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.
"Congratulations" to Dolly (Sabby to us few) Dennis who has a book coming out very soon ,the story is set in Montreal between the years of 1967 & 1970..........( I imagine we can all get into that timeframe) Dolly has been working hard for years & finally she will see the reality of her first novel ,as it is being published as you can read here an excerpt from the Canadian Authours of Alberta website:
http://www.canauthorsalberta.ca/uploads/files/BLMar12.pdf (just type in Dennis in the search window & it will bring you to the following ....... as printed here below,but checkout the whole site if of interest to future talents,it may be of use ................let's support our friend & ex-Montrealer & Buy Her Book,or at least read it ..........I know I will Dolly Dennis’ first novel, Loddy-Dah, has been picked up by Toronto publish-er Guernica Editions. The book is set in Montreal between 1967 starting with EXPO 67 and ends in 1970 with the FLQ Crisis and the War Measures Act. Loddy-Dah explores issues of self-identity, self-image, illusion, delusion and self-acceptance.
Here is the cover as promised: congrats again Dolly. I will post a photo of the cover as soon as I see one,along with the isbn number so you can borrow it from a library or buy your own copy from your favourite local bookstore.............Congrats again Dolly (for never giving up) ~LesF
ps: Dolly is an ex-Montrealer & a talented Verdun character,who is a writer living in Alberta.
Ahh!......... the over regulated police like state of La Belle Province,you know- where they have a police force, for everything (any similarity to the old communist countries is purely coincidental) - lol Common sense & more importantly Common Decency is severly lacking in the heads of overzealous power nuts working for the Bus Company. A real nice story of the ongoing lunacy of our once great city.It sure isn't the La Belle Province ,that ; Je me souviens................lol the following stoy is from the Gazette.
MONTREAL — More than a week after a mother and her 2-year-old son were kicked off a city bus and fined $219 for not having exact change, the STM says it has still not interviewed the bus driver involved in the Verdun incident.
Pauline Tantost, 24, who has since filed a complaint with the STM, was fined last Friday evening after attempting to pay the bus fare with a $5 bill.
STM spokesperson Amélie Régis said an investigation is underway and that all employees involved will be interrogated.
Tantost was headed home last Friday after spending five hours at the Montreal Children’s Hospital with her toddler, Xavier, who was suffering from an infection.
When she boarded the bus at 10 p.m., she asked the driver how much she owed. After looking in her bag for money, she told the driver she didn’t have $3 in change — only a $5 bill.
She offered the bus driver the money, but he refused, saying he only accepted exact change. He warned Tantost of being fined by STM investigators if she stayed on board without obtaining a proof of payment.
“I didn’t care, I just wanted to pay the bus fare and get home as soon as possible,” Tantost said in a phone interview.
She stayed on the bus and sat down behind the driver, with her $5 in hand.
A few minutes later, an STM vehicle rolled up. Two inspectors boarded the bus and asked to see her ticket.
“I left the bus on my own because I felt bad, I couldn’t stop crying, so I didn’t want everyone seeing me like that,” she said.
After the bus left, leaving Tantost on the sidewalk with her son, STM officers handed her a $219 fine for riding without a ticket. They told her she could wait for the next bus and show the fine as a proof of payment.
“I kept crying, I was really sad. Disappointed. I didn’t think something like this could happen,” she said.
Instead of waiting for the next bus, Tantost decided to walk home from the bus stop, which was 20 minutes away from her house in Verdun.
Although the STM has not yet spoken to the bus driver, officials have told Tantost that it wasn’t the driver who called STM investigators.
“It was just bad luck,” Tantost said.
But Wayne Larsen, who was aboard the bus when the incident occurred, is suspicious.
“To me, it looked like it was an ambush because these guys got on and targeted her right away,” Larsen said.
Larsen said that during the inspection last Friday evening, another passenger had issues with her ticket, but was let go with a warning.
“There was another person on the bus — an older woman — and they let her go. They didn’t take her off the bus or anything,” Larsen said.
Régis said Friday that she couldn’t give the specific number of random inspections that are conducted every year by STM investigators. ctonthat@montrealgazette.com
:Here is a youtube of the old advertising campaign from MTC
"Congratulations" to Dolly
(Sabby to us few) Dennis who has a book coming out very soon ,the story is set
in Montreal between the years of 1967 & 1970..........( I imagine we
can all get into that timeframe) Dolly has been working hard for years &
finally she will see the reality of her first novel ,as it is being published
as you can read here an excerpt from the Canadian Authours of Alberta website: http://www.canauthorsalberta.ca/uploads/files/BLMar12.pdf (just type in Dennis in the search window &
it will bring you to the following ....... as printed here below,but checkout
the whole site if of interest to future talents,it may be of use
................let's support our friend & ex-Montrealer & Buy
Her Book,or at least read it ..........I know I will Dolly Dennis’
first novel, Loddy-Dah, has been picked up by Toronto publish-er
Guernica Editions. The book is set
in Montreal between 1967 starting with EXPO 67 and ends in 1970 with the FLQ
Crisis and the War Measures Act. Loddy-Dah explores issues of
self-identity, self-image, illusion, delusion and self-acceptance. I will post a photo of the cover as soon as I
see one,along with the isbn number so you can borrow it from a library or buy
your own copy from your favourite local bookstore.............Congrats again
Dolly (for never giving up) ~LesF
ps: Dolly is an ex-Montrealer & a
talented Verdun character,who is a writer living in Alberta.
A great little local project by Kathryn Harvey,with several long time verdun residents. Worth watching,(especially if you were/are from verdun) Cutting, pasting and remembering is a short film shot in the spring of 2008.
Kathryn Harvey, working with local filmmaker and friend Leila Marshy, wanted to capture not only the process of piecing together an oral history,
but the special synergy and joy of doing it in a group
Thank You to all involved,a good effort to remind us of days gone by in Verdun .....Also if nostalgia is your thing you may like this Luc Bourdon film which I posted here in 2010, it is well made from old NFB clips & put together nicely. It is a long film ,so if your interested,grab a coffe (or a case of beer .....lol) and sit back & watch on full screen,you will no doubt remember this Montreal. http://verdunconnections.blogspot.ca/2010/05/memories-of-angels-luc-bourdon-film.html .........................Cheers ! ~ Have Fun & Remember Verdun/Montreal2
MONTREAL - It was the Gagnons who brought them together in Quebec City more than six decades ago, a family that lived on rue des Érables around the corner from the McKenna sisters.
Jean Béliveau, age 19 in the autumn of 1950, was boarding in the McKennas’ home, living in a small third-floor room while his hockey career flourished with the junior-league Quebec Citadels.
The Gagnons, who attended most of the games, told Béliveau: “Jean, you should come out with us on Wednesday. We have a nice girl we’d like you to meet.”
It was over dinner at Lac Beauport’s Manoir St. Castin that Jean Béliveau would be introduced to Élise Couture, “a pretty, bilingual blond (who) knew absolutely nothing about hockey,” as he brightly recalled in his 1994 autobiography.
In time, Élise’s hair would whiten from blond to snow and her knowledge of hockey would grow dramatically, both by interest and necessity.
A shy young woman also would soon learn that much of her life, and every fibre of her husband’s, was the property of an adoring public.
On Thursday evening, over a quiet dinner with their daughter, Hélène, and granddaughters Mylène and Magalie, the Béliveaus will celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary.
Jean and Élise Béliveau exchanged their marriage vows at St. Patrick’s Church in Quebec City on the morning of June 27, 1953. Three months later, Béliveau would join the Canadiens, finally wooed from the senior semi-pro Quebec Aces to begin an illustrious NHL career that shaped him into one of the finest players of all time and its greatest ambassador.
If hockey was Béliveau’s natural calling, there wasn’t a magnetic pull between this man and woman whose marriage 60 years ago instantly produced hockey’s royal couple — a reign that continues to this day.
“I don’t know …” Béliveau said with a laugh, asked this week about love at first sight of his soulmate. “Maybe I had visions that my life wouldn’t be easy and there would have to be a lot of understanding between us two.
“It turned out,” he said, chuckling again, “that I made the right decision. I think Élise and I have done a pretty good job.”
So was Béliveau instantly the life partner for Élise?
“Not really,” she replied with a laugh. “I didn’t know him at all. I thought he was very nice and all that, but there was nothing there at the beginning. But after that, he started calling and calling and we began to go out.”
It wasn’t long before Élise was attending her beau’s games, getting a close-up look at his star quality.
If Élise’s mother was a hockey fan, she doubted the off-ice sincerity of the men who played the game.
“After two months, I asked my mother what she thought of this young man I was bringing home,” Élise told me in a profile of the couple published on Valentine’s Day five years ago.
“She replied: ‘He’s very nice,’ and I said: ‘Well, I’m glad, because he’s a hockey player.’ I hadn’t dared tell her anything until then.”
(Madame Couture probably was less than thrilled that her daughter lost the family dinner bell, brought to one of Béliveau’s Aces games in Chicoutimi as a noisemaker only to have it stolen by an angry fan of the Saguenéens.)
Neither Béliveau nor Élise precisely remember the details of the Christmas 1952 marriage proposal. What was clear was that Le Gros Bill soon would realize a dream of playing for the Canadiens, and that this would happen a few months after the couple’s June 1953 wedding, the society event of the season.
And so they were married on June 27 by Father Leonard Murphy at St. Patrick’s, the parish of the Couture family.
The newlyweds planned to honeymoon in Florida, but never made it south of Virginia Beach, returning to set up their first Montreal apartment on Abercorn Ave. in Town of Mount Royal.
Their daughter, Hélène, was born during the 1957 playoffs, Béliveau in Boston as the Canadiens steamed toward their second of a record five consecutive Stanley Cups.
The couple have been at each other’s side, in sickness and in health, through more than six decades.
On the occasion of his 81st birthday last August, Béliveau suggested that he’s had “a few too many battles” in recent years.
A grand understatement, of course, given a cardiac issue, a cancerous tumour in his neck requiring 35 chemotherapy treatments, abdominal aneurysm surgery and a couple of strokes — all of this following countless injuries he suffered during his 18-season, 1,125-game, award-winning Canadiens career.
Élise has had health scares of her own; the couple even wear his-and-hers pacemakers. But her laugh is robust and you’d need the proverbial team of wild horses to slow her down.
Ten days ago, the Béliveaus drove to Quebec City to celebrate the 94th birthday of Élise’s sister, Rita, in the shadow of the parish (since rebuilt) where the couple was wed.
Thoughts were expressed to Rita this month about her perhaps downsizing into a retirement home.
“I’ve been trying to put that in her head, but my God, she’s Irish, eh?” Élise said, laughing again. “When it’s no, it’s no. There’s no ‘maybe.’ ”
The couple attended a handful of Canadiens games during this lockout-abbreviated season, bookending two guests in their regular seats three rows behind the Montreal bench.
From my media-gallery seat over centre ice, there’s a pregame sense of “now we can begin” when they take their positions, their matching white hair a beacon even seven storeys above the rink.
Sometimes, it’s easier for Béliveau to watch the action from the comfortable, ice-level Salon des Anciens with old friends and teammates; navigating corridors and a few winding stairs to his seat saps his energy and challenges his balance.
It makes no difference whether he’s in the arena or not, of course. Where the great Maurice (Rocket) Richard was the fire-breathing soul of the 1940s and ’50s Canadiens, Jean Béliveau was and remains the conscience of the club.
On Thursday night, dinner conversation will turn to hockey only if restaurant staff and star-struck diners mention it to him.
And they will.
If hockey has been the centrepiece of Jean and Élise Béliveau’s rich, eventful life together, it’s hardly been their sole focus. A diamond anniversary to be quietly celebrated with family will remind the sport’s royal couple of that.
“I’m going to let the girls decide what I’ll eat,” Béliveau joked of his wife, daughter and granddaughters.
“I’m surrounded by four girls. They’ve never aimed me in the wrong direction and this would be a bad time to start, wouldn’t it?” dstubbs@montrealgazette.com
What a terrible end to a real character, Tony Koulakis, Cosmos founder of the NDG famous breakfast joint ( I mean that respectfully) has been murdered.
MONTREAL — Tony Koulakis, the founder of landmark N.D.G. diner Cosmos, was stabbed to death in a St-Laurent home early Saturday morning. Police have arrested his 40-year-old son, who will likely be charged with murder when he appears before a judge later this afternoon.
Koulakis, 86, was stabbed in the upper body around 3:30 a.m. in his Hufford St. apartment in the north-end St-Laurent borough. The victim’s son was arrested in the apartment later that morning.
A family member discovered Koulakis’ body just hours after he bled to death, according to police, who said the relative was checking up on the elderly man.
Neighbours described the suspect as a disturbed, “unnecessarily aggressive” and confrontational man. One neighbour says he was threatened by the 40-year-old and suspects the man may have suffered from some sort of mental illness.
The circumstances around the death, the 12th homicide of the year on the island of Montreal, are undetermined according to police.
Renowned for its greasy breakfasts, Cosmos has been a staple of the west Montreal neighbourhood since it was founded in 1967.
In 2000, Koulakis was the subject of a documentary called Man of Grease, chronicling the life of the Greek-Montrealer who created what many consider an institution in N.D.G. Koulakis immigrated to Montreal from the island of Crete in Greece, where he was born.
In the documentary, patrons of the restaurant recount Koulakis’ sense of humour and his Spartan work ethic. He retired shortly before the film was released and handed the business over to his children.
“(Koulakis) was a really nice guy, an affable man,” a neighbour told The Gazette on the condition of anonymity. “It’s just awful this business, just terrible. Hard to process.”
MONTREAL — I deeply regret how despite being the fourth generation of my family to live in Montreal, I spent my first 21 years growing up in Verdun and LaSalle and did not learn to speak French.
French second-language instruction was very poor in English-language schools in the 1960s. Having a teacher tap on a picture board with a pointer, and prompt the class to repeat words in unison, just didn’t bring the language together for me.
I still remember the collection of voices in my Grade 3 class almost singing: alarm clock, tap, alarm clock, tap, alarm clock (un reveille-matin). And every so often the teacher would bring that long wooden pointer down onto a student’s desk, if the student sitting there had the gall to daydream and look out the window.
I was told in the 1970s that I would never build a career in Quebec with my English-sounding name. But that wasn’t the full reason behind my decision to leave. I decided to leave after the Quebec government said no to my application to become the legal guardian of my younger sister. Even with help and guidance from Naomi, a wonderful social worker with the Verdun Anti-Poverty Association, Quebec still refused my application. I was only 20, and Barb was 14, and the rejection was disappointing.
But they accepted my application in British Columbia, and so I eventually became my sister’s legal guardian there. As a result, I have spent the last 36 years of my life in Victoria, B.C.
Even with all of the natural beauty on Vancouver Island, the good weather, my satisfying career, great friends, colleagues and family, Victoria has never felt quite as comfortable for me in the same way that Montreal did. Home is home.
I miss the excitable arguing and the lively spirit of the place. I miss the diversity of characters, and I miss the directness of people. I even miss the snow — well, sometimes I do.
People in Victoria really don’t like to argue, and they are not big on black humour either. It took me a while to figure that out.
I may not have made exceptional contributions to my adopted hometown, but I have been a responsible citizen, a good employee and a loving person to my family and friends.
These days, I resent hearing about anglo “deserters” who left Quebec in the 1970s. Reducing me to a “bad anglo” for having chosen to find a workable path for my life is unreasonable, an unwarranted judgment.
It is unknowable, but when I think of many people who left Montreal in those days, I can only conclude that the city and the province missed out on their potential contributions.
Many of those young people who left, at the least the ones I know of, left when they were in their late teens.
They had guts — or “gumption,” as my mother would say — to seek a better life in a place where they were not so distinctly the unwanted “other.”
One day in my retirement, I hope to get back to Montreal for a year or so, and have lunch with a French person a couple of times a week, and finally learn to speak French.
I think I could learn the language that way, eye-to-eye, over a bowl of soup and some good conversation.
I think my subconscious mind must have picked up a fair amount in those formative years in the 1960s.
I also want to go to the St. Jean Baptiste Day parade, and begin to get to know that “other” that I missed out on meeting in my youth.
It was my loss in not learning to speak French back then. But if you don’t mind me being so bold, I’d like to say that Quebec lost out, too.
Some good “bad anglos” went on to make useful contributions elsewhere. Thelma Fayle is a freelance writer who lives in Victoria, B.C., but was born and raised in Verdun. She is the author of Ted Grant: Sixty Years of Legendary Photojournalism, to be launched in Canada by Heritage House Publishing in October.
