GROWING UP IN MONTREAL A story for my grandchildren, Charlene, Alex, Tim and Suzanne, whose initials spell "Cats." Their parents are allowed to read it too.

SHERBROOKE STREET (1927 to 1933 )

Grandpa Bill was born in Montreal in 1927. My father, Alex (Alec), was a Chartered Accountant and my mother was Hilda . (Young Alex will remember her, your great-grandmother, who lived until1994.) The Catherine Booth Hospital where I was born is next door to the house on Walkley Avenue where Grandma Nina grew up . Home was on Sherbrooke Street,where we lived upstairs from my grandparents . This is one in a row of houses across from Westmount Park. It became a doctor's office where Grandma went years later when she broke her leg but that is another story. What was it like then? There was no TV and very little radio. In 1927 Lindbergh was the first to fly acoss the Atlantic. It seems like winters were very cold and the snow was piled high . Maybe that was because it had to be removed by men with shovels, horses and sleighs . A lot of these men were out of work because of the Great Depression.There is a picture of me somewhere in a white fur hat and coat in a white wicker pram. People moved about in streetcars and trains. My dad used to take me to he train station to see the trains and once we rode in one to downtown Montreal and back which wasn't really far . When we first went to our cottage at Lac Marois when I was a baby it took TWO cars -one for us, one for stuff, as the cars were small and did not have trunks .My mother used to bring the canary cage on her lap! The cottage was fifty miles north of Montreal and it took more than two hours to get there becase of the old roads , My brother Ken lives there now -it is a beautiful house converted from a log farmhouse . From that house on Sherbrooke you could walk any where -to school, church, the "Y" at the end of the block and to stores .My favorite store was Fry's, where they had wonderful cream-filled chocolate bars and comic books from England. Even when you were little you could walk anywhere because the streets were not dangerous .. There were no supermarkets. When you went to a grocery store a clerk stood behind the counter. You told him what you wanted and he got the items off the shelf one at a time. He then added the prices up on a piece of paper and you paid. You could also order by phone and the store would deliver the groceries to your house by bicycle. Sometimes the bicycle had a special compartment in front to hold the groceries.

It was nice to live across the street from Westmount Park. It was large with a playground, lots of activities, a duck pond and another pond for sailing toy boats. I had trouble with talking properly and went to a speech doctor to learn how to pronounce different sounds. I made up for it in my reading as I learned to read before starting school. My parents had to hide bad stories in the paper from me! When I went to kindergarten they took me to a second grade class to show off my reading. The following year I skipped from kindergarten to grade two . In 1933 brother Ken was born, also at the Catherine Booth Hospital. I remember waving to my mother in the hospital window. We then moved to a bigger place on Trans-Island avenue in Snowdon Junction, a northern part of Montreal. It sounds like that street went from one end of Montreal Island to the other but Trans -Island was not very long . How did it ever get that name?