Today, she turns 100
A portrait of Vera Lemay Armstrong
Record readers may not immediately recognize the name Vera Lemay Armstrong but from 1951 to 1970 her photographs appeared in Sherbrooke’s English newspaper regularly if not daily.
Today, she turns 100, after having been feted on Saturday by a very large group of family and friends at the Wales Home where she has been residing for the last six years.
She was born Vera Macleod on January 7, 1919 on the Scots Road, at the time still farm country. She was the seventh of eight girls and one baby brother. Her roots in the Townships go very deep. On her father’s side, she is a Moe, among the earliest families to settle in the area. The one-room schoolhouse she attended stood across the road from her home on land donated by her great grandfather.
“He also donated land to build an Anglican church,” Vera explained on the weekend, “but it was never built.”
“The Macleod house was close enough to the school,” Vera’s second
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husband, Jerry Armstrong said, “that if someone scraped his knee, or felt ill, he’d be brought from the schoolyard to Mrs. Macleod to be tended to.”
Vera was quick at school but her eyes caused her problems.
“I was almost blind,” she said. “I was very close to my older sister, Eileen, and she would read to me, and do mental arithmetic.”
For a while, these coping mechanisms made up for her visual handicap.
“My parents sent me to the Mitchell School in Sherbrooke for Grades 6 and 7,” Vera recalled. “We would go in by horse and buggy, or horse and sleigh. My older siblings would drop me off and go on to Sherbrooke High School.”
By the time she reached Grade 8, Vera’s eye problems had worsened to the point that she had to withdraw from school.
Fortunately, a short time later she was seen by a doctor, a friend of her father’s, who was able to find improved lenses, and with her new glasses she was able to resume her schooling.
“I had lost a year of school,” she recalled, “so I would no longer be with my friends and classmates. One of my uncles lived in Windsor, very close to a teaching convent. I went there and took business and secretarial courses. I thought I might learn French, but nearly all the students were Irish Catholic and they all spoke better English than I did.”
The outbreak of war in 1939 caused considerable disruption and for Vera it meant a three-month stint in a munitions factory near Valleyfield, and then a similar short stint at the Ingersoll Rand factory in Sherbrooke that had been retooled for war production.
As an 18-year old, Vera had worked as a telephone operator at the Sherbrooke Hospital and she was able to return to work there as a secretary.
“Everything was quite controlled during the war,” Vera shared. “You’d be assigned to a job. I was very unhappy at Ingersoll Rand, and I mentioned this to a doctor I knew at the Sherbrooke Hospital. He was able to pull some strings and I was very happy when I was re-hired by the hospital.”
“I was made a secretary in the X-ray Department,” she continued, “but Dr. Beaton encouraged me to train as an Xray technician, and I became the Sherbrooke Hospital’s first graduate in their training program. I remember that I had to go to Montreal to write the exams. I wrote both the Canadian exam and the Quebec exam.”
She was appointed chief technician at the Sherbrooke Hospital in 1946, a position she held until 1951.
In 1946 she married Gerry Lemay, a Sherbrooke Daily Record reporter who had served in the Canadian Air Force during the war, and who had come back home to his old job. Enterprising and talented, Gerry Lemay soon opened a photography studio on Wellington St. in the same building that then housed the Sherbrooke Daily Record.
Gerry and Vera Lemay had two children, Danny and Linda, and Vera became a working mom
“At the beginning, I did the secretarial work at the photo studio,” Vera said. “I was already well acquainted with dark room procedures, and pretty soon I was also doing portrait photography and weddings.”
The fact that the Lemay Photo Studio was in the same building as the newspaper kept the ties between the Daily Record and the Lemays quite close.
“Quite a few of the Record reporters were young men, still studying at Bishop’s,” Vera recalled. “We had a car, and often the young reporters didn’t. Doug Ameron was the editor and he would ask me to drive a reporter out to cover a story and ask me to take a picture at the same time.”
Some photos were more memorable than others.
“On one occasion,” she says, “I took photos of a train wreck. Some months later I was asked if I would appear in court in the United States where my photos were part of the evidence in a case. It was settled out of court, and I was glad because I had two small children at home.”
“Another time,” she continued, “I was sent to St. Benoit du Lac. The Governor General, Vincent Massey, was visiting and the paper wanted a photo. I got there late. The Governor General and his wife were already waking away. I asked one of the attendants if I could ask them to stop for a photo. I was told I was too late and I was brushed off. But Mr. Massey had noticed me and overheard my request. He stopped and let me take a shot. It turned out to be a great photo.”
In 1970 two things happened that put Vera’s life back on its previous course.
“One was that my husband fell ill,” she says, “and the second was that the studio was slapped with a big tax bill. We had never previously paid taxes on the chemicals we used to develop photos. I suddenly found myself with a $5000 tax bill that I thought was quite unfair.”
“I met the radiologist at the Sherbrooke Hospital,” she continues, “and he told me that I should take a refresher course, but that as soon as a spot opened up, I’d be the first to be called.”
“I was rehired as an X-ray technician in 1971, a position I kept until I retired in 1984.”
In 1989 Vera married Jerry Armstrong, a man at whose first wedding she had been the official photographer, and someone she’d known since adolescence. Both widowed, they met through mutual friends with whom they enjoyed playing bridge, golfing, and cross-country skiing.
“Looking back,” said Vera Lemay Armstrong, “I’ve had a wonderful life, and I’ve met so many generous and helpful people.”
Happy Birthday, Vera!