Montreal Olympic Hypesters

This is a August 1973 photo of Louise Wronski, 28, and Philip Wronski, 32, aboard their minivan they called Pilou. They drove it 86,000 miles through four continents to hype the Montreal Olympic games, all on their own nickel. It cost them $16,000, including $4,000 from CKVL radio in exchange for radio reports. They handed out leaflets and talked enthusiastically about the Montreal Olympics, which must've been a pretty big letdown because Montrealers were never that charmed by the event and the political situation went to rot soon after. In Africa a guy blocked a road with a log for the purposes of extortion, in Panama a robber game at them with a knife and in Congo they were surrounded by hungry tribesman but in each case the 6'5", 250 pound gym teacher and judo expert was able to scare his would-be assailants off. The trip was meant to take four years but they came back after two due to homesickness. He appears to still be among us.

Chomedey and St. Catherine

Quiz - what does this photo portray?

We have a winner!

On Friday Sept 7 1973, the City of Montreal gave Israeli developer David Azrieli a permit to demolish the historic Van Horne Mansion on Sherbrooke in Montreal's Golden Square Mile.

Reporters asked him if and when he planned to actually demolish the beautiful structure built by the great Last Spike railway baron between 1868 and 1870.

He replied, "I have time, I don't have to rush."

The next morning at 7;30 am workers were inside prying off parts of the gorgeous building with crowbars. Azrieli had told the same reporter that it would take about three weeks to demolish. Two days later the entire building was gone and city dwellers stood out front mouths-agape, some weeping and others, as seen in the photo above, picking through the debris.

The building had been uninhabited since Mrs. William Cornelius Covenhoven Van Horne had departed and left it to the maintenance people.

The wife of Van Horne's grandson is

to have lived there full time from 1936 to 1963.

Prior to shoving off, she made many happy by giving much of the other valuables in the home to such establishments as the Canadian Railway Museum, whose then-curator, Robert Nicholls expressed appreciation.

The event is considered the birth of the preservationist movement in Montreal, around which architect Michael Fish became the head with his Save Montreal Group, which was eventually supplanted by Phyllis Bronfman's tamer Heritage Montreal. In spite of his smiling face in the photo, Fish was, and remains incensed and depressed by the demolition.

Among the art hanging in the home was this painting that she sold 1963. It's now at the MMA in NYC.

In November 1975, many were surprised when Concordia University gave demolitionist David Azrieli an honorary doctorate. He had given $250,000 to the university over the previous five years. Local social group Head and Hands made a symbolic protest.

Last year Azrieli was estimated to be the seventh wealthiest Canadian with an estimated worth of over $4 billion, rich in money, not necessarily in appreciation.

The leapin' bank teller

On April 18, 1929 Dominion Bank teller Robert G. Patenaude simply cleared out his cash and leaped out the side window of the branch where he worked at 6045 Christopher Columbus, corner Bellechasse. He hopped on a train to New York to spend the dough.

As you can see it does not appear to have any side window these days.

In New York Patenaude partied hard with a hostess named Ann Kelley of the Artists and Models Club in Manhattan.

She said she had a sick aunt in Detroit so the duo rented a room at Detroit's Hotel Stattler and pulled the same trick, they hopped out the window rather than pay their bill.

The previous September he had been sentenced to one months hard labour for stealing golf clubs out of cars. May 4 1929 Montreal Standard

An unlikely artist - Alouette legend Tex Coulter

The lively portrait above, from the cover of a 1958 magazine selling cheap on Ebay displays, of course, Henri Richard, the Pocket Rocket, younger brother of Maurice Richard. It's a beaut. The artist was none other than Montrealer Tex Coulter, an Alouette from Texas who moved here to play football and offered much of his skill as an artist. Coulter, who never drank and was from a Masonic background, was a gruff Texan who fell in love with Montreal so much that he stayed here 15 years after his career ended. He had played six seasons in the NFL become coming here in 1953. He blamed his desire to play all 60 minutes of every game - including punting - for cutting his career short. During his tenure here he helped take the team from the pavement to the penthouse, alas - familiarly - the Als had little luck in the finals, as they failed to win a Grey Cup between 1946 and 1970.

Coulter stayed in Montreal with his wife, Ruth, and four children for 15 years after his playing days. He loved Montreal, even the winters.

Before dying in 2007 on his eighty-third birthday, Coulter told The Gazette's Ian McDonald: "I'll take Montreal winters over Texas heat any time," he said. "If it was up to me, we would have stayed in Montreal, but my wife had brothers and sisters down here. She didn't lay down the law, but I knew she wanted to be with her folk."

Coulter lived at 2294 Beaconsfield, below Sherbrooke in NDG, according to 1962 Lovell's

He was never elected to the CFL Hall of Fame.

This other portrait Coulter did of Henri Richard recently went for $800 at auction.

Then and now Ontario and Papineau

Hippies: build a park before you die

Here's a buncha early 70s Mtl hippie activists working at recapturing an empty lot for a park in the McGill ghetto which had been put aside for the Milton Park project. Note the chubby guy in the middle taking a break to push his hair out of his eyes and certainly not to pose, he will reappear tragically below.
Not exactly sure where this cool park was put up but the kids seemed to be enjoying this rickety bridge. The only way it could be made better is if were ideologically correct, complete with greedy developers waiting below to catch any stray children and sell them off into sweatshop slavery.
Alas the guy in the first photo soon died of a heroin overdose alongside his girlfriend, a French Canadian lass who had acted in a small role in a movie or two. I could tell you their names but lost the link, if someone can fill us in, please add it in the comments below. Edit: As someone mentioned in the comments, it turns out he was Dr. Hymie Shuldiner and she was Marie-Claire Nolin.

New major motion picture features familiar looking villains

Roald Dahl's 1970 book The Fantastic Mr. Fox is now a Wes Anderson film with big name narrators, such as Bill Murray and Owen Wilson. The villains Boggis and Bean appear as portrayed above and are the "meanest, ugliest, nastiest farmers in the valley." Canadians will spot the resemblance between the characters and former separatist Premier Jacques Parizeau and the chain smoking former separatist Premier Rene Levesque. Coolopolis shall try to find out how they chose to use these likenesses for the characters. (Spotted initially on Peter Wheeland's FB posting)

Death of a pornographer

Montreal: you love porn. So much so that when a university sought men who didn't consume porn, they couldn't find one. Yet not so long ago in June 1986 Justice Minister John Crosbie had planned to outlaw, "any visual matter showing vaginal, anal or oral intercourse, ejaculation, sexually violent behavior, bestiality, incest, necrophilia, masturbation or other sexual activity."

Back then one could watch porn in theatres or rent tapes at one of the three Flixxx locations (including one on St. Denis) run by Montrealers Peter Grace and Stuart Shore. These charged a then (and still) hefty $25 membership fee plus $5 per rental for such titles as For Your Thighs Only and Desperately Sleazy Susan. The Flixxx duo boasted that they were grossing $40,000 a month.

At the time many felt that the women in the movies were being manipulated and mistreated.

That notion was encouraged by the 1981 film This is Not a Love Story, an old school feminist crucification of the men who make porn.

Bonnie Klein was the force behind the film, which also starred the recently-deceased Montreal stripper named Lindalee Tracy, who was a feature act at such places like the Lodeo on the Main at Lagauch, where she called herself Fonda Peters.

Klein gained additional notoriety as the mother of the high-profile Noami Klein, who also has latched onto popular points of view to create media fame. A young Noami is apparently somewhere in her mom's film re-enacting a scene of some sort.

The chief scapegoat in the film is Montreal smut mag publisher named John S. Wells who shows up amiably willing to discuss his views on porn but gets ambushed.

In this scene these two articulate Jewish media types go head to head: Wells, in his beautiful dulcet Brit-tones reports that, "Men prefer to dominate these women...the greatest turn on for a man is to have a woman kneeling at his feet performing fellatio."

Back then fellatio was seen as a deviant act, quite the opposite of the pedestrian way it's viewed today. Klein doesn't exactly smile at Wells' portrayal of a delirious man receiving frantic oral love from a kneeling woman. (Cut that out... Chimples)

So Klein hits him with questions that include such terms as "degrading to women," and "(porn) must carry over to how men treat us," and so forth.

The film didn't help Wells' career. His titles, such Canadian Beaver, featured photos largely printed from porn movies he had sent away for. Presumably those copyright holders weren't inclined to sue him. Wells eventually continued his publishing enterprises with a sort of American Yellow Page directory. Wells' bookkeeping got screwed up and he ended up having more investors owning more percentages than was numerically legitimate. A financial Armageddon ensued and he was soon sought for fraud.

Wells fled to the Caribbean but bounty hunters kidnapped him back to American territory. He was convicted and sentenced to US prison time but then sought a transfer to a British prison. In the UK gaol he was diagnosed with a terminal disease for which he received inadequate medical care. Various Orthodox Jewish Rabbis offered him moral support in prison even though he had never been religious. David S. Wells died soon after.

Quiz-what Montrealer made the cover of ths olde issue of Playgirl?

Sure looks like some bad 80s Pre-PShoping. Winner gets a raised eyebrow.

1968 - when elephants came to Verdun

There was some sorta zoological display of elephants in Verdun Stadium in 1968. I don't know this stadium and am kinda doubting that it's even there anymore. The guy in the middle of the top photo dressed in old fashioned cap and pedal pushing trouz should serve as a warning to photographers, beware of people dressed in retro 1920s clothing trying to confuse & anachron your shot! Tricky tricksters! Photos lifted from Verdun Connections.

Bring back the traffic cops!

With their white hats and spiffy white gloves, cops used to rule intersections throughout the city. Coolopolis feels that a few of these should be brought back for touristic purposes and perhaps even for the occasional eye-on the street effect, bringing some life to the drab corners portrayed above in these summer of 1929 photos one, two and three.

Clone Nigar Azizmoradi!

According to a paid press release from the Montreal-based Raelian alien sex cult, the leader of the Iranian Raelians (both of them? - Chimples) faces death for the crime of atheism. Negar Azizmoradi fled from Iran to Turkey but was imprisoned by the Turks and now suffers from a lung infection. Turkey is sending her back to Iran. Alas, since Raelians made wild claims about their cloning activities, they have are to credibility what Ponzi schemes are to conservative investing. Brigitte Boisselier has led the media communications on Azizmoradi. I once interviewed Boisselier who claimed to have cloned a human. Today I spoke to a local Raelian and who insists that Negar Azizmoradi actually exists. Sorta unlike the clones. Having a Raelian making your plea to the media is like calling a lifeguard that can't swim when you're drowning.

Quiz - what symbolic item do these cities have that Montreal does not?

These cities - among others - all boast a symbolic attraction that Montreal sadly lacks: Paris, St. Petersburg, Minsk, Sofia, Liverpool, Rome, Riga, Warsaw, Berlin, Munich, Kaunas, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Yerevan, Oslo, Baku, Barcelona, Arlington, Honolulu, Gettysburg, Atlanta, Miami, Washington, New York, Shanksville, Chicago, Almaty, Tulsa, Newport News, Memphis, Melbourne, Brisbane, Alma Ata, Bishkek, New Delhi, Tel Aviv, Seoul, Accra, Pretoria, Madrid, Kiev, Dublin, London Ontario, Ottawa, Edmonton, Toronto.

===

As usual the Cleverest People on the Internet: Coolopolis subscribers (just nine bucks a year although it's also free) have guessed it. Montreal is a city without an eternal flame. An eternal flame is a monument which has dotted populated areas since the dawn of time and can represent anything from faith, to fallen heroes to war memorials. There used to be torches burning outside a restaurant on Peel below St. James but that's long gone.

Our lack of a symbolic ongoing conflagration is proof that...hell..sorry but I have to break into a rap here: ."..I don't wanna blame but we gotta end the shame, we're the same in this game, we're so tame and our name is lame lame lame so let's claim a flame... NDG Represent! Peace! Out!.."

In other words, Montreal must install an Eternal Flame pronto.

I don't care where it goes. But all things being equal, it should be fired up at Gravenor Park (aka Coolopolis Park) where Upper Lachine meets St. James West.

Here's a rough viz of our proposal.

Quiz - who is this relatively famous former Montrealer and why was he recently sentenced to 45 years in prison?

This is indeed former major league baseball player Mel Hall Jr, who was born in New York state and subsequently played mostly for the Chicago Cubs, Cleveland Indians and New York Yankees. He married a Montreal woman and spent a few winters here in the late 80s.That was exceptional, as even the Expos didn't live in Montreal in the off-season, perhaps with the exception of Chris Speier who stayed to give anti-abortion lectures at schools in the area.

We haven't discerned who Hall's Montreal wife was but we've been told that she might be of Sicilian extraction and might no longer live here. Hall wintered in Montreal perhaps between 1987 and 1991. He has children, including reportedly twin girls one being Bianca Hall, likely from this union, possibly in this photo. While in Montreal, Hall did some volunteering for Johnny Elias's youth baseball clinic and hung out at Winston's gym. When one gym member asked Hall for a donation to allow her to attend a bodybuilding competition, he generously ponied up. We're unsure of when Hall split with his wife. It might've been around 1991.

In July 2009 Hall was convicted of conducting three relationships with minors, one with a 15 year girl in Connecticut in 1989 and two a decade later in Texas involving girls on the basketball team he was coaching near Dallas, they were 12 and 14.

The first relationship started when a girl asked him for an autograph at Yankee Stadium. He failed to do so. She then sent him a letter. Hall started calling her and soon declared his love for her. He bought her parents a new car and promised that he would only consummate his relationship when the girl turned 18. But the sex started sooner. The family did not discourage the relationship because they were hooked on his gifts.

After four hours of jury deliberation in July Hall was sentenced to 45 years of prison time. A minimum of half that must be served.

It might be worth noting that had Hall conducted a relationship with a 14 year old girl in Canada it might not even have been illegal. The Conservative government only recently hiked Canada's age of consent from 14 to 16. His misdeeds in Texas would have been entirely illegal as one of the girls was 12 and he was in a position of authority.

At Hall's trial, his daughter made an impassioned plea for clemency. Much opinion has flowed concerning the sentence, including one rather fascinating series of exchanges and this ongoing debate which offer several points of view about Hall's reckless behaviour and the appropriateness of the sentence.

Two deaths over a bundle of clothing

At 5:30 am 27 February 1957, cops were called to deal with a disturbance at a home on Cumberland near Somerled (a newspaper reported it at 6448 Cumberland, but that address doesn't exist). A bandit who had recently robbed the Burton clothing store at 6559 Somerled - now a food store - shot eight year police squad vet Charles Houde, father of six. Houde's partner Philippe Darlington, 29, then shot assailant William Riddle, a criminal with a long rap sheet for armed robbery and prison escape. Two men dead over one pile of clothing.