A Canadian Family

Growing Up In Ville Lasalle, Quebec (1950s/60s)

This vintage black and white postcard of the Mercier Bridge Cabins (Villa du Pont Mercier), first caught my eye because I grew up in the Montreal suburb of Ville Lasalle – and because of the odd telephone number (ELwood 0148) in the top right hand corner.

My family moved to Ville Lasalle in the late 1950s. It was still relatively undeveloped. There was no Lasalle Hospital, Civic Centre or high school! As a matter of fact it was a few years before the first big department stores opened. It was quite an adjustment for us to leave a third floor walkup in a French-speaking, Catholic neighbourhood of Verdun and settle down in a modern little bungalow in the predominantly English-speaking, Protestant neighbourhood of Riverside Park but many young families were making the move because it seemed to be a great place to raise children!

One of the first things my parents did when we first arrived was to teach me and my sister our new telephone number – Dominic6 – 7025. The prefix made it easier for us to remember the number and it also instantly told you where someone lived. I remember that my friends in Verdun had the prefix POntiac. The prefix was always a word based on two letters of the rotary dial – in my case DO stood for the numbers 36.I found a great online resource about heritage telephone numbers and in a section called Montreal telephone exchange geography it says that DOminic was in use from 1959 until the early sixties. The ELwood Read more »

October 27, 2009 Posted by Evelyn Yvonne Theriault | . | family history, Lasalle, postcard, postcards, vintage postcard | 10 Comments