Ville St. Laurent

 

We moved from 3405 Barclay just down the road from the newly built Cote Des Neiges Plaza to 1425 Ouimet St in Ville St. Laurent. I don't remember much about moving day or even the days leading up to the move because my mind was far more focused on what my parents were turning into. 

 

At first I thought it was spelled weemet and the famous marker had already tagged my little green baseball bat before my mother could step in and correct me on the spelling. We had a basement apartment there with three bedrooms and enough space to be a kid. Not only that, there were lots of other kids living in these projects and Parkdale Elementary and Parc Cousineau were just a couple of blocks away from my front door. I fell in love with hockey shortly before my arrival and was a dedicated Bobby Hull fan and therefore I cheered for the Chicago Black Hawks and it was here that I found out just what it was to be a fan of Les Habitants, a team so great it seemed that you could hardly find anyone who cheered for anyone else. So I was the new kid and an oddball Black Hawk fan even if Bobby Hull had the hardest slap shot in the NHL.

 

Those green railings you see in this photo are exactly as I remember them and once they ruined my best pair of pants. The railings had been freshly painted unknown to me and it just so happened that I was wearing my favorite pants, gold brushed cord du roy.  We were tossing a frisbee on the way home and while bending over to pick it up from just over the rail I managed to catch a line of green across the front of these pants. We were on welfare at the time and nice things didn't come easy. I was afraid to go home, sure my mother would have at me and then back to school after lunch where she could stew on it and have a real tornado waiting when I came home at the end of the day. Something no kid on my block could look foward to.

 

I had learned that telling the truth to my mother was very often worse than just telling her some bullies pushed me or some such thing but this day I wasn't interested in fabricating any scenarios that she may or may not believe. It actually became more interesting to tell the truth and be called a liar than give everyone a believeable lie. So I just told her I didn't see any fresh paint signs and when she went out to look she didn't either. I was off the hook and my mother could direct her anger at building management and the manufacturers of Tide.

 

Hockey was what was really going on in that neighbourhood when I lived there.  We played all year long, all day long and well past the streetlights coming on. As a matter of fact, the streetlights only signified the beginning of a night game. The night games ended when kids were called in by their mothers one by one until there wasn't enough kids left to really have a solid game. My mother rarely called for me and I was usually one of the last kids to go home. When she did call I was usually ready to come in anyway, spent and hungry, failing school and then I got a job on a milk truck.

 

Hockey was how I fit in with the other kids. Being the new kid wasn't the easiest thing to do, you had to navigate your way around new surroundings and language racists while trying to be funny or smart enough to hang with kids cool enough to protect you from all that nonsense. One of those kids lived just down the street from me and I shall call him Rocco. He was a chubby kid who could play goal and looked like Gump Worsley. He had a couple of sisters and a mom that looked strangely the same as my auntie Lorraine.   

 

Little did I know how much the Montreal Canadiens really meant to kids until the Stanley Cup playoffs of 1971 when the Hawks and the Habs would play for Lord Stanley's coveted cup. I was a Bobby Hull fan and that automatically made Chicago my team. This was the first time I remember things really mattering and a lot was riding on that series for me which was full of drama and suspense.