Frank Morrissey and family

This is Frank Morrissey, one of my father's older brothers. See the Morrissey Family History website for more information on Frank.

This is Eva Dubois who married Frank Morrissey; they had one daughter, Patty Morrissey.

Photo of Frank and Eva's daughter, Patty Morrissey Robb, she was like a sister to my father, Edgar Morrissey, and in this photograph, with Patty, is her second husband, Sid. Patty was born in 1920; my father was born in 1912. 

Here is a 1979 photograph of Patty Morrissey Robb's children, Frank and Eva's grandchildren; also in the photo is Patty's first husband, Peter Robb, on the far right. From left to right we see Patty's sons Don, David, Chris, and her daughter Patty (Ferrari).

Just think, we (and others) have all of these relatives we've never met, and they've never met us. People move away and stop communicating with the family and the family loses track of these people. Or the people who would keep in touch with family die or forget to keep in touch and the connection is lost. And then, one day, even the names of some family members is forgotten and new family members take over and start the whole thing over again. 

Frank and Eva, at one point, lived at the Corona Hotel near Guy Street in downtown Montreal (this was back in the 1930s); I believe they also used to live on Decarie Blvd. near the corner of Cote St. Antoine Road, and I pass their old home fairly often. Their only child, Patty, often stayed at our grandmother's flat at Girouard, and she and my father were very close; my impression is that her home life was not good. The family in Montreal lost touch with Patty when she and her family moved away. Patty's daughter, Patty Ferrari, sent me these photographs. 

Update: I have the address on Decarie where Frank and Eva (Eve) lived; they sent their daughter, Patty Morrissey, to the Villa Maria, a private girl's school about two blocks from their home. Frank and Eva lived on Decarie Blvd. not far from 2226 Girouard Avenue where Frank's mother and some of his siblings lived. 

Alburgh, Vermont, around 1957

Why do kids have to pull faces when they're getting their picture taken? Maybe they don't any longer...

Here is my brother (seated) and I, with our dog Buddy, outside of the cottage we rented in Alburgh, Vermont. I assume this was the cottage we rented...

Here I am with our dog, Buddy. I remember taking him for a walk that summer and being dragged along the dirt road holding onto his leash as he ran after something; then I let go and he escaped, but we must have found him or he returned by himself. Now I think of it, cats and dogs running away and the effort to find them, driving across the city, advertising in the newspaper, announcements on CJAD radio, phone calls from total strangers saying they'd found our cat or dog, all of that was a part of growing up. Alburgh, Vermont is located on Lake Champlain, which is one of the largest in-land lakes in North America. Alburgh is about sixty miles from Montreal. Of course, we all love Vermont, one of the most beautiful states. I think a typical Canadian experience is living within a hundred miles of the Canadian-American border and driving across the border to the States to buy cotton goods, blue jeans, cotton sheets, and back in the fifties to buy chocolate bars you couldn't buy here, and to smuggle back alcohol and cigarettes. I remember returning from Vermont with my grandmother in the back seat with packages of cigarettes in her purse for my Uncle Alex. Or the various ways Canadians used to smuggle back bottles of whiskey, in thermoses, or hidden elsewhere. Or taking the kid down to the the States in his old clothes which were discarded down there, and returning wearing three shirts, new blue jeans, running shoes, and other clothes hidden away in the car. Now, with free trade, that's pretty much a thing of the past. But it was a Canadian experience back then, whether in Montreal driving down to Burlington or Plattsburgh, or in Vancouver driving down to Bellingham, or (I guess) in Toronto...

Ottawa, late 1930s

From left: my mother's uncle, Harry Chew; sitting; behind him (far left) is Mrs. May (?) -- (she owned the house in the picture; I think Uncle Harry was a boarder at the house); my mother is in the middle, standing and looking stylish as ever; I believe that's my mother's mother, Bertha Chew Parker standing next to my mother (she died when I was around seven years old and I have no memories of her); in front of Bertha, sitting on the stairs (in suit and tie) is my grandfather John Richards Parker. Harry was the best man at my grandparents' wedding.

Uncle Harry's wife ran off with another man, possibly to Chicago, and left him with their two daughters. I have the girls' names written down somewhere. This was a story I heard quite often but despite that I have still forgotten the girls' names. One of the girls was adopted by my mother's cousin, Gertie Holden Brown (her mother was Alice Chew, the sister of Bertha Chew above) and Gertie's husband Fred Brown who lived in Woodstock, Ontario, but I guess Gertie and Fred were set in their ways, older and conservative and not really parent material, and I guess the girl was young and a bit too energetic or too wild for them and they sent her back...

The Chews, Parkers, Richards (my grandfather's mother), all came from Blackburn, Lancashire, England, and some of them moved to Montreal, or Woodstock, Ontario, and one went to Bercy, Saskatchewan. Back in Blackburn they worked in property management, the trades, or in the mills. It's possible we have relatives there we don't know about, you can see more at Morrissey Family History. Later, I'll post some photographs of them.

From ERM's office at Windsor Station, Montreal

Here is my mother's note, written on October 3, 1979, regarding the following photograph (first, below). I remember that day, she gave me the photograph and I kept the note with it and dated it at the time.

Taken in the late 1930s (or early 1940s), this photograph (taken from my father's office window at Windsor Station, then the C.P.R.'s head office in Montreal), you can see St. James' Cathdedral (renamed Mary Queen of the World Cathedral around 1950, for the year of Mary) beside Dominion Square in downtown M0ntreal.



This is the parking lot behind Windsor Station, on St. Antoine Street (where the Bell Centre is now located).

St Eustache, an afternoon at the quarry, early 1960s

Here are two photographs taken at the quarry near St. Eustache. You take the Oka road, on which the monastery where the monks made Oka cheese was located (but is now closed). I remember this day very well, I remember not wanting my grandmother to come with us to the quarry... Now I wish she were still here.

Auntie Ivy and my mother.

My mother.

My Auntie Ivy.

St Eustace summer cottage, 1940s and 1950s

My father's brother, my Uncle Alex and Alex's wife, my Auntie Ivy. This is where we used to swim, at the bottom of 11th Avenue in St. Eustache, where my grandmother and Uncle Alex shared a cottage just up the street; we had a rented cottage across the street from them, behind the Goodyear's home. In the cool August evenings we'd have a fire in the Franklin stove and toast bread on it. That was always nice.

My mother and our beagle, Buddy. Around 1957 - 1958, outside our grandmother's cottage.

                                                     My brother, John Morrissey.

                        My brother and I outside of our grandmother's country cottage.

                       Auntie Mable (my father's sister) and me, maybe early summer 1951, 

                       sitting in someone's rowboat at the bottom of 11th Avenue in St. Eustache.

                      My father's sister, my Auntie Mable outside the summer cottage, in 1948.

My grandmother outside the cottage. I think this was taken in 1948, just a few years after my grandmother and Uncle Alex bought the cottage. Before this they would spend the hot summer months at Pine Beach, which is on the West Island of Montreal, just off Highway 2 & 20, near Pointe Claire.

Here I am on the left, with my mother and my brother.

My cousin Herb Morrissey and his mother Ivy (Lewis) Morrissey, around 1948.

I always loved St. Eustache. What wonderful summer holidays we had there! For a child, it was truly, shall we say, "Edenic". We had our cottage and across the street was my grandmother's cottage, which she owned with my Uncle Alex. They (Alex and Ivy and my grandmother and Mable) all shared their rather small cottage every summer. During the day, when my mother was at work, my Auntie Ivy and my grandmother kept an eye on my brother and I. We spent our days swimming, walking on the railroad tracks to a small island and making camp fires there, smoking little cigars (the things children do!), roaming around, walking on the train tracks into the country, hearing about some farmer who would shoot trespassers with pepper shot, buying candy at Jed's, going to movies at The Normandy (?) Theatre, sitting in the still hot summer afternoons with my grandmother and Auntie Ivy, the smell of Ivy's DuMaurier cigarettes, the smell of newsprint and the coloured comics on Saturday, sleeping with my Auntie Mable and grandmother when my mother wasn't there, the three of us in the same bed with my head at the bottom of the bed between them. I wouldn't exaggerate this if it weren't as I've described, but (of course) what I've described is from a child's perspective. For my grandmother there was the middle of the night phone call from my Uncle Herb telling us that Auntie Mable had died in her early 60s in P.E.I (?). Mable was Grandma's closest companion. No wonder I'm still writing about them, thinking about them, I loved them all so much.

Photos of 4614 Oxford Avenue

It's around 1954; photo taken outside of our flat at 4614 Oxford Avenue.

Here I am with my friend Ica Shainblum, on Oxford.

Graham Nichols and our dog Buddy, living room at 4614 Oxford Avenue. My mother married Graham in May 1963 at St. Matthew's Anglican Church; later in 1963 we moved to 4350 Montclair Avenue, in western Notre Dame de Grace.

St. Matthew's Anglican Church, Montreal

The side door at St. Matthews.

I am holding the Easter box for donations to the church.

A more recent photograph of St. Matthews, from where a condo was built in the early 2000s.

The front door of St. Matthews.

St. Matthew's Church was the church of my childhood. A wonderful place! Everyone was kind to me here, everyone was very pleasant and I loved going to this church.

My parents' honeymoon in Washington, DC, April 1940

My father in front of the Capitol Building, April 1940.

My mother, stylish as ever.

My mother.

My parents married at Trinity Memorial Anglican Church (located on Sherbrooke Street West next to Northcliffe Avenue) in April 1940, these are photographs from their honeymoon.

Our neighbours on Oxford Avenue

Here we are in the lane behind the Oxford Avenue flats. That's Ica Shainblum on the far left, Audrey Keyes in the middle, and myself on the right. Photo courtesy of Bobby Keyes.


Here is my brother feeding a squirrel in the back lane.


And here's Bob Keyes that same day. These photographs were taken around 1957.

Here's Audrey Keyes (now Veeto) and myself years later at the St. Viateur Bagel Restaurant on Monkland Avenue, just down the street from our old home on Oxford. It's 2005 now and we're meeting each other for the first time in forty-two years. Veeto has lived for many years in Australia where she has a son, a daughter, a son-in-law, a grand daughter, and a soon to be born second grand child. It was like no time had intervened since we last met!

There I am on the front steps of 4614 Oxford Avenue, and Veeto is on the steps of her old home. How often I would go over and say to Mrs. Keyes, "Can Audrey come out to play?"

Here is Veeto with her late mother, what a lovely woman she was. Mrs. Keyes was 98 years old when she died and had been a resident at the Manoir Westmount for about ten years. The Manoir is run by the Rotary Club, and what a wonderful place it is. Mrs. Keyes grew up on Landsdowne in Westmount, only a few hundred feet from the Manoir Westmount.

These photographs and my poem, "Oxford Avenue, Hoolahan's Flat" can be found at http://www.coraclepress.com/, as well as a short essay on meeting Veeto again after so many years.

Here is an email, full of memories vividly recalled, from Colin Paterson, who used to live on Harvard (the next street from Oxford); I look forward to reading more of Colin's memories:

I grew up in N.D.G. in the 1950s on the block next to Oxford at 4590 Harvard Avenue. My name is Colin Paterson and I have been doing research with the expectation of writing either a rather long essay or a book on the times back then. I went to both Willingdon School and West High and odd as it may seem also spent 2 years at Weredale House, also known as The Boy's Home of Montreal. My brother David and I both knew Bob Morrisey, your cousin. Bob was a friend of Peter Tellier who lived downstairs from us. I also remember Bobby Keyes. For some odd reason I have always been able to remember certain things like small details as far as my personal history goes. Thought you might be interested in a few of those details as follows. Across the street from you lived Shelly Dorfman, Neil Stein, Peter Litwin and the Wenger brothers, Marty and Harold. The Wengers were pretty decent atheletes and Marty played fullback for the NDG Maple Leafs football team in the mid 1960s. At the corner of Oxford and Summerled lived a family who bought the NDG Food Market on the corner of Wilson and Summerled. (The pharmacy next door was called Lackman's.) This family had two brothers who were only a year or two apart, I once auditioned for a band they had called Jenifer's Gentlemen. Behind the house you lived in, directly across the alley lived a guy named Albert who was spastic. I remember him contructing a cross bow that eventually put an arrow through one of your neighbour's garage door. The Robinson's lived in the next house towards Somerled on Harvard. (Houses? They were all four plexes.) Next to that house lived the Durells, Nancy and Jimmy, downstairs, and the the Kramers upstairs, Louise, Ruthy, and Norman. Jimmy Durell later became the mayor of Ottawa and was one of founders of the Ottawa Senators hockey club. His sister, Nancy, was Miss Grey Cup in 1970 and was escorted out onto to the field in Toronto by none other than a fur coated Pierre Elliott Trudeau. I remember Harry's where the fireworks and Christmas displays in the window lingered long after their time of year had passed. Harry's has a pinball machine, a jukebox and a lunch counter. I seemed to recall he did a lot of screaming and had what he thought was a wayward daughter. There was also another corner type of store almost next to Harry's that had a gum machine out front. I once swiped the steering wheel off the jeep at the B.A. gas station but my brother made me give it back. John Feguson, who played for the Montreal Canadiens gave me the finger once when I was standing on that corner hitch hiking. Cote St. Luc and Summerled. We used to play hockey for hours between the houses on Oxford. I remember coal being delivered and sometimes stacked before it went down a chute to the basement. I also recall the wooden back porches that had dark passagways leading to the backdoors of houses like the one you lived in. Funny the little "pieces" we remember. I know Bob Morrissey was a sports reporter. Something tells me also played some guitar and spent some summers in Maine, perhaps Hampton Beach or Old Orchard Beach. Well that was load of random thoughts of years past. Really enjoyed your "Hoolahan Flats"!

Cheers,

Colin Paterson
Nanaimo, BC.