When informing a journalist that his text was being selected for publication on the front page, Pierre Beaulieu did not say a word, stood straight in front of his desk, then, bending his knees a little, took on the offbeat appearance of a coaching coach. baseball, pointed at it with his two index fingers and, with a rapid movement, brought his two thumbs towards him with a sharp jerk. This caricatured gesture, repeated so many times by Beaulieu in the middle of the newsroom of the Duty, was known to everyone. She made you smile.
Pierre Beaulieu has just left us. He was, at Duty as elsewhere, a colorful desk chief, after having enjoyed a career as a journalist under various brands. He was the first French-speaking North American to cover the Tour de France. With his typist under his arm, he found himself in a caravan where, from restaurants to hotels, he managed to write atmospheric articles. With him, I endlessly discussed champions, like Merckx and Ocaña, but also Pierre Foglia or Réjean Tremblay, who made him pedal. It is only at The PressPierre Beaulieu had been in charge of the sports desk, long before moving to Dutywhere nothing has ever been in a hurry on this side.
As a journalist, he was long associated with the world of entertainment. Journalist Sylvain Cormier, an inveterate collector, looked through Beaulieu’s papers devoted to Harmonium, Beau Dommage, Offenbach, Pink Floyd at the Olympic Stadium, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, while recalling that he was the only French-speaking journalist invited to the famous show of the Rolling Stones at El Mocambo in Toronto. Among a thousand stories, among a number of witticisms that made people laugh, Pierre Beaulieu readily recounted having seen the Beatles during their visit to Montreal or even having produced, leaving his shirt there, a record by Pierre Harel called Tender pest.
Beaulieu had left The duty with others to embark on the ephemeral adventure of a tabloid. The intention of this new daily, called The morningwas to compete The Montreal Journal. He no longer found himself, he said, in the type of journalism implemented at the time by the management of the Duty. His bet came up against the reality of the market: The morning had 39 issues, counting those which had served as test shots. After which Pierre Beaulieu became editor-in-chief of the weekly Our Earth. And he returned to Dutywith a little dirt on his shoes.
He was a curious man, with a delicate physique. With his eternal faded black jeans and his threadbare blue shirt, his disheveled hair and his toothless mouth, he looked like a comic book character who had aged without ever changing. He did serious work, but didn’t take himself too seriously. He was one of those, quite few in number, with whom it was always pleasant to be.
At UQAM, many students had him as a professor. Under his influence, The duty turned more and more often in this direction to select its recruits. Environmental journalist Alexandre Shields owes it to him, he says, for daring to one day get a foot in the door. The newspaper’s news director Deals, Marie-Pier Frappier, was his student, then his assistant. There are many people he helped to access paid positions.
Pierre Beaulieu had a precious quality: composure. I remember one evening when, the newspaper was short of photographers, I went to take a disaster portrait of Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd, at the very end of deadline. Back at the newspaper with full speed, my best photo had been corrupted in a hasty maneuver. In less than two weeks, Pierre and I had found a way to overcome this misfortune inherent in producing a newspaper under pressure. Pierre was used to last-minute tricks. After freeing himself for the better from a similar misfortune, he let out a sort of little whistle of relief which gave the impression of a steam engine from which the pressure escapes.
How many editorial meetings have we attended side by side? These meetings began with a phrase invariably pronounced by director Bernard Descôteaux: “Now let’s come back to tomorrow. » Pierre Beaulieu always presented himself at this long table with a bottle of orange juice in his hand. She served as his dinner. Said bottle served, for the rest of the day, as an ashtray. In the afternoon, nonchalantly, he walked around the middle of the room to take the pulse of the topics of the day. In the evenings, he almost invariably ate barbecue chicken bought on the street corner. Like many, he ate in front of his desk, his eyes glued to the screen of his computer, busy finishing the next day’s edition.
With work like this, as he said, it is impossible to go to bed with peace of mind, as if nothing had happened. Sylvain Cormier, accustomed to the accelerated late-night writing exercises, recounted how Beaulieu used to, once the diary was completed, sit down in a bar to unwind. It was in the middle of the blue of the smoke that he found, slowly, escaping from his inky black nights.
Pierre Beaulieu was a character the likes of which you rarely find in newsrooms anymore. He was the keeper of the fort. It was he, in the evening, who was the last to put the key in the door, after having raised the drawbridge and having ensured that everything was secure on the printing works side.
Since his retirement from Duty, we had no news of this discreet being. He had resolved to unplug from everything. The clock has just hit him. Many of us are mourning him at the start of the year.