We have several photos of our father’s classes in primary and middle school. Most of these appear to be at the Ecole Beaudet which was located at 695, boulevard Decarie, in St. Laurent. Rue and Parc Beaudet remain, but the school closed in 1970.

At age 18, in the first year of the Great Depression—called “La Grande Crise” in French—our father began a full course of study at the College de St Laurent, founded in 1847 and located in St Laurent at 625, Avenue Sainte Croix. Today the College is francophone and public and is called Cégep de St Laurent; it continues to offer a large number of undergraduate and technical/professional programs—many of them exceptional in their combinations, e.g. Science and music.

In our father’s era, many of the non-residential students also served apprenticeships and worked on pro-bono community projects at the direction of the college and community  leadership. The faculty were almost entirely Holy Cross priests and brothers, and the students were all male. Women who wanted to teach—like our father’s sister Lucienne—went to colleges run by Holy Cross nuns, and they often became nuns themselves.

Reading our father’s description of his post-secondary student days makes me realize that the “new” model of community colleges in the 21st century was alive and well in the 1920s and 1930s of the French Canadian 20th century. If anything, the College of St Laurent also incorporated the compulsory community service aspects of the European model for post-secondary education.

The college must have produced many young men—women, of course, had fewer options—with multiple skills. While that potentially enabled them to go into many different professional fields, it also meant that getting any one job with good pay was more difficult. This was particularly true in areas like teaching where so many positions were already filled by religious orders of brothers and sisters who worked for no pay due to their vow of poverty.

Our father also worked for his father and his uncle while attending college and he somehow found time to socialize with an amazing number of friends—dubbed “Our Gang.”

A journal he began on his first day at the college details a schedule that began at 5:30 in the morning by walking to the college and finished-up around midnight by walking home from a concert or restaurant that many of the students frequented late in the evenings after school and work. Many of his courses took place at the music school which was newly built and is still used for that purpose—the amphitheater inside accommodates audiences of 500 persons and productions were full-size. He mentions lessons in voice, cornet and violin and practice sessions directing a chorale, band and orchestra. In art, he took classes in lettering, painting, and imitative finishes and a full array of theater scene construction, play writing, and performance. He mentions performing in the Moliere/Charpentier “Le malade imaginaire” and the Gounod “Messe Sainte Cecile.”

It is disconcerting to hear him talk about meeting his friends “to babble”—the word in French is “babiller”—when I remember him as a serious man of very few (English) words. It reminds me that he must never have felt confident in his grasp of the English language.

Over and over again, he sprints home to help with shoeing horses at either his father’s or his uncle’s business.

Sometimes the businesses let him take a vehicle on the road and, of course, he manages to pick up friends along the way, especially when he’s got the old Ford or a new truck. One day he stops off to see his Grandmother Elodie Valois in Dorval. Another day he luckily gets out of a traffic ticket when he fails to stop at a traffic light. Another time he reports a strange incident where a brother at the college makes him demonstrate to a class at the college how to ride a horse and do vaults onto and off the horse. (It is a punishment for his being late to class. I am not making this up.)

In addition to his classes, he was expected to sing on demand whenever needed at churches and other music gatherings, and he served as tutor and assistant at several of the other nearby schools, including the Ecole Beaudet and the secondary school of Notre Dame, located across the street from St. Joseph Oratory. The latter school/college was established in 1869 and it is where Brother Andre was the doorkeeper. It also continues today, as a private francophone institution, and has a highly rated music curriculum as well.

If we had not recently found his journal—it covers the years 1929-1935 when he was 18-24  years old—we would not know how he obtained his musical training.

I remember wondering what his schooling in music and other subjects had been like but I never asked and he never volunteered the information.

After a couple of years in college—including a few months in the nearby Holy Cross Seminary/Juvenat, which he pretty quickly determined was not for him—he and many of his fellow students were increasingly  discouraged by the deepening economic crisis. They were all studying and working long hours but they were competing with heads of households in the job market who were desperate to keep as much income as they could to support their families. It did not seem to matter which field they tried to enter—none of them offered a real future or solid jobs for single men.

Our grandfather apparently had a professional sign painter resident in his establishment and our father determined he would have to complete an apprenticeship with that painter. He describes the experience as a very bad one because the painting-master “had a passion for drinking” and he blamed his apprentices for messes he, the master, made instead. As soon as he could, Paul Emile started up his own team of sign painters and they did reasonably well except that the only way he could keep them all employed was to lower his quoted prices to bargain levels. By the end of a couple of years of hard work and long hours, he just barely paid all his men, and his debts for materials with almost nothing left over for himself.

Together with a friend, Georges Marcil, who was also a student and plumber, he decided to move 185 miles north to the old logging camp and “beautiful village” of Ferme Neuve where for several years he stayed with families and friends and worked a wide range of jobs during the spring, summer and fall, returning home to St Laurent and school during the winter. One of the village leaders—Henri Charbonneau, who owned a hotel—just about adopted him into his family. There were several hotels in the Laurentian Mountains and Mr. Charbonneau gave him excellent references to all of them.

The young college boys from Montréal, Georges and Paul Emile, would have made quite an attractive impression in the village, with their many practical skills as well as musical gifts. There are many photos of the countryside, our father’s friends and family, his shop and the hotel owned by Henri Charbonneau on what must have been a primary roadway in the village. There are also many photos of some very pretty cousins and friends.

It is Germaine Charbonneau whom most of the Charbonneau and Pepin/Labelle families thought he would marry.

He frequently wrote about her in his journal—where he called her “Maine”—but the journal ceases before letting us know what eventually happened. Paul Emile doesn’t mention the fact, but I have learned in historical records, that Germaine would have already been working full-time as a teacher at the local village school when he first met her in Ferme Neuve in summer of 1932. The school was a big one, with five teachers—three of them Holy Cross nuns—for the 180 students at all levels. The fact that he had no full-time job in his primary career ambition—to be a singer, music teacher and choral/orchestral conductor—must have grated. At one point toward the end of the journal entries she tells him that she wants to go somewhere to study and learn English so she can teach her students in both French and English, and they discuss whether she could go to learn in St Laurent at the same time he returns there in the winter. Whatever happened, or did not happen, Germaine never married. She died in July 1995, the same month and year as our Aunt Lucienne. Her ashes are interred in the beautiful old Notre Dame des Neiges cemetery close by St. Joseph Oratory. Her death notice—as well as that of her sister Marguerite—was amongst Aunt Therese’s papers when she died.

As the depression years continued to grind-on, our father taught just about every instrument anyone wanted to learn and he took every job that came his way in both Ferme Neuve and St Laurent, no matter how small or short-term. I had to read the journal entry several times before I could believe what I was seeing, but one of his jobs was as a traveling salesman in the regions around Ferme Neuve for a company of products called Familex.

He was thrilled with the tiny commission he earned and only casually mentions that the way he got to all of these out of the way places in the mountains was by dog sled.

(I am not making this up. I kept wondering why he would take in his vehicle four dogs when he was on his sales trips, and why he would keep referring to their “excellent conditioning” until I finally figured out that the vehicle was a sled and the dogs—Loup, ’TiPrince, Prince, and Sport—got him where he needed to go to farm homes through the snow and ice.) His friend Ernest LaChance—perhaps the same one who later invited him to visit him in Florida—secured the job for him. Paul Emile took advantage of the traveling circuits he made with his products to bring his instruments with him and play small concerts at the hotels, pensions, and homes where he stayed overnight. He doesn’t say so, but he probably gave music lessons as well!

In Ferme Neuve, he wrote a historical play for the local troupe to perform on an important feast day, and he revived the local band and chorus, which had been moribund for nearly 15 years. In addition to giving music lessons, he painted a number of tableaux in the school, illustrating the history of the village and the country. He also built and maintained an ice skating rink for the community.

One of his proudest accomplishments was a “chaloupe” that he built himself and that he took on fishing trips with his friends.

A “chaloupe” is a shallow-draft boat. He would not have known that it is very much like the ones his ancestors built for navigating the rivers around Montréal and further afield. We have a number of photos of that boat and can now understand why he had his friends take so many pictures of it.

We visited Ferme Neuve—and other villages closer in such as Le Sage, St Agathe and St. Jerome—on our 1967 trip to Canada, but I fear I remember little. We saw some teams of lumberjacks working, but the main thing that impressed us when we visited that summer for Expo ’67 was all the extra doors on the second floors where, it was explained to us, the family members entered and exited in winter at the level of the deep snows in the Laurentides. When he later re-located the younger part of the family north from Miami, the North Carolina mountains must have seemed to our father a lot like those Canadian mountains, except that there would not be nearly so much snow.

The journal we have only recently found deserves to be translated in detail but it has been as much as I could do so far just to read it carefully. As a college student, Paul Emile obviously writes quite well in French—in contrast to the fact that he could never write almost anything in English, relying on our mother to do all of the writing that his work required—but the handwriting is almost illegible and so it is very slow going. The first couple of years of the journal includes markings correcting his spelling or grammar, so perhaps the journal was required in college.

There are many, many names in the journal of family and friends, including some that I cannot yet link onto the family tree—they include a Madeleine, an Aunt Amanda, and an Aunt Josephine. He gets into trouble several times but doesn’t completely disclose what the problem is, which is frustrating but understandable with a personal diary. In one case I think he allowed himself to be persuaded to share some cigarettes with a young lady whose father thought that was a very bad idea. In another couple of cases he worries at length about misunderstandings, especially between friends. All throughout the journal he is terribly concerned that he’s just not a good enough Catholic—in my turn, I will refrain from making any comment about that.

He was obviously extremely pious and conscientious, and also, for the time, relatively privileged to be allowed to go to college and pursue a career in music and the arts.

In the last few journal entries before his birthday in April of 1935, he says he has just written in response to a request for him to apply for a music position at Sainte Gregoire in Montmorency near Quebec City that would also include directing their orchestra and band. It sounds exactly like what he had been hoping for. But there is another journal entry telling about a letter from the family saying that they need him in St Laurent for some work as soon as he can catch up and finish what he is doing in Ferme Neuve.

By mid-decade the depression of the 1930s is not getting much better—jobs are still few and far between—and there are sad times immediately ahead for the Pepin family in St Laurent: Grandmother Elodie Valois dies in 1936 at age 77; Uncle Edouard dies in 1937 at age 48; and Paul Emile’s father Albert dies in 1938 at age 51. As the eldest, at 24, of the children and the many cousins, it was likely pretty clear where our father’s duty lay.