Coolopolis

Phillip Watts, 11, put on his I Love K-Mart t-shirt, donned a jacket and boots and braved the -14C morning in the dark at 5:30 a.m. on January 7, 1977 to deliver a big stack of Montreal Gazette newspapers around his home in St. Laurent.
Watts had been delivering newspapers for only a few weeks after taking the route over from one of his five brothers. He sought to make some money for Christmas presents and kept the route after the holidays.
After doing his rounds, Phillip was headed for the Westbrooke Elementary School where Principal Stewart Lough had been planning to recommend that he skip a year, as he was deemed very bright.
Watts had delivered all but four of his papers when he was confronted near his home. Someone stabbed the boy 12 times in the neck at around 7 a.m. and fled.
Watts died at the scene.
The only clue to the killer's identity was a pair of size eight shoes or boots.

One newspaper quoted a police detective saying that the killer's footprints northwest about 400 metres until becoming indiscernible. The police report notes, however, that the footprints became impossible to follow just four houses down at 2110 Patricia, about one minute walk, or about 90 metres away.

The killer seems to have been headed towards busy Henri Bourassa.
Neighbour Gerard Belanger was getting ready to go to work when he spotted Watts' 4'9" blood-covered, 80-pound body, with arms crossed over chest.
The child's boots had come off after he was dragged 15 feet to a more secluded area where he was discovered behind 2010 Patricia, about 200 feet from his own home at 2020 Connaught.
Watts had not been sexually assaulted and had no money to rob, indeed he had two dollars in one pocket and one in the other, He had no known enemies.

The boy's father Clive Watts, who worked at the Canadian National Railway, and his wife, the former Noreen Shirley House, were active in Protestant churches, as were their six boys and one girl.
House had been battling cancer at the time of her son's death and she died four years later.
Police questioned a number of suspects but all were released without charges.
The Montreal Gazette reported on the death of its newspaper delivery boy, as did other media outlets but a TV show called The Fifth Estate interviewed the family briefly in a segment angled to accuse newspapers of glossing over subjects that might reflect badly on them.
Montreal newspapers later abandoned the longstanding practice of allowing minors to deliver newspapers, Some claim the new policy was a direct result of the killing.
A special coroners inquest looked into the child's death four months later, noting that the boy died of perforations to heart, lungs and carotid artery.
But the murder was never solved.
Sam Watts, who heads the Welcome Hall Mission, was 15 at the time of his brother's death.
He tells Coolopolis that he and his brothers and sister (Esther, James, Stephen, Joseph and Jonathan) never got any insight into who might have committed the grisly and inexplicable act.
The only clue, the size eight shoes, would suggest that the killer was likely small of stature, or might even have been a minor.
If anybody has any clues or information please contact police or write megaforce@gmail.com.

Montreal 375 Tales contains dozens of stories on Montreal bars and restaurants from the past, including a variation of this one. Keep an eye on this site for news on its upcoming availability.
Unlike other Americans who drifted to Montreal during the Vietnam War, David Wittman was not dodging the draft.
Wittman had been harassed by police in Ohio over a small amount of marijuana and he saw little future in the rust-belt in a country where body-bags were returning from war full of bodies of bright young recruits.
So he came to Montreal en route to a backpacking trip through Europe.
Wittman found himself bored staying with a friend at the McGill Medical residence, so he wandered downtown and followed a long-haired hippie to see where the action was shaking.
The hippie walked into the Rainbow Bar and Grill on Stanley, which had been recently opened by a pair of popular staffers from the Sir Winston Churchill Pub.
Dan Woodward and Judy Ponting had opened the place on a shoestring bugdet after cops shut down its predecessor Seven Steps Pub following a police altercation with bikers.
The ownership duo sought new investors all the time, so a bunch of people, including Concordia Sociology prof Taylor Buckner put in about a few thousand each and a promise to bring their friends. Eventually about nine owners were on board, although it was a loosely-run place.
One day, for example Ponting and Woodward ingested a quantity of magic mushrooms that left them too stoned to move out of a downtown restaurant booth.

Upon entering for the first time Wittman enjoyed the gloomy, windowless atmosphere of the place and its 65 cent beers and libertine female beauties and handy ashtrays everywhere for avid smokers like himself.
Wittman stayed and stayed and stayed, spending almost all his waking hours at The Rainbow until his Europe cash disappeared.
About two weeks later Wittman explained his problem to one of the owners, maneuvering to make it look like they were to blame for his running out of cash.
That owner was accustomed to laying guilt strategies himself. So he gave Wittman a job as doorman.
Co-owner Judy Ponting instructed Wittman to avoid calling police, as she felt any mentions of the club on the police blotter could lead to its shut-down. So Wittman had to deal with some hairy situations without help from cops.
Wittman rose to barman and met up with Nancy Nelson from B.C., who was paying her way through school keeping half of the $1 on each rose she sold in bars, the Cock'n'Bull being the most lucrative spot of the 40 downtown places she dropped in on.
Wittman was working three nights a week and staying upstairs from Carol's Snack Bar on Crescent Street where the Iadeluca family gave him a bed, table and fireplace.

He later moved to Stayner Ave. in Westmount where many of the staffers of the same place also had homes. Wittman and Nancy Nelson were doing well, making solid cash in the downtown bar economy.
The Rainbow remained popular for some time, as people came in the afternoon to read The New York Times, play backgammon, drink and stay late and watch as Wittman announced closing time by lighting up some brandy he breathed into the air.
Buckner lived in a small apartments upstairs and used the bar to develop his understanding of sociology and human behaviour.
The eye-catching monochrome sign hanging over the street was the design of artist Gerry Lorange. His Danish business partner Michael Fog drew a cartoon in the men's bathroom of a man with a rocket penis and managed to get the same illustration in just about every bar downtown for a while.
Rainbow regulars included journalist Nick Auf der Maur who preferred it when others bought him drinks. Mike Boone, who became a well-known scribe at The Star and Gazette, hung a hat there. Fine Arts students from Concordia filled in as did a bunch of CBC staffers, including Patrick Brown, now based in China. Bartenders included a Neal J. Smitherman, now a prominent Toronto lawyer.
After three years Wittman and his wife Nancy took their savings and combined with Eftaib Kahn to purchase a building on Bishop just north of Dorchester for $90,000.
Kahn owned the Pakistan House Restaurant on Mackay just up from De Maisonneuve. Kahn was from a wealthy family and had come to Montreal for Expo 67 and stayed. He noticed that his restaurant was usually empty while the downstairs cafe in its many changing names, was always full.
So Kahn sought part of that action and went in 50-50 with the couple at what would become Darwin's.
In the months preceding its opening Wittman let his customers at The Rainbow know about his new bar and many followed him, as did many staffers when it opened on the final day of the 1976 Olympics.
The Rainbow suffered a downturn as Darwin's thrived. Unlike the Rainbow it was a bright, airy spot with ferns and an outdoor terrace.
In its first few years Wittman would lay out line of shooters on the bar to be ready for the nightly last-call rush. Waiters and other downtowners would come in and down a couple of shots just before last call.
Ricky McGurnaghan of the Irish West End Gang and friends would not take news of closure kindly and sometimes tossed a stool in protest to the night being over.
After a few years, however, the last-call chug-a-lug last call ritual faded and the late night energy dissipated at Darwin's.
Wittman and Nelson had just had their second of what would eventually become four children in 1980 when they got an offer they couldn't refuse.
They sold their interest in Darwin's to Tommy Caplan of the Caplan-Duval retail clan for $100,000.
The couple then migrated to Georgia and Florida and tried operating a few bars in those parts before returning ot Montreal. Wittman worked in a series of bars as a manager before eventually becoming a carpenter.
Both Woodward and Ponting, who launched the Rainbow are no more. Woodward, who was gay, died of AIDS. Ponting died in a car crash on the way to a barbecue in the Eastern Townships after marrying one of her former students.
Buckner now lives in the US and sells vintage firearms on the Internet.
Darwin's closed after a fire in January 1994 and the building was demolished.

A new study has demonstrated that those who experience a terrible event can prevent the onset of post traumatic stress disorder by simply playing video games within six hours of the event.
Researchers found that 62 percent of 71 UK car accident victims who played the games after being treated in an emergency room suffered fewer bad memories than those who did not.
Distracting the brain with puzzles or games requiring concentration seems to deter the creation of long-term memories.
The news is exciting for those who have endured difficult events but it also has less positive implications.
Are you killing your future memories by over-stressing your mind with puzzles and games?
Memories of specific events are not only entertaining later in life but they also allow us to look back and learn from our experiences.
So while you might still have a fuzzy, fond memory of strolling down Main Street with your mom to pop into a bakery at the age of 4, those growing up now might not have the same joy of being able to look back at such special moments, as their long-term memories are being unknowingly wiped clean by technology.
So is the silly meaningless game you're playing actually destroying memories like the machine Arnold Schwarzenegger entered in Total Recall?
A glorious summer shall soon be upon us with great moments in store.
Those who choose to thumb away at their telephone games or play online risk possibly never having those great moments to look back on.

A sheer blouse didn't do much to hide this lovely young dancer's torso in this 1969 photo from inside an early Montreal disco, where Plexiglas ruled with, 150 modular sixties seats.
The Plexi discotheque, which opened in the Iroquois Hotel on the west side of Place Jacques Cartier in 1969 would go on to have some crazy and very violent as I detail in my book Montreal 375 Tales.
These photos, shot by Jacques Varry for Architecture-Concept Magazine July 1969, offer a tiny glimpse into that little photographed world of dancefloor glory inside Montreal's early-era discos (ie: pre cocaine, pre-wall-shaking speakers).

2: In this second photo a man in a turtleneck and relatively long hair (barber seats went empty starting 1968) is seen dueling for the affections of a silky-haired woman in a long black dress, as a competitor attempts to cut in, emboldened by his snappy white Nehru jacket that we're pretty sure he wore to the Yellow Submarine screening. She's not tipping her hat to her choice of disco dancing suitor.

3-The third pic shows the DJ setting up his next time, which we are guessing is not The Doors, or Mashmakhan. Montrealers are acclaimed for conserving space on dance floors by keeping their elbows tight and resisting the temptation to to grab too much dance floor real estate. Dance clubs in other cities invariably see the occasional Tony Manero, who think that others must stand aside and give them a wide berth. The dancers seen here, including one with short hair and a white leotard might be under the effects of LSD as they are stretching out phantasmagorically to touch the music.

4 - Photo four shows the lounge lizards who have preferred drinking at the bar over the terpischore pleasures of hip-rotating and arm twirling preferred by many of the fairer sex. They stand like peacocks with hair combed and ties done tight. Passively hoping to attract female company. The Plexi bar was made of glass and had mercury flowing underneath for the pleasures of optical stimulation.

5- In this pic Yvette and Claude celebrate Pierre's new home in Brossard. (Seriously, shut up, once you mock Brossard I'm no longer on side. Chimples)

6- Spiky ceilings and ancient stone walls met around a swathe of chairs that are almost surely sitting in a dump somewhere far from where they had their brief moments of glory.

7-Quebec's drinking minimum was 20 years of age and over until 1971 so we can deduce that this frazzle-haired beauty arms aloft stretching out her silk blouse was at least that age.

8-Suit and ties were required for men in clubs during those years but as we can see some rebels managed to pull off of higher status by being dressed more shabbily, namely the man with his eyes closed on the bottom right.
If anybody looking at these photos has any insight into these people or that place, or even that time, please share them in the comments section and we'll be happy to get your input.

When the Riviera Theatre opened as an 800-seater
at 8820 St Lawrence, north of Cremazie in 1954 it tried to pass itself off as a drive-in theatre.

Drive in theatres provided novelty thrills across North America in the 1950s but watching a movie from your car remained impossible in Quebec, as religious authorities worried frisky hands would turn moviegoers into sinners.
When drive-ins were finally permitted in the 1970s, the fading gimmick was so popular that the province made an impressive sum in new taxes, surely making them reconsider their ban on potentially profitable things that the religious authorities disapproved of, as I recount in my book Montreal 375 Tales.

Owners put a big drive-in sign on the Riviera marquee, reasoning that it's sort of like a drive-in, insofar as you can drive to the entrance, let your guests out and then park your car in the big adjacent parking lot.

It was a lie of course, as The Riviera was a conventional movie theatre with parking and the Drive In was removed from the signage.
The building belonged to the city's most powerful mob family at the time, the Cotronis.
Vic Cotroni's sister Palmina Puliafito initially rented the theatre out in 1956 to a group headed by Socrates Athanasiou.
But those tenants went to court to cancel the 10-year lease after city authorities deemed the bathrooms inadequate (or possibly non-existent). The dispute went to the Supreme Court, which sided against the owners, creating a precedent that remains relevant today.

So The Riviera became a hub of Italian activity, with some saying that its second-rate films were the only game in town for Italian culture for some time.
The Violi-friendly management team would brazenly intimidate any other Italians presenting competing cultural fare, so management's reputation for kindness was minimal.
Paliafito, whose husband died in 1972, lived in a humble home at 8807 Clark and was considered an important impresario nonetheless.
The once-pleasant area where the Riviera sat suffered a blow when Highway 40 was built and left the theatre in the shadow of zooming cars and ramps.
The theatre made headlines on Valentine's Day 1976 when Pietro Sciarra, 59, was shot dead in the head in the adjacent Steinberg's parking lot after after watching Godfather II with his wife. Sciarra was a Sicilian who was loyal to the Paolo Violi's Calabrians.

Sciarra, who had played dumb at a crime commission hearing, was at the time appealing a sentence for entering Canada illegally for the third time.
The killer was believed to be Sebastiano Messina, a Rizzuto loyalist was then shot dead at his cafe on March 10, launching a bloody feud between the Violis and Rizzutos that lasts to this day.
The theatre endured as a legit enterprise until around 1988 or so and became The Riviera Palace Bar, then Studio Montreal, hosting such classy acts as Michelle Sweeney for some time in around 1992.
The Solid Gold Strip Club took over the premises in 1994 and became one of the first places in town offering the previously-banned lap dances. The building belongs to manager Rejean Pothel.

Elzear Duquette was a middle child born on a farm in Mirabel in 1910 who devoted his life to becoming a lovable oddball by pulling a coffin around the world.
Duquette would go to far-away lands and pull the coffin all day and then sleep in it at night, also using it as a bathroom and a place to watch a little portable television.

He once pulled that sucker for seven years straight throughout Japan and other points east, returning for Jean Baptiste Day in 1976.
He felt wounded when celebration organizers didn't honour his accomplishments in their events.
Nonetheless author Micheline La France wrote a book about his exploits at that time called Elzéar Duquette Sur Les Routes Du Monde. En Cercueil Roulant. You can borrow it at the BANQ library on Berri or get it used for about eight bucks.
Duquette would walk right into crowded towns with his flag-festooned death vessel, going right in front of the most heavily-trod areas of touristic Paris and park his coffin for all to see. \
He told reporters that in spite of his fearless voyages, he still had no clue how to read a map.
What reaction people had to the ghoulish cart remains unclear.

One La Presse writer asked him why he did it and he rambled on that he had "too much freedom in his heart." Although he also conceded that if he had worked in a regular job "he probably would have liked it."
He also said that he has to "fight the temptation to make friends" in the places he visits, as making such connections would "make him regret leaving."
Duquette was aged around 68 when he finally stopped pulling the infernal contraption and lived in St. Sulpice, 45 minutes from downtown Montreal with his dogs and cats.
One day a fire hit his building and he got out but then sought to rescue his cats and was found dead in the blaze along with one of the kitties he was hoping to save.
Duquette died by fire at 1485A Notre Dame on 6 Feb. 1988.
Quebecer Jean Beliveau more recently walked around the world in a similar fashion, although minus the coffin. He too became a hermit after returning, living in the woods with no running water.

André Larivière greets client at his home in an artistic collage

This house at 3426 Marcil, on the west side of NDG Park, was headquarters of one of the nastiest or perhaps most misunderstood psycho-hustlers this city has seen.

André Larivière popped onto the scene in the early 1950s and grew a thriving practice as a psychoanalyst to the wealthy folks of West End Montreal.
He also banged out dozens of books on psychology, explained in laymen's terms.
Some were translated into other languages but there is little trace of them now.
His little book industry that was so successful that he owned his own printing press, Editions Psychologique, in Berthierville.
By the mid-60s Larivière was best known for tackling the anxieties of his wealthiest through sexual pleasure, which rubbed some people the wrong way.
Larivière, it was often noted by possibly-jealous rivals, was not officially recognized by any order of psychiatry.

Indeed he had dropped out of the U of M and then went to study in Paris where he dropped out again.
It does not appear that he ever claimed to be a formally-trained psychologist.
In his early days Larivière was considered respectable enough to be invited to give speeches on the rubber chicken circuit, speaking, for example, to the Youth Chamber of Commerce on the subject No Man is Inferior, on in February 1957.
Then the real fun began.
Larivière became emboldened in embracing sexuality, notably giving a speech criticizing Quebecers for being afraid to sin.
His therapy included what he called gratifications affectives maximales. Patients were instructed to carry out sex exercises.

Authorities took note and in 1965 police and charged him with a litany of misdeeds, as he was suspected of corrupting young women, and procuring abortions.

A younger André Larivière

He was acquitted.
But a prosecutor was so enraged by the judge's acquittal that he denounced the judge publicly, leading to some discussion of a possible contempt of court charge.
Meanwhile psychiatrists criticized the prosecution for allegedly putting private patient files in the public realm.
But prosecutors tried him again on charges of mishandling his patients, who he encouraged to learn to relax through sex.
One expert said that one might indeed relax through sex but said it was a transitory state, like taking an aspirin.
It was noted that one of his patients tossed herself off the Eiffel Tower to her death.


	An older André Larivière

Other testimony was sealed and later destroyed, as women would have hesitated to testify had it been a public affair.
He was found guilty and Judge Omer Cote of St. Jerome sentenced him to 20 years in prison in June 1966.
His lawyer, however, noted that all of his patients had participated willingly in all of his sessions.
An appeals court judge later reduced his 20-year sentence to just two years.
A new batch of charges were produced, including a charge that he helped a young women get an abortion in 1965, and his sentence was raised from two to four years in prison.
Four dozen police, including the chief of police, came to his house to arrested him during this second arrest episode.
Larivière was back on the scene before long, however and relocated his practice to 423 St. Joseph W. where he declared bankruptcy in June 1969.
His troubled times were not yet over.
Provincial tax authorities charged him with tax evasion in 1978, as he had failed to fully declare his entire, rather significant, income between 1971 and 1977.
He was given a choice of paying $188,000 or going back to prison in 1982.
The trail gets washed out after that and we're assuming that he is now dead or else around 100 years old.

Until the mid-1980s Little Burgundy was split by a mud-infested area known as the Bonaventure Yards that gobbled up 900,000 square feet of prime real estate between Atwater and Peel between St. James and Notre Dame.

A poet with a flair for geography could have created something memorable about the massive and gloomy property that divided a key part of town. None did as far as we know.

The area was once filled with Canadian National Railway tracks that led to Bonaventure Station, which sat at around Peel and St. James across from Chaboillez Square (later home to the Planterium).

Once the glorious steam locomotives and tracks were pulled from the tracks, the Bonaventure Yards became an obsolete eyesore that cast a gloomy pall over the area.

Those who sought to pass the land were forced onto bridges at Guy and Mountain, a melancholy experience that I salute in my upcoming Montreal 375 Tales, which should be out in September.

The Bonaventure Yards was slated for residential transformation in April 1969 when Montreal approved the purchase of a few sheds and a fruit store at northwest corner of Guy and Notre Dame, which did not require demolition at all but still went down, with great difficulty we are told, as it was a particularly sturdy structure.

The project also widened St. James to 80 feet wide.

Montreal paid $12 million for the sprawling property, with some contributions from the federal and provincial governments. The deal was announced on December 19, 1973.

The new residential neighbourhood was expected to be built within about five years but took well over a decade to complete.

The project aimed at uniting Little Burgundy, which had been split between north and south prior and the plan was to allow developers to build and sell off properties on the newly-recovered blocks. The transformation was a triumph for the city, except that in many cases the homes built ended up uniform and drab. The process that allowed such an unappealing aesthetic remains unknown but we shall endeavor to figure out how it happened.

Laval's Gabriel Aubry overcame a difficult childhood bouncing around foster homes away from his many brothers and sisters, who all suffered a similar fate.
Little is known about his tumultuous upbringing, as he has never discussed it openly in any detail.
But young Gab persevered and reunited with his dad at age 18 and his fame blossomed as soon as the world learned of his perfect skeletal features.
He had been working as a cook at East Side Mario's in Laval when Kelly Yee, a stylist for the Montage agency, discovered him at the Bourbon Street North in Ste. Adele. (Both now closed, the once-thriving bar now an old age home).
Aubry had never flown on a plane when they handed him a ticket to Milan a few weeks later.
Nor could he speak a word of English beyond the customary Quebecois "yes, no, toaster," as he vaulted to fame by overnight becoming the world's highest paid male model in around 2000.
He soon became part of a celebrity tandem with actress Halle Berry.
The duo became a bit of a local celebrity power couple around Montreal after purchasing land in the Laurentians.
Alas their duration was limited and Berry, who shot at least one movie in Montreal, irritated a few by allowing a guard to cut her to the front of a line at a local airport.
She was not seen locally after that.
Berry's net work is estimated at $70 million so Aubry let a big fish off the hook when the duo split.
News is, however that Aubry, who is currently stationed in Los Angeles and might not exactly be on the next flight back to Montreal, is now dating Charlize Theron, who is another big ticket item.
She busted the balls of the greatest actor on earth Tom Hardy last year in a Mad Max flick.
Theron might even be considered an upgrade on the fading Berry, as her net worth is said to be around $105 million.
So Aubry, who was made to look like less than a champ in a recent encounter with Halle's replacement pal, appears to have come out on top.
Aubry would be a great candidate to write an autobiography of his untamed young years in foster care, perhaps even donating the profits to local charities.

Antoinette Lashley, 32, moved to Montreal from Edmonton in 1986 and got a job in the needle-trade.
She met James "Jimmy The Mick" Kairns, 57, a working class guy from The Point/Verdun. His job was delivering early-morning Gazette newspapers on the West Island.
Both were single with kids from previous couplings. He had twin boys and three daughters with Emma Rath, while she had a younger eight-year-old son living with his father in Edmonton.
Lashley moved in with Kairns at his apartment at 2285 St. Matthew.
The couple lived together for eight months when they hit a rough patch and neighbours heard them arguing.
Lashley informed Kairns that she was moving out. She laid a $50 deposit on an apartment on Aylmer Street, where she planned to live with her son, who was coming to town to live with her.
She found Kairns too possessive and switched to another boyfriend, according to friends.

Lashley went missing on July 9, 1986, a day after the big argument. Her body was found 14 days later upstream in the St. Lawrence River.
Her remains were in rough condition and were impossible to identity.
Police had bungled and mistakenly reported that Lashley was white skinned and stood 5'6."
So the pathologist at the morgue dismissed the possibility that the 5'1", light-brown skinned body was Lashley.
So Lashley remained listed as a missing person well after her body was found.
Police interviewed Kairns for a possible link to the disappearance but didn't have homicide in mind, as Lashley was still only classified as missing.
However police learned that Kairns had withdrawn his life savings, signed over his delivery business to a son and relocated to Vancouver shortly after Lashley's disappearance. His car was found in Thunder Bay Ontario bearing a license plate stolen in Dorval.
It seemed fishy but police had no grounds to charge him with a crime.
Two years later, in September 30, 1988 Lashley's passport washed up in Tracy, Quebec and police finally identified her as the person they had found in 1986.
Police had little evidence against Kairns but arrested him in Vancouver in January 1990 and charged him with murder.
He was kept in prison in Montreal for eight months until his trial ended.
Theresa Joan Dell'Ece, 38, and another friend testified about the circumstances surrounding Lashley's situation. But the prosecution was doomed, as it was never even established that Lashley was even murdered.
A jury took only a day to clear Kairns of the charges. After being acquitted, Kairns returned to Vancouver where he now lives, now aged about 88.

Please send any input concerning this case to megaforce@gmail.com

1. St. James Club NW corner University and Dorch. Demolished for PVM in the 1960s.

2. Colonial Apartments SW corner Dorch and St. Matthew. Demolished after the south side of Dorch was demolished in the mid- 1950s for widening. Street address 1806 Dorch contained at least 26 apartments.

3. Desbarats House built in about 1865, apparently on the South side of Dorch between Guy and St. Matthew

4. The psychedelic Western General Hospital came with two antenna-like turrets and windows that look like the architect thought patients might be forced into shooting arrows at attackers. Built in 1919 and incorporated into the old Children's Hospital which appears slated for demolition now. The windows and turrets were gone long ago though.

5. The Fraser institute Free public library was run by R.W. Boodle, librarian in 1890 at 811 Dorchester. The office tower at 625 Dorch W. now inhabits the site. Merchant Hugh Fraser willed his fortune to open a free public library "open to all honest and respectable persons" after he died in 1870. But the family fought for the money and it only got built in 1885, taking over an old school house. By 1959 it was in NDG and had Andrew Hickson's name tacked on after he donated $1 M to its coffers.

6. Church at the NE corner of Guy and Dorch.

7. Dorch and Mansfield.

8. Proposed building on Dorchester, probably never built

9. Apartment building at Dorch and St. Matthew, probably never built.

10. Unidentified building somewhere on Dorchester, taken at an unknown time. Somewhat reminiscent of the Royal George building on Bishop.

11. Franciscan Church on Dorch SE corner Chomedey was only demolished after a 2010 fire. It was built in 1893

12. Knox Church was knocked down for the Sun Life building, along with a big YMCA. This sat at the NW corner of Mansfield and Dorch.

13. SW corner St Cat and Drummond. It was knocked down and replaced with the taller Willis Pianos b building after 1910. The building to the right is still there and houses the Laser Quest and other stores.

14. Wilson Smith House at Drummond and Sherb where the Ritz Carlton Hotel now stands.

15. This one was at the NW corner of Sherbrooke and University.

16. SE corner of Drummond and St. Catherine.

17. Building demolished for the downtown YMCA.

18. The Hosmer House sat on Drummond between Dorch and St. Cat. It was built in 1906. Wrong time and place, as downtown became largely unsustainable for such structures not long later due to tax evaulations.

19. Robert Meighen's house downtown. Became the Mount Stephen Club on Drummond, west side north of St. Cat.

20. Angus House, west side of Drummond, a few doors up from Sherbrook.

21. This bucolic beaut sat at the NE corner of Park and Sherbrooke.

22. SE corner of Park and Sherbrooke. Date unknown. That's Z.A. Lambert grocery with the big awning.

23. The American House sat on Drummond, west side, above St. Catherine, somewhere around where the Drummond Medical building now sits.

24. Miss Edgar's and Cramps School girls private school sat the east side of Guy and Lincoln when it opened in 1909, with 70 studnets, called Edgar's School. It stayed there until 1949.

25. Mountain and Dorch.

26. Original MAAA at Mansfield and De Maisonneuve from about 1881 to 1905 when it moved to its current location on Peel.

27. Northwest corner Overdale and Lucien L'Allier. The St. Andrew's Home went up around 1890. 403 Aqueduct, as the building was then located, sat far enough from the corner of Overdale to build a couple of industrial buildings betwixt. So by 1920 Royal Sponging and International Braid sat next door, with Guaranteed Pure Milk soon taking over that corner. Three residential buildings flanked it on the Dorchester side. It was gone by 1930.

28 Up at the top of Drummond, 3655, now sits that round McGill medicine building. But railway baron Duncan McIntyre once called it home with his mansion known as Craguie. It went up in the 1880s and went down in 1930. The family donated the land to McGill who turned McIntyre Park into its current vocation in 19565.

29. St. Paul's Church sat at Dorch and Beaver Hall (SW corner) from 1867 to 1932. It moved up to where Vanier College now sits. It came with an eye-catching structure that inexplicably sticks out in front and casts shad on is door.

30 Douglas Church became the Seville Theatre at Chomedey and St. Cat, NW corner.

Engineer Pierre Kounelis invited Nasir Ameeriar to his downtown apartment on the 11th floor of 3445 Drummond on Friday 19 June 1987 to sell his father's 1967 white 1967 Jaguar sports car for $22,000.
Kounelis, 64, was a Greek Montreal who had worked his entire career for the City of Montreal and the Montreal Urban Community.

Nasir Ameeriar

Mohamed Nasir Ameeriar was a 23-year-old Afghan who was living with his brother at 3605 St. Urbain. He had already given Kounelis a cheque for $6,000 and was bringing him a second cheque for $16,000.
The two tested the car on nearby streets, along with Kounelis' young son Jean-Pierre, aged 12.
Soon after, a neighbour found Kounelis' bloody corpse in the fourth-floor staircase half-covered in plastic.
Minutes earlier Ameeriar left with the boy, according to building superintendent witness Gilles Pilon.
Ameeriar later rented a car with Kounelis' credit card, which led police to track him down soon after. His prints were found in the building.
Dozens of police officers searched for the boy's remains around St. Urbain and Sherbrooke. They put out an alert for a taxi driver who might have driven the duo from the scene of the crime.
Jean-Pierre was never found. Police suspected that Ameeriar killed the boy because he had witnessed the murder.
One theory had it that Ameeriar might have simply put the boy's lifeless body out in the garbage that passed by his home that same day and that the remains were never located because they were swiftly burned at the city incinerator.

JP Kounelis

No charges were laid in his disappearance and the boy was never found, much to the regret of his mother Lena Kounelis, 52, who offered a $20,000 reward for information of his whereabouts.
Ameeriar was convicted of murdering Kounelis after a two-week trial on 19 Dec. 1987.
One witness told the court that Ameeriar tried to have the witness doorman killed to prevent him from testifying.
Ameeriar was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole for 15 years on 28 June 1988.
He continued to plead his innocence. He said that he didn't want his family, who loved him, to visit him in prison.
Once at Parthenais prison, he paid another inmate Michel Reeves to confess to killing the boy.
Reeves implicated an inmate named Gilles Meloche of Port-Cartier to settle an old grudge.
Meloche, of course, wasn't too happy about this false accusation. His name was cleared by 1991 and he sued journalist Claude Poirier for bringing his name into the affair.
Meloche was later charged with assaulting a prison guard while serving his time.
Somewhere after 2003 Ameeriar was released and married a woman named France Thibault who divorced him in the summer of 2005. He had apparently been living in a posh spot at 22 Upper Trafalgar, according to a business records document.
Ameeriar was on some sort of parole when he violated his parole conditions by disappearing, which merited him a spot on Canada's most wanted, as noted on the RCMP site.
His whereabouts and activities are anybody's guess.

Let's talk Café Caprice, which was once a sort of landmark bar on St. Denis just north of Mount Royal.
4557 St Denis housed a rubber company back in the 1920s and then later became a printing company.
It burned in 1947 and the Caprice Restaurant was born.
It ran occasional newspaper advertisements noting that it served good food as "le rendez vous des gastronomes" and stayed open until 4 a.m.

- 20 Dec. 1951: Mme. Ernest Ethier, 47, of 3414 Bordeaux was sitting in the joint during a show by a fire breather called Bozo, who was dressed as a cannibal. He managed to spill the flaming liquid on her while walking by. Six years later a judge ordered owner Jean Brossard to pay her $1,462 for her burn injuries.

-1953 Singer Jean Lapointe landed at the bar after he arrived in Montreal from Quebec City with just twenty bucks in his pocket. He won a $5 prize at amateur night talent contest at what was now known as Cafe Caprice, leading to a steady gig. He called himself Jean Caprice for a while. Lapointe is still alive, now about 82, and in the Canadian Senate.
-1960 Newspaper survey lists it as one of many bars that stayed open serving alcohol well after the legal 2 a.m. closing time.
-Oct 2 1965 Ruby Viel, 35, of 5212 Parthenais collapsed and died after returning from the dance floor after dancing with what a newspaper described as a "scantily clad young black woman."
-21 Jan 1968 - Jacques Forest, 22, was shot in the abdomen at the bar. He survived. People in the club thought it was part of the show. Police found the suspect after ordering a motorist to park properly. He explained that he was going to meet his brother, whose name police recognized as the suspect.
-1972 Place was smashed up by loansharks who were connected to the FTQ union.

-10 May 1973 three young guys in a brief shootout with police as they were caught with 6 sticks of dynamite which they wanted to use against guys who smashed up the Caprice a week earlier.

-5 Feb 1971 - Andre "Ti Noir" Daigneault, in his thirties, was shot in the stomach and killed at about 2:30 am. About 60 other inebriated revelers were brought into police custody for interrogation by Night Squad Chief Cpt Jacques Cinq Mars and assistants. It was described a biker hangout.

Violette Barette and Claude Lafortune

27 July 1978 - By now it's a full-blown strip club managed by Claude Lafortune Jr., 23. He was arrested after shooting his girlfriend Violette Barette, 24, to death. Barette, who stripped at the bar, was living with him nearby at 444 Gilford Street apt 31. She was on speed and he had drank copious amounts of rum and smoked marijuana when they quarreled. Lafortune said she came at him with a fork and stabbled him in the elbow and so he shot her. He was tried for manslaughter but the verdict and sentence is unclear. A neighbour testified that Barette had once responded to his request to turn down the music by pointing a shotgun at him.

The Chauvin sisters

1978-79 Sisters Patricia Chauvin and Maude Chauvin, from France, frequently danced at the club during the time they got in hot water for being girlfriends of brothers Pierre Renaud and Michel Renaud, who had killed a cop and seriously injured two others in a gunfight. They also danced at the Sextuple, Georgio and Doric. "They are beautiful but we had to fire them because they bickered over romance. We don't keep those types of girls here even if they make a lot of money," said manager Georges Lafortune.

3 Dec 1982 Dozens of feminist protesters came to express displeasure after the club puts up a sign reading "our 1983 models have arrived." The protesters didn't like that the club was comparing women to cars. Vandals painted the window in later months as a brief wave of anti-porn protests hit the city, most notably as Concordia student Paul Sypnowich smashed windows at the Cinema L'Amour a half dozen times in 1983.

-In the 1980s it was renamed Pub de Londres a Berlin and then the Diable Vert until 1998 when it returned to its original name. Management wanted to put the old sign back but the city wouldn't permit it, so they attached it to the ceiling. It's now known as the Clebard Bar.

May 1963, Montreal courthouse.

21 April 1978 Roland Quintal, 49, was killed by a bomb under the seat of his Cadillac near his home at 289 2nd Ave. in Verdun. 21 April 1978. Marcel Talon, who was best known for trying to tunnel into a bank in Old Montreal, was tried for the murder in 2005. Talon served little time after acting as an informant.

10 April 1979 Paul Arthur Joron, 43, was found in his car trunk shot dead in a car at the parking lot in Dorval Airport. He owned Star Glass on Jean Talon and was a father of three.

April 12, 1979 Liberato Lombardi, 40, Honda car dealership guy was shot dead in his car.

Parent and Beaudoin

22 Oct. 1979 Raymonde Parent was shot dead in the elevator at her home in the Olympic Village on Oct 22, 1979. Her husband Fernand Beaudoin was shot in the same incident but survived. Beaudoin employed 168 at his Ferncraft Leather. Beaudoin had earlier flourished a gun at the office of Aetna bos Gerald Levinson after he pulled financing. He was sentenced to three months. Beaudoin then tried to sue Aetna for $25 million. The provincial government bankrolled Beaudoin's new leather business. The murder victim Raymonde was likely not at the centre of any of these storms but she ran for the Creditistes in the late 1970s.

Ralph Ordower

21 March 1980 at 6 pm. Lawyer Ralph Ordower, 44, left his office at the real estate giant Ivanhoe on the 5th floor of Alexis Nihon Plaza to get to his car in the basement lot. His killer knifed him after slashing his tires. The only hypothesis was that a real estate guy named Arthur Ross from Texas might have wanted him killed to prevent him from testifying at a complicated fraud trial but that was just hearsay from an informant.

Oct 21, 1983 Pierre Dubois, flashing a nice fat wad of cash of Canadian cash money was killed by a stripper he met in the Golden BB on Concorde in Laval. Suzie Hunt, 20, was caught and convicted to 10 years in the slammer.

Jan. 4. 1984. Marie-Francoise Hanriat was killed in an alleyway on Bishop by a bankrupt restaurateur after she tried to take possession of his goods that she bought at auction.

19 Dec. 1984 Used car dealer Allan Wasserman 35, was shot dead while getting ouf of his car at his business on Royalmount with a machine gun.

Peter Glasheen

7 Sept. 1985 Peter Glasheen , engineer, political organizer and philanthropist was killed by smashed skull and found in his apartment on Crescent after doing some social drinking on the strip. Glasheen was an engineer at IBM and high profile political organizer, who helped Don Johnson in his Liberal party leadership campaign in 1984 and ran the youth orchestra and was active in the Society for Emotional Development for Children. Cops were perplexed and imagined it was a robbery.

Marcoux

8 July 1986 Pierre Marcoux, 41, bank manager for Royal Bank on Mount Royal Blvd. was blown up in his car in his apartment building in St. Lambert at 7:30 a.m. Police investigators later noted that Marcoux, who had recently divorced, had been living well above his means. Marcel Talon was convicted of the crime many years later.

Can a killer collect a reward by confessing to a crime he himself committed?
The question has led to some theoretical debate, without clear resolution.
But a Montreal criminal once tried to scoop up reward cash for a murder he committed in 1994, with some problematic results.
***
Claude Ranger, 34, Kyle Bigelow, 24, and Peter Pompeo, 26, sat with Thomas James, 31, in Maz bar on Sherbrooke on Nov. 20, 1994, where Pompeo's mother worked as barmaid and manager.
All listened to James' plan with interest.
James' unlikely caper? Rob a pair of armored guards by simply shooting them as they departed with cash from the Provigo at 5595 Monkland.
Though inelegant and unnecessarily violent, the plan sounded like a winner and all three signed on.
Ranger, who had committed at least two previous armed robberies, was to wield one gun, with Bigelow going in with the other.
James and Pompeo were to watch from outside and create a diversion with an alarm clock bomb and be wheelmen for the heavily-armed duo exiting with cash.

Thomas James

The gang spent the night prior to the robbery at the Chateau Champlain Hotel and arrived at the Provigo at 11 a.m.
***
1994 was year of shifts. People were discovering Internet via dial up. Grunge was on the ropes with Kurt Cobain's suicide. Gardening upstart Pierre Bourque beat veteran Jean Dore to become mayor of Montreal.
Old style violent robberies had started to fade, as indeed Montreal saw only 52 murders in 1994, far fewer than the 80 annual average in the five years previous.
***
A bus shelter poster pushed Tom Cruise's new film Interview with a Vampire in front of the Provigo on Monkland when the two-toned gold colored van Secur armored car pulled up in front of the grocery store on Nov. 22, 1994.
Ranger and Bigelow stormed in at 11 a.m. wielding a 44 Magnum and a machine gun. They fired before the guards had a chance to aim back.
Ranger blasted guard Richard Lavallee with three bullets to the abdomen. He died soon after. The second guard, John Rosen, 64, was hit in the wrist as about 50 looked on.
The gang escaped with $120,000 in cash.
A bystander rushed to help the dying Lavallee and offered a moving account to journalists concerning his futile effort to keep the guard alive.
***
The four escaped the scene. Police started investigating leads.
But the investigation would get help from an unlikely source and in May 1995 Bigelow was arrested in the West End, while James and Pompeo were rounded up in Toronto.
Ranger had made the mistake of reading a newspaper article about the guard he had killed. He found himself overcome with guilt and regret and decided to turn himself and his accomplices in.
He confessed not only to the crime but also to a pair of other robberies, one of which left a jeweler injured on Cathcart in 1995.
Indeed Ranger so talkative that he spent three weeks revealing his delinquent behavior in school, past crimes, drug use, his ability to manipulate prison staff, his love life, his debts and everything else in 2,431 pages of transcripts.
Ranger was not very precise in negotiating the terms of his confession however and received no clemency in spite of his confession and cooperation.
He was sentenced to 25 years in prison for shooting
Ranger is apparently still in prison.
***
Bigelow told the court that he really meant to shoot at a wall. He was found guilty on Valentines Day 1996 and sentenced to life. He appears to have been a model inmate and now lives in BC.
Pompeo was sentenced to 14 years and has been out of prison for a long time.
James was convicted and sentenced to life in prison as the mastermind behind the reckless, murderous robbery. A judge was unamused when an anonymous caller offered a juror $5,000 to influence his vote to see James freed.
The jury was reduced to 11 and James was found guilty of premeditated murder March 7, 1997.
***
Ranger, though in jail, realized that he might have the right to collect the $50,000 reward Secur offered for the capture and conviction of Lavallee's killer.
He figured he had done just that and sought to collect the cash.
Newspapers reported in April 1998 that Ranger had launched a lawsuit to collect the cash that was rightfully his.
***
Thomas James saw this as a chance to appeal his life sentence.
He went to court claiming that Ranger's attempted cash grab proved that he was motivated to get money, not tell the truth. James argued that Ranger's testimony against him was corrupted by his goal of getting a cash reward.
A court document from James' ultimately futile 2001 appeal attempt referenced the Ranger's attempt to collect the reward.

During his preliminary (August 1995) and trial (February 1997) testimony, Claude Ranger has consistently argued that he has confided in police officers in a fit of guilt and sympathy after reading an article by press on the punishment of the family of the shot down security guard; cross-examined on the subject, he denied having asked, or even intended to ask for, the payment of the reward promised by Sécur.
on 31 March 1998, a little less than 13 months after the verdict against the appellant, Ranger claimed from Sécur the payment of the promised reward. The action was brought on 9 April 1998. However, it was to be discontinued on 22 March 1999; the Superior Court document indicated that the discontinuance occurred "considering" his testimony at the preliminary hearing of the appellant, Pompeo and Bigelow, who were then co-accused.

Ranger abandoned his lawsuit in 1999 for reasons unknown. So it remains unknown whether Secur would have been forced to pay off the man that killed their slain employee.
So it leaves the question unanswered: can a criminal collect a reward on himself?
The $5,000 reward, at 8 percent annual compound interest would be worth about $388,000 after 25 years.

Montreal Forum clock post 1966

Montreal Forum timekeeper André Dandurand had a lot of nerve.
Dandurand pocketed a $12,500 bribe to manipulate the clock to dictate the time goals were recorded in front of all to see.
Dandurand brazenly and routinely allowed the clock to keep ticking after goals in front of 15,500 fans.
He did this because many fans bought underground lottery tickets that would reward them if a goal was scored, for example, within the first five minutes on an odd second or an even second.
All Dandurand had to do was get the instructions and stop the clock to ensure a goal was notched at an odd or even second, according to the day's tickets.
The scam, when done right, ensured that all the tickets would be losers.
It lasted apparently from September 1968 to 23 March 1969.
Thousands of fans were somehow oblivious to the fact that the clock wasn't always stopping right away after a goal.
Nobody said anything until cop Steve Olynyk came along.
****
Timekeeping was a serious business when the Montreal Canadiens started at the Mount Royal Arena at the southeast corner of Mount Royal and St. Urbain.

Mount Royal Arena had no visible clock

Timekeepers Dr. Albert Surprenant, Dr. J.A. Clement, Hector Quevillon, Charles Mayer and Robert Rochon took the job ultra seriously, keeping time on European stopwatches, with separate watches for penalties.
Coaches would frequently send emissaries over to ask how much time remained in a penalty or period, while they would often have their own men keeping their own time, to ensure against manipulation.
League president Frank Calder was vigilant in keeping eye on the timekeeping and would frequently check up on the timing.
(Strange fact: Penalized players allowed kids to sit on their laps in the penalty box at the Mount Royal Arena.)
***
The Habs moved to the Forum where a SporTimer clock, shipped from Thunder Bay in Oct. 1931, was affixed to the wall.

pre-1966 Forum clock

The same timekeepers from the old arena would often show up with their stopwatches just to ensure that the clocks were faithful to the correct time.
The first clock at the Forum had a minute hand that only had 20, 15, 10 and 5, with only the last five minutes getting by-the-minute treatment.
The second clock, which lasted until January 1966, had a second hand that was so heavy that the first 30 seconds of each minute would pass faster than it should and the second half of a minute would go slower, as the upward motion required extra mechanical strength, former timekeeper Mayer claimed in a 1966 article. Nonetheless each minute was 60 seconds exactly.
There was no public penalty clock and fans were sometimes infuriated that the light permitting players to leave the box often didn't go on at the same time in the case of offsetting penalties.

Montreal-born Phil Watson, who coached the New York Rangers from 1955-1960, wasn't a fan of Forum timekeepers, as the former star noted that the clock once didn't budge on a false draw even though the timekeeper made a point of pretending to press the start button.
The Canadiens eventually replaced the timekeeper with someone from building maintenance staff, who was presumably totally neutral.
End-of-period buzzer beater disputes were common and eventually the red goal light and green end-time light were rigged so the two couldn't light simultaneously.
The familiar four-sided digital clock was installed in 1966.
***
Scandal struck when Montreal police Morality Squad chief Steve Olynyk attended three games at the Forum in January 1969.
According to one version it was his only son who noticed that the clock kept running after goals, while according to another he was accompanied by fellow officers when they made the observation.
After one goal the clock ran a full five seconds, according to Olynyk.
Staffers were questioned and four, including timekeeper Andre Dandurand, 34, of 7075 Mousseau in Anjou, were charged with playing along with the illegal lottery scam.

Olynyk

The bunch were arrested and granted bail until their May trial. Dandurand confessed and implicated former announcer Jerry Marcoux, who denied everything. He was fined $50.
Time had run out on Dandurand's career as a timekeeper and never was his index finger to touch a Forum clock controls again.
Dandurand, in his erratic testimony, variously accused colleagues Henry Labelle, 35, of 1253 Osborne in Verdun, Gilles Bacon and Jean Guy Doiron.
Police found notes in the pockets of some of the suspects demonstrating that they were involved but the court would not allow them as evidence.
Cops seized lottery printing apparatus from 8415 Levrard in St. Leonard.
Pierre-Paul Archambault and Jean-Claude Lamarche asked for police protection as they provided testimony about the scam, which saw them send blank cheques that were eventually cashed by Bacon.
The other three were acquitted five years later after charges were dropped and then revived.

Shirley was eating dinner in downtown Montreal with a friend when she spotted a natty blonde man in a pinstripe suit at another table.
"I thought my friend knew him. So I was looking straight at him. He started laughing. My friend turned around. She didn't know him. He came over and started chatting with me."
Alfred Pinisch then met Shirley for their first date, coming to see her in the recreation room of the YWCA where she claimed a certain prowess at Chinese Checkers.
Pinisch grew up in Europe of Polish-German extraction where he witnessed the war, a war which saw his father jailed for opposing Hitler.

Shirley came to Montreal alone in 1951 from an English sugar plantation family in Barbados where she was raised by her mom. Her father ran the luggage room at Grand Central Station in New York City.
She landed work on the same day she arrived in Montreal and toiled as a Canadian Pacific Railway secretary in an office at the Board of Trade Building and rented a reasonably-priced apartment on Maplewood.
Pinisch toiled on St. James, and lived on Dorchester and worked at a sporting goods store.
He was an avid outdoorsman, keen on cross country skiing and participated in various rifle shooting tournaments. The two frequently enjoyed dining out at the St. Moritz restaurant at the southwest corner of Stanley and St. Catherine (now a coffee shop).

See also: 50 years ago today -2 killed in FLQ robbery

They met in June 1953 and were married that same December.
They lived a normal life, attending dinners at friends homes and picnics and parties.
Pinisch was quiet and hard-working but didn't much enjoy working at the International Firearms on Bleury, although he didn't mind working for them occasionally at their plant in St. Alban's.
The couple had a son and then another nine years later but Shirley worried about her family during the political turmoil of the separatist movement.
She called her husband at work after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. "I hope nothing ever happens like that here," she told him.
**
The young family's nightmare began on Aug. 29 1964 when heavily-armed FLQ terrorists burst into the store on Bleury to steal weapons.
"They had the employees lined up against a wall. Al ran downstairs, got a rifle and helped another employee escape by pushing him through a window. 'Go get a cop!' he told him, Shirley recounts.
"Just as he's coming up the stairs two young cops come in with guns drawn."
'I'm an employee!' he told them.
It was already too late, as an officer shot Pinisch, believing him to be one of the murderous terrorists.
"I was waiting for him to come home for dinner when someone phoned me said there was an accident and your husband was involved. I asked "was he hurt?"
The person was agitated and said "calm down!" over and over.
"Why cant u tell me how hes hurt? He cant be dead!"
***
Shirley, who just given birth to her second child, not only lost the man she loved but also the family's main breadwinner.
"At Al's funeral the priest asked (International Firearms store owner William) Sucher, 'what will you do for this family?'
Sucher said 'we're going to set up a trust fund for the children,' Shirley Pinisch told Coolopolis.
No such trust fund was ever set up.
Pinisch noticed a distraught stranger at her husband's funeral.
"He kept shouting at me, 'I'm sorry madam.'"
It was the officer who accidentally shot her husband.
Pinisch never saw an autopsy or police report and doesn't even know the name of the officer who accidentally shot her husband dead.
She said rumour had it that he went mad and died. She has no way to confirm that.
***
Meanwhile Pinisch, in her grieving, started getting threatening phone calls suggested she leave Quebec with her children. She feared they might be kidnapped, so Sucher gave her money to go back to Barbados for four months until the pressure blew over.
When she returned she brought back a housekeeper to watch her child.
"I called Sucher to ask him about the trust fund. He said 'you're a healthy young woman and you can find a way to manage.'"
She eventually took any work she could get, working as a secretary in the daytime and selling cosmetics at night, while helping with wedding photography on weekends.
The schedule forced her to rarely see her own children, she now laments.
Her maid, she later learned, had taken to beating her two sons.
The trauma and stress had taken its toll on the two boys who had a tough time thereafter, with the older child suffering psychological trauma from the loss of his father and the subsequent family turmoil.
Pinisch wishes things could have turned out otherwise but had no choice in the matter.
"I was worn out. I worked myself to the bone," she said.
***
Pinisch did not attend the trial for two FLQ terrorists responsible for the murderous event, which also saw manager Leslie McWilliams shot dead by the thieves.
Belgian immigrant Francois Schirm, 32, attempted to make a mockery of the proceedings by representing himself while wearing army fatigues. He was arrogant and unapologetic, as the judge noted when sentencing him and his younger partner in crime Francois Guenette to death on May 22, 1965.
Terrorist sympathizers pressured Prime Minister Trudeau to commute the sentences and Schirm was eventually sent to life in prison. He was an old man when he was released and died soon after.
***
Pinisch remarried a man working at the St. Lawrence Seaway. She left with him to Toronto when he was transferred in 1974. Two years later he started having heart issues and then became ill-tempered and was diagnosed with brain cancer and died soon after.
Pinisch, now in her 80s, has since remarried for a third time to a man now in his nineties.
**
She fears for the fate of her two adult children when she's gone and their ability to cope.
She received any compensation for the disaster still holds out hope that police, government or some other person will step up and set up a fund to her her sons.

A list of things that Montreal was first in the world at.
1868World's first kidney removal was performed at Hotel Dieu Hospital.
1872 World's first tongue and jaw amputation was performed at Hotel Dieu Hospital
1874 World's first game of modern football was played between harvard and McGill in Montreal.
1875 First recorded indoor hockey game takes places at Victoria Rink on Drummond.
1883 World's first hockey tournament takes place at the Montreal Winter Carnival took place in Montreal.
1890 Louis Rubenstein became world's first figure skating champ in an international competition in St Petersberg.
1896 First x-ray used in a court case. George Hodder shot Tolman Cummings in the leg inside a Montreal bar around Christmastime 1895. Surgeons couldn't find the bullet but doctors located the it thanks to an x-ray image taken at McGill University. The bullet and x-ray were used in court and Hodder was sentenced to 14 years in prison in February 1896. It is believed to be the first time an x-ray was used in a court case. SourceTaming the Rays by Geoff Meggitt.

1898 Westmount Arena, the world's first designed specifically for hockey, opens.
1901World's first police forensics labs opens in Montreal under Eugene Laflamme.
1907 Ernest Rutherford becomes the first to prove the concept of radioactive half-life at McGill University and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
1919 Montrealer JKL Ross's horse Sir Barton becomes the first horse to win the Triple Crown.
1945 Jackie Robinson becomes the first African American to sign with a major league affiliate team and debuts with the Montreal Royals next season.
1959World's first femur transplant was performed at Hotel Dieu Hospital
1959 First maintenance and overhaul unit designed exclusively for turbine aircraft was opened at Dorval Airport.

1966 - October: Montreal unveiled the world's first fully rubber tired subway system.

1967 Montreal hosted the world's first satellite telecast at Expo 67
1976 Montreal's Velodrome becomes the first indoor racing track. It was used for the Montreal 1976 Olympic Games.
1981 World's first recovery of a patient with 90 percent burns on his body performed at Hotel Dieu.
1983 The world's first robotically assisted laparoscopic surgery was performed at Hotel Dieu.
1987World's first global treaty for protection of the environment was signed in Montreal.
1990Montreal Heart Institute introduces world's first percutaneous cryocatheter
2002- Montreal undertook the world's first large-scale urban demergers.

2011 World's first commercial rooftoop greenhouse opened in Montreal.

2013 McGill unveils McSleepy, the world's first completely automatic anesthesia delivery system.

2015World’s first open surgery orthopedic training simulator was created in Montreal by CHUM hospital researchers.

2017World's first "connected bridge" unveiled as the Jacques Cartier Bridge lights up.
2017McGill University's Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital beomes the world's first open science institution, which means that they share their research for free.
2017 World's first dual-fuel asphalt tanker was christened in Montreal. It was designed by the Desgagne Group and built in Turkey.

Lowbrow adult movies once constituted a major chunk of Montreal's cinema fare, as dimly-lit 18-and-over joints exploded across towns in the 1970s.
Nowadays only such solitary place exists, the Cinema L'Amour on the Main (formerly The Pussycat) and it's seen as a lovable throwback.
But these friendless, secretive and lonely places emerged and persevered in spite of disapproval from residents and authorities.
The first such establishments cropped up under the reign of Mayor Jean Drapeau, a savvy veteran whose entire reputation was built on fighting smut and crime.
But Drapeau's prudish ways were challenged by a massive baby boom demographic who embraced sex and drugs and rock and roll, and weren't keen on having their appetites limited by middle aged humbugs.
Drapeau was brazen in his opposition to such films asQuiet Days in Clichy, which he obsessed over days after the much more important October Crisis of 1970. He also offered free publicity by fretting about the visiting topless African Ballet and singer Muriel Millard for her midriff poster slapped on construction sites around town.
Quebec adopted three categorizations for films in 1967: For All, 14 and Over and 18 and Over. The grown up designation suggested naughtiness and nudity at the very least
The Bureau de surveillance du cinema replaced the old-time censors and the board saw its priority as being to allow adults to watch what they liked and ensure that young people don't get to see the same naughtiness.
Montreal had no dedicated porn theatres in 1968 although something called the Cinema Underground (Revue Theatre) offered A trip in Erotica, while the mainstream Snowdon played the Danish- SwedishI, A Woman for four months before authorities shut it down and attempted to fine the theatre, a fiasco that dragged on until 1974 when all charges were finally dropped.
Judging by the oft-obscure internet traces of these forgotten films, viewers required a high tolerance for boredom. It must have been hard not to doze off in those dark and lonely seats, as the sexual titillation, which was, by all measure, scarce.

Montrealers Andre Link and John Dunning started churning out daring movies, starting with Valerie, about a girl who meets her true love after leaving the convent and becoming a hippie prostitute. Dunning and Link would go on and the spectacularly crazy Ilsa She Wolf of the SS.
Valerie played to an 18-and-over crowd at the Parisien, so the line between art and sexploitation was still being drawn.
Other adult-sounding films playing in Montreal the time were the Miracle de l'amour at the Canadien and the Plaza. Les Filles de Plaisir at the Mercier, andI am Curious Yellowat the Festival theatre.
The films only suggested sex and offered brief flashes of passing nudity, or simulated sex at best. They were packaged as European art films or educational, so Montrealers who furtively slunk into Sexual Freedom in Denmark had to sit through a lot of people being interviewed in the streets of Copenhagen. Eventually the director gets to the part showing a half dozen blondes frolicking around on a bed. It played at 5117 Park Ave.
***
What went on inside Montreal's porno theatres? That remains a dark-roomed mystery. According to David Simon's hit TV series The Deuce, prostitutes patrolled offering their services in Manhattan porn theatres. No records of such activities are apparent in Montreal, (although older Montreal gays report that certain theatres were hotspots for quickies).

By 1972 certain theatres were become enshrined as dedicated smut joints but many mainstream theatres were playing adult fare. The Seduction of Inga was at the Bonaventure, The Big Bird Cage was at The Capitol and Suburban Wives at the Salle Hermes of Cinema V.
That year in New York Deep Throat came out and featured much explicit oral sex. It became a massive hit and fodder for chinwags, but the film would never play Montreal, which led some to complain that the Montreal was being prudish.
The actual theatres were naturally, already movie theatres before porno came. They simply needed business after business plummeted with the arrival of TV. The owners cannot be blamed for trying to stay afloat in the face of obvious impending doom.
In spite of the enticing newspaper ads, the movies were dull, at least from what we can tell from the online video snippets. For example Smoke and Flesh at the Eros seems to have no nudity but for a girl who loses at strip poker and runs up the stairs, Justine de Sade seems even tamer.

One young entrepreneur, McGill student Robert Lantos, made the shrewd move of seizing on the low-effort-high-profit formula by getting rights to The Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival. It was hot stuff at the time but a more recent viewer commented, "No film has bored me this much."
By 1973 the porn theatres had become a staple that passersby didn't even notice, even with long-running films like "La Sexualite chez les adolescentes," which played at Plaza K Mart and the Omega.
La Presse bemoaned the wave of smut as one editorial bemoaned in 1973 that "Montreal police made so many mistakes (Ballets Africains, I, A Woman) that they seemed to have let go the handle after the axe."
Porn theatres were slugging it out against the Kung Fu movie fad of 1976 as Raquels Motel a film made six years earlier, played the Eros, while The Guy Cinema next to the metro entrance offered Hot Sex in Bangkok and Keyhole Report.

Montrealers protest porn establishments in 1983

Porn theatres almost made their smut movies look important upon occasion, as several theatres united to show the same films and buy a larger newspaper advertisement, which resulted in the Pigalle, Versalles, Rivoli, Greenfield Park all plying "While The Cat's Away." And "Millionaires' Women."
Who went to porn movies and why? The question will forever remain unanswered as the pasttime was not one to be celebrated openly.
Montreal of those years was also full of about four times as many strip clubs and ubiquitious street hookers (a time-honoured spectacle that has now gone totally extinct), so the face of sex was omnipresent and seemed normal in a way that might seem odd today.
Needless to say the theatres began their slow decline with the rise of VCRs and the temporary emergence of porno booths where viewers could slide change into machines in cubicles, which also now appear to be largely gone.
The loneliness, horniness and desperation that created a market for porn market is surely still around but largely quelled by the majesty of the internet.

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