by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

One February morning in Rosemont, a woman in black carried her baby in white to the corner of de Normanville and Bellechasse. She held her baby and leapt into the watery quarry 100 feet below.

Cops tried for hours to find them but it didn't help that the two child witnesses (who would be 83 and 82 today) waited eight hours to report what they'd seen. Such was the daily news in the dirty '30s; Montreal's most messed-up and most influential era.

Much has been written about Montreal as a party town in the '40s and '50s, but the hungry years of the Depression gave birth to Canada's socialist bedrock as well as such instruments as the Bank of Canada, the CBC and the widely-accepted role of big government.

Alongside hunger and boredom, Depression-era Mtl knew all its current evils except for festivals and the Internet. We had abandoned wives, like Lucienne Cazeault of 2153 Wolfe, left poor and hungry by hubby Eugene, 29, after he left her to join a sexy religious cult. At the Sect of the Crucified, "people offend god in scanty clothes" during their Saturday night rites, says the Montreal Herald of Feb. 10, 1933. Hubby had only given wife $2.50 in six weeks. After appearing before the judge, he fled out of the courthouse with her chasing.

Suicide was rampant - or maybe seemed so - because newspapers reported the gruesome details. You'll know that one Montrealer that same year blew his head off with dynamite and a 15 year old hanged himself because he had broken a worthless handle on a coffeepot. A rich kid simultaneously shot, hanged and poisoned himself. Another took notes as he succumbed to gas. One teen accidentally shot his sister, and, instead of calling for help, he helped end her sufferings with a knife and then shot himself in shame as dad slept. Sheesh. No wonder they stopped reporting a lot of this stuff.

Communism was illegal for a while during the Depression, as a court stenographer identified as St. Martin, of 2036 Favard, was reminded after publishing his zine Spartakus. The magazine criticized meagre handouts and bad sandwiches given to the unemployed. He was busted for his "libelous and blasphemous" literature.

Yet capitalists had anything but free rein 70 years ago, as demonstrated at 4370 St-Dominique, where bailiffs had been sent to evict a bed-ridden, deadbeat tenant. Each time they tried to get the invalid out, a gang of mostly Polish neighbours would fight them off. Eventually, 40 police officers accompanied bailiffs against a reported crowd of 2,000. This led a terrified cop named Joseph Zappa to shoot Nick Zynchuk, 32, dead. The eviction proceeded but later the city howled for the cop's head.

Back then, death threats on city councillors were common. "These threats were made by members of the unemployed it is rumored, who were said to be disgruntled at the manner in which direct relief is being handled, among other things," according to the Herald. The article also notes that in radio broadcasts, fascist labour union leaders counselled the blowing up of city hall.

Other familiar conflicts brewed. In June 1935, a committee of two anglos and two francos unveiled the new city flag, based on the city's century-old coat of arms. It features a shamrock for the Irish, a rose for the English and a thistle for the Scots, alongside a lonely little fleur-de-lys to represent the French. Mayor Houde suggested that the flag would increase tourism, but P. J. Leduc, a priest from Ahuntsic, questioned this. Speaking at city hall, Leduc said he'd prefer a Union Jack, "until the day another revolution places us under a domination other than English, or until we get an independent political regime."

Meanwhile anti-separatist strategies were also around, as witnessed in 1937, when councillor Dave Rochon suggested that Montreal should separate from Quebec, a notion recommended again by others in '53, '59, '61 and more recently.

Many streams of that bygone Montreal still flow, although admittedly the TV and plumbing is surely a lot better today.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca