"Sunday at the ‘Hi-Low’: Wilfrid's Story"

This is an excerpt from a memory book I’m writing. More than 90 people responded on Facebook to the photograph of Marion’s Meat Market which I posted and is featured on a new website about immigration in Lowell, Mass., developed by history professor Bob Forrant and students at UMass Lowell. Given the interest, I’m posting this piece of my book-in-progress, Blue Suburban Sky, to give people more of the story related to the iconic photograph of Wilfrid Marion’s store in the Little Canada neighborhood in the 1920s and ‘30s.

Marion’s Meat Market in Little Canada in Lowell, Mass., c. 1925 [Photo (c) Paul Marion]

Sunday at the “High-Low”: Wilfrid’s Story

WAITING FOR HIS CARD-PLAYING FRIENDS ONE NEW YEAR’S EVE, my grandfather, Wilfrid Marion, lit a small heater in his store. When he and his chums left to drink a good time, papers near the heater caught fire and set the store aflame. Wilfrid later headed home across the river’s ice where the rocks make a rack of ribs to hop on from bank to bank. Old Stony, they called it. As soon as he got to the north bank, a neighbor, a fellow grocer, rushed over to tell him about the fire. Distraught and spitting mad, Wilfrid took my father, a teenager, back across the river to assess the damage. Without insurance, Wilfrid struggled to pay off debts to vendors who provided goods for his store. A local meat supplier placed a lien on Wilfrid’s two-story house on Martin Street in the Rosemont, a sub-neighborhood of Pawtucketville across from downtown, which he eventually lost to the creditors. The bankruptcy settlement required him to pay all the small business people to whom he owed money, which he did in installments. Pépère cried years later when he described the catastrophe to us.

The French Canadians in the United States don’t have an Angela’s Ashes memoir that captures their immigrant and ethnic experience. Frank McCourt’s 1996 book was a cross-over hit with readers throughout the social spectrum, not only Irish Americans. The subsequent film carried the story farther. French Canadian-Americans have Jack Kerouac’s so-called Lowell novels, especially three that track closely to his youth in the city: Visions of Gerard, Doctor Sax, and Maggie Cassidy, published between 1959 and 1963.

My father, roughly the same age and upbringing as Kerouac, read Doctor Sax around 1970 when I brought the book home. He laughed out loud hearing himself say the dialogue in Lowell French that Kerouac reproduces by sound. He had never seen those words and expressions in print. A couple of examples: “‘Cosse tué pas l’cou, ey?’ (Don’t break your neck, ey?)” and ‘O les pauvre Duluozes meur toutes!—enchaineés par le Bon Dieu pour la peine—peut être l’enfer!’—‘Mike! Weyons donc!’ (Saying: ‘O the poor Duluozes are all dying!—chained by God to pain—maybe to hell!’—‘Mike! My goodness!’) Kerouac described this particular brand of French patois (French-Canadian French, New England French-Canadian) as: “one of the most languagey languages in the world. It is unwritten; it is the language of the tongue and not of the pen. It grew from the lives of French people come to America. It is a terrific, a huge language.” (Kerouac, Atop an Underwood, 1999)

Authors like the highly praised David Plante have mined the French Canadian-American experience. Plante’s fiction, particularly The Francoeur Trilogy, represents a significant achievement, however, the novels are not common touchstones in American culture, must-reads in the literature of immigrant families dealing with survival, assimilation, and identity maintenance.

Wilfrid’s story is one in millions branching from the Quebec voyageurs who descended on the river valleys and mills of New England. Born in Lowell in 1896, his American line starts with Joseph and Claire Charette Marion of Canada. In 1881, they traveled from Quebec to settle for who knew how long in the burgeoning textile manufacturing center of Lowell, following the first Québecois arrivals in 1841. A trickle of their countrymen and -women turned into a gusher by the early twentieth century. After the American Civil War, they just kept coming. No longer in horse-drawn carts and farm wagons, people rode the train south. Here’s what the editor of the French newspaper said:

“We used to see the Canadians arrive at the railroad stations. There would be the father, with a burlap bag on his shoulder containing spare clothes. His wife would walk beside him carrying some household item. Then children would follow, each one carrying something. They would walk into town, and if they hadn’t seen anyone they knew, would stop each person they met to find out where such and such a one lived whom they had known in Canada.” (Frances H. Early, The Little Canadas of New England, 1983)

Immigrants often believe they will return to the “old country” in the unspecified future. Most of them do not reverse course even if they visit later. Joseph was a carpenter, like his Biblical forebear.

Wilfrid and Antoinette Héroux Marion, at the Hi-Low “park” in Little Canada, Lowell, Mass., 1917 [Photo (c) Paul Marion]

In two long quiz sessions in the 1980s, the second just months before he died of prostate cancer at ninety-three years old, Wilfrid told my brother Richard and me as much as he could recall about his life. At twelve or fourteen years old, eldest of his siblings, he worked for a family with a horse-and-carriage business whose own sons felt they were above such horse-work. He then got a job at Robitaille’s Market in Little Canada. Living on the north bank of the river in the Rosemont section of lower Pawtuckeville meant he walked to work over the Moody Street Bridge. Aware of this and happy with his employee, Mr. Thaddée Robitaille allowed Wilfrid to board with his family. On Saturdays and Sundays, Wilfrid’s sister Jeanne picked him up with the family’s wagon for home visits. At twenty years old, he married eighteen-year-old Antoinette Héroux, who worked in a hosiery mill. Industrious and a genial social navigator, bon vivant Wilfrid had met her family through grocery work at Robitaille’s and Mrs. Héroux’s food store plus street cart. Antoinette, an only daughter, had attended a religious school in Quebec. The newlyweds lived for a time with her parents.

Wilfrid Marion, far left, with his friends dressed in their Sunday best at the Hi-Low “park” near the Merrimack River in Little Canada, Lowell, Mass., 1916 [Photo (c) Paul Marion]

I have a photograph of Wilfrid and his crew the year he was married, 1916, maybe related to the wedding. Under a clear sky, six young men in long black topcoats and black fedoras stand in high grass just off Melvin Street in Little Canada, specifically at the “Hi-Low,” a favorite field near the river. Behind them are triple-deckers, three of the dozens jammed together in the ethnic enclave. The line-up looks like a scene from The Godfather or a group of undertakers. Everyone has a tie. Several wear gray pants. They look stern, so maybe it was an after-funeral shot? Wilfrid is far left, hat tipped up a little to show his forehead. Next to him are George Bellemare, who delivered bakery goods; Leandre Marion, a relative and later a successful house builder; Hormidas “Bidou” or “Bill” Héroux, a supervisor at the Suffolk Mill and soon-to-be brother-in-law; Alexandre Durand, a carpenter working with Leandre; and Joe Clermont, a baker with Honeycrust Bread in the Centralville, across the river, and later founder of Clermont Market in Lowell, known for its Black Angus beef. There are no mill workers here, although there is a mill supervisor. These guys have their eyes on business and a trade, thirty-five years after the first Marion stepped foot in Lowell.

Wilfrid’s initial business venture was buying the Robitaille grocery, the beginning of a succession of self-proprietorships, bankruptcies, and free-lance meat cutting. The Robitaille purchase came unglued when lawyers invalidated the agreement, which gave Wilfrid an opportunity to back out or to sue for damages—but he declined and stayed with it. He hired Joe Clermont from the above photo to work for him and a man who had owned a market in St. Jean de Matha in Quebec, one of the rural home plates of the Marion and Héroux clans. A butcher by trade and grocer by profession, his best run was Marion’s Meat Market in Little Canada, which he operated from about 1925 to the late 1930s before it burned.

Also known as “Ti Noir” (Blackie or Little Black for his dark hair) was known to have “une blonde” on the side at times. He laughed, telling us about the night one of his cousins bumped into him and a woman who was not my grandmother at a carnival on the fairgrounds in South Lowell. He said, “How are you, Irene? This is Gertrude, one of my best customers.” Well into his eighties, he joked about his younger days seeing vaudeville shows at the B. F. Keith Theatre on Bridge Street downtown after which he’d visit the “girls upstairs” in the boarding house across the street.

After losing the store, Wilfrid hired himself out to Greek market owners like Mr. Gefteas on Market Street. In his 70s, Wilfrid was still cutting meat for Gefteas, then at Skip’s Restaurant in Chelmsford, which was popular among families and truckers coming off nearby Routes 495 and 3. He brought home leftover steaks and large round commercial pies filled with whole apricots and thick apple slices which he shared with our family.

He managed surprisingly well financially, enough so to buy houses on upper Merrimack Street, a former funeral home, and on Sladen Street in Dracut. Wilfrid had clear memories of cars he had bought, and listed them with the purchase price, not the year however: $1,300 for a sedan with Isinglass windows, a celluloid material used in Model T Fords; a Plymouth sedan for $600 followed by another $600 Plymouth; and a fourth car, Plymouth again, for $1,000. For one of his markets he drove a black delivery truck that had been a police patrol wagon. This vehicle carried him across the iced-over river and over unplowed bumpy streets on his delivery rounds.

He and Antoinette enjoyed going out to the many theaters in the city, seeing vaudeville shows and movies. Their two children were born in 1918, Rolande, and 1919, my father. On July Fourth, families pushed baby carriages to the North Common for picnic outings and festivities topped off by fireworks. The more mischievous types captured rats from the canals and released them on the streets, blowing some of them up with firecrackers and lighting others on fire. In summer, kids swam in the river near the Old Stony rock-ribs, diving into favorite pools between the rocks called “le ti kibby” an “le grand kibby.” For the adults, the Strand and Rialto theaters had live shows, plays, and even a tightrope walker one time. Families rode streetcars as far as Lakeview Park on Mascuppic Lake in Dracut, built in 1899. There was swimming, boating, a merry-go-round, and an arcade as well as grounds for basket lunches. The centerpiece of the Park was a ballroom that drew “record-breaking numbers” by 1925, offering Latin dance shows and the full repertoire of partner styles. The New Year’s celebration, Réveillons, ranked higher than Christmas for the French. Pépère said, “Christmas was for rich people who had a lot of money for presents.” . . .