After spending15 years driving a hot dog and coffee cart to city construction crews and another couple of years trucking around asbestos Pierre Cochard went on to open Edmonton’s first all-nude (and booze-free) strip parlour. Now 83 years old, the peeler pioneer is still finding beauty, and business, in burlesque.
Scott Messenger: I’ve read a lot about you in newspapers and magazines. I know that you came to Canada in 1951.
Pierre Cochard: I stayed in Montreal one year, between ’50 and ’51. In Montreal, to make my living, it was very tough. We shovelled snow from sidewalks, a dollar a sidewalk in the wintertime. We could do about 20 sidewalks. To us, $20 in those days was like $20,000. We didn’t have [much] money. We were eating in drugstores, at the counters. I think we paid 35 cents for coffee and toast and bacon.
S: You were boxing as well, no?
P: I came here to train. I never fought [in Canada]. I fought in Europe.
S: Why not in Canada?
P: First of all, the prize in Canada for boxing, if you were the first time here in Canada, they gave you 60 bucks, 70 bucks for the fight. In Europe I had $2,000 for a fight.
S: But you were a boxer of some skill. You had championship titles in Europe?
P: I was the Intercontinental Army Champ. I was in the army in 1944, ‘45.
S: So after Montreal, you headed west?
P: I knew a guy in Edmonton, he said, “Pierre, you come over here, there’s lots of work.” So I came here with my three buddies. We bought a car in Toronto, a 1929 Buick, and we drove that thing over here and we made it. The cooling system didn’t work; one guy had to sit out between the front and the motor and pour water while we were driving so the motor kept cool, on the highway. The highway was not like the Trans-Canada, no. You got about 3,000 miles from here to Toronto. About 2,000 was paved and the rest was gravel. They were building the Trans-Canada then, piece by piece, so you had stretches of 500 miles or more of gravel, holes and pits and all kinds of stuff.
S: You’re 83 now, so how old would you have been when you arrived in Edmonton?
P: I would have been 26.
S: Is that when you started with the truck, going to construction sites?
P: Chuckwagon lunch. They’d never seen that before here in Edmonton. I picked the idea up in Toronto, to go to construction sites and service stations at 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock and sell coffee and hot dogs and hamburgers, doughnuts, cigarettes.
S: And you did that for 17 years?
P: Yeah.
S: And then you started a club in Grande Prairie?
P: In 1968.
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