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| The late Irene Ryan as Grandma Shalako. |
Louis Shalako
What if a person had never worked in their life? Grandma Shalako's job was the house, the kitchen, the bedding, the laundry.
Cleaning the bathroom.
She raised eight squalling kids in a three-bedroom house, and she was a very good Catholic.
When her youngest, my dad, Big Frank came along she was in her
forties.
He was her little boy, which sort of grated on him. When he told her he was getting married, she threw her head back and laughed. She thought he must be joking. He was still flying model airplanes, and going off to Scout Jamborees, perhaps that was it.
At some point her job was looking after my Uncle Ed, who had taken over the business when grandpa passed away. This is almost funny. Turning 65, one day there was a cheque in the mail from the Canada Pension folks. She was afraid of it. It had to be explained to her. Someone helped her open a bank account, probably Ed. When she died, every freaking penny of it was still in the bank. She'd never had a cent of her own, unless she’d won it at cards down at the Masonic Lodge. I believe she enjoyed taking money off of all the nice Protestant ladies. Basically, Ed gave her household money and wrote all the checks and stuff like that.
Born about 1898, Eugenie had a grade six education if that. Coming from the Hull, Quebec area, her English was very good, yet she still said “Please pass the pommes de terres,” when she wanted the mashed potatoes. Hull is just across the river from Ottawa, and even today, there is still a lot of intercourse between the two cities. The Great Depression put a lot of people out of work and maybe Sarnia just had better prospects.
I don’t think they were running from the law or anything like that.
Debt, maybe—but not the law.
Taking over the family business at 17 years of age, Uncle Ed had, at best, a grade nine or ten education. With eight children, one would imagine Eugenie liked sex—pretty much everybody does, and in the end, she might have gotten a little tired of it. When grandma died, each of her eight children got a cheque from the estate for $700.00 or so, and Ed inherited the house and the business. We can put that down to sweat equity—he’d built the business up to an extent, kept it going and paid for the house and all other expenses for many years.
Yeah, they’d been paying $25.00 a month in rent for the longest time, so Ed made the owner an offer and bought the place for three or four grand, which sounds ludicrous these days, but those were very different times.
Nowadays, the two-income family has become the norm, perhaps even a necessity. There have always been single parents, in the Depression they scrabbled for their living as best they could. In a time where women particularly, didn’t get much higher education, it was a challenge. Also, in the Depression, there weren’t enough jobs to go around to begin with, and this probably went double for unskilled women.
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| Good for delivering tombstones... |
My grandfather sold and installed monuments. Tombstones, ladies and gentlemen, using planks, rollers and brute labour to get them into the back seat area of a 1928 Hudson. The compressor for sandblasting was a screw-in fitting which utilized an old Model-T Ford engine, which would somehow keep running with one cylinder providing pressure for the sandblasting, used to cut names and dates into the granite slabs. With portability, the date of decease of a second spouse for example, could be done in situ, that is to say right in the cemetery after the stone had been erected.
It must have been a wonderful thing, for Uncle Ed to finally get an actual pickup truck, and a set of chain-falls for the garage where the work was done. For a young kid, always hungry for money, it was something of a thrill, to work on a Saturday, putting up a tombstone in a Lambton cemetery, and earning a whopping five dollars for the trouble.
Ed used to sing, as he drove along.
“Every little breeze, seems to whisper Louise, the birds and the bees, seem to whisper Louise—”
The sort of thing you never forget. If you have to have a crazy Uncle, there’s nice crazy, and then there are other kinds. Ed was a nice kind of crazy.
There is a kind of heritage there.
Our family has a reputation for hard work and fine Italian craftsmanship—which is pretty good considering we’re just a bunch of Frenchmen, une bande de foutus français.
The past really is a foreign country, but at least I understand the language.
END
Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Amazon. The audiobook is free with membership. Click on the author’s name to see the full list.
Louise. Maurice Chevalier. (Youtube)
Here’s a rather stylish air compressor based on the Ford Model A.
Thank you for reading.
