Memories of summer in the city
Pierre Lalonde, Belmont Park, a mauve bike, picnics … my urban ‘vacations’ were fabulous
Summer is the perfect time travel machine. Popsicles, coloured bikes and flip flops take me right back to my childhood. But nothing works as well as the intro to the 1963 French hit song, C’est le temps des vacances.
(Neil Sedaka’s Let’s Go Steady Again.)
“Roum dum dum wa la dou, c’est le temps des vacances,” sang the biggest Quebec pop artist of the time, Pierre Lalonde.
A Hudson man, the impossibly handsome Pierre Lalonde was the son of a Quebec superstar of the ’50s, Jean Lalonde, known to his fans as the Don Juan of song.
My mom liked Jean. I liked Pierre. I was hoping to marry him one day. I was 7.
From 1962 to 1971, Pierre Lalonde hosted the most popular French-language youth television show ever, Jeunesse d’aujourd’hui, the first program in Quebec to reach a million viewers despite the fact that everything was in playback and in black and white.
Quebec’s star system grew from Jeunesse d’aujourd’hui.
In those days, entertainers did French versions of American hits wearing silly stage costumes. For example, César et ses Romains dressed as centurions to perform Bobby Darin’s hit Splish Splash in French while les Classels, the most popular of all, dressed in white, hair and all.
When She Loves You hit the charts in 1964, everything changed. I fell in love with the Rolling Stones later that year when they first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show to sing Chuck Berry’s Around and Around and Time Is on My Side.
The Stones became — and still are — my band, Keef is my man and Satisfaction, released in 1965, my favourite rock song to this day.
But this column is not about rock music, it is about vacations. And memories. In honour of the vacances de la construction that started Friday. Traffic on the streets of Montreal will lighten up for two weeks, but work on the Turcot Interchange and other essential infrastructure will continue.
I wish them all a great vacation. These men and women work hard, in the heat, the cold, the rain, the snow. Often in dangerous conditions. Hats off.
According to CAA- Québec, the No. 1 vacation spot for construction workers this year is Virginia Beach, followed by the Gaspé Peninsula, Wildwood, Myrtle Beach and the Niagara region.
When I was a girl, I would have had no idea what and where these places were. People from Hochelaga-Maisonneuve did not go away on vacation in those days.
My family had more money than most people in the neighbourhood but, having grown up in poverty, my parents had kept their frugal habits. Only near the end of her life did my mother travel to Europe and to Florida, but my dad was happy to stay home, open his garage door for all to admire his Chevelle SS and sit on a bench in the driveway, chatting away with the neighbours and giving hell to a man who had escaped conscription in 1944.
Until I was 8, we owned a cottage in Saint-Donat, on Lac Blanc. My dad sold it because I did not want to go there anymore. I was bored stiff. There were no other children around, only black bears.
From that point on, it was summer in the city for me. Balconville. We used to roll down the grassy hill of Maisonneuve Park, destroyed to make space for the Big O; I’d ride my mauve Raleigh to Parc Lalancette to ogle the neighbourhood bad boys’ choppers. Our moms would take us to Lafontaine and Belmont parks. We’d go swimming at the Centre Charbonneau and have picnics at the Botanical Gardens at the top of my street. It was fabulous.
We did not go on vacation. We were on vacation.
And then Expo 67 came along. Never would we be satisfied with so little ever again.