What I recall from speaking with my elders.
Grandpa LaFond, I don’t even know his first name, was a plump little fella who loved to feed Blackie, his small, fat, black dog. He painted signs as a job—I think had his own shop and was self-employed. He had a work shop in his basement where all of the screws, nails, nuts and bolts were in cigar boxes that had been labeled. He smoked a lot of cigars. The pipes in the ceiling were exposed. I think I recall some signage wire hanging from one thick black pipe, maybe the main to the street. Grandpa built bird feeders. Over 30 decorated the margins of the back yard. In retrospect he and/or grandma must have done much decorative gardening, as it was so pretty back there. In the middle of the yard was a covered swing, a green-painted metal contraption where he and Roy, which is what he called Grandma, liked to sit.
I recall one New Year’s Eve with them, drinking a toast of ginger ale at midnight. He showed me how to make a toy boat, a yacht, by cutting out a deck plank, painting it, and using pins and sewing line to make a railing, tacking in blocks for a wheelhouse. The squirrels ruined his feeders. He was going to address their depredations with some design improvement when he retired. He died of a stroke the day after he retired. His eldest Son, Uncle John, became an architect and facility manager. He loved to dance. I have no clue what his origins were, other than grandma inferring that his forefather had been sold as an English orphan to French Canadians as had hers.
Alberta Vista Roy outlived her husband by some 30 years and breast cancer by some 60, surviving a double mastectomy when a young mother of three sometime in the late 1930s. The doctor gave her six months to live and she buried him too. For most of her elder years she lived with my father’s older sister, Marie, a darling lady who had a large family: Billy, Mike, Louise, David, Susan and Lenny & Larry, the twins. The father of the twins, Marie’s second Husband, Herb, influenced me the most on my father’s side of the family. He read a lot as an engineer on a cargo ship, and loaned me many a book, always free to speak of what we read.
Alberta told me that her father, Elzear Roy, had been sold to French Canadians, earned his freedom, then worked as Shipwright and Herbalist. He sailed with the ships he built into the arctic for their first cruise. She described them as scooners. He conducted most of his work as an herbalist in the woods and meadows and had a rivalry with some villainous person named Ballanger, who sold to the same apothecaries and pharmacists. He had a good friend, who was an Indian, whose name was Mister Short Step, who used to visit often and helped her mother with heavy work while Elzear was off on a cruise, as well serve as a ward against the evil Ballanger. They crossed into the U.S. and settled in Fall River, Mass, when Alberta was an infant, in 1901. Since Alberta recalled Mister Sort Step and collecting herbs against the Ballanger person, these activities must have been pursued in the US, not just Canada.
Alberta was “Granny in the Room,” for a good 20 years. I would walk down to Soller’s Point and Waters Edge where they lived on Wednesday when I worked at East Point Metro in the early 90s. She baked something called Congo Squares, called us all “my honey,” and knitted afghans for all the children in the family. Her favorite food was Mitchell’s Shoepeg Corn, which I brought her by the case. She and Grandpa set up home in Pimlico, Baltimore City in the mid 1900s. By the 1960s, they had moved to Willoughby Road in Parkville, Baltimore County, the general migratory path of both sides of my family, from West Baltimore, to Northeast Baltimore and adjoining sections of Baltimore County. Aunt Marie’s path diverted to Dundalk, Southeast Baltimore County, due to her marriage to Herb, a merchant mariner.
Alberta was the sweetest person I ever met. So it shocks me to this day to recollect her hugging me for the last year I visited, when she had begun to tell me of her family and past, and whispering, “My Honey, remember, [1] we hate the English because they sold us to the French!”
There was one work story that Alberta told me during our visits as she knitted in the plush chair in the front corner of the small bedroom off the dining room:
She was working at a shop where things were assembled by women. The way she related it, it struck me as similar to collating in a print shop, were the workers shuffled along a table stacking page 1 on page 2, page 1 and 2 on page 3, page 1, 2 and 3 on page 4, etc. all day, my first job. I seem to think it had to do with assembling shoes. Well, there was a boss who supervised the young women, who would step up behind them, while excited, in his slick suit, and press his private parts against their butts. This was done under the pretext of looking over their shoulder. She had already related how one stood up against bullies in the woods, who filched your best herb sources, describing a world of minor sabotage, unto casting stones, at Ballanger the malefactor. She proudly related to me her caper against the amorous work house manager. She had always had “a bony little butt, like you, my honey,” and she pulled that butt in when the supervisor looked over her shoulder. Knowing that he would have to really thrust his pelvis out to reach her inverted butt, especially since he had a big gut, she waited for him to push near, and then slammed her butt back, smashing his offending parts between her bony butt and his own pelvis. “The brushing up, stopped abruptly, you can be sure of that.”
That is all I knew of my old folks work.
Dad worked as a printer, then salesman, then manager of Harford Press, within blocks of where I lived and still visit in Northeast Baltimore. His work flow was to manage a print shop for some time, then become restless, and take a business opportunity, usually in sales. He sold: encyclopedias, meat/freezers, memory courses, then tractor trailer training. This job took us to Western Pennsylvania, 30 miles northeast of his HQ in Wheeling West Virginia. That job dried up and he took a job selling chemicals, then worked managing a print shop, worked as a short order cook. With three full-time jobs, he passed out shaving one morning. I recall the sound of his big square head cracking into the bathroom tile and Mom gasping.
When I was 16 and dropped out of school Ted gave me my first adult job in the bindery at Mancuso Press, which he managed for a nice, crippled old pervert with a bald head, Mister Sam. His next job, which made him money, was being an insurance salesman, for Met Life, which collapsed under some regulation scandal. Later in life he returned to sales and really enjoyed selling trade school courses to people whose college degrees had not panned out into viable careers. He left that, to drive long haul truck in his late 50s, a job he was happy with. He sued to stop at the Columbus, Ohio Public Library for audio books, drive 25 days, come home for 5 days. He visited me a couple times while I worked overnight at a supermarket, the cab of the truck outfitted with chairs, bed, fridge and microwave.
He went to the hospital with a lung complaint just shy of his 62nd birthday and found he had lung cancer—everywhere. He told me like this, “They are giving me 3 months. If I don’t make it six months, Pat, your step mom, has nothing. She raised kids all her life. So I need to live for that long.”
He beat the prognosis, not by decades like his mom, but by a couple years. It turns out he did his biggest work for free, as a mentor at AA. Those people far outnumbered us at his memorial. I recall a few of the drunks he picked up off the street and brought home to dry out. Ted worked hard and believed in his employers and business partners, and almost always got screwed. He was the eternal optimist and found his true calling as a self help mentor.
Those are the only clues I have on my paternal side. I have lacked curiosity concerning my ancestry, which, among other flaws, makes me more American, and more “white” than I would like.
Notes
-1. This varied with “don’t forget” and “never forget,” as she aged recalling with more vigor a strong
