Richard and Laurie Dorge have loved and committed themselves to the community of Ste. Agathe for more than five decades. Now, at 82 and 76 years of age, they are some of the last aging seniors in the community. While they wish for an assisted living complex in the village Richard was born in, they will soon make the move to Winnipeg, like so many of their friends before them.

Without question, the residents of Ste. Agathe will feel the loss. The couple’s passion for community and Richard’s quick-witted sense of humour precede them wherever they go. Laurie will also be missed at the local school, where she’s worked as a teacher’s aide and speech therapist for the past 35 years.

The couple married back in 1962 and settled on the 400-acre farm Richard had purchased from his father only a few years earlier. At a cost of $35 per acre, they struggled under the debt load. Laurie used her previous banking experience to manage the Ste. Agathe Caisse Populaire, and together they raised two daughters in the community.

Eventually, they were able to build a comfortable bungalow on Ste. Agathe Street, complete with a covered backyard pool. It became a summer cooling off point for kids all over town. Laurie hosted swimming lessons each summer in the pool.

Raising the children and volunteering around the village kept her busy while Richard invested himself in volunteer positions almost too numerous to mention.

“I’ve been president of every cultural committee there was in Ste. Agathe,” Richard says.

And it’s true. Richard organized the efforts to build Chalet Ste. Agathe, the community’s only seniors housing project. He spent 25 years on the local chapter of the Knights of Columbus, first as Grand Knight and then as Master. Along with his farm work, he drove a school bus for 43 years and worked with CBC Radio Canada, occasionally flying to Montreal to find musical artists to play at CBC events.

The Changing Village

The Ste. Agathe they knew in the early years of their marriage is a different place today.

“It was smaller and more active,” Richard recalls. “Everybody went to church… Everybody!”

The Ste. Agathe Parish, after all, was a major gathering place for all the families. But although they once expected to see 300 to 400 people there on any given Sunday, only about 40 parishioners attend today.

“I think people are too busy now for [church],” Laurie says. “They have [so many kids in activities]. People don’t seem to have the time to get involved with anything anymore.”

Another favourite community meeting place was the dance hall. Willing musicians were always easy to find in or near the village.

“Nobody dances anymore, but at least once a week we had a dance,” says Richard. “We danced a lot… I went to dances at maybe 17 or 18 years old, when we could swipe a couple of beers.”

The Moneylender
 

Richard grew up the last of 14 children. His father immigrated to Ste. Agathe from Quebec when Manitoba was giving away 160-acre parcels of land. His land comprised much of what the community sits on today. His father did well on the land and, in the 1930s, he also became the local moneylender.
 

“In those days, if you didn’t get [your money] back in seven years, then forget it,” says Richard. “That was the law. Then he became poor. He lent too much money… When he died, we found all of his IOUs.”

Richard recalls his father speaking of one borrower who went on to start a very successful paint company in Winnipeg, yet the loan went unpaid even as the borrower achieved his millions.

“They could have at least sent him a five-gallon pail of paint,” Richard jokes.

Life During the Depression

Born in the middle of the Great Depression, Richard has memories of a life that was all work and little play. The family farm did well, though, since the grain sold for much higher prices than it did years later when Richard took over the farm. They also had a large variety of livestock to sustain the family.

“[During the depression], we were well off compared to people in Winnipeg,” Richard says.

He remembers his father hitching up a team of horses and taking loads of wheat to a mill in Steinbach. The mill would keep half of the wheat and give back the other half, milled into flour.

Naughty Child

Richard admittedly was a naughty child. He recalls attending school in a multi-storey convent located where the current school sits today.

“The nuns had a strap in their pocket all the time and there’s nobody in Ste. Agathe that had it more than me,” Richard says. “I guarantee you that. I was bad!”

For him, the strappings began on the first day of his first school year. On the playground with a friend, Richard decided to take a pee where he thought no one would see him. A nun did and he paid the price.

That was the first of many incidents, he says.

The event that replays most vividly in his mind took place when he was in Grade Five. He had distracted some boys in the classroom and within minutes the nun had him in her chair and was sitting on him. Then he made the ultimate mistake—lifting her hair veil for the other children to see.

“She made me stand on her desk and she told me to raise my pant [legs],” he says, adding that she proceeded to strike him forcefully ten times on each bare leg. “It burned like crazy. Those were real leather straps.”

He was sent home and, as was common in the day, his parents rallied behind the nun’s disciplinary decisions. The welts on Richard’s legs swelled and became infected. He missed three months of school and had to repeat Grade Five to catch up.

Not All Hard Times

But life wasn’t all hard times. Richard recalls big family parties that became raucous when the local moonshine came out. The women were loud, too, he jokes, even though they couldn’t drink because they were always pregnant.
 

Holidays were special times as the large family gathered around tables of French Canadian food. To this day, Richard enjoys making some of his mother’s traditional recipes, namely ragout, a stew made with browned flour and pork hocks and served over beets.

New Year’s for the men of the village meant a visit to every household for shots of alcohol.

Growing Up in Lorette

Laurie grew up on a farm near the village of Lorette, the oldest of ten children. She recalls hard work, too, such as milking cows and tending a very large garden.

“In the summer, [my mother] would take a piece of pork and put a weight on it on a stick,” Laurie says. “We’d go to the Seine River… and we’d go and [catch] crayfish… My mother would throw them to the pigs, because they loved that. We used to laugh because [the pigs] would get caught with the claws.”

She recalls playing an Indigenous children’s game with her friends called tippet and spending hours in rousing games of baseball with all the community children. She also says the nuns at Laurie’s Catholic school didn’t use the rod as harshly as they did in Ste. Agathe. The girls wore school uniforms and black stockings even in hot weather. Boys and girls were separated on the playground.

While she wasn’t a naughty child, she remembers being strictly forbidden to use her left hand for writing. Years later, Laurie learned that left-handed people were once considered evil.

Richard says his father was also left-handed, but it was never corrected since he didn’t go to school.

“He learned to write his name [but that’s about it],” Richard says. “He learned to write a little bit because I saw one love letter. It had about 40 words and 40 mistakes.”

Marriage and Traditions

The couple met when Richard came to Lorette for a wedding.

“My girlfriend couldn’t come… so I asked [Laurie] to come to the wedding with me,” Richard teases.

He continued to sneak off to Laurie’s family home regularly when his girlfriend was busy with other things.

Three years later, Richard and Laurie married.

They continued in the Catholic traditions of their parents, attending midnight mass on Christmas followed by the full turkey and tourtière meal, a tradition the French Canadian call Réveillon.

“Supposedly Christ was born at midnight,” Richard says of the long-held tradition.

Unfortunately, it’s a tradition that no longer exists at the Ste. Agathe Parish, with the declining congregation and priests that come from outside the community.

Laurie carried on with her mother’s tradition of hosting elaborate birthday parties and pool parties for her kids and five grandkids.

Worries About the Future

Apart from the decline of church attendance, the couple sees societal changes that they find alarming and worrisome.

“The kids are younger and they’re doing adult stuff,” Richard says. “They’re living together now at [a young age]… They have no commitment… But in our days that was a sin, so you had to confess and rather than confess you didn’t do it.”

Laurie is likewise saddened by the lack of community togetherness and neighbours helping neighbours.

“When we were young and my father would build a shed or something, everybody would come and help,” she says. “Now you don’t see this anymore.”

She worries for the world her grandchildren are growing up in, where consumerism, debt, depression, and anxiety are the norm. It’s a world so very different from the one she once knew.

In May, the Dorges will move from their home of 45 years to an assisted living complex in St. Norbert.