SANFORD — Easter Sunday — said to be the most important day in the liturgical calendar — has dawned. It is perhaps the most important day in the Christian faith in all of its variations.

For early Franco-Americans, whose lives were closely entwined with the Roman Catholic Church, Easter services were “everything Irving Berlin wrote about, and more,” said Lorraine Masure. There were Easter bonnets, and what she described as “gorgeous and festive liturgy and music” to commemorate this special day.

Masure, a first generation Franco-American and retired university administrator, knows a lot bout being Franco — and what it meant for her family to be Franco in the early days of Quebec immigration to the United States, where the lure of earning a steady paycheck in the mills brought thousands from the farmlands of Quebec to Maine and other New England states.

Over the last decade she’s given many talks about her parents and grandparents lives in America, and her own childhood.

Now, she’s put all the information she has gleaned into a book, called “Growing up Franco-American (with no black patent leather shoes).” The first-person account is available on Amazon, and in some local shops, like Hair Designers, at the lower Mid-Town Mall on Main Street.

She used to say she didn’t have the patience to write a book, but in February 2016, she sat down and began.

“It’s easy to say ‘Joe LeBlanc said x,’” Masure said from a sunny room in her Sanford home on Tuesday. But Masure is a stickler, and so was intent on getting attributions and facts just right, a time consuming task.

But it was pleasant too.

“It was peaceful; it was fun,” she said.

Masure will give a talk about her book at 6:30 p.m. May 3 at Goodall Library.

Masure’s paternal grandparents were born in Quebec, her father in New Hampshire. Her maternal grandparents and their nine children moved from Quebec to Lewiston. Her mother, she said in the book, was like many of her day — she  left school in the fifth grade because she had no shoes  to wear and so was free to help her own mother, who worked in the Bates mill, with housekeeping and child-minding chores.

The girl who left school in fifth grade grew up to be a woman who read an English language newspaper daily, even though for Masure’s mother,  English remained very much a second language.

Masure  remembered that sometimes, it was evident her mother’s first language was not English — like the time when the social order was changing and love became more free.

“I don’t believe in that pre-mental sex,” Masure recalls her mother saying. Some might wonder, however, if the expression was a true lapse because of the language or if it was, perhaps, a mirror on what she was truly thinking.

The book chronicles life in Sanford — where Masure, like her Franco contemporaries, attended Catholic schools for 12 years. The 1940s, she wrote, was the peak for Catholic schools, when 1,430 students in Sanford and Springvale were taught by 37 faculty — which works out to about 39 students per class.

Some years, she related, morning classes were taught in the French language, and in English in the afternoon.

The path for Franco-Americans in America had a dark side. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan emerged in Maine, and there are historical photographs that show a parade in Sanford where people dressed in white hoods marched against the French and the Roman Catholic faith.

These days, the French language isn’t heard on the street as much as even 30 years ago. And even among those who speak it, most times, conversations are conducted in English.

While she regularly has conversations with her brother Fernand in French, English tends to prevail elsewhere.

Masure spoke of her school friends, who meet for lunch once a month.

“(We) do speak French intermittently, but mostly these are one-line bromides in good-will imitation of our parents or nuns,” she said.

When the French left there agrarian lifestyle, she said, they “joyfully assimilated” to the American way of life where they earned a regular paycheck and became part of the middle class.

Assimilation aside, the door for remembrances of how life was remains open. 

Masure speaks of the Quebec motto: “je me souviens,” which translates to “I remember.”

She wrote the book, she said, to foster remembrance and pride in the French culture.

“I hope the book inspires Franco-Americans to give our rich, cultural legacy the dignity it deserves by remembering and being proud of it,” she said.

— Senior Staff Writer Tammy Wells can be contacted at 324-4444 (local call in Sanford) or 282-1535, ext. 327 or twells@journaltribune.com.