“Musical Bricks”, Milton Street, Montreal, 1966
Ottawa 1947-1965
I was born in Canada in 1947. I grew up in suburban Ottawa. Until I was 18, I lived with my parents and three younger brothers, Tom, Mark, and Chris. For many years my parents had to live on a very strict budget, but we were not poor. Like many post-war young families, we had our own home. Dad (1923-2003) went out to work and Mom (1920- ) stayed home to look after four children.
The social world I grew up in was mainly English-speaking and white. It’s religious boundaries were Christian, Protestant and Catholic. The latter split in the Christian world continued the rupture of the European Reformation of the early 1500s. Plotting my location on these axes, I came from a White, Irish-English, Catholic background.
I had friends from both sides of the Christian divide. Catholics, in Canada, were mainly of Irish or French background. Although our faith was the same, there was little French-English mixing. Although I lived just across the river from Quebec, and many Quebecois lived in Ottawa, I had no Francophone friends.There were separate French Catholic Churches and English Catholic Churches. In the Pt. St. Charles district of Montreal, for example, two very large churches are beside each other, one for English Catholics and another French Catholics.
If we imagine a spectrum of social relations, it could begin with animosity at the dark end and progress gradually to: tolerance, accommodation, familiarity, peaceful co-existence, reciprocity, cooperation, mutual helpfulness, and eventually synergy.
Religious identity factored little in personal relationships. Protestant-Catholic relations were in the zone between tolerance and mutual support. French-English relations were more complex, displaying characteristics up and down the scale depending on the individual. Paradoxically, the quality of our relations with our coreligionists was lower than the relations we had with those of a more similar cultural background.
In addition to living downstream from the Protestant Reformation, we lived with the result of centuries of conflict between the French and English that began around the year 1200 AD. In the 1500s their rivalry spread to North America. First settled by the French in the early 1600s, Canada was taken by the English in 1763. In the Treaty of Paris, instead of deporting the French - there were too many of them - the British allowed the French Canadians to stay, and keep their religion and customs. s, the British said the King’s “new Roman Catholic subjects may profess the worship of their religion according to the rites of the Romish church, as far as the laws of Great Britain permit”.
These religious and national identities, interacting with the indigenous peoples of North America, are the matrix from which new-Canada began.
In the 1950s and 1960s, my Catholic world was most visible inside our family; the weekly
visits to church to attend what was called a Mass, the annual family pilgrimage to Ste. Anne de Beaupre near Quebec City, and the Catholic atmosphere in our so-called “Separate” Schools. Wishing to have a strong coherence between their faith and the education system, Catholics in Canada were allowed have their own school system.
My parent’s faith was the center of their life. They were not saints; but they took their faith seriously, and saw the world through its lens. They lived in a God-centered world. It was more than just attachment to the rituals, ceremonies, and community of the church. They believed in the existence of a spiritual dimension of reality, the authority of the Bible, in their personal relationship with an omnipotent Creator-God; and in the continued existence of the soul after the death of the body. The purpose of their lives was to be in the presence of God, and to develop their spiritual capacity that they might be worthy of the soul entrusted to them. In their spiritual framework, good behaviour and qualities were more than adherence to a code of conduct, but were characteristics, habits, and attributes of the soul. “God sees everything we do”, Mom would say, trying to instill into her children the joy of knowing God, a desire to please God out of love for Him, and, to a slightly lesser degree, to see God with awe and some fear.
There is a story in our family of something I said to my Aunt Bernie when I was about four years old. Bernie, Mom’s older sister, lived with us while her husband, Uncle Ralph, was fighting in the Korean War (1950-53). Bernie was our built-in baby-sitter. One day when my parents were out, she told me to do something. Not liking what she wanted me to do, or how she told me to do it, I replied to her, “Aunt Bernie, you’re not the boss; God’s the boss”.
They strove to exercise charity and forgiveness in their lives, and tried to be upholders of the weak and underprivileged. They gave 10 percent of their net income to charity. Both of them were especially warm toward people such as the mailman, the paper boy, repairmen who came to the house, Mom’s hairdresser, and so on. There was nothing patronizing in their tone; all were treated with respect and kindness. Those who came for repeat visits, such as the plumber, became friends. A carpenter who worked on an addition to the house was one such friend, and the son of that carpenter as well. Mom’s hairdresser called himself our family’s fifth son. She has been going to him for forty years. When she was in her late 90s, he came to our home to cut her hair.
She had been raised in a Catholic-Irish home in Tignish, a small community in northern Prince Edward Island (PEI). Her father, Joe Bernard Morrissey, was a farmer. Mom called him “Pop”. He was also a Justice of the Peace and the organizer of the local baseball league. With one leg damaged by polio, and a wife who had just died in childbirth when my mother was two, he asked his younger sister Mary Ellen (Manie) to return from her life in Boston to help on the farm. Manie had ‘escaped’ from rural PEI and was established in the United States, but family ties pulled her back. Not married, she became the surrogate mother of the family. In the Depression, Pop’s younger brother, Arthur, went to the US to work and left five of his six children with relatives, and one at an orphanage. Manie and Pop became the parents of three of his sons. Manie was also a mid-wife for the community, and organized a woman’s league that often met in their home.
Despite the hardships, Pop and Manie were devoted co-parents and gave a lot to the community. Pop also found time for poetry. In one piece, called “I Like”, he lists the beauties of nature that he sees each year. The poem ends with:
Oh, I love it all
Though I’m somewhat awed
For I know this to be
The work of God.
Dad, with the outbreak of World War II, had interrupted his University of Toronto education to take special fast-track training in radar. In 1942, by way of England and Africa, at 19 years of age, he arrived in Egypt via Cameroon, and then to the top of Mt. Carmel in Haifa, Palestine. He was in charge of a radar station, watching air traffic over North Africa. A man of faith, working on war. He reveled in the echoes of Bible footsteps in Tiberius, Damascus, the Dead Sea, and Jerusalem. He loved Beirut and Aleppo.
Mail delivery from the war zone was severely curtailed and expensive during the war. Dad economized by writing squeezed notes on the back of black and white photos. On one, dated Nov. 11, 1942, a picture of him gazing longingly out to the Mediterranean, he wrote: “Hello Dears: …Mr. P. took this picture just a few days before I had my little leave. You can all picture me back in the little mess for the time now till Christmas, and you know I will be with you all in spirit this year, and maybe in fact, next. I dearly hope so. It’s all for the best and God’s will - and maybe He has something wonderful for me to come? Prayers - love- Frank”
Mom, Dad and me at 42 Fairmount Crescent, Toronto, where my father grew up.
My Father at his radar station on top of Mt. Carmel, Haifa, 1942
Letter on back of photo
Dad channeled his beliefs through actions and targeted advice. Three examples:
Shoveling out the Basement
In 1955, my parents bought a new home at 3 Greenhill Way in the east of Ottawa, close to the St. Louis de Monfort Hospital. Dad decided to create a new exterior stair from the ground to the basement. He did it all by hand, and there was a lot of shoveling to be done. He recruited me and one of my friends to carry the buckets of earth he filled as he dug his way down. Our wages were one cent per bucket. He wanted me to see the relationship between amount of work done and amount of money earned.
The Stone in the Wall
When I was about eleven, our family went on a road trip to Nova Scotia. Dad was working for Parks Canada. The trip combined visits to national parks and historic sites along the way. One of these was Fort Lennox on an island in the Richelieu River near the American border. It was built by the British between 1819 and 1829, and was designed to protect the colony of Canada from possible American invasion. In the early 1800s, French and English Canadians fought together against the Americans. For the French Canadians, the Americans were a greater enemy than the English Canadians.
I wanted a souvenir, so I took a small loose stone out of the wall of the fort. My father saw me, squatted so we were at eye level, and asked me, “What if everyone did that? What would happen to the fort?” Understanding his point, I put the stone back where I found it.
The Big Toy Truck
Mom and Dad were loyal and hospitable to their friends and relatives. One was Ross Gooding, Dad’s Toronto classmate. They went to war together in 1941. Ross never married, and also ended up in Ottawa working for the government. He had a permanent seat at our white-table-cloth Sunday dinner. Without a family of his own, he adopted ours. He spent Christmas every year at his parents place, north of Toronto, so, a week before, he came to our home and gave us gifts. He enjoyed this ritual as much as we did. One year, he gave my younger brother, Tom, a popular Rock and Roll music album and gave me (now 15 years old) a big toy truck. He said he thought I could afford the batteries. Dad saw my disappointment and - before Ross could see it - asked me not to show it. ”It will make Ross feel sad”, he whispered. I understood and complied, pretending to be grateful for the gift.
Relating to emotions in a conscious, open, interactive way was not strong in our family. Many years later I learned my parents agreed, when we were young, that they would hide from us any disagreements they had with each other. They felt fighting in front of us would be very damaging to our development. Perhaps their approach was extreme? How do we learn, for example, what to do, when we are torn between telling someone the truth and fearing their emotional reaction? I think, subconsciously, I learned to hesitate or even avoid responding in emotionally-charged situations.
This habit appeared in my first marriage and helped destroy it. It appeared in my second marriage as well, but at least I was aware of the behaviour and more able to face emotional “heat”. Nevertheless, it’s an inter-generational habit. To some extent our two sons have this problem, probably learned from me.
My Elementary Catholic school was very English, with one memorable intervention. In 1957, when I was ten, a young man, about 14 years-old joined our class. He squeezed into a too-small desk and wished everyone wasn’t looking at him. He was a refugee from the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and spoke very little English. My first encounter with someone outside my ‘matrix’.
I went to the University of Ottawa Preparatory High School. It was the nearest available Catholic high school to our home and was 80% French. Thanks to our common faith with French Canada, I spent four years rubbing shoulders with the francophone world. However, the contact was not strong. Although we were all in the same building, we were taught in separate all-English classes. In this school, we were a small English bubble inside a French bubble, inside a predominantly English Ottawa.
The administrators of the school and most of the teachers were French-Canadian.
Our teachers taught in English but were nearly all francophone. The best high school English teacher I ever had was M. Pelletier, a Quebecois. Our geometry teacher was M. LeBlanc. Both of them welcomed our requests to talk about things other than English literature or congruent triangles. M. LeBlanc once told us that when he was a teenager, during WWII, they played hockey using a ball of frozen horse manure as a puck. All of his friends were French and it wasn’t until he was an adult that he ever heard ‘maudit’ and ‘anglais’ as two separate words. In French, ‘maudit’ means ‘damn’, and ‘anglais’ means ‘English’. Only as an adult, as his intercourse with Les Anglais increased, did his tolerance increase. We liked these teachers very much. These agreeable experiences were small inoculations against prejudice.
One of the distinctions between the public and separate schools is the latter had a religion class. Our high school religion teacher was a very tall and strong priest who loved to sing opera as he strolled down the hall in his long black cassock. As he came into class, and we had not yet settled down, he would say, ”Be quiet or I’ll break your leg.” “Was he joking?”, we wondered. In one of his classes he shared a three-word sentence that has stayed with me until today. He said, “Truth is one”. While he was attesting to the truth of the Catholic Church; he also established for me a new bottom line. If different parties claim to have the truth, and their versions differ, they must face the challenge that truth, eventually, is one.
In the background was the Cold War; the Cuban Missile Crisis; the assassination of President Kennedy, beloved by Catholics; the growing resistance to the Vietnam War; the chorus of protest folk songs, and so on. Something was deeply amiss and we seemed ill-equipped to deal with it.
Popular music filled our young ears and gave voice to the background darkness. In 1961, Bob Dylan composed a song that became the anthem of the civil rights movement, and of the time, called “Blowin in the Wind”. Some of its lyrics include:
”Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly Before they're forever banned? Yes, and how many ears must one man have Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, and how many deaths will it take 'til he knows That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind The answer is blowin' in the wind.”
When I was 18, in 1965, one of the most popular songs in North America was written by 19-year-old P.F. Sloan. The song’s name was “The Eve of Destruction”. It contained angry lines such as: “You don't believe in war, but what's that gun you're totin? Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction. If the button is pushed, there's no running away. There'll be no one to save with the world in a grave. Hate your next door neighbor, but don't forget to say grace”….and so on.
These songs, and many like them, were a graphic portrayal of a disordered and increasingly cynical world. They gave young people new highways for their thoughts. They aroused in us a restlessness and helped open in many, including me, a reservoir of idealism. What could I do to make the world better?
Global fear and disunity awakened a global awareness. President Kennedy and others had founded the Peace Corps in 1961, “a volunteer program to provide social and economic development abroad through technical assistance, while promoting mutual understanding between Americans and populations served”. I remember wishing Canada had an equivalent. A few years later I approached the Oblate Missions and CUSO (Canadian University Students Overseas). Organizations like these absorbed some of the longing to do something useful. Unfortunately, I lacked the skills their programs required. I was accumulating a cloud of potential energy that had no lightening rod to ground it. I remember telling a friend, “I’m looking for something, but I don’t know what it is.”
In my last year of high school (spring 1965), Dad suggested I study architecture. I have been grateful to him ever since. I looked for a school of architecture. The School at Carleton University in Ottawa would not be founded until 1968. I phoned John Bland, Director of the School of Architecture at McGill University in Montreal. I made an appointment to show him my academic records and a portfolio of my sketches. At our meeting he accepted me.
Just before going to McGill, in September of 1965, I had a summer job as a “Cargo Officer” on a supply ship delivering supplies to what was then called Ft. Chimo (Kuujjuaq) in Ungava Bay, northern Quebec. I was employed by the Canadian government to report on the safe delivery of cargo. Every summer they chartered several ships to send supplies to these isolated communities. When I told Dad about this job he said, “That’s too far.” I said, “I’m going.” It was the first time I had said “No” to my father. He said, “OK”. I knew I had to go.
The ship, registered in Quebec City, had an all French Canadian crew. It was docked close to the Jacques Cartier Bridge in the port of Montreal. The exact departure time depended on how quickly supplies could be loaded, so I was told to be there a few days early. During the three-day wait, between shyness and the limitations of my high school French, I found out where I should sleep, but not where to eat. After a couple of days, Captain Rock asked why he hadn’t seen me in the galley. I took the opportunity to ask him where it was. I had been walking about four kilometers to an A&W hamburger restaurant, downtown on St. Catherine St.; one I had been to, years earlier, on a family holiday trip.
We sailed down the St. Lawrence, through the Strait of Belle Isle, up the Labrador Coast. Captain Rock said to me, “Take the wheel”. It was not as easy as it looked. Constant over-compensating soon resulted in a zigzag wake. Light traffic up there; no danger to anyone. We rounded Cape Chidley and entered Ungava Bay. At the south of the bay, an Inuit pilot came on board and steered us, slowly, over 50 kilometers, up the Koksoak River. The sonar under the ship measured the clearance between the keel and the river bottom. When the reading went below 2 meters, Captain Rock, pointed anxiously at the small number. He pleaded with the pilot to be careful. The pilot broke out in a great smile; the same response to emotional heat that I saw later in China. In white-man’s Canada this response was not re-assuring. This was my first encounter with the indigenous people of Canada.
In Fort Chimo, I met a Montreal French Canadian student with a wry sense of humour. We talked about the dilution of French with English words. He said, “Oui, watchez ton langage, il slide sur la bum”. [Pay attention to your speech; its quality is deteriorating.]
One evening, Captain Rock invited me up to the bridge. He had patched the ship’s radio to our home telephone in Ottawa. “Hi Dad!” In a conversation, punctuated with “over” at the end of every statement, I knew my vicarious father was pleased.
McGill University 1965-1968
I went to Montreal to register. On a bulletin board at McGill, I saw a notice for a room for rent on Avenue de Vendome in NDG. The woman offering the room was Mrs. Barbara Braum.
The First Year architecture program included an elementary design course. Hand-drawing was emphasized. We were asked to buy a blank book and observe the city through sketching. We decided what we wanted to look at. It was liberating to be asked, so unconditionally, to see with my own eyes. I wasn’t being taught to draw; I was being asked to look.
Random stroll in Montreal, 1965
Entrance to Redpath Hall on McGill Campus, 1965
I spent a lot of time on the streets drawing as I went, even skipping classes to do so. I saw many parts of the city and took buses around the edges of Montreal island. One day, I walked from the double-car garages of the homes in Upper Westmount - with teenagers tuning their all-terrain vehicles - down to the stacked flats of St. Henri, Little Burgundy, and Griffintown with huddles of conversation at the bottom of outdoor staircases. I had not seen social-economic boundaries this wide before.
A Montreal Gazette article in 1971 describes the conditions I saw in those poorer parts of the city:
“No natural disaster in Quebec history can equal the damage done to the lives of 460,000 persons in Greater Montreal every year…These are the 20 per cent in poverty: born weaker, they live more miserably and die sooner than the rest of us,” wrote reporter Brian Stewart. “They live in districts where the infant mortality rate is nearly twice that of the middle-class, where disease and psychological problems are rampant, where the death rate is one-and-a-half times the city norm.”
One sketching outing took me to St. Joseph’s Oratory, Montreal’s largest church. I asked a priest if I could go to the top of the dome. Student-looking, with sketchbook in hand, in those less security-conscious days, I seemed to pose no threat. He asked a maintenance man to accompany me up a staircase inside one of the four giant columns that supported the drum and dome above. He left me at the top of the columns, at the base of the drum, between the inner and outer domes. Why two domes? The outer dome is too high for the proportion of the inner space and the inner dome is too low for the skyline. There were openings in the inner dome through which I could look down to the floor below and see quiet parishioners lighting candles.
St. Josephs Oratory facing the altar
View of nave and organ over the entrance
Sketch of St. Joseph’s Oratory dome
Section sketches of St. Joseph’s Oratory structure
A steep staircase clung to the outer surface of the inner dome and led to its summit. Teetering at the top of the inner dome was a 20 meter high stair made of scaffolding that rose up to the outer dome. At the top of this stair, I pushed open a trap door and climbed into the cupola. Alone in this holy cockpit, I looked out at the mountain and the city, and down the strong ribs of the dome sliding out of site to their base.
View between domes looking up at trapdoor to lantern
View from lantern looking down
View from Lantern down to base of inner and outer domes
At base of inner and outer domes
At base of inner and outer domes
View inside roof over nave
The winter afternoon was ending and the sky darkened. I climbed back down to the base of the domes. The door to the staircase was locked. How to get down? It was almost too dark to see. I felt my way in the very dim light looking for another way. A slanted opening led to the space between the inner and outer roofs of the nave, the long body of the church. Rafters and joists measured the pitch black space as I held each one feeling my way.
A sound was getting larger. Someone was playing the organ, a huge one over the entrance to the church. Total darkness, dramatic sound, volume increasing. I felt a small door; not locked. I went down an unlit, narrow wooden spiraling stair. The music was now thundering loud. Opening the door at the bottom of the stair, I looked into the surprised face of the organist. He didn’t miss a note and kept on playing.
* * *
In the summer of 1966, I had a summer job again as a “Cargo Officer”. I was aboard the P.M. Crosbie from St. John’s, Newfoundland. Skipper Lush regarded me with hostility, as a government spy. I boarded in Montreal Harbour, as the year before, but instead of making one stop at the relatively larger community of Fort Chimo, we went to four smaller communities around Ungava Bay: Port Burwell, George River, Payne Bay, and Wakeham Bay.
There were no ports or docks at these small communities. A barge and a small tug-boat, which we brought with us, were lowered first over the side. When the barge was full of cargo, the tug pulled it to shore. The contract was to deliver to the tide’s high-water mark. The shores were shallow and gradual. It was challenging to time it just right; to get the barge to the high water mark, get it unloaded, and return before the tide went out again. The Newfoundlanders were very good at it.
At Port Burwell - now abandoned - local Inuit came out on their outboard canoes, and climbed the rigging to visit the ship. I watched one come to the room where the crew was playing a round of poker. There was money on the table. They kept asking the shy guest to join the game; for a long time he just watched and smiled from the doorway. Finally, he sat down. One hour later he had all their money.
The crew had to work in rhythm with the tides which often meant working in the middle of the night. How to load a barge? First, a crew in the hold loaded a pallet. Then the pallet was winched up and over the side where another crew on the barge unloaded it. Pallet by pallet they loaded the barge in time for the high-tide tow to shore. There were few mishaps, but once a load of gallon-sized paint cans spilled from a poorly balance pallet just as it was about to go over the side to the waiting barge. We leaped away from the cascade of buckets that burst into colorful wet explosions as they hit the bottom of the hold.
While the pallet was being off-loaded by the crew on the barge, we had several minutes break. Down in the hold, out of the wind, smoke-breaks for some, there were occasional shows of jigging, danced on top of the crates. Back to work, loading another pallet, moving a particularly heavy weight, young Charlie lamented, “I thought Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery. I sees he didn’t! I sees he made a f___ of it”.
Ship empty, we returned to Montreal. In this late summer of 1966, moving under the Jacques Cartier bridge, we had a good view of the huge construction site readying for next year’s World’s Fair, Expo67.
In Year Two at school the main architectural design course was taught using the studio method. We worked individually on design assignments and the teachers strolled from desk to desk. They commented, asked questions, and sometimes covered our work with tracing paper to sketch their thoughts. We each had our own small workspace which was quickly personalized with drawings, photographs, study models, etc. The studio turned into a maze of individual booths like a country fair or an outdoor vegetable market.
I valued the architectural method of teaching-learning. We did not approach a problem with analysis in the front of our mind. Instead of trying to break a complex topic into smaller parts to gain a better understanding of it; we tried to integrate and make a cohesive whole out of wide range of requirements: structural, functional, aesthetic, social…..The range of criteria to consider was widened by the comments of our teachers based on their practical experience. Very few of them had advanced academic degrees; most were also practitioners. We were apprentices. My favorite teachers were immigrants: John Schreiber (Poland), Norbert Schoenauer (Transylvania), Gentille Tondino (Italian-Canadian), and Joe Baker (England). The one-to-one mentoring gave an intensity to our relationship. In summer breaks we often worked for them in their offices. The closeness made us life-long friends.
My first design studio was with Prof. Stuart Wilson. Each design assignment went on for the whole term. At one point I responded - too much in hindsight - to a remark by his assistant that greatly changed the nature of my design. When Prof. Wilson noticed what I was doing he expressed his strong disappointment. I bitterly regretted letting go of my own original idea. I had lacked confidence to defend it. But by that time the change was too late to undo. At the end of the term, Prof. Wilson gave me only a passing grade.
Norbert Schoenauer
Gentille Tondino
Gerry Tondino was our Free-hand Drawing teacher. When we drew too much detail – of the models we were sketching – he asked us all to stop and called out, “New piece of paper!” Sound of big sheets of newsprint flipping over easels. The descent into detail was made possible because of the time we had to draw, a 20-minute pose. So, he changed the pace; “A series of five poses, 30 seconds each’’; time only to catch a gesture. He hoped we would see the deeper structure; and not lose sight of it.
One time he stood behind me as I drew, and watched. With my chalk, I had traced a line of the model’s foot, leg, and waist. Then I adjusted the location of my line, drawing a similar one, basically parallel to the first. When I finished, he asked me to turn the page over and write on a new page with my chalk, “2 + 2 = 5”. Then he asked me to trace the lines of the “2 + 2 = 5” over again. “Did that solve the problem?” he asked, and moved on to the next student.
Only once we saw him draw. He shrank from ever showing anyone 'how' to draw. He so much wanted us to have our own moments of discovery; he avoided being the 'demonstrator.' In this way he also taught us discipline, and humility; not the first attributes normally associated with expression and creation. One day, he did sit down to draw, however. After a half-hour he stopped. The image had 'evolved' and could have continued to evolve. That’s what struck me most; it was not finished, it could continue to develop; perhaps it could never be finished. I had watched a long-distance swimmer do a few laps.
In early December, every year, Eaton’s Department Store held a Santa Claus Parade that started in the east end of Montreal and worked its way to their large downtown store on St. Catherine Street. I signed up to be a duck. I got up at 4:00 am to get to the starting point of the parade by 5:00 am. It took a couple of hours to get everyone dressed, lined up and ready. I had a marching band behind me and, in front, the back end of a large float. My costume had two parts. The first was yellow leotards with webbed feet. The second was a large papier-mâché duck with a very long, giraffe-like neck that rose about two meters over my head. My yellow legs stuck out from a hole in the bottom of the duck’s egg-shaped body.
Two straps stretched over my shoulders went down to the rim of the hole; the weight of the whole duck was on those straps. I could see outside through a small horizontal slot in the duck’s chest. For the duration of the parade my view was limited to the back of the float in front of me and the occasional majorette who broke off from the marching band behind me to thump loudly on my duck body and peek in my window. I could see them, but they couldn’t see me because a piece of fly screen covered the opening. Their thumping helped brake one of the straps and I now had to hold the duck up with the remaining shoulder strap and one hand on the rim of the hole. From the outside, I don’t think the people lining the parade route noticed the new wobble in the duck’s movements; but, from the inside, it was now very difficult to balance the tall structure. When the body started to fall backwards, I would have to stop it from collapsing into the band behind me by butting my forehead into the duck’s chest and against the little screen window. In the nature of temporary structures, the staples holding the fly screen did not have their little legs folded back, but rather, they protruded into the empty body of the duck. At the end of the parade, when we went to claim our hot dog and coke - payment for services rendered - my forehead was pock-marked with dozens of small bloody punctures.
We frequently “pulled all-nighters”, staying up for two and even three days straight to get ready for a presentation. We smoked cigarettes, including pungent Gauloises from France, and drank coffee. Some students had record players. Excited voices would burst into the studio announcing the new Simon and Garfunkel album, or Leonard Cohen’s first; “He made an album! He’s singing his poems!”
“And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China.
And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers.”
At McGill, the social diversity around me expanded a little. I worked on a design assignment with a Jewish classmate, Tommy Gluck. It was a few days before Christmas. I mentioned a couple of times I would stop work on our project during the Christmas holidays; he kept saying he would not. I finally asked him, “Why?”. He said, “Joe, I’m not a Christian!” Later, he told me about escaping, as a child, from Hungary in 1956, hidden in a hay wagon.
There were a few Chinese classmates who came from Hong Kong. I once helped Ken Chen hold 64 quarters as he fed them, one by one, into a pay phone on University Street to make a long-distance call to his Cantonese family. We were aware that Mainland China was very closed. Giulio Maffini, born in Italy, became a life-long friend. There was one black student, from Bermuda.
I explored the Montreal cultural mix - French, English, and immigrant districts in the city: Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Jewish… We ate meals from around the world for $1.24; above that price a city tax was due so many restaurants served a small meal under the limit. Even students could afford to eat out in this global cafe. Dad once came to Montreal and I took him to my favorite Lebanese restaurant. Dad had been to Beirut in WWII and loved Lebanon. I rarely saw him so out-going and animated. The owner was pleased and surprised, but the small restraint in his smile told me, for him, the Montreal he moved to was better than the Lebanon he left behind; and less golden than my father’s memory.
Gerry Tondino, introduced me to a summer job on a tree farm near St. Agathe north of Montreal. Shearing trees into Christmas, cone-like shape, while horseflies burrowed into your hair. My employer gave me a season’s pass to Expo 67 that was open from late April till late October. Getting there on our new subway – the excavation provided landfill to build the Expo islands - and seeing mind-stretching exhibits from all over the world, was a happy adjunct to school. I was there on the final day when we, the last world citizens, assembled in an outdoor bowl-like space in La Ronde, the Amusement Park. Sad to leave, we let the police come, in a long line, slowly spiraling to the center of our nebula, peeling off the outer layers of our united body until the last man stood cheering, waving the Expo flag.
The school year began with a 10-day event called Sketching School. This year it was in Grand-mere.
Coming back to McGill for year three, it took several days to find a place to live. I spent nights on park benches, riding buses, or sleeping behind the couch in the architect’s student lounge. The night watchmen never looked behind the couch. A new student in the class, dapper with his blond hair and black umbrella, said he was looking for a place to live. Stuart Kinmond had taken a year off school to travel around Europe and was back. “Let’s share a place.” “OK”. Quick and easy. We found a large third floor flat at Sherbrooke and Guy where we learned to sleep through the sound of ambulance sirens racing to the Montreal General.
Stuart introduced me to his Dutch immigrant friend, Pieter Sijpkes, who was planning to study architecture next year at McGill; and to John Dixon, a poet, also carrying a black umbrella; he had just used it to thrash the hood of an aggressive taxi cab. Both to become life-long friends. Visitors were frequent; including the occasional distressed draft-dodger from the US. In Montreal we welcomed them.
Our lead studio professor was John Schreiber, a passionate teacher and designer. He invited his architect colleagues to attend our crits. In those days our Professors had no Ph.Ds; they were practitioners who also taught. Many of us worked in their offices.
A wind both inspiring and disturbing blew through the sixties. Among its accents was an idealism, a wish for peace, and a desire to serve. Worshiping at the alter of design did not feel well enough attuned to the needs of the age. I asked myself, “In what way was architecture a socially useful profession”. Doubts sapped my energy. Jane Jacobs had panned the planning profession for its contribution to the destruction of cites. The UK architect, John Turner, was an advocate for self-help housing in Peru. I had visions of helping poor people in South America to build their own homes.
I shared my doubts with Maureen Anderson, the school secretary. Her friendly door was always open. I could place before her the most fragile bubbles of evanescent adolescent thought and she would hold them gently. I made her a thank-you gift; I put black paint on a star-patterned manhole on University Avenue, pressed a large square of yellow cloth on it, and gave her a print.
The summer of 1968 deepened my despair about architecture. I worked at the Ottawa office of Lithwick, Lambert and Sim. Mr. Lambert was a neighbour. One man in the office was upset because his title block design was rejected by his boss; another spent a lot of time on the telephone talking with a friend about lawn care. Bob Dylan was singing, “And you don’t know what’s happening, do you, Mr. Jones?”
* * *
Expo 67
A striking contrast with the undertow of the Cold War, and French-English tensions in Canada, was Montreal’s Expo67. 1967 was the 100th anniversary of Canada. Montreal, at that time, was its largest city and its financial and cultural center. Expo was a design feast of buildings and exhibits from 62 countries that shared a few walkable islands out in the St. Lawrence River beside the city. Earth from the recently-completed subway excavation was used to build some of these islands. I was a frequent visitor.
Exhibits were not limited to national pavilions. Nations also contributed to shared venues such as Expo’s “Man and His World International Fine Arts Exhibition”. This large building was organized into rooms called Man and Work, Man and Play, Man and Love, Man and Nature, Urban Man, Man and His Conflicts, Man and Ideals, Man the Visionary, and Man and the Infinite. Here, humanity was the focus; not the nation. The artworks represented humanity’s expression of various themes, not the countries the artworks come from. In the room called Man and Love for example, a 4,000 year-old Egyptian Pharaoh family was juxtaposed with one from Holland in a Renaissance painting, and a more modern one from Impressionist Paris. The family bond was universal and connected these works of art. Ideas like these were woven into the atmosphere of the Fair and washed over the more than 50 million people who attended.
In those days “man” was a more generic term. In today’s world, the Expo theme might have to be “Humanity and its World”.
McGill University was in Quebec, but it was an English bubble in a French Province. From this relatively insulated base, I was not very conscious of Quebec’s 1960s Quiet Revolution. This was an intense period of political and cultural change. The Quebec government took control of health and education away from the Church and secularized those systems. They nationalized the generation of electrical power, and reduced outside ownership of their resources. There was a rise in Francophone pride; they adopted a new name for themselves, “Quebecois”. Politically, a polarization arose in Canada between federal and sovereigntist (separatist) factions. From 1963 to 1970, the Quebec-based Front de liberation du Quebec (FLQ) exploded almost 1000 bombs.
“Church attendance dropped dramatically as its spiritual and temporal authority waned. Attendance at Mass was an indicator of its rapid decline: “In the early 1960s, the percentage of Quebec Catholics who attended mass once a month or more was over 80%. By 2007 weekly attendance had dropped to 15%. Today (2017) less than 5 percent of Catholics go to Mass on Sundays. There are few religious marriages, most funerals are civil, and baptisms are increasingly rare.”1
I left Montreal in 1968 and missed the crisis that soon engulfed it. “The October Crisis” occurred in 1970, mainly in the Montreal metropolitan area. Members of the FLQ kidnapped the provincial Deputy Premier, Pierre Laporte, and British diplomat, James Cross. The kidnappers murdered Laporte and negotiations led to Cross's release and the kidnappers' exile to Cuba. Quebec asked for federal help and Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, which limited civil liberties. The police were enabled with far-reaching powers, and they arrested and detained, without bail, 497 individuals, all but 62 of whom were later released without charges. The events of October 1970 galvanized opposition to the use of violence in efforts to gain Quebec sovereignty and accelerated the movement towards electoral means of attaining greater autonomy and independence.” (Wikipedia) These events helped trigger an exodus from Montreal of many anglophones, and business headquarters. Toronto was a favorite destination.
Many years later, thinking about these events, I wondered why, during the 1960s, in Quebec, there were two simultaneous, apparently contradictory lines of thought? On the one hand, there was a push for more autonomy and even independence, and, at the same time much energy , originating in Quebec, went into celebrate Canada’s 100th birthday. Expo67 was the focal point of Canada’s anniversary year. The event was not limited to Canada; it was a vision of a world family of nations. Separation and looking in contrasted with integration and looking out.
The latter process was visible in the conception, management, design, planning, and construction of Expo67. And it was all very French, very Quebec. For example:
Senator Mark Drouin of Quebec, in the late 1950s, developed the idea of a world exhibition in Montreal in 1967 to coincide with Canada’s 100th birthday. Senator Drouin and Senator Sarto Fournier, former mayor of Montreal, presented the idea to the Bureau International des Expositions in Paris in 1960. In 1962 it was awarded to Canada.
In May 1963, a group of people from all walks of life was invited by the Expo Corporation to gather for a few days at Montebello, Quebec. They were asked to reflect upon the “Terre des Hommes” theme for Expo and to see how it could be given tangible form. One member, was Gabrielle Roy (1909 - 1983). She is considered one of the most important Francophone writers in Canadian history and one of the most influential Canadian authors. She had suggested “Terre des Hommes” as the governing idea for Montreal’s Expo.
In the introduction to the Expo 67 corporation's book, Roy expressed hope for “tenderness between human beings”:
“In Terre des Hommes, his haunting book, so filled with dreams and hopes for the future, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes of how deeply moved he was when, flying for the first time by night alone over Argentina, he happened to notice a few flickering lights scattered below him across an almost empty plain. They "twinkled here and there, alone like stars. ..." In truth, being made aware of our own solitude can give us insight into the solitude of others. It can even cause us to gravitate towards one another as if to lessen our distress. Without this inevitable solitude, would there be any fusion at all, any tenderness between human beings. Moved as he was by a heightened awareness of the solitude of all creation and by the human need for solidarity, Saint-Exupéry found a phrase (Terre des Hommes) to express his anguish and his hope that was as simple as it was rich in meaning…”
Also attending the Montebello gathering was Montrealer, Hugh MacLennan (1907 - 1990) a McGill professor and prominent author who wrote a novel called Two Solitudes in 1945. This title became emblematic of Canada's most challenging legacy: the relations between English and French Canadians. Leonard Cohen was one of his students.
Another francophone was Claude Robillard, a town planner who had contributed much to the preservation of Old Montreal, and for a while was the planner of the Expo site. This team unfolded Expo’s core concept in several sub-themes around which the Fair was organized: Man and his Health, Man in the Community, Man the Explorer, Man the Creator, Man the Producer, and Man the Provider.
Canadian diplomat Pierre Dupuy was named Commissioner General. The management group, mostly French, became known as Les Durs—the tough guys— were in charge of creating, building and managing Expo.
Logo for Expo 67
The Expo67 logo was designed by Montreal artist Julien Hebert, considered the father of modern industrial design in Quebec. The logo showed the peoples of the world united in a circle.
These essential inputs to Expo67 all came from Quebec.
Why did Montreal conceive and host Expo67? If it was a successful expression of ideas and aspirations already in the minds of those who planned the event, then who are those people? Most of the members of the Montebello meeting were in their mid-50s. As young teenagers, they experienced WWI, in their 20s they experienced the Great Depression, in their 30s WWII. Was Expo67 a phoenix that rose from the ashes of that experience? They were tapping into the larger spirit of our time; a concern for humanity as a whole, a longing for peace and unity. They displayed a spiritual sensibility. They read well our collective evolutionary path and wanted to give it a push.
* * *
Expo gave me a taste of the world’s diversity, and a glimpse of what it might look like if nations were neighbours not adversaries. In the history of the concept of the oneness of humanity, Expo 67 has to be a landmark. While concern for the environment and the role of women were not emphasized as they are now, there was a reduction of excessive nationalism and prejudices, an appreciation of our common cultural heritage, an interest in diversity - folk art, craft and music, and so on. And, it all took place in a car-free walkable town; anticipating an essential characteristic of urban sustainability.
I was there on the final day when we, world citizens, assembled in an outdoor bowl-like space in La Ronde, an amusement park that was part of Expo. Although sad to leave, we let the police approach us to move us out. In a long, dark-suited, helmeted line, they slowly spiraled to the center of our nebula, peeling off its outer layer until the last of us stood, waving a flag with the Expo logo, and left.
Within four years, Quebec hosted Expo67 and experienced the 1970 October Crisis. Expo had a vision of unity, but not a plan for it. A world’s fair was not enough to unite the world, but it was a valuable glimpse of a direction we needed to take. The sixties, including Expo 67, stretched our boundaries.
* * *
Although I was only vaguely aware of the scale of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution and its massive retreat from the Catholic Church, I began to experience my own withdrawal. I stood on Dorchester St. (now Rene Levesque) and stared at the statues of Christ’s disciples standing on the parapet of Mary, Queen of the World Cathedral. I thought, “I believe there is a God, but His religion must be bigger than the Catholic Church”. Humanity is one; truth is one. Why can’t religion be one? I told a priest at the campus Catholic Newman Center, “I have doubts”. “They will pass”, he said. He was sympathetic but not very helpful.
Distracted by these boundary-stretching themes, I looked at what I was studying in school. I questioned whether architecture was a socially-useful profession. I shared my doubts with Maureen Anderson, the school secretary. Her friendly door was always open. I could place before her the most fragile bubbles of evanescent youthful thought. She would hold them gently, respectfully. I made her a thank-you gift. One night I put black paint on a round decorative manhole on University Ave., pressed a large square of yellow cloth on it, and gave her a print. She was not focused on her research interests as our teachers were. She was focused on the students, as people, and rejoiced in their progress. She has a most rare heart. It included and encompassed all of us. The shyest one was noticed most. She was the hearth of the school where I could warm myself.
Maureen Anderson and Ricardo Castro. Maureen’s birthday lunch at the McGill Faculty Club
I could not find sufficient coherence between what the world needed, and what I was believing and doing. It bothered me so much, I stopped going to Church and I quit school. I believed in “something” although I could not define it. I wanted to do something useful with my life, but was unable to define that either. I had no clear alternative to turn to, but I felt I had to leave both institutions.
In the spring of 1968 I completed 3 years of a 5 year architectural program. I told my father in his Ottawa basement train-hobby room that I was going to quit school. He showed no anger, but I could feel his strong disappointment. He said, “If you leave university, you will be on your own financially; we won’t support you.” He didn’t say I was being short-sighted or muddle- headed. He didn’t say he was exasperated or concerned about my mental condition. Those thoughts were probably saved for anxious talks with Mom. As much as he disagreed with it, he let me make a choice.
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