Paternally, the Burnses were Catholics who hailed originally from Scotland, tracing their history to a town called Burnshead in the county of Cumberland, during the reign of Edward I. The Burnses had their own coat of arms: a hand holding a hunting horn—symbolizing power—surrounded by three white fleur-de-lis, signifying peace. The clan’s motto: “Ever ready.”
From genealogical research undertaken by Patrick’s sister Diane, the family’s ancestors abandoned Scotland for Ireland around the time of the Great Potato Famine that began in 1845, an inauspicious move, since destitute Irish families were fleeing starvation by the boatloads for America. Plenty of Burnses joined the mass emigration, but this branch of the family hung on. It was Alfred Burns’s grandfather who sailed to Canada from County Cork.
His progeny fared adequately; a hard-working lot from which eventually sprang Pat Burns, one of the NHL’s most respected coaches, three times winner of the Jack Adams Award as coach of the year, and among the highest paid in his profession. None of that, of course, could have been envisioned when Louise Geraldeau Burns brought her baby home to a cramped apartment. Of Louise’s heritage, little is known except that her forebears had lived in the region of rural Calumet, Quebec, for as far back as could be traced.
Alfred Burns was a strapping fellow, baldish, with a gift for the gab and a rollicking sense of humour, traits his son would inherit. “My father was Irish right to the bone,” Pat would say. His hefty dimensions came from Alfred, too, but otherwise Pat physically resembled Louise. Diane, next youngest to Pat and seven years his senior, idolized her dad. “He was a very good father. Taught me how to put a worm on a hook. He called Patrick his chum. He was so pleased to have another son. Dad was a great fisherman; he loved boats. Pat took that up quite a bit from him.”
When Louise met Alfred, they were both working at Imperial Tobacco in Montreal. She was living in a boarding house, drawn to the big city from Calumet in pursuit of gainful employment, first as a cleaning lady, then babysitting for a “high-class” family, before moving on to the tobacco company. Her given name was Giralda, but Alfred couldn’t even pronounce that, and everybody called her Louise. Alfred was a master electrician and Louise was on the assembly line, churning out cigarettes. She spoke no English; he spoke no French. The women at the plant all wore trousers, not for fashion but for comfort and utilitarian purpose. One hot afternoon, she was sitting in the park across the street from the sprawling factory and rolled up her pant legs. Alfred spotted the young lady’s shapely calves and thought, appreciatively, “Hmm.” They were married within a year, and the babies starting coming.
The flat on Laporte Avenue, a fifteen-minute walk from Imperial Tobacco, was long and narrow. A hallway led to a living room, dining room, the couple’s bedroom, a bedroom for the older children, and another, in the back, with bunk beds, to be shared years later by Pat and Diane. First born was Violet, now in her late seventies, then Alfred Jr.—called Sonny—then Lillian and Phyllis and Diane, and then no pregnancy for seven years. “Pat came along really late,” recalls Diane. “He wasn’t a planned baby. I don’t know whether it was a fluke or not. Mom says she would have had more had my father not passed away.”
In St. Henri, the children—though not Pat, still a toddler—attended St. Thomas Aquinas School and worshipped at the attached St. Thomas Aquinas Church every Sunday. But the family left Montreal and moved to Châteauguay before Pat’s third birthday. A lovely profile written by then Montreal Gazette columnist Michael Farber in 1988, just as Burns was beginning his NHL career, would become the biographical template, resurrected as a requiem and widely reproduced twenty-two years later. Farber, trailing the coach through his old neighbourhood, could not possibly have grasped that even then Burns was burnishing an invented childhood, making up chunks of a sweet past as he undoubtedly wished it had been.
Burns recounted how his father had taken him to Canadiens games every few weeks, the two sitting in the whites at the Forum, peering around posts that blocked their view, the boy in his number 9 Maurice “Rocket” Richard sweater. “One of those big woollen ones, eh? With the turtleneck. During the fall and spring, they’d start scratching you, eh? Somebody in my family bought me a Blackhawks shirt. I don’t know who—an aunt, I guess. I cried my eyes out. I couldn’t wear it here. I couldn’t wear it here.”
Though not yet three years old at the time, Burns claimed to remember his father and brother, Sonny, listening to reports on the radio one evening about a commotion developing outside the Forum. It was March 17, 1955, St. Patrick’s Day, and this would become the politically and culturally defining Richard Riot in Quebec. NHL president Clarence Campbell, long at disciplinary odds with hockey icon Rocket Richard, had suspended the fiery superstar for, in his view, deliberately injuring an opponent during a game against Boston and then punching a linesman. Richard was suspended for the remainder of the season and the playoffs. With Richard’s chance at a scoring title and the team’s first-place standing in jeopardy, to say nothing of their postseason fortunes, Quebecers were incandescent with rage. Foolishly, after imposing the suspension, Campbell decided to attend Montreal’s very next home game. Spectators at the Forum could not restrain themselves, pummelling their Public Enemy No. 1 with food and garbage. The game was suspended and the arena evacuated, which dumped thousands of fuming fans onto the street. In the ensuing melee, windows were smashed and somebody set off a tear gas bomb. The riot marked a seminal moment in the evolution of Quebec’s modern nationalist movement.
Teased out of a memory likely formed from the retelling rather than the actual event witnessed, Burns recalled father and brother walking up Atwater Avenue to investigate the scene. “There was a story going around the neighbourhood that Dad was up there breaking windows, that the old man had gone up there to cause trouble. That was ridiculous. Years later, he would talk about it and say, ‘I remember back in 1955, they were throwing stuff at Mr. Campbell and …’ ”
In fact, there would be no “years later” for Alfred Burns, who died in 1957, aged forty-nine. The truth is more poignant than any improvised reminiscence.
“In the papers, when he first became coach in Montreal, they said his father took him to games, but that never happened,” says Diane, setting the record straight. “Not that Dad wouldn’t have done that, but he just never got the chance.”
When the family picked up and moved to Châteauguay, with Pat three years old, an uncle married to Alfred’s sister permitted them to reside in a “house” he owned there. Actually, it was no more than a garage on a piece of property where the uncle’s family lived in a large separate house. But Alfred was handy and converted it into a decent home for his brood. “Dad turned the garage into a house for us,” says Diane. “But we never had papers or anything to prove that the house belonged to us. When he passed away, my uncle kicked us out.”
It was around Christmas. Alfred had been attempting to unclog a frozen well on the property using a blowtorch. He tried lighting the torch several times, to no avail. Nothing happened. As Alfred was peering over the edge of the well, gas fumes from the torch ignited and the torch exploded, the blowback striking him smack in the face. Amazingly, he wasn’t killed—nor, it seemed, seriously injured. He called for Lillian to bring him a towel. She wanted to call a doctor, but Alfred said no.
Louise and Diane had been shopping in town, walking home because they had no car, when they discovered a dazed Alfred. Despite what Pat would later say, he didn’t witness the accident, either. “The explosion burned Dad’s face, singed his eyebrows and his eyelids,” says Diane. “He actually looked okay except for the singes and the fact he had no eyebrows. But he refused to go to the hospital, because it was around Christmas and he wanted to be with the family. At least that’s what he said.”
Within a few weeks, however, Louise noticed that something appeared wrong with Alfred. He was weak and unsteady on his feet. A doctor was summoned. “The doctor came to the house, took one look at Dad and said, ‘Oh no, he’s got
to go to the hospital.’ ” His brother drove him. “When Dad got there, he bent down to take his shoes off, had a massive heart attack and died.”
Speculation after the fact was that Alfred had a bad ticker, some undisclosed pre-existing condition biding its time until triggered fatally by the blast. There was no history of heart problems in his family; his father died of cancer, while his mother lived to a ripe, old age. “He may have had a cholesterol problem,” muses Diane. “He was a man with a big appetite—big pie eater, big egg eater. He never went to doctors. You would never know there was anything wrong to look at him. Not at all.”
For the youngster Pat, the sudden loss of his father lacerated his psyche, ripping open a wound, a throbbing ache that would never heal. Even before he could process what had been lost, the ever-after absence of Alfred Burns had marked him. Thus would begin a lifelong search for male mentors, a quest for kindly patriarchs to fill that vacuum. There was always a deep-rooted sadness that Burns, as an adult who eschewed navel-gazing and avoided self-reflection, was loath to even acknowledge. “I don’t think he was ever a happy man,” reflects Diane, who was his closest sibling. “From the day my dad died, there’s been a gap in there so big, so big, that was never filled by anyone else—not men friends, not women, and there were a lot of women. He just had this big, big hole that never got filled. That affected all his relationships. He never learned how to be a father because he never really had one.”
Louise received some insurance money and a widow’s pension, but the family faced hardship. Three of her children—Sonny, Lillian and Phyllis—were working at Imperial Tobacco in Montreal, and Violet, soon to be married, at a plant that manufactured Aspirin. None of Alfred’s offspring would receive a postsecondary education, all of them entering the work force right out of high school. When Alfred’s brother-in-law evicted the family from the garage-cum-house, Louise faced a crisis. Younger children in tow, she returned to St. Henri, renting a small ground-floor apartment on St. Antoine Street. She got a job at a clothing shop. Then Louise was offered, and accepted, a job from her brother, who owned a restaurant in Pointe-au-Chine, not far from Hawkesbury, Ontario. Louise became the cook, and Phyllis also toiled in the restaurant for a year until she married her boyfriend and moved away. Four-year-old Pat was still attached to his mom’s apron string, but Diane, then eleven, was sent to dwell temporarily with her maternal grandparents in Calumet. The family had been dispersed widely. “My mother was just trying to cope,” says Diane.
Within a few years, widowed Louise, with Diane and Pat, relocated the shrinking family to Gatineau. Violet was living there then, and Louise wanted to be closer to her daughter and good-natured son-in-law, Bill Hickey. Another tiny apartment was rented for the three meandering Burnses. This was not an unpleasant phase in the Burns family annals. The Christmas Pat was six, Louise had set aside money to buy him—at an employee discount because Diane was a salesgirl at the store, Handy Andy’s—a complete set of Canadiens-logo hockey equipment. Dickie Moore was Pat’s idol, the Hab he pretended to be while playing on frozen ponds and at the local rink.
“He would put on his skates at home, on Oak Street, and walk five blocks to the rink, which was next to our parish church, St. Aloysius. He would play there for hours and hours, sometimes by himself, just a boy with his stick and his puck. He’d stay so long that my mother would have to call the priest and say, ‘Please send Patrick home.’ And the priest would say, ‘Oh, that’s all right. I’ve already brought him in and given him dinner.’ Later on, she’d call again and say, ‘Father, really, tell Patrick to come home now.’ When he walked in the house, he’d be so bush-tired, he could hardly stand on his skates. My mother would take his skates off and put his feet in the oven to warm them up.”
Interestingly, in his own recollections, Burns would often transpose these events, resituating them in St. Henri, maintaining the fiction that his childhood was spent largely there, within walking distance of the Forum. But there may have been psychological reasons for editing history.
While closeness to Violet was probably a factor in Louise’s decision to move to Gatineau, that particular event seems also to have been prompted by romance. Louise had by then met the man who would become her second husband. Her children were never certain exactly when or how Louise came to encounter Harvey Barbeau, a widower with a grown son, but it may have been as early as the family’s tenancy in Châteauguay. What they all agree on is ruing the day he became their stepfather.
“He was a filing clerk for Veterans Affairs,” says Diane, “and he was an alcoholic. Mum didn’t know it at first because he never drank in front of her. I really think at this point our mother was eager to get her own home, her own house, which she’d never had. So they got married.” To Diane and Pat, their mother’s new husband was always Harvey, never Dad. He worked in Ottawa, but Louise insisted on living in Gatineau, which is where Pat came of age.
“It was not a good union,” says Diane of Louise’s lengthy second marriage. “Harvey stayed in her life for thirty-five years. He wasn’t physically abusive or anything, not to me and not to Pat. But my mother was a fighter. So, if he’d come home drunk, she’d fight. Pat and I would go in the bedroom, kind of hide. We didn’t want to be there when the fighting was going on, so the two of us would stay in the bedroom, with the door closed.
“Harvey had a good job with the government and got a good pension, on top of his army pension, so Mom eventually had a bit of money. Oh my God, she did the best she could, a very courageous woman. But this all had a terrible impact on Pat. Harvey was not a good father to Pat. It was actually Violet’s husband, Bill Hickey, who treated us more like he was our father. Pat got very close to Bill Hickey when he was young. Bill took us to the beach, took us driving, did a lot of things with us. Whenever Harvey would have a big blowout, Bill would come and get us, take us to my sister’s house. It was all very scarring—more so for Pat, I think. Pat grew up with a chip on his shoulder, and I can’t blame him. He was only three when our father died, so, whenever we talked about Dad, to him it was like a stranger. I could remember our father, but Pat never really knew him. Then my mother gets remarried to Harvey, who’s an alcoholic and no father figure for Pat. Our family is scattered all over and here’s Pat, hiding under the bed.”
He found his comfort elsewhere. As an adolescent, Burns became deeply engrossed in music, teaching himself to play guitar. Like motorcycles, expensive guitars would later become his adult toys of choice. By age twelve, he had put together his own little garage band, and a year afterwards, when Diane married, that band played at her wedding reception.
Though boastful occasionally about adolescent misbehaviour, the usual scrapes and snarls that accompany the ripening of boys, Pat was in fact no trouble as a teenager. He had lots of friends and was somewhat protected from temptations within the bubble of sleepy Gatineau. He was a poor student, his worst marks in math; had zero interest or scholarly aptitude to pursue college; never even got his high school diploma, so impatient was he to get on with growing up and earning his own livelihood. Burns attended St. Aloysius until Grade 9, endured Grade 10 at St. Patrick’s High School, and then quit. He continued playing organized hockey as a decent winger—a bruising type, with a bum knee, never rising very high in junior, undrafted, realizing early that there would be no NHL for him, although allegedly invited to attend the St. Louis Blues’ training camp as a walk-on, which he declined.
For a year, he’d been a member of the Governor General’s Foot Guards and studied welding at Ottawa Technical School. Then, shocking everyone in his family—and lying about his age—the seventeen-year-old joined the Ottawa police force. Louise wasn’t having any of that. She marched off to the office of the Gatineau police chief—a man she’d never met before—and demanded that her son be hired on the local force, if the teen insisted on becoming a cop. Louise Burns Barbeau in mother-hen dudgeon was a formidable, irresistible force. “If she wanted something, she’d get it,” says Diane. “Harvey use
d to call her the mayor of Gatineau.”
For his part, Burns would say that it was the Gatineau chief who’d lured him into law enforcement as a career. “I said something like, ‘What, are you crazy?’ Then he said, ‘You know, we’ve got motorcycles.’ And that was it. I was sold.” In fact, that wasn’t it, and the Gatineau police didn’t have motorcycles. But to an unskilled, unschooled teenager, policing offered a preferable alternative to working in the local paper mill, the town’s major employer. “There weren’t a lot of choices open to me,” said Burns. So he was dispatched to the police academy in Aylmer. When he formally earned his cop chops and took up duties in Gatineau, in 1970, Burns was making a whopping $39 a week. “What do I do?” Burns asked of his police chief when he started on the job. And he was told: “Here’s the hat, here’s the whistle, here’s the gun. Just follow the older guys. And point the gun away from you. It you want it to work, you pull that trigger.”
He was given twenty-four uniform shirts and wondered, why so many? First shift on the job, working 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., police were called to break up a fight at a hotel. “I just knew half my friends would be in this place,” Burns recounted to a Boston reporter years later. “Sure enough, I walk in and it’s a bunch of my friends. I tell ’em to break it up, and they just laugh and say, ‘Bleep you.’ All of a sudden, I get stung, hit by a good punch on the side of the head. I’m covered in blood and my shirt gets torn off. Right there, I said, ‘Hey, that’s why they gave me twenty-four shirts.’ ”
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