In the eclectic 1960s, back when the young and not so young from nearby Maine could cross the international bridge over the St. John River to the city of Edmundston, New Brunswick, Canada, one could experience a totally revolutionary view of the world. A hip sort of culture not always seen by the rural, middle classes of northern Maine where farm trucks and tractors ruled the roads and where hamburgers and cheese burgers were just taking root.
All we had to do was drive across the river and our world changed.
My 20-something uncle, fresh from college with a degree in chemical engineering, landed a heady job at the Edmundston pulp and paper mill owned by Fraser Papers Inc., the only company in the world that made wood pulp in Canada and then pumped it through a pipe across the international river to a finished paper mill in Madawaska, Maine.
Uncle rented an apartment in the French-speaking city while working days in the English-speaking mill management. The next few years grew more turbulent at the mill, and eventually a strike was formed in 1971. But my uncle had moved on by then, long after experiencing the exotic 1960s as a young dreamer in an otherwise troubling world.
We were invited to meet him at his apartment one day, and my father and mother, unshackled by farm work in the middle of winter, drove me, a girl of not yet teen years, to the bilingual city.
The apartment was suave with the latest modern decor and the records of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, and a new one by Brazil ’66, laid next to his stereo console.
He took us to meet one of his dearest friends who had recently retired from the mill—Ernie, who was totally English, and his petit, elegantly French wife, Dora.
They had no children but lived in a modern brick and pink-stoned house with a carport and wall to wall carpeting. Ernie’s one passion was training their dog, a huge German shepherd, how to sniff out objects Ernie would hide for him inside the house.
Dora was very kind and she dressed as one from Montreal or Paris. She wore real diamonds and emeralds and real fabrics like wool, silk, and leather.
One time during our budding friendship, she gave me her castoff leather gloves. With hardly any wear, they were a stylish brown, soft as kitten’s fur, with snaps on the wrists and cutouts across the tops.
Uncle completed our introduction to his city that day with a meal in a hushed, darkened restaurant where I ate a burger while he ordered a Caesar’s salad…something I had never seen before. A mound of fresh lettuce with croutons and shredded cheese and salad dressing. He loved it, and ever since I have loved it, too.
Bel Air Restaurant was one of the popular eateries in Edmundston.
He let me borrow some of his happier records—including Brazil ’66. The rumba beat, the female soloists singing in Portuguese and English, and the jazz piano fitted the Edmundston of the ’60s. Uncle and other young American men in their black suits and thin ties and white shirts gadded about with the dark and red-haired French office girls they dated. They listened to Brazilian jazz, nibbled at Caesar salads, and enjoyed the small, cosmopolitan city that resisted the encroaching pulp forests, snow drifts, and cold.
Soon the decade turned to 1970. Marriages were secured, mill workers went on strike, and life matured to jobs in the States, families to raise, inflations to combat and conquer.
The ’60s in Edmundston, however, will always be part of the culture I inhaled and internalized through that visit, and the realization that sometimes different worlds can be experienced and, for a time, embraced.
