Word: mayors
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Three years ago Montreal's ex-Mayor Camillien Houde, who had just retired after running the city with all the uproar, fun and profit of a bingo game, was asked by a local matron what he thought of the new mayor, a prim, plain lawyer named Jean Drapeau. Replied Houde: "He is a little man, madame, a little man." But last week, with a new election three weeks off, Politician Houde had changed his mind. Just as a boom got rolling to return him as mayor of Canada's biggest city (and the second largest French-speaking city...
Camillien Houde's Montreal (pop. 1,595,000) has changed, and no one has done more to change it than slight, studious-looking Mayor Drapeau. A political unknown, he shot to prominence as prosecutor (1950-53) in a probe of Montreal vice in the '40s, when gambling czars ran up a $100-million-a-year business and bawdyhouses never closed. He proved police collusion with such evidence as a row of doors nailed to a wall so that cops could "padlock" vice dens without offending the underworld; 20 cops were later fined or fired. Only four weeks after...
...office Drapeau lent the city a new tone. By revamping the city's tax-assessment system, resourcefully tackling traffic congestion, establishing an arts council, tireless Jean Drapeau has convinced Montrealers that the mayor can be more than a circus ringmaster. And although glasses still clink in nightclubs until dawn, big-scale vice has been run out of business-with no evident harm to Montreal's lusty tourist trade or Drapeau's popularity. Says he: "Here in Montreal people used to think that prostitution was necessary to keep down the crime of rape. We found out that...
...appointments faction, which is found on both the city council and the school committee, is made up of names infamous in the minds of Harvard men. Belonging to it are such men as A1 Vellucci, whose schemes for running a highway through Harvard are well known; Mayor Sullivan, who used to give anti-Harvard speeches outside Harvard dormitories; and James Fitzgerald, who made several slurs on Harvard during school committee meetings last year. In the minds of these men, the outcry against the appointments last year was organized by the Cambridge Civic Association, a good-government seeking organization...
...most serious weaknesses of the CCA, perhaps, is its inability to coerce its endorsees to keep to their platform pledges. CCA-endorsed city council members have squabbled with each other since they were elected, and were thus unable to put solid weight behind a good candidate for mayor when this council organized itself in 1955. The result of this was Mayor Sullivan, and, indirectly the appointments issue which CCA is now fighting. Even on the school committee, CCA-endorsed Anthony Galluccio bolted from his platform pledges and sided with the "independents" most of the time...