THE YEAR 1963 DESERVES AN ADJECTIVE OR TWO -- perhaps even three -- but I can't decide which. The melody of "It was a very good year", written by Ervin Drake and made famous by Frank Sinatra, is an earworm I hum while trying to think of replacements for 'very' and 'good'. It was good for me but awful for Montreal, for Canada, the United States, for many countries.
Some historians call it pivotal, others lump it in with the rest of the 1960s, "a decade of change". If you check timelines for many countries you'll find events then whose ripples affect us to this day.
Very early in '63 I met Mother Assumpta's executive assistant at Marianopolis College, Gloria Pierre. Born in the U.S. to Lebanese immigrants, she was First Consul of the American Consulate in Montreal when she met Francois Pierre, an immigrant to Canada from France. When they married Gloria had to stop working for the U.S. Government.
Because she had dealt with women's colleges in the States and was already serving Mother as a sounding board about educational policies being debated in Quebec, Marianopolis hired her full-time. We and the Pierres became a foursome. Charlie and I were of average height. The Pierres, approaching 40, attracted attention wherever we went because they were slender, very good-looking, and tall -- Gloria just under six feet and Francois just over.
Gloria suggested that I volunteer to staff a table at an annual bazaar raising funds for Les Petits Freres des Pauvres -- The Little Brothers of the Poor. (See Chapter 26.) The coordinator was Saidye Bronfman, a dynamo whose house in Westmount was said to be the biggest in Montreal, and who had an unlimited sense of noblesse oblige. (The fact that she was born in Plum Coulee, Manitoba, really amuses me.)
During the bazaar Saidye ambled from table to table, asking if staff needed anything. That wasn't mere lip service; her eyes and mind drew their own conclusions. After I said all was well, she said a standing lamp by my table should have a brighter bulb and she'd send one over. It was installed within minutes.
Saidye supported her workers, as Rev. Leonard J. Crowley did. Appointed as the first Coordinator of English Catholic Activities for the Archdiocese of Montreal, he assembled about 15 women and men to make The Challenge monthly newspaper happen.
Father was a bright-eyed charmer, 40-something, not tall, very thin, and always seeming surprised to be sitting behind his huge wooden desk. On its plate glass surface he had only a large blotter, a black dial telephone, a few papers, and a fountain pen. He was soft-spoken, smiled often, and had an unique style of business dialogue: He wondered out loud.
His mind seemed to just wander without a clear destination. Listeners felt he didn't know exactly what he wanted to say, so we tried to help him along. That was how he drew ideas out of our minds that we didn't know were in them! He was perfect for his job. More than once in later years I copied his cool wide-eyed management style to activate a team, and then hovered watchfully like Saidye, to see what the team needed from me.
The difference between the groups Bronfman and Crowley managed was that she had women and men of different ages, religions, motivations, education, experience, social status, etc., whereas The Challenge crew were professionals from the very complex and hierarchical field of newspaper production. Saidye herded cats. Leonard drove a bus. Their workers were comfortable.
The only time allThe Challenge's volunteers were together was when Paul-Emile Cardinal Leger received us in his residence, down the steep hill behind Mary Queen of the World Cathedral, to bless the project. Otherwise, we did our own things our own way. I paid attention only to what involved me directly.
There was so much new and time-consuming stuff going on in my life that I not only stopped keeping a diary but didn't save clippings. What you read about The Challenge from here on is either fixed forever in my memory or I found it in 2013 in what's left of the tabloid: Bound copies of Volumes 2 to 4.
When Father wondered out loud if, besides reporting, I might write a column for teenagers, I said No.
He looked so helpless, and let the silence grow so long, that I suggested he ask Montreal's English Catholic high schools to identify students who wanted to learn writing on the job. I could mentor them and probably find material worth publishing. They'd be writing for their own age group while they learned. The idea popped into my head at his desk because of his silence. Leonard may have intuited it, but his silence was what led me to speak it.
Things happened fast after he called 16 high school principals and they made announcements. Before Christmas of '62 I held an information session for reps from all the schools, explaining what a commitment of some free hours during the rest of the school year would entail. Almost all of the 20 who attended on that Saturday morning opted in.
Thus in 1963 The Challenge's TEEN SCENE began to appear. The Junior Staff that produced it was one really good thing about that year. Otherwise....
A Molotov cocktail thrown on February 23 into CKGM, an English-language Montreal radio station, signalled the beginning of extremely difficult years for Quebec and Canada.
Soon after the 1960 provincial election which the long-established Union Nationale party lost by a small margin, a few young French-Canadian separatists founded the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ). Although another election in '62 gave Jean Lesage's Liberal party a strong mandate for change, the FLQ was impatient. Lesage immediately set about launching Quebec's Quiet Revolution, but some people would not wait for rational things to happen legally.
They had reasons to be angry. For example, as 1962 drew to a close, a federal parliamentary committee on railroads asked the president of Canadian National Railways, a federal Crown Corporation, why there wasn't a single francophone among CN's 17 vice-presidents. Donald Gordon said only that promotions depended on merit. Less than a week later he was burned in effigy in front of the Queen Elizabeth, which CN owned, by protesters led by Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Bernard Landry and Pierre Marois. Confusion and fear gripped Quebec.
There was "something in the air" of planet Earth in 1963, as if the devil had escaped from hell and ran amok. Many decisive violent things occurred.
In the American State of Alabama, Governor George Wallace promised in his January inaugural speech to maintain "segregation forever", which raised fears and blood pressures throughout the country. Everything that happens in the U.S. affects Canada, which is roughly one-tenth the size, and whose history includes an "underground railway" that helped American slaves become Canadian pioneers.
On February 8 President John F. Kennedy had severed relations with Cuba, controlled by Fidel Castro since a 1959 coup. Russia was very attentive and generous to Castro but the U.S. didn't want Russian influence in the Western Hemisphere.
During the spring, bombs were planted in and around Montreal, at night, in federal, provincial and municipal buildings, especially in Westmount. Montreal police and the RCMP raided and searched and questioned without finding enough evidence to arrest anyone.
The first death occurred on April 20, 1963: A night watchman named Wilfred O'Neill died when a bomb exploded at a Canadian Forces Recruiting Centre in Montreal. Then on Quebec City's Plains of Abraham a bronze statue of 18th Century British General James Wolfe was smashed.
After Charlie left for work on May 17 I heard a loud clap. A bomb had exploded a Royal Mail box at Upper Lansdowne and Sunnyside Avenues in Westmount. Soldiers began searching mail boxes all over town. When a bomb was found, specialist engineer Sergeant-Major Walter Leja set about defusing it. The third one blew up in his hands.
After that, when a bomb was found the box was heavily padded and deliberately exploded. Why wasn't that done in the first place? I guess because the Royal Mail had to be saved. Is hindsight useful or only depressing?
Mail boxes and lockers were removed from CN-owned Central Station. To this day it has a baggage checkroom. Tourists who buy postcards and stamps in the station are given directions to mail boxes on surrounding streets.
The theme of that year's bilingual St-Jean-Baptiste Day parade on June 24 was Joie de vivre. Charlie and I were with Gloria and Francois in the bilingual crowd along Sherbrooke St., in front of the Grand Seminaire, the point where marching bands began playing their final numbers before dispersing at Atwater Ave. The city seemed relaxed and happy, French and English exchanging pleasantries. It was the last such event.
On July 19 Prime Minister Lester Pearson struck the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, appointing as co-chairs Le Devoir publisher Andre Laurendeau (see Chapter 23) and A. Davidson Dunton, president of Carleton University. Given their backgrounds and Pearson's, we can be sure that the Commission's researchers unearthed every detail relevant to its mandate.
Two years later its preliminary report revealed that in Quebec, French incomes lagged behind all ethnic groups except Italians and aboriginals.
On August 13 workers began creating the islands on which EXPO67 would be built. Dump trucks carried soil, blue clay, rocks, broken concrete...clean fill scooped out of construction sites all over the Island of Montreal. Atop their cabs were unobtrusive little signs reading "EXPO67". People waiting at bus stops or for traffic lights to change waved to the drivers, cheering, honking horns.
Charlie heard that the Globe and Mail's newly opened Montreal bureau wanted a part-time translator, French to English, to translate French editorials for the paper's (unilingual) board of directors in Toronto. I applied and was hired, to begin in September.
We ended Charlie's first year at CFCF with a vacation, driving to the Atlantic Ocean and touring Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. We had a budget and took enough cash from the bank to last two weeks because Canadians didn't use traveller's cheques inside Canada and our bank had few branches down East.
Not knowing anyone there, we were unaware that gas cost as much as 10 cents per gallon more than in Montreal. Our very thirsty 1959 Pontiac had to keep moving. We couldn't risk using our contingency fund in case the car had a problem, so for breakfasts and lunches we could only afford hamburger buns with peanut butter, bananas and honey, and milk. We found interesting places to eat supper and talked about getting rid of that car as soon as possible.
The Globe's Montreal bureau -- one man, three rooms with desks, a Telex machine -- was in the new Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce tower at 1155 Dorchester Blvd. (now called Boul. Rene Levesque), at the corner of Peel Street and across Dominion Square from CFCF.
I arrived in the office just before 9 on weekday mornings. Bureau Chief David Oancia had already scanned Le Devoir and La Presse. The tabloid Montreal-Matin did not interest the editorial board (although it should have). He told me which editorials might interest them, I sent summaries to Toronto by Telex, and a note soon came back with further instructions. In the early days it usually said nothing was wanted, which meant I could read the papers for my own sake or leave. David, a polyglot who had been the Globe's best foreign correspondent before this job, didn't talk unless he absolutely had to.
Because Charlie still worked 5 a.m. to noon at CFCF, we often met for lunch and then behaved like tourists, learning as much as possible about Montreal. Our social and professional networks were growing, as was my busy-ness as a volunteer.
A spirit of nationalism was awakening in Quebec. Two years after Jean Lesage launched the Quiet Revolution, André Laurendeau coined the phrase "Maîtres chez nous" (masters in our house) which became its watchword.
In October of '63 the FLQ launched its official publication, La Cognee, which means approximately 'the thing you smash other things with'. Sixty-some issues were published during the next few years, but I never saw it and don't recall even hearing about it in English-speaking Montreal. I learned about it in 2013 on the Internet, doing research for GLIMPSES. That shows how far apart Quebec's two language groups were. Author Hugh MacLennan's novel Two Solitudes reveals their interactions masterfully.
Charlie and I followed through on getting rid of the Pontiac. Chrysler Corporation, on a major quality track just then, offered us an amazing deal: They would take the Pontiac immediately, we could choose all the options we wanted on a 1964 two-door Valiant, and pick it up any time after April 1964. Only then would we begin making monthly payments. We left the Pontiac at the Chrysler salesroom that same day.
Not long after I settled in at the Globe, Charlie's 5-to-noon shift changed to a swing: Mondays and Tuesdays off, Wednesdays and Thursdays 9 to 5, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays 4 p.m. to midnight. It disrupted my sleeping habits and our social lives, but Charlie cared more about his job.
The shift change explains why, on Friday, November 22 of 1963, I was at home watching TV with Charlie as he ate his breakfast and I my lunch when U.S. President Kennedy's assassination was announced. Charlie didn't finish eating,called for a taxi, grabbed his coat and ran. Stunned, I watched history unfold in black and white.
Needing to talk to someone I phoned the only American I knew, Gloria Pierre, in her office at Marianopolis. I asked if she'd heard.... She shrieked, actually fell off her chair, then moaned "Oh, no, no" over and over as her voice grew fainter. Her heels clattered on the uncarpeted, polished wooden floor as she ran out of her office, heading for the faculty lounge which had a small TV set. I hung up.
Those were just some highlights of 1963, an unforgettable year.
CHAPTER 27 of GLIMPSES -- 30