Montreal-- Before All That Snow Flies

On our last night in Quebec the Dodgers vanquished the Mets, 4 games to 3, Orel Hershiser pitching a five-hitter to shut the Mets out, 6-0. So we were in the World Series against the Oakland A’s, and the local sportswriter predicted: “The A’s in four.”

Well, we would see.

We drove from Quebec to Montreal along the St. Lawrence River. It is a handsome modern city that has spared and preserved many of its older landmarks. A majority of its people speak French, but English is the language of commerce.

The French sounds very unlike the French of Paris, a phenomenon that caused the Irish wit, Brendan Behan, to remark that “Montreal is the only place where a good French accent isn’t a social asset.”

The poet Rupert Brooke noted that Montreal seemed to consist “of banks and churches,” and Mark Twain said, “This is the first time I was ever in a city where you couldn’t throw a brick without breaking a church window.”

We stayed three nights at the Chateau Champlain, a modern tower that connects with an extensive underground shopping center--a center so vast that my wife got lost when I turned her loose in it one afternoon.

We were told that the Expo dome, which is visible from great distances, is covered with a costly German plastic that is being paid for by a tax on cigarettes, an expediency that angers smokers, since smoking is not allowed in the dome.

Nearby the huge, pyramidal, beehive Olympic Village, built for the 1976 Olympic Games, has been converted into one-bedroom apartments that rent for $550.

Despite the height of its many new skyscrapers, Montreal seems dominated by the dome-like Mont-Royal, though it is no higher than our own Mt. Washington in Los Angeles, of whose existence most Angelenos are unaware.

We were told that the city has 105 inches of snow a year and that it costs $43 million to remove the snow and salt the streets and sidewalks, which are so damaged by this process that they are under repair all summer.

The first night Tauck Tours gave a dinner party in the hotel for our group. Wine was served and a three-man combo played vintage songs for dancing. From their expressions they were obviously surprised and delighted by the vigorous exhibitions of the Charleston and the jitterbug put on by our fellow travelers.

We drove into the nearby Laurentian mountains the next day and took a boat trip on Lac du Sable, a lovely lake with many bays and peninsulas. Handsome mansions graced its shore, some of them grossly ostentatious.

Our captain pointed out a pile built by a rubber baron who liked to entertain. It had had 40 bedrooms, a service house, a ballroom and a full-time orchestra; the owner brought guests to Montreal on a private railroad car and transferred them to the house in four Rolls-Royces. After the crash of ’29 he killed himself.

Another enormous house, he said, had been owned before World War I by a man named Baumgarten, a sugar merchant. His house guest was a man named Von Ribbentrop, later to become the notorious Nazi foreign minister. When the war broke out the two men were exposed as German agents and deported.

A house once owned by a Lady Jane Costello was so well-stocked with priceless objets d’art that when she died a Brinks truck was used to remove them.

That evening we dined at a maple syrup lodge in the mountains amid 40 acres of maple trees. Dinner was served at long wood tables and our host, a rough-hewn man named Pierre, danced with some of the women and poured a kind of Kickapoo juice made of red wine, brandy and various other intoxicants. He had a gray beard of the kind that begins under the chin and fans out over the chest like a peacock’s tail. Showing us through his maple syrup mill, he said that when he had talked his wife into the enterprise, some years before, he had told her, “It’s a lot of work, but you can do it.”

On our third night in Montreal, Kirk Gibson hit that incredible two-strike, two-out home run in the bottom of the ninth, and the Dodgers took a 1-0 lead in the World Series.