by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

A while ago, you couldn’t toss a snowball here without hitting some hipster decked out in ’60s or ’50s styles. Maybe we threw too many of those snowballs. Our keepers of the retro flame are all but extinct.

Yet they offered a clever solution. Such backwards-looking stylists carried a secret wisdom: The answer to oppressive modern mediocrity can sometimes be found in the past. But as 2005 is almost spent, we’ve forgotten how to reach into the pocket of the past for some time-honoured wisdom.

Here’s one way how retro can save our city. Our local economy is increasingly based on tourism. It’s huge. It’s almost as important as your job selling pens over the phone.

But tourists will never really flock here as much as we’d like because we’re largely just another city. McDonald’s and dull generica sit on almost every corner. So we’ve got to encourage our fast-disappearing, unique throwback oddball places.

Take Wilensky’s on Fairmount. It’s a jewel of a local landmark and yet you hardly ever go. We need to all get there and order the special. We shall train ourselves to order the bologna on fried onion roll with mustard. We will flock there en masse. It will get hot. Our urban identity will intrigue visitors and tourism will boom. Eventually, the city will reverse our gastronomical colonization and Wilensky’s’s will sprout up all over the planet, and perhaps others. Anywhere in the universe you’ll be able to stroll into a Wilensky’s and sit on dodgy 80-year-old stools, order a hand-drawn soda and have your every bite scrutinized by a hawk-like staff who grab your napkin as you take your last bite.

And here’s another retro utopia that needs to be recovered: park leagues. Not so long ago, kids could casually walk to their nearest park and join the park’s baseball or hockey team. They’d give you a shirt with the park name on it and you’d return to drop crucial fly balls for your home team, developing a bond with neighbours, sharing the futile dream of trouncing Benny Park and Terrebonne Park.

The park leagues are our forgotten heritage. The great Doug Harvey played his hockey and ball at Oxford Park, a few feet from where I sit. He’d even return to referee kids’ games even at the height of his fame, according to the excellent biography by William Brown.

But indoor rinks opened and the park teams got undermined. Kids were forced to play all their games at a central place. Many of those who lacked transportation quit organized sports. Today, park teams are still dead and parents often drive their kids clear across town just to get to practice. If you don’t have a car, good luck. You and your kid will be on the bus all week while parks sit empty.

Recently, a neighbour suggested that the nearby park be used for soccer for nearby kids, who are currently forced to skedaddle great distances for their games. The NDG soccer authorities gave him a thousand reasons why it couldn’t be done.

A third lost tradition is that of the yellow press. Midnight was full of colour and lies when it was launched here 51 years ago, with stories about “Where to sin in Montreal, addresses of over 50 brothels.” It offered articles with such lines as “one of the typists at Canadian Car and Foundry is selling her body to male employees at $10 per lunch hour.” Maybe it was your granny.

I found those snippets in a 1957 Time magazine article. It describes one Midnight writer as an “associate of gamblers who boasts openly about the number of Montreal newsmen and editors he has bought off.” He says, “I have more on more people in this city than anyone else.’” My father. What a nut.

Not only is the tradition dead, but only one single copy of the paper from that era still exists. If you find a copy, keep it.

So put on your fedora or fishnets and go out and save the city.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca