The Gaudet Children Who Survived – the Two Boys, John and Gerard

Marie Blanche Poirier was born on January 19, 1890, and married Charles Joseph Gaudet, who was born on April 20, 1891, on April 13, 1915. Their first child was born in 1916, their last in 1934. In that 18-year span nine of them died dreadful deaths, mostly of tuberculosis.

Here is a table with the vital statistics of that sad family.

The Children of Marie-Blanche Poirier and Charles Gaudet
Name	Birth	Death	Cause of death	Age
Joseph Isadore	Feb. 24, 1916	Funeral March 11 1921	Croup	5
Mary Dora	June 4 1917	November 23 1923	Diphtheria	4
Mary Frances	October 20, 1918	February 22, 2014	Stroke and heart failure	96
Mary Elizabeth	May 2, 1920	December 15 1937	Tuberculosis	17
Edward	April 4, 1921	Funeral September 19 1938	Tuberculosis	17
Mary Genevieve (Jane)	March 20, 1922	September 9 1937	Mentally handicapped	15
May	March 10, 1923	April 16, 2010	Lung Cancer	86
Mary Marguerite Rita	March 21, 1924	April 3 1941	Tuberculosis – Sanatorium	17
John Joseph	June 14, 1925	September 5 1997	Debilitation	72
Frederick	December 12, 1926	December 8 1937	Tuberculosis	11
Susan	July 13, 1928	July 25, 2020	Age and disability	92
Cyrus	December 17, 1929	January 3 1930	Infant death	17 days
Joseph Gerard	July 22, 1932	November 17 1999	Heart failure and diabetes	67
Joseph Arthur	January 15, 1934	February 17 1934	Infant death	1 month

 

The Survivors

Somehow, in this morass of disease and death five children survived and reached old age. I knew them all because they were my immediate family as I grew up. One of them, Frances, was my mother.

Mary Frances, (1918 – 2014
Annie May (1923 – 2010)
John Joseph (1925 – 1997)
Mary Susan 1928 – 2020
Joseph Gerard 1932 – 1999

 

The survivors hardly ever came together. Soon the two men, John and Gerard, would also be gone, never reaching the Twenty-First Century.

May and Frances in the front, with John, Susan, and Gerry, December 11, 1986.

 

Of the five, only two had relatively easy lives, May and Gerard. Of the others, my mother Frances was taken out of school in Grade 4 to go and work in a lobster factory, where for years she suffered physical and sexual abuse. John was plagued by a life of endless alcoholic bouts, and Susan, in her early twenties became horribly ill with dreadful diseases that left her deaf and emotionally damaged.

To shorten the length of this post I have separated the brothers from the sisters and will begin with John and Gerard. The three sisters will follow in the next post.

 

John Joseph (1925 – 1997)

In the sequence of births, John was flanked by Rita in 1924 and Frederick in 1926. Three babies in a row, and only he survived. This picture was taken in the summer of 1943 when he was 18. It is the earliest known picture of him.

He is standing on the porch of the family’s “new” house at Christopher’s Cross, and he is proud as a peacock, wearing his new pair of hip rubber boots, the ultimate symbol of masculinity in that community. Its as if he had gone through a tribal ritual permitting him entry into manhood, and he structs his pride.

I would come into his life the following year, in March, having been born a few months before. In time I became a sort of toy for John, who was kind and loving to me, and when I got a few years older, would put me up to tricks for his own amusement. His idea of a joke was to dare me to take my grandmother’s scissors and cut the fingers off somebody’s winter gloves. To please him I eagerly set about the task only to be stopped by my grandmother who saved the gloves and smacked me severely. John went into gales of laughter.

Most nights he would walk to the village, over a mile away, and there he met with his friends, and they all learned to drink together. The choice of beverage was narrow – home-made beer or moonshine. I do not know when he began to be addicted to drink, but before long it became his constant companion, perhaps in lieu of a human counterpart. I never knew where his affections lay but there was never any talk in the family about a girlfriend – only the boys and the booze.

He was great friends with my grandfather’s brother, Jerry the Shoemaker, and spent a lot of time visiting him, getting him to do imitations of priests in the pulpit calling down damnation on their drinking circle. Having filled the crippled Uncle Jerry with liquor, John staggered home to pass out on the kitchen floor. At such an early age, gone was the beauty of the sexy teenager, replaced by degradation, although, in sober moments, his ability to charm never left him for the whole of his life.

I have no idea how John began his working life. One assumes that he found work at Myrick Shore, perhaps as second man to a fisherman. I simply don’t know. He appears to have soon gravitated to the lumber camps of New Brunswick where he worked as a woodsman all his life. My earliest recollections of John in his early twenties were of a man who returned home from working in the woods and in a matter of days, spending all his season’s earnings on liquor. This brought the most dreadful unhappiness into the house. My grandfather was seldom around, himself working in the woods, and when he returned, both father and son got drunk together.

John was away most of the year, but when he came home, he liked to clean himself up, get a haircut, have his best pants pressed and, following the instructions of Uncle Jerry, polishing his shoes to a high shine.

John in the summer of 1960.

His charm never left him, and even in his later years he loved to get together with his brothers and sisters and talk and tell stories, always doing imitations of this one and that one.

A moment of family hilarity: John with his brother Gerard and his sister May. Circa 1995.

 

As he grew older, and as his strength as a woodsman declined, he spent more and more time in Tignish. He had lots of funny stories to tell when he was sober and had friends who enjoyed his company. Many saw him as a sort of village idiot, something to taunt. Finally, a few years before his death, my mother used up most of her savings to buy a fine little house with every comfort he could want. He had happy days there, but of course the drinking continued, fuelled by the income provided by his Old Age Pension.

John with a friend in his last years. Photo: the Internet

 

He died on September 5, 1997. I read the lesson at his funeral Mass, and at his graveside, on impulse, outside the liturgy, sang this Gregorian plea for the dead, the last wish we sang as choirboys, a lifetime before, as the body of the deceased left the church for the Judgement.

This is what it says, and I can think of no better wish for a kind man, full of fun and laughter, who was destroyed by alcohol:

May the Angels take you to heaven, and upon your arrival may the Martyrs plead on your behalf and lead you to the Holy City of Jerusalem. May choirs of angels receive you, and with Lazarus, once a poor man, may you have eternal rest.

 

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Joseph Gerard 1932 – 1999

Gerard was the second-last child of Charles and Marie Blanche Gaudet. She was 42 when he was born in 1932, with eight child deaths behind her, and Gerard would spend his first seven years in the tuberculosis-infected home of his grandfather, Joseph Isidore.

This is the earliest picture of Gerard and his sister Susan, each with a teddy bear and doll, quite possibly taken at Joseph Isidore’s house before it burned down. If so, it is the only know picture of that house – or at least part of it. The children seem warmly dressed and well-shod for winter, but the coats and boots may have been shared with other children in that desperately poor family.

 

In 1940 Gerard would move, with his four surviving siblings, to a new home about a mile north of Tignish. The house was close to the woods where he would soon spend a lot of time snaring, shooting, and fishing in two lovely brooks. He had already begun school, which in those days was taught at the Sisters of Notre Dame Convent next to the parish church. In this 1942 school picture he is sixth from the left in the front row, with blond curly hair and a wide toothy smile.

 

There is another picture from this period – a rare thing in this family – showing Gerard sitting in his Etonia streamlined waggon, probably a gift bought at Eaton’s by his loving aunts, Frances and May who were working in Halifax during the war. His mother Marie Blanche is on the porch step, entertaining Gaudet neighbours from the lane off the main road. They are Malvina Gaudet, Frank’s wife, with a new baby, possibly Alice or Leo, and with her are two nephews, Joe Gaudet’s sons Jerry and Peter, who were his great friends. His sister Susan holds her beloved cat, one in a long string of them all called Nasaille. Gerard looks a bit surly, or suspicious, just like his mother.

 

Probably taken around the same time, perhaps 1942, Gerard and Susan were photographed with their father Charlie, and with their fashionably coiffed sister May, who at that time was being courted by a handsome navy man in Halifax. They would soon marry, to the great distress of Marie Blanche who was horrified that her daughter was marrying a Protestant. In the photo, however, everyone is happy – Gerard is exuberant.

This very lovely photograph – one of the most beautiful in the family collection – shows Charlie leaning against the gate to his property while Gerard cuddles his dog, a water spaniel called Patsy sent to him from Montreal by May’s new husband, Earl Grandin, the dreaded Protestant. Patsy had webbed feet!

Soon after this picture was taken Patsy returned from her ramblings with intestines hanging out of the lacerations where a local farmer had stabbed her with a pitchfork. Gerard quietly took her to a hedgerow down the field, and shot and buried her.

 

Gerard was a most remarkable boy. By nature, he was highly athletic and excelled at all sports played in Tignish. He was a particularly good hockey player. He was a daring and powerful swimmer and at the Tignish Run would show off by diving into the harbour from high piles of lobster traps, or even from moving boats. He was also a hunter, and in those post-war years when we had no meat, he would shoot geese and ducks, and set snares for rabbits. In all my childhood days, aside from the few chickens my grandmother kept in the summer, the game that Gerard brought home was our only source of fresh meat.

He loved to fish, and on his beloved battered bicycle he would set off for secret fishing spots and come home with a string of the most delicious fish that were fried in pork fat by his mother. Gerard had an extraordinarily intense phobia of snakes. Once, while fishing, he hooked an eel and was so horrified that he would not even take it off the hook but towed it home on his fishing line behind the bike. It was one of the few times my grandmother laughed. She skinned and cleaned what was left of the eel and cooked it.

 

The Move to Montreal

There was no future for Gerard in Tignish and his sisters Frances and May, who were now living in Montreal, decided that he should go and live with them and find a job and a start in life.

With his natural charm and aggression, the country boy had no difficulty adjusting to life in busy Montreal. Soon he got a job with a company called Terry Industries.

Homelite, the great chainsaw manufacturer, had a subsidiary in Canada that built saws to conform with Canadian market regulations and to avoid import taxes. It was called Terry Industries and the ID tags generally said Homelite/Terry, Point Claire, Quebec.

Gerard got a job with that company, and he worked for them the greater part of his life. Recognising his manual skills he was selected to be trained as a machinist, turning on a lathe intricate parts for these saws with micrometer precision. He was a perfectionist in this work and was a prized and privileged employee.

 

Life with his Sisters

Living with his two sisters – May freshly widowed – seems not to have been a strain. Gerard was a very laidback person. In those days old friends from Tignish, Joe Gaudet’s girls, were working in Montreal, and there was much laughter and coming and going. American cousins, the daughters of their Aunt Angie from Providence, Rhode Island also visited. There was much carrying on and fooling around because Gerard was so full of fun and outrageous behaviour.

Here he imitates the teachers at school looking for lice in the hair of their students. Headlice was a perpetual problem in those days, in urban as well as country environments.

There was laughter everywhere.

 

Gerard became passionately fond of playing the guitar, and before too long obtained a superb now classic instrument that has been preserved by his son Larry. In Tignish there was a talented musician called Everett Harper who had a brief episode as a schoolteacher during which time he taught me in my Grade 5 year. He visited the family in the mid 1950s and there was much music making. Everett played various instruments and excelled at piano and guitar. Here he is visiting and teaching the young Gerard new tricks. Note the deep concentration on Gerard’s face.

Gerard – who by this time had been renamed Gerry – had a passionate love of music which was very characteristic of both his parents. He loved Country and Western music as growing up in Tignish it would be the only music he would be exposed to on the radio, except for Don Messer and his Islanders who specialised in fiddle dance music. Very early on Gerard developed a passion for the music of the Nova Scotian Country and Western star, Hank Snow, perhaps most famous for his emotionally callous I’m movin’ on.

That big eight-wheeler rollin’ down the track
Means your true-lovin’ daddy ain’t comin’ back
‘Cause I’m movin’ on, I’ll soon be gone
You were flyin’ too high for my little old sky so I’m movin’ on

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XY8h_h-uhA

 

Gerard began to collect the Hank Snow vinyl records and over the years, with great effort, built up a complete collection of all the covers. Along with his guitar this collection has survived.

 

Gerry the Hockey Player

At this time a hockey team was formed at Terry Industries and Gerard soon became their star player. Industrial hockey was a big thing in Montreal in those days and soon Gerard caught the eye of scouts for the bigger teams who were always on the lookout for new players. Perhaps wisely he did not take up on any of the offers made to him at that time. A splendid professional photo of him was taken at the rink and he looks lethal.

 

Marriage and a Family

Marriage always hung in the air and no doubt there was constant pressure from Frances and May that he should find a girl and produce a family. Gerard took his time, more interested in sports and his increasing responsibilities at work than setting up a home. Perhaps he had too vivid memories of his own home.

In the mid-1950s he got leave from work to spend some time fishing with his father for the Myrick establishment. I believe it was Charlie’s last year as a fisherman. Gerard had never fished with his father before and it is typical of him that he could leave the lathe and tend to the hauler to pull laden lobster traps out of the water. Once, in one of his foolish moods, while at sea, he dived into the water, rubber boots and all, and gave his father the most awful fright. In a moment, drenched, he was back into the boat, hard at work with the lobster.

 

It was at this time that he met two sisters who lived at Myrick Shore, Vera and the younger Violet. They were the children of a distant cousin, Alphonse Gaudet (1903-1981) and Ethel Arsenault (1910-2010). He was attracted to the darker, more serious of the two and in July of 1955. after a short courtship, he and Vera were married in the Tignish church.

Soon they set up house in their own flat, not far from Gerard’s sisters in Park Extension in North Montreal.

 

 

The title of Head of the Family is a genealogical one, not much talked about in these times, but when his father died in 1960, the status of Head moved to Gerard as it was most unlikely that the senior John would ever marry. In time this would be confirmed absolutely when their firstborn Lawrence (Larry) appeared in May of 1960.

He brought great joy to his parents and his mother Vera was in transports of joy at his arrival.

Mother Vera and Larry.

He was adored from the start  and became my mother’s chief focus as she dedicated all her spare time to babysitting during the years when it was required – and beyond! With enormous tact she explained to me that it was only when she was able to babysit Larry that she learned what being a mother was.

 

Three years later, in 1963, his daughter, Donna, would be born. These fortunate children experienced the care and love that overflowed from their father.

His son Lawrence flew through the best universities on athletic scholarships, earning a first-class degree in literature that inspired him to write books. In 1989 he married Alison Smith (b. 1984), a graduate in Art History from McGill University in 1986. They had two sons, Jackson, born in 1999, and Theo, born in 2002.

Gerard’s daughter Donna, born in 1963, rejected the city and returned to the home of her parents where she married James Gaudet, her cousin, and a successful fisherman with his own very fine boat. This amazing woman was her husband’s partner in the boat for a number of seasons while they built a beautiful house on the edge of the sea where their hospitality was legendary.

 

Life in Park Extension

Gerard’s son Larry kindly shared anecdotes of growing up in Park Extension with his father. Gerry had friends everywhere he went and was often busy helping people out with various kinds of problems, day, or night. If friends were moving to another place Gerry showed up to help. I remember in well in 1966 when in May I moved to my new flat he was there to help me, and when a few months later I decided to leave Montreal, he once again showed up to put my things in storage at my mother’s flat. He loved helping people, and did so frequently and generously, and all was done with his crazy sense of humor.

Alone among other fathers he played baseball with his son on the busy street where they lived and thought nothing of treating the whole baseball team to Dairy Queen ice cream.

He was a man of the greatest integrity, completely incorruptible. He was also utterly fearless and well into his middle age he maintained the bodily strength of his youthful years.

 

[insert picture of Gerry and Vera]

 

Vera died tragically young at the age of 46 on April 27 in 1982. Shock spread throughout the two Gaudet families and carrying on was difficult. Gerard immersed himself in his music and developed new athletic interests.

 

He left Terry Industries and set up his own specialist mechanics company providing custom parts, often on an emergency basis, for elevators. This shop was on the opposite side of the Mercier bridge across from the Kahnawake Indian Reserve No. 14 where there were two golf courses, one with narrow membership rules (“whites” preferred) and the other, an indigenous course, run by the Patton family with whom Gerry was friends. There he played golf with great enthusiasm and introduced his son Larry to the Patton family who were friendly and relaxed and called themselves “Indians.”

Around the age of 40 Gerry once again became actively involved in his old passion of hockey and was soon again on the ice with a team made of men with similar enthusiasms.

He looks as if he had never aged.

He found more time to visit his family, who were now all moved back to Tignish. May and Donna and her husband James (also a Gaudet) lived at Anglo Tignish and Frances livid in Senior Housing in Tignish. She also had a cottage at Anglo shore. I remember one Christmas when he visited when the whole family, even John, got together at May’s house for a glorious Christmas dinner. There was much jollity and opening of presents, and John and Gerry, who had hardly seen each other in over 40 years met again as brothers.

Gerry visited Tignish more frequently in those years after Vera’s death. He met up with men who had been boys at school with him a lifetime ago and who now ran businesses as mechanics. Gerard was even tempted for a bit to move back down to work with one of them in his big shop.

He enjoyed visiting his daughter and the last vivid memory I have is this photo of him indulging Donna’s greatly beloved ancient dog Lace. The picture is full of his kindness and warmth.

 

On November 17, 1999, Gerard died suddenly of massive heart failure exacerbated by diabetes. He was only 67. Devastated, his children buried him next to his wife Vera in the cemetery at Tignish.

He was the sweetest of men.

 

 

 

Special Thanks

I wish to thank my cousin Larry Gaudet for providing me with photos of his father and also helped with details of the chronology. His sister Donna also helped with dates. Thank you both.