March of Dimes

President Franklin D. Roosevelt formed the March of Dimes in January 1938 (the same year I was born) as a foil against Infantile Paralysis, or Polio, a condition for which he had been diagnosed.  Cards with slots for dimes were passed out in schools.  We children would go door to door almost ready to buy, beg, borrow, or steal enough dimes to fill our cards for a rapid return to our teacher.  Apparently, in time those dimes helped as a vaccine was developed to combat the disease, and a complete cure was ultimately found.

In the meantime, during the 1940s, before the days of TV and other modern forms of entertainment, once a year there would be a local talent show for the benefit of the March of Dimes.  It was held in our local Ogdensburg, New York city hall auditorium.  As a youth, one of my fondest memories was attending the yearly March of Dimes Talent Show, and especially so when my older brother Delbert played his harmonica as a guest performer.  I would always offer up at least one of my dimes to hear him play “Turkey in the Straw,” “The Wreck of the Old 97,” “Redwing,” or maybe “Listen to the Mockingbird.”

Meanwhile there was another performer, perhaps a Mr. Jolly Bergeron, who year after year offered an oral presentation of a poem about Lake Champlain.  It was spoken in a broken French dialect, and ever a huge hit with the entertainment starved audience.  The words, “The vind she blows one hurricane, and the vind she blows some more,” are forever, right or wrong, stuck in my head.  Some fifty years later, in 2004, I made an attempt to locate the words of the poem.  I’ve forgotten the name of a gentleman from eastern New York who, upon my requesting it, offered a poem titled “The Wreck of the Julie Plante,” by Dr. Henry Drummond as essentially being what I recalled from so far in the past.  Somehow though, it never seemed quite right.  I recalled the poem as relating to Lake Champlain, not some place I’d never heard of, somewhere in French-speaking Quebec, Canada.

With always more information appearing somewhere on the web, today I searched a bit more with the result that I now understand that a man named Daniel T. Trombley adapted the original “Julie Plante” version to a newer one featuring Lake Champlain.  I have learned that Mr. Trombley, or Trombly, placed his version in a booklet titled “Poems of Batiste: Whoa Bill.”  He may have titled his version as, “The Wreck of the Julie La Plant.”

If, by chance, anyone should read this that has a copy available, I would very much like to have a copy of it.