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.
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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!"
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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.