Widow seeks spouse | Personal ad results in one large, lively family
We had found our Shangri-la in Elliot Lake, Ont., as new immigrants to Canada.
My husband, Dieter, and I immigrated from Germany in 1952. Elliot Lake, Ont., consisted of only five houses and several nearby uranium mines. We wanted our family to grow up alongside this growing town. We loved the endless forests and many lakes nearby.
We secured a house, tent and kayak and were set to stay in Elliot Lake forever. When blessed with our fifth child in February 1959, our happiness knew no bounds. But just before Christmas, 1961, Dieter was killed in a highway accident.
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He was 34 and our children were all younger than nine.
My parents expected I would bring the family back home, but I couldn’t. Canada was our home. Also, Dieter’s parents had divorced when he was four and by the time he was eight, boarding schools became home to him. He told me many times he didn’t want his children to face the same fate.
“If something happens to me while our children are small, promise me you will do your utmost to find another father for them. I don’t want them to grow up as I did, in boarding schools desperate for real family life,” he advised.
Both young and healthy, we couldn’t imagine ever having to fulfill a promise like that, but when the unimaginable did happen, looking for a new father for our children was farthest from my mind.
As the children had lost their father, I felt it best to create work at home to make ends meet and started a daycare. I also made sturdy wooden toys to sell.
Days were long, busy and exhausting. At times, that promise to Dieter would come to mind along with thoughts that life might be easier with a man in the house.
But there was little chance to meet the right one in 1962, long before internet dating and more relaxed societal attitudes.
I intended to go it alone and do the best I could, when fate took a hand in this matter and sent a young salesman to knock on my door. He was trying to sell subscriptions to The Western Producer.
I leafed through the paper but not raised on a farm, I didn’t find much of interest. Then the personal ads caught my eye.
Men from Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta were seeking women. I imagined the big country, skies, farms and ranches and gardens in addition to men with big hearts.
“I will take it for a year although I am not a farmer. Do you know this is a mining town?” I told the young man.
“Oh yes, but you will find this paper informative and entertaining just the same,” he said.
Reading the object matrimony ads, I noticed that not one ad was placed by a woman. I wondered what those lovelorn men would think of a female shamelessly searching for a man this way, but decided to grab the bull by the horns and find out.
I considered this a safe way to fulfill my promise to Dieter. I would be off the hook if I had tried as promised.
I composed an ad and sent it off, convinced that nothing would come out of it:
“Widow, German born with healthy, intelligent children is looking for motherless children and their tall, generous and widely interested father.”
The paper added, object matrimony.
That made me feel uneasy. Who would want a brazen woman like that?
Two weeks later, the postman delivered stacks of letters, 52 in all, with return addresses in Canada’s West. A little later one arrived from Prince Edward Island and six weeks later, a package came full of photos from a Dutch coconut planter in the Solomon Islands.
By that time, I had made up my mind. I had answered all letters and most dropped out of the competition when they learned I had five children and that I was nearly six feet tall.
It put some fun into my life while it lasted. I left one letter to the last because it meant more to me than any other.
I wrote to the tall father of five, whose wife had passed away. He had grown up in a pioneer farm family with 14 siblings. That tipped the scales.
The Western Producer has a reach far past our prairie provinces. It led me to marriage and down a path to an interesting and fulfilling life.
Together, we operated a market garden and also added two more children to our blended family.
