It’s Nellie Frumento’s choice of keepworthy newspaper and magazine clippings that intrigues us now…
We all have them: images, events, experiences that are burned into our memory banks.
Some of them are personal, sometimes so personal that they can’t be shared; others are more communal and some even thirdhand and more distant but, for various reasons, every bit as memorable.
Anniversaries bring them to mind, sometimes painfully so; they’ve been, after all, hard-wired into our subconscious and, for better or worse, we’re stuck with them.
Anyone who has experienced real tragedy understands this; their lives have been forever altered. Even when that tragedy, say a death, is remote it can remain with us forever. Who will ever forget where they were and what they were doing on the morning of 9/11?
I’m reminded of one of my own memorable landmarks by Mrs. Marjorie Frumento of Chemainus who, son Kelvin assures me, “NEVER misses reading” any of my columns. She offered to lend me a family scrapbook compiled by her mother, Nellie Frumento. As Kevin explains, “She was from England hence the Royal Family clippings.”
What adds to this scrapbook’s value as a family keepsake is the fact that it went astray. Kevin: “Somehow, this book was lost and it was found in a secondhand store by a friend of the family who saw the Frumento connection to the book and returned it to the family.”
It’s a typical paperback scrapbook of the 1960s, about 10 x 15 inches, with newsprint pages and a Norman Rockwell cover of a boy who’s obviously heading home, whistling over his catch of lake fish and accompanied by his collie.
But, the moment you open the cover it takes on its own identity, the alter-ego of Nellie Frumento who was then in her 60s. It’s her choice of keepworthy newspaper and magazine clippings that intrigues us; the first page is a November 1953 Vancouver Sun article on Dr. Edward Lewinson, a plastic surgeon who volunteered his skills to reconstruct the faces of badly deformed inmates at Oakalla Prison Farm. By then he’d performed 20 operations, most of them on inmates’ noses, some of which were so deformed that their owners had avoided being seen in public.
What made Mrs. Frumento keep this clipping?
Accompanying this article is another clipping, this one religious and inspirational.
Then come pages and pages of clipped photos of America’s first family, that of the newly-elected President John F. Kennedy, wife Jacquie, daughter Caroline and a portrait of the late Pres. Franklin W. Roosevelt.
(It was the Kennedy photos that rekindled one of my own indelible memories, that of Nov. 23, 1963: JFK’s assassination in Dallas. I didn’t have an office in those days; I was typing at my parents’ kitchen table when the first news bulletin came over the radio. I stopped cold to listen and probably never did get back to work that day…)
There are numerous pages of photos of the grieving family members, Kennedy’s flag-draped coffin, newly sworn-in Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson with his hand across his chest in salute. Interestingly, this section of the scrapbook is followed by a copy of a radio broadcast. “Talking From London,” by Richard Lloyd Thomas. Intended for replay on Victoria’s CJVI, its subject is that of giving — as in giving to help others even to the point of the sacrifice of one’s own life.
Obviously, CJVI shared Mrs. Frumento’s respect for the sentiments expressed by Thomas as they’d had his talk specially printed as a handout.
Then comes the more eclectic part of the scrapbook, the next page being a large newspaper clipping entitled, “A Most Memorable Day: Rumrunning, Golf in Snow, Running Amok.”
Only then does the family section begin with a newspaper photo of Robyn Frumento, the two and a half year old daughter of the F.D. Frumentos, who’s described as “the darling of Gordon River Camp at Honeymoon Bay, V.I. where her father is camp foreman”.
There’s a small news article on Jack Frumento, then a Victoria florist and formerly a wartime flier and bridge builder, and an undated obituary notice for Marie Antoinette Cockburn, of Mill Bay, who was interred at Cowichan Sation’s St. Andrews Church.
Mrs. Cockburn had had quite a career, being a daughter of “the first white men [sic] to come to live at Cowichan Bay and was one of the best known women in the central part of the Island, having lived in the Cowichan district 57 years.
“She went to Cowichan Bay when very young with her father, G.B. Ordano, who, a native of Italy, went out to San Juan Island, where Marie Antoinette was born. Her father’s store and hotel, the latter known as the John Bull Inn, which Mr. Ordano took over from John [sic] Harris in Cowichan Bay, were the first in the district. She was a well-known horsewoman, with her thoroughbreds for years being a feature of western tracks…”
For years she’d operated a hotel at Cowichan Station until its destruction by fire and she lived her final decade in failing health at Mill Bay.
The Ordano-Frumento links become much more apparent thanks to a lengthy article in the Cowichan Leader, this one dated 1961, by the late Jack Fleetwood. Here’s a story in itself, Jack having been a gifted raconteur with almost photographic recall of everything and everyone he knew or he’d ever learned about Cowichan history.
There’s an article on insomnia and dreams by the Colonist’s G.E. Mortimore and a photo of Jack Frumento with his 15-year-old Cairn terrier, Jeep, who’d slipped from Jack’s truck while in Esquimalt. Making his disappearance all the more critical was the fact Jeep needed special medications but all ended well when he scratched at the door of a Mrs. Nelson on Bay Street. Recognizing him from an appeal in the newspaper, she immediately phoned Jack. Jeep was hungry and footsore, having made his way from Esquimalt to town, but he apparently suffered no other ill effects.
Obviously, Nellie Frumento was a lady of varied and maternal interests, the next two pages being of babies, including a set of quintuplets (not the Dionnes). Then it’s back to JFK, with a chronicle of Mrs. Johnson’s activities in the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s death, followed by photos of the late president and his family and “A Mother’s Letter to Caroline”.
From the Old Country, Nellie, couldn’t have resisted pasting in photos of a young Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret and Sir Winston Churchill. Then more international tragedy: the shooting of Martin Luther King, a ferry sinking in Wellington Harbour, N.Z., and a tribute to the late Maggy (not Margaret) Moss of local health care fame.
There’s the death of the Duke of Windsor and Gov.-Gen. Georges Vanier (we’re now up to 1967) then, out of sequence, more on the young, pre-assassination Kennedys immediately, (and poignantly) followed by tributes to the just-murdered Bobby Kennedy.
Then more local news stories, some of them having a family connection, some of local history, and a half-page feature on the latest medical marvel, heart transplants.
She ends with the oldest item in the scrapbook, a facsimile copy of the first issue of The Cowichan Leader. All in all, it’s quite a journey as seen through the eyes of the late Nellie Frumento.
One that, but for the friend who rescued the scrapbook from a secondhand store, would never have been returned to the family, would, perhaps, have been lost forever.
My thanks for today’s Chronicle to Marjorie and Kevin Frumento.