Time to salute a great Montreal entrepreneur who brought glory - and shame - to this city and also time to ask whatever happened to the book he promised to write?
More at the end of this little bio.
Joe Azaria was born a Jesuit in Iraq in 1929, he moved to Lebanon at 10 and then on to Canada at 19 and worked as a waiter as a resort in Ste. Agathe, the same job featured in Duddy Kravitz.
He dreamed of being a reporter, a plan shot down when the Montreal Gazette declined to hire him in 1954.
So he took $16 and some credit from a printer friend and hired editor John Vader for the lofty sum of $10 a week and launched Midnight.
The paper floundered until somebody realized that it might sell in the United States. Soon the scandal sheet had 520,000- 750,000 (depending on your source) weekly readers, nine of 10 being in the USA.
He bought out four competitors and saw the money roll in.
I should mention that he was a close friend of my father, who played such a central role in the early years of the tabloid that many assumed it was his paper.
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Azaria grew tomatoes on the roof of the company's office at the southeast corner of St. Catherine and Mackay and even kept ducks, which the receptionist was required to walk.
Several aging scribes have reminisced on their days at the paper, including Joseph Glazer, who is working on a memoir of his time there.
After a few years Azaria sold Midnight to his own company's comptroller Ike Rosenbloom for $4.2 million.
Rosenbloom renamed it The Globe and it was eventually moved to Florida.
Meanwhile Azaria and founded the Sunday Express, Canada's first Sunday paper, in 1968.
Azaria attempted to turn it into a daily in 1971, a project that failed and eventually sold it to the Peladeau Quebecor organization for $500,000 in 1974.
Azaria also made headlines with his failed attempt to purchase the floundering Life Magazine in 1972 and also dodged a significant lawsuit involving Christine Keeler.
Azaria also owned America's oldest magazine, the Police Gazette, which was founded in 1845 and moved the operations here from New York City, complete with editor Nat Perlow and faded starlet Veronica Lake, who lived together on Queen Mary. That storied publication folded in 1977.
Four years after his early retirement Azaria took his $8 million life savings and moved to Pital de San Carlos, 150 kilometres north of San Jose Costa Rica where he grew black pepper on 120 hectares of a 607-hectare tract of rain forest he bought and named Tierra Buena, Spanish for the Good Earth, the name of his favorite novel.
Azaria lived there with his second wife Laura, going without electricity for many years until finally getting a generator.
"My famous line to my wife was that in Canada you spend $100 for a candlelight dinner and here you get it every night," he told a reporter.
He built a village around his land and also returned to spend summers in Canada where he had a 242-hectare forest south of Montreal complete with pheasants and buffalo. He would return summer and spend time with some of his six kids. He eventually sold that farm to Pierre Peladeau, a close friend who helped him as a printer.
He died in 2001.
In the 80s he vowed to write a book about Montreal mobsters that he knew.
We would love to see that manuscript or whatever notes were left.
More at the end of this little bio.
Joe Azaria was born a Jesuit in Iraq in 1929, he moved to Lebanon at 10 and then on to Canada at 19 and worked as a waiter as a resort in Ste. Agathe, the same job featured in Duddy Kravitz.
He dreamed of being a reporter, a plan shot down when the Montreal Gazette declined to hire him in 1954.
So he took $16 and some credit from a printer friend and hired editor John Vader for the lofty sum of $10 a week and launched Midnight.
The paper floundered until somebody realized that it might sell in the United States. Soon the scandal sheet had 520,000- 750,000 (depending on your source) weekly readers, nine of 10 being in the USA.
He bought out four competitors and saw the money roll in.
I should mention that he was a close friend of my father, who played such a central role in the early years of the tabloid that many assumed it was his paper.
Azaria grew tomatoes on the roof of the company's office at the southeast corner of St. Catherine and Mackay and even kept ducks, which the receptionist was required to walk.Several aging scribes have reminisced on their days at the paper, including Joseph Glazer, who is working on a memoir of his time there.
After a few years Azaria sold Midnight to his own company's comptroller Ike Rosenbloom for $4.2 million.
Rosenbloom renamed it The Globe and it was eventually moved to Florida.
Meanwhile Azaria and founded the Sunday Express, Canada's first Sunday paper, in 1968.
Azaria attempted to turn it into a daily in 1971, a project that failed and eventually sold it to the Peladeau Quebecor organization for $500,000 in 1974.
Azaria also made headlines with his failed attempt to purchase the floundering Life Magazine in 1972 and also dodged a significant lawsuit involving Christine Keeler.
Azaria also owned America's oldest magazine, the Police Gazette, which was founded in 1845 and moved the operations here from New York City, complete with editor Nat Perlow and faded starlet Veronica Lake, who lived together on Queen Mary. That storied publication folded in 1977.
Four years after his early retirement Azaria took his $8 million life savings and moved to Pital de San Carlos, 150 kilometres north of San Jose Costa Rica where he grew black pepper on 120 hectares of a 607-hectare tract of rain forest he bought and named Tierra Buena, Spanish for the Good Earth, the name of his favorite novel.
Azaria lived there with his second wife Laura, going without electricity for many years until finally getting a generator.
"My famous line to my wife was that in Canada you spend $100 for a candlelight dinner and here you get it every night," he told a reporter.
He built a village around his land and also returned to spend summers in Canada where he had a 242-hectare forest south of Montreal complete with pheasants and buffalo. He would return summer and spend time with some of his six kids. He eventually sold that farm to Pierre Peladeau, a close friend who helped him as a printer.
He died in 2001.
In the 80s he vowed to write a book about Montreal mobsters that he knew.
We would love to see that manuscript or whatever notes were left.