Lois (nee Pinder) Valli, January 4, 1908 – February 15, 2008
Lois Valli died six weeks after celebrating her 100th birthday spent with a large group of well wishers, recounting tales of her youth with the assembled guests.
Lois was predeceased by her parents, Henry and Lydia Pinder, by her sister Eva Lawson and brother Stanley Pinder, and by her husband M.A. “Buck” Valli. She is survived by her three children, Gilda in Edmonton, Ted (& Carroll) in Illinois and Angela Valli (Wall Walpole) in Brooks; her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Rob (Elin) Valli, children Perrin, Alexandre and Madeleine in Guelph, Ont.; Lois Valli and husband John Longfield, children Shea and Olivia in Cambridge, Ont., Spencer Valli in Guelph, Ont.; Tracy Baksa and partner Don Kenney and children Colin, Danny and Flynn in Medicine Hat; Terresa Baksa and partner Kelly LaBoissiere and children Dayton, Bernard and Ben near St. Albert; Cesare Valli in Brooks and daughter Allie; Walter Walpole Jr. in High River and children Christopher and Tyler; Craig Walpole in Brooks; Randy & Cindy Walpole in Grande Prairie and children Jay, Justin and Derrick.
Lois was born on her parent’s homestead near Taylorton, Sask. It is unclear when Lois’ birth was eventually registered in Estevan some 35 miles away. Lois said no one wanted to ride a horse that far in winter to register a female birth.
Lois’ father, Henry Pinder, was born at Cinderhill, Nottingham and her mother, Lydia Baldry, was born in Suffolk. Her parents emigrated to Saskatchewan in 1905 from Doncaster, England where her uncle was the mine engineer and her father was a miner. Henry, a small man with a huge heart and back of iron, could fill coal wagons at a rate unmatched by most men much larger than he. Henry knew nothing of farming and came with a large group of British immigrants who all settled in the same area. Henry did not ask the previous owner of his oxen team how to drive them, and couldn’t make them plow a straight furrow. Completely frustrated, he finally yelled, “Go anywhere you so-and-sos, it all has to be plowed!” Cousin Harry Banks who came at the same time and started a strip coal mining business in that area, said you could step from one rock to another right across the farm.
Each year challenged the newcomers with hail, grasshoppers, drought, spear grass and rattlesnakes. Since Henry and Lydia knew the coal business well, they left the farm after 14 years and moved to Redcliff where there was work in the coal mine, and Lois went to grade school. Lois played piano for the United Church choir and accompanied silent movies in the early days of cinema. Following Grade 8, Lois attended Garbutt’s Business College in Medicine Hat and learned typing and shorthand skills which she retained during her life.
Lois was hired as secretary to Colonel Doughty, the new manager of the massive CPR irrigation district undertaken to attract farm settlers and business for the railroad. As an early settler in Brooks, Lois met and married young Mario Valli who had emigrated from England in 1920. Mario followed his sister Jean who married Ted Litchfield at the end of WWI, a veteran wounded at the Battle of Vimy Ridge, and settled with him in Canada.
Lois and Mario settled in Brooks where M.A. played polo and sold insurance for Monarch Life, and Lois became a mother. When the depression set in, M.A. took a job managing J.J. Bowlen’s Nine Bar sheep ranch at Alderson, then comprising 76 sections of very dry short grass country. Lois worked very hard in those years, learning many life skills and feeding crews of 20-25 men at shearing times, all unpaid as part of the effort to keep their children fed and clothed. She was the only woman within miles and comforted herself with writing children’s stories, some of which were published as a sign of the creativity yet to come. Gilda and Ted recall being taken for walks by Lois on the prairie around the Nine Bar Ranch where they found rattlesnakes and beetles under rocks here and there.
Lois was a skilled bread maker and always said it was not an obscure art but mainly hard work doing the necessary kneading to produce a good loaf. In 1938 they moved back to Brooks and the EID dairy farm, but this time she was paid $0.25 a meal for cooking for the farm labourers. Lois always supplemented her meals with a huge garden that she tended herself. In 1946, Lois and Mario moved to their own land four miles north of Brooks on the Duchess Highway where Lois worked in the row crop plots and cooked for large harvest crews.
As the farm became more established, Lois began to paint and took lessons with a group in Brooks and even gave lessons in subsequent years. At the same time, she developed her rhyming skills by writing many poems about the life and times of the early days in Alberta and the characters whom Buck would bring home unannounced for a good meal. Lois used to say she had nightmares about having unexpected guests with nothing to feed them, so she always had a freezer stocked with supplies for such occasions. Three of her collections became books, “Prairie Wool”, “Prairie Winds” and “Grandma’s Stories for Children”. As her painting became better recognized, she sold them widely and had several shows of her work in the Brooks area. Several of Lois’ paintings from a collection given to the Brooks Campus of the Medicine Hat College.
No description of Lois would be complete without mention of her love of all animals, including birds. For some years she raised and registered Scottish Terriers and also fed the many Border Collies that were kept for sheep herding. Lois had a good eye for livestock and assisted Mario in choosing the young rams to be kept for sale and breeding. She kept and fed chickens for many years, talking to them and commenting on their various personalities. Lois had communication with the geese on the neighboring slough and would call back and forth to them, and also to a hawk that had a favourite perch nearby and came to see her in the evening as she sat outside the house. Judging by the number of “strays” that found their way to her door, the animals must have sensed her love for them.
Lois’ life encompassed an amazing period of change. She entered life with the horse as the main mode of transport and motive power and recalls seeing the men go off to war in 1914. Lois saw the advent of the radio, telephone, cars and television, World War II, and space travel. Lois saw and accepted all this and was a great mother who always made sure her family were warm and well fed.
Lois believed in the Golden Rule. She practised it and readily accepted the value of other cultures. She recognized and admired the Native American attitudes toward the physical world, its animals and their value to mankind.
Marian Wells who took much care of Lois commented that she accepted her physical decline “with such grace” and never lost her sense of wit and humour. She left us all a huge legacy and a great role model.
Private interment of the cremains in the Redcliff Cemetery is planned at a later date.
