Honouring a Flour Mill memory keeper

Jeannine Larcher Lalande has accomplished a lot for her community in the Flour Mill, Claude Charbonneau said. He is the chair of the Flour Mill Community Action Network.

Lalande, 76, was honoured at the March 10 city council meeting with a Lifetime Achievement Certificate from the 2009 Heritage Recognition program of the Ontario Heritage Trust, the province’s leading heritage agency.

Mayor John Rodriguez, Ward 12 Coun. Joscelyne Landry-Altmann and Charbonneau presented the certificate to her in the council chambers at the beginning of the meeting.

“It recognizes her for all the volunteer time over the years she has given to her community,” Charbonneau said.

“She has a lot of passion for her community. She is very sharp.”

Lalande, a retired nurse, said she was overwhelmed by the honour.

“I work and work at something until I achieve it,” she said. She said she is the person she is today because of what she gave to the community.

“You always get back more than you give.” Among her many achievements was the initiation of the city-wide Sudbury Blueberry Festival in the mid 1980s. She was assisted by former mayor Peter Wong, Charbonneau said.

Lalande said she enjoyed working with Mayor Wong on the blueberry festival.

“He was really approachable. He was a good mentor for me. He was very enthusiastic about blueberries,” she added.

“He would follow though with my ideas and dreams about the blueberry festival. He could direct you to the resources you needed for a project.”

She was known for being the author of “le cookbook Sudbury” and she organized a Blueberry Den in a small building beside her house.

“We used to have our organizing meetings there and when the festival was on, we opened it to the public. I had a lot of blueberry memorabilia there.”

She became interested in the stories about the Flour Mill. As a youth she was excited by the electric street cars.

“I can remember getting on the street car on Notre Dame Avenue when I was nine, to travel to the beach at Ramsey Lake with my friends,” she said.

According to Lalande, the street car, in the 1940s, traveled downtown to Durham Street to Elgin Street and then up Paris to Elizabeth Street where Austin Airways had a building beside Lake Ramsey.

“I once received a story from Mr. St. Germain, who said there were many large families who struggled with finances in the Flour Mill area. The regular driver of the street car, Pat Savard, knew this and would let the kids onto the car for free when they were going swimming. That is just an indication of the sense of community there was then.”

To help document this history, Lalande is developing a power point presentation of an imaginary electric car ride, featuring scenes from Sudbury as far back as 1910.

“The honour for Jeannine is well deserved,” Greater Sudbury museums curator Jim Fortin said.

“She has single handedly worked to preserve a list of the francophone families in the Flour Mill. She volunteers a lot at the Flour Mill Museum.”

Lalande said she had documented the history of about 150 Flour Mill francophone families in five large binders.

“The families wrote me their backgrounds in letters — anywhere from a few pages to 10 pages.”

Some residents of her street went on to fame. “There is television host Alex Trebek and hockey player Al Arbour. Both grew up on Murray Street,” she noted.

“(The family histories) are a gold mine of information,” said Landry-Altmann.

The councillor, and the Flour Mill Community Action Network were involved in the nomination process.

Her son, Jacques Lalande, a fleet services employee for the city, said his mother does a lot of good in the community.

“She’s a good woman,” he said. “She has a good heart.”