Growing Up on a Canadian Prairie
FRAN PEART'S STORY CONTINUES
In our last column, Fran Peart was teaching school in Carstairs, in the prairies of Alberta, Canada on the eve of World War II She decided to ask the school board to raise her $l000 a year salary and they weren't able to find the money, so she looked for another job.
She got a job at a flying school near Calgary which provided twenty hours of flying experience for young men who wanted to be fighter pilots or bomber pilots. They came from England, Poland and Czechoslovakia, and all could speak English. After their training there, they went on for more specialized training in another school before flying planes in the war over Europe.
Fran was the purchasing agent for the school and she made $20 a week, not much of an increase in salary, but she said it was a whole lot easier than teaching school. It was especially important to keep up with the gasoline supplies as they were rationed. One month she was called in by her supervisor because her accounts showed more gas had been used than her records showed. To track this down, she rode around the school with the bowsers, the men who serviced the planes, and found that they were using the airplane gasoline for their trucks. No fraud was intended, and the matter was soon cleared up. No more high octane gas for the service vehicles.
As the war began to wind down, the school was closed. After staying with her mother a short time after her father died, she found work at Fort Nelson in the Yukon of the Northwest Territories. She arrived on Christmas Eve. Even life on the prairie didn't prepare her for the cold and darkness of the Yukon. According to Fran, the surroundings were beautiful, great evergreen forests and lakes. But since the sun rose at ten o'clock and set at three in the afternoon, she arrived at work in darkness and left to eat in darkness. She only saw the sun and the scenery briefly on weekends. Temperatures were routinely at thirty and forty degrees below zero. Snow was too deep to walk in, crusty and thigh-deep. Everyone walked on the roads which were kept well plowed. She lived in a barracks with twelve other girls and ate in the mess hall with the servicemen. The second winter their barracks burned, and Fran was only able to save her fur coat. Fortunately the Red Cross soon supplied the girls with underwear, and they wore G.I. issue shirts and pants until they were able to order more clothes from the Hudson Bay catalogue.
The main activity at Fort Nelson was delivering lend-lease planes to Russian Pilots who then flew them to Russia over the Bering Strait. Fran became friends with a Captain in the Air Force from the United States, Captain Bill Peart, who ran the control tower and radar equipment. Fort Nelson closed, but before Fran left, she was wearing his engagement ring.
There was no work in her small town in Alberta, so she went to the big city of Toronto where she was able to stay with her sister as she looked for work She answered an ad in the paper and went to work for Dr. Clarence Hill, a well-known ophthalmologist. She said this was the hardest job she ever had. The doctor scheduled appointments every fifteen minutes, and he always ran behind. He had a buzzer from his office to hers. One buzz meant she was to come to his office, two meant she was to bring in the next patient, and three meant he was finished with a patient and she was to come in and usher the patient out so he or she wouldn't waste the doctor's time standing around talking. She scheduled appointments, accepted payments from the patients, and kept the books. Since he always ran late, she started at 8 AM and most of the time didn't finish until 6 PM. She was relieved when he fired her for mistakenly scheduling appointments on his golf day.
She then went to work as a bookkeeper for a car dealership in St. Catherine, only about fifteen miles from Niagara Falls where her fiancé's parents lived. Captain Bill Peart had been sent to Paris where he ran the control tower at the airport. When he came home from that assignment, they were married at his parents' home and honeymooned in Washington D. C. when the cherry blossoms were in bloom.
They were then stationed in Oklahoma, and then at Almagordo, New Mexico where he was an electronics engineer. He decided to get out of the service and since he had always enjoyed being in charge of young airmen, he looked for a college which would train him to be a high school science teacher
After studying the high marks that Barrons or another college rating book gave Heidelberg, he and Fran decided to come to Tiffin. He was able to get his degree in two years and began teaching at Clyde in l965. The first year was very hard, but the second year was much easier, and he was really warming up to the task.
Unfortunately, tragedy struck and he fell out of a tree that he was pruning with a chain saw and died. Doctors speculate that he must have had a heart attack.
Fran and their son Matt continued to live in Tiffin, supporting and being supported by their many friends. Fran still lives in their house on Prospect Street and spends most summers in Canada in their cottage on Twenty-mile Lake. Matt and his wife and two sons live in Wooster where he works at the Experiment Station