Bernard Beaudoin was born 3 years before “The Great Depression” of 1929. He often mentioned his father had to go to Northern Ontario to find a job at the beginning of the 1930s and that his young family of 5 in the Beauce County south of Quebec City survived on bread and white shortening for a while.
By the end of the 1930s, Bernard’s father, managed to buy a small house in Lac Mégantic, a town close to the States of Vermont and Maine. Bernard attended school there until Grade 7. He was then sent to a boarding school in Victoriaville where he completed his secondary schooling, He then obtained a teaching certificate and his B.A. degree thanks to the generosity of religious teaching Brothers who had come from France through the State of Louisiana.
With his qualifications, he was allowed to teach in the Province of Quebec, but had to attend Ottawa University Teacher's College in 1953-54 when he decided to teach in the Niagara Peninsula in southern Ontario, where his parents were then living. There, he met the love of his life, an elementary school teacher named Florence Roy. They married in August, 1955.
Ten years later, they decided to move East from Welland Ontario to Ottawa where the Government was hiring English and French language teachers. He soon became the principal of a school there. I remember my mother helping him to organize receptions for his staff in our house south of Billings Bridge in Ottawa. My siblings and I attended schools in that area in the 60's and 70's.
He took early retirement at the age of 59 and enjoyed the improved health and reduced stress that came with it. He enjoyed driving to the Eastern Townships, to a nursing home a few miles from Lenoxville where his father had retired. In winter, though my parents would rather drive south to Mesa, Arizona where our now deceased aunt Angeline used to live, the 3 of them spent a few weeks together every year during the winter months, even longer periods of time after my grandfather had passed away and my brother and I had moved to the West Coast.
In March of 1993, they drove up the Pacific Coast from California to B.C. They visited several retirement gated communities in Surrey and Langley,BC. They decided to wait for the completion of Churchill Park that was being built in Langley, BC in the spring of 1993 and made the move from Ontario to BC. They quickly adapted to living in the Vancouver region and being a part of their new community.
Bernard considered it “icing on the cake" when he learned that a one acre lot had been purchased by the Catholic Archdiocese not far from Churchill Park for the eventual foundation of a new parish in Walnut Grove in Langley. Bernard was happy to join a founding committee that began to meet in the Fort Langley Fine Art School. He became an usher for the 10 o'clock mass that was celebrated in the auditorium of that school.
He later had to resign his various volunteer jobs when he lost much of his hearing, and most of his eyesight which was greatly affected by a serious case of macular degeneration.
Despite his encroaching blindness and hearing disorders, he continued to desperately use his computer for years until recently, just weeks before his death. With a very large screen magnifier, he patiently spent hours carefully writing and exchanging very short emails to stay connected with relatives and friends who were across Canada and the US.
Unfortunately, Covid brought much isolation, and I’m sure he is happy to be in a better place, hopefully with his wife, our mother, Florence, who passed away in September 2017. He so often spoke about wanting to be with her again and how he missed her.
We’ll miss you mom and dad.