Lorna Rumsby

Mom was born on November 24, 1929 in a private house on the edge of the lake in Fife Lake, Saskatchewan but she grew up further south on a wheat farm near the small town of Constance in a place called Boundary (because it was on the Canada-USA border) which was not really a town, just a few houses with a one-room school. All the farm children from around the area attended this school. Every school day began with a Bible reading and the singing of both the Canadian anthem and the Star Spangled Banner as there were children attending the school from the United States. Mom had always wondered why she knew all the words to the American anthem but didn’t find out why until she was in her 70s and visited an old school with my sister, Maureen, and realized the American students were the reason.

Theodora Dighans, always known as Dora, Mom’s mother, came over from Germany with her family when she was 18 years old. Dora had a twin, Minnie, and three other sisters, Christine, and Paula and Clara, who were also twins and one brother, John. The Dighans family came to Canada as a result of the Canadian Government advertising in Europe for more settlers and was offering immigrants land to farm on the Prairies, so they ended up in Southern Saskatchewan near a small farming community called Rock Glen.
Mom told me that when she was growing up, all the sisters lived with John and Dora Lence until they either married and moved into their own home as Great-Aunt Paula did or landed a job in Kimberley, B.C. as Great-Aunt Clara did.

Great-Aunt Christina (A.K.A. Steen) married George who lived in Montana just over the border from Boundary. She had one son, Melvin, whom my mother kept in contact with all her life until he died (in 2021, perhaps.)

Mom’s father, John Stefan Lenz, left Bavaria when he was 13 because his father had died and his mother had remarried and his stepfather did not treat him well. Grandpa Lence made his way to the sea where his plan was to buy a ticket on a ship sailing to Canada. There is a little story about this that Grandpa told Mom. While Grandpa was on the dock trying to figure out how to buy the ticket, he was approached by a man who was quite friendly and asked him if he needed help. Grandpa explained about wanting to buy a ticket and the man said: “if you give me your money, I will buy your ticket for you” so Grandpa agreed. So you would think this was a very bad beginning to Grandpa Lence’s plan to go to Canada, but no, the man came back with the ticket and change and so Grandpa got on a ship sailing to Montreal.

After working at a few jobs he made his way west and ended up settling in Saskatchewan. Because Mom was born in Fife Lake, she assumes her parents might have lived there for awhile before her father bought some land down south, near Boundary, with Constance being the nearest town. Mom doesn’t know how he and Dora met and married but the communities were small so, I expect, the people around probably knew each other through going to town for church services and supplies and perhaps other community events, such as weddings.

Mom grew up on a wheat farm and during her childhood, she experienced the big Depression, and the disastrous drought that drove many farmers off their land but her father did not lose their land. Mom had 3 sisters: the eldest, our Aunt Mary, Clara (who died of cancer at age 2 1/2) and then, a few years later, her younger sister, our Aunt Clara, was born. For some reason, when Aunt Clara was born, my grandparents asked Mom what she would like to name the new baby and she said “Clara” and so it was done.

Mom was 12 years old when her Mother died at age 34 after about 5 years of suffering the effects of two cancers. One was breast cancer, which spread to her brain, eventually causing her to become blind. Aunt Mary and Mom helped their father care for her because there was no hospital close by and Grandpa Lence still had to work the farm although he had hired a man to help out. Grandma Dora was in a lot of pain and was given as much morphine as was safe, so sometimes she was given a placebo. The morphine caused her to have hallucinations and Mom was the only one who could feed her as Dora believed other people were feeding her worms. As you can imagine, Mom’s childhood was not an easy one.

Then, in the mid 1930s, as rumours of a probable war with Germany began to circulate in the Canadian news, Grandpa Lence decided it would be a good idea to change the spelling of his last name from L-E-N-Z to L-E-N-C-E and so he made the legal name change for protection of his family just in case war was declared.

Mom remembers when she was 10 years old, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth came on tour to Canada in 1939 on their way to important meetings with President Roosevelt to raise money for the war effort. The Royal train travelled across Canada and stopped in Regina and Grandpa took her to see them. There were lots of spectators and so the open air car went around in a circle twice so everyone could see the Royal Couple. After the first circle around, her Dad asked her if she had seen the King and Queen and she said no she was too busy looking at the RCMP in their formal uniforms on their beautiful horses so she had to pay attention on the second circuit.

Another story Mom told me was a memory of going to school in Rock Glen one day that ended up being a “snow day”. Sometimes, Aunt Mary and Mom drove to school in a buggy drawn by their farm horse. Aunt Mary, being the elder, would usually drive. One day there was snow on the ground which didn’t bother the horse so they set off to school as usual. As they progressed along the road, the wheels fell off the buggy but the girls didn’t know this until they realized the horse was making heavy weather of the trip. They saw that the horse was dragging the buggy along the snow as if it was a sleigh so they decided to tum around and go home.

A year after Grandma Dora died, when Aunt Mary was 15 and Mom was 13 years old, her Aunts, Clara and Paula, made the decision, that she and Mary would leave the farm and move to Kimberley, B.C. to stay with their Aunt Clara (who was single at the time) to go to school. However, Mary didn’t like it there and moved back home early but Mom stayed for 2 years.(Mom was not a farm girl!).

At this same time, since Aunt Mary and Mom were moving to Kimberley, BC, it was decided that Mom’s sister, our Aunt Clara, would move in with Great-Aunt Paula who lived in Rock Glen not too far away from the new house that Grandpa Lence had bought. (Around this time, Grandpa had sold the property down south and bought a house with a pig farm nearer to Rock Glen that Grandma Dora had always admired which happened to be across the street from Aunt Paula.) Mom told me she always felt sorry for her Dad because he must have been lonely, losing all his girls at once. But I said to Mom it wasn’t that bad if Grandpa was just across the street from where Aunt Clara was living with Great Aunt Paula but Mom said it wasn’t that easy as Grandpa and Great Aunt Paula had a falling out and were no longer speaking to each other.

When she was 16, Aunt Mary, followed her girlfriend, Josephine, out to Oliver in the Okanagan. In due course, Aunt Mary met and married a local boy, John Radies, and had a family while helping her husband run a peach orchard. (Happily, Josephine married John’s brother, Chris.) We often visited Aunt Mary and Uncle Johnny in the summer and we kids were allowed to eat as many peaches as we wanted as long as they were “falldowns”, i.e. lying on the ground. Wow, did I love those peaches!)

After the 2 years in Kimberly, Mom moved to Moose Jaw to attend Grades 11 and 12 at the High School operated by the Sisters of Mt. Sion as there was no suitable school in Rock Glen. (The one room school in Rock Glen went to Grade 12 but may not have taught science as Mom wanted to be a nurse.) When she graduated from Grade 12, she wrote a letter to apply to a Nursing School in Cranbrook, B.C. However, that school wrote back to say they had just closed down and recommended that she apply to the Sisters of St. Joseph’s Nursing School in Victoria, B.C. (The Sisters at that time also operated St. Joseph’s Hospital on the comer of Humbolt and Blanshard Streets in Fairfield which is now the Victoria General Hospital on Helmken Road). Mom applied to the Victoria Nursing school and was accepted. This would have been around 1947-1948, I think.

Grandpa Lence was semi -retired from farming by then and was wintering in Vancouver each year and was familiar with the Victoria area so he brought Mom out to Victoria to help her get settled in the Nursing Program and to make sure his daughter would be safe and happy. Mom’s nursing schooling was part classroom, taught by the Sisters and part hands-on at St. Joseph’s Hospital.

At nursing school, Mom met Marge (who later married Dad’s cousin Art Rumsby), Joan Rumsby (Dad’s younger sister who later married Lawrence Zipp, an American and moved to Seattle, Washington) and Sheila who became life-long friends. It was through Joan, with the connivance of Grandma Nettie, that Mom met Dad over Rumsby family dinners and eventually started courting.

Thus, Mom’s younger sister, our Aunt Clara, is the only Lence daughter who remained in Rock Glen and married a local boy, Ernest Hansen. Her 4 children grew up on a wheat farm in Rock Glen, so our Saskatchewan cousins had a completely different life experience than we Rumsbys or our Radies cousins. Our family would sometimes take a couple weeks in late August to travel to Osoyoos to visit with our cousins and made a couple trips out to Saskatchewan to visit the Hansens and other relatives out there. We also went to Montana once to visit Melvin and his wife, Ursula, whom he had met in Germany while in the American Army.

Mom’s nursing friends kept up their friendship for all their lives even after they all married. Aunt Joan lived in Seattle for many years but came up to Sooke to visit her family quite often and so we would see our Zipp cousins in the summer or at Christmas. This group of nursing friends would meet every few months and tried to make their nursing reunions every year. Since Marge and Sheila remained in the Victoria area, Mom would invite them to supper at our house, especially if Aunt Joan was in town. The conversation was often full of laughs and gory nursing stories and Dad always said “when the nurses got together the conversation went downhill rapidly and I was forced to leave the room.” (I guess he had a weak stomach and maybe I inherited that from him.)

Betty Lence married the handsome blond known as Richard Lawrence (aka Larry) Rumsby on January 26, 1952 in the little charming Roman Catholic church of St. Rose of Lima in Sooke, B.C. after a few months of courtship. I heard from Mom that Dad gave her an ultimatum: they should marry soon or not at all. So they married and went on a six week honeymoon down to California. Mom told me at first that once she married she had to quit work but she changed her story later and said she quit nursing after a few months and now I suspect it was because she was pregnant. I arrived in December of that year and Dad once said she was worried that everyone would be counting on their fingers.

Mom and Dad did not have much money in their first years of marriage as Dad had been recovering from surgery, having had his spleen removed and he was unable to work for some time. However, he started working for his Dad, my grandfather, Frank, and learned the electrician trade from him and later took over Grandpa Frank’s business.

In their first year of marriage, they lived in a cute cottage up in Sooke, on the highway just past Eustace Road, which now may be operated as a Dentist’s office. But after that, they bought the property on Phillips Road from Grandpa Frank and Grandma Nettie, where they lived all their married life.

Mom and Dad had seven children in total, (being good practicing Catholics), of which I am the eldest. Since we did not have too many neighbours and the Arena/swimming pool and Sun River had not even been thought of yet, it was a quiet rural neighbourhood for us kids to run wild in. Across the road, there was a wooded hill with a stream at the bottom and the Sooke Flats behind the house with the Sooke River and so, between rowing on the river and swimming or fishing in it and building forts on the property, we kids had lots to keep us busy which was lucky for us since there were seldom any other children living nearby to play with. When Mom wanted us to come home, she would blow on a police whistle which could be heard for quite some distance.

Mom didn’t pass her driving test to get her license to drive until I was 13 but she kept applying for her Learner’s License all through our childhood and we kids had a lot of fun “helping and encouraging” her while Dad taught her how to drive.

My four brothers and one sister played softball so Mom became a great fan and she went to all the games she could. Dad and all the kids that weren’t playing in the current game would attend also and some of those games could get quite exciting, with scores so close and all the bases loaded. Not anywhere near as boring as professional baseball was as I found out later in life.

Mom, like Dad, was quite involved in the church when she could find the time. Mom was in the choir and was a member of the Altar Society where the women would look after the alter linens, the flowers, and the church cleaning, etc.

I remember the Sooke churches getting together to raise money for something or other by having tea parties in the summers in the gardens of different people. The women would do all the making of sandwiches and the baking of the cakes and squares and they’d serve coffee and tea. The women ran the whole show. Hardly any men would attend other than the ministers of the participating churches. There would be fancy tablecloths and teacups and anyone was welcome to come and partake.