Art St Hilaire's Little Pleasures

One of the fellows atop this building on the campus of RPI, Rensselear Polytechnical Institute, 

repairing brickwork is Art St. Hilaire, a mason by trade.

Arthur St. Hilaire

A family contributor and grandson emailed FrancoAmerican Gravy with memories of Art St Hilaire's small pleasures and his character.

"Pip" also enjoyed his Camels -- several packs a day, in fact -- until the summer of 1977 when an X-ray showed an unidentifiable spot on his lung. He never smoked again after walking out of the doctor's office that day. For someone who smoked so heavily, Pip never complained when he stopped and as far as I remember it didn't affect his disposition one bit. It was just something he had to do, so he did it, he didn't complain, and he moved on with life. Lots of packs of unopened camels stayed undisturbed in the old "smoke stand" for at least two or three years after that, when he gave them away. That's one of the most important lessons I learned from him, a template for handling unpleasant situations, or things that seem overwhelming: Just do what needs to be done and get over it; something better is bound to be on the other side. In his case, who knows how many years he added to his life by stopping smoking in 1977?

Another simple pleasure -- very Franco-American, as I understand it -- was a fondness for pickled pigs' feet (pied de cochon). Yuck!

In later years, the biggest pleasure was sitting around and chewing the fat with anyone who was around -- at the American Legion bar, where he was an "honorary member" (never actually having served in the military), at home with whoever stopped by, at his friends Marge and Danny's "camp" on the NY side of the Crown Point Bridge on Lake Champlain.

Thankful for Life's Little Pleasures

Thanksgiving time and I am thinking about simple pleasures that make me thankful.  Then I get thinking about the people in my life who have passed on....and some of the simple things that brought them happiness and small pleasures.

Dad, Uncle Al, Uncle Bob immediately came to mind..

 Al  Rivet loved "Good & Plenty"

 Bob Wills loved eight track tapes

Art Mylott loved reading science fiction by Edgar Rice Burroughs

AND

And all three loved cigarettes, Camels or Lucky Strike,  until they all gave up smoking!

French Huguenots: First Thanksgiving and First Pilgrims to North America

At Thanksgiving 2008, the New York Times published an Op-Ed written by Kenneth C Davis, the author of  America's Hidden History.  It truly made its impression on me, forcing me to try to understand why the collective memory of the United States pays such tremendous tribute to the New England pilgrims.  Perhaps because the the Plymouth pilgrims survived at the cost of so many natives people's lives and grimly pushed their righteous cause to above others they are remembered, canonized and immortalized.  The dead cannot speak their story, so I went to the library to borrow America's Hidden History.  The first chapter, about the massacre of the French Protestants in what is now a suburb of Jacksonville, Florida, certainly forced me to remember there were so many others who came to North America to escape religious freedom and servitude. Most did not survive.  The first pilgrims were not the founders of the Plymouth colony, they were the French Huguenots of Fort Caroline.

From the New York Times on November 26, 2008

Op-Ed Contributor

A French Connection

By KENNETH C. DAVIS

TO commemorate the arrival of the first pilgrims to America's shores, a June date would be far more appropriate, accompanied perhaps by coq au vin and a nice Bordeaux. After all, the first European arrivals seeking religious freedom in the "New World" were French. And they beat their English counterparts by 50 years. That French settlers bested the Mayflower Pilgrims may surprise Americans raised on our foundational myth, but the record is clear.
Long before the Pilgrims sailed in 1620, another group of dissident Christians sought a haven in which to worship freely. These French Calvinists, or Huguenots, hoped to escape the sectarian fighting between Catholics and Protestants that had bloodied France since 1560.
Landing in balmy Florida in June of 1562, at what a French explorer had earlier named the River of May (now the St. Johns River near Jacksonville), the French émigrés promptly held a service of "thanksgiving." Carrying the seeds of a new colony, they also brought cannons to fortify the small, wooden enclosure they named Fort Caroline, in honor of their king, Charles IX.
In short order, these French pilgrims built houses, a mill and bakery, and apparently even managed to press some grapes into a few casks of wine. At first, relationships with the local Timucuans were friendly, and some of the French settlers took native wives and soon acquired the habit of smoking a certain local "herb." Food, wine, women — and tobacco by the sea, no less. A veritable Gallic paradise.
Except, that is, to the Spanish, who had other visions for the New World. In 1565, King Philip II of Spain issued orders to "hang and burn the Lutherans" (then a Spanish catchall term for Protestants) and dispatched Adm. Pedro Menéndez to wipe out these French heretics who had taken up residence on land claimed by the Spanish — and who also had an annoying habit of attacking Spanish treasure ships as they sailed by.
Leading this holy war with a crusader's fervor, Menéndez established St. Augustine and ordered what local boosters claim is the first parish Mass celebrated in the future United States. Then he engineered a murderous assault on Fort Caroline, in which most of the French settlers were massacred. Menéndez had many of the survivors strung up under a sign that read, "I do this not as to Frenchmen but as to heretics." A few weeks later, he ordered the execution of more than 300 French shipwreck survivors at a site just south of St. Augustine, now marked by an inconspicuous national monument called Fort Matanzas, from the Spanish word for "slaughters."
With this, America's first pilgrims disappeared from the pages of history. Casualties of Europe's murderous religious wars, they fell victim to Anglophile historians who erased their existence as readily as they demoted the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine to second-class status behind the later English colonies in Jamestown and Plymouth.
But the truth cannot be so easily buried. Although overlooked, a brutal first chapter had been written in the most untidy history of a "Christian nation." And the sectarian violence and hatred that ended with the deaths of a few hundred Huguenots in 1565 would be replayed often in early America, the supposed haven for religious dissent, which in fact tolerated next to none.
Starting with those massacred French pilgrims, the saga of the nation's birth and growth is often a bloodstained one, filled with religious animosities. In Boston, for instance, the Puritan fathers banned Catholic priests and executed several Quakers between 1659 and 1661. Cotton Mather, the famed Puritan cleric, led the war cries against New England's Abenaki "savages" who had learned their prayers from the French Jesuits. The colony of Georgia was established in 1732 as a buffer between the Protestant English colonies and the Spanish missions of Florida; its original charter banned Catholics. The bitter rivalry between Catholic France and Protestant England carried on for most of a century, giving rise to anti-Catholic laws, while a mistrust of Canada's French Catholics helped fire many patriots' passion for independence. As late as 1844, Philadelphia's anti-Catholic "Bible Riots" took the lives of more than a dozen people.
The list goes on. Our history is littered with bleak tableaus that show what happens when righteous certitude is mixed with fearful ignorance. Which is why this Thanksgiving, as we express gratitude for America's bounty and promise, we would do well to reflect on all our histories, including a forgotten French one that began on Florida's shores so many years ago.
Kenneth C. Davis is the author of "America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation."

In May 2010, I briefly visited the Fort Caroline National Historic Site on the Saint John's River  where the French Huguenots settled.  Here's a few photographs:

 A French Bread Oven just like the ovens along the roadside in Québec!

 Shell Midden

--