Check out this joint at the corner of Gene Tallin and Snow Slope Boulevard. It's Smith Brothers Granite, since 1882. It's the oldest monument maker in the city. I rung up the place to inveztigate and was told that it started as a family business on Bleury, then moved on to Ducharme in Outremont and they were forced to move into this former CIBC bank building in 1993 when the industrial park closed. Elliot Smith died in 1989, his son lives out in Banff and the daughter had no inclination to run the place, so Smith's associate Joseph took over.
We had a nice morbid cemetery chat. Joseph, the boss, agrees that vandalism and theft of monuments in graveyards is a problem, particularly those with bronzed bits.
-Joseph doesn't like Drapeau's black granite monument in the Catholic cemetery. Even Drap's wife came to dislike, blaming it on sales staff pushing their own designer on her.
-Unlike me Joseph thumbs-downery to the Robert Bourassa gumby-legs monument in the Catholic Cemetery, "It says nothing to me, it's two pieces of granite carved in a certain way."
- He says to watch out for cemetery staff pushing headstone makers they had business arrangements with onto you. "They put a bug in your ear."
"I see a lot of memorials manufactured today. There’s no quality there. They’re basically going after a price and not something of quality. Ten, 20 yrs down the road, those monument wills still be new but will look bad."
There's also Smith Bros. cough drops. If you didn't know, ask an old person.
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