When I was 12 my father got me a summer job licking stamps at a lawyer’s office. It was a make-work program for boys whose fathers wanted them to become lawyers and involved arranging paper clips and filing documents in alphabetical order. The lawyer, my father’s son from his first marriage, had some snoozers.

If a merchant at les Terraces sought to knock a few bucks off his commercial rent for inadequate ventilation, this is the guy they’d call. It was hardly the stuff to turn a kid into Perry Mason.

But one file in that pile dealt with a case that stood out. The lawyer had been given the delicate job of negotiating a compensation package for the families of victims who died in the Blue Bird Café fire. Nobody much spoke of the litigation and I knew that it was not a success. Had he cut a healthy deal it would have become part of family legend. But nary a peep was uttered in my circles about the case.

And that silence echoed in the city’s newspapers, where shockingly little was mentioned of the arson in a nightclub on September 1, 1972 that killed 37 people at a downtown country music bar – most in their 20s.

It’s hard to imagine that in our media-drenched cityscape where reporters drone on for weeks about floods and other events where barely a person breaks a fingernail, that only initial reporting and cursory court coverage dealt with the most shocking criminal event in the city’s last half-century. The story is one of youth gone nuts.

Before torching the stairway of the Wagon Wheel Club in the Blue Bird Café building on Union just north of Dorchester (now René Lévesque), firebugs James O'Brien, Marc Boutin* and Gilles Eccles spent a day drinking countless beers on a South Shore beach.

According to news coverage of the trial, they were so drunk that they drove to Campbell Park where they spun their car in circles at high speeds around the baseball diamond. Their unbridled insanity somehow didn’t attract police attention and when they were refused entry into a nightclub where they thought some of their friends might be, one of them filled up a container of gasoline at a station on de Maisonneuve Boulevard.

While Eccles slept in the car, Boutin and O’Brien lit a fire on the stairs, seemingly never really thinking that the place could turn into a death trap for those inside. After they realized that their attempt at a deathly prank had spiralled into a mass murder, killing not only their friends but a total of 37 people, the trio panicked and regrouped at a bar in the Hotel Colonnade at Crescent and Dorchester. They fled to Vancouver but were apprehended soon after.

The ensuing trial made the newspapers, but was bumped out of the spotlight by the Canada-Russia hockey series, which made for lighter entertainment. The three men ended up serving time in prison for murder and were paroled in the early 1980s. Mr. O’Brien returned to jail for other crimes.

The legacy of that dark night can still be felt, as much for what this city has, as for what it does not. The fire claimed vital, young hardworking folk from the Gaspé and various parts of the island such as Point St. Charles and Verdun – the sort of people that you can find in those areas today; honest, outgoing people with hearts of gold and an ability to tell a yarn. They provide a city not just with numbers, but with character and charm. Their stories were frequently told in their circles, largely far from the mediatized chattering classes.

Mary McGimpsey lost a daughter that night, after previously losing another daughter to a hit and run. McGimpsey forgave the perpetrators but saved her wrath for those who administered the aftermath, treating the victims’ families with aggression and disrespect.

My half-brother, who represented those victims, was a young, inexperienced lawyer at the time and actually recommended that they accept the laughably feeble pittance they were offered, about $1,000 to $3,000 each. It was hardly the sort of tale of justice that would have persuaded me to become a lawyer, as my father so hoped.

It took almost 40 years before somebody really started to demand recognition. Sharon Share, who never met her father because her mother was widowed while still pregnant with her, has inspired many others to bravely face what happened.

They're meeting Thursday night for a candlelight vigil at what’s now a parking lot on Union near Dorchester to recall what happened and hopefully get a remembrance – perhaps a plaque – permanently installed at the site. Sadly, it’s too late for some. Mary McGimpsey – possibly the kindest person I can ever remember speaking to – has died, and the mother of another victim, Kathleen Livingstone, was tragically killed this year.

Germans use the pechvogel: bird of unhappiness. It's been hovering over Montreal in the form of a bluebird, but its shadow, one that has caused decades of shock and trauma, seems to finally be in the process of winging away from the city.

The world of the early 70s was far different from that of today. Bank robberies were an hourly occurrence, prison breaks were commonplace, killers such as Richard Blass were turned into rock stars by a lurid crime press that reported on a murder rate far higher that that of today’s Montreal.

But quietly amid all of this chaos, the Blue Bird Café fire inspired change. In the months following the murderous conflagration, the province started the Victims’ Indemnisation Fund (IVAC). It didn’t do much for the families of these victims, but it helps out now. Fire authorities started enforcing much stricter rules about building safety.

The fact that Montrealers now live in a safer, more just city, is a gift partially paid for by the lives of 37 country music fans 39 years ago. Let's always remember them.

This blog post was originally published on Coolopolis. An edited version has been reprinted here with permission.

* CORRECTION September 2, 2011: In the original version of this blog post, Marc Boutin was referred to erroneously as Jean-Marc Boutin.