The Past Whispers

Monday, August 29, 2016

With A Closed Fist–Growing Up In Canada’s Toughest Neighborhood

Offering a glimpse into the culture of extreme poverty, this memoir is an insider’s view into a neighborhood then described as the toughest in Canada.

Point St. Charles is an industrial slum in Montreal which is now in the process of gentrification, but during Kathy Dobson’s childhood, people moved for one of two reasons: their apartment was on fire or the rent was due.

When student social workers and medical students from McGill University invaded the Point in the 1970s, Kathy and her five sisters witnessed their mother transform from a defeated welfare recipient to an angry, confrontational community organizer who joined in the fight against a city that turned a blind eye on some of its most vulnerable citizens. When her mother won the right for Kathy and her two older sisters to attend schools in one of Montreal’s wealthiest neighborhoods, Kathy was thrown into a foreign world with a completely different set of rules that she didn't know—leading to disastrous results.

This compelling, coming-of-age story documents a time of great social change in Montreal and reveals the workings of an educational system trying to deal with disadvantaged children.

A "gutsy, no-holds-barred, coming-of-age story,"

Kathy Dobson has a B.A. from the University of Waterloo and two certificates in social work. A journalist, her work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, National Post, Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, and more.

She has produced several short documentaries for CBC Radio, including one with hockey legend Bobby Orr. She lives in Waterloo, Ontario.

An Irish Heart - How A Small Immigrant Community Shaped Canada

During the Great Famine of the 1840s, thousands of impoverished Irish immigrants, escaping from the potato crop failure, fled to Canada on what came to be known as “fever ships.” As the desperate arrivals landed at Quebec City or nearby Grosse Isle, families were often torn apart. Parents died of typhus and children were put up for adoption, while lucky survivors travelled on to other destinations. Many people made their way up the St. Lawrence to Montreal, where 6,000 more died in appalling conditions.

Despite these terrible beginnings, a thriving Irish settlement called Griffintown was born and endured in Montreal for over a century. The Irish became known for their skill as navvies, building our canals and bridges, working long hours in factories, raising large, close-knit families.
This riveting story captures their strong faith, their dislike of authority, their love of drink, song and a good fight, and their loyalty.

Filled with personal recollections drawn from extensive author interviews, An Irish Heart recreates a community and a culture that has a place of distinction in our history. From D’Arcy McGee and Nellie McClung to the Montreal Shamrocks, Brian Mulroney and beyond, Irish Canadians have made their mark.

Sharon Doyle Driedger, a former senior writer for Maclean’s magazine, was born in Griffintown to a third-generation Irish family. This book grew out of a Maclean’s cover article that had tremendous reader response. Doyle Driedger has won aNational Magazine Award for her writing. She lives in Toronto with her family.

©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

Sunday, August 28, 2016

Montreal’s Irish Mafia - The True Story of the Infamous West End Gang

Their names resonate with organized crime in Montreal: the Matticks, MacAllisters, Johnstons and Griffins, and Peter Dunie Ryan. They are the Irish equivalent of the infamous Rizzuto and Cotroni families, and the "Mom" Bouchers and Walter Stadnicks of the Hells Angels.

Award-winning producer, journalist and author D’Arcy O’Connor narrates the genesis and rise to power of one of Montreal’s most powerful, violent and colorful criminal organizations. It is the West End Gang, whose members controlled the docks and fought the Hells Angels and Mafia for their share of the city’s prostitution, gambling, loan sharking and drug dealing. At times, they did not disdain forging alliances with rival gangs when huge profits were at stake, or when a killing needed to be carried out.

The West End Gang—the Irish Mafia of Montreal—is a legendary beast. They sprang out of the impoverished southwest of the city, some looking for ways to earn enough just to survive, some wanting more than a job in an abattoir or on a construction site. In that sense, they were no different from other immigrants from Italy and other European countries. A shortcut to wealth was their common goal. And Montreal, with its burgeoning post-WWII population, was ripe for the picking.

The Irish Mob made headlines with a spectacular Brinks robbery in 1976, using the money to broker a major heroin and cocaine trafficking ring. It took over the Port of Montreal, controlling the flow of drugs into the city, drugs which the Mafia funneled to New York. The West End Gang had connections to the cocaine cartel in Colombia; hashish brokers in Morocco and France; and marijuana growers in Mexico. The gang imported drugs on an enormous scale. One bust that took place off the coast of Angola in 2006 involved 22.5 tonnes of hashish, destined for Montreal.

The West End Gang is a ripping tale that unveils yet another chapter in Montreal’s colorful criminal underworld.

©Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

Ship Fever

The elegant short fictions gathered hereabout the love of science and the science of love are often set against the backdrop of the nineteenth century. Interweaving historical and fictional characters, they encompass both past and present as they negotiate the complex territory of ambition, failure, achievement, and shattered dreams.

In “Ship Fever,” the title novella, a young Canadian doctor finds himself at the center of one of history’s most tragic epidemics.

In “The English Pupil,” Linnaeus, in old age, watches as the world he organized within his head slowly drifts beyond his reach.

And in “The Littoral Zone,” two marine biologists wonder whether their life-altering affair finally was worth it.

In the tradition of Alice Munro and William Trevor, these exquisitely rendered fictions encompass whole lives in a brief space. As they move between interior and exterior journeys, “science is transformed from hard and known fact into malleable, strange and thrilling fictional material” (Boston Globe).

Saturday, August 27, 2016

Community & the Human Spirit Oral Histories from Montreal’s Point St. Charles, Griffintown, and Goose Village

A solid contribution to social and urban studies, this fascinating collection of oral histories details the life and times in Canada's 'cradle of industrialization.'

Contributors to this book were all born between the 1920's and 1950's and remember growing up around the east end of the Lachine Canal near the Montreal harbour.

It was a time when ships from far away places still navigated the canal and this historic working-class area hummed with the sounds of factories.

Families were often large and the streets teemed with children. These oral histories follow contributors' lives to the present day.

The book also discusses the redevelopment and evolution of the area. Well-illustrated with archival photos, with bibliography, and an introduction by the author.

I own this book and highly recommend it to anyone who has an interest in the subject and wants to learn first hand how it was, back in the day.

(c)2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

Thursday, August 25, 2016

Belding Corticelli Silk Company

Belding Paul Co the first Belding Paul Co., the first silk mill in Canada, set up shop near the Lachine Canal in 1884. It would later merge with Corticelli from Saint Jean-sur-Richelieu. Silk ribbon was made and later, nylon stockings. The workforce was made up mostly of women. After closing in 1982, the factory was converted into condos.

Belding, Paul and Co. merged with Corticelli in 1911. Formerly a silk manufacturing factory, it has been recently renovated into residential space (1989).

Belding Brothers & Company – Silk Manufacturers

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Griffintown Horse Palace

The Griffintown Horse Palace is a stable in the Griffintown district in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, which dates back to around 1860.

For three decades, the stables were run by former Goose Village resident, iceman and calèche driver Leo Leonard, also known locally as Clawhammer Jack.

Leonard, who was reported to be the last Irish Quebecer left in Griffintown, retired and moved to Nun's Island in 2011. The sale of his land around his Ottawa Street residence has cast the future of the stables in doubt. Montreal landscape architect Juliette Patterson has formed a foundation in an attempt to save the Horse Palace, which has also drawn support from the area's historic Irish community.

Though the stables are considered to have cultural heritage value by the City of Montreal, they are not a protected heritage site by the Province of Quebec.

Patterson and her foundation would like to preserve the Horse Palace as a working stable for caleche horses serving nearby Old Montreal as well as a museum of 19th-century Montreal history. But the foundation has been unable as of December 2011 to raise enough money to purchase Leonard's land and buildings, which are now valued at over $1 million. The horse palace site includes the stables, a vacant 3,500-square foot lot, the Leonards' brick triplex and an aging former auberge, and is being sold in three separate lots.

Horse Palace Video