http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014...y_endures.html
The luck of one Edmund Fitzgerald — veteran’s love story endures
Edmund and Florence Fitzgerald met in Fredericton on a Wednesday night in 1943. They fell in love. Then came the call to war.
By: Katie Daubs GTA, Published on Sun Nov 09 2014
“She’s a cougar. She’s two weeks older than I am,” 91-year-old Edmund Fitzgerald says in his clear, deep voice, smiling at a joke that’s grown old with him.
“Don’t say that,” Florence chides, sitting on a chair beside him in a royal blue sweater accented with a poppy that just won’t stay put.
When the Fitzgeralds tell the story of their lives, you can’t help be charmed by the animated way they tell it, perfected over a 71-year-run that began with a chance meeting on a Fredericton street on a Wednesday night in 1943.
“I said to my friend, ‘I don’t know about you, which girl do you know?’ He said, ‘The one on the outside.’ I said ‘That’s fine with me because the one on the inside, she’s a real looker. When she introduced herself as Florence Irving ... I thought Irving Oil, they’re millionaires … I’ve made it.”
“But we were the poor branch,” Florence says. “He thought he really lucked out, but we’re distant relatives.”
“He says, ‘Do you go to the dance on Saturday at the Odd Fellows hall?’ There was always a dance, and he said, ‘I’ll see you there.’”
“I figured he’d never show up, but he did, this tall handsome soldier asking me for a dance, with the big tall boots.”
“After the last dance, he asked if he could take me home, I said no, I had my bicycle and I lived in the country. Well, we walked and walked, and I thought, well, if he goes any further, I’ll never see him again. I said, ‘You better go back to barracks.’ He said, ‘Well, can I kiss you good night?’ My bike was between me and him and he fell over the bike — That was it, wasn’t it, Edmund?”
Yes, that was it. He was born in Saint John, N.B., she in Fredericton. He had done his basic training in Fredericton and then came back to train new recruits. They were both around 20.
“I’d visit Flo in her house. She had a younger sister — she was 8 or 9 years old. She’d walk by the entrance, and she’d sneak around the door, and look like this,” he says, arching his eyebrows and widening his eyes.
“We’d sit on the chesterfield, necking as they called it in those days,” she says.
“He’d have to be in by 10 p.m. The winters were so cold for Fredericton. Remember how you’d leave? You’d crack through the snow . . . you’d have to make a run to jump at the fence cause you were late?”
“The time came to go overseas. We said our goodbyes; we promised to get married when we got back, if I did come back,” he says, holding his glasses in his hands.
“It was a big elm tree in Wilmot Park … He had me up against the tree, gave me a goodbye kiss … you walked away just like in the movies and I went home,” she says.
“We never looked back,” he says.
“I think some disease got them (the trees) not too long ago,” she says.
“They were tough times, you know. I didn’t know if I’d ever come back, and she didn’t, either.”
“They were romantic times, really,” she says.
“I would write letters, in the little blue envelopes,” she says.
Fitzgerald served with the North Shore (New Brunswick) infantry regiment in Belgium, Holland and Germany.
“There was something going on every day, being in a war situation. It’s a constant din of noise, day and night. It’s explosions going on all the time in the distance — that’s what you hear, when you go to sleep. It puts you to sleep.”
In February 1945, as the Allies advanced toward Germany, Edmund was hit with shrapnel.
“If it wasn’t for my buddy … we were out digging a slit trench for the night … I was hit by shrapnel from the rear in my right leg, I bled profusely and he put a tourniquet on my leg.”
“I wrote you from the hospital in Belgium,” he says.
“Maybe you did, dear. It’s so long ago, I’m starting to forget. It was 70 years ago, dear.”
“I wrote to let you know I was safe.”
“I spent a month in the hospital. Every day they checked me out. Penicillin came out in 1939. I’m thankful for that. They pumped me full of penicillin for three weeks before they sewed it up. There was a lot of nerve damage and muscle mass lost.”
Fitzgerald convalesced in Belgium as the war in Europe ended. He later rejoined his regiment in Holland, where he was promoted to an NCO position, looking after a number of affairs at headquarters in an old school, and getting to know locals who had lived with very little during the German occupation.
“Every morning I used to walk one short block to report to the camp commander. As I did, the Dutch inhabitants would be out working in the garden, they’d say, ‘Hi Ed.’ We went back after 26 years. I took Flo to the schoolhouse up there. We were walking up the street and didn’t they recognize my walk? Remember that?”
“I got the message we were going home and there were three piles of coal in the schoolyard. I went to the people living in the area and said, ‘Look you can have two of those piles. You have to take them after midnight and they have to be cleaned up afterwards.’ … The next morning the two piles were gone and the cement was just as clean as ever.”
“He sent me a picture with the two Dutch girls, one on each side — imagine that,” she says.
“In Rotterdam there was a big dance pavilion in the park. The Dutch ladies would come in bunches … They loved to have pictures taken.”
“I saw that — well, he’ll bring a war bride home.”
“Once I got home I surprised Flo. I called your mother; you were out to a show,” he says. “There was a restaurant we always used to go to after the show, and I ordered a coffee and sat there, and sure enough she showed up with the girlfriends.”
“I had no idea,” she says.
“I wasn’t sure she’d show up, or if she’d show up with a boyfriend, there was a lot of hugging and crying and so on,” he says. “I want back to university — sophomore year, and in junior year we got married, how do you like that?”
“Our first child was born in the bottom of the year in time for graduation,” he says.
“All the letters you did receive from me … our daughter was playing with them,” he says.
“I was with her in the bed. We were living with my parents, I was changing her diapers. I guess I had all the blue little letters out. She peed all over them, so I destroyed them, and I’m so sorry I got rid of them. I would have loved to have them.”
Edmund and Florence had four children and lived in Montreal, where Edmund worked in the pharmaceutical industry as a director of microbiological services. They now live in Brampton, to be closer to family.
“Not many people live to 91, 92, and have been through a war. And then have a career afterward, and then a retirement period of 15 to 20 years — we consider ourselves very lucky we’re together and our health is not that bad,” he says.
“(On Remembrance Day) we stay right here, I’m too old to go out and stand.”
“We like to watch it from Ottawa,” she says.
“I’m still in love with him.”
“We’re always together.”
“It’s been good, dear.”
Edmund Fitzgerald - a different story
