The Dionne fives received worldwide attention after being born in Corbeil, Ontario. They were born to parents Oliva and Elzire Dionne on May 28, 1934. They are the first known fives to survive childhood, and all five survived to adulthood. This miracle, plus their sweetness in the baby, the poverty of the French, their Canadian parents, and the controversy over their guardianship, made them the best news story of the 1930s.
Family:
The Dionne family was led by father Oliva-Edouard (1904-1979) and Elzire Dionne (1909-1986), who married on September 15, 1925. They lived just outside Corbeil, Ontario, in a farmhouse on unregistered territory. Dionnes was a French-speaking peasant family with five older children, Ernest (1936-1995), Rose Marie (1928-1995), Therese (b. 1929), Daniel (1932-1995) and Pauline (b. 1933). Pauline was only eleven months older than the fives. A sixth child, Leo (b. 1930), died of pneumonia shortly after birth. The Dionysians also had three sons after the fives:Oliva Jr (1936-2017), Victor (1938-2007) and Claude (1946-2009).
Birth History:
No one could have known, not even Elzire Dionne, that she was going to give birth to the five. Already a mother of five, shocked to have given birth to five more girls - Annette, Emilie, Yvonne, Cecile and Marie - knocked her out for two hours. "What am I going to do with all these babies?" she allegedly shouted.
Elzire suspected she was carrying twins, but the thought of the five never occurred to her. And why should it? Doctors say that the odds of naturally conceived fives are about one in 55 million, but the odds of identical fives are even rarer. Dionnes are the only identical fives that have ever been recorded and the first ever known to survive childhood.
The five girls were born two months premature on May 28, 1934 in Corbeil, Ontario. Together they weighed only 13 pounds 6 grams (just over 6 kg). They were barely alive and had severe respiratory problems. The conditions on the farmhouse, without heat and electricity, did not help their survival.
Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe was present during the birth and did a great job of keeping the girls alive. He sterilized the farmhouse. He kept the babies warm in a basket using hot water bottles and an open oven. And he also hired a team of nurses to massage them with olive oil.
Spread the news:
Dr. Dafoe began spreading the news shortly after helping deliver the five girls in the farmhouse. First he ran into the girls' uncle and informed him that his brother and sister-in-law had just gone from parents to 5 to 10. Then he went to the post office in the next town and told everyone in there. After that, he told a store clerk, who said she should tell the local newspaper. But the girls' uncle had already done it.
The editor of North Bay Nugget immediately posted the exciting news on the wire service, then sent a reporter and photographer to the farmhouse. And within six hours of the birth, the Dionne fives - Annette, Emilie, Yvonne, Cecile and Marie - were photographed for the whole world to see.
The exchange of the Dionne sisters is now the subject of a book called "The Miracle and Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets" by Sarah Miller. Miller has previously written books about women who have made headlines, such as Lizzie Borden and Anastasia Romanov.
Media Attention:
To begin with, increased media attention about the birth of the five mines. Journalists from Chicago and Toronto brought with them water-heated incubators that almost certainly saved the girls' lives. Hospitals on remote control delivered with breast milk and the Red Cross provided a nursing team around the clock.
In the course of days, thousands of spectators had gathered outside the house, looked through the windows of the farmhouse and turned Dionne's land into a parking lot. Journalists hung around inside and outside the house.
Meanwhile, the girl's father, Oliva Dionne, worried about how he would pay for medical treatment and all other expenses for five more children, in the midst of the Great Depression. He went to the priest for guidance in accepting an offer to show the mines publicly for money. The pastor offered to be the business leader.
Within a week, Oliva had signed a deal worth tens of thousands of dollars. He agreed that if and when his daughters were healthy enough, they would appear at the Chicago World's Fair for six months. He regretted signing the deal almost immediately and tried to get out of it, but the Chicago promoters refused. Meanwhile, the girls' condition worsened, and the little babies began to lose weight. Dr. Dafoe and his nurses closed a room for the girls' care and would not let anyone in. Even the parents only got a glimpse.
Red Cross custody:
When Chicago promoters tried to enforce the agreement, the Attorney General's Office in Ontario proposed a solution for Olive and his wife:they had to sign custody of the Red Cross girls for two years. The Red Cross was not committed to the organizers; plus, they would build a special hospital across the street from the farmhouse just for girls' care.
Once the baby girls were removed, it was even harder for Oliva and Elzire to make time with them, as they lived in a sterile place that was closed to the world. And the parents were never allowed to be alone with them.
Months later, the Prime Minister of Ontario proposed a bill to permanently remove them from custody and turn the girls into departments of the state until they were eighteen years old. He argued that it would protect them from being exploited and would ensure that all the money earned would be kept in a trust fund for the benefit of girls. The parents, who were often portrayed in the media as ignorant farmers, publicly asked for the chance to prove that they were good parents, but it did not matter. The bill was passed. The Dionne Fives were raised primarily by Dr. Dafoe and a team of ever-rotating teams of nurses.
Bigger Than Niagara Falls:
The newly appointed guardians of the Quintuplets turned around and did exactly what they were supposed to protect the girls from. First, they built an outdoor area where the girls played twice a day. It had a long observation arc curved around it for thousands of daily spectators.
At the end of the observation corridor stood a sausage stand and souvenir shops. One was run by midwives who helped give birth to the babies. Another was run by his father, who rarely saw them. "Kwint Kabins" appeared all over the region for visiting tourists. In 1937, "Quintland" was a more popular tourist destination than Niagara Falls
But it was just the tip of the iceberg. There were also dolls and paid photography for magazines. The Dionne fives also appeared in ads for many products - Heinz ketchup, Quaker oats, Lifesavers candy, Palmolive soap, Lysol, typewriters, bread, ice cream and disinfected mattress covers.
All the money that came in was put into a trust fund intended for the girls. But the fund was regularly searched. It paid for all aspects of Dionne Hospital. It paid for the construction of public baths for tourists. And hotel dinners for psychologist visits.
Photography is often centered on holidays and will be taken several months in advance.
The windows in the observation corridor were supposedly hidden so that the girls could not see all the strangers, but they still knew that they were being monitored. And in the nine years they spent in the hospital, they went only three times, for promotional trips and to meet and the King and Queen of Toronto. Yet the latter described these years as "the happiest, least complicated years of our lives."
"We did not know at the time that the way we were raised was bad for us." and Yvonne.
Return:
Oliva and Elzire never stopped going in to get all their children under one roof. When they finally succeeded in 1943, they were given a mansion with 19 bedrooms, yellow bricks, paid for with a five-year trust fund.
But despite the reunion, it was not a happy home. Years of separation between the girls and their parents had done their harm. The girls felt guilty about the suffering they had brought the family. Elzire treated them harshly, sometimes shouting insults and beating them. Years later, three of them also claimed that Oliva had sexually abused them. The other Dionne children denied this.
The hospital across the street was turned into a private Catholic school for the sisters, with some other local girls as classmates. At one point, Annette confided in the school chaplain about her father's abuse, but he did nothing, apparently believing that if he had confronted his parents about it, they would pull the girls out of school, and that some contact with the outside was better than no one in it. at all.
As the years passed, interest in the girls began to decline, but they were still forced to dress in matching outfits for photography in their teens. The media continued to follow the girls' lives closely. The Toronto Star published each girl's weight when they were 14.
Emilie started having seizures, but due to the stigma of epilepsy at the time, the family decided to keep it a secret. Her seizures became more frequent and more severe.
Leaving home and adulthood:
Marie, who was the last born and supposedly the most frail in the gang, surprised everyone by being the first to leave the household. As a 19-year-old, she joined a strict order of nuns and moved into a convent. Emilie followed her into another convent shortly afterwards. Just two months later, Emilie died suddenly due to her complications with epilepsy. She was 20.
Even in grief, the four surviving sisters were forced to pose for press photos next to Emilie's open coffin.
In death, Emilie gave the sisters "a kind of liberation" as Cecile put it. Public interest in the girls dried up, they moved away from the family and started their own lives in Montreal. Yvonne and Cecile went to nursing school together. Marie and Annette rode together in college. Three of them eventually got married, although none of the marriages lasted. Even as adults, the sisters found it difficult to be close to each other.
In February 1970, no one had heard from Marie for a few days, and the girls began to worry. A doctor visited Marie's home and found her body in bed next to several bottles of pills. She had recently divorced her husband and placed the children in foster care due to her struggle with depression. The cause of death was reportedly a blood clot in the brain.
After her death, the sisters became even more private.
Money settlement and current life:
You're probably wondering what might have happened to the trust fund that was supposed to make the girls wealthy. When they knew about it and gained control, half of it was already gone. In the 1990s, Yvonne, Annette and Cecile struggled to pay their bills.
Cecile's adult son Bertrand Langlois began investigating the situation and discovered how the fund had been searched. A public relations campaign began so that the girls could shame the Canadian government for giving them some of the money that had been stolen. The sisters spoke to the media for the first time in many years and revealed how miserable their lives had been.
In the end, they settled for $ 4 million.
Now 87 years old, two sisters are still alive, Cecile and Annette. But the son who helped them win the money back disappeared with Cecile's share of the money. With terrible irony, she is again a state ward and lives in a state-run nursing home. The two sisters rarely talk to the media, and when they do, it's usually just to warn the public that what happened to them must never happen again.
