Joseph Glazner and his experience as a U.S. draft-dodger in Montreal
Image: Cover of The Georgian, vol. 32, no 13, October 1968
Transcription: The Georgian / Vietnam anti-war rally / Saturday, noon at Phillip’s Square / See page 10
Credit: ARCMTL collection. Interview was conducted in Montreal on May 20, 2021 with Joseph Glazner by Louis Rastelli, Director of ARCMTL.
Duration: 4:02 min
Listen to Joseph Glazner, draft-dodger and author, talk about his decision to move to Canada to avoid the draft in 1967, as well as about being Jesse Winchester’s neighbour, in the Village du Carré Saint-Louis.
Transcription:
Joseph Glazner: So I had this romantic idea of Montreal being – I actually hitchhiked across the country and got a ride in Albuquerque in New Mexico in ’65, and the guy was a artificial inseminator who was going back to Vermont to pick up his family and his tools and head back to Arizona, and he was going through Montreal. So he dropped me off in Montreal. You know, and I had a few hours of walking around in Montreal and decided, hey this is a kind of a neat place. And it had a whole romance about it. So I quit in my first few weeks of UCLA and that was it!
I mean, I still wasn’t drafted until I got to Canada but I just said, I don’t want to be part of this anymore, and I don’t want to keep looking over my shoulder anymore. It’s just not – And apparently from what I can tell, I arrived about a week before Jesse Winchester and he lived down Aylmer as well (Laughs.), up the street from me. So we ended up on the, not only at the same time, but the same street. And you went up the top of Aylmer, that’s where the Yellow Door was.
Louis Rastelli: Yeah, it still is actually!
Joseph Glazner: Yeah. We were both down umm – Sherbrooke and then what’s the next street above that? it’s –
Louis Rastelli: Milton?
Joseph Glazner: It’s Prince Arthur?
Louis Rastelli: Prince Arthur, yeah, yeah.
Joseph Glazner: Yeah! So we were both in that little block there, between Prince Arthur and Sherbrooke.
(…)
I arrived, I think it was either [inaudible], it was either five or ten days after Expo closed, and that was a really strange time because there had been so much money pouring through Montreal and then it was like, it was over, and it was like desolation row. You know, the money just ran out. There was a lot of desperation among a lot of the people who had been making money during that period – and suddenly it ran out. And Montreal was really interestingly cool because of that in some strange way, you know. It was… It was…
I found that – and I had spent only a small amount of time up in San Francisco – but I would say that the closest thing to Montreal in the 60s was San Francisco. It definitely wasn’t New York, wasn’t L.A. It had that San Francisco kind of… An outlier, but very hip.
(…)
You could literally live on nothing because housing was a very small portion of anything that you needed, if you were willing to take those old places. And everywhere in that whole area you could rent a place for, you know, even 40 or 50 bucks, you know, depending on what, you know, you could get a small place. And mine was huge! I mean I’m telling you, three bedrooms; it was just the whole, you know, flat, it was the whole top floor of one of those huge family places! It was a Portuguese family beneath me and you know I never saw them! I mean it was, you know, I had literally three bedrooms and a big, you know, a big kitchen and a big, you know. I mean it was all, it was totally run down, it hadn’t been touched probably since the 20s and the building was probably 1890s, 1880s, so the floor was so crooked that if you put anything, anything that had any ability to roll at one end, it would just go to the other end of the room by itself! (Laughs.)