Earl De La Perralle: ‘Sun Youth was his family’
There’s a story about Earl De La Perralle that Sid Stevens likes to tell because it shows just how invested he was in the Sun Youth Organization, which the two co-founded and ran together for decades.
He had taken his daughter, Kara, to a football game at Jeanne-Mance Park; one of his teams was playing. She was four years old. And so involved was he in the game — it was a championship game and his team won — that he was halfway home to Rosemere before he realized he had left Kara in the park.
Over the years, Sun Youth has helped thousands of disadvantaged Montrealers through programs from sports and recreation to emergency food baskets. Today it receives considerable financial support, but money was scarce
early on — and Sun Youth meant so much to De La Perralle that he mortgaged his house so staff could be paid. It was years before he told his wife.
Earl De La Perralle died Tuesday night at St. Mary’s Hospital of heart and kidney failure. He was 73. He leaves behind Kara, son David and three grandchildren. His wife, Hilda, died in 2013.
A son of the Plateau, he attended Deconshire Public School and graduated from the High School of Montreal. At Sun Youth, he was best known for his work with sports teams and was honoured — and revered — for his contributions.
“He was just so involved with his teams,” Stevens recalled Wednesday. “The kids loved him like a father. He had his own family and he didn’t ignore his kids, but Sun Youth was his family.”
Kara is OK with that: “Earl was my father and David’s father, but he was not just our father. We shared him with everybody.”
Late Tuesday, she made a few calls to tell people her father was gone — and within minutes, the news had spread like wildfire on social media. So many had turned to him for advice and help.
“‘I need to talk to Earl,’ they would say.”
So many say “they are who they are because of him.”
De La Perralle was 9 and Stevens was 13 in 1954 when the two started a handwritten newspaper they circulated around their Plateau neighbourhood, charging people to read it.
“Earl would organize sports and I would write about them,” Stevens recalled.
The goal was to found a group to help neighbourhood kids. They invested the proceeds in organizing sports teams and uniforms and the group grew into the Sun Youth Organization, named for their paper, the Clark Street Sun. Their partnership lasted nearly 65 years.
“They complemented each other,” said Robert Mironowicz, president of the Sun Youth board. “They
The kids loved him like a father. He had his own family and he didn’t ignore his kids, but Sun Youth was his family.
respected each other’s strengths and weaknesses. They had their moments, but they always worked through it.”
De La Perralle preferred to be out of the limelight, which made Stevens the public face of the organization. “Earl never liked dealing with the media: I inherited that mantle.”
“He was so caring, so giving, so willing to help out when you needed help,” recalled longtime assistant Soula Provias.
And he was always “ready to go the extra miles for his players, to try to teach them good life skills,” said Mironowicz, who coached football with him.
“He was very pragmatic and down to earth and stubborn. If you talk to anybody who played for him, they had his wrath at times, even if it was fair. But he had a huge heart and so much love for his players.”
Sometimes help came in the form of a bag of groceries if they didn’t have food. Other times it was finding a way to get them a suit if they needed one for a football banquet — or getting them a tutor if they showed themselves to be making an effort.
Education was important to De La Perralle: To be on a Sun Youth sports team, you had to be in school.
“If they weren’t showing an effort, and he could see that, he would find a way to make them understand that, in order to be successful in life, something had to change,” said Mironowicz, who knew De La Perralle for more than 50 years.
On one wall of the organization’s St-Urbain St. headquarters hang photos of more than 300 Sun Youth kids who earned sports scholarships to university. Some have gone on to play professionally.
“That was his life — getting basketball and football scholarships for the kids,” Stevens said. “He never abandoned his kids.”
Said Stevens of his co-worker and friend of so many years: “He was a great man.”