Le Courant

‘Alouette’ Lapointe Market Léopold Lapointe, aged nineteen, born in Cookshire, arrives in April 1932 on board the Grand Trunk and lodges at the Laberge residence on St-Jean-Baptiste street till his marriage to Germaine Beaulieu also from Cookshire. He lives in St-Edmond parish at the birth of Pauline, the first child, and rents a two-room apartment at 379 St-Edmond street (owner Alfred Guilmour). In 1944, he buys the house of Edmond Blain (office of dentist Desroches) at 241 Child street (demolished). In 1945, he opens on Child street in co-operation with Charles-Émile Audet (future mayor) a serve-yourself grocery Audet & Lapointe (now the Café central). Afterwards, he works at different jobs, clerk at the Salois store, railroad man for the local train station and night caretaker at the Hotel Child. He buys in 1952 the grocery-butchery shop that Ludger Deslongchamps had opened in 1936 on St-Edmond street. With the help of his wife and two eldest sons Gilles and Jacques, he builds up inventory to always better offer products to his customers. The butcher is Noë Jubinville then Denis Arsenault, Guy Jalbert and Gilles. With the expansion using the veranda done by builder Aimé Perron in 1957, other clerks are hired like the brothers Daniel and Luc Péloquin, Jacques Boivin and deliverymen Achille Scalabrini and André Guimond. In 1963, Gilles takes over the store when Léopold pre-retires. The store did not open on Sunday and was closed the Wednesday afternoon. It closed definitively in 1976. Through the years, the banner changed from ‘Alouette’ to ‘Rouge et Blanc’. About the surface of a dépanneur, the store offered grocery, butchery, fruits and vegetables, beer, biscuits in bulk, delivery, phone orders and credit (manual billing with entry in the Big Ledger paid for by personal pay check a month later or sometimes… much later). Furthermore, it was a great fad to give customer fidelity stamps. The customers would stick Gold Star stamps in the exchangeable leaflets as in Michel Tremblay’s play and musical Les Belles-sœurs in order to get household or sports articles. Bernard Lapointe