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| Little Jean Taschereau died in January 1951 |
Details of the story, alas, have been stubbornly evasive, none of the 5Ws of the sad anecdote have emerged, in spite of endless searching.
Colin A. Gravenor I purchased the land for almost free from Canadian National Railway, he explained to me, by offering to accept all legal liability for the property following the death of a child "who fell down the cliff."
He later allowed downtown skyscraper builders to dump their excavation dirt over the cliff, effectively growing the property considerably until it grew into the spacious lots present around Terry Fox Park.
But who was the ill-fated child and how and when did he die?
Years of rooting around old newspapers have proven fruitless but the death of three-year-old Jean Taschereau in 1951 - an article I stumbled over yesterday - might be just the thing.
At the start of January 1951 CNR lawyer Pierre Taschereau moved into a home at 2296 Harvard with wife Yseult Beaudry and only child, toddler Jean.
Witnesses noted that they spotted a toddler walking alone down Girouard and through the Girouard underpass.
A massive team of 500 police, firemen, Boy Scouts and other volunteers rapidly started scouring the area for the boy in the cold weather.
After midnight the team found the little boy frozen to death at a creek west of the Turcot train yards. The exact place is not described in the story.
Ross Flanagan and Robert Easton, who found the toddler, surmised that the child broke through ice and only managed to get a few more feet from the creek before succumbing to the cold.
Exactly one week later another small child, Peter Le Gros, 4, disappeared from his home at 2122 Addington but was found unharmed weeping at the corner of Goirouard and Sherbrooke, ending a four-hour, 30-person search.
As for the ownership of the strip, it is no longer in the family, as Colin A. Gravenor died in 1993 and those who inherited all of his wealth (none for me) sold it and pocketed a solid profit.
Pardon my suspicious nature, but this tragic death suggests foul play.
ReplyDeleteThink about it: how did a 3-year-old child manage to walk such a long distance all by himself, not only successfully crossing many busy streets but almost certainly jaywalking between intersections and traffic lights apparently without a single bystander not realizing that something was wrong? NO ONE thought of taking him by the hand and notifying the police?
Then there is the question of how the boy somehow conveniently found his way to the cliff, reportedly falling the not-insignificant distance down to the bottom without perishing from the fall itself, but to end up drowning in the creek? It all seems a little too convenient.
Paranoia notwithstanding, an alternate scenario suggests that a predator could have spotted the solitary child at some point along the way, intermittently accompanying and/or following him at a discreet distance in order to not arouse suspicion, and then intervening at the opportune moment to lure him to the cliff, guide or drag him down, and then commit whatever dastardly deed he had in mind before finally shoving him into the creek.
Rest assured that if such an incident were to occur today, a more intense investigation would involve detailed, forensic analysis and it would not be dismissed so readily, not to mention a more vocal outcry by the media.
Maybe it's just me, but I find it impossible to read these type of vintage newspaper articles anymore without getting the impression that critical information was deliberately left out or that police tactics were simply inept.
Thanks for the interesting arcticle!
ReplyDeleteI lived on Regent very close to what was then Upper Lachine Road from 1949 -1959. I remember dump trucks coming down Regent Ave to dump their loads over the escarpment. My mother and a half dozen other mothers organized a blockade on Regent to put a stop to the noise and dirt the trucks were leaving in the area. Either the Montreal Gazette or Montreal Star had a lengthy article with photos of the blockage. Around 1959, the area south of Melrose and Wilson Ave had a landslide leaving only about 5 feet of land at the top of the escarpment.
ReplyDeleteRonald MacDonald,
ReplyDeleteAs I'd like to research your story further, can you remember the year, the season, and--ideally--the month(s) of that year when Regent Avenue was being used as a through-road for those dump trucks you mentioned? Try to pin-point that time-period as closely as possible by asking others you know who may remember pertinent details.
As is the case with many other such local stories, researching Google Archives and other online resources has proven problematic. Furthermore, one's childhood memories of past events are too often incomplete and confused with others.
The prospect of wading through almost 365 days (minus Sundays) of the Montreal Gazette to locate certain, perhaps obscure local events is discouraging to say the least, not to mention the unfortunate (and unacceptable!) current online unavailability of the Montreal Star and--worst of all--entire months and even years missing from too many newspaper archives, both English and French.
I have not investigated if it is indeed possible to research the archived tapes of radio and/or TV news stories as presumably everything has been kept gathering dust on shelves somewhere and unlikely to be viewed again, at least by the general public, although I suppose these could be accessed as evidence in a court case. Then, perhaps not. YouTube uploads of news broadcasts are limited in this regard, unfortunately, but it is amusing to see the many embarrassing bloopers to be found there.
One particular local event, the full details of which I have as yet been unable to track down, involved a suicide in N.D.G.'s Park Row Park on Sherbrooke St. West circa the 1940s or '50s. From the meager facts I did discover some years ago that were vaguely described in a hand-written letter deposited in a library file, a school teacher shot himself in that park after having been accused of molesting one or more of his students. I believe the student was part of a boxing class.
Back in the day, such pedagogical misbehaviour was kept as quiet as possible whereas today, of course, the media exposes every lurid detail unless the judge decides to seal them or the participants decide to write about them later.
Kristian, you may well be able to find out more about this aforementioned incident? Good luck!
I have a subscription to newspapers.com which allows me a much more effective search on the Gazette so I'm happy to help if you have search term ideas.
ReplyDeleteNewspapers.com look promising, Kristian. I will add it to my list. Here's another you may not have been aware of: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/
ReplyDeleteThe New York Times and others have their archives on subscription/pay sites.
Google Newspaper Archives initially had a more comprehensive search engine enabling anyone to pinpoint specific time frames but for some reason they dropped the ball and refused to reply to users' protests. I assume they simply became lazy or that the task was too time-consuming for them to continue. Therefore, what remains today is too limited and frustrating to utilize for detailed analysis, forcing die-hard researchers to scan sequentially and endlessly day by day to locate an elusive incident.
Libraries still rule, however, regarding more comprehensive research, the downside being that their staffs usually enforce a time limit at the microfilm/microfiche readers, particularly on busy days when students have invaded the premises.
Many library birth and marriage records are also only available for viewing when they date back from a specific year after which everything is considered confidential. Not sure if Access to Information laws would supersede such restrictions. Thankfully, pay sites such as Ancestry.com cover at least some of that territory.
I also discovered that school boards are loathe to allow anyone to browse through their records--even yearbooks! Privacy concerns are given as an excuse, so you might have trouble tracking down an old classmate or teacher (if alive) unless you happened to keep your own copy. Paranoia seems to be the name of the game nowadays.
I often wonder if there is a depository for every school text book ever published for students beginning from Kindergarten through high school. I remember some of those books we were given back then would today be considered rather controversial and probably even banned for the ideas they promulgated--innocent as they seemed at the time.
Anyway, Kristian, since N.D.G. is often the focus of your own historical analyses, perhaps you will stumble across the specifics of that suicide I referred to. Trenholme Park is the correct name of the relevant location, bordered by the streets Park Row East and Park Row West. I don't remember if the name of the school where the teacher taught at was included in that document, but it was likely either the PSBGM or the Catholic board of that era.
Good note. Thx. Neswspapers.com just recently started offering the Gazette and the search function is massively better than what Google newspapers was offering and I think they might be missing fewer dates too.
ReplyDeleteBest way to search old yearbooks is by joining classmates.com and pretending you were a grad of the particular school that you're researching. A fellow journalist suggested this trick for my research on Autumn Kelly, which ultimately ended when News of the World simply refused to pay me for my work.
I'll see if I can find something on that story you're referring to.
Thanks, Kristian.
ReplyDeleteLast time I looked, most of those so-called "find your school pal", genealogy, and "phone number identification" sites were headquartered in the U.S. thereby relegating Canadian information mostly unattainable, but presumably this will be adjusted over time.
I am suspicious of such sites which ask for money up front with no guarantee that their data is up-to-date or even accurate.
Female friends of yesteryear would generally have their surnames changed after marriage, and when relevant records are unobtainable, you're out of luck. I once managed to track down the sister of a neighbourhood girl I knew back in the early 60s--the latter whom I wanted to ask about her memories of that time period. The sister, however, was not forthcoming, unfortunately. As a matter of fact, I had never met the sister back in the day nor knew she even existed until I had begun my research. To be sure, people are entitled to their privacy, so I didn't press the issue.
In a crunch, there are ways to find people if one is prepared to pay a "Sam Spade" type of detective or if you are a relative of or personal friend of an employee of government records such as Revenue Canada, various licence bureaux, the I.R.S., etc.
Then again, some people may not WANT to be found, which is their privilege.
Your headline story, "How a toddler's death reshaped the geography of NDG" is eerily similar to this latest tragedy:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cnn.com/2018/09/27/us/what-we-know-missing-north-carolina-boy-autism-maddox-ritch/index.html
Notice how the authorities intend to be more comprehensive with their forensic analysis than they would have been back in 1951 and how today's media asks more questions and demands more answers.