Bye to brother Lawrence June 24/20

 

Lawrence Frederick LaFrance 1939-2020

He was one great musician, not to mention life saver!

                                    by Robert LaFrance

            My brother Lawrence Lafrance died two months ago and I never did say thank you to him, for saving my life – twice.

            He was 78 years old when he died, or as he would put it, 78 and a half years old. His birth date was September 28, and if you disagree with my math, go and get your own brother.

            The first time he saved my life (I never asked if he regretted it) occurred when I was in my late teens. One of my father’s drunken friends was spinning his pickup truck out our driveway in Tilley and lost control of the vehicle. He headed straight for where Lawrence and I were standing.

            Although it was a hot summer day, I froze. Lawrence stepped back out of the way but I stood there like a hypnotized aardvark. As the pickup got closer, ever closer, I froze a little harder.

            The next thing I knew I was lying on my face in some hazelnut bushes. Lawrence, taking his own life in his hands, had grabbed me by belt buckle and thrown me about ten feet into that bush. The truck missed him by inches.

            The second time he saved my life was only about six months later. I had just returned from a year in the Northwest Territories where I had been working for Canada’s weather service. Once again it was a pickup truck barrelling across a parking lot and aiming straight for me. Lawrence, who never played football, executed a great flying tackle so that the truck missed me by about an inch. My ruggedly handsome face was all cut up from sliding on the pavement, but I was alive. “What did you do that for?” I said out of my bloody mouth. He pointed to the pickup truck that had gone over a hedge and ended up wrapped around a City of Edmundston hydro pole. Unfortunately the driver was unhurt.

            So far this column in tribute to my brother was mostly about me, but I felt I should remind myself and others that if not for Lawrence I would never have been able to sit in front of this word processor and mention these things about his life. The reason I never mentioned these incidents to anyone else was because I didn’t want people getting mad at him for allowing me to continue my career.

            Totally unlike me, he was a mechanic. When he was growing up he could fix anything, just like his sons Terry and John are today. I hate them all. They got all that from Fred LaFrance, my dad and Lawrence’s dad, and I had better mention my sister Joan. Fred was another one who could fix anything; he built a generator in the late 1940s so we had electric lights before most other Tilleyikers.

            Lawrence worked for A.G. Campbell in Andover for quite a few years and then took a woods working job with Fraser Company where he made about three times as much money as he did working in a garage. Picture the year 1976 when he made about $600 a week. He had six chainsaws and I swear he could run three at a time.

            That year he bought a new Ford Explorer pickup, a yellow one, and I remember one day when I was home on vacation from Sachs Harbour, NWT, when I went with him to Perth. I had never had a smoother ride in a vehicle. I’m not sure why I remember this; probably because some of the vehicles I had ridden in, in the NWT, could have been compared to a double wagon driving over a rockpile.

            Now to Lawrence LaFrance the musician and how mad he made me back when I was ten or so, the late 1950s. George Maunder’s band had hired him to play guitar and who knows what else, because he could play anything he touched - harmonica, Hawaiian guitar, dobro, fiddle, mandolin, piano and banjo. Give him a zither or xylophone or a pitchfork and a foot-long dowel and he could make music with it. He was in his teens and playing lead guitar for the band and later for John Maunder’s band, the Common People based in Nackawic.

            He was highly respected for his musical ability and is best known as a great fiddler and composer of beautiful fiddle tunes. He is a member of the NB Country Music Hall of Fame.

            In giving my late brother all this praise, I have (so far) neglected to mention one fact. I hated him, nothing to do with his mechanical ability. Well, I hated him for a certain length of time anyway. He was in his late teens and playing with George’s band one or two nights a week, besides working full time in the woods, cutting down and loading 4-foot pulp by hand onto a truck or boxcar. That was when I grew to hate – no, despise – him. After a dance in Arthurette, Glassville or some other hall somewhere he would arrive home in the wee hours, sometimes as late as 3:00 am. What did he do then? He would bring in his electric guitar, take it out of its case, plug it in to his big Fender amp and start playing ‘Wipe Out’, ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ or ‘California Sun’ and I would jump right clear of my bed in the upstairs room I shared with him. “*&^%$#*&!” I would say gently, but I was the little brother and therefore ignored.

            One final story: You can ask John Maunder about this. Lawrence could play the guitar while he was asleep. With a cigarette dangling from his lips, he would be sitting there on the stage and playing some complicated tune when one couldn’t help but notice that the cigarette in his mouth was mostly ash but still hanging together. His eyes were closed. He was asleep. John would play a loud flourish on his drums and Lawrence would wrap up the tune. Time for the cigarette ash to drop on his pants.

            He was a great musician and certainly helped a lot of people become good ones, and, by the way, I haven’t hated him for many years.

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