My grandfather Joseph Philippe Gagne, on the right. c. 1900
Joseph Philippe Gagne, my mother’s father, was French Canadian, from the Trois-Rivieres region of Quebec. “Gagne” means ‘farmer’ in French, and is a common name along the St. Lawrence River in Canada, where sturdy young men from France first came to trade furs with the Native Americans back in the 1630’s. Historians record that initially these young men were encouraged to marry Native American women, to settle down, convert their wives to Roman Catholicism, have large families, clear the dense forests, sow cabbage seeds, and milk goats. The idea had little appeal for most of these lusty young men, who prefered to continue tramping through the pristine wilderness to trade furs and take their fleeting pleasures where they might. Of my grandfather Gagne’s ancestors, very little concrete genealogy has been done; but his dusky skin tone hints, at least, that some of his forebears may have gone that route.
Then in 1666 the King of France decided to take a hand in matchmaking; under his auspices hundreds of women, some of them gentlewomen in distressed circumstances, some of them jailed Protestant heretics, and some just plain street walkers, were shipped off to New France, with instructions to behave themselves and get a man. When these Filles du Roi arrived in Quebec the authorities forbade any man under the age of thirty from leaving town as a voyageur until he could show he had an ‘understanding’ with one of these imported hoydens. These are the lily white ancestors my grandfather’s family decided to embrace. Not the street walkers, mind you, but most definitely the gentilshommes embarrasses.
I never met grandfather Gagne’s mother, but my own mother described her as a fearsome old battle axe, swathed in black bombazine, who boxed the ears of anyone suggesting that the Gagne family had anything but pure Gallic blood coursing through its veins. Even though, in my mother’s memorable words, she herself was “as brown as tobacco juice.”
As scion to a prosperous family of lumber and paper mill owners, grandfather Gagne undoubtedly could have had his pick of eligible mademoiselles. Indeed, prior to World War One, it was standard procedure for well to do French Canadian families to send their sons to fin de siecle France for a look see at distant female cousins in Brittany or Poitou. But grandfather Gagne chose instead to fall in love with the family maid, one Daisy Ellen Bedelle, from Swanscombe, Kent, England. And so a great drama began.
Having married Ms. Bedelle against his parent’s wishes, grandfather was treated as a pariah for consorting with the hired help; he and his new English bride were no longer welcome in the Gagne family circle. And so he took her to a new land. Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the USA. There were lumber and paper mills galore in Minneapolis back then, and he soon got on very well, first as a plant manager, and then, in a dazzling career move, as a top salesman for Pillsbury Flour.
Although I can find no proof of it in the annals of flour milling history, my mother always insisted that grandfather Gagne came up with a bleaching process for wheat flour that he sold to Pillsbury for a fabulous sum. A hundred years ago consumers craved flour completely denatured of any fiber or color (or nutrients.) Such deracinated powder made biscuits and bread so light and fluffy they nearly floated out the kitchen window. However it happened, grandfather Gagne had made his pile.
But alas, the voyageur strain in him meant that during his long, dull, sales trips around the Midwest, he had not been as chaste as he should have been. It turned out, according to my mother, that the old fourflusher had several paramours stashed away in cities like Chicago, Des Moines, and Milwaukee. Once the money began pouring in, grandfather Gagne up and left Daisy Ellen Bedelle, and their two children, flat. He settled in Chicago, with a former Ziegfeld Follies showgirl, to sample the delights of the Roaring Twenties. A canny man with a dollar, he eschewed the shenanigans of the Stock Market and invested strictly in Windy City real estate and several lake resorts up in Wisconsin. So when the Great Depression hit, he remained comfortably solvent.
The same could not be said for Daisy and her two girls, Ruby and Evelyn. Apparently grandfather Gagne never sent a dime to help out the wife of his youth. They struggled along in a series of rented rooms in ‘Nordeast’ Minneapolis, often with no indoor plumbing -- mom and her older sister Ruby subsisting on slices of bread smeared with bacon grease and topped with scallions swiped from neighboring gardens. Poor grandmother Daisy worked in a sweatshop, sewing piecework, until she developed a hunched back that shortened her to a mere four foot ten, along with severe astigmatism -- so that when I knew her she appeared to be a little old lady permanently bent over, with huge glasses that slipped down her nose every time she laughed. And, strangely enough, I remember her laughing a lot. To me, a little boy very unsure of his place in his parent’s hearts, her smile was as warm and comforting as a Dairy Queen hot fudge sundae.
My mother, Evelyn, did not care to talk about her father to me and my sisters. I never actually met him. But since I was what used to be called a “little pitcher with big ears,” I overheard quite a bit about the old rascal and his family. One of his brothers choked to death on a fishbone during a shad fry in upstate New York -- and that’s why we never had any kind of fish in our home except for insipid fish sticks; there was too much danger of repeating a piscine asphyxiation.
A distant Gagne cousin also moved to Minneapolis about the same time as grandfather, to become a policeman. He did not approve of his cousin’s abandonment of his Minneapolis family, and helped grandmother Daisy with rent and groceries on his meager patrolman’s salary. His son found his service revolver in the closet one terrible day and accidentally killed himself with it. My older brother Bill was an avid hunter of ducks and deer, but as long as he lived at home he had to keep his hunting rifles at a friend’s house -- they were never to be seen in the house.
And then there was Verne Gagne, the wrestler. His exact connection with Joseph Philippe Gagne remains tenuous, outside of the same last name, but apparently he knew and liked both Joseph Phillippe and Daisy Gagne -- and when he hit the bigtime on the Dumont TV Network in the early 1950’s he always left several ringside seats for her when he played Minneapolis. Grandmother Daisy never went to see him wrestle, I gather, but collected and sold the tickets to help pay medical bills -- such as for my mother Evelyn, who suffered from a lingering case of polio well into her forties. As a baby I wasn’t walking by the age of two. Dad said I was just being lazy and liked being carried around. But grandmother Daisy scalped tickets for a bout between Verne Gagne and Gorgeous George to pay for my examination by a specialist, and then for the hand tooled orthopedic shoes he recommended I wear, since my feet were congenitally splayed. Within a month of putting them on I was happily running around like a chicken with its head cut off.
When grandfather Gagne died in 1961 neither my Aunt Ruby nor my mother went to the funeral. Nor did Daisy Ellen Bedelle Gagne, his first wife. The wake was held at a Lake Shore Drive chophouse in Chicago, and apparently continued for several days until Mayor Richard J. Daley called in the riot squad to break it up. His will was invalidated by the probate court after it was discovered he had been careless about legally divorcing each of his four wives prior to marrying the next one. He was technically a bigamist. But his only legitimate children were mom and Aunt Ruby, and so they hired a lawyer, traveled to Chicago, and came back with a nice chunk of change. Aunt Ruby used her money for a down payment on a large and gracious house out in Edina. Mom’s share, as I’ve written elsewhere, eventually financed my dad’s part interest in a disreputable drinkery called the Gay 90’s.
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