A DIARY REVEALS A NORTHWEST NOVEMBER IN 1940

  

Note: I published this post a couple of years ago, but its message is worth repeating— BE GRATEFUL.

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 A couple of days ago, I picked up my father's diary from 1940 to peek into my parents' lives during the month of November that year. His words made me think about all I have to be thankful for and how little we really need to be happy. In Norman Rockwell's famous painting "Freedom From Want," the artist created a scene that has become our ideal image of Thanksgiving. We see a smiling, laughing family gathered around a table heaped with food while the grandparents present the turkey. Even though mine was a loving and happy family too, real life in the '40s wasn't quite so perfect as nostalgia would suggest. I was the sixth of seven children, a child of the '50s and '60s, so I wasn't there, but thanks to Dad's diary, I can picture that time.

Howard and Rosalie Willsie with the first three of their seven children.

 In November of 1940 my parents, like others in their small community, still struggled to recover from the effects of the Great Depression. My father already had a wife and three young children to support.  A national election that month meant President Franklin Delano Roosevelt would serve a third term, and Congress had passed the Selective Service Act in September, requiring all men between the ages of 18 and 35 to register for the draft. During that year, the news on the radio reported the latest, none of it good. Nazi Germany invaded and conquered one country after another. Japan controlled Indonesia and Italy controlled Greece, and most disturbing of all, over 400,000 Polish Jews had been forced into the Warsaw Ghetto.  

Reading the diary, I though about what must have been on my father's mind daily as he worked hard, spending long hours driving a freight truck, picking up meat from Carsten's packing house in Tacoma, roses from Beall Greenhouse on Vashon Island, moving furniture, hauling groceries, and more. He had livestock to care for, as well as other chores around their place, and he dedicated any spare time available toward his effort to get a new barn built before winter. In that month, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed, complicating freight delivery. With everything else that concerned him, he also followed the news as World War II grew ever more devastating, not realizing that within a year his own country would be involved.

As for my mother, her days revolved around the household their two-month-old infant daughter and young boys, one a toddler and the other three years old. The domestic duties she took in stride included not only caring for small children, but also washing laundry in a wringer washing machine. Since she had no electric clothes dryer, she dried everything on a  either a wooden clothes rack indoors or outside on the line on days with no rain, even in freezing weather. She sewed, baked, cleaned, canned, and worked as hard as my father, morning 'til night. Mom kept a diary through her teen years and at the beginning of their marriage, but by November of 1940 she had left it to my father to preserve the days of their busy, hardworking lives in the little leather-covered book I now hold in my hand, 73 years later. Repeated throughout is some form of the statement that they both went to bed exhausted.

In the small space allowed for each entry in the five-year diary, my father crammed together bits of home life, social life, and current world events.

Sun. Nov. 10 - "Finished my sawhorses and went over to the place and cut the sill and joists for the barn. It snowed most of the morning. Dad went duck hunting."

Mon. Nov. 11 - "No freight trip today. I got in a full day on the barn. I'm all ready to start laying flooring. The girls had the baby shower today. Neville Chamberlain is dead."

Wed. Nov. 13 -"Too busy again to day to work on the barn. The English scored quite a naval victory over the Italians. The big Narrows Bridge collapsed last Thursday."

Thursday. Nov. 14 - "Very foggy until noon in Tacoma this A.M. Had another busy day. Paid some more bills. The lodge is giving a card party but we are too tired to go."

The next day they asked a friend to watch the children so they could have a little date night. They "took in the show," meaning they went to a movie at the small local theater. He mentioned the death of a community member on the following Monday. On Tuesday, Dad rejoiced that he had a small load of freight. Even though it meant less income, he could spend over two hours working on the barn. A week earlier, my mother had taken her babies to a clinic set up at the local high school, for smallpox vaccinations, and on Tuesday a county nurse came to their home to check on the children. For dinner that night, she roasted a duck her father had shot when he went hunting.

Wednesday, Nov. 20

"Rained all day. Grandpa and I went up to the bank and he gave me the deed to our place as we have it all paid for at last. Tomorrow we eat turkey."

Yes, they did eat turkey the following day at the home of my grandparents, but before the meal, Dad spent the morning working on the barn. The next day the sun came out and my mother did a big wash. They picked up several boxes of apples from a friend and soon the kitchen would have been filled with the sweet smell of homemade applesauce and pie. I can close my eyes and remember that smell, still part of home life after I came along.

Next he wrote, on Saturday, November 23, "The Greeks are forcing the Italian Army back into Albania. It's warmer tonight and raining. Couldn't get over to the barn today at all. Eggs are forty cents a dozen."

A few days later he noted that my mother "... hung out a big wash yesterday and boy how it rained all night. She went out and wrung them out on the line."



Thanksgiving day passed and life went on. His noted that his gross income from hauling freight that month was $36.00 lower than in November of '39 and he had put 22,000 miles on his Diamond T truck. My mother sewed a snowsuit for their oldest son. Christmas would soon be upon them and year later, war. After the shock of Pearl Harbor, the news that came over the radio would no longer seem so remote. My father wanted to join the Navy but remained a truck driver, his trade considered vital to the nation. 

When you sit down to Thanksgiving dinner this year, be thankful. I am thankful for my parents and I miss them. The world is still a troubled place and always has been, but rich or poor, in times of war or peace, home is home and family dear. Put aside your little aggravations, petty issues, negative thoughts and feelings of never having enough. You have enough. Look around the table. Others will go hungry. Others are alone. Some are refugees or homeless in your own town. Think of those missing, those who should be in the empty chairs. In memory of them, their struggles, their happy times, and most of all their love and good example, be grateful.



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Mom and the Dionne Quintuplets --

On a cozy, rainy Monday morning in Tacoma, Washington, when I should have been doing something more constructive, it occurred to me to pick up my mother's diary to see how she spent this day of October 10 back in 1936. I never expected that such a whim would lead to several more hours of investigation.

"All of us kids went to the show 'Country Doctor' this evening. It sure was a swell picture," she wrote on this date, seventy-five years ago. I knew nothing about the movie, so I sat down my cup of tea, opened up my laptop, and started doing some research. The more I learned, the more I realized that my mother had been one of millions of people swept up in a world-wide frenzy that provided an irresistible distraction in the midst of the Great Depression.

The movie "The Country Doctor," as it turned out, was based on the story of Dr. Allan Defoe, the  doctor who delivered the famous Dionne quintuplets, the first in the world to survive past infancy. The children themselves also appeared in this and other Hollywood movies. Here is an entertaining review of "The Country Doctor" published in the New York Times in May of 1936, a few months before the movie came to the small town theater in Western Washington, where my mother saw it on that long ago October evening. The reviewer refers to Mr. Dionne, father of many children, as "a rabbity little man."

I mean no disrespect to my mother when I point out that she took part in the national hysteria. She was a good, kind person, who happened to adore babies, in the extreme, all her life. She was, in fact, obsessed with babies. At the time the quintuplets were born, my mother, then in her late teens, no doubt relished thoughts of marriage and babies of her own. So it came as no surprise to me that she would adore the Dionne quintuplets. I never thought too much about finding old yellowed newspaper clippings about them among her things after she died.

Like everyone else, I knew about the Dionne quintuplets, but somehow I remained ignorant of the the whole complex, disturbing, and still contradictory story, until today.

A French Canadian named Oliva Dionne and his wife, Elzire Dionne, lived on a farm in rural Ontario, Canada with their five young children, when Elzire gave birth two months prematurely to five more, on May 28, 1934. The tiny identical baby girls, all from the same egg and each weighing under two pounds, were named Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie. When word got out, they became an overnight, worldwide sensation.

By many accounts, the babies received loving care at home from the beginning, were kept warm and fed on a regular schedule. But by the time they reached the age of four months, government officials in the province of Ontario, influenced by Dr. Defoe and the potential financial consequences of such an oddity, declared the family unable to properly care for the infants and took custody, making them "wards of the King." Against their parents' wishes, the infants were removed from the family home to live in a special hospital built expressly for them, across the street from the farm. From then on, decisions concerning their care were made by Dr. Defoe and other authorities. Exploitation had never before been accepted with such mindless glee and fascination. One of the girls, as an adult, called it a "circus."

Known as "Quintland," the hospital served as the only home the children knew for the first nine years of their lives until their family won back custody in 1943. It  has been called Canada's first theme park. The parking lot held 1,000 cars and a gift shop sold souvenirs to the thousands of visitors who came each day (the most frequently quoted figure being 6,000 daily) totaling over three million in the years during which the children lived there. Their staff of attending nurses dressed them up in matching outfits and trotted them out on display two or three times each day, in front of large windows with one-way viewing, screened to obscure the girls' awareness of the curious crowds who fought for position to get a look at them. As adults, the Dionne sisters remembered seeing movement and hearing noises beyond the screen, but didn't realize what was going on. Quintland became an extremely lucrative tourist business for the government, even more important and profitable than the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Along with Dr. Defoe, they appeared in countless advertisements for many products.

A trust fund established for the girls grew rapidly, but by the time they were 18 and could have collected the money, only a fraction of it was left. Many profited from their fame, but probably the province of Ontario most of all. Even the girls' family benefited, in that a 20-room mansion was built for them when the quintuplets returned home, to replace the old farm house, all paid for by the trust fund.

Over the years the father, Oliva Dionne, has been portrayed as everything from a heroic and loving parent who fought for custody to a man who sexually abused and exploited his own children. He was purported to have thought of exhibiting the infants in the United States shortly after they were born, which may have been part of what led to the government taking them away. Doctor Defoe lives on in history as both a savior and an entrepreneur, depending on opinion. Books, documentaries, articles, and even the accounts given by the surviving daughters themselves offer differing viewpoints and interpretations of what happened to them.

Seen by some as valuable objects in an exhibit, having only limited contact with their own family, and kept in relative isolation, these innocent children lost the opportunity for a normal upbringing and home life. But then perhaps the home life offered did not offer much. As adults, their struggles to maintain some privacy never ended. As of this month, October 2011, only two remain alive, now 77 years old. They still receive fan mail from all over the world.

Here are three of them, Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile, being interviewed in conjunction with the 1994 release of a Canadian movie, a fictionalized version of the story, called "Million Dollar Babies":

And here is a look at the movie.



An autobiographical book called  Family Secrets told the story in their own words. And this is one of the best, most comprehensive articles I've found: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3683/is_199401/ai_n8716816/

How strange to think that the five babies my mother adored, as much as today's teenage girls adore rock stars, now number only two, two women about the same age Mom was when her own life came to an end, and maybe not so different. As she matured, I like to think my mother looked at the Dionne quintuplets with compassion rather than fascination. But have we as a society learned anything from this story?

With modern communications faster than anything my mother could have imagined, celebrity can occur in mere minutes and go on to make the individuals involved miserable to a degree never experienced before.

My "to do" list gathered some dust today, but I've learned a lot. Right now citizens of our nation, and the world, feel burdened by economic troubles similar to those of the Great Depression. They too, seem to need distraction. But next time you feel tempted to ride the wave of freak show curiosity and voyeurism, please remember the very real human lives involved.