Joan Charlton (right) with one of her older sisters circa 2010.
Born in 1932, Joan Charlton was raised and educated in an English-speaking section of Montreal. The youngest of five, Charlton always ended up sleeping at the foot of the bed with a few cousins when they went to spend the summer at their grandmother’s farm in neighbouring Glengarry, Ontario.
Charlton as a young girl circa 1935.
Charlton as a young woman circa 1958.
“Every summer, tons of cousins, as many as six of us, would visit my grandmother’s farm in Glengarry. We would sleep three to a bed and the youngest always got the foot of the bed. I always got the foot.”
Those summers, they would have no electricity and no plumbing. They had a summer kitchen outside so that it wouldn’t heat up the house during the summers. There was a wood stove, and Charlton describes how, when they were little, they would bathe in a copper boiler.
“The well water was very hard, so we had to collect rain water from the eaves.” They used the rain water for cooking and bathing, but a river went through the farm, so when they got older they could bathe there.
Those summers at her grandmother’s farm are her favourite memories.
“We had cats and dogs and little pigs. We named all the animals on the farm. There was Glen the rooster and Johnny Willy Billy D the goat,” she said.
To this day, she keeps in touch with her cousins from those summer months at the farm. Every two to three years, they have a reunion. One year when she went back for a visit, it was the MacMillan family’s 200th anniversary of their emigration from Scotland to Canada. Her mother’s family, the Kennedys, came from Scotland, too, but they had been in Canada for much longer.
Her father was 50 and her mother was 38 when she was born. Her father worked as a bookkeeper and her mother was a stenographer in the CPR Head office. “On our street everyone worked in an office, bar none,” she said.
Charlton’s Father in the center.
Charlton’s siblings during the late 1920s.
Charlton’s favourite subjects in school were history, English and Latin. “I loathed math,” she said. “I lost a whole year of school.” She had fallen ill with St. Vida’s Dance disease, a neurogenic disease caused by a strep infection that affected the base of her brain and made her an invalid for a period of her childhood.
She went to St Augustan of Canterbury Girls Academy for elementary school. Then, in 1950, she graduated from the Thomas Darcy McGee High School for Girls at age 18, going straight into the convent at St. Mary’s Hospital School of Nursing.
Her mother had enrolled her in nursing school while she was away at her grandmother’s farm over the summer. From ages 18 to 21, she was isolated in the residence at the convent. She didn’t have a choice over her career, but now that she looks back she figures her mother knew best.
“We were told by the good nuns in school that the first occupation we could take up was in the religious vocation, and then we could be a teacher or a nurse,” she said. It was either that or to get married, become a stenographer or switchboard operator, or a clerk in the five-and-dime store, the lowest of the low, she said.
She worked as a nurse her entire career, in a variety of hospitals and in different wards, including maternity, infectious disease, critical care, emergency, and the cardiac unit. She worked as an IV nurse at the Vancouver General Hospital and finished her career as a supervisor at Delta Hospital.
In 1954, less than a year after graduating from nursing school, Charlton became the first person in her family to fly.
She came to Vancouver, 14 hours by plane to get from Montreal. She remembers it was a North Star aircraft that held about 40 people. She said most of the flight attendants and a few of the passengers were nurses, so they fed babies during the flight. The ticket was $252 for a one-way ticket.
She met her late husband, Ted, in 1960 at a ranch in the Cariboo region, near Clinton. “There were 50 of us. We went up there on all the holiday weekends.”
Ted was always there and they kept meeting and finally started dating. They dated on and off and four years before getting married. “We were together from 1964 until 1996 when he died.” They had no children, but thought about adopting as Ted was 47 and she was 32 when they got married. But mixed religion couples didn’t adopt back then. (He was Anglican and she was Catholic.)
Jack MacMillan
Charlton has travelled a lot over her lifetime. She has been to Montreal from Vancouver countless times, to almost every state in the U.S., and all over Europe including England, Germany and France. “I’ve been to Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, so many places.” But the one place she says she has yet to have been and still wants to visit is Newfoundland.
Her hobbies included reading and writing and although her writing has become a little shaky over time, her love for reading is still prevalent. Charlton says if she could give one piece of advice to young people, it would be to read a lot and to write creatively.
Lauren Rudy
I thought your article was well done. I liked how you added in quite a few photos as I felt it made the story more enjoyable to look at. I also found it helped make a connection to the story, instead of just glancing over words.