LAY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-04-07 published
He struck gold at the old Empire games
By Tom HAWTHORN
Special to The Globe and Mail Monday, April 7,
2003 - Page R7
Jim COURTRIGHT, who has died, aged 88, was one of Canada's top
track-and-field athletes, winning a gold medal in the javelin
throw at the 1938 British Empire Games in Sydney.
Just getting to the meet was a marathon for Mr.
COURTRIGHT, an
engineering student at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario
The price of a train ticket to Vancouver beyond his means, he
found work as a prisoner escort, travelling cross-country in
a converted box car while handcuffed to a man facing deportation.
In any event, he found his fare and went on to join the Canadian
team which arrived in Australia on January 15, 1938.
In the javelin throw, Mr.
COURTRIGHT faced formidable competition
in Stanley
LAY of New Zealand and Jack
METCALFE of Australia.
LAY, a sign writer by trade, had been a capable cricketer who
put his arm to great success.
METCALFE was a superb athlete whose
specialty was the triple jump, in which he won a bronze at the
Berlin Olympics in 1936 and gold at the Empire Games in 1938.
In the end, it was the Canadian who prevailed, followed by
LAY
and METCALFE.
Despite his gold medal, Mr.
COURTRIGHT was overshadowed by Eric
COY of Winnipeg, who had won two medals and so was awarded the
Norton H. Crowe Trophy as Canada's outstanding amateur athlete
that year. Mr.
COURTRIGHT also trailed Mr.
COY and sculler Bob
PEARCE in voting for the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada's top male
athlete, a prize open to amateurs and professionals. Mr.
PEARCE
won the trophy.
Later in 1938, Mr.
COURTRIGHT unleashed a throw of 62.74 metres,
an intercollegiate record at the time that still ranks as the
third longest in Queen's University history. He broke his leg
in an accident at a gold mine in Northern Ontario in the summer
of 1939, yet recovered to play guard for the school's basketball
team the following winter.
James Milton
COURTRIGHT was born in 1914 to a civil engineer
and the daughter of the town sheriff in North Bay, Ontario The
family moved to Ottawa and the boy participated in football and
field events at Glebe Collegiate.
Mr. COURTRIGHT placed third nationally in the javelin in 1934
while still a student at the University of Ottawa. He finished
second the following year behind Mr.
COY.
In 1936, the Ottawa student was the best in the land and attended
the Berlin Olympics that summer. One of 28 competitors in the
javelin, Mr.
COURTRIGHT's best throw of 60.54 metres was too
short to qualify for the final round. He finished 14th in an
event won by Gerhard
STOECK of Germany, whose winning toss of
71.84 metres was inspired by chanting crowds at the Olympic stadium,
among them Adolf Hitler.
The disappointment of his Berlin performance spurred Mr.
COURTRIGHT
to greater success in throwing events. In 1937, he was Canada's
intercollegiate champion in javelin and the shot put.
In July, he travelled to Dallas to compete at a 200-athlete meet
organized as part of the city's Greater Texas and Pan-American
Exposition. Mr.
COURTRIGHT won the gold medal in javelin at the
Cotton Bowl. The success of the meet inspired the organizing
of the first official Pan-American Games fourteen years later.
Mr. COURTRIGHT attended postgraduate classes in engineering at
Queen's, where he did double-duty as star athlete and track coach.
He was also president of the student body in his final year.
After graduation, Mr.
COURTRIGHT joined Shell Canada as a refinery
engineer in Montreal in 1941. As he was promoted he accepted
back-and-forth postings from Montreal to Toronto to Vancouver
to Toronto to Montreal to Toronto, including a stint as a public-relations
co-ordinator.
He became a vice-principal at Queen's in 1970, a job he held
until retirement nine years later.
Mr. COURTRIGHT died on February 21, just days after the 65th
anniversary of his triumph in Sydney. He leaves eight children
and sister Celina
COURTRIGHT of Ottawa. He was predeceased by
his wife, Mary (née Roche), and three brothers.
In 1958, a moving van loaded with the family's possessions caught
fire and burned, destroying many of Mr.
COURTRIGHT's medals and
trophies. A prize rescued from the ashes was the gold medal from
the British Empire Games. It is now in the hands of a grand_son.
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LAY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-08-18 published
BIRKS,
Helen
Thompson
Died peacefully on August 16, 2003, in Montreal, in her 92nd
year. Predeceased by her husband John E.
BIRKS. Dear mother of
Sally BONGARD (Strachan), Barbara
WYBAR and Peter
BIRKS. Cherished
grandmother of Sarah, Ashley and John
HENNESSY,
Caroline,
Jonathan
and James WYBAR, Nicola Wybar
THOMPSON/THOMSON/TOMPSON/TOMSON, and Michael
BIRKS. Survived
by her brother Alan G.
THOMPSON/THOMSON/TOMPSON/TOMSON and sister June
PASHKEVITCH.
Predeceased by brothers Richard
THOMPSON/THOMSON/TOMPSON/TOMSON, John Munroe
THOMPSON/THOMSON/TOMPSON/TOMSON
and sister Margaret
LAY.
Funeral service will be held on Tuesday,
August 19, 2003 at St. Andrew's and St. Paul's Church (3415 Redpath
Street, Montreal), at 2 p.m. Memorial service will be held in
Metis Beach, Little Metis Presbyterian Church, on Friday, August
22nd, 2003. Donations in memory of Helen
BIRKS may be made to
McGill University, Attention Libraries (3605 de la Montagne,
Montreal, Quebec H3G 2M1) or to the Little Metis Presbyterian
Church Outreach, c/o 21 Beach Road, Metis Beach, Quebec G0J 1S0.
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LAYTON 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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