#127

#127

BIRTH OF FIVE TURNED INTO A CARNIVAL FOR DEPRESSION ERA WORLD

by PETER THOMAS BUSCH

T

he Great Depression was four years on, taking the global world order down more than a notch or two since the affluence of the Roaring Twenties.

The rising unemployment and the collapse of small farms put 1.5 million Canadians on government assistance. The global economic collapse had sapped away hope from people around the world, particularly people in small towns who would not be secure from month to month under normal economic conditions.

During the darkest parts of the day, the world needed a miracle, and Canadians in small towns were far from the exception.

All this uncertainty collided with a growing struggle to define what life was to be Canadian, apart from the domineering smugness of the British Empire and the recurring unhappiness of French Canadians.

The birth of the Dionne Quintuplets on May 28, 1934 became a gold rush of another sort with the line of cars three miles long filled with people wanting to be part of the miracle, all of whom had to gas up before turning around and heading home again.

Only two previous times in the records of births anywhere in the world were five babies born from the same mother at the same time. But the newborns had short lived lives.

NICU Wards were not what they are now, especially on a farm in a small town. Babies frequently died no more than a few hours after birth, let alone a few days. Infant mortality was high, and mother’s frequently died during childbirth.

When the Dionne Quintuplets were born, the miracle only got more miraculous as each hour passed, with the tiny newborns initially being kept warm in a basket in front of an open oven until the country doctor got there.

The birth of quintuplets was so remarkable that 6,000 people per day waited for a glimpse, moving forward 100 guests at a time passed a viewing area built around the children’s playground.

Callander, Ontario was a former lumber mill town when Canadians were becoming more lumberjacks and less fur traders, while the Dionnes were trying to become generational farmers in a place struck just as hard by the Great Depression as any other small town.

Global celebrities before the Quints included Hollywood’s Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford whose fame spread as film art moved from a Hollywood curiosity to a global phenomenon.

Unbeknownst to just about everyone, since obstetric ultrasounds would not be used for another thirty years, five more celebrities would arrive weighing 13 pounds and 6 ounces in total for all five newborns.

Elzire, the farm wife, and Oliva, the farmer, already had five children, with one more not expected until July. When five more came premature, one after another, the word of a miracle birth spread quickly.

The quintuplets, with all the attention, soon became a metaphor for hope during a desperate time as stories of the birth printed by nearby media outlets got picked up by the newspapers in the big cites, like Toronto and Chicago.

The French Canadian Catholics were extremely blessed, with the newborns, Yvonne, Annette, Cecile, Emilie and Marie receiving frequent check-ins by a country doctor and 24 hour care from a nurse in a room that became a nursery just for them.

The medical intervention wasn’t all grace and charity, though.

Dr Dafoe, the small town country doctor, became more famous than the parents, Oliva and Elzire. And within a few weeks, the five little girls became wards of the provincial government, and less and less the daughters newly born into a farming family.

The quintuplets were separated from their family in what became a nursery across the road from the farmhouse. The isolation initially kept them alive by protecting them from infectious diseases that their siblings might inadvertently spread to them.

The five sisters lived separate lives from the rest of their family from then on, even when reunited at the age of nine. The girls lived nearby, but a lot of people showed up and created a daily barrier between groups of siblings and their parents.

Quintland, as the tourist attraction became called, had a Midway between the nursery and the farmhouse, with the Quints’ dad, Oliva, managing two of the four shops, and sold, among other things, his signature for 25 cents. (all funds in 1930 CDN dollars)

In the process, the Quints licensed their names for advertisements, sold merchandize and were even featured in three Hollywood movies.

Twentieth Century Fox paid $350,000 for three films. The Alexander Doll Company paid 5% of sales from dolls, which amounted to $27,828 in a second year of sales. There was another $10,000 here and there for exclusive rights, such as exclusive rights to photograph the girls.

A trust fund had been established that amount to $1.8 million by the age of 4.

The carnival atmosphere lasted 8 years in total, with 3 million visitors and $500 million in tourist revenue in total to the provincial government.

There would have been so much more, but a sense of outrage among the public developed over the exploitation of the children, particularly since the parents had hardly any involvement in the girls’ lives, while the provincial government managed just about everything.

The government pulled back a bit more on marketing the Quints when interest waned.

By the age of nine, the world moved on from the Quintuplets to other global events, such as World War II.

Hollywood celebrities suffered too as the focus shifted from fantasy and escape to the real life battle between good and evil. And many actors went to the war front.

When the quintuplets moved back into the farmhouse, which was really then the Big House, after the government built a ‘big house’ in anticipation of the end of the tourist era and the reuniting of the family, the family under two roofs would become two families under one roof.

Two separate families had permanently formed among the 13 siblings living in isolation of each other just a few hundred feet apart.

When the quintuplets turned the age of majority in 1957, all that was left in the trust fund was $945,00, with each young woman receiving $133,951.

The problem was that the value of the trust fund no longer reflected the ordeal or what now had become characterized as something quite more traumatic, looked at through a contemporary lens.

The government and their father had provided for the five girls, but all expenses and a bit more were paid out of the trust funds.

In the result, the children had been exploited as a government organized tourist attraction, even studied under the controlled environment of the nursery – absent parental oversight.

The miracle still remains in near memory as examples of the struggle between the need for independent individual identity and the ability of government to intervene and make life easier for people.

The sisters needed to be individuals five times as much as regular siblings while the rights of the mother to have all her children in her care under the same roof were ignored.

And the history of the nation was forever changed.