Mary Huber, who will turn 96 on Nov. 17, is at home in North Vancouver, surrounded by mementos of her travels, telling some of the stories about her family’s adventures in New Zealand, India and Iowa City, that she is collecting for a family history.
Her storytelling abilities must be inherited; one of Mary’s fondest memories is of her grandmother, ensconced in a rocking chair, playing a few bars on her harmonica before launching into tales of the family’s travels that reached back across centuries.
The Shelley and Huber families, Mennonite and Anabaptist on Mary’s side and Mennonite on her husband Grant’s side, shared much of this history as both branches made their way from Europe to North America, finding refuge from religious persecution in Pennsylvania.
By 1820, Mary’s side of the family had left the Pennsylvania Dutch country for Canada, travelling by Conestoga wagon, crossing the Susquehanna River by raft, and travelling up through the Niagara peninsula to Ontario. In Kitchener, of a size where most people knew each other, Mary and Grant’s grandmothers were friends. Their offspring met in high school, became teachers, and married in 1943.
The Huber’s travelling adventures began when Grant took his PhD in mechanical engineering in Iowa City. Mary and the children, and baggage for a year, boarded the train for America. It was 1954, a serious period in the United States. McCarthyism was in at its peak and the Korean War had ended the year before.
War vets returning to take up their education created housing shortages in university towns like Iowa City – a situation that lay in the Huber family’s future. First, Mary and the children had to overcome a more pressing problem – getting to Chicago where Grant was waiting. Advice from the United States Consulate that Grant’s visa would suffice for the family turned out to be unaccepted at the border. After hours of interrogation, the family was permitted to enter the United States, provided they applied for a visa.
One thing came after another during the Huber’s year in Iowa as happens in families with young children. They had to find a house, then mumps followed measles or maybe it was the other way around, and various family matters had to be dealt with. The year in Iowa was coming to an end, leaving no time to pack up the kids and the car and travel to FBI headquarters in Omaha, Neb., to get that visa.
On the day before the Huber family left Iowa City, the FBI came knocking.
“More questions,” Mary recalls, “the same as they asked at the border – trying to catch us in mistaking the eye colour or weight of our children.”
Common sense prevailed, supplies were loaded into a playpen and tied to the roof of the family car, with a trailer hitched behind and the Huber family set off on a three-month tour that would take them back to Canada.
The adventure included a stop in Vancouver.
“The Trans-Canada wasn’t finished yet,” recalls Mary, “so we drove back across the top of the United States.”
A new house was waiting for them in Ontario, but the children preferred their living quarters of the past three months. The family spent their first night at home crammed into the cosiness of their trailer.
Over the years, Grant’s work took the family to India and to New Zealand, and those experiences are included in Mary’s family history, as are summers at the family cottage.
In 2010, now grandparents, Mary and Grant moved west to be closer to their family, arriving in time for Christmas. Sadly, their life together came to an end after 67 years when Grant died less than a month into the new year.
At 90 years of age, Mary resolved to make her life in North Vancouver. Perhaps living in so many different parts of the world helped with that decision and so, too, did the North Lonsdale United Church in the persons of Barbara Cook and Verna Mossop who welcomed Mary into the community. The three are firm friends today, standing by one another especially now that they are getting on in years.
Laura Anderson works with and for seniors on the North Shore. 778-279-2275 seniorsconnect@shaw.ca
