Growing up, I thought nothing much happened in Mom’s childhood or family. That was because we were raised on Dad’s dramatic legends of his small town, Drumheller, Alberta, the Fort MacMurray of its day, full of bootleggers, madams and shoot-outs with the police. The town characters, which included some of our own family, would have fit well in a Southern gothic novel – large characters, both admirable and weird, whose lives had rather unusual and too often tragic trajectories. I’ve come to think of Mom’s family as more Alice Munro material -normal working and middle-class Canadians who went quietly about their daily lives until one strange thing happened to them. Then they mostly went back to being “normal” people.
Mom’s Uncle Andrew and Aunt Jean were probably the most well off of her relatives because he was the manager of the Pioneer Laundry company in Vancouver. Aunt Jean kept up with he grown family and entertained in her West Vancouver home. It was unlikely she needed extra income, but she had a side career as an advertising model. “Isn’t that your Aunt Jean?”, Dad asked Mom one time in the early 1960’s, pointing to a flyer featuring a Hudson’s Bay sale ad for women’s lingerie. Aunt Jean, an attractive woman in her late forties, was modeling a brassiere. There was nothing wrong with that, but in those more modest times, you didn’t usually see pictures of relatives in bras, or the family didn’t mention it.
Aunt Jenny Campbell was one of Grandma’s younger sisters. She too had come out from Glasgow to Vancouver, where she married Uncle Norman. They’d lived on a farm in Chilliwack and then in Creston and raised five children. In the late 1950’s, her middle son, Gordon disappeared. He was about nineteen. In the early 1960’s, I remember Grandma reading the Vancouver Sun while visiting us and shaking her head. “I wonder if that is our Gordie”, she said, reading a report of a minor crime committed by a Gordon Campbell, the kind that used to be reported in the papers. “Gordie would be about that age.” Mom doesn’t remember Gordon much except recalls him making a show of deliberately swallowing cherry pits when they were eating cherries from their Grandmothers’s tree. Perhaps he was a bit strange.
Gordon finally turned up again in the late 1970’s at Aunt Jenny’s eightieth birthday party. He was with his Mexican wife and two children, who didn’t look to be his. None of us ever heard any explanation of where Gordie had been in the intervening twenty years although Mom thinks it might have been Toronto. At that time, Grandma was in extended care after a stroke, so we never got to tell her or find out what she thought.
At the end of the eighties, I was looking at my Vancouver Sun one day and saw a headline, “Coquitlam man dies after eating mushrooms picked on front lawn.” The man was reputed to have been knowledgeable about mushrooms, but somehow ingested one that proved to be fatal. It was “our” Gordon Campbell.
Aunt Jenny’s other four children led quite normal lives as far as we knew.
The other story is a funnier one and goes back to my childhood. Mom’s cousin Margaret Halliday was a nice woman, an immigrant from Scotland, who only did one weird thing that I know of. She joined the Church of the More Abundant Life. It was there she met Ted Fowler, a quiet pleasant man, who sang in the choir and was the assistant minister. I was the flower girl at their wedding in the summer of 1955. It was a modest affair. The only other members of the bridal party were Margaret’s cousin and a best man.
I was seven. I had to sit quietly in the minister’s study for awhile, waiting for the ceremony to begin. As I looked curiously around the room, I noticed a series of photos on the wall. In the earliest one, the minister was wearing a regular clerical collar, but in each of the following years, his garments became more elaborate until finally in the most recent one, he was attired like the Pope in full regalia. Somewhere in that time sequence, he had obtained the title of “Archbishop John”.
The wedding party went into the church, a big old mansion in Burnaby that also apparently housed their “school”. When the choir was singing, Archbishop John sat down in his chair and fell asleep and started snoring very loudly. I was familiar with the United Church and found this a bit odd. When it was time to join the couple in holy matrimony, someone must have nudged him to wake up and come forward. Then Archbishop John uttered the unforgettable words in a whisper that most of the church could hear, “Pssst, Girlie, what’s your name?” That had to be embarrassing for poor Margaret, who was in charge of the Sunday School. After the ceremony, I heard the adults saying that Archbishop John was drunk.
Again, it may have been Grandma that brought it to our attention, or she would most certainly have had something to say about it. Archbishop John had absconded to South America with the temple’s secretary and a lot of its money. A 1971 Vancouver Sun article “Whatever happened to Archbishop John I of Canada?” tells how in 1955, Wolsey (his real name) was “consecrated” in London as an ”archbishop” by “his Grace, Dr. Harold Percival Nicholson, Archbishop of Karim,” also known as Old Nick, a former waiter at London’s Savoy Hotel (Vancouver Sun 1971). The article reported that his former parishioners had been trying to get their money back after Archbishop John was tracked down in Santa Cruz, California, but they had been unsuccessful to that date.
Mom’s family, the Bernards and the Clements, have other stories too. Sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century, Grandpa Clement, an early resident of BC, got shipwrecked when he was prospecting with a friend off Haida Gwaii. And then there is Grandma, apprenticed to a bake shop at fourteen in Glasgow, and later known as a psychic and teacup reader among other things. Both Grandma and Grandpa deserve full stories of their own, but theirs are less about strange events than the remarkable things that normal people do to survive in challenging times.
Now my family seems so normal except for my cousin who wrestled under the name, The Magnificent Mennonite.
Really enjoyed this story Anne.
No doubt this will dislodge a few memories of my own family. I think of a dear uncle who was convicted of armed robbery, if what I was told was correct.
So far all I can remember is Grandpa Herb who swallowed knives to entertain us children after the regular Sunday dinner. I will continue thinking of other stories to tell you all.
Those all sound like stories that would fit in the same category!