A century of smiles
Laughter is the medicine that keeps 100 year-old Emily Donnelly going.
Happily, she has a big extended family to laugh with. They view her as the matriarch of the Williams family of Barney’s River and when called upon to describe her at her recent birthday party they came up with lots of words, including tried and true, energetic, resilient, fun, stubborn and sexy.
Donnelly, who has buried two husbands and two of her three children, moved into Valley View Villa a year ago. She misses her home at The Ponds but allows the move was a little easier because her son and brother have rooms on the same wing.
“Good God, no, I guess I didn’t but I’m enjoying it,” she says when asked if she ever dreamed of living to be 100.
She has no idea what has contributed to her longevity.
“But I can tell you having some hard times, dancing, playing cards for a little money and the odd drink of rum haven’t done me any harm.”
She grew up in Barney’s River where the shortest way to school, 2.5 miles away, was to walk along the railway tracks and jump off when a train was heard in the distance. Her father had a lumber mill and woods camp and her first job was as temporary camp cook.
“The cook went off and my father asked my mother if she could go up for a couple of hours but she’d just set bread and had other things on the go so she told him to take me. I was 16 and when I got up there I found out I was cooking meals for 16 men. I had a cook to help and he was younger than I was.”
She met Allister Smith, her first husband, after she and a dance partner entered a hot polka contest in Avondale.
“He asked me to dance and then made a comment about the contest being a setup so I walked off and left him. I met him at another dance and it didn’t go any better but I ended up marrying him at 22.”
She moved a few kilometers east to The Ponds where she and Smith built a house. He had just left for work early on a November morning when Donnelly, five months pregnant and with two young children sleeping upstairs, heard a strange sound as she stirred the morning porridge.
“When I opened the living room door, the room was on fire. I raced through to get to the stairs and up to the children. I grabbed one in each arm and started down but the baby must have been scared by the flames and she almost jumped clear of me. As she was lunging, I got my hand through her diaper and we made it out.”
They sustained minor burns while the house and everything in it was lost.
“Of course it was hard to lose the house but I’d come so close to losing the kids, too, that I was just grateful to God we got out.”
Smith, a trucker, suffered from repeated bouts of pneumonia and his doctor recommended finding another line of work. He went to Ontario with neighbours who were looking for work but never planned to stay.
“Then I got a call from him that he had a job and would find a place for us. Much as I didn’t want to leave all my family, I knew it would be better for his health and I didn’t want to lose him.”
She agonized over how to tell her parents they were moving to Ontario.
“First I sold our cows and they wondered what was going on. Then I gave up the telephone exchange and I still hadn’t found a way to tell them.”
It was 1949 when she and the children boarded a train for Toronto, loaded down with all their belongings.
“The kids were so excited they couldn’t sit still, wanting to be at the windows and in the aisles. As soon as I’d go after one of them another, another would take off in the other direction. None of them would go to sleep overnight. My mother had packed us a big lunch because we didn’t have any money to spare and when I went to get it my daughter had given it away to somebody.”
Their first home in Toronto was a basement apartment with a hotplate and two beds.
“I remember going upstairs in the building for a phone call one day and it was my sister. She and a friend were coming to visit. I was desperate to see them but where was I going to put them? The friend went to somebody else and my sister stayed with us, three of us in each bed but it was so good to see her.”
She soon found a job working for Bell Telephone and moved up from operator to senior positions, retiring after more than 25 years service.
“It was a rough start but we had a good life and we made good friends. We never missed a chance to come home, though.”
A few years after her first husband passed away she was introduced to her second husband, Alec Donnelly.
“After we got to know each other I asked him to come to Nova Scotia for a visit. He said the only way he’d come was if I agreed to marry him. I wasn’t missing a trip to Nova Scotia so I married him.”
She was touched that his children were among the more than 200 who gathered to celebrate her birthday.
After the death of her second husband, Donnelly moved back to The Ponds in 1991.
Niece Wendy Ross remembers the day her modular home was delivered.
“We were all there, siblings and nieces and nephews and lots of children running around. It was so exciting because we all loved Emily and she was finally moving home.”
Twenty-six years later, Emily Donnelly is as spirited and popular as ever.