DOW
DOWDALL
DOWNIE
DOWNING
DOWNS
DOW o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-10-15 published
Marguerite Ruth
DOW
By Betsy CLARKE,
Wednesday,
October 15, 2003 - Page A22
Teacher, professor, author, daughter, sister, Christian. Born
June 13, 1926, in Ottawa. Died May 13 in Ottawa, aged 76.
Marguerite
DOW was a gentle, gracious, caring lady who was generous
with her time and resources and who always had a happy smile.
She was a teacher by profession, a loving sister to her family
and a devout member of St. Matthew's Anglican Church in Ottawa.
I first met Marguerite when I began teaching English at Laurentian
High School. As our department head, she was meticulous in everything
she did; no document, exam or set of marks escaped her keen oversight.
But she was an excellent mentor and adviser, always ready to
help fledging and largely untrained new staff members in our
struggle to get through the first weeks of our career.
In 1965, she become the first female professor in the faculty
of education at the University of Western Ontario. It must have
been a very difficult decision for her to leave Ottawa as she,
her identical twin Helen, her sister and brother-in-law Dorothy
and Michael
WALSH, and their parents shared a home with three
apartments in the Glebe, an Ottawa neighbourhood.
Marguerite flourished as a professor and an author. She retired
from Althouse College in 1985 and returned to Ottawa. She began
attending St. Matthew's Church, even though she had been raised
a Baptist and, in 1988, she was confirmed into the Anglican faith.
She loved St. Matthew's, especially the music.
Her twin sister, Helen, had also retired from her teaching position
at the University of Guelph so the two sisters once again shared
a home. Helen soon became ill with a "degenerative illness,"
but she remained at home under Marguerite's care. After Helen
moved to a palliative-care facility, her twin visited every day.
Soon sister Dorothy's health deteriorated and when dementia meant
that her husband, Michael, and Marguerite could no longer care
for her, she was moved to a long-term care facility. Marguerite
began the daily routine of taking Michael to visit his wife.
However, she had an additional burden: Michael himself was not
well and needed caregivers.
Marguerite sadly postponed the inevitable decision to find a
facility for Michael. "He's family," she told his case worker,
who referred to Marguerite as a saint. On the other hand, she
recognized that she would soon not be able to manage, even with
caregivers.
On May 13, Marguerite's body was found in her home. She had been
bludgeoned to death. One small comfort in the face of such a
violent death is that she likely didn't know what happened to
her. Michael has been charged with second-degree murder; he is
currently awaiting trial.
We have so many reasons to celebrate Marguerite's life. She loved
teaching and her students. She was a lover of art, especially
Chinese art and furniture, and both were evident in abundance
in her home. She was the mainstay of her family. Only after her
death did we learn that she was a philanthropist as well. She
was a generous benefactor to Western and the University of Toronto,
with the establishment of scholarships, bursaries and fellowships.
St. Matthew's was filled for her funeral. We sang the hymns she
had chosen and heard the biblical passages she had selected.
Among the prayers was one that gave thanks for her gentle and
generous spirit. We all recognized we were better for having
been in her circle of Friends.
Betsy CLARKE taught with Marguerite and was a fellow parishioner
at St. Matthew's.
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DOW o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-10-16 published
Died
This
Day -- Herbert Henry
DOW, 1930
Thursday, October 16, 2003 - Page R11
Chemist and industrialist born in Belleville, Ontario on February
26, 1866; invented method of extracting bromine from prehistoric,
underground brine; by age of 32, had 100 patents; best known
for work on halogen; founded multinational giant, Dow Chemical
Inc.
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DOWDALL o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-12-11 published
TERDIK, Joseph (Superintendent, Peel Regional Police, Ret'd)
Joe died December 9th, with dignity, in the warmth of his family's
love. He was most proud of his service to the community of Mississauga/Peel
the officers he commanded and his warm Friendship with Hazel.
An Federal Bureau of Investigation Graduate (Pres. Fit. Award),
Medal of Bravery (Miss. Disaster, Personnel Deployment) Exemplary
Service Award, Exec. Officer to the Chief, Cmdr. 11 Div., Cmdr.
Spec. Services, Crim. Intel. Bureau, Cdn Police College Lecturer,
Author: Mgmt. Audit Manual, founding Pres. Sr. Officers Assoc.
Born Windsor, March 1943, resident in Peel till 1997, adoring
husband of Barbara
DOWDALL-
TERDIK, father of Robert (Jessica,
Meaghan, Ashley); Jodey (Paul)
LITTLE (Caleb, Taelor); Susan
CORNWELL;
Proud
son of John (dec.) and Irene
TERDIK, brother
of Bill (Karen;) John (Donna) Irene (Aimo)
MANNINEN.
Cherished
brother-in-law to David (Paul); Susan (Shane); Peggy (Don, Tom,
Mimi) Catherine (Rob, Graeme, Iain, Allison, Colleen) and special
Joanna DOWDALL.
Friends will be received at the C. Stuart Sykes
Funeral Home, 91 Division St. S., Kingsville from 2: 00 to 4:00
p.m. and 7: 00 to 9:00 p.m., Friday. Funeral service from the
funeral home Saturday, December 13th at 11: 00 a.m. Remembrances:
Palliative Care, Hotel-Dieu Grace Hospital, 1030 Ouellette Ave.,
Windsor, Ontario N9A 1E1
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DOWNIE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-04-22 published
He founded Readers' Club of Canada
Nationalist visionary struggled financially to publish Canadian
writers
By Carol COOPER
Special▼ to The Globe and Mail Tuesday, April
22, 2003 - Page R7
In the early 1960s, when writers asked Peter and Carol
MARTIN
where to publish their manuscripts on Canada, the couple realized
how few choices there were. Inspired, the Martins, both voracious
readers, staunch nationalists and founders of the Readers' Club
of Canada, decided to start their own press. In 1965, Peter Martin
Associates came into being. Last month, Peter
MARTIN died of
lung cancer in Ottawa.
In an industry overshadowed by American companies, Peter
MARTIN
Associates was among the first in a wave of independent publishing
houses to open during a time of rising Canadian nationalism.
Launched in a downtown Toronto basement on a shoestring budget,
skeleton staff, idealism and enthusiasm, the company flew by
the seat of its pants. Its employees were often young and new
to the business. But many, including Peter
CARVER,
Michael
SOLOMON
and Valerie
WYATT, went on to become Canadian mainstays.
"It really was a time of Canadian nationalism and those of us
who believed in that cause could see what Peter and Carol were
doing," said Ms.
WYATT, a children's editor who spent four years
with the company in the seventies.
During the 16 years before its sale in 1981, Peter Martin Associates
published approximately 170 works, mainly non-fiction. Its presses
put out I, Nuligak, the autobiography of an Inuit man; The Boyd
Gang by Marjorie
LAMB and Barry
PEARSON;
Trapping is My Life
by John TETSO; and the Handbook of Canadian Film by Eleanor
BEATTIE.
Others who came through their doors included Hugh
HOOD,
Robert
FULFORD, John Robert
COLOMBO, Douglas
FETHERLING and Mary Alice
DOWNIE -- all to have their works published.
Started with small amounts of seed money from private investors
and no government funding, Peter Martin Associates constantly
struggled financially. At one point, for a bit of extra cash,
the office became the designated nuclear-fallout shelter for
the street. Pat
DACEY, once the firm's book designer, lugged
suitcases of books up the street to sell at Britnell's bookstore
with summer employee Bronwyn
DRAINIE.
Working at Peter Martin Associates was always fun, Ms.
WYATT
said. "You went in to work happy and you stayed happy all day."
Still, in a time when Canadian works received little recognition,
she remembers finding it difficult to get media interviews for
the author of Martin-published book.
Yet another title caused trouble with its subject. The company
was putting out a collection of previously published sayings
of former prime minister John
DIEFENBAKER, called I Never Say
Anything Provocative, edited by Margaret
WENTE. Mr.
DIEFENBAKER
heard about the project, called Mr.
MARTIN and threatened to
sue. Mr. MARTIN stood firm.
"He handled it with such élan," said writer Tim
WYNNE-
JONES,
then in the art department. "He was suitably dutiful, but not
in awe. Mr.
DIEFENBAKER was just over the top, as was his wont."
The book went to press and Mr.
DIEFENBAKER did not go to court.
Once listed along with Peter
GZOWSKI in a Maclean's magazine
article on "Young Men to Watch," Mr.
MARTIN was born on April
26, 1934 in Ottawa to a dentist father and a mother who drove
an ambulance in the First World War. The younger of two sons,
he attended Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario and
the University of Toronto, where he earned a degree in philosophy.
During a year in Ottawa as the president of the National Federation
of University Students, Mr.
MARTIN met his first wife
Carol.
They married in 1956 and moved to Toronto. Three years later,
they founded the Readers' Club in Featuring one Canadian book
a month, it distributed works by Mordecai
RICHLER,
Irving
LAYTON,
Morley CALLAGHAN and Brian
MOORE among others, and supplied its
members with coupons. While continuing to run the Readers' Club
(sold in 1978 to Saturday Night Magazine and closed in 1981),
the MARTINs started Peter Martin Associates.
Throughout his career, Mr.
MARTIN spoke out for Canadian publishing.
Alarmed by the sale of Ryerson Press and Gage Educational Press
in 1970 to American firms, he called a meeting of publishers
to discuss problems in the industry. Named the Independent Publishers
Association, the group started in 1971 with 16 members and with
Mr. MARTIN as its first president. In 1976, it was renamed the
Association of Canadian Publishers and continues today with 140
members. As a result of the group's efforts, Canadian publishing
began to receive federal and provincial funding.
In the late 1970s, the
MARTINs went their separate ways. Afterward,
Mr. MARTIN published a small newspaper, The Downtowner, and owned
a cookbook store with his second wife, Maggie
NIEMI. In 1983,
they moved near Sudbury, Ontario, where Mr.
MARTIN did freelance
book and theatre reviews, then moved to Ottawa in 1985 to work
as president for Balmuir Books, publisher of the magazine International
Perspectives and consulting editor for the University of Ottawa
Press.
After a spinal-cord injury in 1997, Mr.
MARTIN was left a quadriplegic,
except for limited use of his left arm. Even so, he remained
active, maintained a heavy e-mail correspondence and spent time
in the park reading while seated in a bright-yellow wheelchair.
Mr. MARTIN leaves his children Pamela, Christopher and Jeremy
and his wife
Maggie
NIEMI. He died on March 15.
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DOWNING o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-08-23 published
Artist focused on geometric shapes
Sculptor helped to design precast concrete panels that sheathe
the University of Toronto Medical Sciences Building
By Carol COOPER
Special▲ to The Globe and Mail Saturday, August
23, 2003 - Page F8
Robert DOWNING thought that he needed lessons in order to become
an artist. Entering a storefront studio in his hometown of Hamilton,
he paid the $1 fee and was asked what he wanted to make. When
he replied that he didn't know, the studio owner told him to
come back when he did and gave him back his buck.
Turning to the door, Mr.
DOWNING realized that whatever he did
was in his own hands. Deciding upon this as the subject of a
sculpture, he paid again and, in clay, fashioned a hand with
a spike through it. Upon seeing the sculpture, the studio owner
returned Mr.
DOWNING's dollar, saying, "You don't need me. You
know what you want to do."
A creator of sculptures, paintings, prints, photographs and digital
art, Mr. DOWNING has died at the age of 67.
His work appeared in the Ontario Centennial Art Exhibit, the
National Art Gallery of Canada Sculpture '67 Exhibit and
at Habitat
during Expo 67. In partnership with sculptor Ted
BIELER,
Mr.
DOWNING designed the precast concrete panels that sheathe the
University of Toronto Medical Sciences Building and, on his own,
designed two of its interior concrete-sculpted walls.
In 1969, he was the first Canadian to have a solo exhibition
at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.
His work is also found in the National Art Gallery of Canada,
the Art Gallery of Ontario, the University of Saskatchewan's
gallery and the Singapore National Museum among many others and
were included in 77 exhibitions in seven countries. As well,
he completed 16 commissions in three countries.
Largely self-taught, Mr.
DOWNING, a one-time police officer,
burst onto the scene during the late '60s with his Cube Series
in aluminum and Plexiglass. A highly intellectual artist, who
often explored sophisticated mathematical concepts in his work,
he created 108 cube-related sculptures for the series. Seventy-four
appeared in the Whitechapel show and the British Arts Council
purchased one, The Cube Turned Inside Out Revealing the Relationship
of the Sphere.
Mr. DOWNING's work remained centred on geometric shapes throughout
his career. "I am one of those people who views geometry as a
divine expression of integration between the physical and the
spiritual," he wrote in a brochure. He attributed his interest
in organic geometry to the works of sculptors Eli Bornstein and
Tony Smith, and the Art and Technology Movement.
Despite his intellectual bent, spirituality figured large in
Mr. DOWNING's art and provided his inspiration to pursue it.
When he was a Hamilton policeman, he was relaxing after a shift.
"I suddenly became conscious of the warm glow of a transparent
rose-coloured light completely surrounding me," he wrote in his
memoirs, Feeling My Way.
"I was still aware of my body, but I felt myself to be extended
into and penetrated by this light, which simultaneously caused
me to feel radiant pulsations of pure love. It was as though
I, somehow, had transcended the physical plane and, for a brief
moment of time, experienced a cosmic level of infinite bliss."
Thereafter, Mr.
DOWNING felt a new sensitivity to life and found
himself in an almost trance-like state when observing the world
around him. He left the police force -- and his family -- to
become an artist. He maintained, "I've been given to make art
in celebration of life as a humble song of praise to the Divine
Creator of All."
Mr. DOWNING was born on August 1, 1935, in Hamilton, one of two
children of a Canadian Westinghouse labourer and a housekeeper.
When he was young, the family lived in a tent while waiting for
housing.
In early adolescence, bedridden with a bout of rheumatic fever,
Mr. DOWNING discovered that he enjoyed working with his hands
by threading macaroni and constructing lilac-shell pictures.
Leaving school at 15 with a Grade 8 education, Mr.
DOWNING delivered
telegrams before joining the Canadian navy for five years. There
he worked in food stores and as a photographer. After the service,
Mr. DOWNING joined the Hamilton Police Force.
Early in his art career, Mr.
DOWNING became discouraged by his
attempts to sell his work in Toronto. He hit the road, travelling
to Montreal and then to Vancouver, where he sold his first sculpture
in 1962.
Still seeking a direction, he moved with his second wife to California,
where they ran an antique shop. Mr.
DOWNING experimented with
d-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide and yoga, and participated in a
couple of shows.
Returning to Toronto, Mr.
DOWNING approached Mr.
BIELER, who
taught at the University of Toronto, for instruction. With Mr.
BIELER's encouragement, he began his exploration of the cube.
"He used whatever was available to dig into this and then came
up with some quite interesting stuff," said Mr.
BIELER, now a
professor at York University in Toronto.
Selling his house to pay for shipping his sculpture to Whitechapel
Art
Gallery,
Mr.
DOWNING ended up after the show emotionally
and financially exhausted. To recover, he spent a year studying
the sitar.
After the bubble of government funding for art during Canada's
centennial period burst, Mr.
DOWNING and other Canadian artists
found themselves short of work and money.
"By the end of 1972, my commissions and sales of art had completely
evaporated," he wrote in a preamble to his Fibonacci Series.
The only job he could find was teaching at an Ontario private
school.
Throughout his career, Mr.
DOWNING taught at several institutions,
including U of T, the Ontario College of Art and the Banff School
of Fine Art, all the while living a hand-to-mouth existence.
Still, despite a lack of money and critical attention, he created
prolifically, in series that often overlapped, carefully recording
his creative process and organizing his works.
During the '70s, influenced by Mr. Bornstein's work, Asian philosophy,
crystals and numerology, he explored the hexagon, producing a
trial printing set for children and his I'Ching Series, a notebook
in which he placed a diary-like record beside a tangram (a Chinese
puzzle consisting of five triangles, a square and a rhomboid)
based on a computer printout.
While in hospital in 1974 with a heart attack, Mr.
DOWNING worked
with construction paper and scissors and formed a three-dimensional
shape that led to the Fibonacci Series, also called the Nothing
Series. The 24 solid-steel castings and eight metal powder and
fibreglass life-sized sculptures reflect a system Mr.
DOWNING
said he discovered, of combining squares, equilateral triangles
and pentagons. Some of the works' proportions contained the Fibonacci
ratio. (In the Fibonacci sequence -- 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 etc. --
each successive number is equal to the sum of the preceding two
numbers.)
When discharged from the hospital, Mr.
DOWNING was unable to
pay his mortgage. He sold the house and moved with his third
wife and family to California, where he lived from 1974 to 1978.
He taught at California State College in Long Beach and continued
with the Fibonacci Series.
Entering the '80s, Mr.
DOWNING turned to conceptual/performance
art. In conceptual art, the works themselves are not considered
important, but are intended to examine the language and system
of art. Performance art presents actual events as art to a live
audience, as opposed to the illusions of events presented by
theatre.
For the series Art Isn't? Mr.
DOWNING used a Canada Council grant
to solicit work from the presidents of Canada's top 500 companies.
Asked by the council to reimburse the money because he had not
used it to create art, Mr.
DOWNING agreed to send a monthly cheque
for 10 per cent of his income. The amount came to $2.
The Canada Council responded with a request for a bigger cheque
and Mr. DOWNING complied. Using a photocopier, he enlarged a
$2 cheque and sent it off.
"He was desperately honest and he would not put up with bullshit
at all," sculptor and artist Gord
SMITH said. "He stayed on top
of the Canada Council.... He believed passionately in the culture
and knew it was going down."
Also during the '80s, Mr.
DOWNING produced many Documeditation
works, which included Transentials in Space, the work he said
in 1992 was the most significant of his life. Describing it as
a visual literacy program, he spent two years developing the
three-volume work.
Always an outspoken advocate for his calling, Mr.
DOWNING helped
to found Canadian Artists Representatives in 1967. Driven, brilliant,
often difficult and prickly, he was frustrated by his inability
to qualify for grants from the Ontario government. He lacked
the formal training the government required and went to the offices
of the Minister of Culture and Citizenship to state his case.
Screaming, "
This isn't art?" Mr.
DOWNING hurled his portfolio
to the ground. The minister's office called the police.
Mr. DOWNING described his Closet Art, from 1984 to 1987, as "an
installation piece which outgrew the confines of two large storage
closets and raised the question of how practical it was for a
senior artist to continue playing the role of an unpaid custodian
of earlier work that had long proven itself to qualify as legitimate
cultural property."
He donated the works to the Art Gallery of Hamilton, counting
the 250-page record of his negotiations with the gallery as a
Documeditation. "Coming back to these [donated] works again and
again one is reminded of the expansive scope of Mr.
DOWNING's
thinking, of the evolving nature of his practice," said the gallery's
chief curator, Shirley
MADILL.
Mr. DOWNING left Canada once again to make a living in the late
'80s, working and teaching in Botswana and Singapore. Returning
because of ill health, he spent his last years largely confined
to his apartment. He found a creative outlet, producing computer-generated
images, once again exploring geometric forms. In 1998, as artist-in-residence
at the U of T, he developed a Web site containing a retrospective
of his work.
Always outspoken, a quality that alienated many, in the spring
of 2002, he published an Internet manifesto announcing his resignation
as a practising Canadian artist. In it, he chastized business,
government, galleries and academia for not supporting artists
in general and him in particular.
At his death on July 22, Mr.
DOWNING had not sold his work in
Canada for the past 15 years. Still he continued to promote it,
even receiving a posthumous rejection.
"Robert's first love was his art, and his life was his art, and
that's the beginning and end of it," said his fourth wife, Mickey
DOWNING.
Mr. DOWNING leaves his wife, Mickey, two ex-wives, children Michael
DOWNING and Sara
ROBINSON, and three grandchildren.
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DOWNS 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)
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