I wonder if anyone knew a man named Stan Johnson from Keewatin or Kenora, Ontario, a trainee pilot who worked for Starratt Airways in 1939. Because in going through my mother’s papers, I just found a proposal of marriage from him to her. More or less.

It’s in a Starratt Airways envelope addressed to my mother under her birth name at her then-address: “Nurse’s Residence, c/o Children’s Hospitals, Winnipeg, Man.” She was a student nurse at the time, raised in Keewatin but doing her training in Winnipeg, and the handwritten letter found her without any more specific address.

It was written on the letterhead paper of Starratt Airways & Transportation Ltd. (R.W. Starratt, President) from Gold Pines on August 17, 1939. Here’s what Stan wrote:

Dear Isabel,

Well, here I am again, back in the great northern wilds, but I don’t feel as though I belong. At present I am at Uchi Landing where I stay at night. To go to work I have to fly forty miles to Gold Pines before breakfast every morning. At night on the last trip in, I climb aboard and fly back to Uchi.

The pilot, Doug Pickering is a good sport and lets me do the flying when I go with him. At present he is teaching me to do power landings (i.e.) landings with the motor still turning over fairly fast. Believe me, these big freighters require a bit of handling. With a load on, they have to be brought down at a speed of about ninety miles per hour so a person has to be pretty careful when setting them down. If only this kind of flying would count, I certainly would have enough time to write for my pilot’s license.

Well how are you making out in your training. Can you keep a ward full of babies quiet for at least fifteen minutes? If you can do that, you have accomplished wonders. I have known times when it took three adults and a dog to keep one baby quiet for five minutes. Just think, some fine day you may be taking care of —– pardon me, I won’t say it. Anyway just think some fine day you may be married. Well, anyway he’ll be a lucky man whoever he is. Confidentially will you please tell me just which one it is going to be, Clark Gable, Robert Taylor or Errol Flynn. You know, Izzy, you can’t give them all the runaround forever. One of these days you will be getting gray hairs and then it will be too late. After all you don’t want to be an old maid, not if you are the least bit human.

Anyway for all I know you may be already on your way to the altar to say a meek “I do.” When you do, make sure it is the right man because you are only supposed to marry once.

Before you make the choice, I would appreciate it very much if you would give me a

sporting chance. After all, I am not as bushed as my letters may sound, I am well set financially, I have $100 in bills (sometimes they call them statements of accounts), I have a wonderful future, I hope. I am young (only 23), lonesome, most of the time, carry more insurance than I can afford and love my parents and hate all girls but one. How’s that for a summary.

I hope you enjoyed your vacation but am sorry to the point of tears because I couldn’t go home at the same time. Instead they shipped me still further away, but I shall never give up hope.

I shall be looking forward to your letter and tell me all about your vacation. After all, it’s awful lonesome here, although you may not be that way.

Love, Stan

My mother died in Vancouver in 2009, and in packing up her condo, I shipped a couple of boxes of papers back to Toronto that I’ve only started to go through now, so many years later. Only two boxes; they don’t take up too much space and were easy to let lie. But now I’m planning to organize all sorts of family papers and this is where I’ve started.

My mother nursed for twenty-five years, first in Winnipeg but for most of the time in Vancouver, where she moved not long after her training. She married someone else eight years after Stan’s letter, my father being a returned Canadian Army soldier who’d served overseas for five years. She met him a couple of years after the war when he went to visit a buddy who was still in Shaughnessy Veterans Hospital, where she was nursing at the time. Those possible kids Stan half mentioned are my brother and me. Our parents had given up hoping for children when we were born, and my mother stopped nursing when we were young to stay home and tend the house.

Once, when I was visiting her in Vancouver, I was looking for some financial papers she needed. My mother was extremely clean and tidy but her papers were all over the place, in dresser drawers and in a cedar chest, in the linen cupboard, even between the pages of books. Somewhere I came across the distinctive Starratt Airlines envelope and asked her what it was. She snatched it back, but after smiling for a minute, said it was from an old boyfriend who’d wanted to marry her.

“Why didn’t you?” I asked.

“Because I didn’t want to,” she replied, rather pertly.

That was all I was able to get out of her.

I have no idea what happened to Stan Johnson. He doesn’t show up online—or at least I don’t recognize any details of anyone the right age named Stan Johnson. I wonder if he might have been an air force pilot killed during the war, but he doesn’t show up on any Canadian lists of downed or injured pilots. And the two photos I found in my mother’s oldest photo album, both saying in her handwriting on the back that they show Stan Johnson, seem to be of two different men. (You decide).

A couple of kids in their early twenties, one with $100 in bills and more insurance than he could afford, another a student nurse in Winnipeg—and I’ve found out some pretty interesting stuff about her training that I want to get into as well.

But in the meantime, if you have any idea what happened to Stan Johnson, please let me know.