It was 40 years ago today, Expo taught us all to play...

It was a shock to some of us to be told this week that the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper album was 40 years old, and that was the same year at Expo 67. For younger people it may merely be an amusing aritifact, but it is hard to over-emphasize how important its release seemed then.

The Beaver magazine and its staff, particularly art director Michel Groleau, has done its current cover (June/July) as a takeoff on the iconic album cover art and inserted a number of well-known faces into the crowd, including Jean Drapeau, the mayor of Montreal ("a fair can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby"), Rene Levesque, Conrad Black, Lester Pearson and so on. In the front row near the left are the outgoing editor of The Beaver, Doug Whiteway and his predecessors Murdoch Davis and Annalee Greenberg And somewhere in there, sporting a Marilyn Monroe haircut, is the publisher and president of Canada's National History Society, Deborah Morrison. You may want to buy the issue to get a close-up look (the circulation department would appreciate that.)

An interesting Canadian connection to the album was that it was debuted on this side of the water at Expo 67 when an airline attendant hand-carried a copy and gave it to Youth Pavillon host Gilles Gougeon to play a full 24 hours before its official release in North America.