Interview with Louis Desrochers

It’s Adriana Davies interviewing Louis Desrochers for the Maclab fiftieth anniversary commemorative project.  Louis, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself, your educational background, where you were born…

Louis Desrochers:
I was born in Montréal and lived there until I was 11 years of age, living in an entirely French atmosphere. My mother was a widow; my father died when I was about sixteen or seventeen months old. 

To make ends meet, she ran a kind of boarding house in Montréal where the nephews and nieces received post-secondary education.  Their parents would help Mother with the boarding room payments, but Mother always had a deficit so her unmarried brother in Jasper, Uncle Cy, would send a cheque to cover the deficit and after a while, he said, “This is crazy.  Why don’t you come out here and live with me in Jasper?”

So in June of 1939, my mother and I left Montréal and took the train all the way out to Jasper.  I remember looking for the Rocky Mountains in Capreol, Ontario.

We arrived at Jasper and I had a very happy time there.  But there was no French education in Jasper, so my mother and my uncle made some inquiries and they sent me to the Jesuit College here in Edmonton which was then where the Charles Camsell Hospital was situated.  I was at a boarding school run by the French-speaking Jesuits, and I was there from 1939 to 1942.

They sold the college to the Americans Bechtel-Price-Callaghan during the war because that company needed some headquarters and there were not very many highrise buildings in Edmonton in those years.  This was a three-storey building in Edmonton and considered a high rise.

Then I went to Jasper High School for a few weeks and in high school in Jasper, I did my classmates’ French assignments and they did my chemistry and biology and math until my mother found out and she said, “That’s not good.  We’ll send you away again.”

So she and my uncle made inquiries and they looked at three places: they could send me to the Jesuit college in Saint-Boniface or they sent me to Notre Dame in Wilcox with the famous Father Athol Murray or here at the Juniorat Saint-Jean which is now la Faculté Saint-Jean.

They picked the last one and I came here, finished my high school and did my first two years of undergraduate at the college.  In my last year there, I went to the University of Alberta to make inquiries whether I couldn’t have had my BA after the college because it was affiliated with the University of Ottawa; and at the University, there was no way I could do that because I was taking my degree extramurally. 

They said, “You have two choices: you can come here and do your arts and law and you won’t lose any time, or you can go back and go to the University of Ottawa to do your last three years intramurally and we’ll recognize your degree and you can go into Law.”

So I went back east, back to Ottawa, and I took my undergraduate degree in Arts, majoring in aristotelia and holistic philosophy.  I took courses in Latin for a few weeks and that’s where I met my wife.  She was in nursing.  She was taking a nursing course at the university and at the General Hospital.

Then, in 1949, I came back to Edmonton and went into the Faculty of Law, lucky to have a class with a great bunch of guys Peter Lougheed, Merv Leitch.  They were great to me.  They just took me in as a long-lost brother and we had a lot of fun.  Then my wife and I got engaged and got married.

In 1952, after my law degree, I was articled for S.H. McCuaig – Stan McCuaig.  Articled means that you do your apprenticeship for a year before you can be admitted to the Bar.  Mr. McCuaig was a very prominent lawyer … he was the north Alberta lawyer for Crédit foncier franco-canadien which was a major mortgage lending company that had headquarters in Paris and had a lot of French capital in it. 

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AD:
You brought up the francophone community in the city and maybe you could talk a little bit about that and your involvement.

LD:
My involvement goes back to the early 50s.  I was just a young … hungry young lawyer with lots of spare time so I joined the French-Canadian Association local at Saint-Joachim on 110 Street and then I became the charger of the provincial organization.  Then I became the vice-president then I became the president of the French-Canadian Association of Alberta and I worked very hard at getting the government to relax the laws so we could have education in French.  I worked very hard at that and eventually succeeded.

Our children went to French immersion schools but our grandchildren are going to French schools: that shows you the development that’s taken place.  I worked hard at Faculté Saint-Jean to get …

Saint-Jean was associated with the University of Ottawa and I worked to have the affiliation changed from the University of Ottawa to the University of Alberta.  I worked on that with Dr. Walter Johns and Dr. Herb Armstrong.  Herb Armstrong then became the president of the University of Calgary.  As a result of that work, I kept on working at it and I was on the Board of Governors of the university one day and I was happy to see on the agenda that the Administration was recommending that the board approve that the Collège Universitaire Saint-Jean to the Faculté Saint-Jean.  Of course, I voted. I declared my interest, and I voted.

AD:
So that now it is possible to be a francophone in Alberta, to have access to higher learning…

LD:
Two of our children got their first degrees at the university at the Faculté Saint-Jean and Claire, our third child, got her Arts degree and her Education degree and a couple of years ago, she was a sessional lecturer there in Education.

Their children are all … Our grandchildren – Pierre’s children – are all going to French school at Notre Dame and many of them went to the secondary school of Maurice Lavallée in Bonnie Doon. It’s been tremendous.

AD:
An enormous difference from the 50s when …

LD:
I remember when I first came to Edmonton, we used to get on the streetcar at the hockey games at Jesuit College to go and play against the team. We’d get on and talk French and some snotty old bugger would turn around and say, “Speak white.” 

That’s true.  I had to live with that.

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