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Life Real Loud
John Lefebvre, Neteller and the Revolution in Online Gambling
By Bill Reynolds ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Bill Reynolds
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-572-6
CHAPTER 1
I (1951–65)
Hello Father, Goodbye Father
Louise Lefebvre was born and christened Theresa Louise Cullen on March 4, 1927. Over eighty years later, on a lovely autumn day in October, sitting in her twelfth-floor condominium, she is sharp and focused, with piercing eyes and a knowing, warm smile. Her head is crowned with a white-blond, chin-length bob. Her hair looks gorgeous, every strand just so. She looks like she takes a lot of care with it. Her bearing suggests she is at peace with herself, though she does pipe up about her children's antics. She worries for them as only a mother can — even though they're all now in their late-sixth or early-seventh decade.
Listening to Louise speak, again it occurs to me that if you really want to find out about somebody, you might start with their loved ones. They're the ones who are the most perceptive and see into the soul of your subject. Enemies just want to defeat their adversaries, and their viewpoints are most likely colored in this way. In any event, they may not necessarily enhance the understanding of your subject.
This is the impression Louise creates as I speak to her at the kitchen table and look across the Elbow River to the neighborhood of Roxboro, where she raised three children as a single parent. Louise's parents moved to Calgary around 1905, and she was born at home in Calgary's Killarney neighborhood, near the intersection of Seventeenth Avenue SW and 26A Street SW, just west of Crowchild Trail. "I don't know if Mom was in a hurry or if it was in vogue," Louise said of her home birth, "but that's how it happened." Louise grew up in an Irish Catholic family. Everyone came from Irish stock, at least until Louise went off and married a military man with a French name. (He of course was still a Catholic.)
Louise's family moved to a new place in Calgary's Beltline district, closer to the core, on Thirteenth Avenue SW, just west of Fifth Street SW. She thought it was a beautiful old neighborhood at the time. "It still is, sort of." At age fourteen, when Louise was in ninth grade, her family moved again, this time from the Beltline to a house on Garden Crescent SW, near Earl Grey Park, just off Elbow Drive and across the street from the Elbow River. In fact, the house on Garden is just up the road from where she lives now, on Twenty-Fifth Street SW, overlooking the river. "Yes," she says, "I'm well traveled."
Louise's father, Harold Benedict Cullen, was a Canadian National Railway chief dispatcher stationed in Calgary. The family was proud of his job. They all thought it an important position that enhanced their social stature. He worked out of his own office at the CNR station, 141 Eighteenth Avenue SW, now the Nat Christie Centre, home base of the Alberta Ballet Company, right next to St. Mary's Cathedral.
The local Catholic school was Holy Angels. Louise attended grade school there, as did all of her children. She also spent part of junior high there, because the girls stayed longer than the boys. At puberty, girls and boys were separated. The boys were sent to St. Mary's Boys' School after sixth grade. Eventually, Louise's old school became a school for unwed pregnant teens. "So it went from the holy angels to the fallen angels." The building still has an education function today, as a Montessori school.
When Louise was twenty, her friend Nora Valentine introduced her to a man named Joseph Edmond Lefebvre. Nora's father, Colonel Valentine, was a friend of the Cullen family. He mentioned to Nora, who herself was dating an officer, that there was a young officer who needed to come to mess with a proper lady for a change. Nora and another friend, Teesy (Theresa) Ryan, brought Louise along. Ed wore his informal uniform to mess that night — khaki shirt and tie with a khaki wool crewneck sweater. According to Louise, she wore "clothes." They danced.
He was known as "Mun" to his family and his pals in the military, but Louise called him Ed. He was a year older, and his family was from Espanola, Ontario. He was part of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, stationed at Currie Barracks in Calgary, off Thirty-Third Avenue SW.
Currie Barracks was named after Sir Arthur William Currie, a soldier in World War I and the first Canadian to attain the rank of full general. The barracks opened in 1933, the year Currie died. Until the nineties, it had been home to Canadian Forces Base Calgary, or CFB Calgary. It was redeveloped into subdivisions, and the Princess Patricia's now operate out of CFB Edmonton. "That's where we had our reception, the officers' mess," Louise says, "after our wedding at St. Mary's Cathedral."
My wife, Laura Lind, and I were also married at the Currie Barracks officers' mess. Despite the name, which might imply something casual and run-down to those unfamiliar with common military phraseology, the room was anything but a mess. It sported a formal presentation and featured sumptuous, shiny hardwood floors and paneling. A large framed picture of Princess Patricia of Connaught hung impressively and regally above a mantelpiece. Princess Patricia, or Patsy, as friends and family knew her, was Queen Victoria's granddaughter. Her father, the Duke of Connaught, was appointed governor general of Canada in 1911. In 1918, Patricia was appointed colonel-in-chief of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. The unit was named for her, and she held the position until her death in 1974. Her cousin, also named Patricia, succeeded her.
Mun, promoted to the rank of captain after he married, had a bright future in the military. He and his bride migrated back east to start a family. They moved frequently — Quebec City; Chatham, New Brunswick; Barrie, Ontario; London, Ontario — as many military couples do. Anne Louise came first. She was born on October 30, 1949, in Kingston. John David Lefebvre came next, on August 6, 1951, while Mun was stationed at Camp Borden in Barrie. Three months later, the Lefebvres moved again, this time settling in Chatham. Mun took a position as ROTC officer. A third child, Joseph Edmond Lefebvre, Junior, arrived on November 29, 1953. The name "Joseph Edmond" was important to the Lefebvres — Mun had been named for Sister St. Joseph Edmond of the Grey Nuns. The Sisters of Charity, founded by Madame d'Youville in 1737 in Montreal, dedicated themselves to helping the infirm. Mun came from a family of staunch believers in Montreal. As Louise says, "They're keen on those names."
In general, Catholicism and its teachings leach out of the pores of her large Cullen family, but for her mother and father-in-law it perhaps dribbled. Mun, however, was more like the Cullen clan. "It was important to him," says Louise, "which I thought was lovely."
Louise's son was never positive about his father's deep commitment to the faith. Sure, Mun was Catholic, but he may have been religious to the extent that it got him into close range of Louise. "My dad," says John, "was religiously devoted to receiving my mother's hand."
Louise continues, "And religion is still important to me. I'm the only one in the family that it's really important to. I love the church. I have tremendous problems with some of the things that are called Christian — things that are just as far away from that as they can be. But there's a wonderful movement in the church if you meet the right people and see what's really going on."
Louise says her children were more willing to accept the Catholic teachings dished out every weekday at school than her wisdom at home. She's not sure how that happened, given she was a high school guidance counselor in the separate school system and knew how to influence children. "I was a counselor in the same school I graduated from — isn't that awful?" she says. "The only time I was away from home was the four last years of my marriage."
In November 1951, three months after John was born in Barrie, Mun became the resident staff officer for St. Thomas College, as part of RCAF Station Chatham. According to Louise, he was a lovely man. Her son John, she says, is quite similar in temperament. But Mun always felt overshadowed by his brother John. Somehow he always felt inferior, that he was the less bright of the two.
Mun's son John says while that may be true for some, as a son his perception was different. He always thought his dad looked way more comfortable in his own skin in comparison to his Uncle John, who always seemed more reserved. Mun liked to play the eccentric. For instance, he picked up this strange habit of walking around with blue cheese in his pocket. He would pull it out — along with a knife — and offer it to whomever he was talking to. His son thinks Mun learned this weird little trick from some novel. "Dad was well informed," his son says. "He listened to Max Ferguson on CBC, and CBC national mornings," the latter the equivalent of NPR's Morning Edition.
Brother John didn't think he was any smarter than his sibling, but he couldn't understand why Mun would want to go into the army, or at least why he wouldn't want to get his undergraduate degree. He lobbied for him to head to university, but World War II dragged on and Mun wanted to enlist. The Allies declared victory the year Mun signed on, yet his mind was made up — he would remain a professional soldier. Moving from Kingston to Quebec to New Brunswick, as part of the Canadian Officers Training Corps (COTC, now ROTP or Regular Officer Training Program), Mun's job was to be on the lookout for potential officer material. Meanwhile, his brother finished his undergraduate work and became a pediatrician.
Mun was based at St. Thomas College in Chatham and taught officer training. He headed back and forth between St. Thomas and Sacred Heart College in Bathurst, New Brunswick, about one hour's drive away. Enlisted men who wanted to attain the rank of lieutenant or better had to start with him. In early 1955, Mun took a much longer trip, to Ottawa, for some meetings. Back then, the army would either pay your way or you were allowed to take your own car and it would reimburse you for gas and lodgings. Mun decided to take his car for the 1,200-mile round trip. Louise can't recall what the other military personnel in Mun's vehicle were doing, whether or not they were also coming home from Ottawa. "A man with a Dutch name later wrote me a letter without a forwarding address," she says. "It was too bad — it was a beautiful letter."
On the morning of March 18, 1955, Ed and his fellow passengers set out from Edmundston, New Brunswick, on their way back to Chatham. They were about 120 miles from home when they encountered weather.
"There was a terrible snowstorm," Louise recalls. "He couldn't see where the road was, so he was following the tracks of the car in front of him. He slid into a car and then a third car slid into our car. The grill in our car was broken up and the people in the front car had two children with them and they turned on the engine to keep warm. The fumes went into the second car and there were three men who were killed from asphyxiation. Terrible, freakish thing."
His son John says now,
We moved around a lot but that only lasted for five years and then he was gone. My dad died when he was twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He'd just finished writing his papers for his majority. He died a captain but was about to be made a major. He did all the things you were supposed to do — turned off his engine, pulled on a blanket, rolled down the window a crack — but the guy in front of him left his car running and the exhaust came up through and asphyxiated him. When the storm cleared he was seventy-five yards from a farmhouse. But you don't go out in a blizzard and start looking for shelter.
I remember Mom was wondering where he was. Instead of Dad coming home, the colonel and the chaplain showed up. We got sent to our rooms and Mom was crying. My brother was just about one, my sister was five, and I was three when he died. I have a lot of memories of him. I remember we went to a football game in the wintertime, probably in Chatham. As we were coming home there was a guy delivering milk on a big skid on a big sled pulled by horses, all these milk cans on the back. We got on the back, and I was walking among these milk cans that were taller than me.
Dad was showing off one time. He bit into a rubber ball and got his gums to bleed. He taught me how to pinch my brother's ass. I remember Ted was running around bare-ass but I didn't use the right technique. I was supposed to get a really tiny bit of skin and squeeze that. He taught me how to do that and then got in super hell.
Considering Lefebvre was only three years old when real life became memories, his recall is excellent for precious everyday incidents that show Mun's character.
He continues,
And then there was the time my sister and I were hiking things between our legs, like we were hiking a football, at this window. Little things like Parcheesi pieces, plastic things. "See, I can throw this at the window and it won't break!" And then I got a C-cell battery and said, "I bet I can throw this at the window and it won't break ..." Smash! So then I had to get a spanking. Mom made Dad do it. Dad took me to my room and sat me down and said,
"Okay, I'm going to slap my thigh — like this — and every time I slap my thigh you've got to go, 'Ow!' Let's try it, okay? On three ... One, two," slap.
"Ow."
"No, no, say it like you really mean it, say it like it really hurt you." Slap on knee ... "Owww!"
"Okay, try one more. Slap on knee ...
"Owww!!!"
He's whispering to me, "That's really good." So then he slaps his knee again and I don't say anything, so he looks up at the door and there's my mom ...
I used to watch him shine his shoes and put on his putties. Army guys had pants that go down below your knee. Then you had a little chain to hold them down, so they puff downwards.
Louise argues that John doesn't really remember all those things — he's actually putting images and stories to things she told him. Or, equally plausible, these recollections have subconsciously metamorphosed over the years, through family storytelling and faded black and whites, into memories. "He knows of his dad from what I've told him. I don't think he remembers his dad that much, actually. I asked him once, 'Do you remember his face or the jokes he told?' It's hard to tell if John remembers or he remembers what we've talked about."
Lefebvre claims to remember "tons of things" from before he was three years old:
I know I do because they're memories that have my father in them. I ask other guys and they say they don't remember anything from that time. But really they probably do, they just don't realize that it was from when you were three because you don't have that kind of temporal litmus.
Anyway, my dad was a soldier. I think he was born in northern Ontario — Espanola. My grandfather Lefebvre was from there. And my grandmother Lefebvre was a Masicot. They were both French. Emily, my daughter, can speak French. My mother can struggle through. I know enough to ask which way is the No. 14 bus.
There wasn't that much influence linguistically, because although my grandfather was ethnically French Canadian he despised people who made a point of only speaking French. He was always shooting off his face — "Those asshole Frenchmen, why can't they join our country?" So, no, there wasn't really a strong francophone influence.
So my dad was a soldier from Ontario, and he came out to Alberta, took my mom out to the mess on an introduction, and stole her away from all the Calgary boys.
* * *
When I mention how difficult it must have been, Louise says, "Uhmmm-hum ... fortunately, I had three wild little children. You couldn't do much mooning about."
And neither did Louise's friends in New Brunswick, who sprang into action. She recalls,
Those were hospitable people. They contacted me out of the blue to say they had a bridge club going, and did I play bridge, and would I like to come and meet the ladies. Of course, I was a terrible bridge player, but I said yes. Anyway, they came and they packed everything. Except for I had saved letters that I used to get from Ed when we were discovering that we wanted to get married. I had tied these up and I never got them back. I don't know where that package went, but probably in the garbage.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Life Real Loud by Bill Reynolds. Copyright © 2014 Bill Reynolds. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
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