Back in the days when Lorne Greene was the voice of all of the Canadas and neighbouring housewives used to ring your doorbell to borrow eggs and sugar, Montreal had a lot of streets that have since disappeared.
For example, the land that the Olympic Stadium currently occupies contained little streets, including Bennett that ran up to Sherbrooke (and maybe beyond) and that's precisely the intersection where Jean L'Esperance, 42 of 4567 Orleans smashed into a tree and killed himself. His two children were injured but survived on Dec. 2, 1956.
Back then, motorists would drop like flies as brakes were unreliable and tires bald.We really should create a memorial to those traffic victims, who died because of inferior technology.
L'Esperance's sad but highly-photographable demise was one of many motor deaths on National Traffic Safety Week in Montreal that year when nine died over the weekend. One of the dead was a 15-year-old cyclist.
Still better than the 15 that died the weekend before.
In Quebec in 1956, 669 died on highways. There were 50,000 accidents in the province that year, almost exactly half of those in Montreal. At the time there were 825,000 motor vehicles in Quebec and over one million drivers.