She always had Paris

By Steve Landwehr
STAFF WRITER

August 18, 2008 06:24 am

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Everyone's life has a story. In "Lives," we tell some of those stories about North Shore people who have died recently. "Lives" runs Mondays in The Salem News.

IPSWICH — Paris. That's what the dateline on this story should be. That's right, Paris, France, the City of Lights, Gay Paree.

It locked a young girl's heart in its intoxicating embrace and never let go. You'd need maps of both the Western and Eastern hemispheres to stick a pin in all the other places she lived — and they were legion — but if home is where the heart is, they were all temporary quarters.

And if there was one mistake Constance (Bonneau) Sale felt she made in life, it was leaving Paris for good. She died Friday, Aug. 8, at Merrimack Place in Newburyport. She was 77.

Her remarkable journey to and from the far corners of the world began strangely enough with a tragedy.

Sale's mother died when she was 12. Her father was serving in the U.S. Army in Paris at the time, as Gen. Dwight Eisenhower's driver and translator. He'd grown to love the city and brought his children over. Sale was in a boarding school until she was 18, then moved to Paris.

By then, her father was working at the American Embassy, and Sale got a job there, too. Her French was so good that some natives would say they knew exactly in which neighborhood in Paris she'd been born and raised.

She worked as a translator at the embassy, at the time France and other European nations were hammering out their response to the Marshall Plan, America's proposal for rebuilding Europe after World War II, while at the same time repelling Communism.

Also working at the embassy was fellow American Joseph Sale. The two met, fell in love and married, moving to San Francisco so Joseph could complete course work to become an architect.

Globe trotting

Understand something about Connie Sale. She was not a stay-at-home mom, or stay-at-home anything else, for that matter.

"It never occurred to her not to work," said her daughter, Karen.

So it wasn't long before Sale became the first woman licensed as an insurance adjuster in San Francisco, though that career was short-lived.

Joseph eventually got a job with J.C. Penney, which sent him first to Hawaii then San Diego, where the family got the opportunity of a lifetime.

Penney's had just bought Sarma, Europe's largest department store chain, and Joseph Sale was offered a position at the company's headquarters in Brussels.

There were heady days for seven years, with numerous formal balls and frequent visits to France.

"I don't think my dad was paid as much as other Penney's executives," Karen said. "But Mom always found a way to make sure she looked good and we looked good. It was pretty cool."

Then it was back to California, where Joseph lost his job. Connie went back to school and got her bachelor's degree, then a master's in sociology with a specialty in gerontology, and a master's in French, to boot. For four years, hers was the only paycheck coming in.

Her last position was finding jobs for senior citizens throughout northern California.

"Every place we went, she bettered herself by pursuing something she was interested in," Karen said.

French lessons

Despite the turmoil during all those years, there was one constant — France.

Sale and her family returned every chance they could. Without fail, until two years ago when she was too ill, the entire Sale clan, even after the two girls married, spent one month each summer in France, from the Cote d'Azur to Paris.

Winters found them skiing in the French Alps.

Not to say that everything was la vie en rose.

Her husband died in 1998, the beginning of four painful years for Sale. Four months after Joseph's death due to cancer, her youngest daughter, Janet, was also diagnosed with the disease at the age of 40.

She was given two years, but lived until 2002, the same year Sale's four best friends also passed away.

"She was never the same," Karen said of her mom.

The fiercely independent Sale then moved into her own apartment in the big old house Karen and her husband, Mark David, own on Argilla Road in Ipswich.

Part of Sale's l'affaire France was gastronomic — "I never knew her to turn down an invitation to a restaurant," Karen said — but mostly she just felt more comfortable in a country that in her eyes took a less myopic view of itself than America.

"In some ways, she regretted ever coming back to the States," Karen said.