit for talking into a box for 90 minutes at a time without anyone asking her questions.

In order to assemble some chronological and thematic continuity, I had to rearrange some portions of the text, so you’ll note the ellipses -- you know, all those dots in a row! My editor’s notes are just about anything you see in parentheses, and those were generally done to clarify something left unspoken. Gus and Rolande’s comments are likewise in parentheses. Otherwise, I just let Jeannine’s voice do the talking.

If you have any questions about the text, feel free to write me at 1221 Floral St. NW, Washington, DC 20012. You can also call me at 202-541-3263 days or 202-829-9289 evenings and weekends, or you can e-mail me at either mpattison@catholicnews.com or pattison_mark@hotmail.com. Or, if you’d like, I can even make you a copy of the tapes she made, so you can hear her voice for your own self.

As I said earlier, I hope this whets our appetite to do more to document Kirouac family history. There may be only three of Jeannine’s generation left, but there are 30-plus of our generation. I don’t know if we can become the best-documented branch of the Kirouac family, but in our age of convenient recording devices and ever-cheaper and more powerful computers, we’ve got a great chance to be if we set our minds to it, one at a time.

Mark Pattison

My mother was getting married, and Aunt Corinne was only 16. My mother was 18. And Aunt Corinne, my mother and her sister married brothers. My father’s name was Louis Philippe and she married Uncle Joe. His name was Joseph. I’m sure I have his name in the (family genealogy) book. And she wanted to get married and she wanted to get married. And her mother wouldn’t let her get married: She said, "She’s too young. She’s too young. Sixteen is too young." But my mother was getting married, and she was going to get married because she didn’t want my mother to beat her. I think she was always in competition with my mother and I don’t know why. My mother was very good in school, but she was going to school and I’m sure she wasn’t a dolt, you know what I mean. So my grandmother went and talked to the priest: "Well, you know," he says, "sometimes you’re better to let her, let her get married and get it over with," he said, because, you know, there were, I, suppose there were some forced marriages, out-of-wedlock births, so let’s face it. So my mother got married and Aunt Corinne got married, and of course, nine months to the day that my mother got married, Jolicoeur was born. I mean, she must have got married in the fertile time. You know, they didn’t -- I’ll discuss that a little later. (In a July 24, 2003, telephone conversation to fill in some of the more apparent gaps in these reminisces, Jeannine said that doctors never spoke about sex or sex education in those days. "It was all kind of taboo," she said.)

And, of course, Aunt Corinne got pregnant, too. I didn’t know. And she wouldn’t eat. And the only thing she’d eat was ice cream. They had ice cream in those years. I don’t know how they preserved it, and that’s all she ate. And then she had another child. She got pregnant again. She wouldn’t eat and it wasn’t that she was throwing up. I don’t know what it was. But anyway, after a number of children, she got TB, because there was this constant drain on her, her, her physical body. You know what I mean. So she had these children. Marielle was born, and Paul-Emile was born, Rodrig was born. She had another child, I heard his name, and when she went to the TB sanitarium, the older children went with some nuns. And they sort of tested them. And they put Christine in school, I think Paul-Emile went to school, and I think Rodrig went to school. But Marielle was very young. I’m talking grade school. And they decided that she wasn’t bright enough to be educated. And she worked in the kitchen. Now, she had a memory, I mean, she could remember everything. And I don’t know why, I mean, with that kind of memory, I don’t think she was untrainable, you know what I mean. And she was telling me this was when I was at school, and she said, "I used to look out the window when I was in the kitchen" and she’d be peeling potatoes or scrubbing pans. This was like an orphanage, but not necessarily orphans -- children whose parents couldn’t care for them and stuff like that. And she said, "I never got to play," she says. "I was always" -- seven days a week, she did not have any recreation. You talk about child abuse.

And anyway, I really felt sorry for her. Well, the baby, Aunt Corinne sent this baby some other place. She and her husband, by this time, were separated. She -- it was not, it was not a good marriage, and you know, I don’t know, I don’t know what it was, whether she was just impossible to live with or she wouldn’t cook, but I don’t know. But they were apart. And she was in the sanitarium. And this child was with someone. And Rolande said he was hurt over it. He was an infant. So they sent the baby over to my mother. And of course, she took the child and she, he was -- oh, there were a lot of people around there, Rolande, Carmen were there. They might still have been in school. But there’s always room for another baby when you have a large family. And she kept him. I don’t know -- he stayed there for a while and then maybe he got old enough to go some other place, you know what I mean?

And he eventually died. And she told me, she said, "Your family killed him." She was in the hospital. I’m there and I’m hearing all these terrible things she’s saying. So a few years ago, I asked Rolande, "I’ll tell you what she said." And she said that wasn’t true. The first house that he went to, something happened to him there. And he declined. And you have to understand: People weren’t going to the doctor’s (office) like that. By the time he left, maybe my mother had another baby, I don’t know, you know. But he went some other place, and he died in this other house, of whatever happened to him at the first house. But my aunt’s blaming my family for this. Well, I didn’t, I told Rolande, and I was just really annoyed with my aunt. And I’m still a little annoyed....

My mother and father were married in Warwick, Québec, and while they were in Warwick, Gus was the last child born in Warwick. So that means there was Jolicoeur, Phil, Rolande, Carmen, John and then Gus. And then they moved to a town called St-Hyacinth, It‘s spelled H-y-a-, I guess it’s spelled H-y-a-c-i-n-t-h-e. And then from there they moved to Sherbrooke. And then they moved to a town called Waterville.

And they had a bakery in Waterville and it was doing pretty well. They were renting the property. They didn’t buy this, but it was a bakery and they rented it, and (clears throat) pardon me, there was a fire. It was set by, I think, a disgruntled person. Maybe (they) wanted that kind of a business or something, I don’t know. But anyhow, they couldn’t prove it, but he was the -- it was one of these things that you know but you can’t prove. And there were quite a few children by then. I wasn’t born, but I don’t have the exact who-was-born-where. When I speak to Rolande I’ll try to get that for you. (The Kirouac family genealogy, as of July 2003, contains only the province of birth of Jeannine and her siblings.)

And all the children got out. My father took some. You know, they were in different bedrooms -- you know how this is -- and they got out. My mother grabbed something on the way out, and when she got out everybody was safe, and what she had grabbed was the dishpan. (suppresses laugh) I guess it was the only thing that was handy. And they were there all in their nightclothes, and it was cold, and you know, you’re in your nightgown -- pajamas I don’t think were too popular then, for perhaps men and women.

And the next day, people in the town, different families, all knew that they were -- I don’t know where they all went for shelter. I have to be honest with you. When I find out I will let you know. Everyone, since the children were in school and they knew the approximate ages -- ’cause people did deal with the bakery, they went there and bought bread and what have you -- and different families, would pick, they each one picked a child where they had a like child of about the same age and size, and they sent them all a complete outfit like of used clothing.

Now I’m not -- maybe someone might have had new stuff, I don’t know. But each child had a pair of shoes, a pair of socks, underwear, shirts and pants and coats, and what have you. But everyone got one set of clothing, which was really very, very generous. You know what I mean. Because times were very hard. I mean, you know, there weren’t a lot of rich people. There were a few rich people, but most people were middle class, or middle class-to-poor. (In a March 14, 2003, interview in his home in Brookville, Fla., Gus recalled that the bakery was rebuilt, but not the home attached to it: "They rebuilt just the bakery. The first one that burned, everything burns and the house and everything was attached, all in one thing, you know, after they burned, they just, they just rebuilt the bakery." Rolande Pickett added that they rented a house on the same street as the rebuilt bakery.)

And from there, this Waterville, they moved to Montreal. I know that I was born there, but I think I’m the only one. (In a March 22, 2003, interview, in her home in Howell, Mich., Rolande Pickett said Jeannine got her middle name of Gilberte, from her godmother, Gilberte Comeau; Gilberte’s husband, a deaf dentist, was the godfather. "You know they should have let her marry some guy that she want to marry," Rolande said. "The guy she married couldn’t hear," she added. "They came and they were godfather and godmother to Jeannine.") Anyhow, I think I told you this but I’ll just put it down. Three of my father’s brothers went to a place called Sorel, Connecticut, and they had found work. (There is no municipality in Connecticut named Sorel, but there is one in Quebec.) There wasn’t a lot of work, and Canada was a small country and Quebec was, you know -- there maybe wasn’t a lot of manufacturing and stuff like that. And they went there and they got jobs. So my father went because they told him to come, he would probably get a job. And the wages were higher than they were in Canada.

So he went there, but he had just missed the hiring surge, I guess, because he never found work. And he stayed there for three months. So he came back to Montreal and he got a job working in a tailor shop. He was pressing men’s suits, and of course in those days there really weren’t too many synthetic materials. Everything was wool, I think. Anyway, this is what he was doing. And there was -- it was like, like a trade in a sense, so he was doing that. That’s what he was doing at this time. My father never worked in the bakery. He did something else and I don’t know what. Again, if I find out I’ll let you know. (Rolande said he was a presser virtually all of his life before moving to the United States.) Because the flour bothered him. I don’t say that he had allergies, I don’t know. But maybe it was allergies in those years they didn’t really recognize that. So anyway, he found other work in this Waterville, but he couldn‘t bake the bread or anything like that because it was something that sort of really bothered him.

And when they moved to Montreal he got this job working at the tailor shop and he was pressing clothing. And he wanted -- after a while he wanted to move again. These moves that I’ve told you about, from Warwick to Ste-Hyacinth, to Sherbrooke, to Waterville, they were my father’s thing. I think he’d say, "If we moved to this place, there’ll be more advantages and stuff like that. I’ll make more money." And so he was always, I think -- I’ll say "restless" was the term, but I think he was always moved to become more prosperous.

And so my mother really thought that Montreal was good because it was a city and there are usually more opportunities in a larger locale. Let’s face it. There are restaurants, there are factories, there, like salesman’s jobs, I mean, anything. And I’m sure there were some factories, let’s put it that way. So anyway they got to Montreal and she was sort of -- she thought they could make it there because, with that many children that they had, there would be more opportunities for them.

Well, my father looked around and, I don’t know how long we stayed there, but anyhow, he wanted to move to Detroit. And my mother really didn’t want to move to Detroit. No one spoke English, although everyone was educated -- well, the ones -- everybody went to school, don’t misunderstand. There weren’t dropouts or anything like that, but a foreign language is a foreign language. So anyway, he said he really thought it was going to be a good place. So after all these moves, and from these, I think there were one, two, three, four, five moves in their marriage up to that point and this would be number six -- so she exacted a promise from him.

She said, "If we move there," she said, "this will be, promise me this will be our last move." Because she really wanted to sort of settle someplace. And he said, "Yes, this will be our last move." Well, Rolande told me that he -- ah, geez, what was I going to say now? -- he didn’t make that promise. He had gone to Sorel -- I had just found this out perhaps a year or so ago -- and he couldn’t find work.

So she (Rolande) said, "I’ll tell you something about your mother that you didn’t know," And I thought, "Geez, what’s she going to tell me?" She said, "Ma said to him, ‘Well, you went to Sorel the last time.’ She says, ‘This time you’re going to stay home,’" because my mother wasn’t working. He had a job, and she had a large family. "I will go to Detroit and find work and you will stay here," because he had the job, and he could pay the bills. And of course Jolicoeur and Phil went along. I think they almost went first, but I’m not sure.

So my mother went first. And I guess Jules was really a very appealing child. He was about 5. She took Jules with her because she couldn’t leave him behind. I guess maybe it was hard to go and leave all the children behind, so she took him, you know? And they went to Detroit and Dad worked and my grandmother, my mother’s mother -- when she got married her last name was Jolicoeur, but she married three times and one man’s name was Dubois -- (pronouncing) Doo-BOYS -- and the last one was Richard, who was -- like Rocket Richard? He was your Aunt Bernie’s grandfather, but I’ll get back to that later, I hope, if I don’t forget. (Rolande Pickett took note that Jolicoeur and Bernie had the same godmother.) So anyway, Dad’s mother was dead anyway, so she couldn’t come and help...

Well anyhow, my mother and brother and Jules left for Montreal, I must have been ill, or something was wrong with me. And I cried night and day. It certainly couldn’t have been colic. But anyhow, you know, I just cried and cried and cried, and the only person that could calm me down was Rolande. Rolande would hold me and then I would go and I would calm down, but I don’t know maybe whether it was sickness or -- they never took me to the doctor. And they, I mean, I really got on everybody’s nerves, let’s put it, let’s put it that way. They were gone for six months. And I just cried incessantly.

And so my grandmother figured, if I died, she said, "We’re not going to tell her mother, we’re just going to bury her," because it would have been hard for the fare and everything like that. But I didn’t die, and I survived. So I did make it. I made it to the United States. But that must have been very, very, very difficult for them to have a child crying incessantly....

The day that we all came over, you were on a waiting list when you wanted to come to the United States. When we got off the waiting list, when my mother went over to earn money for the fares, because there was a $10 apiece head tax, and there were 10 of us. Of course, Phil and Jolicoeur had already paid, but my dad and the rest -- there were eight of us left because my two brothers were dead already -- the salaries were small so they had a tax, and you had to pass a physical.

Now, I don’t know how well, how thorough this physical was, but my brother John wore glasses. Now, they weren’t like Coke-bottle glasses or anything like that, but he was wearing glasses. And they looked at him and they said, "Oh, we don’t know if we can let him in." See, he didn’t look like he was in perfect health because he wore glasses. And that meant that, well, my family wouldn’t stay because what were you going to do? John wouldn’t go back by himself. And I don’t know, my mother or somebody must have interceded. You know, they were like -- I don’t know if they were reading glasses; he wasn’t cross-eyed or anything like that. But anyhow, they really hemmed and they hawed and they decided the rest of them were OK, you know, so they passed John.

So then they came up to me, and I was 18 months old, so certainly my vocabulary wasn’t very extensive. But I must have been, like, tired. And I didn’t cry and I didn’t -- I was probably just looking around, taking this all in. But I didn’t make any noise. So then they decided that maybe this kid’s deaf and dumb. You know what I mean, because usually this didn’t take like 10 or 15 minutes for this physical. This was a long, slow process.

So the, I can’t think, the agent, the -- hah! I can’t think of the word now -- the guy that was letting us in in Customs -- well, it wasn’t Customs, it must have been another name. But anyway, he said, "Ask her something," because that way, if they ask me something. Somebody asked me in French what did I want. And I said "L’eau-l’eau." That was baby talk for "water." So then they knew that I could hear. Obviously, I could see, because I was looking around. And I spoke. So anyway I got a drink of water. I suppose there was a water fountain there....

And she (Grandma Kirouac’s mother) stayed and ran the household, taking care of the kids, cooking, cleaning, and Dad worked and Ma went to Detroit....

So the family came through and we just came through and we didn’t have any furniture (laughs). My mother had to sell everything ’cause to ship it would have been extravagant. So anyway, they bought some second-hand furniture -- you know, the beds, the mattresses, what have you -- and obviously a stove and a wash machine because with a family that size you certainly had. And we rented, I don’t know where the first place was, I was too young. But the first residence that I remember is when we moved on Sheridan. The address was 4403 Sheridan....

So when she (Grandma Kirouac) got there, she went out to look for work, and my mother could really sew very well. She could make things. She could do invisible darning. I guess they called it "French weaving" then. And so she didn’t speak English. But she went to a place. It was called Forest Cleaners. They were kind of an elite cleaners. I mean, you sent things there and they could do -- all cleaners then could tighten up buttons, replace buttons for free, there was no charge, but this was specialty work and this you had to pay for. In those years, men would smoke and they would burn cigarette holes in their suits, and you could get it repaired by someone who knew how to do it. But everyone didn’t have mastery of this particular technique.

So Ma went to Forest Cleaners. And I suppose she explained to him what she could do. She must have taken a sample of her work or something. And he hired her. The woman that had been doing this work had left for vacation the day before. She had a vacation. I don’t know if it was a paid vacation, this was a long time ago. And she was a black woman but she could do this weaving, too. So Ma got the job, and eventually Rolande at the time was, let me see, close to 18. She got Rolande a job there. I don’t know what Rolande did. I’ll have to find out. (In a March 2003 interview with Rolande Pickett, Rolande said, "I wrapped up all the hats, the sweaters, and then the gloves.")

And she got my father a job pressing men’s suits. She told him, you know, what my dad could do. So he came in. But the equipment, I’m sure the equipment they used in Montreal must have come from Britain. You know? Because he was used to this pressing machine. And when he got to Forest Cleaners, he couldn’t master this other thing. It must have been completely different. And so he didn’t stay there. He went and he got a job at Ford Motor Car Company. This was prior to the Depression. But Rolande stayed there. And again, I don’t know how long but I will certainly try to find out, and give it to you at a later date. (Rolande Pickett says she worked "quite a while" at Forest Cleaners.)

So anyhow, she worked there, and then the lady came back from her vacation and it was really sort of sad because my mother could do it better than she did, and there was -- it must also have been a small business, so there weren’t unions or anything. He told her that they had replaced her. So I’m sure she found work some other place, but she lost this job. And my mother worked there, I don’t know how long, because, again, Rolande never discussed that. I know I don’t remember, because I was only 18 months old when we did move there.

So it was, you know, a long time ago, but while I’m on the subject of the cleaners, your Aunt Leona, Uncle Phil’s wife, her father owned a laundry. And I guess he did other things, too, but it wasn’t a cleaners. And a man came in to his laundry, and he had a brand new long suit, and they were quite expensive. Somehow he had burned a whole bunch of little holes into this suit. Well, if you smoke, it didn’t catch on fire, but it burned a lot of holes into the material. Maybe over a period of time, but it wasn’t that old of a suit. So he went to Mr. Miller and he showed him this suit. Well, "Oh," he said, "I don’t do that, but I have an agreement with Forest Cleaners. Anything we can’t handle of this nature that they did." So he called Forest Cleaners and he explained the situation, and the man said, "Well," he said, "I have a lady here that does that" -- I guess it wasn’t long after my mother got there -- "but she just speaks French." And Mr. Miller said, "I don’t speak French."

He said, "Just a minute!" he says. "My wife understands French." I guess Aunt Leona’s mother was half-French or maybe she was all French, I don’t know what her maiden name was. (According to Janet Kirouac the maiden name of Leona Kirouac’s mother was Josephine Schneider; she was of Alsatian descent. She married a man named William Miller. Leona was the only girl of four children.) He got his wife on the phone, and she and Ma, my mother, got together and she told my mother what this man wanted done, and anyhow, my mother understood. So, yes -- she could say "yes," obviously -- so they sent the suit over and my mother repaired the suit and then, of course, they delivered it to the man and he was very pleased. Because you can’t go wrong with holes in your suit, they were probably in the front of the suit -- you don’t burn a hole in the seat of your pants, usually, ’cause you know it in a hurry ’cause you’re sitting on a fire. So anyway, the strange thing about this is that these were two future mother-in-laws, because your Aunt Leona, eventually, married Uncle Phil, and they had met over the telephone. And they didn’t find out right away. You know what I mean. That isn’t the thing you find out on your first date. But these two women spoke to each other on this particular day, and their children were destined to be married.

So anyhow, I suppose I’ve forgotten -- I should have made notes. So anyhow. Dad worked at Ford’s and he liked -- I don’t know what he, did but it had to be on the line. It was all -- they were making cars. And your Uncle Phil and Jolicoeur, the first day they came into Detroit, they went to a factory to find work. And I think I’ve told you this, but this is part of the history, and Phil stayed there. Jolicoeur worked a half a day and, forget that! It was noisy. I mean, there wasn’t anything about noise abatement, and he quit and he kinda thought, "What am I going to do?" You know. So he said, "I know," he said. "I’ll drive a cab." So he went to the cab company and said he was looking for work, and he’s new to the city, you know. And the guy said, "Yeah, I’ll give you a job."

I don’t know if there was a test or not, but I guess they weren’t as fussy -- he had a driver’s license, let’s face it. So I think -- maybe he didn’t, because I don’t know how fussy they were. So, he was telling me this, and I said, "Jolicoeur," I said, "how can you justify going to a cab company and getting a job when you didn’t know the city and really couldn’t speak the language?" I mean by this time you could always pick up a little bit, and he said, "I knew how to read and write," he said, "and before I went I bought a city directory," he said, "and I never took a fare to the wrong destination." But he said the sidebar, which was very good for him, he said, was, "I learned the whole layout of the city," because they didn’t have, like, routes then. You would get into this cab and I suppose they didn’t have stations then, I don’t know. So he did the west side, he did the east side, and "I knew where every street was," because he did this for a while and he liked, I guess, not being confined in this noisy, terrible place, and of course he learned how to speak the language, too, let’s face it. And he enjoyed it. I don’t know how long he worked there either, but perhaps I can find out someday. (Nobody still living can remember just how long her worked as a cabdriver. Jolicoeur’s son, Roger Kirouac, said that he also delivered gasoline and sold vegetables from a truck before settling into a career as a milkman.) But he really, he really enjoyed that.

And one thing. When my family came and they got settled, they had night courses for immigrants to learn to speak the English language. And everyone -- well, I didn’t of course, and Jules didn’t and Jack -- but all the older ones, they went to, it was a public high school and they learned the English language -- the pronunciation, the spelling. There was grammar, too. It wasn’t just, you know, that you learned to speak, but you learned to read and write it. And they all found work and I know some of them kept some of their accents and occasionally the grammar, I suppose maybe, isn’t as perfect as it should be as an American-born person would speak. But I think for the most part everyone mastered it pretty well. I can’t think of a problem, because I learned how to speak, you know, as soon as I came in.... (Rolande Pickett said she learned to speak English from Edna Gerske. Edna may have worked at the Forest Cleaners along with Rolande and her mother. And, thanks to Edna, Rolande exclaimed, "Jules learned how to speak Polish!")

When my dad was home, he used to sit on the front porch. My father smoked. And he used to roll his own cigarettes, too. So anyway, he used to give me a nickel and this was before I went to school. I could have been four-and-a-half, and I used to go to, it was, I don’t know if it was just a candy store, or if they sold groceries, but he would give me a nickel. And there weren’t bottle deposits then, maybe you took the bottle back the next day, I don’t know -- but I just don’t remember. We lived on Sheridan, and I think the next street was Baldwin, and then I crossed another street. Actually, there were cars, naturally, but they let me go. They always say look both ways before crossing the street. "Use your eyes, your ears and then your feet" -- that was the slogan when I went to school. But I wasn’t in school yet, because my dad left before I started school.

Anyhow, I was coming home from the store and I guess I didn’t look both ways and I got hit by a car. I got up and I ran all the way home, I was crying, naturally, I mean. They weren’t going 50 miles an hour, but they hit me with their fender. So I ran home and I was crying and my father was sitting on the porch, Of course, he didn’t know what was going on, so I told him what happened. And here comes this couple. And I just was really -- frightened and I was hurt, but nothing was broken. So anyhow, this couple came up and it was a couple, and they came up to my father and they said, well, they hit me and they wanted to know if I was OK. And I was just crying. And he was rubbing, it was my hip that was -- they hit me low on the hip, I guess, that’s what he was rubbing, my hip, you know. And through my dress. He didn’t undress me on the front porch. And he said no, no, that was all right, that they could leave. But imagine! It could have been hit and run. They real, well, legally, then, I don’t know if it was illegal to leave the scene of an accident. But they didn’t have to come but they did. They were a very nice couple, obviously. I never did know their names, anyhow, and I didn’t go back to the store for a while.

And another incident. It was after my dad was gone -- because I am hopping, as you know -- and they bought me a tricycle. I don’t know whether it was for my birthday. It wasn’t for Christmas, because I got it and it was warm. And it had a bell. They bought a bell you could put on it and it had a ring like an alarm thing, they’re pretty loud. There’s a picture of me. They took a snapshot of me and it’s in someone’s album someplace. So I’m riding this tricycle. So I went to bed that night and they wake me up and my mother says, "Where’s your bike?" And I said, I remember I would go through the back door, that’s the door we went through, and I parked the bike by the steps in the house. And that’s the last. I didn’t ride the bike anymore that day.

That was the first day I had the bike. And they really bawled me out that I had lost this, you know -- hadn’t taken care of my bike. I don’t know what they think I did with it. So the next morning, well, the next morning I came downstairs and I guess people were pretty upset with me, and it turned out that Jules -- someone had asked Jules to go to a jewelry store. Now, jewelry stores used to have watchmakers or watch repairmen and they repaired watches. And the only thing I can see is, I don’t know if he went for a member of the family or what, but he took the tricycle, it was too small for him, but you could put your right foot like on the -- or left foot, probably -- and you could bend over it and push yourself along a lot faster than walking. Like you’d use a scooter. But he used the bike. He went in the store to do whatever it is he had to do -- I don’t know what it was. He came out and the bike was gone. Well, hen he came home, he never mentioned it. Well, naturally, the next day -- but I had gotten bawled out, you know what I mean, which was sort of like tipple....

So we’re still on Sheridan. You remember Lindbergh flew over the Atlantic Ocean? Well, there was a lot of hullabaloo and hype and everything. And somebody bought a Lindbergh bank. It was his shoulders and his neck and his head, you know, and it was sort of bronze colored. He was wearing that hat that he wore. It was really a nice-looking bank. Someone had lost the key. And this was during the tough times. We were living on Sheridan, and when someone came over that had a job, he’d give -- generally it was the man that was working because the women stayed home, you know, for the most part. And when I got money I’d put it in this bank. They’d say "Put your money in here." Because I said I used to get a nickel from my dad, but I, I don’t know, I used to put money in this bank. How you got this money out of this bank, you’d put a knife in it and you’d slide the money out. It was a long, slow process. Anyhow, I’d put my money in this bank and I don’t know how much I had, because, believe me, I wasn’t keeping track.

I was sleeping one night and everybody was in the kitchen. This was on Sheridan, there was one bedroom on the first floor and Rolande and Carmen and I shared this bedroom, and all the boys slept upstairs and my mother slept upstairs. So anyway, I wake up and three of my brothers are there. I think it was Gus and John and Rene, and they were shaking money out of my bank. I don’t know -- maybe they didn’t dare go into the kitchen and my mother or nobody else probably never knew about it. So anyway, when I looked at them -- you know, it was metal on metal, this was a metal bank -- and they looked at me, they saw I was awake. They said, "Don’t worry. We’re going to pay you back. We’re going to pay you back." (laughs) Well, I never saw the money again, but anyhow, as I said, I don’t think I told my mother, either. But it’s just, you know, one of the things that happened to you, you know, things that happened to me as I was growing up and I laugh about them today but probably I knew they were never going to pay me back then, let’s put it that way.

(Jeannine was not the only victim of an "inside job," to hear Gus tell it: "I remember getting caught. Me and Johnny, on Saturday mornings, we used to crawl in, and Phil and George used to live, they used to stay in the same bed, you know? (chuckles) And Phil would -- he had his pants on the floor. We’d crawl in on Saturday morning. On Friday nights, they’d go out drinking, boy, and get drunk. Phil was drinking anyways. So we’d go out and steal some money. One Saturday morning we got caught. He was waitin’ for us. I don’t know if he grabbed me or Rene or Johnny. I don’t know which one he grabbed by the arm." Petty crime, it turns out, runs in the family. After Mickey overheard Gus talk about his coin-stealing exploits, he told his father, "I hate to admit it, but I used to do that to you.... I’d sneak into your bedroom on Saturday morning. But all really I could get was a nickel or dime out of your pocket." Gus laughed at this revelation and added, "We didn’t get much out of Phil ’cause in them days there was no money. What the hell. We were lucky to get nickels, dimes, that was pretty good.")

So anyhow, and another thing, when we moved on Sheridan, there was not a great big porch like we had on Kilbourne, but about half that size. And my mother liked a porch swing, and they were the kind of porch swings that was suspended on a chain. You’ve probably seen them, and they’re all wooden, and you could really swing back and forth. It held about three people. And we had this swing on Sheridan. We must have had it when we moved to Kerby; I don’t remember it. But when we moved on Crane, my mother had it up there for a while, and so they were well made and they just lasted a long, long time. But anyhow, these are odds and ends that I remember. And they had a -- let’s see if I, I had some things that I had, yeah....

My father’s going to Canada. I know my father was leaving. And he left. It wasn’t a cold day, I can’t remember because I know, and my brother was driving him to the Grand Trunk Western depot, OK? He was taking, probably, the Canadian National and they used to ferry the train cars, the cars across to Windsor. So they were going to leave, and my father -- my brother -- says, "You’ve got to come to the station and say goodbye to your father." And I said, "No! I’m not going! I’m not going. I’m NOT going to go." I knew that something bad was happening. But I didn’t want to go to the station. Well, my brother made me. He put me in the back seat and my father and Jolicoeur sat in the front seat, naturally. And so I bent down and squatted on the floor so I wouldn’t see where we were going. I remember that I just didn’t want to see any of this.

So then my father got on the train, I don’t know how long this took, and then you could go out on the dock where they loaded the trains onto this ferry, and we went out there and we stood until all those trains were loaded. Not trains, all these railroad cars were loaded. And it went across the river. And my brother waved, because we don’t know whether my dad -- maybe he told my dad to look out the window if he wasn’t on the inside. Obviously, all these cars couldn’t have an outside railing. And we didn’t leave the station until -- (weeps) oh, dear -- the boat pulled out. And we came back home.

And I know that my mother was very, very busy. You can imagine, with everyone home except Jolicoeur at the time, my father and her, and she was cooking (banging hand on table), she was cleaning, she used to scrub the kitchen floor twice a week. I mean, the house was very clean. And at night she would sit and darn socks. She was never without some kind of work. If she was not on her feet doing it, she was on her hands and knees doing it. And I don’t remember any of this; only since I moved her that Rolande told me. She said, "Oh, when Dad left," she said. "every day you’d get up and say, ‘Is he coming back today?’" And my mother would say, "No." And, and then, I just blocked this out of my mind, and then (weeps) I went on for months and months and months, she said.

This must have been very hard for my mother, OK? ’Cause you’re answering the same question. I just thought he was going to come back, because I remember this, as I said, my mother was baking. She would make donuts, she made bread and these great big meals, and the house was clean, and the laundry -- no dryer, everything had to be hung outside, spring, summer and fall. In winter it had to come in, you know? And I was going in the house -- I don’t know what I was going after -- and my mother was working and I thought, "My mother never talks to me." I said, "She’s always working."

And I was always with my dad, you know, because when my dad was laid off -- obviously not at the beginning, but eventually my dad couldn’t find work. He wasn’t the only one. ’Cause he did have this job at Ford’s, and what happened is, as I’ve said, there weren’t any unions then, and one of the bosses had a relative who needed a job, and my father lost his, and someone that he worked with told him many people were replaced like that, not just my dad. But I suppose in a sense when my father was home, I was not -- how can I say? -- I didn’t really pester my mother. You know how kids are, they ask a million questions.

And so she, you know, I must have been very attached to my dad, because my dad used to roll his own cigarettes. He smoked. And they sold a little thing and you could by the cigarette paper and the loose tobacco and it was cheaper. So I used to watch him make his cigarettes and say, "Let me make one, let me make one." And so, you know, he let me put the paper in and then you put the tobacco in and then you’d have to wet this piece of paper. It rolled the thing, and then you wet this sticky where the glue was seen, and you’d smoked these cigarettes, and it was a lot cheaper. I did the whole thing, and I imagine it must have been lumpy. I said, "Isn’t this a nice one? Isn’t this a nice one?" He said, "Yes, yes." I don’t know if he smoked it (laughs), but it was not -- I thought it was perfection. But it really wasn’t. (Gus also had his own tribulations rolling cigarettes for his father: "I used to help roll ’em. Oh yeah, yeah. Have the tobacco come out of each hand, yeah (chuckles) . He would smoke, he would have about half a cigarette to smoke." He improved over time though. "You got pretty good after practicing, and he’d smoke half, half, half they’d smoke ’em anyway, what the hell, you know. Tobacco come out of each end if you -- once you learned how, then the tobacco would set in, you know. You’d roll yourself a pretty good cigarette.")

So anyhow, another time, butcher shops used to have in those years -- do you remember those big pink banks that Denise had, that big pink thing? Someone gave it to her when she was born. Well, they were more refined that that, and they used to have two of these kind of pigs, but they had little legs and everything. And I said, "I want one of those pigs, Daddy, I want one of those pigs." So he went in, and as I said, he did speak broken English, and he wanted the butcher to sell him one of these pigs that he had in the store. They didn’t have meat in the window, obviously, but you know, and the butcher wouldn’t sell it to him, so I didn’t get the pig. But at least he tried to get it for me.

And one other thing before he left: I had to have two teeth extracted. They were baby teeth. They must have been the molars in back or something. And they gave me gas. And he stayed in the room with me. I guess they would let you do that ’cause I was pretty young. I don’t know how come those teeth were not so good, ’cause I’m 71 and I’ve still got the rest of them. For some reason, they went bad. And I woke up and I was bleeding from my mouth, and they were pressing this cloth on my face, you know, and then my dad took me home. So I must have had a toothache or something. I don’t know. But anyhow, that’s what happened.

I remember those things and I often thought, "How come I remember these things, these incidents," but I realize those are my last memories of him. There are a lot of other things that I’m sure I don’t remember -- don’t misunderstand -- that happened when I was 6 and 7 and 8 years old. But those are the last memories of my dad. And I know my father did not like cats, and my mother had cats ’cause they were always good for mice. And she liked cats anyway. So she said, pardon me, she said that I would pick up this cat that we had and go put it on his lap, and I would tell him, "Oh, this is such a nice cat." You know how kids go on and on and on and on. The boys would have never gotten away with putting a cat -- a child my age -- on his lap, because he did not like it. But he tolerated this cat because I loved this cat so much. We had a lot of cats, anyhow.

In order to go to St. Anthony’s, the school that I went to along with Jack and Jules and Rene, you have to cross Forest and Warren and Gratiot, and there was not a street light at the corner of Sheridan and Gratiot. And in the morning and in the afternoon when school was going in and when school was dismissed, they had a cop that stood -- you’ve probably seen this thing in cartoons: a cop standing in the middle of the street and he had a little thing. It was on a tall post with a handle so it would be above so the cars could see it, and when he’d turn it to "stop" and the cars would stop, and then he’d turn it to "go." There was no in-between, there was no yellow at the time. You know what I mean. This cop would come and work the mornings. I don’t know if it was the same one.

I know once I decided to go to vespers, I think it was. They used to have vespers. This was -- well, I left there in the fourth grade and I must have been a third grader and I decided to go to vespers one Sunday. I don’t know why. Maybe they told us that we should go. And I went. And I couldn’t get across Gratiot. There was so much traffic. And it took me about a half-hour to get across the street. The traffic was just flowing and flowing and flowing and flowing. And I finally got home. But no one was worried. I told them I couldn’t get across the street. I guess they thought vespers must have been long, because I went by myself. And that was a lot of streets to cross. Forest wasn’t bad. There used to be a streetcar on Forest. There was never any streetcars on Warren. And of course Gratiot had streetcars. I can remember I was really, oh, sort of -- that was a trauma for me not being able to cross that street. I didn’t think I’d ever get home, you know. So anyway, but I made it.

When we went to school, when I started school, my brother Jules was already in the fourth grade, and there was, like, Jules and Jack and Rene, and I couldn’t walk with them, They said I had to walk behind, and they told me they were blocking the wind for me. Because it was cold, and if I stayed behind them, they were like windbreakers. Well, I just think it was that they didn’t want me up there listening to their conversations. But anyhow, whatcha gonna do? You know. I stayed behind and I walked and I got to school, because it was tough crossin’ those streets!...

My first grade teacher, her name was Sister (T)ina Marie. And we never learned how to print. We went right to this cursive. We did not have printing first. We went right to cursive. We used to make those round circles between the two lines to improve your handwriting, make round letters. Well, I think printing would have helped me, ’cause it took me a long time to get better handwriting. It’s not great because some days I write and it doesn’t look so bad and other days it looks terrible. But anyway, I was always sort of tense and she had the ABCs, capital and small, no printed ABCs, they were all along a shelf, the alphabet around the room. They were cards and we were supposed to copy that writing. Well, I never successfully did that but that’s how I learned. There was no printing. Now I think the printing is better, and I think it’s probably easier for the kids.

And my second one, teacher, was (Sister Eva; she had corrected herself in a later portion of her tapes). The other one had a full habit, but they must have been short for some reason. She was like a postulant and she had a white headdress instead of the black headdress. These were nuns from the Congregation of Notre Dame, but their motherhouse was in Chicago. I mean, there’s like the Adrian Dominicans and the Racine Dominicans. And this was the order of nuns. And then, I can’t remember -- isn’t that strange? I can remember those two nuns but I can’t remember the third and fourth graders, the third and fourth grade nuns, ’cause I was there.

But when I made my first Holy Communion it was the height of the Depression. You know, maybe not the height but certainly during this terrible time that was going on. And they said that no one could wear a Communion veil. And the reason they did that is because everyone was very poor, and most people couldn’t afford a veil. But my mother made me a beautiful white crepe dress. And it was cold. I made it on May sixth or May third. I have the holy card someplace. (It hasn’t been found, but it hasn’t been looked for very thoroughly, either.) I think it was May third, The year is down there, too. I should remember the year. I must have made it when I was 7. Maybe it was ’32. So anyway, the dress was beautiful. She had sewn -- the whole top was one row of lace after the other. White lace all across the front and they had nice sleeves and white crepe and it was just beautiful.

First Communion morning she didn’t try it on me. She was a very good seamstress. She went to put it on, and she hadn’t made the neck opening large enough. And I’m standing on this stool, on a chair, and they’re trying to force this dress. But my head wasn’t big. It was just that the thing was too small. And she was trying to get it over my head without having to open a seam. It was impossible. So she had to open up the seam, and then open it up wide enough, and then she sewed it by hand. And I never wore the dress again. I don’t know why, I thought it was so pretty -- once the head opening was, you know -- but I never wore the dress again. Years later, when (Jeannine’s daughter) Denise made her First Communion, this lady across the street was her catechism teacher. I’ve forgotten her name (Her name was Mrs. Shea. She lived at 11781 Kilbourne, across the street and down the block a bit from the Pattison home.)....

(Denise attended) public school, and she couldn’t go to the (first Communion) classes. It would have been hard for her. So she (Mrs. Shea) came and taught her what she had to know. And she bought Denise a Communion dress, but she bought it for a girl that was about three inches taller than Denise. So my mother shortened it. And I know what kind of a veil I wanted. But Leona had Judy’s veil, and she brought it over. But I had wanted a different veil. It was a beautiful veil, but just not what I would have picked for Denise. So anyway, she used this veil, and we had her picture taken, and we -- but anyhow, it was a Sunday after she had made it, and I thought, "Well, I think I’ll let Denise wear her Communion dress." And my mother said, "No!" She said, "She shouldn’t wear that Communion dress." And I said, "Why?" She’s going to outgrow it. It was a pretty dress. And I have to admit that I have not seen -- I have seen some kids wear their Communion dresses after Holy Communion, but it seems to be a rarity, and I guess maybe you wore it once and then you never wore it again. I thought it was a bad investment, you know? So I should have let her wear it anyway, you know what I mean? But I didn’t, so I, I just -- that was my fault, really. I guess I learned if you feel something’s right -- I’m not talking about murder or mayhem -- but, you know, you should follow through on it. But I just didn’t do it.

So anyway, I skipped ahead, because the last time I was there, they were all in night school. But anyhow, they, Rene grew -- your Uncle Rene grew very fast, and let’s see. There’s probably some other -- oh, I can tell you. When we lived on -- I’ll go back to the Sheridan Street house. It was Christmas Day, and you’re always excited, but I woke up really early. So I went downstairs. All the adults were in bed. And I had gotten a little electric stove for Christmas. You plugged it in, and there weren’t any switches. And there were, the oven of course didn’t work, but there was a, the grill where you put the pans. That heated up, and I suppose you could burn your hands off. I got down there and Jack and Jules -- and the cord was very short and the homes in those years didn’t have electrical outlets in all the rooms. And I guess there wasn’t one in the kitchen, or they didn’t know about it.

So they had a chair and on this chair they had a stool because the cord wasn’t long enough. And there must have been a light from the ceiling that had a long cord, and Grandma Jones (the mother of Jeannine’s husband, Robert Pattison) had one in her kitchen. I don’t know if you remember. And usually there’d be a button switch and that would turn on the light. You had to walk to the middle of the kitchen to find this thing. There weren’t any wall switches in these kitchens there. And they had, this was on a chair there, and the stove was up there, and they plugged it in, and they were making toast. It must have been wrapped, but they had helped me unwrap my presents while I was asleep, and I thought, "Why did they do that?" I didn’t cry and I didn’t complain. I knew that belonged to me, but I -- I just, I guess I didn’t complain, and they shouldn’t have opened it. So they were making toast on this little electric stove, and I don’t know whether I used it very often. I really don’t remember.

I remember another Christmas. There was a man. His name was Jules Paris, P-A-R-I-S.. In French it would be "Jules Paree." Like Paris, France. And he wasn’t married at the time, and I think that he would have liked to date my sister Rolande, but Rolande was not interested in him at all.

(Rolande Pickett chuckled when the name of Jules Paris was brought up. "Oh, yeah, I know Jules Paris. He wanted me to marry him. My mother wanted me to marry him. I said no way." Apparently, not even a wristwatch he had bought for her could get her to change her mind. "I would have never married him. Never. My mother wanted me [to]. I says, ‘Un-unh. I’m not going to marry him.’" Gus recalled him this way: "Well, he was a friend of the family, I guess, for years, in Canada, he was in Detroit ahead of us. I think he helped us get into the, to the, this country, I’m pretty sure Jules Paris did.... He was about my height. Kind of heavy set, yeah. He chewed, he chewed.... tobacco. I don’t know what kind he chewed, but he (laughs) chewed tobacco.")

And he brought over a beautiful baby doll. And it had eyelashes, real, and its eyes opened and closed, and it had a pretty dress on, and shoes. And it had blonde hair. I had that doll for years. I had it when we lived on Kilbourne yet. That long. I had thought about getting the face fixed up and I thought, "Oh, well, I don’t collect dolls." So I didn’t do it. But anyhow, it was just a beautiful doll, and he brought it over for Christmas for me. It was nice. I think he had a pretty good job. He worked for the railroad. It turned out that later on he worked for the Grand Trunk Railroad, and I saw him come into the office because our room has three departments, and it was a great big, it was a reconverted warehouse....

And he had come. I saw him, so when he left I went to get a drink of water, and this Jules Paris was telling me that he was leaving the Grand Trunk Western. He wanted to move to California, and he was going to work for one of the western roads, I can’t recall which one it was. But he did move to California and I guess he liked the weather very much....

Rene, as I said, grew very tall, and he was in the eighth grade when our third-grade room, we used to have a class president and things like that. And I wasn’t one of the kids that was elected. But the day that we were supposed to go to the this eighth-grade room -- it was in the high school building, actually, that’s what it was. Maybe was it all one school? I can’t remember. It was St. Anthony’s. Anyway, so I was going to read the secretary’s minutes. So we conducted our meeting. We were going to show how the third graders conducted a classroom meeting, and I read the minutes and then I said my name because the teacher told me I should because I was the acting secretary.

So I said it. And the nun who was the teacher -- Rene was in the classroom -- I don’t know if there were two eighth-grade rooms or not but I know he was in this particular (room) -- there usually was two grades in each room. So what happened was she said, "Are you related to Rene?" I said, "Yes, he’s my brother." So she says, "Well!" She says, "All he does is warm up a seat here!" And of course the whole classroom laughed. And Rene was always, he’s always got a story to tell, and he’s sort of funny and I guess he wasn’t any different when he was in high school....

We were still in the Sheridan house, and it was Depression time, and Carmen was coming home, I don’t know where from. I don’t know if she had a job or where she was coming from. And she found a $20 bill, and oh, with $20 you could really buy the whole world. And she bought everybody in the family a Christmas present out of that $20 bill. I mean, obviously, I don’t know what all the things were but everybody got a gift. She really shopped well. And it was really a very, a very nice, a very nice thing, because Christmas would have been a sort of very poor time....

They used to play games there (outside the house on Sheridan). One was called "Hot Corner." And we lived on a corner house, so every house had a, you know, those four corners. So someone would stand on each corner, and there was one guy who was "it," and then he’d yell, "Hot corner!" and he’d try to beat it from the center of the street to this other corner. It was a game that they made up. It was one of those things where, I guess, they were noisy, and yelling, and someone would call the police all the time. So all the guys who didn’t live at our house ran home. They would never have arrested you, but the rest of us stayed on the porch. And the cops would come up on the porch and say, "Where do you live?" And we’d say, "Here." And then they’d ask -- all the guys were living there, you know what I mean, so the cops would leave. They’d say, "We can’t do anything about this, the people all live in this house, and they’re just playing, they’re just playing." As fussy as they are. There weren’t any crimes committed. These kids were just playing, they weren’t stealing things.

So then another game they used to play was Pom Pom Pullaway. One guy would jump on another guy’s back and the bigger guy had to run with this other man, kid, on his hips and shoulders, hanging on. I don’t know, it was really a hard game to play but I think that was a regular game. Hot Corner was something that they made up....

But when we lived on the house on Sheridan, we had a cat and it was a female, and this is, these are all sort of potpourri but these are things that I remember, and I was very young. And my mother had the cat’s box in the kitchen, and the mother must have gone out to go to the bathroom and it was a pretty -- I was small. And I got in the cat box and I had all the kittens on my -- they were small, and, you know, cute. You remember all those kittens we used to have. They were fun and cute, and I’m sittin’ there with these kittens on my lap. My mother always made tea, that’s what we drank. Eventually, she made tea and coffee, but she sort of had, like, this ceramic teapot, you know what I mean. You know what a ceramic looks like. Not as heavy as that nice bowl you gave me, but you know, that kind of a teapot. And I’m in there playing with these little kittens in a box, and I suppose, maybe they even peed on me. I don’t know. But my mother let me get in there, because I liked these kittens. And she was on her way from the table to the sink, because they brewed tea, so they used loose tea leaves. And she didn’t, she wasn’t using, like, a tea caddy. I don’t know if she didn’t like them, or she just didn’t have one or what, but she didn’t use one of those aluminum things that you put all the tea leaves in.

And, as she’s going past the -- this was a big country kitchen on Sheridan. We have a large living room, a big dining room, but this was a big kitchen. We used to eat in the kitchen there. It was large. The handle breaks off of the ceramic teapot, and it falls on my head, and it cracks open (laughs), and I’ve got -- there was always a little bit of tea left, you know, ’cause you can’t pour all the stuff because all the tea leaves will come out. And I had tea leaves in my hair, not a whole lot of tea leaves, and it was not hot. She was either going to make more, or just go empty the pot. So, of course, I’m crying. I bet that hurt. But everybody that was in the kitchen -- and I don’t know who it was -- they were laughing. You can imagine. I was sittin’ there with all these little kittens (laughs) on my lap. I’m sure some of these kittens got tea leaves on them. And this hurt, and, well, anyhow, this was a very funny situation. I was heartbroken and I really was upset. But anyhow, they had to wash my hair, and I imagine some of the kittens must have gotten some of this on them. When this mother cat came in, she probably wondered what we had done to her kittens. But anyway, I’m sure she licked them clean.

Well, this is just a funny thing that I can laugh about it, because you can imagine how funny that must have looked. But anyhow, that’s, that’s one of the things, and I had to see, oh yeah....

My sister was talking to me once, she says, "Don’t you remember all the square dancing that used to go on?" and I said, "No." I said, "When did all these square dances go on?" She said, "Every Saturday night, when we lived on Sheridan." And we had two rugs on the floor. We didn’t have carpeting. And they’d roll up the rugs, and they’d put ’em aside, and they’d move the dining room table near the wall and then they danced in the living room. And my mother played the piano, and my father was a self-taught musician. He played the violin. And he would call and play, you know, those calls that they have in square dancing. ("And we danced!" Rolande recalled. "We danced so much that we wore out the carpet.")

And I imagine he would be mostly calling in French, but when we got to Detroit, somehow the French people -- Phil knew a barber. I guess he went to get a haircut. And this barber was a Frenchman, and he told my mother -- he used to sell eggs. Things were tough, you know, and a barber’s salary wasn’t that big. So he’d sell boudin. It was a blood sausage and eggs and my mother would buy stuff from him. So the people who came would understand the French and they would dance, and, oh, Rolande said, "We used to have good times." And I said, "I guess I must have been asleep. I don’t remember hearing the noise." That must have been a very noisy thing with people and stuff like that dancing in the other room.

And we used to go on picnics. after my father left, my mother sort of sold -- she bought a second-hand truck, a stake truck -- and she sold vegetables. They’d go to the Eastern Market and buy the vegetables and then -- when the weather was warm -- and one boy, most of the boys went. They weren’t working, and one of them drove, somebody drove, I don’t remember which one. I went on the truck once. I wanted to go, so they let me go. And the rest of the people would stand behind the stake truck and they’d go down the street yelling, like, "Bananas! Oranges! Apples!" Whatever it was they were selling. Vegetables.

And they would sell all the stuff and they would come home. There must have been a scale there. I don’t remember. And on their way home they wouldn’t cover the same neighborhoods. They’d go to a different neighborhood all the time, because it made no point to go to same place two or three days later; they’ve already purchased things, you know. And Rene, your darling uncle who was just a kid, they’d be on the way home, and (laughing) he’d moon people. I didn’t know what mooning was years ago. But he said, "We never went back there." I don’t know if he actually did. He said he did. He must have done it anyway.

And we used to go on picnics. We used to go to a place called Waterford Dam. And there was a TB sanitarium that was there. And there was a wading pool before, it was like, I don’t know if it was -- it must have been a manmade dam. We’d wade in this water but there was someplace you could swim there, too. And this boy’s name was his name was Eugene Funke, an his mother had gotten TB and in those days you had to go to the sanitarium. So when we went to Waterford Dam, Eugene -- we’d take Eugene. Eugene would come with us. And then it was maybe a mile or half-mile. You could see it from the picnic area. And he used to walk over.

And I don’t know whether he could actually go inside or maybe he would just tell -- they’d let his mother know and she could come to the window and she’d see him. And Jules used to walk over with him. He was Jules’ friend. And it isn’t, you know. Carmen was dating your Uncle George then. And George had a car, so he took all the ladies in the car -- that was my mother, and Rolande and Carmen and I, and everybody else went in the truck, you know, because we didn’t -- that was the only transportation we had. And so anyway, I must have been maybe a two-door and we’d all go to the picnics in his car. And then so we had better riding, you know what I mean.

Let’s see. Then your Uncle Phil, when things got better -- I’m jumping ahead here but while I’m on the subject of a car, he bought a coupe, and the coupe had a three-passenger seat and behind the driver there was a shelf, you know, like you’d have at your back window. But the car’s more square. And he’d come home from work and he’d take a nap and he’d get up and eat supper. And this was before he was dating anybody. He liked to go for drives. Phil would like to drive anyplace. And he’d take my mother and Rolande and him. And I’d lay across this shelf. I was small for my age and I was short and thin, and I could see over their heads. And then Rolande says, "Don’t you remember we used to stop and have ice cream?" Or once they stopped for barbecue. I don’t remember any of that. I don’t remember the barbecue....

My mother was not confrontational. Some child would upset her. Like, they would do something that she was displeased with. Maybe it was a character flaw, I don’t know what it was, and what would happen is whoever came home first would never be the child or the adult, but I’m using child as just the term, these were her children. And it happened to be Jolicoeur, really upset with something he had done, and Jules came home, and Jules got bawled out. That was the way, I said, she wasn’t confrontational. And Jules listened to this whole thing and by this time Jules was a near-adult. This was before World War II. But I’m remembering it now. And he listened to everything she said. And he said, "You know, Ma, you’re bawling out the wrong person," he said, and he told her that this was a common practice.

He said, "Jolicoeur’s going to come here tomorrow," he said, "and you’re not going to say a word to him. But you’re bawling me out, and I didn’t do it." It was like, I don’t know, I know I was there, and I just stood there and I watched it. And I, I can’t remember if my mother still did it or not. But she never could confront you with something she felt you shouldn’t be doing. And it was sort of, you would sit there and listen to it -- or you would stand. And then, you know, you would just walk away and sometimes you were annoyed. But at the time I didn’t know about confrontation. And my mother was, like, all the good qualities you had, but she found it difficult to upbraid somebody....

So anyhow, back to Sheridan. Now, when we lived there for, let’s see, well, I don’t know how long, but I was in the second grade when we moved, and we moved to 7418 Kerby, and that was Kerby and Sheridan. And the people that owned the house that we rented had one daughter and about five or six boys. Their name was, they used to say their name was Cook, but it was a German name, it was spelled K-o-c-h, Koch, you know? And when we moved it there was a whole bunch of boys, too. But not long after we moved in there, Carmen got married. So there was no one -- Jolicoeur was already married. I do remember Jolicoeur’s wedding, because they got me a very, very pretty dress, and it had two satin bows and great big long streamers down it. I remember that day very, very, very, very well, ’cause the dress was so pretty, and my father was there when Jolicoeur got married. In fact, after the Depression came, Jolicouer had been working when times got hard, so he and Bernie moved in with us. We were living on Sheridan; I’m back on Sheridan, I’m sort of jumping all around, but I’m putting things down as I remember it. And I’m sure I told you this. But anyhow, when my father went back, I think Jolicoeur wasn’t with us yet, he and his wife, you know what I mean? They had to move in temporarily. It wasn’t a permanent thing....

We used to have a milkman. And my mother bought eight quarts of milk a day, and this was before they had homogenized milk. They didn’t have the half-gallons or gallons. These were glass bottles. The cream used to rise to the top, so, like, if you wanted coffee cream or something, you’d just pour. What you did, you could pour that cream off and just have plain old milk down below. But what most people did is they’d shake the bottle up and down -- they were well-sealed -- and you’d get the richer milk if you put it, you know. If you mixed it like this, well, it was never thin but it made for a richer product.

And I didn’t eat. I don’t know why I didn’t eat. But I drank four quarts of milk a day. My mother used four quarts for the rest of the family, and I drank four quarts of milk a day. (When told of his sister’s drinking habits, Gus exclaimed, "Holy Christ. Well, Jolicoeur was a milkman, so," before he dissolved into laughter. "She was always so gol-dang skinny. She was always thin," he added.) Now, as I said, times were tough, and my mother used to put the food on the table, and she said, "If anybody doesn’t eat, it’s because they don’t want to." Because the food was good. She was baking and she made the cookies and the donuts, and she made pies. She’d make five or six pies at a time, you know what I mean. Because you can’t bake every day. And the bread, of course, that was another thing. But everything was good. So anyhow, I just drank this milk, and she said, "Your teeth are going to last you till you die," she said, because of all that calcium.

My mother had, surprisingly enough -- they always talk about nutrition so much but this was years and years ago. When she went to school, I don’t know if they called it nutrition, but she really knew the foods that -- cabbage is almost like having meat, you know what I mean, if you make cabbage soup or something like that. And so she knew that calcium was good. And I don’t know that that was always stressed as much. This was a long time ago, but while she went to school in Warwick and she really had a good education, so maybe the schools weren’t as backward as some people think they were. It was nuns, it was the Sisters of the Assumption. I don’t know anything about where their motherhouse was or not, but anyway, that’s where she went, and that’s where she graduated from, the school in Warwick.

So anyhow, I would just drink all this milk, and I really -- this is just an aside -- I never really, I used to, my mother used to, no one liked to eat, not to have breakfast, no one wanted to get up early enough to have breakfast. And when my grandmother took care of the household, and my mother worked, she would beat eggs and she would make, like, eggnog. Now it wasn’t as fancy as the eggnog, but it was the eggs and there was sugar and cream or milk, I don’t know which, and you would have to drink two of these raw eggs -- and it tasted good! We were used to it. And so you’d have to drink these raw eggs.

My brothers, when they found work and stuff like that, she made them, they’d have to have these raw eggs, because you didn’t leave the house on an empty stomach. So I had that for years. I don’t know today if I could mix that and drink it up. I think they would advise against it because of salmonella. But anyhow, that’s what I used to drink, like, when they would get me to do it, and when I was working at the Grand Trunk I used to have a raw egg -- just one egg with the milk, but by this time it was homogenized milk, you know. But anyhow, with a little bit of sugar in it. It was like an eggnog. You could put the other stuff in if you want, but I just drank it like that. And it was healthy for you. I know if probably sounds terrible to you, but anyway, everybody was drinking these raw eggs before they went to -- and no one got that sort of that kind of infection.

Your Uncle Phil was really sort of a tender-hearted man. And my mother had made these mashed potatoes once. We lived on Sheridan, because I was sitting on this, this bench that, you know, I was too old for a high chair but this was a high bench so I wouldn’t have to sit on something to make it higher. And he took the mashed potatoes and he made them in the shape of a boat. And I don’t know what else was on the table, and he really wanted -- he thought maybe I’d eat these potatoes, and I still didn’t eat the potatoes. I, I don’t know why, and I thought, he was so nice, I just, but food was just -- I don’t know what, I just couldn’t digest it or what. And if was something rich, what they’d do on special occasions, we didn’t have a refrigerator, we had an icebox, and so they would whip whipping cream and they’d come with a teaspoon full of this stuff and they’d say, "Taste this! Taste this! You’ll like it, it’s good." But it was really very, very rich and I would keep that down. But rich food, I just didn’t like it. ("Jeannine, she liked candy," Rolande noted, "and she was young, and Phil would always have candy in his pocket. So she went to him.") ...

In the winter they would dig by hand, this was a great big one-block-square playground. And at St. Anthony’s -- I assume it was the custodian -- he would, you know how they make a rink out of, perhaps you’ve seen, they dig all the ground up to make a great big bank around it, and then they flood it, and we could go ice-skate there. And it was really nice. I could put my ice skates on at home, and walk over there, you know? It was just, I just lived the second house from the corner across the street, and that was it. And we had all kinds of ice skates. Skating was a national pastime in Montreal, I guess, and I would just go through this big pile of ice skates we had in the attic, and they’d have small pairs, because skates are not exclusively for boys or for girls, just for the left and the right foot. So they had kids, you know, children my size, that had these smaller skates, and my mother just took everything along.

(Rolande recalled some elements of the ice pond. They would go skating, but "not on Sunday because of blue law, but Jolicoeur played hockey, and the doctor came to examine him. He said you have to have a good heart to play hockey like he does. And then John, he was going backwards and nobody could catch him. So I’m the only one that didn’t have skates, so my mother says, ‘You try it first.’ So, woo, I’m going to the ice park. I’m at the end of the curb, and hooooo!")

So we’d go over there and ice-skate, and your Uncle Jolicoeur, well, he got married and they were renting, and he wanted his own house. So he bought a lot, I think it was in Hazel Park. He wasn’t going to have a basement, but he had all the brothers come, carpenters or not, and they helped him pound this house together. And it had a big utility room with a toilet in it, a bathroom. And then it had a large kitchen, a living room, and upstairs they had three bedrooms and a bath. And they -- Roger had a room, the girls shared a room. Of course, he had the smallest bedroom, and Jolicoeur and Bernie had a room. And they lived out there. The children were quite small when he went. They were in school, but I just don’t remember the year. So anyway, they didn’t like the school system. I don’t know that there was a Catholic school nearby, and anyway, he sold the house, and he bought a house on the corner of Field and Kerby. It was just down a block from it. We weren’t living, we weren’t still living on the Kerby address at the time, but, ’cause Kerby was in the St. Anthony’s school system. But anyway, Bernie was in her fifties at this time, and she used to love to ice-skate. So one day the kids were in school and she put her ice skates on and she crossed the street. She lived, you know, this playground was on the side of their house. And she went over there and she ice-skated. And Jolicoeur came home from being a milkman. "You know," he said, "you know you could have broken a hip or something," because people as they get older get more fragile. She was alone because everyone was in school at the time. School was on, so there weren’t that many ice skaters, but she really enjoyed it. But to get back to it, this was really a nice opportunity. There weren’t any lights there at night. If you went over and ice-skated, you skated in the dark. You know, there was moonlight, and there were street lights on the corners of the street, but nothing for illumination at the rink itself.

I’m going back to whatchamacall, because I forgot about something that your Uncle John used to do. John learned to swim -- and I don’t know how -- but he swam like a seal. He just was good. And he could dive. I’m not talking Olympic powers or anything like that, but he was good. And so, they used to walk to Belle Isle when we lived on Sheridan. I didn’t go along on these jaunts, because maybe it was a long walk, and maybe I wasn’t interested. But he would go on the Belle Isle Bridge, and he’d -- some people would be walking over and he’d tell some guy, "I’ll dive off this bridge for a quarter." Now this is where people go to commit suicide, you know what I mean? Because if you hit that water the wrong way, (smacks hands) it’ll break every bone in your body (smacks hands). I mean, you’re probably more aware of those dynamics than I am.

He’d get up there, and he’d dive off the bridge and he’d swim back to shore, and these people that would, you know, give him the quarter -- he’d do it more than once if there was anybody that would give him a quarter. And he used to do this, I don’t know if they went there every day. But one day, he dived off, and what happened is -- I guess they didn’t have a lookout for the other side of the bridge. And there was a pleasure boat, like a private craft, you know. While most people were, well, terribly poor and there was a lot of people that had money, too, during the Depression. And when he hit the water he just missed hitting the side of this boat. He said people saw the people in this craft, and they said they were so surprised. I think they thought they were seeing a suicide. But anyway, I hope he got a quarter for it, ’cause that was really a thrill and a half.

So anyhow, I think I mentioned Jack McNeely. He lived on Sheridan and Field. We’re back-to-back. We shared the same alley. And he lived on Field. And he had a, he was black hair, blue eyes, really a nice-lookin’ guy and he had two sisters. One was Eileen, and she was like the black-haired, blue-eyed Irish person, and his sister Joanne was a blonde. I don’t know who the blonde was in the family, whether it was the mother or the father. But there were two distinct things, two distinct colorings in that family. And she was really nice looking and she was tomboy! I mean, we’re talking tomboy from the word go. So she went with the guys, you know. This was daylight. You didn’t jump off that bridge at night. And she decided that she would jump off the, and I think you call them the stanchions. There was a little lower thing, not right where the railing was, but its a little lower. She climbed right up there. You had to climb up there, you know what I mean. You had to climb down, rather. She climbed and then she got that far, and she got ready to dive, and she got scared, which is only natural. I mean, it must be very frightening. I can’t imagine. And she couldn’t climb back up. There wasn’t enough grip or something. And it was sink or swim. She dived off, and fortunately, for her, she didn’t hurt herself. You know, she made it. But she never went back to dive again.

And this Jack McNeely, he was part of the folklore, too. And his fingers were all crooked. I mean, on both hands. Somehow, he had climbed a telephone pole or an electrical pole. You know, they used to have these things you could climb up for repairs. They probably, now maybe they use one of those cherry pickers, I don’t know. But anyhow, he had gotten up there, and he touched, I think he was going to go across the wires -- don’t ask me why, he was just a kid -- and fortunately, whatever happened, he didn’t get electrocuted, but it made his fingers all crooked. I mean, it actually affected the bones. This happened before we moved there. He really was the sort of a kid who was always a daredevil, and getting in trouble, and sort of goofy things, but you know, he was busy doing them....

Your Aunt Carmen, this was after she was married -- I’m staying back with the (swim) thing -- I’m sure I told you this but anyway I’ll keep on with it -- she wanted to learn how to swim, and George had a good job, and they didn’t have any kids. And the YWCA, there was one, I think it was downtown, I don’t think it was the one in Highland Park, and she went there and she took swimming lessons. It was when school was out, and she would take me with her, And she would come out and pick me up. I could have walked over, because we were living on Kerby then. And it was the fare was six cents and I don’t know if we had to transfer or not, so it cost her 12 cents for the fare, 24 cents a day. And after she had swum, we’d go to a drugstore and she’d buy me a treat. And so I would have an ice cream soda, And man, I would eat this, and we were coming home on the streetcar, and, boy, I said, "I’m gonna throw up. I’m gonna throw up," you know. And the next week, maybe we won’t go next week. Well, she was enjoying this, and I don’t know if she had a soda, but I had a soda. Maybe all that fizz in there wasn’t agreeing with me.

So finally, I just couldn’t -- I don’t know how many weeks, I think there was 10 or 12 lessons. And I said, "I’m really sick." I really thought I was going to throw up. So we were on the streetcar coming home, and I said, I told her, I said, "Carmen, I, I can’t eat those sodas. Every time I eat one, I think I’m going to get sick and throw up." And she was really upset. She said, "Here," she says, "I thought I was treating you," and she was. Money was hard to come by. And she had not a whole lot. George was pretty tight. He handled the purse strings. She -- I’ll go into that. She couldn’t get a penny out of him. I mean, she had to plead and beg for all the money that she wanted, or needed. So anyhow, we didn’t stop at this drugstore. It must have been downtown. It was before we got in -- and most drugstores used to have a soda fountain. But I felt so bad, but I just couldn’t, I just couldn’t eat....

When we moved to 7418 Kerby, it was a really nice house. There was a very small kitchen and we had a table in it, but we have a large dining room and two bedrooms and a bath on the first floor. First floor thing. In the basement -- this was the first house I lived in that had an extra toilet. There was an extra toilet in the basement. And as I said, the people that owned this house, they were Mr. and Mrs. Cook, that’s what they called themselves. They didn’t say (pronounces) "Koch," K-o-c-h, "Koch" I guess what it would have been. But they had this great big porch across the front, and when you crossed Sheridan, right there was St. Anthony’s playground, and, oh, they had swings and they had maypoles. Eventually, the city took it over or something, maybe they couldn’t pay their taxes on it. It was a tough time. And they built a brick house. And there was a restroom there.

And in the summer they had a person one summer there that taught crafts. And I went over there, and you used to take your old -- they were silk stockings at the time. And you’d cut them up -- I don’t remember how we cut them up -- and she taught us to make these braided rugs that you see. Well, obviously, they weren’t made that well. I went over these old, they were a bunch of, they were silk stockings at the time, this was before World War II. Maybe they had rayon stockings, I don’t know. But these were silk, and my mother would darn them. And this lady would show us -- I just took the whole stocking there, you know, and my mother, as I said, was darning so well. And she said, "Who repaired these stockings?" Because they didn’t show. You used to have the silk foot, the toe in the bottom of the foot, and the heel was cotton, and the rest was all silk, and the top was sort of half cotton so you couldn’t make a run. And she couldn’t get over how beautifully this was darned. And I said, "Oh, my mother does the darning. My mother repairs all the stockings." Well anyhow, I learned how to make that, I was probably a third- or fourth-grader there, because in third and fourth grade we lived on Kerby. And it was really a very nice time....

Let’s see. As we only lived there two years, it was nice that none of us had to change schools. Because we just stayed at St. Anthony’s, which was kind of nice. And, oh, this is where I had this cat. There was this little kitten that was born. It was all black and he had four white paws. And we had this cat and I looked at it and I thought it was so pretty. So I called it Snowfeet. I just thought that was the prettiest cat. And my mother said, "Snowfeet." She didn’t like that name. I said, "Yeah, he’s got," I said, "four white feet." You know what I mean. So I said, "Let’s call him Snowfeet." Well, she didn’t like the name, but we kept it. The cat was so cute we left it out one day and it never came back. I think someone took it. It was a very sweet, adorable cat.

But, when we lived there during, I know it was during the war months, and I don’t know if I went every day after school, but my mother, we didn’t have a refrigerator, we had an icebox. So you couldn’t buy, you know, a lot of meat in advance or anything like that. Most people went shopping every day because of the refrigeration. You could keep something if you sat it on a block of ice, but you usually bought fresh and you cooked every day. So there was a lot of trips to the store. So I was going to the store and it was a C.F. Smith store. And I don’t know that they sold meat, I don’t remember picking up meat. But my mother would tell me what I had to buy, and I’d have to repeat it. I didn’t get a list. I had to remember it in my head, which I would do, and then I always went the same route, and I’d come home with two or three bags.

Well, this time, she wanted a half a peck of potatoes. Now that was a lot of potatoes. And there was four or five other items. And I had three blocks, maybe four, to walk. So I left the store, and I’m coming home and the potatoes are very heavy. I only went to St. Anthony’s to the fourth grade. So I was either in the third grade or the fourth grade, ’cause I wasn’t in the second grade ’cause we didn’t live in this house. And I was coming home with -- I was really struggling. ’Cause these potatoes were shifting. They were just in brown paper sacks. There weren’t any handles. A handle, maybe, I could have handled better. The potatoes were shifting and something else was going, and I went past this house, and the lady of the house was living there, and a couple of other people there -- older children, and she says, "Would you like me to help you carry that home?" And I said no. I was having a terrible time. I lived, like, three or four blocks away. And this was the block right after the store, you know? And I said no. I made it home. But I didn’t think that I would without spilling something. Fortunately, of course, we had a milkman so we didn’t have a heavy milk bottle or anything like that. But oh, did I struggle with this package, and -- these packages, not this package. But I always seemed to be the one that went to the store....

Aunt Bernie -- she was really crazy about Jolicoeur. She thought he was the most handsome man in the world. She’d take out snapshots and say, "Look! Look at him!" she says. "He looks like a movie star!" I mean, and she honestly believed that, and she thought he was so good-looking, and I used to think, he was just my brother, you know what I mean. And she was just immersed in his looks and everything like that. So they got married. And the day they got married, she says, "Now," she says, "I never want you to go see your mother again." She didn’t want him to have any contact with the family. And Jolicoeur looked at her and he didn’t know where she was coming from. There was nothing like this. So he says, "OK." He says, "Sure," he says. "That’s OK."

And he did exactly what he wanted. He probably went over to see his mother the day he got home from his honeymoon.. You know, he came to see the family, not the -- and she knew that he was going to see the family, but as long as he promised her that he wouldn’t, it didn’t make (laughs), it didn’t make any difference. I mean, talk about a weird, weird, sense of, I don’t know. I don’t know where she was coming from. So he’d go over, and I think when my father left, he sort of took -- he didn’t take over the role, like he didn’t pay them money. If they worked for him, yes, he would have paid anybody, you know what I mean. But anyhow, he, he worried constantly about all these boys, I guess. A boy always needs his father. And he sort of felt that he had replaced us in the way of advice.

If they played baseball he used to go watch them. They played. John and Rene and Gus used to play for county teams or city teams, I don’t know what, and Rene was a good catcher, and I don’t know what position Gus played. (In an interview March 14, 2003, Gustave Kirouac said, "I played third base at the time. And then after a while, my arm wasn’t too good, and they moved me to second base," laughing, "so I wouldn’t have to throw so far. I played third base for a number of years.") Well, he was still playing when he was past 65, I told you he was still playing. He liked to play. And I don’t know what position John played.

So, but anyhow, Jolicoeur went to watch them play a game once. Now they were all adults and I think they were married, but they liked to play sports, they liked to bowl. So anyhow, there was a bad call or something, I don’t know what it was, but Johnny wasn’t an umpire. He was a player, and he tagged this guy out and this guy just got incensed. And he started beating up on John. Well, of course, John was hitting back. Jolicoeur sees his brother being picked on by another ballplayer, not a fan or anything, and Johnny was out -- they weren’t at bat, they were the other way, they were out in the field. So he went over there to protect his brother and he swung and he hit this guy. And oh! He felt this terrible shooting pain (laughs) in his arm. He had broken it. I don’t know if he had broken his hand or his arm, and he had to go to emergency and get it repaired. He was in a cast. He could work, he managed to work (laughs) but he went to rescue his brother and he’s the one who got injured.

Things were really tough in the city of Detroit, you know, for everyone. And in Canada, things were just as bad. And your Aunt Blanche, the one that had the bakery, um, she had a, there was, she had a son named Janel, J-a-n-e-l. And, I think, Paul (-Emile), I think Paul came, and then Aunt Corinne, that’s Aunt’s sister, these are the children of my mother’s brother, mon oncle Willie, his name was Willie. That was it. It was not, like, well, William, I guess that’s William in French. And Aunt Corinne and Paul-Emile -- Paul-Emile was his name, Paul-Emile Kirouac -- and they came down to Detroit looking for jobs, ’cause there was nothing up there. So they came and there was, there were no jobs available, and those cousins were adults. And of course, Phil was home, Jolicoeur was married, and John, and they’d stay up all night and play cards. You know, they’d play really late at night.

My mother used to make five pies at a time, you know, so she wouldn’t have to bake every day. Well, she’d get up in the morning, all the pies would be gone, and she’d have to start all over again. And they stayed, and they did go look for work. But they’d go -- they used to hire in the morning. You know, you’d have to go to these places, these different locations, and try to get a job, um, if they needed you, or if you had a skill that they wanted they took you. Like Rene, he said he was gonna be 18 years old the day when he was 16. And they were hiring welders, so he just became a welder on the spot, and that’s how he got that job. But that was prior to this time, ’cause Rene was pretty young then. And they couldn’t find work. And finally, they had to leave ’cause my mother was having a tough time feeding them. I mean we never went hungry and she always had food and everything like that -- I don’t know how she managed -- but anyhow, so they went back to their own home because the job situations weren’t any better here than they were in Canada. So they went home.

And then Phil had a job, and he lost it, and he made a friend. His name was Clayton, I can’t remember his last name. (According to Phil and Leona’s daughter, Janet Kirouac, neither she nor her siblings can remember a man named Clayton who was a friend of their father’s, let alone his surname.) He was from down south. And he lost a job when -- the plant didn’t close, but they didn’t need as much help, and those guys lost their jobs. So this man went down south with his wife, I don’t know which state it was. And he came back, and he came to see Phil. And he said, "There’s nothing down south." He said, "Maybe I can find something here." So Clayton moved in at my mother’s, and he was a really tall man, very nice person, don’t misunderstand. But there was no work to be had. And so he stayed and he stayed and he stayed and he stayed, and finally, my mother told Phil, she said, "I can’t."

You know, she had fed these cousins, you’re not going to let them starve. But she really couldn’t feed him because, you know, it was a drain. It wasn’t that he ate more than anybody else, but she didn’t have the finances, and my father was gone at this time, you know what I mean. So there was not a lot of -- I don’t know where the money came from, I have to be honest with you. So anyway, Clayton went back home. I don’t know whether he had to borrow money and take the bus back home or not. But anyhow, my mother just couldn’t, you know, take care of him. So anyhow, he went back down South, so we just like, you know, the one-family unit again.

And after a while, Jolicoeur was married to Bernie, and things got really tough, and he and Bernie moved in to our house, and Roger was born. Well, I’ll put this: Jolicoeur had a job, and there was very funny laws on the book. And Bernie was working. She had a job at Burroughs, that same Burroughs that used to be downtown but moved out further, you know? And the -- I know there were two employment places where you could work that once you got married, you lost your job if you were a woman. They wouldn’t hire, they wouldn’t keep you. Not that she was pregnant or anything like that. You lost your job. And the other one was Detroit Edison. When a girl got married, she lost her job. That was, that was a cancellation thing. So Bernie married Jolicoeur, and she wanted to keep her job, so she never told them at Burroughs that she was married. I don’t think she told anyone else, either. You tell one person, you tell a hundred. So she worked and she worked and she worked, and eventually, she did get pregnant, and well, I guess she lost her position then. So anyhow, Jolicoeur wasn’t working, so they came back and they stayed with my mother for a while. And then eventually, they did, they did go out on their own, and I was very young at the time, and there was other circumstances. I’ll tell you about it, but not on tape, OK? So they left, and so again, things were still tough....

We’re still back to 1944. The house 4403 (Sheridan). Mr. and Mrs. May owned the house that we rented from them. Mr. May had a job. He was working all through the Depression, and of course, he collected rent, so. And he had, like, they were called, like, terrace apartments. There were three. They called them terrace apartments, but they were really flats. And he lived in one of those. They didn’t have too many children then. And this was a big house, so he rented it to us. And this Mrs. May, Jolicoeur used to come and visit my mother.

Well, Gus just told me this. She -- I always thought Rene was the apple of her eye. But she really glommed on my brother Jolicoeur. When she, he must have had a car, and he would come over there and she saw him walking. I don’t know which it was. Her husband would be at home, and, "Oh!" she’d call him over. "There’s something I can’t handle that’s in the house and maybe you can fix it for me," blah-blah-blah. So, it would be harder for him to say no. So he’d go over there. My mother used to get so upset because she said, "There’s nothing wrong over in that house. She just wants male company. Maybe" -- she was sort of, well, everybody thought she was promiscuous. I don’t know if she was. But she just wasn’t satisfied with he husband, let’s put it that way, and she was always trying to get someone to come over to her apartment, in her home, when she was, when he wasn’t home.

So anyway, she sent for a cousin of hers from down South. And her name was Cleo. And there was a, a man on the radio. He used to, it must have been a country-western station. They didn’t call it that then. They used to call it "hillbilly." And his name was Mountain Red, and I don’t know how she got a hold of Mountain Red, but she got him to come to this where she lived, and he used to come and visit Cleo. Cleo was really pretty! Now this went on in the summer. I don’t know what went on in winter because I was out playing. She had a daughter named Georgina who was my age and we used to play together. And Georgina said, "That’s Mountain Red." And I didn’t know who Mountain Red was because we didn’t listen to hillbilly stations. And so he’d go in the house, and I don’t know if he brought his guitar, I don’t remember that, but I wouldn’t doubt that he did. But he had a steady job. I don’t know what they paid in radio, but it must have been a living wage.

And he came out on the porch and he did have red hair and he was quite tall. And Georgina and I were standing by our, my house, you know, we were, there was a yard, like, between us in a sense. And we were watching him come out and he grabs this Cleo and I only went, I lived in that house until I was in second grade, and I was very young then. I mean, if I was a first-grader, maybe that was it. Six years old. He grabs her, and he bends he over and kisses her. One of these, like back-bending kisses. Man! Our eyes popped out. You know, I’d never seen a kiss like that (laughs), and it was really funny. But I said, I used to think -- I think I was always a cynic, because I thought, "I wonder if he visits any other people and any other women like that." ’Cause he could make the rounds. He was single, I guess. This Cleo was pretty, but he never married her, let’s put it that way. But this was really -- well, it was an eye-opener for us. I don’t know if Georgina had ever seen it, but I had never seen anything like that. It was, well, it was strange, on the front porch. I thought, "Why is he kissin’ her on the front porch?" I guess I had some rather odd, as a little kid you have some odd things here.

Well, now, let me see. We, oh, and one thing on Sheridan. They used to have what they called portable record players. Rudy Vallee was popular. And Rolande told me another name and I don’t remember. And this was a blue portable record player. You could take it with you on picnics. It was like, ah, quite heavy. It was like a suitcase. It was medium blue color on the outside. It was probably leatherette, you know what I mean, because plastic wasn’t around in those days. And you opened it up and it had all the records at the time were those big 12(-inch records), those big black ones we used to have, that I used to buy, that you taped records from. And it had a handle that you wound up. It wasn’t electric. And you’d wind it up, and it would play maybe one or two, maybe both sides of the record. And he had those needles that you used to have to change, so if they went on picnics or something like that, they could take this on the picnic with them, or they’d take it. Everybody didn’t have these portable record players. I don’t know which one of them bought it, and maybe this was before the Depression. I don’t know, because I remember seeing it. Sometimes I’d play it, and I’d wind up this one handle that, it must have been a spring that made the turntable turn, and they used to have, they used to have records. And I can’t say that I remember any of the records, but they let me, they let me play with it. And I was pretty small.

And we also had a player piano. When my mother came to Detroit, she bought a piano. And she said she was always sorry, ’cause Carmen played real well and Rolande played real well. They could read music and they played. They had lessons. And, like, Gus played the violin, Rene took sax lessons, Jack took sax and clarinet lessons, Jules took clarinet lessons, and I think some of the older ones, I think, when they went to these colleges, schools, they were teaching schools where the brothers taught. Phil and Jolicoeur were in those, and I think maybe you had to pay for the lessons, but my mother was very fond of music. And it was -- she wanted them to learn, to learn things. ’Cause we had a small violin that, like a little kid could play. ’Cause, you know, a big instrument was, you know, sorta hard to handle. We had like a child’s violin, and my mother gave it to Gus. And when you kids were coming up, I asked him if he still had it. And he said no, they had gotten rid of it. So I don’t know who he gave it to, but I would have liked to have borrowed it to show to you kids. It was a, it had all the right things but it was just for a little kid that could play.

So she got this piano player -- I’m digressing -- and, oh, of course, they bought this piano player, they were rolls of music, you know, and all the words were written on it, and you’d stand around and all the words were written on the side of the piano. You’d pump this thing and this -- you’ve probably seen them someplace. When I used to play, I even knew how to put the rolls in. And I used to do it. And she said, "Once that came into the house, they stopped playing the piano and everybody sang." But that was a lot of fun, too. My mother liked music, and I never noticed this, but when I was, we moved on Kerby, ah, I started this, there was a small kitchen with a table. And we always ate in the dining room, except in the kitchen everybody ate, like, at different times. They got up at different times, so, I always had my breakfast, which wasn’t much because I wasn’t interested in food, but whatever I had. But the other meals, lunch and supper, was always in the dining room. And Jack told me once. He says, "You know, Ma always hummed or sang all day long." You know, she was cooking, she was washing, whatever she did, she’d sing -- not loud, but she’d be singing a song under her breath, or humming -- but she had music always. Well, we must have had a radio, but I’m sure it was in the living room. But he said ... she always sang....

She always sang all the while she worked. And I remember hearing that when I was younger I didn’t pay any attention, but he said she always sang when she worked. So I suppose it helped her, you know, pass the time. And then, eventually, when we moved on Crane, this piano was big, so we had this big kitchen, and we had it in the living room for a while. And when Jack started his dance band. I told you about that, and I’ll talk as long as I can, Well, they were practicing, and the living room was small and the carpet, the rug was there, and it really got dirty. So we moved this piano, because when my mother opened the store, we didn’t need it at home anymore, because there was a kitchen behind the store, so she’d cook while she wasn’t busy with customers. We’d go eat supper there. When I was home from school vacation, you know, and after that, I would do the dishes in the summer, and until I went back to school. And when I was a boarder, I wouldn’t do it.

So anyhow -- well, I wasn’t there. So anyhow, Jolicoeur, I think, wanted the piano, so she gave this player piano to Jolicoeur. And he put it in his basement. And his kids were going to St. Anthony’s, and I know that the school colors were, like, maroon or cranberry, you might, and there was another color, I think. And they put that piano in the basement, and it was like a varnish. You know, not like the same stuff that we have here, but you know. And they painted it maroon and, you know, the other school color. My mother never said anything, but she was so disappointed, because she thought the piano was ruined. You know what I mean. And she thought it looked better as a, as an unpainted piano. Certainly, it lost its value. But she gave it to him and it was gone.

But when Jack started his dance band, there was a guy named Floyd Gross, and he played the piano. And he always sat -- this was in the kitchen -- and he had so much body heat, Mark, that we didn’t notice it right away. And one day Rolande looked. There was the imprint of his fanny. He was burning off the, he was affecting the varnish. And you could see his whole -- well, we say the word "butt" now, but you could see his whole fanny (laughs), you could see the whole imprint of his fanny. He had a fingerprint, but instead of a fingerprint it was a butt print. And when he came over -- well, this was, they practiced for a long time. This just didn’t happen in one night. And of course, I suppose, in the winter it wasn’t so bad. But in the summer it got pretty hot and (suppresses laugh) he must have been a really, a hot-blooded person. And we had this fanny imprint of Floyd Gross on the piano bench. And you walk in, you could just tell what it was. But anyhow, we got a lot of laughs out of that....

I don’t think I said this other thing about the band, and how Jack started it. I don’t think I have time to go through it. And I’m on page four. I’ve written notes. Well, let’s see. Oh, OK. OK. Yeah, OK. I’ll, I’m back, I don’t think I know if we’re on Crane or not. But John and Rene had gotten jobs at Packard’s but this was before that time. And Gus somehow got a job to work on a farm for the summer months. (Gus remembers how he got the job: "Well, there was no work and the Depression was on, and a big family like we had. So I was just at the right -- Johnny was supposed to go. I was too young. But they send me, and the farmers didn’t know any difference anyway. They thought I was Johnny. But I went instead of Johnny ’cause Johnny was older, Johnny had a better chance of getting a job, you know.") This farmer maybe didn’t have any sons, or everybody was married, and he needed some help. And Gus didn’t know anything about a farm, but he could do what he was told. And I don’t know where it was. But anyhow, we drove him out there. I don’t know who drove him out there, but we got out there. But they -- at the end of the summer they invited the family to come out there for a picnic. You now, that meant the whole family....

He stayed there the summer, and he had to do whatever the farmer told him, and they really seemed to like him, ’cause, as I said, they invited us over there when, I guess, it was his last day there. We could have a picnic there. So, I don’t remember where it was. I’m sure Rolande would, but the place is immaterial. And the farmer’s wife, this one particular day, had a bushel of apples, and she peeled this whole bushel. I know fruit turns yellow-brown when it’s exposed to air once it’s peeled, so I don’t know if she soaked these apples in anything, I don’t know what, so that they wouldn’t turn brown. And when she finished, she called Gus in, and she says, "OK, now," she says, "throw these out," OK? So maybe -- and in those years all the farmers did not have indoor plumbing; they had outhouses. And I don’t know -- maybe she had to go to the bathroom anyway. So she came back into the kitchen, and her apples are gone. She didn’t say, "Throw them out." "Feed them to the pigs." "Feed this to the pigs, OK?" Well, as I said, Gus was not born on a farm, he wasn’t raised on a farm, and he was sort of a stranger in the kitchen. So, he did what he was told, and when she came back into the kitchen, the apples are gone. So she called Gus back in. She says, "Where are the apples?" He said, "You told me to give them to the pigs." She said, "No. The peelings!" She said, "They will eat the peels." Well, anyway, they had a laugh. They really thought they had -- well, he was not a farmer’s child, but they took it. They didn’t bawl him out or they didn’t yell at him. They got a laugh out of that (laughs), to think that he thought she was peeling the apples so the pigs could eat them. But anyhow, this is how it happens when you don’t know any better. You know, I guess he figured the pigs couldn’t eat it, I don’t know.

So anyway, it must have been his last day on the farm. And we had the picnic. It was on a Sunday, and my mother always packed sandwiches. You have to remember this is a long time ago, and they really didn’t have these styrofoam things. If they had picnic coolers, we didn’t have one. And so you always packed your lunch and you put it in the shade, and I’m gonna knock on wood (knocks on table), no one ever got salmonella poisoning, or food poisoning, because I don’t know how everything was wrapped individually, and I think my mother was a very, very neat person, you know, a clean person, so we were very fortunate. She couldn’t bring milk. You know, I was drinking four quarts a day, and, boy, so I was there and I wanted milk, and there was water. And I always liked well water because most well water had a strong iron taste. Probably I was anemic, you know, when I think back, because I certainly wasn’t eating good food. But, boy, my teeth should have been in good shape; let’s put it that way. As my mother said, "They’ll last you forever." Let’s hope.

So anyhow, they said, OK, they had cows, they had pigs, I don’t know what else they had there. They said, "We’ll get you some milk." She had the -- I guess it was milking time anyhow. So they went to the barn, and they took me to the barn, and they were going to show me, you know, I could have some milk. Well, this person sits down, I don’t remember this, but I know there had to be a stool and a bucket, you know. And I see this, they’re squeezing the, you know, the udders, and I said, "I’m not gonna drink THAT." I never saw milk in any other form but in a glass bottle. And I didn’t drink -- I mean, I just didn’t know it came from -- no one ever told me. I was probably pretty young, OK? ’Cause Gus was in his teens, or else maybe if I knew it came from a cow, I didn’t know what it looked like. ’Cause this could be another thing, because I had not had any farm experience, either, and I wouldn’t drink this milk. So, I guess I lived on water.

So anyhow, Jules is there, and most farms had -- well, not all, but some of the farms -- they always had a part where, a section like woods. Maybe when this land was cleared they saved maybe some to burn, or maybe they just didn’t cut all the trees down. Jules says, "We’re going to go someplace." I don’t know where we’re going to go. He said, "We’ll cut through the woods." So OK, we cut through the woods, and we, we got lost. Jules was four years older than I, but I think woods are pretty intimidating, and we couldn’t find our way out. And the strange part of it was, they were playing baseball -- they always brought balls and bats and if you had gloves. They used to be, like the softball, not with what the Tigers play, not those things. We used to call them "indoors" and "outdoor." The indoor ball had all the seams on the inside, and the outdoor, the seams were on the outside. When we played baseball in the street, we always had the outdoor ones, ’cause they were easier to pitch when we lived on Crane. I was not good -- I wasn’t better than anybody else -- but I could get the ball over the plate, let’s put it that way, underhanded, you know what I mean. And it was not a standard size diamond we played on Duncan (a narrow, unpaved street with two telephone poles on Detroit’s east side, close to the Kirouac home, as Jeannine recalled later). Anyhow, they used to call them "indoors" and "outdoors," that meant the inseam and the outseam. I don’t know, anyhow.

So anyhow, we could hear them shouting and they were playing baseball -- aw, you know, "catch it!" and stuff like that. And we couldn’t find our way out. And there were thistles in here, and my legs were getting scratched, because slacks weren’t popular and I had anklets and a dress on -- women were dressed the same way. Because slacks had not come out in that prominence. We were there for couple of hours. We finally found our way out, and they saw us. I guess everybody was having a good time, and they knew I was with Jules, so they didn’t worry about me. But that was a long trek in the woods. But, and without milk, I guess I should have thirsty, but I wasn’t going to drink that cow milk, ’cause it probably wouldn’t have tasted very good anyway. Let’s put it that way. But anyhow, I was very disappointed when I saw where the milk came from.

And I’ll get back to Floyd Gross and the band. It was, organizing the band was my brother Jack’s idea. He, he could pick songs out on the piano and he sang quite well. He had a nice voice, you know. He was certainly not Tony Bennett, but he could carry a tune, and he used to sing songs. They had mikes, they had some sort of sound -- they had microphones, I don’t know what kind of sound equipment they had but there was something. And Jack could play the saxophone, the alto sax, and the clarinet, and he had one guy named Bob Wilkins. He was younger than some of them. He played the trombone. And Tony something, it started with a "C," he was Italian, and he played the violin, Floyd Gross played the piano, Sammy Carlisi played the, um, the soprano sax, I think. Not -- Jack had the tenor, usually the soprano sax got the solos. Eddie Nucilli played the trumpet. He lived on Crane like we did, and his father played for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. He played very well. And this Eddie Nucilli, I saw an article that he was playing someplace. And I cut it out, since I moved here in Troy and I sent it to Jack. I said, "I guess he’s still playing music," and when I saw Jack or I wrote back to him he said, "Yes, he stayed with it and that’s how he earned his living."

So anyway, and I told you about the cops coming and all that. Well, the famous imprint of Floyd Gross, it’s still on that piano bench if it exists someplace. So they decided this Tony wanted to lead the band. I don’t know why he wanted to lead the band. Maybe he wanted, he wanted to front it. And my brother Jack wasn’t ready to give it up. He organized it and he got these guys together. There was a guy named Jack Cooper, he played something, too, I can’t remember. There was a, I don’t know who the drummer was; they had a drummer, I don’t remember who the drummer was. So anyhow, they had the meeting in our kitchen, and Jack said, he said no, he wasn’t going to step aside. He’s the one who had the idea. He started it. He collected as many of the musicians as he could together. Sammy Carlisi, uh, I think went to Nativity, too. Nucilli, we were in the same grade, Eddie Nucilli and I, but they had the girls in one room and the boys in another. So I didn’t know him, but later on, I found -- I mean, maybe I saw him, but I didn’t know his name. So anyway, and they had bandstands made -- really nice. And they called -- "Kirouac" was hard to say, so they called it Jack King and His Knights of Royal Rhythm.

And they cut a demonstration record but that didn’t go anyplace. And they, they got, they were making money. They played weddings, they played -- people used to throw dances and they hired them. They were pretty good -- well, they were good enough to be hired. I thought they were very good, but, you know, I was pretty close to it. They made a living, and they bought all the same kind of jackets. They wore black trousers. This was pre-rock ’n’ roll. This was a long time ago. And he had these nice, they were sort of maroon jackets but there was another color in there. So when they went someplace they really looked professional. And they had good mike systems and stuff like that. But Jack won out the -- everybody voted for him. I don’t know why this Tony, he lived about three blocks away from us and I can’t remember his name. And he wanted -- he didn’t quit the band. He just wanted, I guess, the glory of it. And I would have given my eyeteeth to sing with it. I could carry a tune, but as I said, I had a better voice then than I did now.

And I, I would have liked to sing with it, but I never asked because I knew I would be turned down. And they got a girl that could sing and she was about 19 or 20, a beautiful voice and she had a figure that didn’t quit. And I was short and skinny, and if I was 10 I looked 8. I was a little older than that -- well, not much. But anyhow, I wouldn’t have stood a chance at any account. But that was my great desire then, to be a band singer. Not much to aspire for, I guess, but you got to wear a formal all the time, and you got to sing all the new music. That’s why, when I left, Jack knew I liked music, and he sent me some of the little sheet music, thinking I could learn to play it. But the nuns didn’t teach that. I think I may still have a couple of copies of the things that he sent me. (Anything related to music is likely in the possession of Jeannine’s son Mark.)

I’d come home from school and (her mother) she’d say, "Sit." And she’d make me sit down. "I’m going to read this letter to you," and it was all in French. And I’d sit there. And obviously I could understand this and I’d listen and I’d listen and I’d listen. And the next time she got a letter, I don’t know, probably from her brother or her sister, and what have you, I would listen. I would think, "Why is she reading me this? ’Cause I don’t know these people and I’ll never, I’ll never meet them." You know what I mean. But I didn’t say, "I don’t want to hear." So I would just sit there and listen to the things. Well, later on, when we lived on Crane, my mother decided to send me to this convent in Victoriaville.

It was called Ste-Victoire -- and that’s spelled. S-t-e -- the "e" because this was a feminine word, name, and it was "victory" -- V-i-c-t-o-i-r-e. And she couldn’t send me to the school that she went to in Warwick, because those nuns, the nuns of the Assumption, did not have an English class, whereas in Victoriaville they had enough students that would warrant having a teacher that taught all the classes in English. It was bilingual. I had to take French, too, but anyhow, I was sent there. So all of these letters that I had listened to certainly didn’t -- I didn’t know how to read or spell this language, but I could understand it. Well, maybe not anything technical, but I could get by. So then we’re, I, they sent a list from this school about what kind of clothing I had to have, I had to wear black stockings, a black uniform, black dresses during the week, and black hat. Didn’t have to have a black coat, but they wanted everybody dressed in black. And it was a convent boarding school.

So Carmen was over this one day and she said, "How do you spell ‘oui’?" And I said, "W-e." She says, "You don’t know anything!" And I looked at her and I said, "What’s the matter with her?" "It’s spelled o-u-i, ‘oui’ in French." And I thought, "How does she expect me to know French?" I left there when I was 18 months old, you know. Well, I didn’t say anything, but I thought, geez, you know, I thought that was an unreasonable thing. She asked me another word, and I didn’t know the other word. But the "oui" stuck in my head.

Anyhow, I went there and your Aunt Corinne -- that was my mother’s sister -- met me at the Montreal station, ’cause we had to change trains. And I was talking to her, and there had been some submarine activity. This had been just prior to World War II. And the Germans were sinking all kinds of ships in the Atlantic. I said, "They were submarines," and so I tried to say (pronounces in French) "submarine" in French, and she didn’t know what I was talking about. And I thought, "Well, I must be pronouncing it wrong." So anyhow, she didn’t, and I just dropped it. But I think "submarine" is just translated into French, you know what I mean? I don’t know if she just didn’t want to understand me or what, but she met me, and I went to this school, and oh, boy! It was a culture shock. Believe me. ’Cause It was completely different than anything I’d ever been in. Everybody spoke French....

And (the name was omitted) was the English teacher, and she had the English room. She taught shorthand and typing and regular classes. And then we had -- there were a lot of nuns there, but there was a whole classroom -- they had the boarders like us, and the day students just came in and went home, you know, at the end of the day. And the French teacher’s name was Mother -- it was Mother St-Alfred and Mother St-(pronounces in French) Sabine -- S-a-b-i-n-e. (pronounces in English) Sa-BINE? And they would exchange classes, you know. And so anyhow, this was a completely different experience. I got there a couple of days after the, actually, class started. I don’t know why they didn’t send me on time, but anyway, I got there, I got there at night, at suppertime. After supper. And a girl came up to me and she said, "Oh! You’re Jeanne?" And my name is (pronounces) Jeannine in French. And I said, "No." "Oh," she said, "you look just like" -- no, the girl’s name was Yvette Callignan. She said, "You look just like her." I said, "Oh! Well, I didn’t know." I said, "No, I’m a new student."

So they showed me to my room. And we had, like, they were like cells, really. They were along each side of the wall, this long wall, on the third floor. The first floor had classrooms, and the second floor had classrooms. the third floor, the students slept and also the nuns. They had a different -- of course, you know. And they were like a cell, by a cell, you know, like a nun’s cell. It had partitions that didn’t go all the way up. They were high enough, they covered your head, but they didn’t go all the way up to the ceiling. My room had a window in it that opened like these fenestre windows, you know? They swung in. And I had wooden kitchen -- you know, it was a hard wooden chair, you know, like a kitchen chair or dining room chair, but very plain. A wooden small dresser that had one drawer and a door. It had an iron white bed and no mirror, but I had bought a mirror for a dollar at the dime store, so I had a mirror so I could comb my hair.

And we had a bowl and a pitcher on our things, and you had to -- you put, you got the water, there were a couple of sinks there, the restrooms were down the hall. The tubs were there. But we had to wash in this bowl, in this, you know, it was a porcelain bowl, and the pitcher was porcelain. It was a good size. And I don’t know, we didn’t, we got cleaned up in the morning so we had to wash in this, and this was really very primitive. Man, I had a hard time, because I know I brought my own soap and my own shampoo, and you had to bring your own towels, and you were responsible for to do your own laundry, because if they did it, there was a charge. So I figured my aunt would do my laundry. Well, I guess my mother figured the same thing. So anyway, and you had to brush your teeth. You had to save enough water to (laughs) brush your teeth and then in the morning, after you were dressed and everything, you’d walk down and you dump this out. There was, like, a janitor’s sink, a real deep one. You know, it was clean and everything, don’t misunderstand me. It was not your regular wash basin. And then you’d clean it up and then you’d fill up your pitcher -- you were washing in cold water, believe me. So anyhow, this was an eye-opener for me. But anyhow, you learned to accommodate, to make the accommodations.

So when I, we got up at six in the morning. And you sat up, the bell would ring, and you’d sit up and say a prayer right in bed. Well, first, they were all in French, so I didn’t know what they were doing. And then you finished that and you went and knelt on the floor in your doorway, because we had private rooms, some of us, and you’d say another prayer and then you’d start these, your oblations, as they called it. You know what I mean? You’d have to get cleaned up and brush your teeth and comb your hair and dump this out and get dressed. And that was sort of hard to get used to, but this is what I had.

But what really astounded me: I had these tall windows, and they opened up -- there wasn’t a shade! And I had never slept in a bedroom that didn’t have a shade. You know what I mean? And I was getting undressed and I’m not the only one. The nun next to me had a window, too, you know? And I could see people walkin’ around and I said, "I know they can see in," but you know: no shade, no shade. What can I do, you know? So I just did the best thing that I could, And eventually, when I went -- I had that room for one year, I think. Then, when I came back the next year, I got a room on the other side, and these cells, we shared a window, the partition, so you could have it open. And the third year, I didn’t have a window. You know what I mean. But they just moved you around, and there was no difference in price for with or without a window. They got the same kind of money.

But anyhow, to get back to these windows. Obviously, there were people watchers. They could have been on both sides. I don’t know. But I lived on the side right next to the church. And when I came back the third year, they had put window shades up. Someone must have told them. I’m sure that they had peepers. Well, I mean, you don’t have a -- they figured the third story, you can’t see, but you can see. If you’re about a block away. And we had this big church next door. And then, this was a whole width of a city block. I mean, it was a long thing. And then there were some houses there, and the second-story houses could see in and across. I guess this was really a, a, an expensive -- they never had shades there. And for all the years. I’m sure they had peeping Toms in all cultures, you know what I mean, and nationalities, whatever. And I guess someone finally told them that, you know, they should, they should cover those windows, and they did. And they were sort of angry at us. I mean, It wasn’t our fault that there weren’t shades there. You’d get blamed for all kinds of things at this school.

We got up and six and we prayed. Then we went to church. We went next door every day to Mass at this, at this, I can’t remember the name, at the church. And then we’d come back, and we’d have breakfast. And the pastor was really old. I think he was in his 80s when I got there. And one morning he, he really shouldn’t have said Mass. He had assistants. I think there were one or two assistants there. But he would get our Mass, and he couldn’t finish the Mass. We jut sat there and we sat there. He was too sick. He should have taken, like, the day off. But he didn’t and we had to leave, you know, because school was going to start and we had breakfast. And for breakfast you could have cold cereal or oatmeal, and I took oatmeal, and they didn’t give you milk. I drank a lot of milk, so my mother had to pay extra for milk or they’d pour you a glass of milk. And it was -- they had their own cow, and this man they hired, they had someone working there. The first man who was there eventually retired. And they had a really nice-looking younger man. I’ll get to that later.

Because there was a lot going on in boarding school! Not, but conversations, and things, you know. You don’t have much freedom, and I had never really discussed nuns. I mean, I went to school. I liked Sister Geraldine and I liked the other nuns that I had. There was one that did have a nervous breakdown, and I’ll have to tell you about her. (In the July 24, 2003, phone conversation, she recalled that the nun’s family was rich, and they wanted one of their children to go into religious life, "and they selected her." Except that this was not that child’s wish; "she wanted to become a nurse or something like that," Jeannine said. The combined pressure of the heavy workload, parental expectations and her own dismay at not being able to chart her own course in life, contributed to the breakdown, she surmised. "And after she broke down," Jeannine said, "boy, were they hush-hush about it!") But anyhow, we went to school and that was it. We didn’t, we just didn’t really converse about nuns. Well, boy, this was like a hotbed of gossip: "She’s gonna be, she’s gonna be hard to live with," because, you know, these nuns had us for 24 hours a day. At the time, the ones, they taught school all day, and they had to correct papers, but they also had to take care of us. We had a study period right after class. We’d go out, well, let’s see. We had a classroom, and I took piano lessons, OK? We’d have our lunch at about noon, ’cause we used to say the Angelus at noon before our, along with our meal prayer.

And after class they had what they called collation (a snack). And they would serve cookies, and I got milk, and a few others did, and I guess the other ones drank water. I just don’t know. And we had some cookies. They were -- they looked like -- the other girls called them "washboards." They had all little ridges. And, man, they were hard. It’s a good thing that I had good teeth because, man, they were as hard as dog biscuits. And then other times, they had something like -- I liked, I loved molasses, and they’d smear molasses over homemade bread. Now this was good. And these cookies -- I don’t know that we had anything else. We never had peanut butter. Peanut butter was unheard of at that school. They never put peanut butter on anything. But these cookies must have been cheap, and they probably never went bad, because, as I said, they were like rocks. And the kids used to complain.

And then after we had collation, we had to go for a walk if it wasn’t raining. But we had to get exercise. So we’d walk down the main street, all two by two, and one of these nuns that had taught school all day, you’d have Mother Ste-Irene, and Mother Ste-Sabine, and Mother Ste -- they had to take turns. We didn’t have the nuns from, some nuns never did it, but these nuns like the boarding school nuns, the ones in charge of the boarders, so we were limited to three or four nuns. They must have been very tired. So anyway, we’d go for the walk, then we’d come back and we’d have our study period, and then it would be suppertime, and we’d go down and have our supper. And then some kids earned their keep, or helped pay for their room and board, by washing the dishes. I don’t know if they did it at noon, but I think they stayed there and washed the dishes. There was enough time for you to wash the dishes and go to class. And that was a lot of dishes, because, you know -- knives, forks, plates, bowls -- I don’t think we ever had coffee or tea to drink. A couple of times we’d have hot chocolate or cocoa. The first year I don’t think we ever had any. But anyhow, later on, this nun, they sent her to another school, and we got a nun who was trained in institutional cooking. She was very young. And the meals were like at a first-class hotel.

And we had the art teacher. She could draw, she was a very -- she could paint and draw and do all these things -- she had a special room with a lot of windows in it, and she taught art. And I was taking piano lessons, but I would have liked to take art lessons. And I asked my mother if I could quit taking piano lessons and take art instead. I didn’t know if I could draw. But I wanted to. But she said no. So I never got to the art room. Well, this nun -- you’re always in silence, there was a little bell or a clack, a thing that went "click," you know, and when you sat down, you’d say your prayers, your meal prayers for example, and you’d sit down. And the oldest students at the head of the table would serve and pass the food down. If you’d had, like, meatloaf, potatoes, vegetables, you’d pass it down. And they made enough. And if you wanted seconds, the kid would pass the plate back and you could have seconds. I don’t remember what dessert was. We really didn’t have cake. I think it was always mostly cookies. Well, anyway, they never rang the bell so you could talk until everyone was served. And then they could eat and you could talk.

And this nun sat -- it was like on two or three steps, she climbed the steps and her chair -- she had a chair that had armrests, this art nun. And she could see how people ate, if your manners were well or if you were talking when you weren’t supposed to be talking. There was constant supervision. Well, when we got this nun that could rally cook that second year, she would take, like, mashed potatoes, and she’d make it -- she must have had a mold, and this these mashed potatoes would come out in the middle of this tray, and be surrounded by the meat, and it was shaped like a chicken, you know, a big chicken. And she served it with very -- it was very appetizing. Not only that, it tasted good. The other one was not a good cook. They probably -- supposedly, these nuns went into this domestic end of it because they couldn’t teach. Well, I think this woman that was this cook, could’ve taught cooking. She was so good. And it was presented with just so much flair and it really tasted better. Well, then, this nun would crab because "they see this food," she says, "and they’re so hungry." We’re dishing this food out. Eventually, I was one of the servers. The first year I wasn’t. I think I got in there the second or third year that I was there. And she didn’t like the way that everybody was eating so fast. Well, it tasted so good and you’re growing children. And they weren’t shoveling it in, you know, holding their utensils wrong or anything like that. But, um, they, you know, the other stuff was sort of tasteless, you know what I mean, but you had to eat it anyway, ’cause you were hungry. And she was always crabbing about something.

Well, this old janitor that they had, he retired. Maybe he got ill. And they hired this real nice-looking man. He was probably about maybe 38 or 40. He wasn’t very old, and he was married and he had several children. And occasionally, he’d have one of his younger children with him. On a nice day or something like that; maybe his wife had to go someplace. But it was not a child of school age. Well, this man would be cutting through, maybe on breakfast, to go maybe through to the furnace room or, you know, there had to be a hot water tank and boilers and whatever there was. It was a coal furnace, you know what I mean.. I don’t know whether there was just one, because I saw it several times. And when he started to come, she always would stop him and talk to him. And talk to him. She’d show him pictures that had been drawn. I don’t know if she did it or her student. But he never could get by without speaking to her. Well, of course, all the kids, "Ahh! That’s her boyfriend!" Now, I’m sure he was polite, but anyway, this went on for a long time, because "Ah! Ah! That’s the guy that she likes, that’s the guy that she likes!" Well, wouldn’t you know. I don’t know. I didn’t say that because -- I don’t know why. I said, "Well, you know, you can tell there was interest there," but I didn’t say that because one of these kids said it in the classroom, and I don’t know whether the nun overheard it -- you see, the nuns were eating at the same time we were.

But it got back to Mother Superior. And she got bawled out because she was taught -- you know what I mean? It was giving scandal. Now this guy was not interested in her. You know what I mean, not in that way. He was polite and -- but she must have really got that. Well, when she got back to the next meal, we didn’t know it, none of us knew it, but she started bawling the whole assembly there that was eating the meal. And I guess she really got in hot water, and she was upset, and she was accusing us of all sorts of -- and it was just one person. I don’t know if she ever found out who told. But maybe she didn’t but, oh, she was on our backs for a long time. And we didn’t get much conversation that night. The bell didn’t go off. We just got, you know, really bawled out. Because she was, she was really -- the term is "pissed" -- but, unfortunately, we didn’t feel we were responsible for this because she was the one that stopped him anyhow.

So, anyhow, this was sort of difficult, and believe it or not, the first year I was there, you had to, they used to call them compositions. And I had not written compositions. They would give you "I want you to write about spring, or fall, or some other blah-blah-blah," and then the French teacher would come in, and she’d give different subject. You know, if you could have written one subject in English and translated it into French, you know what I mean, it might have been easier for you. But you had two different subjects. And, oh, believe me, every other word -- I had a French dictionary, a Larousse, that big one; you’ve seen it here in the house. And I had to look up every single word. I didn’t know any, I didn’t know any. This was a struggle. But I did it and I would get good marks in the English one, and I got passing marks in the French compositions. But anyhow, at least I didn’t fail, and I had to learn grammar, the grammar, how to conjugate verbs, and you name it, and believe me, I was, I would have been a ninth grader then. These kids had all these years ahead of me. It was their language. I’m sure they were having a tough time with English.

But, you know, anyhow, so I had, once I had to write a composition. She says, "Make up a story. Anything you want." So, the Depression era, the war hadn’t started yet when I was there. The first year, OK. And I made up a story about a man that was out of work and he’d been looking for work, and he found a ticket to a concert. And I had never been to a concert -- I mean school, where kids sing, but never a professional concert. But he looked, and it was for that night, and he knew where this building was -- I must have picked out something in Detroit, you know, a name that I had heard. So he presented the ticket. He didn’t know if he’d get in, ’cause he wasn’t dirty but he was ill-clad. And he gets in this room and it’s warm. He’s been freezing. It was a cold winter night, and it’s really warm, and the chair it’s upholstered in velvet. You know, a lot of them used to have velvet seats in the movies. Now I think they’re all plastic but they were upholstered. But he sat down in this chair and it was so comfortable. And he noticed the painting, and how it was ornate. There was, like, gold paint. You know, they used to have this gilt stuff in there. And the curtains were this luxurious red velvet. And I was describing something I hadn’t seen at a concert, like I had seen some movie things. Sometimes I’d get to the movies early, but they all didn’t look like this. So maybe I was embellishing it. Anyway, he’d never heard music like this. He listened and he was completely enthralled. And I went on and on. I was describing a poor person that I thought, what a poor person, how a poor person would react to this kind of a situation. And he noticed the people coming in, and how elegantly they were dressed, and you know, no one paid any attention to him. I mean, he wasn’t rebuffed or anything, but he had never been in this kind of a setting. And I went on and on and on and on, and anyway he left the concert and then he started to walk home back in the cold, But he was, like, refreshed or maybe renewed. I don’t think I used those kind of terms, but this had really affected him, and I don’t know.

Anyhow, so I went on, and I got an A on this! And she told me, this was Mother St-Alfred, she said, "You know, you could write." She said, "You should try to get a job with" -- they had positions like this then -- "work for someone who doesn’t like to write letters, who needs a companion," like be a traveling companion and were their personal letters for them. Like someone who travels with them. They have friends and relatives, and she said, "You could really" -- she thought this would be a nice life. I had never heard of that kind of position, really. And she said this would be nice, and I guess she liked the description. This is the best I can tell you, as I remember. Well, I was the worst speller in the world. I always checked a word to make sure that I didn’t misspell so she didn’t see that I was such a rotten speller. But I said (laughs) that I’d be leafing through a dictionary the rest of my natural life writing letters for someone else and sign their name to it, you know what I mean? So anyhow, I didn’t pursue that. But the war broke out and I’m sure those positions didn’t evaporate but I don’t think I ever would have qualified for one. But I said I didn’t think writing was for me. But obviously, she was impressed with the description and the cold wind and the snow, and everything, whatever went on.

So anyhow, that went on, and as I said, I took the piano lessons, and I was really not a good musician. I liked music and I had a good ear. I’d hear the piece and then I would not really read the notes. I knew what came next. So I never -- I could sing, I could carry a tune, Maybe I had the wrong approach, but I never thought I could play the piano well. I took lessons for three years. So anyhow, my aunt, this is my mother’s sister, her name was Corinne, Aunt Corinne. This would be your great-aunt. She was, I think, jealous of my mother. I don’t know why, because she kept sniping and sniping. And I thought she worked for my Uncle Alphonse, who was her brother, a priest, and she was his housekeeper. But only she didn’t do the work. Her daughter, Marielle, you know, like Mariel Hemingway? Her name was Marielle, and she was doing all the work. My aunt did the cooking, but these were not elaborate meals. If she could cook, well, she wasn’t as good a cook as my mother. And I used to have breakfast at school the first year I was there. And then the second year, and after that I’d come home for lunch and I’d come home for dinner, you know, at my uncle’s house. He was the, excuse me, he was the chaplain at the boys’ school. There was a boys’ college there. And it was about two blocks away from our school.

So I’d go there and I’d eat, for lunch I can’t remember. I think there was soup and it was sort of a light meal. But as I said, I wasn’t too interested in food, but I’d be coming home from school for supper, you know. I’d get dismissed after the study period, the study hall as you’d call it. And I’m thinking in French by this time, which really helps when you want to learn a foreign language. And I was thinking, "Boy, des bonnes binnes tonight," That means we were gonna have, I was gonna have pork and beans. Good pork and beans tonight. I was gettin’ every night, I was having pork and beans, and pork and beans. I said, "They’d never eat -- lunch was never pork and beans," but and one day I was over there. The first year they didn’t take me home for Christmas. I got all kinds of Christmas presents. Leona sent me something, Phil and Leona were married, and my mother sent me something. I got present after present after present after present. And I thought, "Gee, if they had pooled the money I could have come home."

(Rolande Pickett suggested that it would have been very difficult for Jeannine, a minor and still a Canadian citizen, to return to the United States and make it back to Canada with international tensions increasing in the years leading up to World War II.)

I was there from September through June. It’s a long time to be away from home. And I didn’t say anything, but you know, if they’re not going to take you home, they’re not going to take you home. So it was on a Sunday, and on Sunday we had a study period in the morning and we’d have one in the afternoon, and we’d take a longer walk. And study hall, I guess you’d call it. We used to call it study period.

And it was almost suppertime. So the nuns came up to me, we were coming home. They said. "Rather than come home and take your coat off and stay there for maybe, 45 minutes, go to your uncle’s and eat supper." So I thanked them and I left. So I got there and -- see, they always ate supper before I did. And I didn’t think anything of it. They didn’t do dishes until after I finished. So they’re sitting down and they have chicken and potatoes and a whole bunch of other stuff, and so Marielle got up and she served me, and I’m served a plate of pork and beans. And I looked at my aunt and I said, "I would like some of that, that you’re having." And she says, "No." She said, "We just have enough for us." My uncle had eaten, and I said, "Aha! I’m eating beans seven days a week." Fortunately, (laughs) I wasn’t having gas, but if that had affected me, this would have been miserable, you know? And I thought, "Ahhhh, she’s sniping at my mother." The term p-i-s-s-e-d wasn’t in my vocabulary. "She’s just mad ’cause I’m here." And my mother was paying for my education, and she gave something to my uncle. So it wasn’t that I was a charity case. You know, my mother had, she had this store. So I never said anything. I got home and I, I just didn’t say anything.

But I asked my aunt to do my laundry. She says, "No, I won’t do your laundry." She says, "You’ll have to find somebody yourself." She says, "I’m not going to do your laundry." And I thought, wow. And I didn’t know anybody in town. But, I said, "I don’t know anybody that’ll do my laundry." Gee, I put this off and I put this off because my mother had made arrangements for them to wash my clothes. I didn’t have my clothing tagged. So my aunt gave me the name of someone. And I really didn’t speak very good French. I could, you know what I mean, I had just been there. So she gave me an address and finally I stopped and said who I was and who had recommended her. And I said, "Will you do my laundry and how much will you charge?" So she did my laundry, and I dropped it all off. And I had a lot because I had put this off several weeks. You know, I was just, I didn’t -- I was really, I guess, overwhelmed. This was a completely alien, foreign thing to me. I had never lived in this kind of a situation. So this woman did an excellent job and I mean everything was well-pressed and cleaned, and well, I didn’t -- not that I wasn’t a sloppy eater, but I wasn’t spilling gravy and everything all over me, you know. But it was just normal dirt, and she did a really good job. And she had children, and she used to send, my mother used to send me money. What would happen was that this little boy would come out and talk to me, and I was so impressed that this little boy, about 3, could talk French. I should have known better, but I used to give him a nickel or a dime, and sometimes a quarter. I didn’t see him every day. But (laughs) I was very impressed with these children who had -- I shouldn’t have been -- but he was cute.

So anyhow, but my aunt really sort of gave me a hard time. And she told me some things that I did tell to Rolande later on, and I’m not going to tell you. (Well, here are a few she recounted in July 2003: Corinne, like her sister Alphonsine, married a Kirouac brother. After Father Alphonse, their brother died, Corinne lived elsewhere, but did not take Marielle with her. Marielle lived with other people, and "she got her freedom." Marielle did much of the work at the rectory; "Corinne sort of dodged everything ... she coasted," Jeannine said.) Not anything -- she spoke derogatory, derogatorily about my father. And I didn’t know if this was true, and I really -- I’ll tell you. She said my grandmother, which is your mother’s mother, didn’t like my father. Well, I don’t know that he had that much -- you know, I don’t know whether that was true or not. I did tell Rolande later on. I never told my mother. This was after my mother was dead. And I told her about how I ate beans for all those suppers for years and years and years. And I ate -- beans are good for you. It’s protein. So there was nothing wrong. But when you eat something from September to June, every night, it does -- I ate it, but, I mean, it was sort of -- I was annoyed with her.

Marielle was always nice. I think she got the short end of the stick. I don’t blame her mother for that. I do blame the nuns, because she, just to show you, that winter I didn’t go home, I had spending money. My mother would send me a dollar every time she wrote a letter. Well, I didn’t have any money. I had no place to spend this money. I was in school. I went to bed -- we were in bed by 8:30. We were up at six. I did go for a lunch or dinner. But I didn’t have a fortune, but I had money. So it was Christmas vacation and I was going to go to the movies, and I said, "I’m going to go to the movies and I want to take Marielle with me." I told my aunt and uncle. Wow! You would have thought I was going to take her to a den of iniquity. They said, "No, no. She can’t go to the movies." Because I asked Marielle if she would go with me. And she was an adult! She must have been eight or 10 years older than me. Do you know what I mean? She didn’t go anyplace! Well, she went to church, and I said, "Why can’t she go to the movies?" I said, "I go to the movies all the time when I’m home!" And it was a French picture. I wanted to see any kind of a movie. Believe me, I used to go to the movies once a week. It cost a dime. You know? This was -- you can live without movies, but I was ... looking forward to seeing it. But they wouldn’t let her go. They said, "No, she’ll get ideas." I thought, "What if she get ideas?! She might enjoy this movie." Well, I went, and it was a movie from France. And I, it wasn’t the same genre as the movies I was accustomed to. A different culture, a different kind. I stayed there, and it was just one feature. And I came home. I’m sure she would have liked it. Because the French -- France’s way of life is a little different from the French-Canadian way of life, but the language, some of the language I did miss out on, I’ll be honest with you. But anyway, I got to the movies, and I think, I don’t know if I ever went to the movies again. I really didn’t enjoy that.

But it was a long, long year, and there is more I’ll have to tell you about Aunt Corinne when I went back as an adult, and I went to oh, I don’t know where I went to Sherbrooke. I don’t know. Oh, no, it was when I went to see Yolande, but we did go to another town. And I’ll tell you about the money situation. But anyhow, those relatives -- she was so different from my family. My family was outgoing and joyous and fun and everybody always came home and told jokes at suppertime. She was just grim and foreboding and she was really black hair; she was like Uncle Gus. Her hair never -- when she died she still didn’t have any gray hair. She had dark brown eyes, and she, she didn’t turn gray, you know what I mean. And she went shopping once and she came back with a really nice new hat. Marielle was earning the money, but she got the salary, OK? She bought her two new sweaters, and they were the ugliest colors I’d ever seen. And she bought her a hat that was for a child that was 10. She didn’t buy anything stylish for Marielle; Marielle was in her 20s. She picked the clothing, and I just -- I thought that was very, very unfair. This was when I was going to school.

But anyhow, the school experience, after I got accustomed to the language and to the routine, I really liked it. I looked forward to going back. The first year was very difficult, but it’s something that, you know, you live through, and it was a good lesson, and I learned to make -- I never really had to make very many adjustments, you know? Well, I had to eat -- well, they didn’t make me ’cause I didn’t want to. But I couldn’t go out and carouse, or anything like that, I mean, I had rules. But this was a totally different kind of way of life. And I went with the flow. At first, I didn’t resist, but it was something so foreign. And by the second year I had made more friends and my friend Yolande Rousseau was one of them, and there was Eleanor Auger, that was spelled "Auger," A-u-g-e-r. And she became a nun. It was called the Equipieres Sociales. They didn’t wear a habit, they wore street clothes. This was a long time ago. So when they went to call on people’s homes, people weren’t intimidated by them. But it was a new, a new order that had been started. She ran -- she got to the point where she was in charge of it. And so I made some French friends, but these were both French, but Eleanor’s father, her mother was English and her father was -- not English, he was French, but he spoke English, but her mother was from the United States. I met the family. She had an older brother who became ...

I was talking about Eleanor Auger’s brother, who became a White Father.

Well, I really didn’t see Eleanor Auger after that, because she became a nun, and while I went to Canada a couple times I didn’t know exactly where the motherhouse was located, or the -- I don’t know if they call it a motherhouse. So, when I went through Montreal, I’d have to change trains. And I never saw her....

So anyhow, to get back to Eleanor Auger. We were all in school. If you’ve ever been like, in a school where you eat, sleep, drink, take your bath, wash your hair, and don’t go out. You’d go out once a day and if it was raining too hard you don’t go out because a lot of people didn’t have rain gear. So you know, you were living with these people seven days a week for months at a time. And her brother was going to college -- this was before, maybe he thought he had a vocation then. And they were taking -- I think it was classic Greece. I don’t think this was Latin. Classical, Greek, the classical language. They had, well, they were pretty stiff courses. And he came back with this, and he came home, he’d be home on weekends, and he told her, you know, about this. And the saying went -- and this is Greece, Greek, I think now -- "Oculae bella palina, ella pi-pee and ella ca-CAH," (laughs) I don’t know what that means. But it was supposed to be, "Palina," I think, is either a city or a state, and "oculae bella," oh, "Bella: is beauty or pretty, "palina" is a city, and I don’t know what ella pi-pee and ella ca-CAH means.

(Thanks to the efforts of Marie Timperley, one of the principal translators for the Kirouac Family Association’s quarterly magazine "Le Tresor des Kirouac," we all can know what this means. In Greek, the phrase reads: "Ouk elabon polin; elpis ephê kaka." The phrase refers to the siege of a town during a war. In English, it means: "They did not take the town for lack of hope." But the original Greek, read with a Quebec accent, sounds like: "Ouqué [où est] la bonne Pauline, elle pisse et fait caca.")

But of course, the kids up there, these young guys, just took it for the way it sounded and they would get a laugh out of this. I guess probably this is an old thing. Maybe you’ve heard it when you were in college, I don’t know. But we thought that, well, we were kids, 14 or 15 -- we thought that was so funny.

And then these guys were pretty smart. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this. I hadn’t heard this, and they were pretty tough tests. And this one guy discovered -- probably someone else told him. You know, this was pre-ballpoint pens. We had inkwells and you know, you wrote, you know, with a nib on your pens, and stuff like that, and you had blotters. And what they would do is, blotters came in different sizes, and, you know like your Dr. Scholl’s inserts, like these little foam cushions? Well, they would trace out the shape of their both feet on these blotters, and then they’d cut ’em out and they put them in their shoes. And that raises your temperature real high. This guy really didn’t feel good. I’m sure the brothers that were teaching them knew this. I don’t know if they ever made them take their shoes off or not. And they’d say, "Oh, I‘m so sick," blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, you know, and he couldn’t go to class that day. Well, they could make up the test later. But if they needed a couple more days of study or something, then they’d take the blotters out, well, not in front of anybody, and they would have to take the test until they had more time to (laughs) study. And I thought, "Boy, that would be a neat thing." But we never had -- well, we had tests. I won’t say they weren’t hard, but I never thought of -- I thought it was good information to have, but I never used the blotter deal to get off. I thought maybe they’d raise it so high that you’d hurt yourself, you know what I mean?

But anyhow, I really liked the "Oculae bella palina, ella pi-pee and ella ca-CAH." That doesn’t probably make you laugh, but when you’re 14, that’s really (laughs), it’s really funny....

Now we’re gonna go back. I thought of this. I was a boarder. My mother sent me to this school in Canada. And they were going to have a play or something. And it was a free day. I don’t know if it was a holy day of obligation or what, but we didn’t have school that day. So because my uncle was in town that day, he was the chaplain of the school. I got to go home. I had to go back at suppertime. So on my way out, there were two other girls, they were sisters, they were boarders, and they used to live about a block from where the school was. And they said, "Let’s go skiing." And I said, "Well, I don’t have any skis." "Well, my sister got a brand-new outfit. She got a parka, and pants, and skis." And they said, "You could use hers and we could use" -- they had other members of the family that had skis. And I thought, "Gee. She hasn’t even worn this." And I thought, "Holy cow," you know. And they said, "No, no, that’s all right, that’s all right." So I went and had lunch at my uncle’s place. It was his priest’s house, and I went skiing. We were supposed to be back at four o’clock. Well, time got away from us. And we really didn’t get to the mountain. We were doing cross-country skiing. And believe me, I didn’t know anything about skiing, but it was hard. I fell once, and you try and get up on a ski, you know. It’s a wonder I didn’t break my ankles. Anyhow, we got back, and I came back to school after supper. And I was supposed to be there at four but I didn’t make it. And they didn’t either.

But anyhow, when I got back, boy, were they mad, because -- at me, because I had overstayed, and they probably figured I was out, you know, again, that was the first year I was there. I didn’t go home for Christmas. And they said, "Oh, you know, she’s probably out with a boy, 14." I didn’t even know anybody there, you know what I mean. So I got back and, um, they had an attic, they really would, if you did something bad, they would call your name, and you would stand up and then they would read off a list of your, oh, what they found were faults, or character flaws, or what have you. And then after they were through correcting you -- the whole, the whole -- this was done to the boarders. I don’t know if they ever did it, because the nuns I had, the English-speaking nuns that I had, didn’t do this in class. But this was for the boarders. Then after they finished telling you, you know, telling you what you had to correct and straighten out, blah-blah-blah, then you’d have to sit down and say, "Merci, mere." That was like, "Thank you, mother." They were like Mother St. Alfred, and you’d sit down. Well, I had seen a lot of these things happen to other people, and just before recreation they’d pick someone out. Maybe this girl was talking in line. These were terrible infractions. Once a girl walked in to chapel, and we used to wear these net veils. You had to wear, women had to wear hats then. And for Sunday you wore a little white veil. And it was real pretty. And during the week you had to wear a black veil, you had to cover your hair. And this girl walked in to the chapel, and she was smiling. And they were mad at her. She wasn’t talking, she was smiling. I thought, "Maybe she’s glad to go to chapel." We were in line. We were going to say our night prayers. So anyhow, they didn’t actually reprimand me. But they, they said, "Ah! There’s a girl whose character runs very deep. You don’t" -- in other words, I was concealing an inner, my true character wasn’t coming to the surface. And I thought, "Well, I didn’t do anything. I was late." But I did break a rule.

But anyhow, it was really a very strict school. I really had never experienced anything like that in the United States. And what I told my mother about this later on, when I got out of school, I said, "This is what they used to do." "Well," she said, "the Assumption Sisters never try to publicly humiliate you." I don’t know why they didn’t do this to me. Maybe they thought I wouldn’t come back and I was a paying boarder, you know what I mean, but anyhow, there were two girls there, they were twins, at this school. While I’m on the school subject, I’ll stay there. And they were fraternal twins. One was a blonde, and the other was a brunette. And the brunette, was, oh, always getting in trouble. And by "trouble," I mean, ah, she’d talk in line, or, it was, she wasn’t -- she would try to get away with it, don’t misunderstand, but you were, when you went from classroom to classroom, or from the classroom to the refectatory, you didn’t -- I didn’t say that right -- you didn’t talk. Well, you know, those were major infractions. So she was always in hot water, and her sister, the blonde one, was, she was smaller and thinner and the other girl wasn’t fat, but one must have looked like the mother and one must have looked like the father. They were night and day, but they were twins.

So anyhow, this dark-haired girl wrote a diary and she kept a diary. And that wasn’t against the rules. But what she did is she was, monitoring this one sister, this mother’s name was Mother Ste-Irene. That’s Mother Sainte-Irene. And the other one was, I can’t remember her name. It started with an "m." And for some reason, this Mother Ste-Irene really, they got to be friends. But what she’d do during the class periods, I didn’t know this, I was in this classroom once -- I don’t know how come -- and she sent this pupil in with a little note to this to this Mother Ste-, It’s wasn’t Matilda, it started with an "m." And I sure can’t remember what it was. "Ah," she said in French, "a little note from Sister Irene, Mother Irene." So she’d read it and she’d send it back. But I don’t think she welcomed the, um, the intrusion. You know what I mean? She just should have said she recognized the student, I guess.

So anyhow, this girl was monitoring, writing this down in her diary, and other things that went on. She’d say, "Oh, Mother Ste-" -- I’ll say Matilda, that wasn’t her name -- "is her friend." And she was going on and on and on and on and on. Well, wouldn’t you know, that the nuns found this diary, and -- I don’t know who found it. And it was turned over to the mother superior. She was in her 80s. We’re talking a very elderly woman. And she read this and, oh! She was really incensed that this younger nun was, she had found a friend. I think this is what it was. Sometimes you find a kindred spirit. Or she thought she did. And she would think of something in the daytime and she would write it to her. There wasn’t anything bad about this, but I guess you were supposed to have a different reserve, more of a reserve, when you were a nun. I don’t know.

Well, she got called out on the carpet! Well, the next time that she had us for the recreation period after supper, man! We had to, you had to stand there when they were upset, and she was ranting and raving about this diary and what they said and it wasn’t true, and she went on and on and on and on and on. "Well," I thought, "I wish they just would have spoken to the girl." We all carried the brunt of this because, I think, she talked to us for 20 minutes. We only had about a half an hour of 45 minutes, depending on he day, to talk after supper. You know what I mean. Usually, it was just a half-hour. It really, it was sort of a pain in the neck for us, you know what I mean. But kids, I suppose, are hard to handle. We couldn’t do anything, we couldn’t go anyplace. But I think, probably, when I look back now, they didn’t have any break from class work, from the testing, not the testing, the correcting of the papers, and then they had us, so they were probably working maybe 20 hours a day. And this wasn’t our fault, but it was probably not, you know, a good situation for these nuns. They were really overworked.

Anyhow, it went to a, they, I think the notes stopped. I’m assuming they did. Because I wasn’t in that classroom. Just once. I was in there for a special event. I don’t know what it was....

So anyhow, these two girls left. And the little quiet one -- everybody thought was going to be a nun and later, years later when I was out of school, the dark one who was such a tomboy from the standpoint of she’d stand her ground and she’d try to talk in line, not, and she’d whisper, I mean. If someone talked you didn’t have to answer them, you know what I mean. But she went and she joined the order. She became a nun and her sister got married, so it’s never the one that you think is going to be the, the despot turns out to be, you know, a more savory character....

Well, I have to tell you about a part of my life. This word wasn’t in my vocabulary then, but it was sibling rivalry. And, like, I was the youngest of the family, and, um, there was Jack and Jules closest to me in age, and then my brother Lawrence had died in between (Brothers Lawrence and Robert both died in Waterville, Quebec, of diphtheria, a contagious disease. The Kirouacs owned a bakery in Waterville. Rolande Pickett recalled: "So the doctor says, ‘I’m not going to say nothing.’ So, because nobody would buy bread, you know. So, whatchacall, I forget his name, anyway. He was sick and sick and he was in my mother’s arms in the kitchen, but she called the priest. The priest says, ‘I’ll come and make him his first Communion.’ He says, ‘I’ll come back tonight.’ And he died."), so there was four years’ difference between Jules and I.

Well, for some reason or other, Jack, my brother Jack, just -- I hope I didn’t say this yesterday -- took this. He didn’t want me around, OK? So like I’m talking, like school vacation. I come down for breakfast. I don’t know how long I slept. I come down and he was sitting at the kitchen table. I couldn’t sit down and have breakfast while he sat at the table. I had to wait till he was finished. Now, he was about five-and-a-half-years older than I. And, as I told you, my mother wasn’t confrontational. And she would never say, "Jack, she can sit down, she’s gonna have her breakfast." She just, this wasn’t her nature. So I would just -- and I said, "I wonder why he doesn’t like me." I mean, I didn’t, I liked him, you know. He sang, he could pick at the piano, you know. I was impressed with him, but, boy, he didn’t like me. And this, this went on, I don’t know how long. I didn’t keep track.

But, um, I was at Rolande and Jack’s not too long ago -- oh, maybe two years -- and I brought this up. And Rolande says, "Oh, yes, I remember." And I said, "Ah, but Ma never said a word. I couldn’t sit down until Jack was through. I couldn’t sit" (slams hand on table) -- at supper there was no, there was no leeway. We ate supper. But since on vacation breakfast was staggered, everybody that worked was gone. This was before my mother had this store. And I could not sit down. Later on, when I heard of sibling rivalry, I don’t know what the rivalry was about, but it existed. I probably, I didn’t make a, I didn’t yell, "I can sit down if I want to." You know what I mean. I would just wait until he got through and I’d eat -- I didn’t eat much anyway, so I wasn’t starved.

But when I went to boarding school, my brother Jack started to write me. And he had this beautiful handwriting. And I told you, he sent me music, and all sorts of things -- well, not all sorts of things. But the letters -- he had, he had just beauti -- Jules had nice handwriting, but Jack’s was just gorgeous. And I guess once I was gone, I don’t know whether there was guilt or something, and then of course, when I came out of school, he got drafted, and I would write him letters. And I sent him a few things. But this was actually a case, pardon me, a case of sibling, but the word was not in my vocabulary, and I never heard of it. Now I realize that’s what happened.

And Rolande said, "Oh, yeah," she says, "I knew about it," but my mother, as I said, couldn’t, couldn’t, I don’t know, couldn’t bring herself to face up to things of this nature. I know she said her first inkling -- I’ll go back to this -- she had Jolicoeur, Phil and Rolande, and Carmen. Carmen was the youngest child. And the next child wasn’t born yet. And she put Carmen in the crib, and for some reason, Carmen didn’t want to go to sleep. And my mother said, "Yes, you have to go to sleep now." And Carmen, she was, well, old enough to say yes and no, let’s put it that way. And she was resisting, and she was, and my mother was trying to enforce this by speaking to her. And she says, this went on for two hours. This kid didn’t want to go to sleep. I don’t know what time of the day it was. If I said "nap," I shouldn’t have said it. She wouldn’t go, she wouldn’t -- she was carrying on, just going on and on and on and on. And my mother said, "I vowed then that if a child didn’t want to go to bed, she would just sit there and that was it," you know? But, she said, she would never go through that again. And I think, this was, like, the fourth child, and as I said, she had 12 children....

It was, it was difficult, and I just couldn’t understand. I’d never done anything to Jack, you know what I mean. But, of course, I existed into that time, and I was probably in the way. But it was just one of those things. And when he was an adult and was married, he was, he needed a small loan. It was $200. And when he went to get one, he had, like, a house payment and I don’t know, something else. Anyway, and they said they couldn’t give him any more money. But he always worked overtime. But they only thing they ever judged your salary on years ago: They would never take a wife’s salary into consideration because she would get married and you, you wouldn’t have that money coming in.

So I told Jack, I said, "Gee, you know. I can get --" they had a credit union at the Grand Trunk Western. And I had opened an account there. I don’t know how much money I had in there. So I said, "I’ll borrow it for you, and you can pay me back!" So I went up there and I did not know anything about borrowing money. I said, "I’d like to borrow $200," and they said, "Yeah." And they said, "What do you want to borrow it for?" "Well," I said, "It’s really not for me," I said. "I’m borrowing it for my brother, but he’s going to pay me back." And they wouldn’t lend, they wouldn’t give me the money. And so it just, ah, I was so sorry. I had no idea. So I don’t know if he got the money or he did without it. But I really goofed up. Now I would know better. They probably wouldn’t lend me any money because I haven’t got a job....

We used to go on picnics and we used to go to this Waterford Dam when we lived on Sheridan. (As Gus recalls: "Every Sunday, just about, until night, we’d be in Walled Lake. That’s where we’d have the ballgames and all the, all the picnicking at Walled Lake in them days, that one summer. Yeah, the whole bunch of us -- Phil, Jolicoeur. Well, they had the cars, so [chuckles] we had to go with them.) And somehow, I think, by the time we got to Kerby, I’m not too sure, but there was a place that was called the Old Homestead. And they charged 50 cents a car to get in. It didn’t make any difference how many people were in the car, and they had a nice place where you could park. Now it was not paved, but the road was good, you know. There was swimming, and this, place rented five cottages. You could rent cottages. We never did. And they had a, a stand that sold pop and I think they sold hot dogs, and then on Saturday night, maybe Saturday afternoon -- we always went there on Sunday -- they had a beer garden. And at four o’clock in the afternoon they had a live band there, and they would play music until they closed at night. And they had the same thing that went on Saturday. I don’t know what time they opened on Saturday, but a lot of people went on picnics on Saturday.

So we went there, and then the next year we went there, it was changed to Bill’s Place. The prices were the same. It didn’t cost any more to get in, but they got a good parking area. You could swim. There was a raft out there. I couldn’t swim that far, but you could dive off the raft, and it was pretty good, except that someone had thrown some bottles in there -- probably some drunk picnicker. And one day when we were there, one kid cut a foot. Not anybody in our picnic but someone that -- a lot of people went in these, this picnic area. But I could go into the beer garden as long as I was with an adult. But you couldn’t dance in your bathing suits. That was absolutely forbidden. You could have your bathing suit on, but you had to have a covering, like a shirt over it, you know, or a blouse or something, but they didn’t want contact with that little clothes. Well, you know, it was still a little, oh, I guess, people would drink and go a little too far. I don’t know. We were never there at night. We were there until after supper. We had two meals there.

And what my brothers would do -- they loved to play baseball, OK? And they would buy a keg of beer. And there were -- all my brothers generally showed up, OK? And they would get a game up of the single men against the married men, and other picnickers would show up, and there would be, you know, two couples there. If the guys wanted to play baseball, well, two guys can’t -- well, two guys can play catch. So they’d get up two teams. And the single guys had to be on one team, and the married men had to be on the other team. And then, after this was over, I don’t know who won these games the most. I always used to think it was the single men because they had less responsibility. Then they’d tell these guys, "Well, we got a keg of beer here. Now that the game’s over, you’re welcome to have some beer." And you had to furnish your own glass, but, boy, these people were crazy about that.

So they’d drink this beer, but it didn’t last that long, because you take seven or eight guys on each team. If they all -- well, Jack and Jules were a little too young to drink, but, I mean, it doesn’t last long because, you’d bring a big glass, and that beer would disappear and then they’d go swimming, and they’d eat and then they’d go dance some more. Dancing was sort of a big thing when we moved here. You know, it was ballroom dancing. And so, they’d have a good time and they would meet, not friends, but they would meet new people and they -- it was sort of a jovial atmosphere. These guys were glad that they could play baseball, because there wasn’t, they didn’t have enough to have a game. I don’t know if the girlfriends or boyfriends liked it, but you used to spread blankets, the ones that wanted to sit and watch. And you, know, so you’d watch them play, and I don’t know if they offered the women drinks, ’cause I didn’t hang around for the beer.

So anyhow, one day when I went there, I used to wear my bathing suit there most of the time, and then I’d just take off my clothes, you know. And they had, like, a bathhouse, and there must have been 10 or 12 little private things. There was a bench that was attached to the wall, and there was a door that closed and you could go and get undressed. I don’t know what the men’s place was like. And so, when you came out from the water, you’d have privacy, and you’d take off your wet suit and you, you’d just put on your play clothes or something.

So anyway, I had been swimming. We had been there -- I can’t -- we went there for more than one year. I know that, because picnics were something that everybody enjoyed. I used to burn to a crisp. They didn’t have any sort of sunblock. And I would get blisters on my back. I mean I really get -- I’m not the only one, but I was really fair. And I really, I really got burned to a crisp. So anyhow, this one time, I had been -- well, I couldn’t swim, dog paddle -- but I had been in the water and now I was taking off my suit for the rest of the day and I was going to get dressed. And I was in this little dressing room, and you always had to bring your -- everybody had their own towel, so my mother must have had a, almost, a load of towels just from the picnic, you know what I mean. Well, it wasn’t an automatic washer, it was an agitator. So anyhow, I wiped off my toe, and I saw a little black thing there.

So I, I tried to get it off. I said, "How come it’s not...?" I thought it was a little piece of leaf. And here I must have nicked my toe and it was a leech. I had never seen a leech before. So I pulled it off with my hands and I took my shoe and I squashed it (banging sound). But if I hadn’t noticed that darn thing, well, I don’t know, I would have died, because this was a great big leech, but it was a leech and it was very busy on my foot. And I don’t know if we had any antiseptic or not. I don’t know that I told anyone. I was, like, in grade school. Maybe I should have, but, well, fortunately (raps table three times) no infection. I don’t know if leeches can give you an infection or not, but I had that....

And I’m going to jump now to when we moved on Crane. I was older now because when we moved there I was in the fifth grade. So right on the corner of Crane and Harper there was an A&P store. They had, you know, stores in all the neighborhoods. C.F. Smith was a big chain, but this was just a block away. And there was a butcher shop. There was the Crane (motion picture) show, and there was a store and there was this butcher shop. Well, so we still had an icebox. But the iceman came around every day so, you know, you always had a fresh block of ice. He had to put a sign in the window: 10 pounds, 20 pounds. I don’t know if they had 25 pounds. Maybe they had, even had 50 pounds. Some people might have had a big icebox. But you just put up the weight of the block of ice that you’d want and he’d chop it off and carry it on his shoulder and bring it in the house and put it in your icebox for you.

So anyhow, I would go to this A&P in the afternoon. Like I said, with lack of refrigeration, by the time my mother would send me, the store was crowded and it wasn’t pick a number. And as I said, I was short and skinny, and all these people were ahead of me. And I’d stand there and I stand there. And these, there were men in the stores. There were more men than women in the stores, and I was about the only kid there. And they’d say, "I’m next, I’m next." And they’d crowd ahead of me and they’d crowd ahead of me and I knew they weren’t next ’cause I’d been there such a long time. And then the manager would spot me or one of the clerks would spot me and say, "No. She’s next." But I had been there for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and all these people were crowding ahead of me.

So anyway, I was going to the store every day after school. And so one day I got really upset and I told my mother, "You know, I don’t know how come I always have to go to the store. Jack and Jules would never go to the store. They’d come home first. ... I’m the only one that has to go to the store." And she says, "Well," she says "they hurry up and they change their clothes and they leave so fast I can’t catch ’em," so I had to go to the store anyway. So I used to go on Saturday afternoon. I don’t know what I went for, but probably something for Sunday, ’cause the store wasn’t open on Sunday. And they weren’t busy on Saturday afternoon. And I had, like, just taken my bath and I was all cleaned up, you know. I was probably 11 by this time, and I’d go there and this manger that was there -- they’d just have one clerk there on Saturday and it was the manager of the store. And they’d talk to me and they’d talk to me, and I’d get the groceries or whatever it was and I’d come home. And I’d tell Rolande about this conversation, what he said and what I said and blah-blah-blah, you know. And I just, you know, really, I used to think he talked a lot. And Rolande said, "Well," she said, "he likes you." (laughs). And he was a young guy, you know what I mean? And then I got really uncomfortable, because (I was) 11, you know what I mean, or maybe I went there when I was 12, too. It was, you know, I wasn’t ready for -- these were not romantic conversations, but he kept me there to talk to me. So anyway, it was one of those things that I never forgot, ’cause I wasn’t bright enough to recognize that someone might have been interested in me....

When Jules got out of high school, we were living on Crane. As I say, this is potpourri, but these are different things. And on this, the first paycheck that Jules ever got, he cashed it before he came home. And until he went in service, he gave me 50 cents a week allowance. And I was so surprised. I mean, I said, "You don’t have to give me this. I don’t know why." ... I never, you know, not that I used to go to the show once a week, and I still wasn’t buying a lot of candy; my mom had a candy store but I was not eating her out of house and home. I used to take these wintergreen balls. They were four for a penny but I used to ask her, "Can I have four of these?" And this was before I went to high school, and after that, Ruth and I -- my friend Ruth Romain and I -- used to go for a walk. And we’d each chew these balls, you know? They tasted real good. And that was a lot. Well that was the going price. So I got 50 cents a week, and until he got drafted, but anyhow, he was very generous. Jack never offered, he never -- I didn’t tell anybody else. I took it, but I, I just didn’t maybe feel that I deserved it.

Well, I did used to keep score for him. He’d want to know the baseball score, and he’d tell me, you know, "You’d make one of these, you draw one of these things where you know, those little squares, and you put fly out or foul out." And I’d have to put the lineup down, and you know, whoever’s going to pitch, and stuff like that. And I used to do that for him. And maybe he thought that was payment for the, you know, for that, I don’t know. But, so I used to listen to the ballgame every day, but I could never distinguish. Because there’s a fly out and there’s a foul out. And there’s a fly out. And I used to write the same thing "FL," (laughs) because I didn’t know the difference. And I don’t know whether he ever compared, but it was an out, anyhow. But he wanted to know, like, what was going on. So I learned.

He taught me how to keep score because I did go to the ballgame once with my girlfriend, and her aunt used to take, pardon me, her sister’s children on Ladies’ Day. ’Cause we got in really cheap, I don’t know what it was. And she took me. I had to pay my own way and my own car fare. So I went to Tiger Stadium (in her childhood, it would have been known as Briggs Stadium) very young, in grade school. And her name was Mary Green. And she worked at the Grand Trunk when she was single. And she never had any children, but she came back later on, and she worked there when I did. And we always used to go there, so I sued to see the -- I saw Charlie Gehringer, and Gerry Walker, and Hank Greenberg, and there were more -- Billy Rogell, I think, was there then. ’Cause I went more than once, and their, I think Schoolboy Rowe pitched. And I didn’t see them actually always on the field. Gehringer was on the field, Hank Greenberg was, but you’d see the pitchers, you know what I mean. I don’t know who pitched during this, you know, you know, who was pitching. But you saw the pitchers because they were in the dugout. So anyhow, that was my first experience at a ballpark....

I’ve been talking for an hour and a half. Sweetie (her dog; adopted, 1988; died, 2001]) looks at me and I think she thinks I’m nuts. But anyhow, I’m doing the best I can....

I was an adult, and my mother was talking once about this. She says, "I think the only" -- I don’t know if she said "boy" or "child" -- that missed their dad was Jules. She said, "I think Jules missed having a father." And at the time, I just found out since I moved here how I carried on for months and months and months that I asked was my father coming back. And when was he coming back -- was it going to be the next day. And I went on and on and on. It wasn’t, like, two months. It was forever, Rolande said. And she never mentioned that to me. And I guess she probably, I think, I don’t remember this, but I must have missed my father a great deal, because I inquired about his whereabouts. And I know when we lived on Crane once, I was thinking. my girlfriend used to talk about her father -- Ruth. And other children had their fathers. And I’d say, I said, "We don’t" -- I says, to myself I was thinking, "We don’t need a father. My mother is supporting us." ...

One thing about Rene, as I told you, he was tall, and his beard came in very young, and the Western Union in those years they used to deliver the telegrams. Young people used to deliver these telegrams. You had to be 16 years old and you had to have a bike. So Rene got a bicycle, I don’t know, it was a second-hand bike, and he went to the Western Union office and he, he tried to get the job. And as I said, he had a beard and I think he was 14 or 15, he was lying about his age. They didn’t ask for proof. This was, not any kind of coverage; you got hit by a car, it was curtains for you. So anyhow, Rene said, you know, he wanted to deliver these Western Union telegrams. The man said, "Who are you kiddin’?" He said, "You’re 21 if you’re a day!" He says, "This is a job for young kids!" And he was young. But he didn’t get the job. He had a black beard. And he looked older than his age. And he was tall, and so he didn’t get this job.

So later on in life, when he got to be 16 -- I’m jumping ahead -- he went to get a job. And they asked him how old he was and he said, "Sixteen." This was at Packard’s. And they said, "We hire only 18-year-olds." Eighteen years old. And these places were flooded with people looking for jobs. So he waited a couple of days, and he went back, and now he’s "18," you know what I mean? And he was listening. They’d call out the different jobs they were hiring for. Like that day they wanted welders. So he says, "OK, I’m 18 years old and I’m going to be a welder." He said, "All I have to do is watch what the other guys do," he says, "and I can do it." And he had no qualms at all about being able to do this job of being a welder. So they said, "We want welders." And Rene held up his hand and he went forward. And the guy said, "How old are you?" and he says, "Eighteen." "OK, go on in. " and he got whatever there was, you know. They gave it to him, and he opened his eyes, and he did the work. I mean, I suppose maybe there was a little instruction, but he was supposed to have experience, and he had experience. That’s the only way he got the job.

I’ll stay on this while I think about it. So he worked there. And this was at Packard’s. And I think we were living on Crane at the time. It was 6427 Crane, OK? The reason I’m saying these addresses is because the house previous to that was 7418 Kerby. The first three addresses that I remember, the second digit was always a "4." There was 4403, 7418, 6427. And anyhow, so he worked there for a while and there was a woman, which was very unusual for a woman to have this kind of position in the factory. Most of the jobs were held by men. But I know before Packard’s went under or it went out of business, the husband died who owned the business, and his wife took over, and I’ve often thought that maybe this was a relative or a friend or something. But there was a woman in this position. So Rene’d go up to her and he’d say, "If you ever really want a good worker, I know this guy, he’s so good," he says, "and you won’t regret it," blah-blah-blah. He said he looked older than he was, and he was very good-looking. He sort of had charm, I guess that’s what it was. So anyway, eventually she said, "Yeah," she says, "tell this guy to come in and we’ll see. "John," he’d say, "you can get in there." He said, of course, it was up to John to hold the job once he got it.

So John got in, and I don’t know what kind of position John was hired on. It must have been, as I said, the line. He eventually did do work, and he got a trade out of it. It took a long time. What happened was: The trades are pretty closed. If a man was an electrician, he got his son in. You could hardly break in to the trades unless you had some sort of a relative. This is how it worked then. Pre-union, now. And so John worked there and he was at Packard’s and he’d been there a long time, and he was trying to get in as a tradesman. He was already working there, but he was trying to shift from line work. This was a much better paying position. And there was a three-man board, and they asked him all the questions, and he didn’t make one mistake. Maybe there was a written test, this I don’t know. But he was, he could do the work, but he wasn’t getting the money. And they were really hemming and hawing. See, he didn’t have a relative in the trades and, as I said, the unions were not that -- I don’t think they could interfere that much with the trades then, anyhow. So he said, he was really upset. He said, "You men won’t give another man a break, because I can do the work," and he was a very good worker. He just didn’t take any time off. He just went to work and that’s all there was to it. I mean, sick or half-dead, he went. And he, I can’t remember the whole speech that he gave, but I did hear it. And they passed him and he did get a tradesman’s card.

And later on, this was after you children were born, Packard’s closed. I don’t know how many years he worked there. But before it closed, he knew it was going down, and Ford was opening up a new plant, it was on the east side someplace. And he went there. and he said, "I’m not going to be without work. I’ll start right at the bottom." And he got a job because he was a skilled tradesman. And he wasn’t there very long that he got something that was called sciatica. I mean, he was in constant pain. It was a disease or illness of the spine. And he went to work and he had to climb a ladder to do this, I guess, to make sure everything was hooked up right or something. This is what he did. And your father and I went to visit him one day. And we said, "John, why don’t take, like, a couple months off and see if you can’t get over this?" He said, "No," he says, I’m a new man." He said, "If they knew there was something wrong with me," and he was doing his work and wasn’t taking any time off, and there was a lot of overtime. He was working six and seven days a week. He said, "If I take time off they’ll let me go," he says, "and I’ll never get back in here again." Well, he liked the work and he knew he had to work, and he worked his way through it. I think he had this for over two years. And eventually, whatever was troubling him, it desisted. And he was like work, free -- not work-free, pain-free.

But anyhow. Back to Rene and Packard’s. After John had worked there a while and he was doing such good work that he said, "You know," he said, "if you ever need another good worker like that, like my brother," he said, "I have someone else who’s just as good," he said. "Just let me know." He said, "And you won’t regret it, you won’t regret it." Well, sure enough, but I think she must have -- he said it better than I did -- but he got Gus in at Packard’s (laughs). And Gus worked there at Packard’s until they closed, you know what I mean, and he went out the next day -- he could have gotten compensation for, gee, maybe a year, maybe six months, you know, unemployment -- but they were hiring summer jobs for the county (Wayne County, Mich.). (Gus disputed Jeannine’s assertion that Rene got him the job at Packard, circa 1937. "I got my own job at Packard. Rene was three years younger than I was when I went to work at Packard’s. I was 17 or 18 years old.," he said, adding that he did "regular assembly work if I remember right. Nothing special."

He saw it in the paper and he went out there, and this man hired him. He was an older worker and he was cutting grass. You know the sides of the expressways they had these steep embankments that were covered with grass? Well, he was doing that, and Gus was really not an outdoor person, he really didn’t like that kind of work, but he knew he had to work, and he figured working for the county would be a good thing. It was just for a summer job, but his compensation would last longer in case he didn’t find something else. He worked in what was called the tool crib at Packard’s. They needed, for certain jobs, they needed certain equipment, certain tools or something, and you would check it out to this employee, and he had to return it ’cause a lot of people would walk off with the tool, just take it home, sneak it out, you know what I mean. So that was a pretty -- he worked his way up to that. That wasn’t the way he started but eventually he got into that. And so he got into that and he worked the whole summer at this county job. And at the end of the summer, the man that hired him was a white man. He came up to him and he said, "Well, you can have a steady job here if you like." He says, "We older guys have to stick together."

(Gus recalled that the man making that comment was Bill Piscopink. "He was working, he was a foreman of that, some kind of leader, anyways. When he’d seen me, we belonged to the same club" -- the Moguls, he said. Gus and Piscopink "were playing ball together, bowled together and everything, and so naturally we were friendly. We were real friends," Gus said. "I had no trouble there getting by. I got to get the job, but, hell, I had friends down there already. Yeah, I worked there 22 years.")

And so he got a permanent position and he was driving a wrecker, and then he would also spread salt, you know. That was like, when the expressways and streets were icy, that’s what he did. And he had a partner. And he was really, he said, a really, a real jerk. He says he’d get in the car and he’d sleep. He slept for eight hours. He would do all the driving, and sometimes when you worked the salting you’d work longer hours, you know what I mean? But he never told the boss or anything like that. But he said he was really a very, very poor worker. And he, he didn’t enough that aspect of it that this guy slept and collected the same thing as he did, but I guess he just didn’t want to turn him in, maybe for a couple of reasons. This man happened to be black, and he said, he doesn’t want to work and he’s lazy. (Gus could not recall whether this particular worker was as bad as his kid sister described. But "in wintertime we drove, we had our own equipment. I had my, we had our own truck to drive, salt truck. In the summertime, they made crews up. I used to drive, but then all these guys, maybe five or six guys, all these crew members would do all the work, like in the summertime. Grass, whatever guys had to do then.") He’s getting all the benefits but he never turned him in. He never lost his job, I don’t know if he’s lost it since. But anyway, Gus worked there until he retired....

When Jolicoeur stopped doing this cab work, he was married during some of that period, and he went to Jersey Creamery, where he applied for a job. He wanted to be a milkman. He really wanted to work outside. He didn’t want any indoor, you know, position. And he got a job, and he was working, and doing, you know, well. Everybody was, well, there wasn’t as many, there weren’t milk depots, I don’t think, and there were grocery stores, but a lot of people got their milk delivered. My mother did. So he worked there, and when the Depression came, not the day it hit, but within several months there was such a decline in customers they couldn’t afford to pay it. And I don’t know what they were using, but if you don’t have the money you can’t buy it. And Jolicoeur, along with other milkmen, lost his job. So I don’t know what he did in the interim. He probably picked up a few dollars, you know, doing odd jobs. And he and his wife really used to love to go to the movies. And they would have, they were, I don’t know if they were dish nights or special nights. If you go there real late, you could get in for almost nothing. Because they wanted, they wanted a dime or 15 cents, you know what I mean? So you’d go and sometimes you’d get a dish, too, a free dish. I mean, everything was very dirt cheap. They lived near the creamery.

They were renting someplace, and the man that hired him, his name was Ward. Now I don’t know if that was his first name, ’cause sometimes people would address you by your last name, you know like you’re John Ward and they call you "Ward." Like when your dad was in the service they never called him Bob. They called him "Pat" because his last name was Pattison. So sometimes you’d get, you know -- it would depend on, you know, how the people felt -- he always referred to him as Ward. So he’d stop in, he’d take Bernie home and he’d stop in and he’d chat with Ward for a few minutes. They really hit it off. They got along well. He was a little bit the way Gus was when he got that job at the county. And so this went on for, oh, over -- they weren’t going to the show every night or every week, but he stopped in one night. Maybe, I think there was a time lapse of a year. And he said, "Ward," after the conversation, "Ward," he says after the conversation, "Ward, you got a job for me?" And Ward says, "Yeah. I got a job."

He said he had an opening, he says, "and you can have it." And my brother couldn’t believe it. But he said, "You have to have a $300 bond," because, you see, they handled money, so if some guy was a crook or something and ran off with the take, they had to have a, that bond would cover for, you know, if he was dealing with someone who was dishonest, I guess. And Jolicoeur said, "Well," he said, "forget it. I haven’t" -- he didn’t have $20, let alone 300. And Ward says," Don’t worry. I’ll tell you where to go to get this." And he gave him the name of a bank, and they were going to have to verify this, He’d go there and say he’d been hired by Jersey Creamery, and that they would loan him the $300 and he could pay it back. I don’t know if it was weekly payments or monthly. It used to be at one time you made payments once a month. And so he got the job, and it wasn’t like, you know, $30 a month. It took a long time. But he was working. So he got this job. And he was very fortunate. I think because he was, he liked the man, for one thing, and the man liked him. And he’d stop there and talk to him and he didn’t ask him for a job during these previous conversations. But this time he just opened his mouth and he got, he got a steady job. He worked there. That was the only steady job he had. Well, he worked for Jules for a while after he retired, but I’ll go into that a little later.

So anyway, he got the job, and the milkmen used to start delivering -- he used to have to get up at 2 in the morning, and you had to have your route done by the time people went to work. I think he got up earlier than that. And during vacation, he’d come to the house and he’d pick up Rene, or Gus, anybody that would go with him who he could get out of bed, and he’d take them on the route and he’d tell them which house to go to, and he did half the route. He gave them something, I’m sure it wasn’t a lot of money. But he wasn’t alone. There wasn’t the crime factor. There wasn’t anything like that. It was just that I think it was a way of these young guys would earn some money and they would eat breakfast someplace. ’Cause you’d eat out, you know what I mean, ’cause you’re, you’re on this route. And Rene went, I think Gus went, and they got older and got jobs, and then he was down to Jack and Jules. I don’t know if Johnny -- probably Johnny went, but I’m not too sure. And so he said "when it came to getting Jack out of bed, Jack said" -- they were kids, they were in school, but this was during summer vacation, and "I’m not going. I’m not going. I don’t wanna go. I don’t wanna go." Jack did not want to go peddle milk. And he said he’d get him out of bed, and they’d get on the truck, and he said five minutes after he was on the truck he was whistling, he was singing, he was humming. Jack was always very, very -- well, I had said I told you he had the dance band. So once he started he never stopped singing. I mean, he wasn’t singing like Caruso, I mean, not loud, but he was humming. He was enjoying himself. Jules would get up without any fuss, but he was not a singer. He just did the work, and he was easy to get up, but Jack really resisted, he said, but once he got out on the truck he was really a very happy person.

And so, let’s see. Rene was telling of one experience. They covered -- these were mixed neighborhoods. Some were white, some of them were black. It would depend on what kind of route Jolicoeur had. And he said they were just beginning the route and it was very early, and Rene’s running up the back steps. And I said he was 6 foot tall and he was very young, and he’s carrying the milk. And there’s this body that, you know, it was dark, and there was this big tall black guy, and he thought either someone was coming to rob his house, or, you know, maybe make time with his wife. And, and Rene was -- they had these cases you’d put five or six quarts of milk. Milk was delivered by the quart. Rene said he’s wasn’t too brave, but when the guy saw it was the milkman, he didn’t attack him. But Rene said, "Boy, was I scared." But, you know, I could see if he had heard someone running up on the steps and you were awake, you’d certainly want to do something about it.

So anyhow, to get back to -- there are some other things. I made a sort of a list of things that I wanted to say, but that’s one thing, with Jolicoeur’s milk route. Later in life, while I’m on him and his route, I told you that they, if you were a milkman, on Labor Day they wanted you to march in the Labor Day parade. They had to. And Jolicoeur did not want to march in the parade because someone made him. So he always took his vacation over Labor Day, and that way if you were on vacation, you know, you wouldn’t have to. So he never marched in the September Labor Day parade. I don’t know why he didn’t want to. Maybe he was tired, ’cause when you’re handling -- it was glass bottles and they were full, and you’re taking the empties back, too, they returned them. There weren’t deposits or anything. But anyhow, he just wouldn’t march in this and he never did.

And later on, he had a series of small strokes. This was later in his life, and a couple of winters he took off, ’cause he didn’t want to work, and work was plentiful, and there was always somebody waiting to do work with him. And he was no longer on a residential route. By this time he had a commercial route, which was supermarkets and stores. And you would be carrying milk in by the case. And it was very heavy. And near the creamery, there would be, like, people who wanted to earn extra money and there was, these milkmen who had the commercial routes would go up to these individuals and pick one out and say, "You want to work with me today?" And Jolicoeur paid $20 a day, that was the going rate, and this was tax-free. Because this was unreported. He got the help and the guy got this. And there was this elderly man, and Jolicoeur didn’t know the circumstances, but he needed the $20 a day. If he worked five days, that was $100.

And Jolicoeur did work five days a week, you know what I mean, although the days were -- I don’t know if they ever delivered milk on Sunday at the supermarkets. I don’t think so, but perhaps at one time they did. And so, he said, this man, he would move the cases. Jolicoeur would move the cases, too, but this guy, he would work with him. You know what I mean? And he said it was so hard, and he doesn’t know why he needed to work. But then they weren’t making deliveries at night. So he would give him the $20 a day and buy him his lunch. Because by the time they started, he didn’t eat. They had to work right away. And the man would get a free lunch, and then he’d get the $20, so he got one meal and if this paid his rent or bought food for five days, he got one meal free.

And then, so then Phil had worked at Hudson’s Motor Car. I’m now back in the early years now. And he couldn’t find work right away. So Jolicoeur said, "I need a helper." He said, "I pay $20." He was going to pay him what he paid everybody else. Phil was much younger, though. So Phil would drive down to wherever this was, I don’t know whether the creamery was still on Field, I really don’t know. But he had his car, and then he’d work with Jolicoeur, and he was just two years younger than Jolicoeur. So if Jolicoeur could do it, he could do it. And he did this for the $100 a week. You know what I mean? Maybe he had run out of compensation, ’cause Hudson’s Motor Car closed because, I guess, for lack of sales or poor management. It’s hard.

There was probably too much competition. And they didn’t compete. And the man, as I told you, the owner had died, and the wife was running it. And she probably didn’t have the skills or the foresight for the new models or the new things like that. The change of -- the Hudson car was very good. But I don’t think there was enough change in the body, and people always want something new and different looking. So anyhow, he did this for quite a while, and then your Uncle Jules had this -- remember he had commercial heating and cooling? And he had his, Packard’s had closed. And he had his office in the manufacturing part of what they did there in this part of this Packard complex.. There were a lot of businesses that went in there. And he had enough, because you had to make your sheet metal, you know those things, the heat conduits that are in the basement. We had them, you know, from the furnace they would go to the different registers. Well, they’d have to do those sort of things to the buildings that they bid on, you know what I mean.

So anyway, Jules had a contact in the Teamsters union, I don’t know who it was, and Phil got a job, he got Phil a job driving a truck. But he wasn’t getting a regular Teamsters wage. Let’s say they were making $16 an hour. I’m just picking this out, I don’t know what. He made less, and he couldn’t join the union. I don’t know. He wasn’t the only one there, but he got this job and he worked there until he was old enough to retire, you know what I mean? And, so, it was a good job, and I think -- I don’t know if there were benefits, I think there might have been benefits. But Leona was working. She got a job at Montgomery Ward’s. After Jimmy was born, she really didn’t want to stay home. My mother used to go and take care of Jimmy, and they did a series of other things, and sometimes the stores have it, but I really don’t know what kind of hospitalization they had. But they had two salaries coming in. His salary showed; he had to pay income tax. And it might have been more than $10 an hour, but it wasn’t what the regular Teamsters were making.

But when Jolicoeur and Bernie got married, Bernie had sort of her own, I don’t know, outlook on life, and my mother had, like, had had, like 10 living children. She was over at our house once and she looked at Jack and Jules -- I guess I didn’t figure into any of this -- and she said, "What kind of work are these two kids going to get?" She said, "There’s nothing out there," like they had absolutely no future and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. And of course, she’s saying this in front of my mother. Well, my mother didn’t care for that too much. But you know, this is sort of -- you know, keep this as an aside. Bernie used to keep very, very, very different views. And I’ll tell you about it after this. And so my mother, later on -- Jolicoeur was hired by his brother, Jules. After Jolicouer got out of -- let’s see, he retired -- Bernie was unhappy with his being home. He had a pension or something, but she was just, she said, "Go sit outside. I have to do the housework and you’re in my way." He was sitting in the living room.

It was really -- she was a different woman. She’s a lot different today that he’s gone. But she just was -- he’d have to go sit outside in October. I mean October when it’s cold, you know! And he was really, he was sort of depressed, you know what I mean? So Jules gave him a job at his place of business. It was, gee, I can’t remember the name. I used to know it, but I don’t remember it, well, it’s not important (oh, but it is to us; it was called Consumers Sheet Metal) -- driving a truck for him, and he had him go get, pick up things that they need, like some of the sheet metal, you know. He wouldn’t have to load it. When you’d buy it, they’d load it in your trucks, and he gave him a job and Jolicoeur worked there for a long time, along with getting his Social Security. I don’t know that the, the whatchamacall, the creamery, had a pension. I really don’t know. But anyway, he got the job, and your Uncle Jack got -- he has trade, he had some kind of tradesman’s card, he owns a motel, and he certainly didn’t, he certainly didn’t have trouble finding a job. You know what I mean....

People would get married, and they would have a wedding shower. And what we would do is the girl who was her best friend would pay for the girl’s dinner and the rest of us paid for our own dinner. You could rent the back room of restaurants. I think we were in the back of Joe Muer’s once. And we went to Joey’s Stables once. And these were restaurants. Most of them sold drinks, but I didn’t drink so the drinking was not -- first, I wasn’t 21, but drinking didn’t appeal to me, OK? So I never smoked or drank because I thought it was a waste of time. And I’d order what I wanted. You’d go to the restaurant, people would make the arrangements, you’d ask for a menu and you could pick out what you wanted. You didn’t have to eat chicken. If you wanted steak, if you wanted pork or spaghetti, depending on, you know, on you, and they would come with your specific meals, and then the girls would collect enough money that the prices were listed on this menu, and you would have to put in your tip, you know. So let’s say the meals were worth $4.50, well, then you’d have to give, I think it was 10 percent then. They’d all figure this in and they’d collect the money ahead of time, and you would get your meal.

You know, there might be five or six chicken dinners or stuff like this, and I would go to these things, and really, I could never finish what I ordered. And they didn’t have boxes to take home. I probably wouldn’t have taken it home, anyway, OK? But they didn’t have these carryout boxes they have today. So it was during World War II and there were quite a few girls who got married because they married servicemen. And then we’d give them baby showers, too, and so that was another thing, you know what I mean. A wedding shower and a baby shower. Sometimes we would just take up a collection. They’d pass a sheet and they’d say, "So-and-so is going to leave on such a date because she’s having a baby," and then you’d put in, they’d put an envelope there and you could put in, it used to be 50 cents. Fifty cents was a lot of money. And if everyone put something in, you could get a really nice gift. And on the last day the person would get something pretty nice.

So anyhow, right after World War II -- it wasn’t over because the Japanese thing wasn’t over -- and they’d start showing these Holocaust victims, and they were skin and bones. ... And I thought, "How silly of me not to eat." I couldn’t eat any more, but not to try and eat all this food that’s placed in front of me. And after that, when I’d go out, I would try to finish the meal. But at home I never took more than I wanted. I started to eat, probably, more better -- not, "more better" is very poor English -- I started eating, well, like a normal person would. It took me a long time, and eventually I suppose I did get overweight. This would take years.

But for years and years, food was the last thing that I really was interested in. And I was always, as I said, skin and bones, but obviously I must have gotten enough food that nothing happened, If anything happens to me now, it’s because I’m old, not because I didn’t eat when I was a kid. But anyhow, those Holocaust -- I mean it was, those people suffered so much, and all during the war I had more than I really wanted and I couldn’t eat it, and I sort of felt guilty about that, that I didn’t finish -- of course, it wouldn’t help them a bit even if I did finish everything on my plate, but I haven’t changed. I don’t throw food out. Maybe I will have to someday for whatever reason, but anyhow, I got better eating habits because I really felt sad that these people suffered so much, and really just because of a madman....

So I will skip on later on. I’m out of school, and I’m working for the railroad, and my best friend at school was Yolande Rousseau. She got TB, and I was going to Canada, and I told Jolicoeur, I said, "I’ll take Little Rolande with me," I said, "and I’ll go see my friend." I could Little Rolande wherever I went, and I could see my uncle at Sainte-Brigitte-des-Saults. He was a pastor there. Ste-Brigitte, that was the church he was doing. So I went there and I said -- oh, this was a different time. I went with Little Rolande anyway, and I went to see Yolande. This was in Sherbrooke. It was in Sherbrooke! That’s right! It was in Sherbrooke. And I did have -- I went there twice. No, with Little Rolande. I don’t think she came with me when I was with Little Rolande, and anyhow, so I know it’s not important and I shouldn’t waste time on this. But anyhow, I went to see Yolande. I had a pass. It didn’t cost me anything to travel on the CNN lines. And I went to the TB sanitarium and I took Little Rolande with me. And I said, "I want to see Yolande Rousseau." They said, "Well, we do not allow minors in a TB sanitarium." Well, I should have known this, so I took Little Rolande back a movie theater, and I didn’t know what kind of movie she was going to see, and I gave her the money. And, oh, these kids, they were waiting to get in. You know how kids are, they’re noisy, blah-blah-blah. And I took her there twice ’cause I stayed in Sherbrooke for two days.

And then I went to, I don’t know who I visited. I must have visited my dad. My dad was still alive. (He was indeed alive. According to Rolande Pickett, "He went and he worked for his brother. His brother had a manufacture of wool, and so he worked there." This would be Willie Kirouac, and the shop was in Warwick, where Philippe eventually died. Rolande and Jolicoeur visited him at one time and, rather than permit them to stay in a hotel with her father, he told them, ‘"You come here and stay!’ Because he had a maid, he had all kinds of stuff." Although Philippe and Alphonsine only separated and never divorced, Rolande added, "they say my father never sent alimony. I don’t know what they called it then.") And anyhow, she never complained, but when we did go back to where my uncle was at Ste-Brigitte and we would take a walk at night and we’d go -- there were cows in the field -- well, so we’d walk up to the fence and call the cows, and they’d come over. We would pet the cows. They were not wild or anything. So my uncle wanted to take me for a ride. So there was an assistant, I think he had an assistant priest. So he told this priest, "Go pick them up." And the priest said, "Oh, they’re probably" -- there was probably like, they used to call them restaurants where the young people hung out. They didn’t have drinks but they used to have candy bars and pops. Maybe they sold sandwiches, I don’t know. Well, Little Rolande and I, we were city children. And we were very interested in the animals, you know, in whatever we -- so this guy went into town, and he didn’t see us (laughs), this priest. So he went down the road and there we were standing by the fence, petting cows. I’m sure we were a disappointment. I guess he thought we’d be more -- ’cause I was an adult by this time, you know what I mean.

And the funny thing happened. My mother noticed that Little Rolande was scratching her head and scratching her head. And I had taken her with me and my mother had said, well, there was this lady on Crane that was a beauty operator, but she had retired. Not retired, she had children. And so she’d make, you know, do hair at home. So she sent Little Rolande there to get her hair washed. She thought maybe her hair was dirty. So Little Rolande and I, there were double beds and we shared a double bed. And we sat next to each other together on the train. And it turned out later on: Little Rolande had head lice. And I don’t know how my mother discovered it, but she had sent Rolande out to buy a fine-toothed comb. And there was medication. And she felt so bad that the lady probably thought we were really filthy people, and she said, "You didn’t catch it?" I said, "No." We shared the same bed. I was so glad. I’ll probably get lice now (knocks on the wood kitchen table), but in those years it’s just something that happens. But my mother felt so terrible. This lady probably washed her hair and saw all this head lice, you know what I mean, but didn’t tell my mother.

So anyhow, Little Rolande and I, he took us for a ride to show us the points of interest. It was a very small town. We could have walked and seen the points of interest. Anyhow, we, we were there and I had a coat. My mother had a coat for me. It was navy blue. It didn’t have a warm lining, it had a beautiful, almost white, a cream-colored purple coat. And oh, my cousin Marielle, the one that was doing all the work, really liked that coat and she wanted the coat. So when I got out of school and I got a job, I told my mother that Marielle wanted this coat. So we sent it to her. And when I got there that summer, she had gotten it, you know. You didn’t get a pass the first year. I think you had to work there a couple of years before you got it. You got a limited pass. You could go in the United States free, but Canada, you had to earn that. I think you had to have a year’s seniority for those free passes. So anyway, she was telling me the priests’ house had a porch that was almost all the way around. And she says, "In the winter I put this coat on," she says, "and I walk." There was always so much snow in Canada and of course, it was shoveled or swept or something. And she says, "and I wear this beautiful coat." And she says, "I walk all the way around the porch." I think she loved the collar. And she was a brunette, so I’m sure she looked really nice in it....

So anyway, the brothers were always close. Jolicoeur bowled with the Jersey Creamery team, and there was a place called Great Lakes Bowling Alley. It was on Woodward, and the Grand Trunk Western, we bowled there one year, maybe two. We were at the, it was called the Red Mill, and they wouldn’t take us back. The Grand Trunk had three women’s teams, and about five, five or six men’s teams. These were the office workers, not the railroad men, obviously. And they, they wanted maybe a larger -- maybe they wanted somebody to take the whole alley, and probably these guys bowled -- maybe they bought a couple of beers while they were drinking, but they said they wouldn’t accept us for the next year, so we went to Great Lakes. And so I’m bowling one day and all of a sudden I look and our alleys are adjoining. Jolicoeur’s bowling there and I’m bowling there. I’m with the Grand Trunk Western and he’s with the Jersey Creamery Company. And I bowled there about two years, and that’s really how I met your father.

Jen Esselman and I used to bowl. And then we didn’t have time to eat. We worked till five and we started bowling at 5:30, and we took the streetcar down Woodward to the alley. And when we got there I had my own shoes but we just had time to put our shoes on and start bowling. So we -- excuse me, excuse me -- we bowled from 5:30 to 7. It was about a two-hour thing. So after we were through bowling we’d have supper. They sold hamburgers and, I suppose, sandwiches, and they had pop. Maybe they even had dessert. But I know we always had a hamburger and fries. Then when we’d go home we didn’t have to eat or anything, you know, ’cause we were hungry by this time. So anyway, we stayed there, and there was a guy who worked in my department. His name was Bob Fagen. And he said, "Hey," he said, "I can get us a ride home." And I said, "Well, you know, how’s that?" ’Cause I used to, I think I walked down to where I could catch the Clairmount streetcar line, and that would leave me right off at Crane and Harper. It went down a lot of streets. It went from the east to the west side, this Clairmount line.

So anyhow, he brought Bob back and he introduced me, and Bob got a ride, and there was one other guy that worked -- well, they all worked at the Grand Trunk -- and I was the closest one to Bob’s house, ’cause he lived on Harding and I lived on Crane and I was the last one that he dropped off. So eventually, I had several rides, this was before Christmas. So I was going to my sister’s. Carmen was having a New Year’s Eve party and so I said, "Well, would you like to come to the party?" And he did and we started to date, and we got married, I think, the following fall. So I did bowl a couple more years, and then I got pregnant. ’Cause I married in ’51 and then Denise was born in ’53, and I think that I bowled up until -- you usually bowl until May or April, and then I never went back to bowling. That’s how I met your father. With the bowling things.

And Jolicoeur, I don’t know if the, if the Jersey Creamery was still going there, ’cause sometimes you’d get -- a bowling alley won’t want you if you don’t spend very much money. This happened to your Uncle Jules. Guardian Angel Parish had bowled for years at -- it was called the Fantasy Bowling Alley, and it was off of Gratiot, and it was near, I think, near Seven Mile Road. I think I could be wrong. (Fantasy Lanes’ last location was on E. Seven Mile just west of Hayes.) But if you went down Gratiot towards Eight Mile you could see if off the street. And they had bowled there for I don’t know how long, and this was a Guardian Angel league. And your Uncle Jules bowled in there, and Frank Cornelissen. That was, I think you’ve met some of the Cornelissens -- Mary Margaret Cornelissen. Well, and they told them one year, "You can’t. We don’t want you back." And they said, "Gee!" This was a church league, they’d been there for years. "Well," they said, "you’re not spending enough money." And wow, they were a little surprised. So I think they went to that German restaurant that was on Gratiot for years and years and years and I can’t remember the name, I just don’t remember. (It was the Little Cafe.) Gee, they were there, they had an exceptional restaurant. And we had eaten there a couple of times. And they had a bowling alley. So I think they could accommodate the league, and they went there. Well, not long after they, it was a few years elapsed.

And the city started to change. Demographics, let’s put it -- I guess population, color. And this Fantasy bowling alley, nobody was going there anymore. I don’t know if there was more crime, what, I don’t know, I don’t remember. So they called Guardian Angels and they said they had openings if they were interested. And they didn’t go back because they felt they had been such good customers and I don’t know if they always stayed at this German rest- -- I can’t remember the name. It did close. The grandmother died and the mother and father died. And the kids went right through it. They didn’t pay their bills.

I know someone that I worked with temporarily, we were both temporaries at the bank, you know, when I was working out here in Troy, and her, this girl had a twin brother that sat next to me. And he used to deliver the meat there, and they weren’t paying the bills, so they said, "If they don’t, if they don’t pay this time, don’t leave the meat." They used a lot, you use a lot of meat in a restaurant. Now the kid got really mad and he was shouting at him and everything, and the guy said, "No," he says, "If you don’t pay for this, I can’t leave it here." He was just a driver. And he left with the meat. And it wasn’t long after that that the thing closed. They, I guess they just went bankrupt, because probably these kids didn’t -- I don’t know, they were in their 20s, but they had really fancy cars, and she knew them, the girl, and she said they weren’t paying the bills. Well, they didn’t know how to manage and everything went right down the tubes.

I did, ah, visit Yolande (Rousseau) once when she was in the TB sanitarium. And afterwards, when she got out, and she had this boyfriend, and he worked, like, your cousin Madeleine’s husband, out in -- he worked for the government, in, like, the woods. They were doing forestry work or something, and he had sort of a degree of some sort, or at least he graduated from these boys’ schools where mon oncle Alphonse, my mother’s brother, was a priest; he was a chaplain in this school in Victoriaville. Well, he didn’t go to that school, but these -- these were almost like college courses. It was very intensive, and you got a really good education. They were (an) all-boys’ school. They called them boys’ colleges. And anyway, he had that kind of position. And I met him when I visited Yolande once in Victoriaville after she had gotten discharged from the TB hospital. I was there for two days, I think, maybe three. I don’t know, two or three days. I don’t know. ’Cause I would take a week off and I’d visit my uncle and her, and he came down on Sunday. He had a day off. And he was really tall. He had curly hair. He was fair. And they eventually got married. She, she, yeah, she got married before I did, because I was visiting there and I was single.

So anyhow, after your father and I were married, we, on our honeymoon we went up to the Upper Peninsula, to Taquahmenon Falls and -- Jack wasn’t there, and we really didn’t make Ontonagon, but we drove through, past that -- they have a prison up there, in the Upper Peninsula, and we drove past that. And I said, and I was thinking, "Boy, I hope there’s not a jailbreak," because, you know, they commandeer cars ’cause they usually have some sort of a weapon. But anyway, we got past, and I won’t go into the honeymoon. Maybe at a later date. (In a July 24, 2003, telephone conversation, Jeannine remarked about the water and the woods and the forests. "You see trees in the city," she said, "but not that many of them, and so tall, and all together.")

So, we would correspond. I’m not a good correspondent. I write, but not too frequently, as you have probably noticed. And I had really gotten impressed with the Reader’s Digest at Carmen’s house. I don’t know if I got this on tape. I’ll have to go on how I first got into this Digest. A man that worked with George had subscribed when the magazine came out, and he had, like, two-year subscriptions, you know, all these magazines piled up. And he brought ’em in to the police station one day, and he gave them to George. But actually, you know, George is -- George Navarra’s name is really Nicholas Navarra. But when he met Carmen, he didn’t think that her family would let her go out with him unless he said he was French, and he didn’t think Nicholas was a very French name. So he took the name "Georges." Georges is spelled G-e-o-r-g-e-s, I think, in French. So he said his name was George, and that he could speak a few French words. Not like that he was a displaced Frenchman, anyhow, it wouldn’t have made any difference what nationality he was. He was a nice person. But anyhow, he thought that since the whole family was French, he figured that, you know, he wouldn’t, they wouldn’t -- I don’t know why he thought that. We were a very ordinary family. Of course, maybe all those brothers intimidated him. That could have been it, too.

So anyhow, he brought those magazines home and I used to baby-sit for Carmen occasionally. Raymond was born at the time. I don’t know where she went, but I’d stay overnight because she lived on Wayburn, and I’d take the bus over there, and I was working, you know. So she told me, "Oh," she said, "if you want to read something good, read those magazines." And she said, "They’re just terrific." So she went out and she had a stack of magazines. So I picked the one off the top. And no pictures! I mean, usually, I had read, like McCall’s and I had subscribed to different magazines. And you know, they’re glossy things, like Rolande gives me her McCall’s, and I had Good Housekeeping one time, and I’d buy Redbook. They used to have, like, a miniature novel in the back. And it was kind of good. The writing was well. But it was a glossy. This was just plain paper, and just solid reading. They had no advertising. So I picked and choosed, and I liked what I read. So there was these kiosks downtown. There were two kiosks that sold magazines, out-of-town papers -- local papers, too -- all sorts of things. And I would go there and I would buy the Reader’s Digest.

And I always thought I should subscribe to this, you know, and I wouldn’t have to walk all the way downtown to buy this. But I didn’t. So anyway, what I did when Yolande was single was, we didn’t exchange Christmas presents, but I subscribed her to it, and they gave her the Canadian version, not the written language in French, but the English-speaking. And she was bilingual, so she could read French and English. And I subscribed her to that for several years because I thought it was so good. And I thought she’d enjoy it. And they did have some stories that, occasionally, they were a little bit like you’d find in the United States, the American -- you know, the United States version. But they’d try to get stories that were more of a Canadian nature. And anyhow. and she saved them one day when I went to visit her and she sent me home with a bunch of them. She said, "Maybe you’d like to read them." So I took them back home with me and I must have read them -- I don’t know if necessarily, I read them as a digest.

So anyway, she wrote to me -- she was married and they were living in a place Val D’or V-a-l, D-apostrophe-o-r, Val D’or, and that was "valley of gold," or something, you know what I mean? And he was doing government work. And she said that she was pregnant and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, and she’d been married for a while, and she described how she lived. But I won’t go into this. So I wrote a letter and I said, "We’re taking a vacation," and I said I thought we’d drive up there and see her, and then we’d visit a few of my relatives. Not to stay anyplace. We stayed in hotels. We were both working, and we didn’t have any children. And so we drove there first, and then we came back and we visited -- we stopped one afternoon at Aunt Blanche’s house, and my uncle was still had a pair -- we stopped there. And we stopped in Warwick, where my father had lived. I think my father was dead at the time.

But anyhow, so we drove up there. And we checked into a hotel at Val D’or, and I, we went, we tried to call where she lived. I had the address, but she wasn’t listed. So I, I had told her that I was coming and that we’d be up there for a couple of days. Not specifically to go to where she lived, because her husband was working in the woods. And now that she was pregnant, she had moved in town, and she was, like, boarding at some sort of a home. And before we went on this trip, I told Bob, I said, "I’d like to bring her a maternity dress." I says, "The styles are so different, the Canadian styles and the American styles," and I said, "I’d like to give her this as a present." And I knew what size she wore, and then I bought one that size. It was two-piece, it was a skirt -- a black, expandable skirt -- and a black-and-white top. And, it was, it was nice, you know. I would have bought it for myself if, you know, I was, like, expecting. And I wrapped it up as a gift and I put it in the trunk. And so anyhow, we got together, and her husband was in town that weekend, and we met at a hotel for dinner. And so, we were talking and stuff like that. No one drank -- we had the meal and everything. And I said, "Oh, would you come up to my room for a minute? I want to show you something." ’Cause the guys were talkin’. And what I did was I gave her, it was wrapped up, and I said, "Here," I said, "this is for you."

She opened it up and she said, "Oh!" She said, "You have no idea how I needed this!" She was beginning -- this was her first child, and she was beginning to gain weight, and none of her clothes fit her. You know, your abdomen protrudes, and she said, "The girl that I borrowed this from is pregnant, and she wants her dress back, and I can’t give it to her because," she said, "I don’t have anything else to wear." So, I said, "Well, listen," I said. "Change your clothes," and, I said, "Wear this new one down." And I said, "Surprise your husband." Well, I didn’t know what kind of a guy this was. But she told, she said, "I tell him I have to have a dress. This doesn’t fit me," and he wouldn’t give her any money. She couldn’t buy a dress, and she wasn’t working. You know, most people don’t hire pregnant women. It wasn’t -- and this was in the early Fifties. Not that women in the workforce, but maybe in Canada, you know what I mean, there was less, there were less opportunities.

"Oh," she said, "I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t do that." And I said, "Why can’t you do it!?" "No." I guess she figured he’d be offended. And I thought to myself, "Well, he has a right to be offended when his wife doesn’t fit in her own clothes and he kept the money, his hand on the purse strings." He had to pay for her room and board there, and he wouldn’t buy her a maternity dress. So she took the box down with her, ’cause, and I don’t know if she took the wrapping papers, I don’t know. And she was just ecstatic about this because, I don’t know, I can’t remember what she had on, but I knew it wasn’t new. I could tell that. A maternity dress gets a lot of wear. So she said, "This lady will be so glad that I’ve given her this back." Well anyhow, I was really annoyed with him. I didn’t have a reason to be annoyed, but he had a good job, and he -- she needed this. I mean, this was not a question of frivolity or "I see this blouse and I have to have it." It was a necessity. And he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t spring for this dress. So, at least, turned out to be good. And she wrote me a letter later on, and I know she used it for several pregnancies, because she had four or five children, you know what I mean.

On our way home, I thought, and I said, "Are you still getting the Digest?" You know. I was still in Val D’or, and I said, "Are you still getting the Digest?" And she said, "Well, yes, but I haven’t changed the address to where I’m living. Because" -- I think his name was Leo Menard -- it was Leo Menard, M-e-n-a-r-d -- and she said, "Well, he enjoys reading it so much that he gets it first," and then, well, he would probably bring it down to her -- I suppose if he didn’t forget it up there. I guess he must have been sort of a controlling person. You know what I mean? And I just, I just got annoyed, and I thought, "I could afford" -- we were both working -- $3 a year for the Digest -- and this was a long time ago. And the next year, I didn’t renew the subscription, because she wasn’t -- you know, I had intended it for her.

But something can be shared, but he just seemed, he was just not, I don’t know, I was not impressed with -- well, I don’t have to be impressed, but I was annoyed. Whether I had the right to be annoyed, I don’t know, but I was really -- the magazine was incidental, but the dress, I just, I thought, it was just unforgivable that he wouldn’t buy her a dress, and this other lady wanted this, and he knew (strikes table) this. This other lady wanted her dress back. He knew, when you figure when you have more than one maternity dress, ’cause you have to wash it. You know what I mean? And they didn’t have dryers up there. This was sort of primitive, and this lady ran a boarding house. So, you know what I mean, there were washing machines and stuff like that, but there was not a lot of the things that you really need. So I was glad that I just did -- it was blind luck that I got something for her that she really needed, and I had no idea.....

I’m going talk about card parties now, and how those euchre parties were um, started. Jolicoeur was very family-oriented. ’Cause he was always watching over my brothers, you know, taking them on the route with them and paying them. I think he felt that there was nothing that you needed to have a father figure present for. But when my father left, my brother was probably 25. I was 5 years old. He was 20 years older than me, give or take a month or two maybe, you know. And so he always felt he always had to be a presence in his younger brothers’ lives. And he was very, he always was over. And he’d visit my mother and stuff like that.

I’ll tell you this: He had a bottle, a quart of whipping cream once, and my mother was in the store, so he went to the house and he dropped this, he gave her this quart of whipping cream, and I think, some sour cream. He was, by this time he was on a, I think he might have been on a commercial route, but she had this store but he said, "I’ve got this left over," and he took care of it. So my mother saw the milk in there, and the next day, she used it for drinking. She never looked at the cap or anything. And so he comes over a few days later and he says, "How’d you like the whipping cream?" And she says, "What whipping cream? I didn’t have any whipping cream." He says, "I put a quart of it in the refrigerator!" Well, I don’t know if I drank any of it, I don’t know, because she had more. But it was used for coffee or for tea or for drinking (laughs). And whoever drank this whipping cream just probably thought they were drinking very rich milk. The sour cream was recognizable because that was in this little half-pint jar or something. But she just thought it was -- anyway, it was sort of funny, because whoever drank it did not realize how rich it was.

Well anyhow, your father and I were married, so, and we were on Kilbourne. And Jolicoeur went to visit different members of the family and said, "We should get together and play euchre once a month." He said, "There are 10 of us, and we can each take a turn," you know what I mean. Like, you’ll go to nine parties, but you’ll just have the expense of the party once a year. They didn’t have it in July and August at first. And so, and no children. He said, "You can’t play cards with" -- he says, "This is an adult party." Jules had young children, Jack had young children, I had, we had three, and ah, Rene, um, didn’t -- his were all grown up and just towards the end before they moved to California they had Laurie Kay. So everybody knew that no kids were allowed, so when the, when it started, Grandma Jones used to come over and baby-sit.

And Jolicoeur started it. He took the first party. We went by age. And then Phil took a turn, Rolande took a turn. It was in your house, in the basement, wherever you wanted them to play. We didn’t have a finished basement. Gus didn’t have one either, and John took a turn, and then it would have been Gus, Jack, Jules and I. So this way, a party’s a lot of work to plan and organize the food and everything like that. But it’s not bad when you only take it, the turn, once a year and you get to go to nine others.

So anyhow, when it came to Gus’ turn, Bessie was not going to have it. She says, "I’m not taking a turn. I am NOT." She didn’t want to participate. She was a -- very intelligent and interesting, and hard to live with. HARD to live with. I mean almost impossible. And so Gus came back to the next card party, and he said, it was just before -- she didn’t wait until it was his turn -- he said, "My wife won’t take a turn." So he said, "I’m gonna drop out." And everybody said, "No. Forget about it." They knew what she was like. And they, they said, "Come." Gus really liked to play cards. So he came, but I think he always felt very sad, that she would not -- it was work. And they had a basement, but some people played in the dining room or front room. You didn’t have to be in the basement. It was warmer if it’s not in the basement, let’s face it. So anyhow, the card parties started.

(Gus Kirouac didn’t comment on his sister’s words that his was hard to live with save for a "yeah" and a little laugh. But their son, Mickey, offered some insight on why his parents never hosted a card party: "It took years before we finally got a gas conversion. I think Jules put that in. But had the old coal bin down there. ... You wouldn’t want to walk down that basement. And that was, you know, the house upstairs wasn’t big enough to host that many people that you had to have. I guess all that coal dust and everything was down there. it really didn’t get fixed up until we tore the coal bin out. But it was like that until I came home from the service. I painted the whole damn basement and cleaned up. You wouldn’t want to go down there. Trust me. ... That place was total mess from there. It took me a month with a vacuum cleaner just to get all that stuff off of the overhead, you know, the flooring and the timber, before I could even paint.")

And then Rene had Laurie Kay, and I don’t know how far into the card parties we were, and he brought Laurie Kay. And he knew that no young children were allowed, you know what I mean, and it was at my house, and I had just gotten this -- you know this wrought-iron -- Grandma Kirouac bought this wrought-iron couch for me. And we had all moved upstairs, and Denise was too little to leave alone and sleep downstairs. So she bought -- she said I could pick this out, and that was a reasonable price. And I had that downstairs bedroom there off the back, and I had the couch and that iron chair that you had, that matching chair that you used to have in your bedroom. And we had the toy box in there, and we had an area rug that used to belong to my mother, and she didn’t use it anymore. And it was rolled up, and she gave it to me. There was quite a rectangular -- that room rug, you might remember, it had a fringe around it. So you kids didn’t have to play on the floor and it was really nice. And so they brought Laurie Kay, and she was very young. And this couch was pretty new. And so she fell asleep and they laid her on there, it was bedtime, and so she slept through the whole thing. When the card party was over, she had wet this couch, it was brand new, and Gerrie apologized. But she was at the diaper age, you know what I mean?

And this happened with your Aunt Lou and Uncle Ralph (Jones, Robert Pattison’s half-brother and his wife), with one of their children. When they go to bed at night, kids wear diapers and rubber pants or your sheets are just going to smell terrible, your mattress and stuff like that. Well, it seemed to stain, but eventually -- I was really disappointed. I thought, first, they weren’t supposed to bring her, and they had someone at home who could have baby-sat. Someone was old enough to have baby-sit one of their own children. And secondly, she should have been in diapers. So I said, "Oh, well, forget about it," but I was annoyed. I mean, I wasn’t dragging you kids to these card parties. And I was beginning to be resentful. The ones that felt that they, you know, the rule didn’t apply to them once they got another one, you know. And I can see they didn’t want to leave the little girl home.

But it was at Easter Sunday, and I had just scrubbed the kitchen floors. We were living on Kilbourne. And then Aunt Lou came over with the two girls at the time. She and Ralph had been apart, and they went back together again. They had an on-and-off relationship. And I had really scrubbed the floor and I, I don’t know. They didn’t come over for a meal; they just dropped in unexpectedly, you know? So I was going to serve, I was giving the kids cookies, and this little girl, they were dressed really nicely, and she got on one of the kitchen chairs, like the kind I’m sitting on right now, and all of a sudden -- she wasn’t trained. She had little rayon panties on. This urine stream, and she really had to go, and it was a dark urine, you know, all over the chair and down her legs and, naturally, all over the floor. And Lou apologized. But with this dress she could have worn diapers. But for some reason, these women thought when they took these girls out, they shouldn’t be in diapers. But if you’re not trained, you belong in diapers.

So anyhow, the card parties were good. And eventually, I don’t know -- Dad was working at Enterprise Tool and Gear, and it was being mishandled, and it closed, and Rene lost his job, and your dad lost his job. And the company that bought just took this one guy who was German. All the rest of the employees were out. So anyhow, Rene couldn’t find work, so when he had gotten out of service, he wanted to go back to California. He really loved California. And Gerrie said no. that the family was here and she wouldn’t go. So Rene stayed, and he came back. He was in Michigan, so he stayed. And he found work and blah-blah-blah. So eventually, this was a mini-depression here at this time. So Larry wasn’t working at this time; he was old enough to work.

So Rene and Geri, he talked Gerrie into going back to California. And she had a cousin that had, like, a little cabin at the end of their property. And, ah, Rene and Jerry went to this home, but they didn’t feed ’em. They took care of themselves. And they went out the next day and they each got jobs. I don’t know where Rene got a job. And three weeks later they had saved enough money to pay for Laurie Kay and Gerrie’s fare. And I think -- I don’t know if Patty was married or she was working so she could be on her own, and Suzanne was married. So they got out there, and then they -- he had bought, before Enterprise closed, he had bought -- he had a house on Elkhart in Harper Woods.

He had sold that and bought a nice home in St. Clair Shores. And there was a, like, an island of grass and stuff in the middle of the street, you know? It was nice, a really nice setting. He had just bought that. And Gerrie’s aunt had a house in Caseville, up in Michigan there, and Gerrie didn’t want this house to go to a stranger, so they bought THAT house. And they had two payments, and he had bought a new car. And then not long after that, all these are payments are due -- no job. And Jolicoeur said, "Oh, boy. If Rene gets out of this dilemma," he said, "I’ll never worry about anybody again." So he always was concerned. Well, Rene got the job. They couldn’t sell the house. As I said, there was a mini-depression, and real estate wasn’t moving. And finally, it was on the market for two, three years, and he had to make these payments. And he sold it at a loss. But he was able to deduct that from his income tax. So that wasn’t too bad.

But the people that rented it from him had children, and when a child wets a diaper, you throw it in the diaper pail. These people who were renting -- it was a really nice home -- they’d throw the wet diaper on the floor, where urine was removing the, the finish on these floors. These were hardwood floors, you know? So then, the whatchamacall sold, the Caseville house. I don’t know how long that took. But that did sell. I don’t think they made any money on it, but I don’t think they lost anything -- probably broke out even. And the car, they must have just kept.

So anyhow, so that was one less on the card party list. So then, Jack was living in Harper Woods. He built the house he lived in. and this, if you ever record this, don’t let it -- Hilda was sort of, she spent a lot of money. She came from Europe and she just thought there was more -- she came from Austria, you know? Actually, she was Czechoslovakian; she was born in the Sudatenland. And, I’ll give you a little history back there: a firm believer in Hitler. And she says, (with accent) "Hitler was good for the German people." And this was when she first came to the United States. And Rene, everybody came over to meet Jack’s future wife, because they had gotten married here in the United States. He met her while he was stationed in Austria. It was during wartime. And Rene said, "What!?" You know. (laughs) He killed all those millions of Jews. He said, "We got Hitler in the kitchen!" You know! She didn’t like that, but he was laughing. You know, he had been in the South Pacific and Rene -- I mean Jules and Jack -- were in the European theater.

Anyhow, a lot of the truth was coming out about Hitler then, you know. And, of course, it’s hard to believe that your leader had not only clay feet, but mush for a brain. So anyhow, and she was charging -- they had a, I don’t know, she learned how to drive. And she, no matter, Jack was doing very well. He was a contractor, he built one house at a time. And it was good money but he couldn’t get ahead, he couldn’t get ahead. So finally he said, "I’m going to move to the Upper Peninsula." And he figured it was more isolated, and he sold what he had, and he bought this motel, this Johnson’s Motel, well, they never changed the name. And the reason you could make a living: You rented it out in the summer and there were the Porcupine Mountains up there. I don’t know if you remember the trip we took when we got the Falcon, and we took a trip up there. We were there for a few days. So you were there. Whether you remember it, I don’t know. And in the summer they had skiers come from Wisconsin, mostly. And so they had an income, but Jack still had to work. This didn’t support the whole family. So we lost another person, so we’re down to eight now, instead of 10.

So then how we did it is they started not having them in June because by this time we had a lot of kids who were graduating from high school. And the families would throw graduation parties, and it was sort of -- whoever had a graduation party, it was a big expense and then you had the card party. It was a big expense, because you had to buy food and you’d have beer and you’d have wine. We never served whiskey. I don’t know why. Whiskey -- any kind of whiskey. Because I guess people would mix drinks and get sick and drive. And there wasn’t this "don’t drive when you’re drunk," or stuff like that. I mean there wasn’t all the suits going on, but this was the, it was, they served beer and out of deference for some women who wanted wine, they had wine. I didn’t drink either. So it didn’t make any difference to me. The only guy who suffered was Uncle George, didn’t like beer or wine, and he would have preferred a mixed drink. And he might have had one or two, but he didn’t make the rules and so they abided by it.

So anyway, we had these card parties for a long, long time. And, of course, Jules always took his turn. And Gus couldn’t take a turn, so there was like, just seven, actually, you know what I mean. And eventually they just sort of died out, but we had a lot of fun while they went on, and it, it was interesting and fun, and it was sad to see it end. After they curtailed for a year, some of the young nephews and nieces wanted to start them up. And they used to come to the parties. You know, when it started out it was just the adult ones, and when these kids got old enough to play cards, they came. Raymond would come while he was -- Roger came, and others came. And the ones that didn’t play euchre would play pinochle. So the party had expanded, so it was more expensive all the time. So they said since this, the, ah, elder aunts and uncles had had it so long, that they would take it over and the aunts and uncles could come. Well, they had about two or three, and I guess, the expense, they just withered on the vine. So there wasn’t any, it just died out. So anyway, all good things come to an end. And I doubt if they’ll ever be revived.