Author Denis Ledoux at his home in Lisbon Falls, where he wrote his latest book, “French Boy: A 1950s Franco-American Childhood.” Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal
Thousands of kids grew up in Lewiston and its surrounding towns in the years following World War II, but few had the time, skill or inclination to tell the story of what it was like.
Writer Denis Ledoux’s new memoir, “French Boy: A 1950s Franco-American Childhood,” is a valuable exception.
“It’s more than just a memoir,” said James Myall, who co-authored a history titled “The Franco-Americans of Lewiston-Auburn.”
Ledoux called his new book “the story of my tribe at a time when so much that was dear to us was being lost.”
The cover of Denis Ledoux’s book. Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal
“It’s not all about me,” he said.
An award-winning writer and historian, Ledoux also teaches memoir writing, has taught Franco studies at the university level, and lectures on cultural diversity and North American Franco culture and history.
He said that writing a memoir is “a huge undertaking” and that a good one uses a life “as a sort of trellis” on which to hang a bigger tale.
So Ledoux aimed to do two things: to tell readers “what it was like to be a boy who grew up in the 1950s” and what happened in the community in which he lived.
“The world that I grew up in was so different than today,” he said, and much of that is “just gone.”
Ledoux said he hopes that “French Boy” will speak to readers about their own experiences – no matter where or when they grew up – and also offer a guide for coping with “darkness that surrounds us.”
A memoir, he said, is inherently a heroic journey in which an author must pick out the things of value from his own life that offer enlightenment about the human experience more generally.
Plus, of course, it needs to be interesting.
“You don’t want people to be bored stiff,” Ledoux said.
For Douglas Rooks, a Maine journalist with a penchant for history, Ledoux’s autobiography was anything but dull.
“It was just wonderful to hear so many French voices” in the volume, Rooks said.
THE FRENCH WAVE
In the last half of the 19th century, as Lewiston’s mills grew in size and number, French-Canadians began to pour into the city to snatch up the jobs the industry created.
By 1900, more than half the people in the city could trace their roots to Quebec. French was heard everywhere, except in the rooms where civic and business decisions were made. That didn’t come until later.
The Franco community, though often mired in poverty, consisted of big families, a strong Catholic faith and hope.
A page from Maine writer Denis Ledoux’s most recent book. Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal
Ledoux’s grandparents came late to the game, arriving in in Lewiston in 1916 after spending two decades in Massachusetts.
Ledoux himself didn’t show up until 1947, when he was born at St. Mary’s Hospital and came home to live in a second-floor apartment at 49 Farwell St.
His memoir details his first 12 years, initially in Lewiston and later in Lisbon, growing up in that tight-knit Franco world that was always distant from the rest of the community.
“We brought otherness with us,” Ledoux said.
Even youngsters like Ledoux could not help but stand out from the old Maine heritage. The very sound of their voices gave them away.
Ledoux writes about how “the library ladies” he heard while perusing the stacks conversed with a Yankee accent he could not match.
“We children were exposed to this accent but we were learning our English from Franco-Americans who spoke English in a Frenchified manner. That is how we, too, spoke.”
A YOUNGSTER IN LEWISTON
It’s more than a little fortunate that Ledoux survived to tell his story.
Not even a year old, baby Denis went into convulsions and began foaming at the mouth, apparently in reaction to his teeth coming in.
His mother scooped him up and raced up Farwell Street looking for help from his grandmother. Having little idea what to do, they put him under a faucet and let cold water run over him, which might even have helped.
Denis Ledoux’s grandparents, William and Marie Ledoux, are shown in their apartment upstairs in the family farmhouse in Lisbon Falls around 1955. “They were very much part of our lives,” says Ledoux. Submitted photo
In any case, his doctor later suggested if it happened again to put him in a basin of lukewarm water and dry mustard. The physicians had no clue either.
He warned Ledoux’s mother it could happen again, perhaps because the stress of teething was overwhelming the baby’s system. It could kill him, the doctor said.
Though the baby was twice more afflicted, he came through it all, perhaps smelling a little of mustard.
As a toddler, Ledoux went with his family to a camp on Thompson Lake in Poland that belonged to a cousin of his grandfather. Some older boys were leaping off a dock repeatedly, having a blast.
“I walked down unnoticed to the end of the dock,” he wrote. “Just as the big boys were doing, I lined myself at the edge of dock, and big boy that I was, dove in.”
“I faintly remember water coming over me and not being able to breathe. It was not, to put it mildly, what I had expected,” Ledoux wrote.
The next thing he remembered was lying on the beach nearby with a lot of excited people around him.
Ledoux, in short, has always been one to jump in, a good trait in a memoirist. Luck helps, too.
GROWING UP IN THE ’50s
For a child, discovering the world is always more than a little magical. It doesn’t matter who you are or where your family came from.
But part of the magic is learning who your family is, what your community is like, and how all of it fits together – the necessary foundation for figuring out who you are.
For Ledoux, as he details in his book, it was a swirling mass of characters, most of them French, who told stories, took him places and somewhat unwittingly exposed him to the richness of his heritage.
Denis Ledoux and his siblings, clockwise from top: Bill, Denis, Claire and Rachel around 1953. Submitted photo
It was a world of Sunday Masses, fun-loving uncles, loving parents, school, devoted mothers, fathers working out of the home and a series of familiar places where a boy could feel safe.
In his book, though, Ledoux also tries to explore “what it meant to be born outside the dominant culture and language, to experience foreignness and a pervasive sense that we are not really Americans – not yet anyway.”
“French Boy” captures a slice of that Franco-American life, which seems distant to the world we live in today but in some ways highlights an enduring piece of the nation’s story: how people from one place come here, rooted in their past and their faith, and gradually become American.
Part of it is, surely, that they broaden what it means to be an American.
But it has a price, as Ledoux makes clear.
He said his generation feels a shame over the way an ancestral culture has slipped away and at the loss of everyday French use, perhaps symbolized best by the closure of Lewiston’s French newspaper, Le Messager, in 1966.
“My generation’s experience is one of fashioning a new identity out of our loss,” Ledoux said. “This story is bigger than me.”
“French Boy” can be purchased at Quiet City Books and at the Androscoggin Historical Society, both on Lisbon Street in Lewiston, as well as a number of other bookstores across Maine. It is also available from Amazon.
Author Denis Ledoux displays copies of his book “French Boy: A 1950s Franco-American Childhood” at his home in Lisbon Falls. Russ Dillingham/Sun Journal
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