THANKS for stopping by, I do my best to acknowledge when someone leaves a comment,you do not have to be a member here & everyone is welcome.
Ps: This site is monitored but not actively posting on a regular basis. Mostly these are stories & some photos saved from a defunct site known as Verdun Connections which was on MSN Groups initially then on a social network called Multiply.
Over the years I try to wish everyone who surfs by, message of Season's Greetings, which I interpet as saying Merry Christmas to all & of course a Happy New Year.........I came across this youtube video of some young people doing their own version of Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah ,they have inserted their own lyrics, but have stayed true to the song itself. I prefer the original:
I am not a religious character but I like the song, maybe you will too......perhaps it is the time of year to listen to it. You Decide: Cheers ! & Merry Christmas have a safe holiday season & appreciate your family & friends........................LesF
.......and here is the original lyrics performed by Susan Boyle ...pretty good version
Singer known for hits like With a Little Help From My Friends cover died after lung cancer battle
CBC NewsPosted: Dec 22, 2014 1:43 PM ET Last Updated: Dec 22, 2014 7:54 PM ET
British blues and rock singer Joe Cocker, performing on at the Montreux Jazz Festival, in Switzerland in 2002, has died at age 70, his agent confirmed on Dec. 22, 2014. Cocker is known for hit songs including You Are So Beautiful and Up Where We Belong. (Fabrice Coffrini/EPA)
Joe Cocker, the legendary British blues rock singer known for such hits as You Are So Beautiful and his 1968 cover of the Beatles' With a Little Help from My Friends, has died at age 70, his agent says.
BBC reported Monday that Barrie Marshall confirmed Cocker's death.
The Sheffield-born musician died after a "hard-fought battle with small cell lung cancer," said his record label, Sony.
Known for his gravelly voice and charismatic stage performances, Cocker shot to fame in the 1960s when his version of With a Little Help From My Friends made it to No. 1 on the charts. The song was released by the Beatles in 1967 on their critically acclaimed Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band studio album.
Joe Cocker was one of the star acts at the outdoor lovefest known as Woodstock in 1969. He sang his hit version of the Beatles' With a Little Help from My Friends. (Canadian Press)
Cocker's 1969 performance of the song at Woodstock has become one of the most iconic moments to come out of the legendary American rock music festival. Cocker's nostalgic version was also used as the theme song to the hit television series The Wonder Years in the 1980s and 1990s.
Cocker's cover was 'mind blowing,' says McCartney
In a statement Monday, Paul McCartney remembered hearing Cocker's cover of the song he and John Lennon co-wrote for Ringo Starr and finding it "just mind blowing," a "soul anthem."
"I was forever grateful for him for doing that," McCartney said. "I knew him through the years as a good mate, and I was so sad to hear that he had been ill and really sad to hear today that he had passed away."
The ballad You Are So Beautiful, with Cocker's voice cracking on the final emotional note, was a Top 10 hit in 1975. He reached the top of the charts in the 1980s with the duet Up Where We Belong, with American singer-songwriter Jennifer Warnes.
The platinum-certified, Grammy Award-winning track also appeared in the 1982 movie An Officer and a Gentlemen,starring Richard Gere and Debra Winger.
Cocker also had hits with Randy Newman's song, You Can Leave Your Hat On and When the Night Comes.
He recorded 40 albums in his four-decade career and influenced the work of many other artists.
Canadian rocker Bryan Adams turned to Twitter to express his grief over losing his "good friend."
"You were one of the best rock singers EVER," wrote Adams.
Last year, Cocker and his band toured Europe for two months on the heels of his new album, Fire It Up.
Order of British Empire recipient
Cocker, who received an Order of the British Empire for his contribution to music, released 40 albums and continued to tour after the hits stopped. His other popular covers included Feelin' Alright, The Letter and Cry Me a River, a song previously recorded by one of Cocker's greatest influences, Ray Charles.
Cocker, outside Buckingham Palace, was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for his services to music in December 2007. (Colin Davey/AFP/Getty)
His voice, at times so worn it seemed in danger of shredding, was just one part of his legend. No Cocker fan could forget his intense, twitchy stage presence, his arms flailing, his hips stretching, his face contorting.
Among those watching was actor John Belushi, whose expert imitation became a feature of his early National Lampoon shows and eventually a part of popular history when he joined Cocker in 1976 for a duet of Feelin' Alright on Saturday Night Live.
Ran children's educational foundation
Cocker was born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, and was singing with local bands by the time he was a teenager. His early groups included Vance Arnold and the Avengers and the Grease Band, which backed him on With A Little Help From My Friends.
Cocker moved to Crawford, Col., a town of fewer than 500 people, in the early 1990s. He and his wife, Pam, ran a children's educational foundation — the Cocker Kids Foundation — that raised funds for the town and schools, and ran the Mad Dog Cafe for several years in town, said Tom Wills, publisher of The North Fork Merchant Herald, a local community newspaper.
Wills said Cocker bought about 40 acres of property and built a hillside mansion, which he called Mad Dog Ranch, when he moved to Colorado.
A group of Cocker's friends gathered Monday at community radio station KVNF to play Cocker's songs.
"He had a long battle with cancer. We're trying to do a little tribute for him," said Bob Pennetta, a real estate agent and board member of the Cocker Kids Foundation.
Cocker is survived by his wife, Pam; a brother; a step daughter and two grandchildren. A private memorial is planned. In lieu of flowers, memorial donations may be made to The Cocker Kids' Foundation, P.O. Box 404, Crawford, CO. 81415.
Gazette arts columnist Brendan Kelly introduces filmmaker Claude Demers, who talks about his new documentary about verdun, Where I’m From, in Montreal, Thursday December 18, 2014. Thumbnail attached.
But his latest documentary, Where I’m From (D’où je viens), is much more personal. It’s a look back at his childhood growing up in Verdun, coupled with his own impressionistic snapshot of the city today. Where I’m From opens on Boxing Day at Excentris in its original French-language version with English subtitles.
The National Film Board of Canada project started from the idea “that I didn’t know where I come from exactly,” Demers said. “I was adopted … it’s more like a personal quest. It’s a mosaic film. It’s about this neighbourhood, so there’s a realistic part. At the same time, there’s a lyrical part. It’s more about my quest, to find out where I come from.”
But that contemporary fare is balanced by Demers’s heart-on-his-sleeve narration that has him talking about his often melancholic early years.
I don’t remember anything … except the rage and violence.”
It’s as if I have no history,” Demers says in the film. “Who am I really?” — Claude Demers
He speaks in the narration of “this incredible sadness.” Of his teen years, he says: “I feel a deep void within me and a desire to be elsewhere.” At another point, he looks back again, saying: “I don’t remember anything … except the rage and violence.”
In other words, the film is anything but a typical documentary looking at a city and its history. It’s clear that much of this questioning comes from the fact Demers is adopted and that he has always been curious to find out more about his own roots.
Claude Demers began to move away from fiction filmmaking to documentaries after meeting his biological mother eight or nine years ago.
Phil Carpenter / Montreal Gazette
“If you watch the movie, it looks like I suffered a lot, but it’s a condensed version,” Demers said. “It’s not like I was suffering every day. I have identity issues.” He traces the genesis of this trilogy of feature documentaries to meeting his biological mother eight or nine years ago. That’s when he moved away from fiction filmmaking to documentaries.
“I was working on different projects, a big, big feature, and it was so complicated,” Demers said. “During this period, I met my biological mother and it changed a lot of things in my life. It grounded me. And from that point, I didn’t want to make fiction like I was doing before.”
Barbiers came directly out of meeting his biological mother. She told him his biological father was Italian, which prompted him to focus on these barbers, many of whom were Italian.
His life as an adopted kid is addressed more directly in Where I’m From. Talking to Demers, I get the sense it was a cathartic experience for him making the film. He lives in Mile End, but he actually rented an apartment in Verdun for three months to really get a feel for the place and he spent a lot of time hanging out, at the McDonald’s just round the corner from the Verdun Auditorium, and at Dunkin’ Donuts.
Push the envelope
“When I arrived in Verdun, I said — ‘Where do I start?’ Well every time I was going to Verdun, I was going to the St. Lawrence River. So I said — ‘There’s something there.’ And after a few months, there were five topics that were really important. Childhood. The relationship with nature. Faith. The words. And struggle. That was my guideline.”
And most important, he wanted to take some chances with the film, to push the envelope.
“I think I found a way (to talk about my life) in a more evocative way, in a more poetic way. I’m quite happy. People say they recognize themselves in my film. Recognize when they were kids. That was my challenge — to be personal and universal at the same time. The challenge was to be lyrical and realistic.”
Where I’m From (D’où je viens) opens at Excentris Friday.
It’s another cold night in December when the lights go out over Ash Park.
Except for a faint glare from the nearby rail yards, the park, the children and the skating rink are all cloaked in darkness. It’s time to shuffle home, for the kids to retire to the rowhouses on Ash Ave., Liverpool St. and the other narrow roads that slither through Point St-Charles.
But for Shawn O’Donnell and his chums, the night is just beginning. The boys break a padlock affixed to the park’s fuse box, turn the lights back on and continue playing hockey. Now the dull buzz of electricity returns, bathing the ice in artificial light. The boys glide across the rink for a few more hours, chasing the puck as night turns into morning.
O’Donnell says this was a common scene during his years as a teenager in 1970s Point St-Charles — the working-class Irish neighbourhood on Montreal’s southern peninsula (the area is affectionately known as “The Point” to locals).
“After a while, they stopped locking the fuse box because they knew we were going to break the lock anyway,” said O’Donnell, now the headmaster of Sacred Heart School of Montreal. “We’d play until 2 in the morning on weekends. When we were done, we’d clean the ice with our shovels, turn off the lights and walk home. … We were troublemakers but no one ever told us to stop, we never got in trouble. Well, not for that, anyway.”
Hockey may be “Canada’s game” but it’s among the nation’s least accessible sports. It costs less to put a child through competitive horseback riding than it does to fund one season of hockey, according to a 2014 study released by Solutions Research Group of Toronto. Youth hockey costs Canadian families $1,666 per season, per kid, in fees and equipment—a figure that doesn’t include extras like the travel and lodging costs associated with tournament play.
And yet, in The Point, generations of children were able to lace up their skates and compete in organized hockey even if they couldn’t afford it.
By and large, they were from poor families, lived in small crowded homes in a neighbourhood that was often overlooked by city hall. But through a seemingly endless sequence of fundraising drives, their parents cobbled together enough money to field dozens of youth hockey teams each year between 1951 and 1991 (there were “A” “B” and “C” teams for every age level).
They played a relentless, rough-and-tumble brand of hockey that resulted in both bench-clearing brawls and city championships.
They wore their neighbourhood’s green, white and gold jerseys on outdoor rinks and in the few arenas that existed in southwest Montreal.
They called themselves Leo’s Boys.
A unique neighbourhood
Years after he competed in youth hockey, a friend of O’Donnell asked him why he’d been so fearless on the ice.
“Fearless?” O’Donnell recounted, quizzically. “I was scared to death out there.
“When we played the big tough teams I was always looking over my shoulder. I never showed it because I was more afraid of what my teammates would have thought if I didn’t go in the corners,” he continued. “You were expected to play a certain kind of hockey when you had that Leo’s Boys sweater on. You had to be tough and you had to be working class when you came to the rink. Whether you were a star or not, there was absolutely no, no tolerance for guys dogging it. It was a culture that didn’t accept that. The worst thing that could happen to you, far worse than being hurt, would be to have a teammate call you out and say, ‘Hey, O’Donnell, you better get in the corner and get that friggin’ puck.’ ”
Leonard Johnston says he was 13 or 14 when, during a game against the rival Ville Émard Hurricanes, an on-ice brawl quickly spiralled out of control.
“I was skating across the blue line and I had my head down so a kid just punched me in the eyeball,” Johnston said, smiling. “I guess I should have kept my head up. … We fought but by the time I got to the penalty box, it hurt so bad I could feel my heart beating in my eye. … So I grabbed him and cracked him in the head, we fought again.
Leonard Johnston’s photograph of one of the Leo’s Boys teams from the early ’70s.
Graham Hughes / Montreal Gazette
“There were skirmishes across the ice but then it spread to the crowd, to the benches, the coaches, outside the arena,” said Johnston, now a manager of housekeeping at the Montreal Children’s Hospital. “Pretty soon, they called the police. … It was pretty much forgotten the next time we played (the Hurricanes). There were no hard feelings, things just got out of hand sometimes.”
On at least three occasions, O’Donnell says, his team was escorted out of St-Henri’s Gadbois Arena by police.
“The rivalry we had with St-Henri was unlike anything I’d ever seen, I’m going to get in trouble for saying this, but they were just as tough as us and it made us crazy,” he said. “We were always warned about bench-clearing brawls, the refs and our coaches would tell us to cool it. But then one of your teammates would be in trouble and someone would say, ‘Screw it’ and jump in to help them. It was inevitable.”
Perhaps it’s the claustrophobic geography of southwest Montreal that bred such stirring rivalries between nearby neighbourhoods.
The Point, for instance, is hemmed in by man-made boundaries. The Lachine Canal cuts off the district’s northwest flank, creating a shallow moat that wards off marauding children from the warehouses that line St-Henri, Little Burgundy and Griffintown.
To the east, the vast Canadian National Railway yards loop around Wellington St. — its rusted steel fences, machine shops and freight trains blocking locals from accessing the nearby riverbank.
Finally, there is that elevated span of highway connecting downtown Montreal to the Champlain Bridge. The structure — a mound of dirt, grass and concrete— stands between The Point and Verdun. It is the last piece of a border that isolates Point St-Charles from the rest of Montreal.
From the moment they were erected, these borders, it would seem, had a dual effect.
On one hand, they helped foster a sense of nationhood in Point St-Charles. The neighbourhood had its own grocery stores and movie theatre, there were social clubs like the United Irish Society, a half-dozen churches and nearly twice as many taverns. The Point even developed its own dialect—someone acting crazy was “whacked” or “daft,” boys and men were often referred to as “lads” and there is a sort of Irish-French hybrid pronunciation of placenames (LeBer Park, for instance, is often pronounced Lee-Burr Park).
There was a game on every street, on every corner, in every laneway. You just had to pick up a stick from the snowbank and jump in. — Kevin Figsby
The people who lived within its boundaries were largely English-speaking descendants of poor Irish Catholic immigrants. But there were also Polish Catholics, Irish Protestants, Italians and a large Francophone community — who, though they may have spoken a different language, shared in local rites and traditions such as Leo’s Boys.
“We had some Francophones from our side of The Point who barely spoke English. But when Leo’s Boys played the French-speaking teams like St-Henri and that, and there was a bench-clearing brawl, the Francophones on our team were every bit as Irish as we were,” O’Donnell said. “Same goes for the Italians and the Polish kids. We were all Leo’s Boys.”
Perhaps there was one great equalizer in The Point — virtually everyone was poor, or as former Leo’s Boy Howie Myers put it, “One paycheque away from having nothing.”
In those days, the kids’s parents, often both parents, worked in the nearby textile mills, at the docks, in the CN machine shops. They were rarely afforded anything resembling job security.
O’Donnell’s mother — who raised six children — worked at the General Foods plant and had to resign every time she gave birth.
“She would work until the last possible minute, until she was just about to give birth,” O’Donnell said. “Then she would have to re-apply for her job when she wanted to return. There was no maternity leave, she had no rights. She kept losing her seniority and having to ask for her job back. She could have retired a lot younger if they’d treated her fairly, but that’s the world a lot of us lived in.”
The other effect of the neighbourhood’s rigid boundaries is that they limited the amount of useable public space. With the post-war baby boom at its zenith in the 1960s, Kevin Figsby said the streets were overrun with children.
During midwinter days, Figsby’s father would send him around the corner to buy heating oil for the family home. Figsby, not quite a teenager yet, dragged a sled along because the oilcan was too heavy to carry across the snow. Almost every trip, however, was sidetracked by an impromptu hockey match.
“There was a game on every street, on every corner, in every laneway. You just had to pick up a stick from the snowbank and jump in,” said Figsby, a former Leo’s Boy and now the head coach of Concordia University’s men’s hockey team. “So sometimes those trips to get heating oil took a few hours instead of a few minutes.”
Of all the pickup games in every alley and corner of The Point, few were more coveted than the one in Ash Park. During the ’60s and ’70s, the outdoor rink was one of only two refrigerated ice surfaces in Montreal.
The ice was hard, smooth and perfectly level even after rain or sleet would batter the other rinks in Point St-Charles.
A hockey net sits outside the snow-covered hockey rink at LeBer Park in Point St- Charles on Dec. 19, 2014. The park, also known as Ash Park, was a popular destination for outdoor skaters in the 1970s.
Phil Carpenter / Montreal Gazette
“God knows where they got the money for the artificial rink, I don’t know if the boys in The Point threatened somebody at city hall,” said O’Donnell. “Because the ice was good, the rink was always crowded. We learned to play in limited space, in confined quarters. There might be five or six games going on at the same time. Some might be going the full length of the rink, some might be going sideways and some might be going diagonally.”
Hockey, like so many team sports, is a game about space. Attackers want to break away from the pack, to find some sheet of open ice for just long enough to get a quality shot at the net. Defenders seek to narrow that space, to close in on their opponents, press them against the boards in hopes of forcing a panicked reaction out of an otherwise calm player.
It can be hard enough for players to find that open ice on a standard size rink, with nine other skaters in the mix. But in Ash Park, with as many as 30 kids playing at once, children learned to embrace the suffocating elements of the game.
“Those outdoor games made us used to congestion, to banging guys against the boards and coming away with the puck,” O’Donnell said. “These were full-contact games, by the way. We hit hard, the older kids hit us hard, but you certainly didn’t want to be the one to bring a helmet or to bring equipment with you. You didn’t want to look weak.”
In those days, only the Leo’s Boys “A” programs — the elite youth teams — competed indoors at the tiny St-Charles Arena on Grand Trunk St. Every lower tier played at Ash Park, hoping that enough strong performances would cause the “A” level coaches to notice them, giving them a shot at playing games in arenas against St-Charles, St-Henri or the Ville Émard Hurricanes — the latter of which produced players including Hall of Famer Mario Lemieux, former Canadien J.J. Daigneault and Canadiens general managerMarc Bergevin.
“Leo’s Boys was the centre of our lives; we would go to the arena to see a friend’s brother play and stick around for more hockey after that,” Figsby said. “So to be able to play for the “A” team. That’s something you wore like a badge. It was a great honour … The culture of the southwest, the working-class mentality made us insanely competitive. Some of our coaches weren’t that knowledgeable about the game, but the compete level they instilled in us was incredible.”
Said Johnston: “We played to win. Not too many of us backed down. … Every kid in the neighbourhood wanted to wear that jersey. It made you proud to be from Point St-Charles at a time when a lot of people had nasty things to say about the area.”
Leonard Johnston at his home in Point St-Charles. He still has his Leo’s Boys sweater.
Graham Hughes / Montreal Gazette
Raising the money
When he was in charge of Leo’s Boys, Neil Myers’s living room doubled as a stockpile for discarded skates, sticks, helmets and pads of every size and description.
It wasn’t as though he had room to spare. Myers, his wife and their four children lived in a three-bedroom apartment on Charon St. But Myers, a truck driver by trade, crammed the equipment into his home anyway. He collected it because children whose families couldn’t afford to buy equipment knew they could depend on his pile of hockey gear. All they had to do was knock on Myers’s door, no questions asked.
“We didn’t judge the families who had no money because we knew we were all one paycheque away from ending up there too,” said Howie Myers, Neil’s son. “There wasn’t a set cost to be in Leo’s Boys. You gave what you could and if that meant you couldn’t give anything, we found a way to make it work.”
“Pay what you can” was the ethos of Leo’s Boys since the Mell family founded it in 1951.
Joe Mell was a figure of near mythic proportions in The Point. He served in the Special Forces during the Korean War, graduated from McGill University, he’d been a procedures analyst at Canadian Pacific railroad, a car salesman, a failed candidate for political office and the owner of Mell Motors Registered — a used-car lot on Bridge St.
His most enduring legacy, however, will be that he shepherded Leo’s Boys, during its early years, into a local sports dynasty, putting together football and baseball teams as well as hockey leagues. The Mell family named the sports club after of Joe’s brother Leo Mell, who died of leukemia in the 1950s.
But even with the Mells’ financial backing, Leo’s Boys drew much of its funding from the hordes of Point children who hustled for every nickel and dime. Kevin Figsby remembers spending hours outside the Autostade stadium during Alouettes football games.
“If there was an event at the Autostade or a hockey game at the Forum, you better believe we were out there raising money,” said Figsby. “We did it all: we sold chocolate, we held can drives, we sold coupon books.”
Said Myers, “They would also hold bingos and lottos that may not have been 100-per-cent legal. We did what we had to back then.”
Perhaps because outsiders viewed the neighbourhood as a working-class slum, O’Donnell says, it was a point of pride to outfit the neighbourhood’s hockey teams with professional-looking uniforms.
This, of course, included the green, white and gold hockey sweaters, matching socks but also the little extras: jackets, tuques and scarves adorned in the Leo’s Boys logo — a three-leaf clover.
Leonard Johnston’s memorabilia from his Leo’s Boys days include these team crests.
Graham Hughes / Graham Hughes/The Gazette
When they left The Point to play away games, Johnston recalls, the children had their hair combed, wore their Sunday best and proudly sported the neighbourhood’s colours — along with its high expectations.
But just getting enough money to pay for that bus trip and buy those jerseys and jackets was, in itself, a small feat of magic.
“The guys who got us our jackets, they were hustlers, they could make things happen,” O’Donnell said. “Some nights we’d get the jackets the night before we left for the Boxing Day tournament. The guys would say ‘Don’t worry, they’re coming.’ But these guys are wheeling and dealing, looking for donors, looking for sponsors, trying to shake guys down. ‘Come on, these kids need jackets.’
“We’d be calling the coaches and they’d say, ‘You’ll get the jackets, just stop calling.’ Then, on Christmas Eve, we’d get the call: ‘Come to the boys’ club, your jackets are in! Try them on.’ ”
A changing neighbourhood
By the 1990s, minor hockey in Quebec had evolved passed the days when it was one neighbourhood’s kids vs. another’s.
Gradually, Leo’s Boys were phased out and replaced by district teams, organized under the supervision of city employees.
By then, the neighbourhood, too, had undergone drastic changes. At the height of its population boom in the 1950s, there were about 30,000 people packed into Point St-Charles.
But as Canada’s manufacturing sector underwent dramatic changes, a great exodus from the city began.
The Northern Electric plant was one of the first to go down in 1974, taking 4,700 jobs with it. Then the Redpath Sugar refinery moved to Toronto two years later. A terrible domino effect was underway and as plants and foundries continued to close, entire sections of The Point were nearly wiped off the map.
Fast-forward to the late 1980s and there only about 13,000 people left in the neighbourhood. Over the past decade, there’s been something of a resurgence in the area, with new condo developments springing up where warehouses and shops used to be. The gentrifiers have brought with them a new tax base for the city, businesses on Centre St. — where entire blocks of real-estate were boarded up just a few years ago — and renewed energy to the community.
Ash St. in Point St-Charles in April 2007. The neighbourhood is undergoing some gentrification.
Gordon Beck / Montreal Gazette file photo
There are still subsidized housing projects, apartment co-ops and community outreach groups, but it seems almost impossible to imagine the neighbourhood banding together now as it once did to outfit a small army of children for organized sports.
“People have always been saying the neighbourhood is changing, I remember during Expo ’67 when they expropriated the shacks in Goose Village, near the Victoria Bridge, our parents generation used to say, ‘The Point is changing, they’re letting all these new people in,’ ” Johnston said.
“Of course it continues to change, a lot of the people we grew up with are in the West Island, on the South Shore or in Ontario now… But we all look back—we even run into people from back then, from the Leo’s Boys—and we’ll never forget. There were a lot of great memories.”
