One Soul's Journey

By Louise V. V. Simson

This book is about the first thirty-four years of my life. It takes the reader back when and where I was born in Australia, and then it goes on to explain how I immigrated to the United States and then to Canada. After this, my story takes you to all the wonderful places I traveled to, lived, and work in during the 1970s. It was wonderful to go to places where too many tourists had not traveled to at that time. I am now seventy-three years of age. I got my BA degree in 1966 from Trenton State Teacher's College, which is now the College of New Jersey. In 2005, I graduated with an MS degree in management and administration of educational programs from Nova Southeastern University, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. After that, I went on to finish all the courses in the doctoral program—organizational leadership online with Nova Southeastern University. I have written animated scripts for the Canadian portion of Sesame Street, teaching children about Canadian history through a character called Beau Beaver for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and animated scripts for the Singapore government's Save Water Program back in the 1970s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642989335

Book preview

Chapter 1

Australia

Wow, I understand the koala bear farm that belonged to the friends of my grandmother is still in existence outside of Brisbane today. I have a picture of the mother koala bear that I was holding when I went to this farm. My sister posted this picture on Facebook for me. When I saw this koala bear, I thought that she was fat. Oh, when they gave her to me, I almost dropped her, but I caught her just before she hit the ground. This mother bear was shaking. Koala bears have a lot of fur, but their bodies are small.

I was born in MacKay, Queensland, Australia, on May 1, 1944. My grandmother and grandfather owned a cattle ranch and sugarcane plantation.

One of the relatives in Australia told me that grandfather used to bring Maori natives over from New Zealand to cut down the sugarcane. My mother told me that she could not wait for the men to come in from the fields. My mother took a stick and picked off the dirt from the bottom of their shoes and ate it because it was sweet. She had developed a saying from her action, A pound of dirt cannot kill you, only cure you! My mother had two siblings—a brother and a sister. My mother, Vivienne, was the oldest and her sister, Frances, was the middle child, and her brother Bill was the baby of the family.

My mother was a beautiful woman and well educated. The photograph is a picture of my mother, who, at the time, was eighteen and a debutante. This is when a young woman makes a formal entrance into high society. My mother died August 3, 2014, at the age of ninety-two. There was only one thing she told my sister, which did not help her to live longer, and it was chewing on the deadly nightshade berries when she was two years old. The doctor told her a couple of years before she died that what she had done weakened her heart.

A picture of my mother, Vivienne Annetta Koch when she was a Debutant.

All the people in my mother’s family, except for my grandmother, had their own horse. My uncle Billy’s horse, one day, took off and bolted under the house. There was a nail sticking out that tore open his scalp. All my uncle said to me was, I deserved it.! My grandfather’s horse was called Lightning. My grandfather went out for a ride on his stallion one day when his horse did not anticipate the gully being covered by a vine called lantana. When his horse jumped, both fell into the gully. My grandfather did not get hurt, but his horse broke one of his front legs, and he had to kill him. Years ago, this is what people did to their horses if they broke their legs, but now this is not the case. I was never told about the horse belonging to Aunt Frances.

Of course, living on a ranch and sugarcane plantation, one must be handy. My grandfather repaired shoes, mended fences, grew vegetables, and delivered the baby calves and foals. My mother enjoyed helping her dad, and this is the reason that she hated being sent to a Catholic boarding school.

I must share the story about how my grandparents met during World War I. My grandmother was a nurse on the front line. My grandmother never mentioned where that was, but it must have been in Gallipoli because that is where my grandfather was fighting. He was a colonel in the light brigade and one of the few survivors of this campaign.

My maternal grandfather, William Joseph Koch in Australia who was a Colonel in the Army.

My maternal grandmother Louisa Sarah Koch was a nurse on the frontlines during World War I.

All I know is that grandmother showed me a picture of them both sitting on a blanket with a picnic basket eating lunch on top of a pyramid in Egypt. I believe this is when my grandfather proposed to my grandmother. My grandfather gave my grandmother money to buy her engagement and wedding ring from Lloyd’s of London when she had a stopover to visit relatives before going back to Australia. When they both were back in Australia again, this is when they got married.

My grandmother’s name was Louisa. My parents named me after her, but they named me Louise. I have always wanted to change my name to Louisa. Unfortunately, my grandfather contracted Parkinson’s disease. He decided to sell the ranch and move down to Brisbane. My grandparents bought a beautiful house with four bedrooms, a living room, dining room, kitchen, sewing room, and bathroom with a sink and a tub. There was a porch (veranda) that went from the left front of the house all the way around the right side, stopping where the sewing room started. Later, my grandfather enclosed the porch on the right side of the house.

My maternal grandparents in Australia.

I must tell you that we did not have flushing toilets. We had what we called the little house behind the big house. Inside the outhouse, my grandfather tore up telephone book pages into neat little sheets, and this is what everyone used instead of toilet paper. There were men who came on a regular basis to come and empty the big container from the outhouse. At Christmastime, my grandmother would give the men a generous gift of money.

I remember there was a box where my grandmother kept several items that needed to be refrigerated, and weekly a block of ice was delivered and put in a drawer underneath which was closed. This kept everything cold that would perish if not refrigerated. Yes, there was a delivery of milk every week that went in the icebox.

My father did not live with us because he was in World War II in Germany. I did speak with my father when he called my mother on the telephone from overseas. We had one of those old-fashioned phones where there was a wooden box on the wall, a black apparatus on a cord that you listened through, and another apparatus you spoke into, built into the upper-center portion of the wooden box. When the call was finished, you hung up the apparatus you were listening to that fit into a metal holder on the side of the telephone. My parents wrote a lot of letters to each other.

My mother and her siblings went to a Catholic boarding school in MacKay, Queensland, Australia. My mother resented the fact that she could not stay home on the farm. I went to a Catholic school named Holy Family in Indooroopilly. Indooroopilly is an aboriginal name, and it is a small town outside of Brisbane. I went to school every day. I did two years of kindergarten, which would be comparable to a year of preschool and then a year of kindergarten. I completed second grade, third grade, and the beginning of fourth grade. I rode on the school bus every day to school and back.

When I went to school and if someone was naughty, the nuns would ask you to turn around, and they would hit the calves of your legs with a cane. There were times they would ask you to show them the palms of your hand, and then they would hit your hands with the cane. One day, I was asked to go to the main building to get a box of pencils from a certain nun. I did what I was told, but I had to wait as the nun was busy. The nun sent me back to my classroom. The teacher, for some reason, did not believe me, so I had to turn around and she caned my legs. No, I did not cry because I did not want to let her know that she hurt me. I told my mother, and she just said I must have deserved it.

I liked school a lot. I enjoyed piano lessons held in the nunnery during school. I also liked the talent show. I decided to enter in the talent show as a ballerina. I could sing, but I did not want to do that in the show. I even went so far as to lie as to where I was going to learn ballet. I did not make up the place as it was a real school in downtown Brisbane. I did not win and the person who got first place sang the popular song at the time called The Thing. This song was funny. I never did this again.

What I did not like was when the school had bake sales and I never had any money. My mother always gave me money for the bus to school every day. She gave me extra money. I would sometimes, at lunchtime, go across the street from the playground to get a popsicle at the corner store. I always got permission from the nun on duty. My mother would find out when at night she would give me money in a little tin box for the next day. I also did not like having to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches all the time. If I did not want my sandwich, I would sit on it to squash it, and then when the nun was not looking, I would throw it in the trash can. Thank goodness, I was never caught in the action.

The Catholic school also held a ball where everyone dressed in costumes and did the dances people did in the eighteenth century. We spent a lot of time practicing before the ball was held. The seniors put on the play Cinderella for one year. We had food to eat after the ball was over. Everyone would have a great time. Every time, except for one year, I would get sick when it was time to have the ball. My grandmother would take care of me. Every year, I got a very high fever. One year, I got pneumonia, and it was in both lungs.

The second time, I went to the general hospital in Brisbane was because my mother had to have an eye surgery. My mother had to have her left eye removed because she had a tumor behind her eye. Of course, my mother blamed me that she had to have this operation. One day, I turned on the oven. When she opened the door of the oven to look inside, there was an explosion. This explosion is the reason why she developed a tumor in the back of her eye. The tumor my mother had was rare. I believe she was only the second person in the world that had this kind of tumor, and it was sent to Will’s Eye Hospital here in America.

One of my fondest memories was when I went with my mother to her friend’s farm. I got to milk one of the cows using a milking stool like the one I carried around at home early in the morning at the crack of dawn. I love horses and was so ecstatic to find out that they had one horse I could ride. Well, when my mother’s friend put the saddle on the horse’s back and I went to put my foot in the stirrup, the saddle slipped under her stomach. She liked to blow up her stomach so this would happen. When I got on the horse, finally, I would not get off her all day. Lunch was served to me while sitting on the horse, but for dinner, I had to get off