Pete Murphy, king of the newsboys

Pete Murphy seen in a drawing from when he donated instruments to hawkers

  Local newspapers did their best to turn Pete Murphy into a legend but the newspaper salesman has been totally forgotten since his death, so Coolopolis is going to try to remind you of his glory.
   Murphy was born in Quebec City in 1850 but started slinging newspapers in Montreal at the age of eight, eventually getting a self-built shed at the corner of St. Francis Xavier and St. James, considered an excellent spot, as it was outside of the big city Post Office.
   The city had only about 60,000 residents when he began and his sales grew as the city and he did brisk business with customs such as Sir John A., various visiting royal Brits, and Wilfrid Laurier, who once brought him a gift of a blackstick back from Ireland.
   He formed the Newsboys Protective Association in 1901 and tried to help the various newsboy hawkers, which included mostly Jewish boys, and he sometimes bemoaned that the numbers of Irish were in decline selling papers on the streets.
   Murphy was not only making good money, he had good press, as the papers tended to laud his efforts to sell their product. He got in the habit of forming various associations for the newsboys, providing them with grey knickerbocker suits for the Workers Parade of 1903 and 1906 and he appeared in a photo in the Utica Globe in 1906, a big deal at the time.
   In 1903, Murphy - by now known as the city's oldest newsboy -  asked that newsboys be regulated and forced to pay a tax fought for the right of girls to sell newspapers on the street, which had been banned.
   He threatened to start his own newspaper in 1904 when the Sunday Sun went on strike.
   In 1911 he lobbied for the reinstatement of the right to sell papers after 9:30 p.m and distributed more uniforms to the newsboys from his home at 14 Coloniale. They held a bus tour in his honour that summer, at the end of which he was presented flowers at the Gazette.
  He bought musical instruments for the boys in 1914, spending $400 of his own money on a variety of instruments in hopes that the music would help the boys' minds.
   He held an annual dinner for the newsboys around Christmastime, at his own expense. About 500 attended the last one he held in 1916, at which he pleaded with the boys to stop smoking.
Murphy died in St. Agathe in 1917, leaving a wife, two daughters and two sons, Frank and Peter, one of whom fought in WWI while the other took over his newsstand.
   Murphy was so notable that a significant obituary was written for his widow, who died at her home at 1979 St. Antoine in 1936 at the age of 96.