FULFORD 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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FULLER o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-04-04 published
Mathemetician touted as geometry genius
Friday, April 4, 2003 - Page R13
Toronto -- The Canadian mathemetician who was considered the
greatest classical geometer of his generation has died. Professor
H.
S.
M.
COXETER was 96.
Prof. COXETER, who went by the Christian name Donald (a shortened
version of Macdonald, one of his middle names), dominated the
math department at the University of Toronto for 60 years and
was legendary in the field of hyperdimensional geometries. In
particular, his work on icosahedral symmetries laid the groundwork
for a 1996 Nobel Prize won by two Texan scientists who discovered
the Carbon 60 molecule.
British-born, Prof.
COXETER came to Canada in 1936 to perform
work that influenced such luminaries as the Dutch artist M.C.
ESCHER and Buckminster
FULLER, who described him as "the geometer
of our bestirring 20th century, the spontaneously acclaimed terrestrial
curator of the historical inventory of the science of pattern
analysis."
Prof. COXETER, who at one time headed the Canadian Mathematical
Society and in 1997 was appointed a Companion to the Order of
Canada, died on Monday.
Staff
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FULLER o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-04-12 published
'He kept a little flame of geometry alive'
Superstar University of Toronto mathematician considered himself
an artist, but his seminal work inevitably found practical applications
By Siobhan
ROBERTS
Saturday,
April 12, 2003 - Page F11
Widely considered the greatest classical geometer of his time
and the man who saved his discipline from near extinction, Harold
Scott MacDonald
COXETER, who died on March 31 at 96, said of
himself, with characteristic modesty, "I am like any other artist.
It just so happens that what fills my mind is shapes and numbers."
Prof. COXETER's work focused on hyperdimensional shapes, specifically
the symmetry of regular figures and polytopes. Polytopes are
geometric shapes of any number of dimensions that cannot be constructed
in the real world and can be visualized only when the eye of
the beholder possesses the necessary insight; they are most often
described mathematically and sometimes can be represented with
hypnotically intricate fine-line drawings.
"I like things that can be seen," Prof.
COXETER once remarked.
"You have to imagine a different world where these queer things
have some kind of shape."
Known as Donald (shortened from MacDonald,) Prof.
COXETER had
such a passion for his work and unrivalled elegance in constructing
and writing proofs that he motivated countless mathematicians
to pick up the antiquated discipline of geometry long after it
had been deemed passé.
John Horton
CONWAY, the Von Neumann professor of mathematics
at Princeton University, never studied under Prof.
COXETER, but
he considers himself an honorary student because of the
COXETERian
nature of his work.
"With math, what you're doing is trying to prove something and
that can get very complicated and ugly.
COXETER always manages
to do it clearly and concisely," Prof.
CONWAY said. "He kept
a little flame of geometry alive by doing such beautiful works
himself.
"I'm reminded of a quotation from Walter Pater's book The Renaissance.
He was describing art and poetry, but he talks of a small, gem-like
flame: 'To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain
this ecstasy, is success in life.' "
Prof. COXETER's oeuvre included more than 250 papers and 12 books.
His Introduction to Geometry, published in 1961, is now considered
a classic -- it is still in print and this year is back on the
curriculum at McGill University. His Regular Polytopes is considered
by some as the modern-day addendum to Euclid's Elements. In 1957,
he published Generators and Relations for Discrete Groups, written
jointly with his PhD student and lifelong friend Willy
MOSER.
It is currently in its seventh edition.
Prof. COXETER's self-image as an artist was validated by his
Friendship with and influence on Dutch artist M. C.
ESCHER, who,
when working on his Circle Limit 3 drawings, used to say, "I'm
Coxetering today."
They met at the International Mathematical Congress in Amsterdam
in 1954 and then corresponded about their mutual interest in
repeating patterns and representations of infinity. In a letter
to his son, Mr.
ESCHER noted that a diagram sent to him by Prof.
COXETER that inspired his Circle Limit 3 prints "gave me quite
a shock."
He added that "
COXETER's hocus-pocus text is no use to me at
all.... I understand nothing, absolutely nothing of it."
While Mr. ESCHER claimed total ignorance of math, Prof.
COXETER
wrote numerous papers on the Dutchman's "intuitive geometry."
Though Prof.
COXETER did geometry for its own sake, his work
inevitably found practical application. Buckminster
FULLER encountered
his work in the construction of his geodesic domes. He later
dedicated a book to Prof.
COXETER: "By virtue of his extraordinary
life's work in mathematics, Prof.
COXETER is the geometer of
our bestirring twentieth century. [He is] the spontaneously acclaimed
terrestrial curator of the historical inventory of the science
of pattern analysis."
Prof. COXETER's work with icosohedral symmetries served as a
template of sorts in the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the
Carbon 60 molecule. It has also proved relevant to other specialized
areas of science such as telecommunications, data mining, topology
and quasi-crystals.
In 1968, Prof.
COXETER added to his list of converts an anonymous
society of French mathematicians, the Bourbakis, who actively
and internationally sought to eradicate classical geometry from
the curriculum of math education.
"Death to Triangles, Down with Euclid!" was the Bourbaki war
cry. Prof.
COXETER's rebuttal: "Everyone is entitled to their
opinion. But the Bourbakis were sadly mistaken."
One member of the society, Pierre
CARTIER, met Prof.
COXETER
in Montreal and became enamoured of his work. Soon, he had persuaded
his fellow Bourbakis to include Prof.
COXETER's approach in their
annual publication. "An entire volume of Bourbaki was thoroughly
inspired by the work of
COXETER," said Prof.
CARTIER, a professor
at Denis Diderot University in Paris.
In the 1968 volume, Prof.
COXETER's name was writ large into
the lexicon of mathematics with the inauguration of the terms
"COXETER number," "
COXETER group" and
"COXETER graph."
These concepts describe symmetrical properties of shapes in multiple
dimensions and helped to bridge the old-fashioned classical geometry
with the more au courant and applied algebraic side of the discipline.
These concepts continue to pervade geometrical discourse, several
decades after being discovered by Prof.
COXETER.
Prof. COXETER became a serious mathematician at the relatively
late age of 14, though family folklore has it that, as a toddler,
he liked to stare at the columns of numbers in the financial
pages of his father's newspaper.
He was born into a Quaker family in Kensington, just west of
London, on February 9, 1907. His mother, Lucy
GEE, was a landscape
artist and portrait painter, and his father, Harold, was a manufacturer
of surgical instruments, though his great love was sculpting.
They had originally named their son MacDonald Scott
COXETER,
but a godparent suggested that the boy's father's name should
be added at the front. Another relative then pointed out that
H.M.S. COXETER made him sound like a ship of the royal fleet
so the names were switched around.
When Prof.
COXETER was 12, he created his own language -- "Amellaibian"
a cross between Latin and French, and filled a 126-page notebook
with information on the imaginary world where it was spoken.
But more than anything he fancied himself a composer, writing
several piano concertos, a string quartet and a fugue. His mother
took her son and his musical compositions to Gustav
HOLST.
His
advice: "Educate him first."
He was then sent to boarding school, where he met John Flinders
PETRIE, son of Egyptologist Sir Flinders
PETRIE.
The two were
passing time at the infirmary contemplating why there were only
five Platonic solids -- the cube, tetrahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron
and icosahedron. They then began visualizing what these shapes
might look like in the fourth dimension. At the age of 15, Prof.
COXETER won a school prize for an English essay on how to project
these geometric shapes into higher dimensions -- he called it
"Dimensional Analogy."
Prof. COXETER's father took his son along with his essay to meet
friend and fellow pacifist Bertrand
RUSSELL.
Mr.
RUSSELL recommended
Prof. COXETER to mathematician E.H.
NEVILLE, a scout, of sorts,
for mathematics prodigies. He was impressed by Prof.
COXETER's
work but appalled by some inexcusable gaps in his mathematical
knowledge. Prof.
NEVILLE arranged for private tutelage in pursuit
of a scholarship at Cambridge. During this period, Prof.
COXETER
was forbidden from thinking in the fourth dimension, except on
Sundays.
He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1926 and was among
five students handpicked by Ludwig
WITTGENSTEIN for his philosophy
of mathematics class. During his first year at Cambridge, at
the age of 19, he discovered a new regular polyhedron that had
six hexagonal faces at each vertex.
After graduating with first-class honours in 1929, he received
his doctorate under H. F.
BAKER in 1931, winning the coveted
Smith's Prize for his thesis.
Prof. COXETER did fellowship stints back and forth between Princeton
and Cambridge for the next few years, focusing on the mathematics
of kaleidoscopes -- he had mirrors specially cut and hinged together
and carried them in velvet pouches sewn by his mother. By 1933,
he had enumerated the n-dimensional kaleidoscopes -- that is,
kaleidoscopes operating up to any number of dimensions.
The concepts that became known as
COXETER groups are the complex
algebraic equations he developed to express how many images may
be seen of any object in a kaleidoscope (he once used a paper
triangle with the word "nonsense" printed on it to track reflections).
In 1936, Prof.
COXETER was offered an assistant professorship
at the University of Toronto. He made the move shortly after
the sudden death of his father and following his marriage to
Rien BROUWER.
She was from the Netherlnds and he met her while
she was on holiday in London.
As a professor, Prof.
COXETER was known to flout set curriculum.
Ed BARBEAU, now a professor at the U of T, recalled that at the
start of his classes, Prof.
COXETER would spread out a manuscript
on the desks at the front of the room. During his lecture, he
would often pause for minutes at a time to make notes when a
student offered something that might be relevant to his work
in progress. When the work was later published, students were
pleasantly surprised to find that their suggestions had been
duly credited.
Prof. COXETER was also known to show up to class carrying a pineapple,
or a giant sunflower from his garden, demonstrating the existence
of geometric principles in nature. And he was notorious for leaping
over details, expecting students to fill in the rest.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's resident intellectual, Lister
SINCLAIR, was one of
Prof. COXETER's earliest students. He once recounted that Prof.
COXETER would "write an expression on the board and you could
see it talking to him. It was like Michelangelo walking around
a block of marble and seeing what's in there."
Asia Ivic WEISS, a professor at York University, Prof.
COXETER's
last PhD student and the only woman so honoured, describes an
incident that perfectly exemplifies Prof.
COXETER's math myopia.
Going into labour with her first child, she called him to cancel
their weekly meeting. Prof.
COXETER, who never acknowledged her
pregnancy, said not to worry, he would send over a stack of research
to keep her busy when she got home from the hospital.
Despite several offers from other universities, Prof.
COXETER
stayed at University of Toronto throughout his career.
Like his father, he was a pacifist. In 1997, he was among those
who marched a petition to the university president's office to
protest against an honorary degree being conferred on George
BUSH Sr. Prof.
COXETER recalled with disdain Robert
PRITCHARD's
telling him, "Donald, I have more important things to worry about."
After his official retirement in 1977, Prof.
COXETER continued
as a professor emeritus, making weekly visits to his office.
These subsided only in the past several months. On the weekend
before his death, he finished revisions on his final paper, which
he had delivered the previous summer in Budapest.
In his last five years, he survived a heart attack, a broken
hip (he sprung himself from the hospital early to drive to a
geometry conference in Wisconsin) and, most recently, prostate
cancer.
Considering his 96 years of vegetarianism and a strict exercise
regime, he felt betrayed by his body. "I feel like the man of
Thermopylae who doesn't do anything properly," he commented
recently after an awkward evening out, quoting nonsense poet
Edward LEAR.
Prof. COXETER died in his home, with three long last breaths,
just before bed on the last day of March.
His brain is now undergoing study at McMaster University, along
with that of Albert
EINSTEIN.
Neuroscientist
Sandra
WITELSON
is tryng to determine whether his brain's extraordinary capacities
are associated with its structure.
Prof. COXETER met with her at the beginning of March and learned
that the atypical elements of Einstein's brain, compared with
an average brain, were symmetrical on both right and left sides.
Prof. WITELSON said she wondered whether there might be similar
findings with Prof.
COXETER's brain. "Isn't that nice," he said.
"I suppose that would indicate all my interest in symmetry was
well founded."
Prof. COXETER leaves his daughter Susan and son Edgar. His wife
died in 1999.
Siobhan ROBERTS is a Toronto writer whose biography of Donald
COXETER will be published by Penguin in 2005.
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FULLER 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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FULTON o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-12-10 published
The backroom brain of the Canadian Football League
For 37 years, he was 'Facts Fulton,' the head-office man who
made things work and who wrote the complex rules that govern
the Canadian Football League
By Dan RALPH,
Canadian
Press;
Globe and Mail files Wednesday,
December 10, 2003 - Page R5
For 16 years, former Canadian Football League commissioner Jake
GAUDAUR never relied on a computer to draw up the league's regular-season
schedule. Instead, he looked to Greg
FULTON to do it in his head.
"We used to run it [the Canadian Football League schedule] in
the computer for days," said Mr.
GAUDAUR, who served as league
commissioner from 1968 to 1983. "But in the final analysis, Greg
would always have it worked out in his mind."
Mr. FULTON, who spent 54 years with the Canadian Football League
as a player, statistician and historian, died in Toronto on Monday.
It was his 84th birthday. The cause of death was not provided
but he reportedly suffered a stroke last week that caused him
to fall into a coma from which he never emerged.
"He worked behind the scenes and received so little credit,"
Mr. GAUDAUR said. "There was no one in Canadian history who knew
as much about the league as Greg did."
Doug MITCHELL, who succeeded Mr.
GAUDAUR as Canadian Football
League commissioner in 1984, marvelled at Mr.
FULTON's ability
to draw up a Canadian Football League schedule.
"He did it on a sort of a blackboard," he recollected. "What
the computer kicked out invariably never worked but Greg's schedules
always did. It really was incredible."
Current
Canadian
Football League commissioner Tom
WRIGHT said
Mr. FULTON's passion and commitment were an inspiration. "While
he served our league with distinction and honour, he will best
be remembered for the warmth of his smile, the wit of his stories,
and the depth of his recollections."
Mr. FULTON, a Winnipeg native, moved to Calgary in 1930 and began
his career as a player with the Stampeders in 1939. During the
Second World War, he served with the Calgary Regiment of the
First Canadian Armoured Brigade and participated in the abortive
Dieppe raid on August 19, 1942.
Returning home in peacetime, he attended the University of Alberta
to get a bachelor of commerce degree and soon after found a job
with Revenue Canada.
So, how exactly did a Calgary tax man end up as one of the Canadian
Football League's most influential people? It started with a
love affair for facts and figures that first led to a part-time
job in Calgary as a statistician for the Stampeders. When Clark
DAVEY, who was later appointed to the Senate, was appointed in
1966 as the Canadian Football League's first full-time commissioner,
he lured Mr.
FULTON to Toronto.
Sen. DAVEY "made some quick enemies because he was outspoken
and the job wasn't really ready for him," Mr.
FULTON told former
Globe and Mail sportswriter Marty
YORK. So 54 days after he took
the job, much of which consisted of feuding with Canadian Football
League officials, Sen.
DAVEY resigned. Mr.
FULTON was kept on
under Mr. GAUDAUR,
Sen.
DAVEY's successor.
"Jake usually approaches me every day to ask me something," Mr.
FULTON once said in an interview. "A lot of the times, I think
he knows the answers to the questions he is asking, but I think
he might feel better if he hears something from me. I guess you
could call me his confidant, but there are times when I do mention
something that he has overlooked and that often can have an effect
on the league and the fans."
What was most important, wrote Marty
YORK in 1981, was Mr.
FULTON's
status as assistant commissioner -- a title he did not hold but
a role he filled seven days a week. A walking Canadian Football
League encyclopedia, he was soon nicknamed Facts Fulton. He was
also known as Jake
GAUDAUR's memory bank.
When Mr. GAUDAUR became commissioner, he delegated a number of
the commissioner's key duties to Mr.
FULTON who already administered
the pension funds and had the challenging task of drawing up
the Canadian Football League schedule. Consequently, the nine
Canadian Football League general managers became accountable
to Mr. FULTON.
He was authorized to issue orders, regulations and memoranda
to all club officials, including coaches and players. Also, he
was responsible for roster control, player personnel, registration
of all contracts, waiver procedures, negotiation lists and draft
lists.
"He did the work of three people but the last thing he wanted
to do was talk about it," Mr.
GAUDAUR said.
At the same time, however, Mr.
FULTON was a confessed nag. "I
wouldn't be doing my job if I wasn't," he once said.
Managers of Canadian Football League clubs across the country
sometimes came to dread the sound of the phone ringing. "He'll
bug you when he calls to remind you that you didn't do such-and-such
a thing," said Montreal Alouette general manager Bob
GEARY in
1981. "It gets on your nerves sometimes, but I guess if he didn't
do that kind of stuff, no one would, and we'd be suffering more
than we do."
Mr. FULTON was also something of a Canadian Football League policeman
who had to lay down league laws. At one time, Canadian Football
League clubs were strictly limited about who could attend training
camps. Under the terms of an agreement with the Canadian Football
League Players Association, clubs were allowed to conduct pre-training-camp
practices only for rookies, quarterbacks and veterans who had
surgery the previous year. Veterans were allowed to work out
on their own, but coaches were forbidden to order them to participate.
In a case in which the Argo felt they had good reason to start
camp early, Mr.
FULTON had to consult his regulations.
"I told them it was fine," he decreed. "As long as the veterans
were running around on their own."
Clubs that violated pre-training-camp rules by practicing with
veterans faced fines, he said.
All things considered, though, it was drawing up the schedule
that was Mr.
FULTON's most time-consuming job. It was also the
one for which he suffered the most criticism.
"I've never yet been able to satisfy everyone with the schedule,"
he said. "I'm convinced that that's impossible because of the
uniqueness of our league. We only have nine teams, which means
that one team has to sit out every week. Also, because some of
our clubs play in stadiums where baseball and soccer are played,
I have to work the schedule around that too."
In 1990, Mr.
FULTON received the first Commissioner's Award for
his contribution to football in Canada. Five years later, he
was inducted into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in the builder's
category. In 1995, he was named the honorary secretary-treasurer
and was active in head office as a consultant and historian until
his death.
Mr. FULTON, who was reappointed by the Canadian Football League
to his primary role about 10 times eight times, sometimes felt
guilty about his job because he puts it ahead of everything else
in his life.
"I've never been able to take an extended holiday," he said in
1981. "But I wouldn't change it for anything in the world...
I'm one of those rare people who actually enjoys his job."
To a sometimes troubled league, he was a godsend.
"Thank goodness we have a guy like him," Bob
GEARY told Marty
YORK. "I hate to think what would happen to us if he wasn't around."
Mr. FULTON leaves children Robert, Byrne and Rebecca. He was
predeceased by wife
Angela
BOMBARDIERI in 1990. Funeral details
are pending.
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FULTON o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-12-10 published
FULTON quietly kept the Canadian Football League in running order
By Stephen
BRUNT,
Wednesday,
December 10, 2003 - Page S8
Less than a month back, during Grey Cup week, Greg
FULTON picked
up his phone to answer a few questions from a reporter.
Frail health had kept him from making the trip to Regina, but
in conversation he was sharp as a tack and again proved himself
to be a one-man encyclopedia of Canadian football history.
Paul MARTIN, the prime minister to be, was going to make a much
publicized pregame appearance at Taylor Field, fresh from the
Liberal leadership convention.
Aside from Pierre
TRUDEAU,
FULTON was asked, did he remember
any other prime minister taking the time to attend the Grey Cup?
"Well," he said, "I don't remember Mackenzie
KING being there.
Or Louis SSAINTURENT."
Of course, he knew because he was there. It seemed he was always
there -- a player beginning in Winnipeg in 1939, a statistician
and treasurer for the Calgary Stampeders from 1950 to 1966, a
fixture in the Canadian Football League office from 1967 on,
and, finally in his last job, the Canadian Football League's
honorary secretary and official historian, a title surely unique
in all of pro sports.
The National Football League still has a few owners with connections
to the game's early days, and in hockey and baseball there are
at least a handful of sportswriting elders who still remember
when. But only the Canadian Football League actually employed
someone who had an inside view extending back more than 60 years.
Considering how tumultuous some of those seasons have been and
considering the game's highs and lows and the cast of strange
and wonderful characters who came and went, what a tale
FULTON
could tell.
He was 84 when he died on Monday, and with him, sadly, is lost
much of the anecdotal story of the league. (Commissioner Tom
WRIGHT, who during his relatively short term on the job had come
to appreciate
FULTON's special role, planned to have
FULTON's
memories committed to tape and transcribed. Sadly, that didn't
happen before
FULTON fell ill.)
FULTON's tenure with the league office was perhaps the only significant
legacy of Keith
DAVEY's 54-day reign as commissioner in 1967.
Davey lured
FULTON to Toronto from Calgary to act as the league's
treasurer. When Jake
GAUDAUR took over from
DAVEY, he decided
to keep FULTON on.
"It would be the most important decision I would make,"
GAUDAUR
says now, which, given the events of his 16 years in office,
is quite a statement. Every subsequent commissioner -- and there
have been a bunch -- endorsed and echoed that original decision.
Not that anyone on the outside would really understand. "All
of those beneficial things he did for the league were all out
of public view,"
GAUDAUR said. "He never received any sort of
media credit, nor did he want any. Clearly, it was a labour of
love for him. That's kind of corny to say that, but I really
believe it was."
In those early days, the league was a two-man, two-secretary
operation.
FULTON, an accountant by profession, kept the books,
kept an eye on club finances and kept the minutes during league
meetings -- all during a period when the game grew into a multimillion-dollar
sports business. He was also charged with producing the schedule
every year, a trickier proposition than it might seem, given
the uneven number of teams, the east-west split and the importance
of certain dates in certain places.
At one point,
GAUDAUR remembers, they turned the task over to
a computer. And then, after the computer coughed out its work,
they handed it to
FULTON, who fixed it. "He had what I consider
to be a computer mind,"
GAUDAUR said. "It was an incredible mind."
The Canadian Football League took a turn for the worse after
GAUDAUR left the post. Commissioners came and went, the league
at times teetered on the brink of insolvency, the disastrous
U.S. expansion played itself out and the owners at times resembled
a bag of mixed nuts.
But there was always
FULTON, quietly keeping things in running
order, breaking the tension with his wry, quiet sense of humour,
loyal first and foremost to the game he loved.
"He was a remarkable person,"
GAUDAUR said. "It really was a
pleasure to be around the guy."
Several generations of those who spent time in the Canadian Football
League orbit share those sentiments and mourn the loss.
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