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McCREADY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-04-16 published
His vision for Canada went sky-high
Aircraft engineer worked at Canadian Vickers during the Second
World War and helped in development of Canadair
By James McCREADY
Special▼ to The Globe and Mail Wednesday, April
16, 2003 - Page R9
Perhaps more than anyone else, Peter
GOOCH gave Canada its wings.
An aeronautical engineer, he helped to build the company that
went on to become Canadair, the aerospace division of Bombardier
and the foundation for Canada's success as an aircraft manufacturer.
Like many young men of his generation, the Second World War had
thrust him into the job of his dreams: chief engineer of a vast
aircraft plant building flying boats for submarine patrols and
converting military transports into commercial aircraft.
Mr. GOOCH, who died in February at the age of 88, joined Canadian
Vickers at the outbreak of the war. The company was building
ships in the east end of Montreal but expanded to build sea planes,
including those that landed on floats and skis as well as amphibians,
so-called flying boats, which could take off from water or land.
Canadian Vickers moved its aeronautical arm to Cartierville airport,
then a three-kilometre streetcar ride from the edge of Montreal.
In May 1942, the federal government got involved by helping to
build a 150,000-square-metre plant. Within three months, Mr.
GOOCH and his team turned out the first
PBY, or Canso, an advanced
flying boat which saw extensive service in the war. The technology
behind the Canso's ability to take off and land using the fuselage
as a hull is still used in Canadair's water bombers.
The assembly line produced 340 Cansos. Then a young man who was
not yet 30, Mr.
GOOCH supervised a complex engineering project
with dozens of engineers and thousands of workers under him.
As the war came to an end, the factory expanded to convert military
C47s into civilian DC3s.
At one point, Mr.
GOOCH was also sent to England to work on the
development of the legendary de Havilland Mosquito, an all-wood
fighter-bomber that was later made in Canada and used by the
Royal Canadian Air Force.
Mr. GOOCH was not only a clever engineer but a man of quiet charm
and an accomplished linguist. Both these traits smoothed the
path for his winning the contract for Vickers to build Montreal's
first subway cars. Because he was fluent in French, he was able
to deal with the mayor of Montreal, Jean
DRAPEAU, something few
English-only speaking businessmen of his day could manage.
By 1964, Mr.
GOOCH was vice-president of engineering at Canadian
Vickers. He convinced the mayor that his firm, located in a working
class, French-Canadian district, could do the job of building
the subway cars. Shortly after winning the contract, Mr.
GOOCH
was promoted to president of Canadian Vickers.
Peter William
GOOCH was born on February 18, 1915, in Toronto.
His father was a successful businessman who owned and ran a window-manufacturing
company.
He attended Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto,
graduating with a degree in civil engineering in 1936. A year
later, he earned a masters degree in aeronautical engineering.
His first job in aviation was with de Havilland and he transferred
to the company's home base in England. He worked at its plants
until the outbreak of the war when he started at Canadair, which
was then owned by Canadian Vickers. After the war, the government
wanted to encourage the development of an aviation industry using
Canadair as a base. After one postwar re-organization, Canadair
was bought by an American firm with the odd name of The Electric
Boat Company. It formed the basis of General Dynamics, the defence
giant.
Mr. GOOCH opted to stay with Canadian Vickers and moved to its
operation on the St. Lawrence River. He left the firm in 1967
and moved to Toronto as president and part owner of the firm
that became FluiDynamic Devices Inc., a company that turned exotic
inventions developed at the National Research Council in Ottawa
into commercial products.
A man of immense curiosity, he would get caught up in many projects,
including a windtunnel. Called Airflow, it helped measure industrial
emissions as part of an environmental initiative put together
long before most people had heard of the word. The firm sold
its first wind tunnel to Volvo, in Sweden, to test the aerodynamics
of its cars.
In his spare time, Mr.
GOOCH read in many languages and in addition
to French, he spoke Russian, Spanish, German and Italian. When
visiting businessmen arrived from Europe, he was always called
upon to entertain them. At the age of 60, he decided to learn
Japanese since his firm, FluiDynamics, had picked up a Japanese
client.
A devoted family man, he spent his free time at the cottage he
built at Lac Oureau, north of Montreal. A patient fisherman,
his son remembers him catching just one trout on the fished-out
lake in the southern Laurentians. The family would head further
north on fishing trips every summer.
His hobbies included carpentry and a whole range of sports from
skiing to golf. He was fit even in his later years and last summer
was the first time he used a cart instead of walking the course.
Mr. GOOCH died in Toronto on February 27. He leaves his wife
Evelyn and his four children.
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McCREADY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-06-27 published
His calling was behind the scenes
By James McCREADY
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail Friday, June
27, 2003 - Page R9
Toronto -- Jimmy
FULLER's first job in the theatre was playing
Julius Caesar at the Royal Alex in Toronto. Odd for a teenage
boy with no acting experience. But he played the post-Ides of
March Julius Caesar, lying dead in a coffin on the stage, a part
no actor wanted to perform.
His father was a business agent for the stage union the International
Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, and he wangled the job
for the boy. Jimmy
FULLER went into his father's trade. He was
a member of International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees
for 54 years and was president of Local 58 for 36 years, until
just before his death on May 22 at the age of 82.
Jimmy FULLER worked as an electrician at Toronto's O'Keefe Centre
for the opening performance of Camelot in 1960. He stayed there
for more than 30 years, as chief electrician for the theatre,
which in time changed its name to the Hummingbird Centre.
A union leader, he was also an entrepreneur. In 1976, he started
his own company, Canadian Staging Projects, which rented stage
equipment. It was successful, and he continued as president until
the 1990s. During that time, he also worked in many productions
and negotiated contracts with the likes of theatre owner Ed
MIRVISH
and impresario Garth
DRABINSKY.
The 350 members of Local 58 work behind the scenes in live theatre
in Toronto. They are the stagehands and electricians for everything
from the Royal Alex to the Canadian National Exhibition. Jimmy
FULLER was so enthusiastic about live theatre he would sometimes
invest in the shows themselves. Some were small productions,
but his most successful flutter was in the musical Cats.
James Charles
FULLER was born in Toronto on October 31, 1920.
He went to Runnymede Public School and then followed the family
trade, qualifying as an electrician after studying at Western
Tech high school. One of his first jobs, apart from playing the
dead Julius Caesar, was at a movie theatre, the Runnymede Odeon,
starting as an usher.
In 1941, he joined the army and when they discovered his stage
talent he was put to work as part of the crew for the Army Show.
He was involved with staging productions, and the one he remembered
in particular was with the Canadian comedy team, Wayne and Shuster
Just before the end of the war he was sent to British Columbia
for more serious wartime work: wiring minesweepers, which were
essentially wooden ships that used electrical signals to detect
mines. He was back in Toronto just before the end of the war,
working in his old trade as an electrician at the Odeon.
In 1950, he started J. Fuller Lighting Ltd., a freelance theatrical
lighting business. It was around that time that he became a business
agent for the Toronto Local 58 of International Alliance of Theatrical
Stage Employees. At the end of that decade he became the head
electrician for the O'Keefe Centre and stayed on there until
But it wasn't as if that were his only job. Along with running
his own company, he was running the union, negotiating contracts
with local theatre owners, in particular the Mirvishes.
"Jimmy was labour and I was management. We fought one another
tooth and nail for 30 years. We should have been the bitterest
of enemies," Mr.
MIRVISH said in a statement issued on Mr.
FULLER's
death. "We actually became the best of Friends."
He travelled with many shows, working with the Charlottetown
Festival and the military Tattoo. He also worked closely with
the Canadian Opera Company and was himself a fan of the opera.
Jimmy FULLER led a quiet home life and his family said that once
he was home he never talked business. He leaves his wife, Eleanor,
to whom he had been married for 58 years, and his daughter Susan.
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McCREADY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-07-10 published
Toronto's musical Mr. Chips
Headmaster of private Crescent School took over a rundown building
and fixed its wiring, plumbing and even its furnace until a newer
structure could be found
By James McCREADY
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail Thursday, July
10, 2003 - Page R5
He was the first Canadian-born principal of a Toronto boys' school
that for its first 50 years had hired only British headmasters.
Bill BURRIDGE, who has died at the age of 79, remained at Toronto's
Crescent School until 1986.
The boys at the school both respected him and feared him. The
father of one former head boy remembers "Mr.
BURRIDGE" as a man
who could "cut through the BS. The boys knew they couldn't get
away with anything with him. But he was a wonderful teacher."
Mr. BURRIDGE was an unlikely Mr. Chips. If you looked back at
his early school career, no one would have picked him for the
job as a headmaster at a private school.
William BURRIDGE was a working class boy who was born in Toronto
on August 16, 1923. His father, an English immigrant, was a painter
for Imperial Oil. Young Bill went to Western Technical-Commercial
School to become an electrician.
But like many of his generation, the Second World War wrought
changes in his life.
He went into the Royal Canadian Air Force as an electrician.
One of his first postings was to Dorval Airport in Montreal,
a military field during the war, where one of his fellow electricians,
Phil JONES, remembered they worked on odd planes for the Royal
Canadian Air Force, odd because they were not the standard aircraft
flown by Bomber Command. They were American planes, twin-engined
B-25 bombers and the long range four engine B-24 Liberators.
One big B-24 was unique. It was named Commando and its bomb racks
had been stripped out to make it into a passenger plane, with
two private bunks for Winston Churchill, the wartime British
Prime Minister and his doctor. The plane was parked at Dorval
a lot of the time, from where it could easily head out to Bermuda,
West Africa or to Cairo, or across the Atlantic to Britain. The
aircraft was serviced by Royal Canadian Air Force electricians,
including Mr.
BURRIDGE.
The posting provided interesting stories
for him to tell in later life.
Mr. BURRIDGE and the other electricians were sent to different
bases, including one just outside Vancouver. While there they
used to pick up extra money on their leave by hitchhiking across
the border to Seattle to work as drivers and warehousemen at
a fruit-packing plant. The war meant a shortage of men and the
Canadian airmen were given weekend work, no questions asked.
A professional musician on the double bass since the age of 17,
through the war Mr.
BURRIDGE played in pickup bands and
an Royal
Canadian Air Force band, along with Mr. Jones and others.
When Mr. BURRIDGE came home from the war he kept playing. During
the late forties he played at dances at the Young Men's Christian
Association and at clubs such as the Rex. In the fifties he played
in the Benny Lewis Orchestra at places such as the Casa Loma
and the Palace Pier, then a dance hall, now a family of condos
on Lake Ontario. He played with the jazz great Moe
KAUFMAN and
did some session work with the jazz singers Peggy
LEE and Pearl
BAILEY.
Mr. BURRIDGE also played during the summers at resorts in the
Muskokas. To get there he had to book an extra seat on the lake
steamer Segwun for his big bass.
A short time after the war Mr.
BURRIDGE decided to take advantage
of the free education earned by his wartime service. He went
to the University of Toronto and graduated in 1950 in arts and
sciences. He worked as a salesman for General Foods for a year
and then started teaching school, first in Coppercliff in northern
Ontario and then in Scarborough near Toronto.
By the late fifties he was a principal in Whitby, just outside
Toronto. But a car accident on the way to school influenced his
view of things. His car slipped on ice and broadsided a telephone
pole. Although unhurt, the crash made him ready for a change.
One day he was on jury duty at a courtroom in downtown Toronto
and spotted an ad in the Globe and Mail for a grade 5 teacher
at Crescent School. He applied and got the job.
Crescent School was then on the old Massey estate on Dawes Road
at Victoria Park. When he started there were only nine teachers,
100 students and the school went from kindergarten to grade 8.
Mr. BURRIDGE introduced music to the curriculum and became a
popular teacher. When the headmaster was ill he took over on
a part-time basis, becoming headmaster on his predecessor's death
in 1966.
At the time, Crescent School was a mess. The building was falling
apart and the headmaster was called on to fix the electrical
work, the plumbing and even the furnace. He helped in the search
for a new building and in 1972 the school moved to the old Garfield
Weston Estate at Bayview Avenue and Post Road.
Over the years Crescent School changed and dropped the lower
grades and expanded as far as the last grade of high school.
Mr. BURRIDGE remained headmaster until 1971 and stayed on teaching
and as assistant director of the Lower School until his retirement
in 1986.
In private, Mr.
BURRIDGE was also a Mr. Fixit. He helped keep
up some family rental properties and often workered on his old
Buicks or his house in suburban Ajax, Ontario, on a lot of almost
half an acre. His other hobby was keeping bees.
Bill BURRIDGE leaves his wife
Faith, to whom he was married for
54 years, and his three children, Reid, Rob and Hope.
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McCREADY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-07-12 published
Moms always liked him best
The Happy Gang's popular lead singer had a good reason for saying
hello to his mom whenever the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
radio classic was on air
By James McCREADY
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail Saturday, July
12, 2003 - Page F10
The double knock on the door occurred every afternoon at 1.
"Who's there?"
"It's the Happy Gang."
"Well, come on in!"
Then Eddie
ALLEN,
Bert
PEARL, Bobby
GIMBY and the rest of the
cast of Canada's most popular radio program would break into
"Keep happy with the Happy Gang."
Mr. ALLAN, the show's main singer, accordion player and sometimes
emcee, died last week, leaving Robert
FARNON as the gang's sole
surviving member.
Every day as many as two million Canadians tuned in The Happy
Gang, which led the national ratings for most of its run on Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation from 1937 to 1959. Until television
came along in 1952, Mr.
ALLEN and his cast mates were among the
most famous people in the country.
The show was the creation of Mr.
PEARL, who'd come to Toronto
from Winnipeg (his real name was Bert
SHAPIRA) to study medicine.
To pay for his education, he started playing piano on radio with
a band that included violinist Blain
MATHE, organist Kay
STOKES
and Mr. FARNON, a trumpet player who would go on to be the most
successful of them all.
The band morphed into the Happy Gang and Mr.
PEARL was the driving
force behind it. Eddie
ALLEN was hired as the fifth member of
the troupe and stayed with the program until it went off the
air.
He was born Edward George
ALLEN on December 24, 1920, in Toronto,
and came from a family of musicians. His father, Bill
ALLEN,
played the trombone and was in a military band in France during
the First World War. When Eddie was 10, his father asked him
what instrument he wanted to play. The boy thought about it for
a while and made up his mind after seeing a huge piano accordion
in a music-store window.
"It was bigger than I was," Mr.
ALLEN remembered, "but dad bought
it anyway."
In a couple of years, he was entertaining at small events with
his accordion, making $5 or $10 a week. Better than a paper route.
He also won some local singing contests. When he was 17, he started
singing and playing three nights a week on a radio program called
The
Serenader.
Bert
PEARL heard it and called him in.
"I auditioned him with Bert
PEARL, and we liked him right away,"
Mr. FARNON says from his home on Guernsey in the Channel Islands.
"He looked about 12 years old and could barely see over the top
of his accordion. He was terribly shy, no self-confidence like
the rest of us. He was very popular with the ladies, a very good-looking
little chap."
What impressed most was his voice. "There really wasn't a singer
in the Happy Gang until he came along. I really liked his voice."
Mr. FARNON remembers an incident from a Happy Gang rehearsal.
"Eddie was about to sing a song called, I'll Take You Home Again,
Kathleen, and I came up behind him and said, 'If you bring the
gasoline.' He laughed so much he couldn't sing it when we went
on the air."
The Happy Gang was old Canada, when the country was more rural
and white skinned. It is impossible to imagine the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation mounting something so corny and wholesome. How corny
was it? The host, Mr.
PEARL, was known as "that slap-happy chappy,
the Happy Gang's own pappy."
He also knew that sentiment sold. Mr.
ALLEN would sing The Lord's
Prayer on the program, two or three times a year, such as Good
Friday, and during the war he sang it as an inspiration for mothers
and their boys overseas.
By that time, the show's "appeal was enormous," wrote Ross
MacLEAN,
the late Canadian Broadcasting Corporation producer and media
critic who began listening as a child. "During the war years...
its influence on the nation was profound. Its almost daily performance
of There'll Always Be An England helped maintain home-front resolve
and stirred at least this school kid into a frenzy of tinfoil
collection, war certificate sales and the knitting of various
items for the navy."
Among the cast, Mr.
ALLEN was the kid. He was slight, about 5-foot-6,
and looked as though he were too young to shave. A newspaper
reported that while he was on his honeymoon in 1942, a hotel
clerk in Hamilton didn't believe he was old enough to be married
and refused to rent him a room. Even some of his fans were quoted
by writer Trent
FRAYNE as saying, "Oh my goodness, don't tell
me that little boy's married."
On air, he always sang old-fashioned ballads. "Every mother would
love the stuff he sang," said Lyman
POTTS, a retired broadcaster
who crossed paths with some of the gang. He recalled that one
of the songs Mr.
ALLEN performed on a Happy Gang recording was
I'm a Lonely Little Petunia in an Onion Patch. It was popular
on the program, maybe because it was the perfect example of the
Happy Gang's sort of cornball humour.
Another example is the line Mr.
ALLEN used almost every day in
the early years of the program. Mr.
PEARL had told him not to
let fame go to his head -- "Don't ever get the idea that you're
too big to say hello to your mother." So, for his first six years,
Mr. ALLEN's opening words were "Hello mom."
During the war, they dropped the shtick for fear of hurting the
feelings of mothers with sons in uniform. It sparked a letter-writing
campaign. "Don't let Eddie stop saying 'Hello mom,' " Liberty
Magazine reported in May, 1945. "He reminds me of my own boy
overseas. I wonder if he could think of all of us mothers when
he says hello."
Over the years, the show appeared 195 times, always live (tape
had yet to come into use when it began), in the course of an
annual 39-week season, most of the time with the same cast. Its
time slot was moved when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
began running a 1 p.m. newscast, but the shift to 1: 15
EST didn't
hurt the ratings. At first, it was produced in a studio on Davenport
Road in Toronto and later in front of an audience of 700 to 800
on McGill Street near College and Yonge.
The program's mainstay was not talk or jokes but music, and the
signature double knock on the door was an old-fashioned radio
sound effect provided by Blain
MATHE, who would move up to the
mike and rap twice on the back of his violin.
Working together so closely did create some personality conflicts.
There were practical jokes, usually aimed at the most uptight
cast member: Mr.
PEARL, a control freak who loved to plan the
program in detail and had his own small office at the McGill
Street studio.
One day, Mr.
ALLEN and the other Happy Gang members set all the
clocks forward by a few minutes. "We're late," they announced
to Mr. PEARL, who raced into studio. After the opening, a couple
of performers started to whine: "I don't want to do this."
Thinking they were actually on air, Mr.
PEARL was shocked --
and didn't feel much better when he learned it was all a joke.
It might have been one of the reasons he suffered a nervous breakdown
(called "nervous exhaustion" for public consumption) and left
the show in 1950 after 18 years and moved to the United States.
Eddie ALLEN took his place as emcee, but the incident rated an
article in Maclean's by June
CALLWOOD, the country's top magazine
writer at the time, entitled: The Not So Happy Gang.
By then Mr.
FARNON was long gone. During the war, he had joined
the Canadian Army Show's band, and later led the Canadian band
with the Allied Expeditionary Force, just as Glen
MILLER led
its U.S. ensemble. After the war he became a top arranger, working
on Frank Sinatra albums and scores for such movies as Horatio
Hornblower starring Gregory Peck.
Sinatra, however, was a little too flash for Eddie
ALLEN, who
preferred Bing Crosby. He was a sharp dresser, but his style
was understated, almost always a conservative suit and muted
shirt in a business where the shirt easily could have been orange.
His love of clothes gave him something to do when he left show
business. Eddie
ALLEN owned a men's clothing store in the west
end of Toronto after he left the program. He later retired and
moved to London, Ontario
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McCREADY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-08-30 published
PICK,
Archibald
Roy
(Archie)
After a long courageous battle with pancreatic cancer, Archie
PICK died peacefully on August 23, 2003. His wife, Jeannie, was
at his side.
Archie was born August 18, 1938, in a log cabin in Red Lake,
Ontario. He moved to Winnipeg with his parents in 1941. He attended
public schools in Winnipeg, Rathwell and Notre Dame de Lourdes,
Manitoba.
He was preceded in death by his first wife, Marcia, brother,
Leonard, sister, Barbara and father William. Archie is survived
by his loving wife, Jeannie, his mother Mary, son David (Christine
McCREADY,) daughters: Kirsten Ann
GAUCHER
(John) and Jennifer
Marie SANCHEZ
(Christopher) and grand_son Jacob
GAUCHER. Archie
was very proud of his family and loved them all dearly.
Archie attended the University of Manitoba and the University
of North Dakota. He received his B.S. in Civil Engineering (1962)
and M.S. in Civil Engineering (1966). Archie started his professional
career with the Structural Division of Manitoba Hydro in 1962,
and after receiving his Master's degree in 1966, he joined the
Metropolitan Corporation in Greater Winnipeg (City of Winnipeg)
in the Waterworks and Waste Division. In 1973, Archie moved with
his family to Edmonton to join the newly formed Environment Canada
as head of Water Pollution Control for the Western Region (Manitoba,
Saskatchewan, Alberta, Northwest Territories). In 1976, he was
appointed Chief, Environmental Conservation Branch, Western Region,
Environment Canada. Subsequently, he left Public Service and
joined the consulting engineering firm of James F. MacLaren Limited
as General Manager of Western Canadian Operations (Alberta, Saskatchewan,
Northwest Territories, Yukon). One of the highlights of this
position was acting as Project Manager for the clean-up and recovery
of the Russian Cosmos satellite which crashed in the Northwest
Territory in the region of Great Slave Lake. In 1980, Archie
became the Executive Vice President of MacLaren Plansearch, division
of Lavalin. In 1982, he joined Interprovincial Pipe Line Limited
(Enbridge, Inc.) and was appointed as Manager, Design and Construction,
for the Norman Wells Pipeline Project, drawing on his experience
in the north, engineering, and environment. The successful completion
of this project was clearly the highlight of his career. His
career at Interprovincial Pipe Line involved him in the company's
endeavours in Canada, U.S.A., Mexico, Venezuela and Ecuador.
He retired in 1998 as a result of health concerns.
At various times, Archie taught as a part time professor in the
faculty of Engineering at the University of Manitoba and the
University of Alberta. During his working career, he had been
registered as a Professional Engineer in Manitoba, Saskatchewan,
Alberta and the Northwest Territory. He was a Life Member of
the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists, and Geophysicists.
Archie, along with Marcia and his children, was an avid skier
and was involved with Alpine Ski Racing throughout most of his
adult life. He was a Life Member of the Edmonton Snow Valley
Ski Club; a senior official of the Alberta Alpine Division of
the Canadian Ski Association; served as North Zone Chairman for
Canadian Ski Association-Alpine Division; was a long time member
of the Edmonton Superbowl Ski team.
Archie and Jeannie were married in 1993 and lived in Edmonton
until Archie's retirement in 1998. Since then they have divided
their time between their cottage at Clear Lake and their home
on Vancouver Island, enjoying family, Friends, and time together.
A bright, shining, steady light has gone from our lives, but
will remain in our hearts forever. A memorial service was conducted
in Erickson, Manitoba and another memorial service will be held
on Sunday, October 19, 2003, at 2: 00 p.m. in the Knox United
Church, Parksville, British Columbia.
In lieu of flowers, memoriam to Canadian Diabetes Association,
Heart and Stroke Foundation or Cancer Research.
Rae's Funeral Service of Erickson, Manitoba, were in care of
the arrangements. (204) 636-7727.
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McCREADY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-09-06 published
From fashion to furniture
Photographer gave up the fast life in Manhattan to open a shop
in the Ontario countryside
By James McCREADY
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail Saturday, September
6, 2003 - Page F11
Malcolm BATTY was a top fashion photographer, taking pictures
of the likes of Christie Brinkley and Andie MacDowell for big
Manhattan department stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue. But for
the past 15 years, he ran an art and furniture shop in the hamlet
of Mono Centre, living in a farmhouse in the countryside nearby.
At the peak of his photography career in the early 1980s, Mr.
BATTY, who has died at the age of 57, moved in a rarefied world
of high fashion and show business in New York City. Not bad for
a kid who had started his working life as a waiter in a coffee
shop in Toronto's Yorkville district in the early 1960s.
A man as handsome as his models were beautiful, he was always
cool, in an understated way. Even when he was in the furniture
business, he had a low-key style, bringing his finished pieces
into town in an old red Toyota Land Cruiser.
Mr. BATTY dropped out of photography, and the fast life in New
York City, in part because he came to find the world of fashion
so shallow. He moved back to Canada with his new wife, Jane
FELLOWES,
and started making furniture. The first pieces they sold were
birdhouses made from things such as orange crates.
They sold their high-end birdhouses at the Pack Rat, which at
the time was the only furniture shop along the strip of Yonge
Street in Rosedale, an area now jammed with fashionable stores.
"We decided our birdhouses were not going to be the common hardware-store
style," Mr.
BATTY told an interviewer in 1994. "They would have
themes: Muskoka lodges, Santa Fe roadhouses, Indian dhows, grain
elevators. Very odd stuff. We took them down to Pack Rat and,
lo and behold, they started to sell for $220 to $250 a piece."
Malcolm David
BATTY was born of British parents in India, on
November 29, 1945. His birthplace was Nasik, just outside Bombay
near where his mother was a military nurse. His father was a
riding instructor for the British army who left the family soon
after Malcolm's birth.
When the British left India in 1947, Malcolm and his mother returned
to England. He was brought up in Wales with his mother and grandparents.
He went to an experimental school, but was never a brilliant
student. He did learn one skill that came in handy in later life:
building dry stone walls. His grandfather taught him how and
he built a series of stone walls on his farm in Mono Township,
using rocks from the foundation of an old barn.
Mr. BATTY decided to come to Canada when he was about 16. He
had relatives in Brockville, Ontario, but soon made his way to
Toronto. While working in the Peddler coffee shop, he started
to paint. He had a studio above a sail-making shop on Front Street
and just about made a living selling his paintings. He was talented
enough, but he needed formal training. He received a grant to
study in Paris.
While there, a friend gave him a 35-mm camera and he stopped
painting, for a while anyway, and started taking pictures. He
came back to Toronto, was successful and then moved to New York
City. The full page ads in The New York Times were his specialty
superstar models and spreads for the big Manhattan stores.
"It was the painting that made him a great photographer," said
Alan VENABLES, a friend and the owner of the Pack Rat. "He was
a photographer with a painter's eye. Not too many of those."
Like someone trying to quit smoking, Mr.
BATTY tried to kick
the Manhattan habit more than once. His favourite escape was
in a camper van, travelling across the United States and ending
up in Mexico, usually the Baja Peninsula.
When he came back to Canada in the mid-1980s, it was with Jane
FELLOWES, a Canadian. They spent some time in Cyprus, where Mr.
BATTY's mother had retired. While there, they kept busy training
horses. Because his father had been a riding instructor, Mr.
BATTY wanted to see if he had the same talents. It turned out
that he had a natural touch with horses.
After their furniture business took off, Mr.
BATTY and Ms.
FELLOWES
wanted to find a shop where they could work and sell some of
the things they made. They found it in Mono Centre, almost an
hour north of the Toronto international airport. They opened
a shop called Tequila Cove, across the driveway from a restaurant
and pub, the Mono Cliffs Inn.
By this time, they made more than birdhouses and had expanded
to tables with hammered tin tops, stripped cedar furniture and
seagulls carved from old white fencing. What they didn't sell
in the shop was put in the back of the Land Cruiser and went
to Toronto.
Mr. BATTY took up photography again, working for a quarterly
magazine called In The Hills. A few years ago, he landed a big
assignment as the still photographer for a film Called Spirit
of Havana, a National Film Board Production. It was one of many
trips to Cuba and he always took his cameras.
This started a collection of photography that is to be published
this fall. The book is called Cuba, Grace Under Pressure, with
the text by Toronto writer Rosemary
SULLIVAN.
There are 102 pictures,
with the theme being Cuban culture, the aging musicians, poets
and dancers of the revolutionary era. It talks about how ordinary
Cubans survive day to day.
Mr. BATTY had also started to paint again in the past few years.
And he loved music, in particular the blues. He owned a vintage
electric guitar, a 1967 Fender Telecaster. He leaves his wife,
Ms. FELLOWES, and his mother.
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McCREADY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-09-13 published
Singer was hit on Hit Parade
Canadian-born performer played violin with Jack Benny and posed
as wife of Sid Caesar
By James McCREADY
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail Saturday, September
13, 2003 - Page F11
She was called "Canada's First Lady of Song." In the late 1940s,
singer Gisele
MacKENZIE was so popular on Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation radio that she was known just by her first name.
When she was 23, she headed off to Hollywood, where she became
one of the main singers on Your Hit Parade, a popular American
network television show in the 1950s. By the time television
started in Canada in 1952, she was already a star in the United
States, appearing on programs with Jack Benny and later with
Sid Caesar, the hottest comedian of his day.
Gisele MacKENZIE, who has died at the age of 76, was not always
known by that name. On the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
she was known simply as Gisele, though a 1950 Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation press release did call her by her proper name --
Gisele LAFLECHE. As soon as she moved to CBS in 1951, she adopted
the stage name Gisele
MacKENZIE.
The reason, she told a New York
reporter in 1955, was that the name Gisele
LAFLECHE "sounded
too much like a striptease artist's." The real explanation was
an American audience would have trouble with so French a name.
It was the television network that ordered the name change.
Marie
Marguerite
Louise Gisele
LAFLECHE was born on January 10,
1927, in Winnipeg. The name
MacKENZIE was from her paternal grandmother.
Her father, Georges, was a doctor, who played the violin, and
her mother, Marietta
MANSEAU, was a concert pianist and singer
as a young woman. Ms.
MacKENZIE started playing the violin seriously
when she was 7. She made her first public performance at the
Royal Alexandra Hotel in Winnipeg at the age of 12.
When she was 14, her family sent her to the Royal Conservatory
of Music in Toronto. She studied the violin and the piano, and
planned on being a concert violinist. Later in life, a story
circulated that she never took voice lessons, but Jim
GUTHRO,
who was at the conservatory at the same time, remembered a voice
teacher who took an interest in her. He also remembered that
she attended at the same time as Robert
GOULET and they would
sing together.
When she first came to Toronto, she stayed at Rosary Hall, a
residence for Catholic girls on Bloor Street at the top of Jarvis
Street. Tess
MALLOY, who was there at the same time, remembered
her. "She lived right across the hall from me. She and her girlfriend
used to drive us nuts practising the violin."
Ms. MALLOY didn't remember her singing at the residence, but
somewhere along the way someone discovered Ms.
MacKENZIE could
sing. It was close to the end of the war and she started to perform
for groups of servicemen. It was then that she was discovered
by musician Bob
SHUTTLEWORTH, a lieutenant who led a band for
the Royal Canadian Navy.
Right after the war, she started singing with Mr.
SHUTTLEWORTH's
band at the Glenmount Hotel on the Lake of Bays, north of Toronto.
Mr. SHUTTLEWORTH, who later became her manager and her husband,
took her to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which then
broadcast live popular music over the radio.
"Bob SHUTTLEWORTH called me at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
and said, 'Get a studio, a piano and a vocal mike. I have someone
I want you to hear,' recalled Jackie
RAE, then a music producer
at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, later leader of his
own band (and, incidentally, the uncle of former Ontario premier
Bob RAE.) "I remember her wonderful voice and how fresh she was.
We hired her straight away to do three programs a week."
The program was Meet Gisele, and it ran for 15 minutes on Monday,
Wednesday and Friday. The program started on October 8, 1946,
and lasted for four years. She was so popular the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation used her in other programs with names such as The
Girl Next Door or The Song Pluggers.
In 1951, Ms.
MacKENZIE was spotted by Bing
CROSBY's son, and
went to work in the United States for Bob
CROSBY's
Club 15, bumping
the Andrews Sisters from their regular slot. The pay was $20,000
(U.S.) a year, worth $150,000 in today's money. She was 23.
The money was something Canada could never match. Mr.
GUTHRO,
later head of Variety at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
guesses she was making $200 a week for her radio programs.
"Gisele Leaves for Hollywood. Canada's Loss," read a headline
in one Toronto paper. The article guessed at the pay package,
and it was right.
Ms. MacKENZIE was about to have her best decade ever in show
business. After a short stint on Club 15, she worked on the Mario
Lanza Show, before landing her full-time job at Your Hit Parade.
The idea behind the NBC program was to take the top seven songs
on the hit parade that week and have them done by the regular
singers in the Your Hit Parade troupe. The half-hour program
was a huge success in the United States and in late 1953 the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation picked it up for a while.
Ms. MacKENZIE was the only regular singer on the program to have
her own hit record, Hard to Get, in 1955.
Though none of her family shared her success, all were musical.
There were her parents, both of whom were serious amateur musicians
two of her sisters sang and played, and a brother played the
cello. Along with Gisele, two of them had what is called perfect
pitch.
"It's rare and she had it," Mr.
RAE said. "You would play four
notes on the piano and she could match them. Perfect pitch isn't
always a great thing, but in her case it was."
Ms. MacKENZIE's training as a classical violinist came in handy
on the Jack Benny program, on which she first appeared in 1955.
The droll comedian always made a thing of how he couldn't play
the violin. One vaudeville-type act they would do on his show
involved her patiently showing him what to do with a violin after
he made some awful screeching noise with his bow.
She was Jack Benny's protégé, and he helped land her own television
program in 1958. Called the Gisele
MacKENZIE
Show, it lasted
only six months.
But she remained famous. At one stage, she was the subject of
This is Your Life, which involved linking up with old Friends
and relatives. She was a regular on game shows that featured
minor celebrities, such as Hollywood Squares.
In 1963, she was cast as Sid Caesar's television wife and made
regular trips to New York City, where the program was done. Like
other television programs of that era, it was live, since videotape
was only just being introduced.
Ms. MacKENZIE also acted and sang in live musicals in the United
States, things such as Annie Get Your Gun and South Pacific.
Over the years, she also worked in Las Vegas, performing in night
clubs there. She returned to Canada for the occasional concert
and television special, including one on the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation in late 1960. It was about "her story book career"
and included the yarn, always told by her publicists, of how
she decided to take up singing after she lost her $3,000 violin.
By the end of the 1960s, the big work started to dry up and Canadian
newspapers were running the occasional "Where Are They Now" articles.
She was in a sprawling ranch house in suburban Encino, Calif.
She also owned property in Palmdale and Marin County, Calif.,
as well as a house on Lake Manitoba back home.
All that detail came up in a nasty divorce from Mr.
SHUTTLEWORTH
in 1968. Because he was also her manager, he kept 10 per cent
of her gross income for the next three years. She later married
a banker, Robert
KLEIN, but that also ended in divorce.
During the rest of her career, Ms.
MacKENZIE kept working in
regional theatre and made guest appearances on television series,
including MacGyver and Murder, She Wrote, as well as singing
stints on programs such as the Dean Martin Show. She also did
television commercials in the United States and Canada.
Ms. MacKENZIE had some odd hobbies. She collected and mixed exotic
perfumes and in the 1950s she took up target shooting, becoming
an expert shot. She and her first husband had a large collection
of pistols, rifles and shotguns. In her later years, like many
Hollywood stars, she was involved with Scientology.
Ms. MacKENZIE, who died in Burbank, Calif., on September 5, had
two children with Mr.
SHUTTLEWORTH, a son Mac and a daughter
Gigi (short for Gisele)
DOWNS.
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McCREADY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-10-02 published
He fought the Teamsters -- and won
Worker won protection for part-timers in a court battle that
involved the most powerful union in North America
By James McCREADY
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail Thursday, October
2, 2003 - Page R13
Gerry MASSICOTTE was a man who didn't like being pushed around,
and one of his fights made him famous, at least for a while.
He won a precedent-setting case involving unfair labour practices,
not just against his employer but also the Teamsters, the most
powerful union in North America. The legal battle lasted about
three years, in what was mostly a one-man fight in a case that
was heard in the Supreme Court of Canada.
He didn't take no for an answer when the union said it wouldn't
handle his grievance, insisting that he deserved better because
he had paid his dues.
"His fight was based on the simple principle of taxation without
representation," said Ray
KUSZELEWSKI, now a Halifax lawyer but
back in the late 1970s another Teamster with a problem with the
union. The Teamsters not only refused to represent Mr.
MASSICOTTE,
but it negotiated a lower wage, from $6.85 an hour to $6, in
Mr. MASSICOTTE, who has died at the age of 55, was a man who
could not be pigeonholed. He had a degree in social work and
worked as a professional for more than 10 years before the intensity
of the work forced him to leave.
Gerald Manley
MASSICOTTE was born on October 22, 1947, in Toronto.
His father worked at the Post Office, his mother worked in restaurants.
Eventually she ended up owning her own place, The New Brazil,
at Runnymede and St. Clair in Toronto. Later, Mr.
MASSICOTTE
and his wife, Elaine, would take it over.
Mr. MASSICOTTE went to Runnymede Collegiate and graduated with
a degree in social work from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute.
He worked for many years as a social worker in group homes for
children and in halfway houses. He then took on part-time work,
including a stint at Humes Transport, loading refrigerated trucks.
He did that for 2½ years, before he was fired.
That started his long crusade against the Teamsters. On Aug.16,
1979, he filed a grievance asking his union to protest his firing.
"I claim that I have been unjustly terminated and must be reinstated
immediately," began his grievance letter to local 938 of the
Teamsters. The answer came back that the union would not represent
him, and that he had no protection as a part-time employee, in
spite of paying union dues of $18 a month.
At the time, Mr.
MASSICOTTE and others were unhappy with the
way the Teamsters were run and he set out to prove that it did
him wrong.
The case went to the Canada Labour Relations Board. The union
argued that the safe, clean environment it negotiated with Humes
Transport was a great benefit for a part-timer like Mr.
MASSICOTTE.
The union also informed him that his pay would be lowered so
the company could pay full-time employees more. In late January,
1980, the Labour Relations Board ruled in favour of Mr.
MASSICOTTE,
ordering the union to pay costs. But the Teamsters wouldn't quit.
The union took the case to the Federal Court of Appeal in October,
1980, but lost.
"The union and the employer have established the price of their
labour, and
in MASSICOTTE's case, reduced that price drastically
without asking him," wrote the court.
The case went to the Supreme Court, and the Chief Justice, Bora
LASKIN, confirmed the lower court's ruling in May, 1982.
"It was one of the few cases in which a union member took his
union to court for not representing him," said Brian
IHLER, the
lawyer who worked with him on the case.
It set a precedent that all unions in Canada would have to represent
all their dues-paying members.
By the time the Supreme Court ruling came down, Mr.
MASSICOTTE
had moved on with his life. A keen cook, he took courses at George
Brown College. He also became well-known again, but for his food
this time. He renamed his mother's restaurant, the Northland
Truck Stop and Café.
Mr. MASSICOTTE later moved into his wife's father's business,
selling and servicing small pumps, used soft-drink machines and
even kidney dialysis machines. He and his wife ran the company,
Potter-Blersh. He died of cancer on July 15.
Gerry MASSICOTTE leaves wife
Elaine
BLERSH; siblings Debbie,
Jeff, Ron and Jim; and mother Joan.
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McCREADY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-12-11 published
An old-fashioned newsman
Distinguished journalist began humbly as a copy boy at the Hamilton
Spectator and soared to the top of the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation
By James McCREADY,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail Thursday, December
11, 2003 - Page R11
During the October Crisis of 1970, there were a lot of editors
who buckled under. They followed the orders of the police and
the Quebec and federal governments about not printing or broadcasting
some details about the kidnapping of British Trade Commissioner
James CROSS and the kidnapping and murder of Quebec cabinet minister
Pierre LAPORTE.
Many editors and broadcast executives took to self-censorship,
anticipating what the authorities wanted and keeping newscasts
and newspapers clean. Denis
HARVEY, who has died at age of 74,
was not one of them.
Then editor of The Gazette of Montreal, the man he faced down
was Jerome
CHOQUETTE,
Quebec's justice minister and the public
face of authority during much of the crisis.
CHOQUETTE did not
want newspapers to publish the full manifesto of the Front de
libération du Québec. Denis
HARVEY ignored the request and published
it.
The paper also broke the news that police had a photograph of
James CROSS sitting on what looked like a box of dynamite. The
justice minister warned The Gazette editor he could be arrested
under the terms of the War Measures Act, but Mr.
HARVEY called
his bluff.
During the crisis, Mr.
HARVEY didn't change his habits. When
the paper was put to bed, he would walk to the Montreal Men's
Press Club in the Mount Royal Hotel carrying the bulldog or first
edition of the paper and sit at the bar and argue statistics
with the sports editor, Brodie
SCHNIEDER/SNIDER/SNYDER.
There would also be political discussions, some of them heated,
since the man who wrote the stamp column at the paper had been
called up from the reserves in the military and took himself,
and the War Measures Act, quite seriously.
Mr. HARVEY was an old-fashioned newsman, a high-school dropout
who rose to edit newspapers and who went on to run the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation Television news service and then the
entire Canadian Broadcasting Corporation-Television network.
Denis Martin
HARVEY was born on August 15, 1929, in Hamilton,
where his father was a customs inspector. He left school halfway
through Grade 13 and landed a job as a copy boy at The Hamilton
Spectator. This was not uncommon and was the traditional route
for a young person coming into the newspaper business. Journalism
schools were all but unknown and university-educated reporters
and editors were rare.
He went from copy boy, ripping the wire copy off the machines,
to listening in for police tips on radio scanners. He became
a sports writer and in 1952 quit the paper and went to travel
in Europe for six months. He came back to the Spectator as a
general reporter the next year.
He did everything, from labour columnist to business writer.
At 26, he was city editor of the Spectator and then news editor.
In 1961, he was executive editor and held that job for five years.
In 1966, he moved to The Canadian Magazine, a joint venture with
the Toronto Star. It meant leaving Hamilton after 21 years, but
it was the first step to the most important job in his career
editor of The Gazette, which he took over in 1969, the year
he turned 40.
Mr. HARVEY was tough. He scared people with a gruff demeanour,
which at times seemed like something out of The Front Page. When
he arrived at The Gazette, it was losing the newspaper war with
rival Montreal Star. Many editors had cozy sinecures. Almost
right away, Mr.
HARVEY fired the head of every department but
one. When one editor came into his office and said he had found
another job and was giving two weeks' notice.
HARVEY shot back:
"Two hours' notice." The man was gone in less.
However, he inspired loyalty in his staff of reporters and editors.
"He could be tough but he stood up for his staff. And he was
completely honest and honourable. A stand-up guy," said Brian
STEWARD/STEWART/STUART, who covered city hall at The Gazette and was later hired
by Mr. HARVEY at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. "You
always wanted to impress him."
One night at Martin's, a bar next door to The Gazette, there
were complaints about a sports picture in the paper. The photographer
said to Mr.
HARVEY: "
I'd like to see you do better."
Next night he was at the Forum for a Canadiens game. Along with
two regular photographers, he took pictures which, unsigned,
went back to the office for selection. His picture made the paper.
It was a combination of hot news stories and the ability to turn
around a failing newspaper that made his reputation at The Gazette.
The police strike in 1969, the October Crisis, riots and labour
battles made the period one of the most exciting in the paper's
history.
Having secured his reputation as an editor, Mr.
HARVEY was lured
away to television in 1973 to become chief news editor at Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation Television News in Toronto. His colleagues
told him he was crazy.
"My newspaper Friends said: 'How can you make the transition?'
Mr. HARVEY said years later. "But I'm surprised more people
don't. I believe in changing jobs."
Although he didn't know anything about television, he told people:
"I do know pictures." He went to CBS in New York for a crash
course in television news.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation-Television News was as much
of a mess as The Gazette had been. There had been a series of
editors who hadn't managed to get a handle on the place. Mr.
HARVEY took quick action and made it more professional, spending
less time on bureaucracy and more time on the main newscast.
One night, an old-time producer was called into his office and
the new chief news editor asked him why he hadn't gone with a
fresh lead story. The producer replied he couldn't order anyone
to do that -- that was the lineup editor's job. Mr.
HARVEY disagreed
and said: "Put on your coat and go home." The man kept his job,
but worked on the desk and not as a producer.
During his short reign at Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News,
he brought in fresh faces and got television reporters to think
about breaking stories instead of following newspaper headlines.
Audience levels rose and so did Mr.
HARVEY, moving up the ladder
at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. But the promise of
a big paycheque lured him to a three-year stint at The Toronto
Star starting in 1978.
There, he was first in charge of the editorial page and then
became editor in chief and vice-president. He left the Star in
1981 and was replaced by George
RADWANSKI, the future federal
privacy commissioner, who had worked for him at The Gazette.
Mr. HARVEY returned to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
taking over sports for the English network. By 1983, he was vice-president
of the entire English network of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
He held that job for seven years. He used to say his favourite
part of the job was the power to do programming. He changed the
face of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and it has stayed
that way. Mr.
HARVEY took the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
all Canadian -- it took several years but he stopped running
American program in prime time.
"We have handed over this most powerful medium to a foreign country,"
he told a broadcasting conference in 1990. "Nowhere else in the
world had one country imported the total television of another
country."
Along with Canadian content, one of his lasting creations was
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's news and current-affairs
specialty channel Newsworld. He left the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation in 1991 and worked off and on as a broadcast consultant.
He spent a lot of time travelling and took up some rather un-tough-guy
hobbies, such as bird-watching and going to the ballet.
Mr. HARVEY, who died after a brief struggle with cancer, leaves
his wife Louise
LORE, and Lynn and Brian, his two children from
an earlier marriage.
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McCREADY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-12-24 published
'The lovable rogue' who made and lost fortunes
One of Canada's most successful real-estate salesmen threw famous
parties, especially during the 1980s boom, when he brokered property
deals worth more than $10-billion
By James McCREADY,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail Wednesday, December
24, 2003 - Page R9
Toronto -- His Friends called him a lovable rogue. His enemies
left out the lovable. Eddy
COGAN was a love-him or hate-him kind
of guy, a brash real-estate salesman, maybe the most successful
real-estate salesmen of his era in Canada. He sold more than
$10-billion of real estate in the 1980s, by far his most successful
decade.
When Eddy COGAN died in late October, people remembered two things
about him straightaway: He was the one who brokered the huge
Greymac apartment deal. And he was also the greatest party-giver
of the 1980s in Toronto, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars
on a three-day bash, when he would take over the entire Windsor
Arms Hotel -- rooms, restaurants and bars -- and open them to
his Friends.
Mr. COGAN brokered a deal in 1982 to sell 10,931 apartment units
belonging to Cadillac Fairview to a group led by Leonard
ROSENBERG
of Greymac Trust. The sale was worth $320-million but Mr.
COGAN
found out a couple of hours later that Mr.
ROSENBERG and his
partners had flipped the buildings, selling them for $500-million
to what turned out to be a fictitious Saudi Arabian consortium.
Mr. ROSENBERG eventually went to jail, but Mr.
COGAN was clean
since he didn't have any part in the illegal flip.
Edwin Aubrey
COGAN was born on October 5, 1934. His father had
fled Ukraine after the Russian Revolution. It was a sound decision,
since Stalin starved the Ukrainian peasants in the 1930s and
Hitler's death squads killed almost all the Jews in Kiev during
the Nazi occupation.
Eddy's father was a professional boxer and waiter who changed
his name from
COHEN to
COGAN to get work at Toronto's Park Plaza
Hotel, which didn't hire Jews in the 1930s. Eddy went to Palmerston
Public School but wasn't much of a student and dropped out of
school in Grade 9. At 15, he went west and worked in the woods
in British Columbia.
A few years of manual labour had him thinking about a change,
and he returned to school and qualified as a land surveyor. After
many years working surveying properties, he decided to move into
real estate. In the 1950s, when Mr.
COGAN started doing property
deals, most of the action was in what is called "assembling"
land, which means buying up huge tracts of land, not just in
the country but also in the city.
Mr. COGAN would do things such as go door-to-door asking people
if they wanted to sell their houses or buildings. He was working
for developers such as Cadillac Fairview, which in turn would
put up a strip of high-rise apartment buildings once the land
had been assembled. Probably more than any town planner, Mr.
COGAN changed the face of Toronto from the 1950s to the 1980s.
"After rent control came in, in 1975, there was less demand for
buildings," says Larry
COGAN, who worked with his father for
more than 20 years. "It was the main reason Cadillac Fairview
decided to sell off those properties."
It was that deal that made Eddy
COGAN rich and allowed him to
launch the famous parties of the 1980s. The parties ended with
the real-estate crash of 1989-90. Mr.
COGAN had invested in a
6,000-acre property called the "jail lands" just north of the
city. It was an old prison farm that was to be turned into a
residential development. When the property boom went bust, so
did Mr. COGAN. It was the end of one big fortune and the start
of a decade spent rebuilding his wealth. In the 1990s, perhaps
his most successful transaction involved Terminal 3 at Toronto's
Pearson Airport.
Mr. COGAN was a slender man with a wiry build and movie-star
good looks. Women found him attractive, and his Friends said
that women were his weakness. He enjoyed spending time in Los
Angeles and New York in the company of models and actresses --
some famous, some not.
"When he saw an opportunity to be with a high-profile, beautiful
woman, he would approach it like a real-estate project," his
son Larry said. "He would network and use all his skills to close
the deal."
Like many people who work on deals for a living, Eddy
COGAN had
an unconventional business day, in particular in the latter part
of his career. He loathed gadgets. He didn't like cellphones
or computers and never had an e-mail address of his own. Rather
than offices, he preferred to meet in restaurants, though he
was a light eater and didn't drink much. After the Windsor Arms
and its restaurants closed, he switched to Prego, a restaurant
in Yorkville.
Mr. COGAN lived his work. He was always working on a deal, micromanaging
it to make sure the project came off.
"He was a big thinker. He was very fit and he liked to walk and
think," said Diane
FRANCIS, the journalist who became a close
friend after doing a few stories on him in the mid-1980s. "The
last big deal he was working on was in Niagara Falls, New York."
When he first looked at Niagara Falls, the town on the Ontario
side was a success, with a casino and a diversified tourist trade.
Niagara Falls, New York was a dump, with an empty centre, shuttered
factories and a neighbourhood that was a household name for environmental
catastrophe, Love Canal. Mr.
COGAN spent the better part of a
decade trying to develop the New York side into a place as successful
as the Ontario side. At the time of his death, a casino had opened
on the New York side and he was closer to putting his dream together.
He lived in downtown Toronto in a huge penthouse in the Colonnade
on Bloor Street, a rental apartment with a small swimming pool
inside the unit. Mr.
COGAN was a generous man, always willing
to help his Friends. Once, when promoters were trying to put
together a race between American and Canadian superstar sprinters,
Mr. COGAN helped bankroll it. It lost money.
Mr. COGAN married once and divorced. He leaves his six children.
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McCREADY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-12-31 published
Canada's last air vice-marshal
Pilot who had the most dangerous job in Bomber Command of Second
World War won top military decorations and rose to become lieutenant-general
By James McCREADY,
Special▲ to The Globe and Mail Wednesday, December 31, 2003 - Page R7
The double duty of pathfinder and master bomber was the most
dangerous assignment in Bomber Command of the Second World War.
Like all young fliers who set off to attack German targets, Reg
LANE knew he was more likely to be killed in action than any sailor or soldier.
The job of the pathfinder was to go ahead of the main bomber
force and drop flares to mark the target. The master bomber would
stay over the site for up to 40 minutes, directing the air raid.
Mr. LANE, who has died at the age of 83, did both jobs. He was
the commander of the Royal Canadian Air Force's only pathfinder
squadron and one of the most decorated Canadian bomber pilots
in the Second World War. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying
Cross twice, and the rare Distinguished Service Order, which
when given to a man of junior rank -- he was only a squadron
leader at the time -- is second only to the Victoria Cross for valour.
On two trips as a pathfinder squadron leader, Mr.
LANE experienced
the twin horrors of the bomber pilot: falling prey to a night fighter and being "coned."
The night fighter struck first. On a raid over Cologne on February
14, 1943, Mr.
LANE's
Halifax dropped its coloured markers to
mark the bomb site only to be attacked by a German Me110, a twin-engine
plane with massive firepower. It attacked twice, hitting Mr.
LANE's aircraft in the wing. As the Me110 prepared a third attack
to finish them off, Mr.
LANE stood the Halifax on its nose and
put it into a power dive. The bomber screamed toward the surface
and he pulled out of the dive close to the sea. The manoeuvre
succeeded in losing the fighter, although the severely shot up
and metal-stressed Halifax was later declared a write-off.
Being "coned" was to be trapped in the intersecting beams of
two or more searchlights. Lit up like a bug on the ceiling of
a room, it made a bomber an easy target for anti-aircraft gunners
on the ground. On the night of April 16, 1943, the last flight
of his second tour of duty, searchlights caught Mr.
LANE over
Frankfurt as he returned from a raid on the Skoda plant at Pilsen
in Czechoslovakia. On that occasion, he dived the plane 1,000 feet to escape the lights.
The citation for his first Distinguished Flying Cross spoke of
his After flying 51 missions over Europe, Squadron Leader
LANE
was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and picked to fly
the first Canadian-made Lancaster across the Atlantic. It was
called the Ruhr Express. The government wanted to show the public
and the Royal Canadian Air Force that it was providing top-of-the-line
bombers to replace older planes such as the Halifax and the Wellington, which Canadians were flying.
"The
Ruhr
Express was a propaganda stunt," says Steve
HARRIS,
the chief historian of the Department of National Defence in
Ottawa. "It was only the prototype, and was flown to Britain
long before the regular production Canadian Lancasters were ready
to be sent. Choosing Reg
LANE to fly the mission shows how highly he was regarded."
The fact that he was a good-looking decorated pilot helped the
publicity campaign. The reality was that the first plane was
not quite ready to fly. The Lancaster X was made at Victory Aircraft
outside Toronto. The plant would later become Avro and make the
short-lived supersonic Arrow. The Ruhr Express was rushed into
service for its maiden flight on August 1, 1943. Reg
LANE later recalled that it was almost unsafe to fly.
"We soon found out about the electrics; none of the engine instruments
was working and we had to make a decision whether to press on
to Montreal, as planned, or return to Malton," said Mr.
LANE,
who was fully aware of the propaganda value of the Ruhr Express.
"In view of the publicity, we decided it would be politic to
head for Dorval. There the aircraft was quickly wheeled into a hangar."
The life of the Ruhr Express is thoroughly documented in Target
Berlin, a National Film Board film That is still available.
One of the Canada Carries On series of propaganda "shorts" that
preceded the main features, the film was seen at movie theatres
during the war. A National Film Board cameraman filmed not only
the construction of the Ruhr Express at Malton (now Pearson International
airport), but joined the crew that ferried it across the Atlantic
and later occupied a passenger seat when Reg
LANE took the plane on its first mission over Berlin.
Only six of the new Lancaster X planes arrived in Britain by
the end of 1943. Though many others were flown over soon after,
by the end of the war many Royal Canadian Air Force crews were still flying the older Halifaxes.
Reginald John
LANE was born on January 4, 1920, in Victoria.
He went to public school there and after graduating from Victoria
High School worked for the Hudson's Bay Co. He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in September of 1940.
After pilot training in Canada, under the British Commonwealth
Air
Training
Plan, Pilot Officer
LANE arrived in England in July
of 1941. He flew his first mission in November of that year,
as a second pilot on a Halifax. The target was Berlin and while
cloud cover made the flight a bit safer, it was cold and stormy.
In December he and his crew flew two dangerous missions, daylight
raids at low altitude against the German battle cruisers Scharnhorst
and Gneisenau, which were in harbour at Brest on the Atlantic
coast of France. The bombers came in at 150 feet and met heavy
anti-aircraft fire. In the first raid Mr.
LANE's squadron commander
was shot down; in the second the six Halifax aircraft were heavily
damaged by German fire but managed to make it back to England.
Later he also was part of a group that attacked the German battleship
Tirpitz, anchored in a fiord in German-occupied Norway. Pilot
Officer LANE's
Halifax flew from a base at Kinross, Scotland,
then, after arriving over Trondheim in Norway, spiralled through
the clouds. The Tirpitz was heavily defended and German guns
opened up as Mr.
LANE's plane flew just above the water. His
bomber was hit, cracking the spar in the main wing. Three other
Halifaxes were lost but he managed to make it back to Scotland after a nine-hour flight. The Tirpitz was untouched.
Squadron Leader
LANE flew in the first of the 1,000 bomber raids
designed by Air Marshal Arthur (Bomber)
HARRIS to overwhelm German
defences. That raid was against Cologne on May 30, 1942, and
41 bombers were lost. His last operational flight was just before
D-Day in June of 1944, when he acted as the master bomber over
Caen in Normandy. After that he was awarded a second Distinguished
Flying Cross, known as a bar to the first medal, after completing three tours of duty.
"He completed many attacks on heavily defended targets in Germany
and has consistently displayed a fine fighting spirit throughout
his operational career, read the citation. "An officer of outstanding
ability whose courage, cheerfulness and keen sense of duty were an inspiration to his crews."
Reg LANE started the war as a pilot officer, the lowest commissioned
rank. By 1944 he was a group captain, the air force equivalent
of a full colonel, and after his final flight was put in command of a squadron. He was 25.
After the war he stayed on in the air force, attending the Imperial
Defence College in England in 1946. He rose in the air-force
hierarchy, and took command of the Royal Canadian Air Force base
in Edmonton. Later he returned to Europe twice, the second time
as chief of staff of the Royal Canadian Air Force's No. 1 Air Division at Metz, Germany.
When the Army, Navy and Air Force became the Canadian Armed Forces
on February 1, 1968, his rank changed from air vice-marshal to
major-general. In August of 1969 he became deputy commander of
Mobile Command in Montreal, then commander of the Transport base
at Trenton, Ontario In 1972, with the rank of lieutenant-general,
he moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado., as deputy commander of the North American Air Defence Command.
After retiring he worked for a while as a defence consultant
before moving full time to Victoria. He was active in air-force
associations in Canada and
in England. He was a patron of the
Yorkshire Air Museum, which has the only surviving Halifax. On
the anniversary of the Battle of Britain in early October, he laid a wreath at the war memorial in Victoria.
Reg LANE leaves his wife
Barbara, whom he married in 1944, and their two sons and two daughters.
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McCREARY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-12-16 published
Former National Hockey Leaguer
MAGNUSON killed,
RAMAGE injured
in car crash
By Erin CONWAY-
SMITH,
Tuesday,
December 16, 2003 - Page S1
Former
National
Hockey League defenceman Keith
MAGNUSON was killed
in a three-car collision yesterday when he was a passenger in
a car driven by former Toronto Maple Leaf captain Rob
RAMAGE.
RAMAGE was injured in the car crash north of Toronto.
MAGNUSON played 11 years with the Chicago Black Hawks.
York
Regional
Police said
RAMAGE was driving a blue Intrepid
that was involved in the accident, caused when one of the vehicles
apparently went out of control.
RAMAGE was in an Etobicoke, Ontario, hospital last night, being
treated for a broken femur, police said.
The accident, which occurred in Vaughan, happened about 5 p.m.,
but rescue workers were unable to remove the body until after
10 p.m. Police didn't believe weather was a factor in the accident.
Sergeant Igor
CHOMIAK said late last night that an investigation
is under way.
A third person, a woman, was being treated for non-life threatening
injuries last night.
It was reported that
RAMAGE was travelling back to Toronto from
Bolton, northwest of the city, after attending the funeral of
former National Hockey League player Keith
McCREARY, who died
last week after a battle with cancer.
McCREARY was the chair
of the National Hockey League Alumni Association and
RAMAGE is
the vice-chair.
RAMAGE is a frequent guest commentator on FanSports
KFNS, a St.
Louis radio station. Last night, the station had posted a notice
on an internal bulletin board informing staff about
RAMAGE's
accident.
RAMAGE, 44, played 1,044 games in the National Hockey League
from 1979 to 1994. He served as Maple Leaf captain from 1989
to 1991.
MAGNUSON was born on April 27, 1947, in Wadena, Saskatchewan.
He played college hockey at Denver University, where he helped
the Pioneers to the N.C.A.A. championship in 1968 and 1969. He
was a mainstay on defence for the Blackhawks from 1969 to 1979.
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McCREARY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-12-17 published
Life was good for
MAGNUSON
By Eric DUHATSCHEK,
With a report from Allan
MAKI Wednesday,
December 17, 2003 - Page S1
It was one of those "catching up with" features newspapers run
every so often. Last January, the Chicago Sun-Times profiled
Keith MAGNUSON, one of the most popular players ever to pull
on a Chicago Blackhawks sweater.
To the thousands who used to pack the old Chicago Stadium,
MAGNUSON's
ever-lasting appeal came from a rough-and-tumble playing style
that produced a cracked cheekbone, three knee injuries requiring
surgery, a torn Achilles' tendon, two broken ankles, a dislocated
elbow, three broken jaws, a broken vertebra, a broken wrist,
a dislocated shoulder, three missing teeth and more than 400
stitches.
MAGNUSON, after reflecting on his career, his hobbies and all
the aches and pains that resulted from a 10-year National Hockey
League career, observed: "Otherwise, I feel great. Cindy [his
wife] and I are real proud of our kids."
"Life is good,"
MAGNUSON concluded.
Life for
MAGNUSON ended at the age of 56 in a fatal automobile
accident on Monday afternoon as he was returning home from a
funeral for National Hockey League alumni association chairman
Keith McCREARY, who died last week of cancer.
MAGNUSON was the
passenger in a car driven by former National Hockey League player
Rob RAMAGE, the vice-chairman of the alumni association.
MAGNUSON played 589 National Hockey League games for the Blackhawks,
and on his retirement in October of 1979, he joined the team's
coaching staff, as an assistant to Eddie
JOHNSTON.
JOHNSTON,
now the Pittsburgh Penguins' assistant general manager, remembered
MAGNUSON yesterday as "the ultimate competitor. I mean, when
Keith MAGNUSON put on the skates on, you didn't just get 100
per cent, you got 110 per cent every night. He just played with
so much passion, it was unreal."
The
Blackhawks made it to the Stanley Cup final twice in
MAGNUSON's
career, in 1971 and 1973, losing both times to the Montreal Canadiens.
It was the heyday of hockey in Chicago. The Blackhawks had Dennis
and Bobby HULL, the legendary Stan
MIKITA and Tony
ESPOSITO,
a future Hall Of Fame member, in goal.
MAGNUSON's job was to
protect ESPOSITO, and he did it with a passion that
JOHNSTON
said was contagious in the Blackhawks' dressing room.
"What he always did very, very well was set the tone early in
the game. He let the opposition know that when you dropped the
puck in the game, "This was what you were going to see, guys,
for 60 minutes.' "
MAGNUSON, who most recently was the director of sales for Coca-Cola
Enterprises, grew up in Saskatoon as an all-round athlete. He
was a boyhood chum of former National Hockey League coach Dave
KING.
The two attended Churchill elementary school and used to
play 1-on-1 hockey:
KING as a forward and
MAGNUSON as a defenceman.
Eventually,
MAGNUSON and four other teenagers from Saskatoon
earned scholarships at the University of Denver and helped the
Pioneers win two National Collegiate Athletic Association championships.
MAGNUSON and Tim
GOULD played every sport together and were also
teamed as defence partners.
"We never missed a shift," said
GOULD, whose wife, a nurse in
Calgary, woke him early yesterday to inform him of
MAGNUSON's
death. "He was the greatest guy and a good friend."
GOULD said he and
MAGNUSON used to dream up ways to get
MAGNUSON
to hockey, football and baseball games on Sunday.
MAGNUSON's parents were Baptists and considered the Sabbath a
day of rest. It became
GOULD's job to sneak into the
MAGNUSON
home while they were at church and take Keith's equipment to
the rink or the diamond.
"Of course, if we scored a goal or a run, our names would be
mentioned in the newspaper the next day,"
GOULD said. "But we
thought we were keeping it secret."
GOULD said
MAGNUSON was best known among his Friends for having
a poor memory. Once in Saskatoon,
MAGNUSON drove his dad's car
to the rink for a Blades game, only to drive home with a teammate,
the two of them completely immersed in the game they had just
played.
The next morning,
MAGNUSON's father asked where the car was.
"Keith had to run back to the rink to get it," said Dale
ZEMAN,
another of
MAGNUSON's former junior and college teammates. "There
was also the night Keith and I went bowling when we were freshmen
at Denver. We came out and couldn't find the car. It had rolled
backwards three blocks because Keith forgot to put it in park."
GOULD said: "He was awful forgetful. We're having a reunion in
June [for Denver University hockey] and we had a card printed
up, and Keith's quote on it was: 'I'm going to be there -- and
Cliff [KOROLL] is going to remind me.' The memories, that's what
get you through this."
MAGNUSON is survived by his wife, his daughter, Molly, and his
son, Kevin, a former University of Michigan defenceman who had
a tryout with the Blackhawks. Recently, after a short playing
career in the East Coast Hockey League, Kevin had gone back to
school for his law degree,
JOHNSTON said.
"To have something like this happen, this close to the holidays,
the timing couldn't be worse. It's never good, but geez, here
he is, going up there for a funeral for Keith
McCREARY and then
to have something like this happen.
"God, it's awful," he said. "We'll miss him. He was such a big
part of the community in Chicago, an icon. Everybody knew Keith
MAGNUSON.
It's an awful tragedy."
San Jose Sharks general manager Doug
WILSON, another of
MAGNUSON's
close Friends, was badly shaken by his former teammate's death.
WILSON said he thought of
MAGNUSON as something of a father figure.
"Keith has had a profound influence on my life." Really, all
I can say is, all my thoughts and prayers are with Cindy and
the kids right now."
Jim DEMARIA, the Blackhawks executive director of communications,
worked closely with
MAGNUSON in his role as the founder and president
of the Chicago alumni association.
"Any time you needed something, you could call Maggy,"
DEMARIA
said. "He was the first guy in line to help any kind of charity
you had. I mean, he was just that kind of person. And when the
team wasn't doing real well, he was down in the room, talking
to the coaches, telling the players, 'keep your chin up, keep
working, things will turn around.' He was a real positive guy."
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