N.D.G., Montreal...from the 1950s to the 1960s

Update: October 22, 2017

For a brief period of time I was a member of Facebook nostalgia site called NDG Before The Mid 80's. I posted some remembrances of growing up in NDG and there were a lot of positive responses. About 10 days ago I found out that my postings had been erased. I posted a comment on the NDG site asking why. A Ken Alivisatos, an administrator, replied. He said that the erasing of my postings could be for a number of reasons including talking about politics, being rude, or just a lack of interest on the part of the members. He also said that he and  the 2 other administrators can't please everyone.

My response was that I was no longer going to submit stories or comments if they were just going to erase them. The next thing I knew I was blocked from the site. That's OK. There are 4 devises in our house with Facebook capabilities if I want to look at that site.

About a week ago a member of the NDG site named Wayne Dow posted my blog story below that you are about to read. There were close to 100 "likes" and about 20 "shares. Within a week I had close to 3,000 new readers of my NDG blog story. The story has had over 10,000 reads since I wrote it 5 years ago. I'm kind of proud of that. Writers want to be read.

In the last few days my NDG blog story has also been removed from the NDG Facebook page. They must have clued in on who wrote it I guess.

Am I totally pissed off? Not really. I've met lots of petty people in my life so this really isn't something new to me.

I've found that nostalgia sites in general can be a bit tricky to navigate. It's almost like sifting for gold. Who wants to read what 100 different people think their favourite pizza place was back in the day? Someone posts a picture of a school and asks if you went there. Many respond with a different school they went to. That wasn't the damned question! An overhead aerial shot of Benny Farm really isn't very interesting to most people. You can barely make out the buildings and there is no detail. News flash. Everything old isn't interesting.

The "gold" is when people tell us something fresh and new that perhaps we didn't know or recall. Something interesting with a bit of content?

So that's my little rant. Hope you enjoy the following story.

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I grew up in N.D.G. (Notre Dame de Grace) in Montreal in the 1950s. N.D.G. is a district west of the downtown core of Montreal. Throughout most of the 1950s my family lived on Harvard Avenue near Somerled Avenue. I went to Willingdon School and West Hill High School.

A lot has changed in the past 50 or so years. I thought I would jot down what I can recall from those days long ago. Cue the music. Gino Vanelli….when I dream about those nights in Montreal….

Companies like J.J.Joubert, Guaranteed Pure Milk, and Borden’s delivered milk right to our front doors. You left the empty bottle near your front door with a small milk ticket in the bottle rim and the milkman would replace the empty bottle with a full one. There was no such thing as 2%. It was all homo but you could get a bottle with cream on the top and milk on the bottom. Many of the milk delivery vehicles were horse drawn wagons. Horse poop in the street was a common sight.

Milk delivery wagon

On Saturday mornings, the Y.M.C.A. would show full length movies in the gym. There were no seats and kids sat on the floor. They would also show serial movies that were about 15 minutes long and they were sometimes called “cliff hangers” with the heroes driving over a cliff or a train coming and some young beauty being tied to the railroad tracks.  In the summer movies were shown outside in the field next to the Y at night. I think it was called the Bonfire Theatre. The Y.M.C.A. had its own boy’s football team. Boys used to swim in the nude in the swimming pool. One day, some of the boys didn’t get the message that it was visiting day at the pool and I can still remember the shock on their faces when they realized their naked little bodies had an audience.

YMCA on Hampton Ave.

Up until about 1955 there was a small farm on the northeast corner of Marcil and Monkland Avenues, complete with chickens and a cow. Cote St. Luc Road eventually turned into a dirt road back then and there were a number of riding stables. There was a large public vegetable garden on Grand Boulevard. Probably a holdover from WW2 when there was rationing. There were empty lots between some of the houses. Hampstead had a golf course and acres of empty land around it. The creek that ran through the empty land was nick named Sheik River. There was an unwritten rule that houses in Hampstead were not to be sold to Jewish people.

At the beginning of the decade some homes had ice boxes instead of fridges. The iceman would deliver ice using large tongs directly to the top of the customer’s ice box. He would place a rag on his shoulder before resting the block there. At one time there was an ice storage shack next to an apartment building at the corner of Harvard Avenue and Cote St. Luc Road.

Pom Bakers delivered bread in little green trucks to homes throughout Montreal. They also made the tastiest little raspberry and lemon tarts.

About once a year an old dishevelled guy would come by with his homemade knife sharpening cart.

In the winter, the snow blowing trucks would come by in the early evening. Once in a while, what looked like toothpicks, were all that was left of a misplaced toboggan. Some of us boys hopped cars in the winter which we did by sneaking up behind a car at a stop sign and hanging onto the bumper until the next corner. It was kind of like water skiing. Hitting a manhole cover could be a hazard.



NDG snowstorm

Not all families owned a car and hardly any family had two cars. Some fathers took the 101, 102, 103, or 104 bus to get to work. Most young boys were fascinated by where the gas cap was located on some cars. It could be in the fin by the tailights or behind the lisence plate. Gas stations had names like Shell, Supertest, Esso, White Rose, Fina, and B/A (British/American). I once stole the Jeep steering wheel from the B/A gas station at the corner of Cote St. Luc and Somerled. My brother made me give it back hoping for a reward I think. It was on this same corner that John Ferguson, the Montreal Canadiens hockey player, years later gave me the finger while I was hitchhiking.

There weren’t many ways for a kid to make a buck in the fifties. You might wait fruitlessly for hours at Hampstead Golf course, hoping to caddy for a golfer. Sometimes bigger boys would turn up and threaten us with bodily harm if we didn’t let them get picked first. Delivering newspapers like The Monitor, The Star or the Gazette, in the dark or in ice storms was not exactly a treat. There was a set of cards held together by a ring with the customers’ names on them. I was always forgetting to punch the card and sooner or later I would be short on what was owed the newspaper. I wasn’t exactly reliable with change in my pockets. One dark early morning, I walked into the Diamond Taxi stand on Girouard Avenue to warm up for a bit and was a bit confused when I encountered the first lesbian dyke I had ever seen. The going rate back then for shoveling someone’s walk back then after a snowstorm was a quarter.

Diamond Taxi driver.

The guy in charge of the summer swimming program at the indoor pool at West Hill High School was Nev Thornton who taught technical drawing and coached football at West Hill. Two of the lifeguards for a few years were Scott and Bill Conrod. I once had my bathing suit pulled down for a laugh by a guy named Jimmy McKean at that pool. He later played pro football in the CFL and was an umpire in the American Baseball League for many years.

When I was small, I was taken to a store on Monkland Avenue called Tom’s, which was known in the neighbourhood for its wide selection of model kits. In the back of the store, through a curtain, was a barbershop run by older duffers who wore smocks. Later, I would get my hair cut at Roland’s on Cote St. Luc Road and Melrose Avenue. You could get a crew cut, a Hollywood, a brush cut or a razor cut there. Next door to Roland’s was Bob Lunney’s Sporting Goods. For a while, one summer, Bob would pay me about 50 cents to watch the place for the afternoon. Next to the sporting goods store was Bellman’s, partly a pharmacy and partly a restaurant. For a number of years a Mr, Speers ran the restaurant. He also drove taxi. I once spotted him buying his donuts at Woolworths. Mr. Speers right hand man was a guy named Stan who was a student at West Hill. Stan could get about 20 slices out of a tomato. I know. I watched him. Bellman’s was a West Hill High hang out for many years. Back in the day I was involved in more than one fight outside those doors. Whatever happened to cherry cokes?

In the early sixties they built the Protestant School Board building behind West Hill High by Draper Avenue and Cote St. Luc Road. For years the site was the dilapidated remains of an old tennis club. I think Monkland Tennis Club on Royal Avenue dates back to the early 1930s. Down the street from the tennis club is LCC (Lower Canada College). There were also public tennis courts on Hampton Avenue.In the early 1950s I remember seeing some kids from Holland playing tennis on the street on Harvard Avenue.



Monkland Tennis Club 1930s

Every winter the ice rink boards were set up and Terrebonne Park. A local kid named Robin Burns got his start here and later went on to a short NHL career before he became a successful businessman manufacturing hockey equipment. On Saturdays, British types would turn up behind West Hill High to play rugby. The wives would sometimes sit on the car roofs. We played a lot of scrub baseball on that field back then. Trenholme Park was where the N.D.G. Maple Leafs junior football team played. In the 1960s they made it to the national finals a few times.

In the 1950s, Steinberg’s on Monkland Avenue was where most of our mother’s bought their groceries. If we just needed a loaf of bread, or a quart of milk, my mother might send me off to get what was needed at the N.D.G Market which was located at the corner of Somerled and Wilson Avenues. For a number of years the store had huge posters on the wall of black guys loading a banana boat. I was sitting on a railing near this store with some other boys when I was about five years old when an older boy told us about the rudiments of sex. I can’t remember if I said “You’ve got be kidding?” The N.D.G. Market is where I first bought some beer. I was about 16 and three of us got drunk behind West Hill. One guy went a little nuts. I can’t recall if it was Molson’s, Dow, Carling O’Keefe, or Labatt’s.

In the fifities, fast food chains didn’t exist. If you were a kid, and you wanted to eat some junk like candy, you knew where to find it. The same places sold other things that kids wanted like yo-yos, comics, and toys. Nickle’s on Monkland Avenue was known for its coloured rabbit’s paw key chains. You could also get a sugary donut and Grapette soft drink there. Other candy stores on Monkland Avenue were Tom’s Monkland Tobacco) and Dexters.

The one “joint” I remember the most was a place called Harry’s which was almost next door to the Shara Zion Synagogue where Cote St. Luc Road meets Somerled Avenue. Harry’s was a dump. However, it have a sign that said “Meet the eliite at Harry’s.” Harry’s had a small lunch counter where his friends would hang out and a couple of booths. It had one of those soft drink coolers that was full of cold water and you had to guide your selection along a rail to get your bottle of pop out. Nesbitt’s Orange, Orange Crush, Spruce Beer, Hire’s Root Beer, 7-Up, Cream Soda, Gurd's Ginger Ale. Coca-Cola in pale green bottles. Harry’s also had a juke box and a pinball machine which possibly was disconcerting to conservative parents. In the front window, Harry’s always had a display that often went past its due date. Fireworks and Santa Claus were the two themes.

If we needed clothes and our mothers didn’t want to take the long bus ride downtown we were usually dragged off to Snowden that was a twenty minute walk away. There were clothing shops along Queen Mary Road including a Morgan’s department store. There was also a Woolworth’s which was called the “5 and 10 Cent Store.” Woolworth’s had a long lunch counter with pictures on the wall behind and above the counter that depicted things that were on the menu. Whatever happened to open faced chicken sandwiches with gravy?

As I wrote earlier, there were no fast food chains back then, but that doesn’t mean there was any shortage of places with very tasty food. There were delicatessens around where WASPs like me would become addicted to Jewish food. Smoked meat, mock chicken, karnatzel. Bar-B-Q chicken could be found at the Chalet Bar-B-Q on Sherbrooke Street or the Cote St. Luc Bar-B-Q. They used to use this really crinkly cellophane paper to wrap the chicken up with and the best fries were always kind of soggy. Over on Decarie Boulevard, south of Snowden and near Blue Bonnets horse track, there was a strip of drive-in restaurants on the left hand side of the street including The Bonfire, Miss Montreal and Orange Julop. On the other side of Decarie Boulevard was Ruby Foos that was kind of an Americanized version of a Chinese restaurant and favourite spot for the three martini business types at lunch and Jewish people who wanted to see and be seen in the evening. A block or two away, Magic Tom did his tricks at Piazza Tomasso.

Pretty well everyone I grew up with, at one time or other, took the #17 streetcar  down Decarie Boulevard and out to Cartierville and Belmont Park. (Streetcars also ran along Queen Mary Road, Monkland Avenue, and Sherbrooke Street.) Belmont Park was at the top of every kid’s wish list. (Granby Zoo was probably a distant second). The rides, like The Wild Mouse, The Whirl-A-Way, the Salt and Pepper, the giant rollers coaster, and the Magic Carpet Ride left a few weak kneed. Cotton candy and the smell of fried onions. The house of mirrors. The laughing fortune teller. The sound of most people speaking French. We couldn’t have imagined more fun.



#17 streetcar




Belmont Park

Back in the day nobody wore a bicycle helmet. There was no such thing. If we were thirsty and not close to home we would get a drink from the tap at the side of a stranger’s house. For some of us, if we were gone all day, our parents weren’t phoning the cops. We never thought we were being poisoned because we liked rock and roll. The Hardy Boy books were kind of like literature.  The older we got the further we ventured. Usually on our bikes. Some of us discovered things like Chief Poking Fire’s fort, the caves near the tracks below Trenholme Park, climbing the outside of St. Joseph’s Oratory, or seeing the Orwellian kind of goings on at the construction of the St. Lawrence Sea Way.

We told the guy behind the counter at Val’s Bowling Alley and pool hall on Decarie Boulevard (before it moved to Cavendish Boulevard and became Rose Bowl Lanes) that yes, we were 16, even though we weren’t much taller than the cues, and watched as he shook his head and gave us the pool balls anyway.

We went from Dick and Jane, and Sally, and Spot, and Puff, and Uncle Zeke who baked potatoes on a stack of burning leaves, to the Hampstead Hops, to our first crappy job. In no time it seemed like it was all over and then…..most of us left town.
And some of us ended up in odd places....



Vernal, Utah jail 1972