Nymark's Lodge, St. Sauveur, Quebec

Nymark's Lodge 1940

In the autumn of 1964 I was the lone recipient of a suspension in high school for my involvement in a spitball fight between classes. While sitting at home, I came to the conclusion that high school and I were not simpatico and that it might be an idea for me to look at other possibilities. I scoured the Montreal Star want ads to see if there was anything that might interest me.

There was one ad that got my eye. Nymark’s Lodge at the foot of the ski hills in St. Sauveur  in the Laurentian Mountains was looking for a bellboy. I could do that I thought. I pictured myself hanging around reading magazines until someone needed assistance with their luggage. I could probably get in some skiing.

I was already familiar with Nymark’s. I barely missed getting taken away for underage drinking there the summer before. Trevor Payne and the Triangle had a steady gig there that summer. Trevor’s big tune was Watermelon Man. In 1994 he was awarded the Order of Canada. Yeah, this seemed like a good deal for me. Once the ski season got underway, this was spot was going to be party central.

I made the phone call. Collect. I was a bit surprised when they asked me how quickly I could make it up there. It never dawned on me that they hired me sight unseen. Wouldn’t a lot of people want this job? I never asked what the pay was. I might have not been the brightest 17 year old around. I packed up some clothes in a duffle bag and made my way up to St. Sauveur.

Nymark’s Lodge was built almost entirely by hand by Victor Nymark himself. Victor was an expert on creating buildings out of logs. He was originally from Finland. He was the head foreman on the construction of the Chateau Montebello that was built around 1930. For many years the chateau was the biggest log building in the world. Victor was in his seventies when I met him and he once told me story about being so poor when he was building Nymark’s Lodge that he would give his wife his pants if she had to go into town to get groceries.

I think it was about the middle of November when I turned up at the lodge. There were very few cars in the parking lot and there was no snow on the ground. I introduced myself and was given a tour of the building by the front desk guy who was Victor’s son-in-law. I think his name was Pat. I was assigned a small room that I shared with a guy who worked in the kitchen. His name was Gaetan and he didn’t speak English. We somehow managed to communicate between the few English words he knew and my limited French.

At some point on my tour with Pat I asked about what my pay would be. I was told that it was 15 bucks a week and included the room and meals. I wasn’t very impressed with my compensation but thought that once ski season rolled around the tips would easily make up for the lack of pay.

I soon discovered that the job was a little more than being a bellboy. They never told me that I was also expected to perform any odd job that they could come up with. For the first few days it was a variety of clean up chores and then one night the snow started to fall like there was no tomorrow. By the morning there was about 3 feet of the white stuff up on the roof. I was handed a wide shovel and a ladder and told to go up on the roof and get as much snow off as I could.

To say that this task was tad on the unsafe side would be putting it mildly. There were no ropes or anything like that to secure me. The only thing that might save me from a tumble and injuring myself was that the snow was also about 3 feet high on the ground. I was up above the kitchen shoveling away when I hit a rivet on the tin roof with the shovel and went flying through the air. While in flight I passed over the skylight above the stove in the kitchen below. Luckily, I missed crashing through the glass.

Nymark’s also owned a small ski hill behind the hotel that had a rope tow that was mostly used by beginners learning how to ski. I was assigned the task of grabbing the T-bar at the top of the hill to prevent it from swinging around wildly. It was like trying to grab bull horns with one hand. I got gored more than a few times. On top of that I was freezing to death. 15 bucks a week? You bastards!

Hill 70

It got so cold at the top of the hill that I had to warm up from time to time in the operator’s hut at the bottom of the hill. I was introduced to something I think was called Alcool which is about as close to raw alcohol one can get to and still be drinkable. It helped a bit.

By this time I realized I was just being used as very cheap labour. What really ticked me off that while I was shovelling the roof or working on the ski hill, someone else was getting tips carrying luggage to the rooms.  I thought about just quitting but the hotel had filled up and the Christmas season was just around the corner. Party central stuck in my head.

One day I was in town and used part of my 15 bucks to grab a pork sandwich in a local café right across the street from a place called The Inn which had been a favoured drinking spot by many young Montrealers dating back to the late 1930s. In fact I once found a badge that my uncle who died in WW2 had owned that had the name of The Inn on it with crossed skiis and the year 1939 on it.

I ran into a few guys in the restaurant that I had met a number of months earlier when I auditioned as a singer for a band called Jennifer’s Gentleman in Montreal. I sucked pretty bad. Two of the guys from that band had joined a new band that included two brothers with the last name Lunney. I think they were related to Bob Lunney who owned a sporting goods store on Cote St. Luc Road in N.D.G in Montreal. The long and the short of this chance meeting was I introduced them to Victor Nymark’s son-in-law and they got a gig for the winter weekends.

I went home for a few days at Christmas. The hotel was now packed. I met a couple of guys from Toronto who were really into partying. One of them was a real bull shitter and went around claiming to be David Clayton Thomas. Nobody from the Montreal area had a clue who David Clayton Thomas was at the time so I guess it didn’t much matter.

If these two guys had any funds at all it certainly wasn’t for lodging. Each night they managed to crash in some guest’s room. When they learned that I was going home for Christmas they asked if they could sleep in my room. I said fine but they would have to leave the door unlocked and explain themselves to my roommate. When I got back from Montreal I opened the door to my room and found about two feet of snow covering everything. Apparently they had been using the window to come and go and had left it open.

By the time New Year’s rolled around I knew my days were numbered. Some friends came up from Montreal on a weekend afternoon and we all got drunk in the lounge. One of those friends later became the manager of one of Canada’s biggest companies. He had an interesting habit of trying to freak out girls by taking out a false tooth that was the result of a football collision.

I was fired that afternoon for not only being drunk but for standing on a chair and putting my hand through some ceiling tiles. I was giving bellboys everywhere a bad name I guess. Not working any longer at Nymark’s was OK by me. Fair enough. And then I thought that there should be some settling of accounts.

I went up to one of the top floor bathrooms and placed a rubber mat over the drain in the shower. The bathroom door had one of those old latch hooks and I managed to make it look like the bathroom was occupied by someone by tripping the latch.

I think I had been back home for about a month when one day my father mentioned that he had got a phone call a number of weeks before from Nymark’s and that they wanted to know if I knew anything about a flood that had occurred at the hotel. Who me? I think my father put two and two together.

My history with Nymark’s was not complete. A few months later I rented a pair of wooden skiis from them. I took a bit of a header coming down a hill and one of the skis broke in half. I tried to join the two jagged pieces and took them back to try and get my deposit back. It didn’t work.

Over the next few years I spent a number of weekends up at St. Sauveur. Sometimes I crashed at a friend’s ski shack. A few times I stayed at a little rooming house called the Wee Ski. I slept out by the swimming pool behind Nymark’s one night. The oddest place I ever slept at was in a small chapel just down the road from Nymark’s. I remember waking up in the loft and seeing people wandering in for Sunday services down below. I crunched myself in a corner until the service was over so I wouldn’t be seen.

Ski train from Montreal 1939

I was back east around 1982 and we took a drive up to the Laurentians and I saw Nymarks’s Lodge one last time. I later learned that it had burned down. It wasn’t me!  Honest.

Nymark's Lodge 1978.

Main drag St. Sauveur 2012.

Newer building where I think The Inn used to stand. 2012

Catholic church in St. Sauveur 2012.

Loft in chapel where I slept one night in mid 1960s.

 

Plattsburg, New York

About 60 miles south of Montreal, off of US Interstate Route 87, sits a small city called Plattsburg on the shore of Lake Champlain. During the 1950s the beaches, St. Armand’s about 5 miles north of Plattsburg and the Municipal Beach fairly close to downtown, were big draws on summer weekends for Montreal families who were doing modestly well and had young kids.

Historically, The Battle of Plattsburg was part of The War Of 1812 and was fought on land and on Lake Champlain. It was the Americans against the British (Canadians were kind of British then) along with a number of Indian tribes who chose sides.

Battle of Plattsburg

In 1954 the construction of Plattsburg Air Force Base was started and over the next 40 or so years, thousands of enlisted men from all over the US found themselves stationed there. At one time there were also a number of ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missile) silos in the area.

Many who grew up in that era remember the family road trips in the 1950s The impatience we had in getting to where we were going, the back seat squabbles, the telephone posts going by, the counting of cows. The license plates on other cars from places like Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New Jersey, Massachusetts and New York. We were in America!

Plattsburg could be a day at the beach or the whole weekend that might include staying at a motel like The Royal or The Pioneer, (The Royal had a swimming pool and the units at the Pioneer were made out of logs.)  doing some shopping, particularly for clothes, maybe going to a drive-in movie in the evening and seeing a movie like Trapeze with Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster and Gina Lollobrigida, perhaps having dinner at Howard Johnson’s.

We would stuff the trunk of the Olds 88 or Buick Special with beach blankets, towels, a red and white beach umbrella with fringes, a red Coca-Cola cooler, a few pails and shovels for digging in the sand and off we would go with five or six of us in the car. Almost always before we left my father would say to one of us kids “Am I waiting for you or are you waiting for me?”

I grew up on the west side of the island of Montreal in an area called N.D.G. and our route south to the US involved crossing the Lachine Canal, passing the Seagram’s Distillers plant with its pungent odor, and going over The Pont Mercier Bridge.

There was always a long line up at the border on a sunny summer weekend. My father always told us not to offer any information at the border unless we were specifically asked. I think he relished the opportunity to tell them that he was born in South Africa. The thought crossed the rest of our minds that the South Africa stuff might cause a delay but he didn’t seem to care. If we were interrogated with electrodes he still would have said where he was born.

The beach we went to most often was St. Armand’s. We would usually arrive sometime around noon and the parking lot was always packed by then. Eventually my father would find some spot to wedge the car into. The kids were all assigned things to carry from the trunk of the car and then we set off like a band of gypsies looking for our space of sand. And the sand by then was like a bed of coals. “Yikes! Ooh! Ahhh!”

Plattsburg Municipal Beach

After we planted our umbrella, my mother would paste our young bodies with some kind of sun lotion before letting us go near the water. Noxema would later take care of any missed areas.

We played with complete strangers. We made primitive attempts at making sand castles. The occasional sandwich crust or egg shell could be seen floating in the water. When we got thirsty we would go back to the umbrella which was kind of like a tent and have a Nesbitt’s Orange or a Coke. My mother served us soggy sandwiches that tasted great.

Around 5 o’clock we would pack everything up and make the long trek back to the car. While we were at the beach someone had inevitably attached a sign to the chrome bumper. They didn’t have bumper stickers back then so the sign was secured by wires.  Americans always seemed better at promoting things than Canadians. Everywhere we went we would see other cars with advertisements for places like Ausable Chasm, Santa Claus Village, Forts William Henry and Ticonderoga. “Daddy, Daddy. Can we go to Santa Claus Village?” Parents must have hated those signs.
 

Fort Ticonderoga

If we stayed for the evening we would always go out to dinner at a drive-in and have breakfast at some restaurant. I remember one breakfast in a crowded joint where a young couple walked in and the gal was wearing baby doll pajamas. There were some glares from the mothers in the place and there were some fathers pretending that they were reading the menu.

I remember the cartoons on the drive-in movie screen that would tell us about all the wonderful things at the snack counter. One of the movies I remember was about some calvary guys who were stuck in a canyon by a river. They sent one the soldiers up to the top to see where the Indians were and a few minutes later he was tossed off the canyon rim like Wiley Coyote.

Going across the border was being in America. They were kind of like us. A lot of them seemed to have brush cuts. Whether in a store or on the beach they almost always seemed more friendly than people we were used to. “How are you doin?” They also had pop in bigger bottles and chocolate bars like Baby Ruths that we had only seen on TV.

The Canadian dollar was worth a fair amount more than the American dollar back then and we Canadians were always looking for a good bargain. There weren’t any shopping malls back then but there were places like J.C. Penney. Most of the shops were in downtown Plattsburg in the vicinity of the Fyfe and Drum Restaurant and Bar. More than one dad sat in that bar while his wife spent a good part of his pay cheque.

On one of our day trips to Plattsburg my brother was allowed to bring along a friend.  The friend wanted to buy a pair of black Wellington boots very badly and I remember him sitting in the back seat of our car with his feet jammed under the seat with his new boots on as drove through customs.

When I was about 10 years old one of the coolest things I thought I could do was be in the front passenger seat in the car with the window open when we came back from a road trip. I would rest my elbow on the window bottom and grasp the top of the window with my hand. This was a lot cooler than my father’s farmers tan on one arm.

By about 1960 Plattsburg had lost some of its charm. The baby boomers were starting to grow up and going anywhere with the parents wasn’t that much fun.

In the summer of 1961 I convinced my mother to drive myself and two other guys down to St. Armand’s Beach in her Morris Minor convertible. By this time, unawares to me, nobody was going to this beach. We didn’t have a tent and planned to sleep under the stars in our sleeping bags. We were pretty well eaten alive by mosquitos and spent part of night cowering under a decayed picnic table. I bought a Calypso straw hat that an older boy tried to steal off of my head. The weekend didn’t turn out as planned.

The next time I went down to Plattsburg was around 1965. A guy I knew borrowed his mother’s wine coloured Pontiac Parisienne convertible and about five of us piled into the car for a day at the beach. I remember the Stones Satisfaction blaring away on the car radio. This time we were going to Plattsburg Municipal Beach. We stopped at Carrol’s burger joint for lunch (burgers were about 15 cents) and then we sent the oldest looking of us into a liquor store to buy something called Orange Maid that was a sugary premixed version of the Screwdriver.

By late afternoon most of us were pretty drunk including the driver. Everyone headed back to Montreal except me. I have no idea who drove. I had met a French Canadian gal on the beach. About as far as I got was a bit of wresting on the couch in her motel while her two roommates were just a few feet away.

We used to hang around a smoked meat joint on Queen Mary Road called Manny’s. I met the guys there a night or two later and kind of led them to believe more happened in that motel than really did.

For a couple of years after this adventure, I would hitchhike down to Plattsburg by myself now and then, hang out on the beach during the day and have a few beers at a joint called Brodie’s  in the evening and dance the night away with the willing in front of a live band. Woolly Bully was a popular tune at the time. I spent more than one night sleeping on the beach.

One afternoon, I was sitting at the bar in Brodie’s when a guy next to me started a conversation. He was buying so I was listening. He told me a strange tale about being in the air force in WW2 and claimed that he was one of the guys that wheeled out the bomb code named “Little Boy” that was dropped from the bomber named the Enola Gay on Hiroshima in 1945. I have no idea if he was telling the truth. Eventually his wife turned up and took him home.

Route 87 north

At the end of one of those weekends I got a lift back to Montreal from a guy and his girlfriend who I had met on the beach. A few miles north of Plattsburg we were pulled over for speeding. Several minutes later we were instructed to follow a patrol car and we were led to a farmhouse off the highway where a local judge resided. There was an American flag on the front porch. Through a window we could see the judge’s family eating dinner. I can’t remember how the speeding ticket was resolved because between the three of us (particularly me) we couldn’t pay for it. My guess is that there was some kind of written promise to pay with the threat of jail time should the police at some future date pull the driver over and discover the fine was not paid.

The last time I saw Plattsburg was around 1968. I was on a date with a blonde French Canadian girl and we took the bus down. I can still remember being totally wowed when she came out of the changing room at the beach in her bikini. We ended up at Brodie’s Bar at the beach that night and I was just about out of cash. As luck would have it an old school friend was in the bar and bought us a couple of beers. Strangely enough, this same guy was one of my roommates a few years later in Toronto. I ended up having to borrow the bus fare from the gal I was with to get us back home.

Aside from the beaches in Plattsburg there is something about the city that has always stuck in my mind. WPTZ in Plattsburg. In the mid 1950s TV antennas started going up on the roofs in our neighbourhood. We were used to Canadian TV, the English language CBMT and the French language station CBFT, both part of the CBC network in Montreal. Percy Saltzman, the weather guy tossing his chalk.

Having an antenna meant that we could now get American TV stations. The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, The Ed Sullivan Show. Commercials for Knickerbocker and Naragansett beer. “I want my Maypo!” cereal.

ABC came from Poland Springs, Maine and CBS came from Burlington, Vermont. It was WPTZ in Plattsburg that I remember the most. They had a guy there who was like a one man band. His name was Bird Berdan. He was kind of a balding guy with glasses. He did it all. He read the commercials, did cooking shows, the weather report and the sports. He probably mowed the grass outside of the station.

Bird Berdan

Other than worrying about Russia and the US annihilating one another, times seemed much more simple back then.

Remembering Frank Crabbe

In the fall of 1961 I was sitting in the auditorium at West Hill High School in Montreal and some teachers on the stage were calling out students names and telling us which class to report to. When my name was called I was told to report to the principal’s office and shortly after learned that I was persona non grata at the school and was no longer going to be a student there.

About two weeks later my life took a drastic turn. My father placed me in The Boys Home of Montreal, more commonly known as Weredale House. It was time to pay for my sins for being an immature thirteen year old that wasn’t ready for high school. I am pretty sure that my fate was of no concern to those that took part in my being thrown out of school. My silly grin and impish facial appearance didn’t help me much. I wasn’t a criminal. I was just not very disciplined. I spent almost two years at Weredale, from September of 1961 until June of 1963. Those almost two years left a life-long impact on me.

Weredale House is a four story brick building built in the 1930s. It is located just off of Atwater Avenue, a few blocks away from the old Montreal Forum on St. Catherine Street. The building housed about 160 boys at any given time. Most of the boys were from dysfunctional families. Poverty, alcoholism, abuse, neglect, and abandonment were just some of the things that most boys had seen in their previous lives living with their families.

Pretty well all of the boys were scarred in one way or another. Some had a lot of anger and vicious fights were not uncommon. Most of the boys formed unions with others for mutual protection. Kind of the same way people in prison often do. Often times these friendships ended the day a boy left Weredale. There was an almost daily tension in the place. It is not surprising that many of the boys, as they grew into men, decided to erase as much of these memories as they could. Some went on to successful lives while others got caught in a life of more ill fortune. Probably the most famous boy to come out of Weredale is Victor Malerek, the reporter on CBC Television’s, Fifth Estate.

Jump ahead to the year 1966. I was nineteen and living at my parent’s house for a few months in N.D.G.. At the time, I had the habit of leaving the radio on all night next to my bed. I used to listen to a guy named H.K. Bassier on CKGM who would talk about interesting things from midnight to the early morning. One night I thought I had heard a disturbing news item and wasn’t quite sure if I had been dreaming. When I got up in the morning I went and got the Montreal Gazette that was delivered to our house to see if there was any reality to what may have only been a dream. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a dream.

On or around February 16, 1966, PFC First Class Frank Crabbe of the 3^rd Marines was killed In Viet Nam at the age of nineteen. Altogether, eight died that day when the lead AMTRAK hit a mine while on a search and destroy mission at Trang Dinh village. Frank Crabbe was an ex Weredale Boy.

Frank roomed across the hall from me at Weredale. At one time we were both on the junior staff together. Frank was Catholic and went to St. Leo’s Academy in Westmount in Montreal and I went to Westmount High which was part of the Protestant School Board. We never really saw one another outside of the confines of Weredale House.

Occasionally, we would have little conversations about things I can’t remember. Our chats were usually in the evening or on Saturday mornings before going home for the weekend. We once traded radios. I have no idea why. Frank was a year older than I was and I remember him as being a bit on the husky side. More than anything he just seemed like a nice guy making the best out of things. He was pretty low key and always pleasant to talk to. I think he had a younger brother.

A year or two after I left Weredale House I ran into Frank at the downtown Eaton’s store on St. Catherine Street in Montreal. He was working in the sporting goods department. He asked me if I could hang around for a few minutes to grab a coffee on his break. I did hang around and I can’t remember what we talked about but I know he never mentioned the idea of joining the US armed forces. It was the last time I saw him.

Throughout our lives we meet all kinds of people. Some we like more than others. Frank was a person I liked a lot but to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have thought much about Frank over the years if he hadn’t died at such a young age and so tragically.

Jump ahead again to the mid 1990s. I was living in Vancouver and owned my own company. One of my suppliers was an outfit from Plano,Texas and every year they would provide a free trip to their best customers to a chosen city in the US. One year it was Washington, DC. What an amazing city as far as history goes. I saw all the stuff I had seen in the old Jimmy Stewart movie Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. The Lincoln Memorial, The White House, The Washington Monument.

I also saw something that wasn’t in the Jimmy Stewart movie, The Viet Nam Memorial Wall. It was designed by a Chinese American student, is about 380 feet in length, and is in the shape of a very wide “V”. I believe it was made out of black granite. The dead are listed in chronological order meaning that the first soldiers who died are listed at one end and the last soldiers who died are at the other end.

Viet Nan Memorial Wall, Washington, DC

You have to get assistance to find the person you are looking for on the wall. A vet at a table near the wall told me where I could find Frank Crabbe’s name. It took a few minutes of scrolling and then there it was. Frank Crabbe. Two “b’s” and an “e”. I reached out and touched Frank’s name with my fingers and a tear came to my eye. I was saddened that this nice guy had his life cut short. Over the years there has been a few of times that I wondered what Frank’s death was all about. He seemed to be doing OK at his job at Eaton’s. He had lots of time in his life to climb up the ladder if he wanted to. Maybe it was about him looking for adventure? Maybe he had a break up with a girlfriend? Maybe it was belonging to a group? Maybe it was about having dual citizenship and getting a college education after his tour? Maybe? Maybe? Maybe?

II grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. Over those years I heard a lot of stories about the Second World War. My father spent about five years overseas. An uncle died in Holland. Old veterans would tell you war stories in taverns around Montreal. It always seemed like a just war to fight in. Probably the last just war I think.

Viet Nam was a total waste as far as I am concerned. It bothers me that a young guy like Frank Crabbe never really got a good chance at life. He deserved better. He was a good guy. Life, sometimes, can be very unfair. R.I.P. Frank.

Weredale House was closed for good in 1977. 


I am not 100% sure but the guy in the middle in the back may be Frank.
I'm in the middle in the front. Weredale junior staff 1962.



The Great Grocery Store Robbery

It was the beginning of the summer of 1969 and I was living in a fraternity house at the top of University Street near McGill University in Montreal. It was prime time for hippies and joining an established fraternity was not high on the list of the things to do for the rebellious or nonconformists. The frat house I was living in only rushed one brother that year I think. Pretty well all of the residents were students who had found a cheap place to live. Once exams were done most went home to places across Canada and throughout the US.

The fraternity house on University St. 2012

During the school year a cook came in to make meals for the boarders. By the beginning of the summer the cook was long gone and there were just two or three people left staying in the house. One of those two or three was a guy from Louisiana who was a brother. He was into folk singing and Cajun music and occasionally got a gig at the nearby coffee house, The Yellow Door. Sometimes he performed as part of a duo with a black guy. Not your typical southerner in 1969.

Before going any further, I should say that I was in contact with this guy a few years ago via the internet. I kind of think that he would just as soon forget the story I am about to tell but I am going to tell it anyway. What somebody did about 45 years ago, short of murder, shouldn’t really matter at this point. Most of us did some wild things when we were younger.

The southern guy and his girlfriend and I were sitting at the dining table in a large room when the plot was first suggested to me. The girlfriend worked at a large supermarket in downtown Montreal. They had already devised a plan and had selected me as the one that could bring it to fruition. Maybe they thought I was more disposable if we got caught and that was why the southern guy chose me instead of himself to be an integral part of the caper.

The plot was simple. I was to go down to the supermarket and select some choice cuts of meat like roasts and chickens, stuff them in a cart with some other needed items, and then take them through the cash area where the girlfriend who worked as a cashier would not punch the more costly meats in.

I can’t say that I wasn’t nervous at all when the day came to do the deed. I loaded up about 6 large pieces of meat and headed for the girlfriend’s cash station. Our eyes met and we tried to act as normal as we could. It would just be minutes before I was out of there and on my way home. Not so fast. A woman was standing at the end of the check-out counter. “Excuse me sir. Can I talk to you for a moment?” I thought my….goose was cooked.

“I see that you have purchased some Coffee-Mate. If you can give me the right answer for a mathematical riddle we will give you 25 dollars.” It took a moment for me to digest what she was saying. I’m robbing the place and someone wants to give me 25 bucks on the way out? Wow! It was one of those addition, subtraction, multiply and division things. I checked my answer twice at least. And then I was given some nice crisp bills. I didn’t share my winnings.

We dined well for the next week or so. I can’t recall how the southern guy liked his meat cooked.

A few weeks later the southern guy headed home to Louisiana and handed me the keys to the house. I was laid off after returning from vacation from my job as a purchasing clerk and needed some kind of income. I was a bit pissed about losing the job but I wasn’t going to miss getting up in the dark and the drive to work with a car full of Greek guys with bad breath and shiny gold teeth. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that I was alone in a big empty house. I got a hold of a marking pen and put up a large “Rooms For Rent” sign in the front window.

I did alright that summer. I rented rooms to people from all over the US and Europe. I found out where the secret room was in the house and where the liquor supply was stashed. I never thought I was really stealing in that I was keeping the house tidy and had no agreement with anybody. No one connected to the house ever dropped by. It was like the place had been abandoned. OK. Maybe I shouldn’t have helped myself to the liquor.

If I wasn’t out nightclubbing or showing tourists about I was sharing cocktails in my room or listening to Expo’s baseball. I remember the posters I had on the wall in my room. One was kind of pink and orange and was an advertisement for The Endless Summer surfing movie. Another one was a blown up Life Magazine front cover with a bearded Ernest Hemingway.

In August I decided to hit the road and head out to the west coast again. I handed over the keys to a guy who was at the University of Toronto but working in Montreal for the summer. Part of his following year’s tuition was paid by his renting rooms that August. His justification was that his motorcycle had been stolen while chained to  a fence outside the frat house.

My justification was that I was never that fussy about frat boys.

Here are some pics I took around Montreal in 1969.

Eaton's and Morgan's on Ste. Catherine Street

Mountain Street

St. Hubert Bar-B-Q delivery car

The System movie theatre on Ste. Catherine Street

Sleigh ride on Mount Royal

Mountain Street

Sherbrooke Street

Willingdon School, Montreal

Willingdon School

Willingdon Elementary School. I went there for 8 years in the 1950s including kindergarten. The school was built around 1929 and was named after a man who was Governor General of Canada between 1926 and 1931. I guess he was in the right place at the right time. There is a rumour that William Shatner went to Willingdon in the 1940s.

In kindergarten a few of us ate paste and few of us had “accidents” in our pants.



Kindergarten report card



In grade 1 our class went as far as Old Orchard Avenue on a field trip to find the perfect maple leaf. It was also the year a lot of purple paint and crayons were used because of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation.

In grade 2 my teacher, Miss McNabb, wore a tartan skirt every day and rode her bike to school when there wasn’t any snow on the ground. It was also the first year that I got the strap from the principal. I got the strap at least once a year for the rest of my time at Willingdon.

IIn grade 3 I had my first crush on a girl but she preferred someone else. I think it was the same year I stuffed the Valentine’s box with cards with my name on it.

2nd from the left top row grade 3

 

In grade 4 I was still wearing flannel shorts in warmer weather and britches in the winter. After school we would go sliding down the snow stacks on Royal Avenue that the snow blowers had left behind.

In grade 5 we would rush home to watch Huckleberry Hound on TV. Some kids from Hungary turned up at the school. I finally got some long pants to wear to school.

The big guy in the back is Don Moore, my old roommate in Toronto. I'm in the center in front.

In grade 6 I was caught trying a get a peek under the woman gym teacher’s skirt. I also finally mastered making it up the two story ropes in the gym.

In grade 7 I had about the worst teacher ever, Mrs. Miller, who was a real nasty piece of work.  At the end of the year there was going to be a dance and she paired most of the boys off with girls that she chose. 6 or 7 of us were left in class to our own devises and we ended up playing “hangman”. Years later when I heard the Janis Ian song “At Seventeen” I knew what the song meant and felt badly for the girls that were left behind that day.

For most of my years at Willingdon I was the flavour of the day with a lot of kids. That is until they weren’t allowed to play with me anymore. It seemed like I was always in some kind of trouble. And word got around.

The school had an interesting make-up of kids. More than 1/3 were Jewish. N.D,G. was sort of a weigh station on the road to more success for their parents before they moved to Hampstead or Cote St. Luc. Some kids were immigrants from Europe. Others were temporary until their dads got transferred somewhere else. The overall flavour of the times was Waspy. Don’t rock the boat kind of thing. There was only one black family in the neighbourhood.

My parents passed along a life-long non-belief in religion and over the years I have found it interesting about how much I knew about hymns and the bible from classes at Willingdon when I was but a young lad. It didn’t take apparently. "Swing low, sweet charriot..."

I remember the fads. Bolo-bats, yo-yos, hula hoops, Davey Crockett coon skin hats. Playing Stando against the wall with an Indian rubber ball and kickball or British Bulldog out in the concrete playground. Double Dutch and girls skipping rope and a few boys joining in. Getting cleaned out of my hockey cards by sly guys who could throw “leaners” with their tossing card heavily wrapped in scotch tape.

I learned from my report cards that I wasn’t great at control in speech and action. I could never figure out how I got F’s in things like art, geography, and history when I always was interested in those subjects. I even got failing grades in gym. I think they kind of had it in for me. Gym?

I never showed up on the last day of school not wanting to be humiliated by being one of the few to fail. I got a friend to pick up my report card and was very relieved to see I had passed. The reality of it was more like they were glad to see the last of me and were willing to overlook my grades.

Several years ago a gal I went to Willingdon School with contacted me through a website called Classmates. We had one phone conversation and e-mailed back and forth for a year or two. I kind of pride myself in my memory a bit and asked her if she could help me out in creating a list of people who had been in our classes back then. The gal’s name was Rhona Cossman. She died of cancer in Montreal about 2 years ago.

Here is the list and it is dedicated to Rhona. Apologies for any spelling errors.

Girls…Draper Avenue Entrance

Nina Benedict, Shelley Unger, Naomi Weizz, Heather Lee, Donna Cohen, Liz Martin, Maureen Mullins, Peggy McKay, Christine Hardy, Barbara Afrin, Wendy Chisnall, Bernice Dyer, Gaye Epps, Philippa Bubbas, Rhona Cossman, Anna-Lou Roness, Cathy Marks, Wendy Heyberd, Lillian Bartha, Heather McMillan, Veronica Fletchman, Rita-Jane Lebowitz, Bonnie Pomerantz, Susan Ringwood, Isabel Bennett, Cheryl Fraser, Myrna Daniels, Margie Leiberman, Christine Hardy, Francoise Roth, Karen Bolton, Gloria Soloman, Nancy Little,Joyce Millard.

Boys…Royal Avenue Entrance

Teddy Rutherford, Malcolm Loucks, Doug Storey, Ian Banville, Alan Simmons, Pat Kell, Michael Julius, Harvey Stark, Alan Livingstone, George Thompson, Teddy Thompson, Bobby Thompson, Harvey Biggs, Mark Bernstein, Alan Marks, Geoff Shorrock, Mike Agnew, Doug Feltmate, Louis Yacknin, Murray MacBride, Laurence Levin, Harold Potter, Craig Penfold, John Hutton, Jimmy Fraser, John Robinson, Hugh Mowatt, David Magill, Neil Stein, Shelly Dorfman, Ross Lapper, Miles Hitchmo, Carl Bestersine, Joe Angeles, Herve Dupoe, Jimmy De St. Croix, Martin Dow, Barry Sternthal, Donnie Moore, Don Moore #2, Jay Simpson, Dalton Brown, Andrew Campbell, David Bates, John Haas, Gabor Keitner, Hilliard Abromowitz, Andy Elliott, Wayne Simmons, Charles Dexter, Ian Banville, Jimmy Surridge, Gary Siroka, Julian Smith, Morris Beirbriar, Chuck Wiseman, Drew Brown, Anderson Charters, Greg Small, John Pichnej, Ken Hutchison, Murray MacFarlane, Allan Black.

Apologies to those we didn’t remember.

Teachers

Kindergarten: Miss Reynolds, Mrs. Cram

Grade 1: Mrs. Laroque

Grade 2: Miss McNabb

Grade 3: Miss Cooperman

Grade 4: Miss Jones

Grade 5: Mrs. Ramus

Grade 6: Miss Reaper

Grade 7: Mrs. Miller

Gym teachers: Miss Helyer, Mrs. Mackay

Principals: Mr. Perrie, Mr. Almond, Mr. Pitcairn

School janitor: Mr. Hunter. Once a year he would toss off all the balls that made it up on the roof of Willingdon School.

Tip of the hat to: Elmer the safety elephant

I don't want any trouble!

Chateauguay, Quebec

Chateauguay is a small town across the Pont Mercier Bridge on the other side of the St. Lawrence River just south of Montreal. The Chateuguay river, which is a tributary of the St. Larence River, flows through the middle of the village. From what I understand, today, a lot of people make the daily commute to jobs in Montreal. Back around 1950 it was a sleepy little country town.

I'm not quite sure if we stayed out in Chateauguay one summer or two summers. I was about two or three years of age and the time would have been around 1949 or 1950. The house we stayed at was loaned to my parents by a couple with the last name of Yost. They were friend's of my grandfather's.

There were a few unique things about the house. There was a front room with large screens that had a ships's steering wheel that I was fascinated with. Outside, on the front lawn, there was a goldfish pond with a lighthouse in the middle of it.

I was just a toddler at the time and like every small child I was curious. Somehow, I managed to climb a ladder that was resting against the back of the house. I spotted a grey round object and reached out to grab it. It might just be the first really dumb thing I did in life. The grey round thing turned out to be a wasp's nest. I am sure there was a lot a shreiking going on that day.I

David, Me, Sandra

My father, David, Sandra

My mother

David and Sandra

My father and me

My father stayed in town during the week and only came out Chateauguay on the weekends. A friend of my mother’s, who she grew up with and went to Montreal High with, rented a house up the street a bit. We called her Aunt Airdrie. For some reason an image of her house has always stuck with me. I remember the curtains blowing in the summer breeze in a window at the landing of the steps to the second floor. I have no idea why I can recall this.

On the other side of the street behind a row of trees was a monastery, complete with monks in brown robes like Friar Tuck. Rumour has it that my older brother and sister stole a few apples from their orchard now and then.

My grandparents owned a house nearby to the Yosts. I have no memory of their house at all. My grandfather's name was Edwyn Wayte and he was involved in many amateur theatrical productions in Montreal from the 1930s into the 1950s. He directed a number of plays and musicals for the Chidren's Repetory Theatre at Victoria Hall in Westmount.

IIn the few years that I knew my grandfather I always had the impression that he knew a wide range of people. Back around 1950 the way to get to Chateauguay was through a short one lane tunnel that went under railway tracks near what used to be called Caugnawaga but is now called Kanawake. My grandfather knew the guy at the nearby gas station and the guy that gave people the high sign that it was OK to drive into the tunnel.

About the only other thing I can remember from our time in Chateauguay was the time my grandfather took me for a long walk. We walked over a railway bridge that crossed the river and found ourselves at a little country store where my grandfather bought me an ice cream cone and a pack of baseball cards. One of the cards was of the baseball pitcher of Bob Lemon who played for the Cleveland Indians at the time. The smiling Indian with the big teeth on the card remains forever embedded in my brain.

My father and grandfather in front of my father's Hudson

Ste. Margeurite Station, Quebec

I think it was the summer of 1952 that we rented a chalet style building in an area in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal that we always called St. Margaret’s. I was about 5 years old at the time. Several miles away there was a winter and summer resort called Chalet Cochand where I think the famed Jack Rabbit Johannsen hung out from time to time. My parents also spent their honeymoon at the Chalet Cochand in the mid 1930s.

The chalet was on a hill and had a balcony. I once took a header off of that balcony and that may explain a few things. Across the road in front of the house there was a brook and I remember dipping my toes in the water and having a picnic there with my mother. Cue the cherubs and the harps. I am guessing that she was pregnant with my younger sister at the time.

The closest house to us, and I am guessing here too, was a few hundred yards away. One day, while I was in the care of my older brother and sister, and probably out of boredom, they decided to see if they could break into that house being that it was unoccupied. They jimmied the door to the garage and found an old horse buggy stored there. I think the French word for old horse buggy is “caleche”. The only things that were pilfered were some swizzle sticks. I think some of them were from The Stork Club in Montreal.

And that’s about all I can remember.

Chalet Cochand 1982