Roch Carrier, 10 years old, in the dreaded Toronto Maple Leafs sweater that spawned his classic children’s story ‘The Hockey Sweater’. This photograph was taken by his mother in the streets of his hometown of Sainte-Justine-de-Dorchester, Que., in 1947. ‘I’m not happy about wearing the Leafs sweater,’ says Carrier, a lifelong Canadiens and Maurice Richard fan , ‘but she must have told me to smile.’
The theme of the short story was that his mother ordered the Leafs jersey in error from a catalogue. When it arrived, he was devastated to be required to wear it in his small French Canadian town.
This story became part of Canadian folk lore. It was many years later memorialized in the five dollar bill.
