Surviving the Epidemic in St. John’s
EXCERPT #8 Tales of a Rabbit Town Boy by LEROY SOPER
(Tales of a Rabbit Town Boy was written by my late father LeRoy Soper, born in 1935 in St. John’s Newfoundland. This is the 8th excerpt from the book.)
With the help of older sons and friends, my father began building a new house on Newtown Road in a village known as Rabbit Town. He came home from work with various tools and items to work on our house.
When we moved into the house on Newtown Road at Calver Avenue, it was not yet finished. In fact, it was never finished. Years later when I left home to pursue a singing career many walls were still uncovered, closets stood without doors, and the basement was still a hazard. While most houses have footings and concrete foundation walls, ours had posts around the perimeter and inside at intervals to support the inner structure of the house.
The basement itself had two areas. One was somewhat finished to make a workshop for Dad, while the rest was earth and a pathway from the stairs to the coal-bin. The workshop had its own stove kept burning with the cuttings from the work Dad had in process. There were lots of these cuttings as Dad made all the mouldings for the windows and doors as well as many other wooden fixtures like kitchen cupboards and mantles for the fireplaces. These mantle-pieces were decorated with a combination of fancy tiles and exotic woods and admired by all.
From start to finish, Dad fashioned everything: the masonry substructure in the basement, the bricks and blocks that had to be taken all the way to the upper roof level and beyond to form the chimney protruding about two meters beyond the roof line. In the dining room he combined the direction of the chimney to accommodate the kitchen stove and fireplace on the other side of the wall.
This became the conversation topic of many who came to visit our home. It was a marvel how he accomplished this feat. The curve and the double flue was not an easy thing for even the best of masons. The chimney in the living room went straight up but was designed to cater to a fireplace in the master bedroom immediately above. This fireplace was never activated while we lived in this house. The top shelves were wide and most times full of trophies, pictures and ornate glass or pottery items.
Each of us four boys took turns digging out the basement to eventually make it more livable, with extra rooms and storage. One time when it was my turn to dig, I came close to one of the supporting posts. Unaware of its importance, I dug around it so close that it collapsed. The whole centre of the house should have fallen down, but for some reason, it held up. And here I am!
Dad’s violin
In the dining room of our half-finished house on Newtown Road, we discovered a strange assembly of wood, clamps and leather bands occupying a dresser drawer. We soon found out that Dad was setting things up for the making of a violin. The clamps and straps were tightened on a regular basis to hold everything together and shape the front and back of this instrument.
With the wise use of oils and I’m not sure what else he must have devised, the bellied shape soon appeared. He made another tool to cut the fine grooves around the perimeter into which he set other coloured woods to give it that particular violin appearance.
He made every part of it except the strings and the hair for the bow. As for the hairs in the bow, he told us, “Every time I see a horse I pull a hair from its tail and after about a year I had all the hair I needed.” Captains on the ships and stewards on the trains kept feeding him with exotic woods and bones and shark’s teeth, to add to his supply of things to graft into his many creations. He had lignum vitae from Africa, the hardest wood known to man. There were pieces of whale’s ribs and tiger’s teeth in his cabinet at work.
From all these items he fabricated the neck and bridge and tuning keys and whatever goes into a violin. He made a complete carrying case with compartments for rosin and an extra bow. For the locks and hinges, which were not available in St. John’s, he just set about and made his own. Many times I heard it said, “Give Ned a piece of wood and he’ll make anything.”
Finally, after more than a year of hard work, we heard Dad playing his finished violin behind the closed door of his upstairs bedroom. To be gracious, it sounded awful. However, with each passing day the old hymn tunes wafting through the walls became more and more enjoyable. He taught himself.
One day a captain of an English vessel was consulting with him on a project for his quarters when he spied a partially finished violin at the end of one of the benches. The captain happened to be a concert violinist. When he asked about it, Dad told him of a finished one at home. The next day he brought it to the captain at his office. Placing it under his chin, the captain started to play it right there. Workers gathered around to hear beautiful melodies float through the building.
It may have taken Dad well over a year to make this first violin. Though it may not have been of Stradivarius quality, the captain was so delighted with the sound he heard that he offered Dad the princely sum of $600 — which in today’s money is a lot of dough. Let’s see: that’s over $7000!
The diphtheria epidemic
In the late 40s an epidemic of diphtheria and scarlet fever hit Newfoundland with a vengeance. Hardly a home went unaffected. The provincial health authorities converted clinics and local hospitals into quarantine facilities where the sick were isolated for thirty days. In the east end of St. John’s, the nurse’s wing of the General Hospital became the fever hospital. Several members of our family became residents there, including Dad and my younger sister, Diane.
This was a bad time for Mom. She had already lost a little girl to whooping cough at the tender age of eleven months, and this must have crossed her mind as the ambulance drove away, her new little girl crying with the discomforts of this dreaded disease. True to her protective ways with me, she hid me from the authorities and kept me at home to break the laws of the land and care me for personally. A cot was set up in the corner of our large kitchen. I was isolated in some form, but there was no way they would take me from her.
What about Dad? Well, he wasn’t one to sit idle for a whole month, even if he was prostrate in a hospital bed. Unable to ply his carpentry trade, he became a poet. With pen in hand the poems just rolled out of him, and no one was spared his rhymes. When the 30 days ended, he had the staff of nurses and doctors line up to hear his dedicated lines. Even the cleaning crews and kitchen staff received honorable mention. It was quite a scene to see them all at the exit doors in a party atmosphere while being entertained by Dad’s “tomes of pomes.”
My eldest brother, Ron, tells me that Dad composed a song that was picked up by a well-known pop singer in the USA. It went to the top of the charts with Dad receiving no recognition. Of course, the song and music label will remain unnamed to avoid libel, and I don’t have the wherewithal to mount a suit.
