Vol. 12 Number 2 Feb 3, 1982

Toronto - Even for a public relations office well accustomed to unusual phone calls, this one was a gasper.

"I'm suing you for one million dollars," shrills a female voice.

"Uhh, yes ma'am, what seems to be the trouble."

"I'm only kidding," says the voice, But it's about how you are using my 75-year-old neighbor, the celebrity, in your television commercials."

"Umm, you're still kidding, aren't you ma'am?"

"No I am not," she says, "and we're all very excited and thrilled."

When the dust settles and a certain level of calm is restored, we find that the dark-tressed young teacher whose photograph was featured in one of Canadian Pacific's television advertisements about Northern Ontario school cars is indeed the caller's neighbor.

And she is active and well and willing to reminisce about her experiences as a teacher in this uniquely Canadian episode. To cost $7 million.

Florence Bell was a young mother of two infant children when she and her husband Cameron began their adventure at Chapleau, Ontario. He was appointed a teacher on CPR School Car No. 50. She was to be his assistant.

"We certainly weren't pioneers," she recalls. "The school car concept began many years before, in 1926."

A CPR engineer, W.R. McAdam, was the driving force, according to Mrs. Bell. He loved children and often spoke to them when his train was waiting at a siding along the remote line north of Lake Superior. It became obvious to him that these children of railway workers, trappers, and prospectors had no school facilities anywhere near their homes.

A man of action, he journeyed to Toronto and thumped on the desks of the premier and the minister of education. Dr. J.B. McDougall, school inspector for the north, travelled to the area to investigate. And the school cars concept was born.

Canadian Pacific converted two first-class coaches, equipping them with classroom facilities and living quarters, and donated them to the cause. Walter McNally was the first teacher on Car No. 1, as School Car 50 became known. When he died in 1944, the Bells took over.

They served such tiny communities as Fluorite Forks, Matagama, Rideout, Ramsay, Tophet, Nemesis, and Devon, Mrs. Bell remembers. The car would be coupled to a freight train and dropped at a siding. There it would stand, as the children gathered, and remain for a week. Mrs. Bell and her husband would cram six weeks of teaching into one, assign "homework" and then move on to the next community. While at school, many of the children, ranging in age from six to late teens, would eat and sleep in the car. Some camped out, weather permitting, or were billeted with CPR employees.

"At first, I thought we would never succeed," says Mrs. Bell. "It seemed that although we worked so very hard it would be all forgotten when we came back six weeks later."

But the children were so amazing, she beams. Most of them out-studied and out-achieved their regular-school city cousins. Their scholastic records were consistently above average.

As she studies the classroom photographs, reproduced for her from the company's archives, her eyes light up. Uncannily, she begins to put names to all the young faces. She recalls their illnesses, their families, their joy at receiving graduation diplomas. She wonders what has happened to them all.

For in 1949, little more than four years after Florence Bell became the mobile schoolmarm of the north, her husband died. On the job, at Ramsay, early on a Saturday evening, he was stricken with a heart attack and died before medical aid could reach him.

Left alone, she stayed on for a while longer, and then moved to teaching at regular schools in larger centres.

She retired from teaching in 1971. Living alone in a bright, sunny, apartment overlooking Lake Ontario in Toronto's east end, she continues to be involved in learning. She is enrolled at University of Toronto, taking a history course. She is thinking of writing a book about her school car experiences.

And what has happened to the school cars?

Records show that by the late 1950s permanent schools had sprung up in the northern communities. Car No. 50 was removed from service and scrapped. Its sister car, No. 51, however, was donated in 1967 to the Canadian Railway Museum at Delson, Quebec, as a permanent monument to teachers such as Florence Bell.