FOR A FEW YEARS I'D WANTED TO HOLD a really big New Year's Eve party. We owed many invitations but Charles resisted entertaining. This time I insisted. His response was that since it was my idea I should do all the work myself. As usual, I got over his attitude, and the spine would too if I stayed relaxed and sat more than I stood while preparing. The tricky part would be climbing up and down a ladder for rarely used items on very high shelves (we had nine-foot ceilings).
In those days, hand-written invitations were mailed and RSVPs came back. In mid-November I sent to about 50 addresses, received acceptances for 46 persons. There were no caterers for our income bracket and "pot lucks" were not popular at all. I would do a lot of shopping and cooking on the 30th and 31st of December. The A&P still delivered for 25 cents.
During the week after Christmas the Hong Kong flu (H3N2) reached Montreal. "Symptoms last 4-5 days...especially dangerous for people over 65." (All of Canada hears that every winter now.)Media noted how lucky we were that schools were closed so children wouldn't spread it. Maybe so, but something did!
On December 29 and 30, one call after another came, with regrets.
My shopping list kept shrinking. A&P's delivery boy called in sick so I walked a couple of trips. Preparation of hot and cold hors d'oeuvres took very little time. On New Year's Eve afternoon, snow began falling. Three guests arrived around 10. The couple left at 11 to be with her mother at midnight, and the single (almost 70, still a skier) stayed long enough to sip some Champagne and then rode a bus home to be with her husband, who had the flu.
Charlie and I toasted our sick friends as we watched "the ball drop" in New York City's Times Square. After I placed the traditional call to my parents, partying at the home of friends in Toronto, we went to bed. Neither of us caught that flu.
The 1960s were a decade of restless youth, trying new things across North America. In Toronto, Yorkville was a bohemian village. Some U of T students got organized to build a co-operative housing/educational building called Rochdale College. (It eventually failed.)
Before January of 1969 ended, students at Montreal's Sir George Williams University occupied its ninth-floorcomputer centre to protest against the Administration, accusing it of racism against "Black people". The issue had arisen the previous year, and festered. It led eventually to what came to be known as "the computer riot".
In 1970 the annual January Thaw stretched into February, with days so extraordinarily sunny and warm that some people dismissed the occupation and student demands as early Spring Fever. They said this protest wasn't "serious" like the FLQ bombings of 1963 (Ch. 27). The sit-in wasn't taken seriously by anyone except the University and Montreal's police. We in "older generations" merely said "Tsk, tsk" and left it to "authorities" to sort things out.
Sir George's Administration and the police could not. The sit-in turned ugly on February 11. The computer centre was trashed and burned, a lot of expensive hardware tossed from its windows. When Charlie told me he'd be at the site again on the 12th, I said I'd walk down from Marianopolis to meet him for lunch. He said No, I shouldn't because the situation was fluid and "There is no such thing as an innocent bystander at a riot". Even my curiosity was stopped by that remark.
There still wasn't a real sense of urgency in Montreal. In those days we didn't live with fear, the way we do now.
At a pre-Expo 67 lunch a few years before, an older black school teacher had sat beside me. He had grown up in the same district as Oscar Peterson and many other jazz musicians, but we didn't talk about them. Sitting beside him made me realize quite suddenly that although I socialized with black students at the University of Toronto, knew one at Carleton, and saw several at Marianopolis, there was not a single black person in my Montreal life, or apparently anywhere in Snowdon.
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GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.
Non-FictionDuring the first 30 years of my journalistic career in the second half of the 20th century, good jobs of all kinds were available all over Canada. Those of us born in the 1930s and early '40s were in great demand because our generation was very smal...
