Bill Reynolds - Life Real Loud - John Lefebvre, Neteller and the Revolution in Online Gambling

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,