From Haystack to Snowbird
Lawrence Cloyd Foster was born on October 13, 1914, in a small house on the Lunnford farm in north-central Alberta, the second child of William Cloyd and Dorothy Margaret Tarplee Foster. He grew up in the Depression, left home as a young man, and built a life by his own hands — trapping, trucking, and finally running Foster's General Store in Manola for thirty years. Dealt some hard blows, yet blessed with community support, he kept dancing.
From a log house at Lunnford to a lawn chair in Mesa, Arizona — by way of thirty years behind a counter in Manola
Still Standing
Lawrence Cloyd Foster was born on October 13, 1914, in a small house on the Lunnford farm in north-central Alberta — the second child of William Cloyd Foster and Dorothy Margaret Tarplee Foster, who had come from Birmingham, England at twelve and made her life on the prairie by sheer force of intelligence and will. The house was small and the winters were not. More than a century later my son Stephen drove out to the old Lunnford farmyard — now owned by Lawrence's nephew Clifford Foster — and photographed what is left of it. The house where Lawrence was born has become a storage shed. There are beehives beside it. The vertical plank siding is weathered silver-grey and patched in places, the roof still holding its pitch against the Alberta sky. It is a very small building to have contained the beginning of a life. The vertical planks are worth a moment's notice. That was an American building style. Cloyd had come from Washington State and built what he knew, on ground that was still new enough that you could put your own mark on it.
Born at Lunnford
The birth was registered on March 1, 1915, in the Registration District of Lunnford having been born October 13, 1914— Lawrence Cloyd Foster, son of William Cloyd and Dorothy Margaret Foster. The registrar was Jennie B. Drewry. There is no fee for this certificate. His mother always spelled his name Laurence. The certificate has it Lawrence. The discrepancy never resolved itself in either direction — he was Lawrence to the world and Laurence to her, and that was that.
The Family on the Land
The 1916 census finds the Foster family two years into Lawrence's life and firmly on the ground at Lunnford. William Cloyd Foster, head of household. Dorothy Margaret, his wife, born in England. Bernice, daughter, three years old. Lawrence, son, one. Four people in a small house on the Alberta prairie. It is the first official record that acknowledges Lawrence Cloyd Foster exists.
Made For Him
Margaret sewed her son an elephant when he was small. Blue floral cotton, stuffed and stitched, with a button for an eye. It is still here — still holding its shape, the fabric faded to the colour of a winter sky, the button eye intact. She was a woman who made things with her hands: a gardening book that was never published, a monthly column about farm life, socks for Lawrence every Christmas for the rest of his life. The elephant came first.
Young Family Flourishing
The 1921 census sees new additions to the Foster family. William C. is 32, Dorothy M is 24. Bernice E. is now 8, Lawrence is 6 and Murray M.who went his whole life as Max is 4. Don can'y be far behind but will have to wait for the next census.
The Settlers in Canada
In 1926, when Lawrence was twelve, his mother gave him a book. She wrote his name in the front in her careful hand: LAURENCE FOSTER — LUNNFORD ALBERTA — 1926. Her spelling, not the birth certificate's. The book was The Settlers in Canada by Captain Frederick Marryat, published in 1844 — a novel about an English family leaving everything they knew to make a new life in the Canadian wilderness. Margaret had made that journey herself, arriving from Birmingham at twelve years old, the same age her son was now. She knew exactly what she was giving him.
Lockerbie 1926
LCF
Lockerbie 1931
Fur, Skunk and Muskrat, May 1933
In the spring of 1933 Lawrence was eighteen years old and selling furs to the Sydney I. Robinson Fur Company of Winnipeg and Regina — raw furs, hides, wool, horse hair, Seneca root and trappers' supplies, as the letterhead announced. The receipt dated May 8th, 1933, made out to L.C. Foster Esq., Lunnford Alta., records one small skunk at thirty-five cents and six muskrats at varying prices. Net payment: two dollars and fifty-three cents. All government royalties on the shipment paid by the company. It was not much. But it was something, and something was what a young man needed in rural Alberta in the middle of the Depression. Lawrence and his brother Max were already finding their way by whatever means the season offered — trapping in winter, and before long buying up old Model T Fords, getting the engines running, and hiring themselves out with the machinery for threshing work. You used what you had. What Lawrence had was mechanical aptitude and a willingness to get up early. That same year, 1933, there was a falling out with their father Cloyd — withheld payments for field work the boys had done for neighbours. Lawrence and Max left. They spent their first night away from their mother's home in a haystack. Margaret brought them blankets. It was not an uncommon dynamic between fathers and the sons who were ready to be men.
A Shack in Manola
The first place Lawrence and Max landed in Manola had gaps in the siding boards wide enough, as Lawrence used to say, to throw a cat through. In winter the water they kept on the wood-burning stove was frozen by morning. They took whatever work came — odd jobs, farm labour, threshing crews. One steady arrangement was the job of getting to the schoolhouse before the teacher and the children arrived and having the stove going. On the coldest mornings that would have been a matter of some urgency. In time they set up a mechanics shop and pool hall in Manola, working on vehicles and their own truck while neighbours came and went. Everyone was welcome. It was that kind of place. The truck eventually became the foundation of Foster Brothers Trucking — a fleet of one, hauling everything.
The Cream Route
By the 1940s Lawrence had the contract to pick up cream cans from farms across the district and deliver them to the Barrhead Creamery. Farmers kept their cans cool in the well, and Lawrence's routine was to lean down and haul them up — which is where the turkey came in. There was a gobbler on one of the farms who had worked out the geometry of the situation precisely. He would wait until Lawrence had the can partway down the well, both hands occupied, and then come at him and peck at his ankles. This went on long enough that Lawrence devised a solution. One day he feigned letting the can down as usual, but had a two-by-four concealed in his hand. The turkey came at him as expected and departed with one tail feather remaining to its name. After that it would peer at him from around the granary and gobble loudly, but it did not come closer. Lawrence also held the mail contract for the district, work considered essential enough to keep him out of the army when the war came. His brother Max went. Lawrence ran the operation alone. In winter he delivered the mail by horse-drawn sleigh, the same roads that in summer carried the cream cans to Barrhead.
October 18. 1944
Lawrence Foster and Jean Isobel Walker were married on Wednesday, October 18th, 1944, at Norwood United Church, with Reverend Captain J. Graham of Barrhead officiating. The announcement in the paper gave the bride's name as Joan — she was never Joan. She was Jean, and had always been Jean. Mistaken details in the paper can last lifetimes. They were neighbours, more or less, from around Manola. It was said at their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, in a room full of people who had known them both for years, that Lawrence had had his eye on her early — that he had waited for her to be old enough. The room knew what was meant and took it in the spirit intended.
Foster — Walker
Mr. and Mrs. J. C. Walker of Edmonton announce the marriage of their eldest daughter, Joan Isobel, to Mr. Lawrence Foster, eldest son of Mr. and Mrs. C. Foster of Manola, Alberta. The wedding took place on Wednesday, October 18th, in Norwood United Church. Rev. Capt. J. Graham of Barrhead officiated.
The Old Store
The two photographs of Dale in front of the old store — one as a toddler on the steps with his teddy bear, one a few years later standing on the boardwalk — show the building that Lawrence bought when he made his decision. There had been another option: a farm further east, in the Eastburg area, land he had hauled grain across for years and knew well. He chose the store instead. Jean had a good head for business, and Lawrence knew it. The old store came on four lots in Manola, one of three general stores in town at the time. Lawrence eventually began dismantling it, cannibalizing the lumber for the new building he was putting up on the corner lot. Nothing was wasted.
Landed
Lawrence at about thirty, crouched with Dale on the wooden sidewalks of Manola – steadied between his hands, both of them grinning. The bush is full and green behind them. He had left his mother's home to a haystack a decade earlier with nothing much to his name. Now he had a wife, a son, a store going up on a corner lot in Manola, and this.
The Perfect Country General Store
Two photographs taken within months of each other tell the story of the transition. In the first, the old store still stands — Red White Tea and Red Rose Tea signs in the windows, a bicycle leaning against the front, the false-fronted wooden building that had been there when Lawrence bought the lots. On the left edge of the frame, almost out of shot, the steel framing of the new building is already rising. The second photograph, taken from further back, shows the new store well underway — diagonal sheathing boards, a man on the roof, another at ground level. Lawrence had taken the old store apart board by board and was building the new one out of it on the corner lot. It was the same instinct that had kept a Model T running on the Manola roads a decade earlier. You used what you had.
Foster's General Store
By 1975 the store on the corner lot in Manola was a substantial thing — white stucco, gas pumps out front, a Sherwin-Williams Paints sign on the facade, the residence attached on the left with its dormer window looking out over the street. Groceries, hardware, dry goods, feed for livestock, propane, coal oil. Everything a farming community needed within twenty miles of nowhere in particular. Lawrence and Jean ran it for the better part of thirty years. Jean had the business head Lawrence had counted on when he chose the store over the farm. The store was also home — the boys grew up behind the counter, and the attached residence meant that work and life were never entirely separate, which in a general store in a small Alberta town they never really could be.
Phone 3
In 1959 Foster's General Store issued a calendar. The image on it was an aerial photograph of Manola — the town from above, the streets and buildings laid out in the summer light, the Pembina River visible in the foreground with the railway trestle crossing it, fields and bush stretching out in every direction. Below the photograph, in bold type: FOSTER'S GENERAL STORE — Groceries — Hardware — Dry Goods — Phone 3 — Manola, Alta. Phone 3. The third telephone in Manola. It was a point of pride — the store, the town, the river, the trestle, all of it laid out from the air as evidence of something built and thriving. Lawrence and Jean would have been pleased with it. One year later their daughter Marilyn drowned in the Pembina River while swimming with a group of friends, at the spot shown in the photograph. She was twelve. That calendar went from being a point of pride to something else entirely, and it has been something else ever since. Marilyn will have her own page in this record. But I cannot look at that aerial photograph without feeling the weight of what it became, and it would be dishonest to place it here without saying so. I was born two years after she died.
Shop At…
A brown kraft paper shopping bag, printed in green ink: FOSTERS GENERAL STORE — Dial 674-5914 — Manola Alta. — Groceries — Hardware — Dry Goods. The phone number had grown considerably since 1959.
Owner Retiring
THE Perfect Country General Store. Good profitable business, buildings, equipment, warehouse, garage, home, yard. Owner retiring. Box JC352 Edmonton Journal. He meant every word of that first sentence. In 1978, after thirty years, Lawrence placed four lines in the Edmonton Journal and sold the store. He and Jean moved to Edmonton.
The Tay River, 1977
Lawrence in a lawn chair beside the van, green cap, red shirt, a drink in his hand, legs crossed, the bush thick behind him. This was a man at the end of thirty years of six-day weeks, letting the river do what it wanted.
Faithful Partners
Lawrence and Jean in their sixties, standing close together outside visiting someone, red roses behind them, both in dark jackets. He is smiling. She is composed, the way she often was in photographs. They had built something together — the store, the house, the family, thirty years of shared work — and it showed in the way they stood.
Do-Si-Do
Lawrence and Jean dressed for square dancing — matching white shirts, navy blue skirt and bolo, both wearing club badges. She has the full skirt and white shoes. He is looking at her. They had found something in retirement that suited them both, and they pursued it with the same energy Lawrence had brought to everything else. Jean died on July 25, 1988. She was sixty-three.
She Was Determined
Lawrence and Jean on the sofa with Danielle between them, about six months old, eyes wide open and delighted with the world. Jean's hair is white — it had grown back that way after her cancer treatments. She had been determined to see the grandchild, and she did. Lawrence is beside her, quieter, watching. This was 1987. My daughter was their first grandchild.
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Manola Cemetery
Lawrence Foster was buried at Manola on December 4, 2001, aged eighty-seven. The plot had been there since 1960, bought when their daughter Marilyn drowned in the Pembina River at twelve years old. There was room for all of them. Jean came in 1988. Lawrence came in 2001. They are together now under the spruce trees, beside the road, flowers on both stones. Marilyn Jean Foster will have her own page in this record.
A Second Life
Lawrence and Angela. Dad told me. I want you to know no one can ever replace your mother. I've met a woman square dancing. She isn't like the others – she is independent and not chasing a husband and…. Dad, I said. BE HAPPY. They were married when Lawrence was 75. nd he was for all the rest of his days. Angela was and is a strong presence and helped and comforted him greatly in his illness that claimed him. We are all very greatful for him and that she became Great Grandma to my kids.
Summer / Winter
But first there was squares to dance! Mesa had an active square dancing scene and they was part of it too.
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