When, as a young child, I tried but failed to understand the desperate, French-Canadian mass exodus, of so many thousands of down-trodden, barely educated (no knowledge of English) and large, Québécois families into the barren, grim mill towns of New England’s textile, manufacturing industries, my life-long experiment in finding meaningful answers to life’s varied and frustrating challenges got a major kick in the pants.
Maybe, Mother/Father Nature, an Eastern Divinity concept, was already urging me in my childish worldview to look deeper than the superficial and obvious in discovering true meaning to my worldly concerns, which often centered on being a displaced Canuck (franco-américain) living with other, poor, displaced, highly undereducated Canucks in an English-speaking, Protestant-dominated world called the USA of Lowell, Massachusetts.
Even before WWII ended officially in the fall of 1945, inside of me at the questioning, gut level, our day-to-day, neighborhood ambiance did not feel quite okay, i.e., safe, happy, secure, fulfilling, rewarding, meaningful, joyful, etc., etc. Yes, “the sky was no longer falling” as our courageous, Lowell Sun newsprint captains of local commerce eagerly pointed out, but the Truman administration in Washington already was highlighting the urgent need for Americans to save the world, again, for democracy and capitalism while world Communists under the direction of Stalin’s Politburo in Moscow were hellbent on upsetting any worldwide apple-cart of peace, friendship and cooperation following the disastrous consequences of WWII. The U.S. political powers at the time wished to focus the attention of our American citizens onto the current, global misfortunes that were painfully playing out on humanity’s stage such as: homelessness, despair, famine, inequities, injustice, death by freezing, terminal diseases, hunger, ignorance plus the displaced persons, orphans, cripples, wives and husbands, who were wandering the shattered, empty streets of previously great cities.
Rationing of food items plus gasoline, certain metals, nylon, etc. slowly came to an end in the States, but the raw misery of human survival at the gut-wrenching edge of imminent death still constantly hung over the rest of humanity. Maybe, the Americans had inherited a legacy of making everything better for humanity? Could we save the world from the unfathomably deep stupidity of our limited, basic nature?
World’s Problems & Our Trials in Downtown Lowell
As I recall, my parents plus aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces and, my grandparents, of course, harbored no specific and personal animosity directed at the enemy populations that had served the Nazis, Fascists, and Japanese governments during the war years. However, our own lives experienced over the previous sixteen years (1929 – 1945) had been quite unpleasant and marked by poverty, anxiety, despair, frustration, fear and a barrel of disappointments. As a nearly broken community of wage-earners, our level of personal generosity plus gracious, nation-wide open giving had already been tested to the max.
Autumn 1945
When the fall of 1945 rolled in, we, Lowellians, were still licking our old wounds. We continued to get our shoes, “nos bottines”, repaired at Monsieur Coté, “le cordonnier”, on Aiken Street while fixing old furniture and mending our frayed shirts, dresses and socks ourselves after years of benign neglect.
Monsieur Pinard’s épicerie located at the corner of Ludlam and Hildreth had been our grocery store during the war. This conveniently located store (very few of our neighbors owned a car, so everyone walked back then) provided us fresh meat, fish, vegetables and canned goods, six days a week, come hell or high water as our Protestant Lowellians might have said. Monsieur Pinard was a businessman man of integrity and dogged determination to help his customers survive the hard times. In a Brooklyn neighborhood, he might have been given the label, “a mensch”, but for us, Quebecois-types, he was considered a local savior in a lonely, empty and harsh world of a dog-eat-dog daily reality.
Also, we were postponing the purchase of any new home appliances except, possibly, for that powerful, Maytag electric washing machine, which really took out most of the toil in the housewife’s duty of cloths washing. GE and Westinghouse stocks might not have been flourishing at the moment, but, in the years to come, the use of electrical home appliances surged so Wall Street managed to survive.
Considerations and Decisions Made Elsewhere
Of course, the important, political movers and shakers in Washington, D.C. were, already, fully at work reshaping the future of the planet or, at least, of the entire world order. This remained a task, which we, the simple-minded citizens of the Merrimack Valley, did not and could not begin to understand. Curiously, even in a self-proclaimed “democracy”, the ordinary citizen is quite poorly prepared to correct any broken underpinnings of a partially functioning government.
Generally speaking, the immigrant peoples of Lowell had but a very, very limited grasp of an advanced, literary English used in official documents and academic texts, which examine social and philosophical issues, and, which often center on scientific, mathematical and engineering concepts. In addition, these same working folks, who came from various, primitive agrarian societies, lacked any formal education regarding the different forms of past governments found in Europe. Also, they knew little about the different economic theories dating back around 5000 years, before the Greeks.
Wise Men to the Rescue
At Yalta in 1945, Truman, Stalin and Churchill had already set the stage for our, joint, brave, new, post-WWII world of the day. All that remained to occur, then, was simply for those plans and aspirations to materialize. But, how does anyone with a healthy and active brain chemistry expect to amicably reconcile two, fundamentally opposite socioeconomic systems of government such as Marxist communism and Jeffersonian democracy? But, perhaps, “The Wise Men” could save the day?
In contrast, my familiar everyday, childish activities (hopscotch, hide and seek, tag, Dana Street baseball, etc.), which were focused on learning to play well with others at the corner of Ludlam and Dana Streets in Lowell’s Centerville seem, today, quite unimportant, even trivial, but such is not the case, at all. True, “The Wise Men” on the political scene in 1945 were fashioning a new world for us, but “les jeunes enfants du jardin d’enfance de l’ecole Saint-Louis de France” – some people called it “kindergarten” – were secretly packing away new ways of being happy and even joyful in a world that seems often hellbent on chaos and misunderstanding.