Rolfe photo album 1933-37 (Page 10d)

A photo from Gordon Rolfe's NWT&Y photo album from 1933-37.

Caption: Newspaper article about Phyllis moving to Edmonton

From: Daily Magazine Page - Detroit News 21 Aug 1935

Cow Perils Romance

Taken with baby on trip from Arctic

By Bert Stoll

FORT SMITH, N.W.T.

When Mickey Ryan decided to take seven-months-old Baby Joe and his other two children, and their two nurses, and move them all to Edmonton for a few months recently, he almost broke up a north country romance. Not quite, let me hasten to add, since the situation is all straightened out now. Here's the story.

G.M. "Shorty" Rolfe, a radio operator at Ft. Smith, and Miss Phyllis Foraker, an attractive young nurse, had been "keeping company," as they say in the north country, for some months. In fact, Shorty confided to me himself that his girl friend and he hardly missed a night, when he wasn't on duty at the radio station, watching the moon come up over the wilderness reaches which border the Slave River here.

So when Mickey Ryan mentioned his plan to move the family down to Edmonton, 550 miles south, for a period of months, Miss Foraker didn't like the idea at all. Neither did Shorty. They both protested to Mickey. They based their argument on the question of whether the move would be good for Baby Joe's health. Not on the fact that they would be separated.

"Why, Mickey, with Baby Joe just cutting his teeth and all it wouldn't be right to move him right now," protested Shorty.

Miss Foraker added that in would be hard on Baby Joe to take him off cow's mild on the boat en route up the river to Ft. McMurray and on the train from Waterways on out to Edmonton, and then change him back after they reached their destination.

"Then I proceeded to knock all the joy out of life by saying that I planned to take Baby Joe's 'lunch-box' - one of our Jersey cows - right along with us on the trip out to Edmonton," Mickey said.

"We made quite a picture when we all got aboard the boat over at Ft. Fitzgerald. We all went aboard and then Shorty brought up the rear leading the Jersey cow. When the boat pulled away from the dock and headed upstream, leaving him behind, Shorty proceeded to drown his sorrow, but not with Jersey cream.

"But now that I have the family back with me in Ft. Smith, everything is running smoothly again and the young couple are keeping close check on the activities of the moon over the Slave River once more."

Gordon annotated the article by saying "What an imagination!!" and "Phyllis did not return to Ft. Smith".

Credit: Tom Rolfe