C... Names CS... Names CSI... Names Welcome Home
CSICU - All Categories in OGSPI
CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-01-15 published
John BERNSTEIN,
Founder Of
Summer
Camps: 1918-2004
He survived a catalogue of war adventures to spend 35 years directing
children's camps that he ran with military precision
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special▼ to The Globe and Mail, Saturday, January
15, 2005 - Page S7
Toronto -- The greatest tumult and violence of the 20th century
bred in John
BERNSTEIN not hardness or distance, but a sunny,
forward-looking disposition that manifested itself most openly
in his love of children.
In almost cinematic fashion, Mr.
BERNSTEIN survived the Russian
Revolution, being a Jew in the Second World War-era Nazi prisoner
of war and Swiss labour camps, and fighting in the French Resistance.
In that upheaval, he acted and penned at least one play that
was staged while he was incarcerated in supposedly neutral Switzerland.
Mr. BERNSTEIN had material galore for an autobiography that,
by any measure, would have been a ripping yarn. He refused to
commit it to paper, despite his family's entreaties. "He used
to say people had better things to do than read about his life,"
said his daughter, Suzy.
He cared more about "his" kids. As director of the Jewish Camp
Council of Toronto for 35 years, Mr.
BERNSTEIN ensured that thousands
of children frolicked their summers away in settings they might
not otherwise have known.
Driven partly by having witnessed the displacement and despair
children endured after the war, Mr.
BERNSTEIN founded and ran
several Ontario summer camps not only for kids, many of them
from immigrant families, but for young mothers, seniors, single
parents and the disabled.
It was his way, his family said, of helping to right a world
that had gone mad a scant few years earlier.
And he never looked back. "He didn't dwell on his past. It was
a very 'been there, done that' attitude," said his son David.
"He was not the least bit nostalgic."
Vladimir BERNSTEIN (probably spelled "
BERNSHTEYN") was born to
merchant parents in a Black Sea coastal town just as the Bolsheviks
were consolidating their power in Russia. The family fled the
revolution to Paris, where Mr.
BERNSTEIN attended school and
was given a French name, Jean.
In the spring of 1940, as a young lieutenant, he and his French
army unit tried in vain to defend a bridge against the advancing
German army, their shells bouncing off the Nazis' superior Tiger
tanks. He was captured near Paris and taken to a PoW camp in
Germany, and survived thanks to his skills on the soccer pitch,
which the enemy valued in games against other camps.
Toward the end of 1943, Mr.
BERNSTEIN and a group of other inmates
persuaded the camp tailor to remove the yellow stripe on their
pant legs, which identified them as prisoners. Blending in with
a group of visitors, they escaped. Mr.
BERNSTEIN hopped a train
that was carrying scrap metal to Switzerland.
The Swiss promptly arrested him and shipped him to a work camp
in Kloten, a suburb of Zurich. There, he wrote a murder-mystery
play, titled Crime Avenue Henri-Martin that was staged, complete
with surviving playbill. Family lore has it that it was later
presented in Paris, where it was panned in the papers by no less
than the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.
No one knows how, but Mr.
BERNSTEIN managed to return to France
in 1944 and joined the Maquis, the dominant rural guerrilla band
of the French Resistance. He never spoke of his activities, which
probably involved sabotage and general harassment of the enemy.
At war's end, he was dispatched as a member of the occupying
Allied Forces to Germany and Austria to flush out Nazis and to
help repatriate displaced civilians. Working with a United Nations
agency, and convinced it was not in Jewish refugees' best interest
to be returned to Poland or Russia, he was able to get many people
to Palestine.
The experience kindled in him a lifelong passionate Zionism (though
he was fiercely anti-religious) and concern for the welfare of
children, his family said. With his first wife and a young son
in tow, Mr.
BERNSTEIN immigrated to Canada in 1951, settling
in Winnipeg. Invited to take over the Jewish Camp Council, a
communally-funded agency, he arrived in Toronto a year later
and set about bringing together several smaller sites to create
Camp Northland-B'nai Brith on Moose Lake near Haliburton, Ontario
He also established camps near Barrie and Parry Sound, Ontario,
for mothers and their young children, and similar retreats for
seniors, the mentally and physically disabled and other members
of the Jewish community.
The experience allowed him to indulge his love for young children,
his family said. "He would often bring children to camp who had
just arrived in Canada," said his daughter. "He believed their
parents needed the break."
"He was just in love with children."
Indeed, in his neatly typewritten notes on his philosophy of
camping, Mr.
BERNSTEIN observed that "camp is a child's world.
The camp atmosphere enhances his sense of worth as a human being."
A dapper man, Mr.
BERNSTEIN was known for touring his camps in
crisp tennis whites. "He was a great player," related his son,
who was a tennis instructor at one of the facilities. "Imagine
your father beating you at tennis, and you're the instructor.
He also chain-smoked and I never saw him winded."
Famously, Mr.
BERNSTEIN's camps were run with military precision,
especially arrivals and departures. Meal times were often signalled
by a siren.
And rarely could he go anywhere without being recognized by former
campers. "They were always coming up to him and saying hello,"
said his son. "Even if he didn't remember their name, he'd greet
them."
"He put his faith in the next generation."
John BERNSTEIN was born in Nikoliev, Russia, on July 24, 1918
and died in Toronto on November 24, 2004. He was 86. He leaves
his wife of 48 years, Dr. Vera Rose
BERNSTEIN, a retired pediatric
cardiologist; children Michael, David and Suzy, and five grandchildren.
C... Names CS... Names CSI... Names Welcome Home
CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-01-20 published
Wasyly FEDAK,
Archbishop: 1909-2005
The head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Canada 'was a father
to all of his clergy' and a champion of his homeland's Orange
Revolution
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail; with files from
Canadian Press, Thursday, January 20, 2005 - Page S7
People with deep religious convictions often have a lovely way
of putting the everyday. For example, the announcement from the
church hierarchs did not state that Wasyly
FEDAK, head of the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada, died in his sleep last Monday,
but that he had "reposed in the Lord."
Archbishop
FEDAK's official title was similarly grand: Primate
of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada, His Beatitude, Metropolitan
Wasyly, the Most Reverend Metropolitan-Archbishop of Winnipeg
and of All Canada.
In that position, he shepherded some 33,000 members of the Ukrainian
Orthodox Church in this country. "He was a father to all of his
clergy," said church chancellor William
MAKARENKO. "He was very
accessible. He never rushed to judgment.
"We have a saying in Ukrainian: Measure something seven times,
cut it once. That is what he did. He was very, very patient."
And unperturbed. On his 90th birthday five years ago, his granddaughter
Larissa asked: "Dido, you have lived a long time, have studied
and witnessed many things. What is the most important thing that
you could advise me?" He answered without hesitation: 'Don't
worry.'
The same wit was evident until his final hours.
Archbishop
FEDAK's son, Emil, recalled that a few days before
his father's death, a priest came to his hospital room and asked
whether he could read prayers to the dying cleric. The reply
was: "Will it be long?"
Archbishop
FEDAK's life spanned nearly the entire history of
Ukrainian settlement in Canada and mirrored the community's development,
said Ostap
SKRYPNYK, executive director of the Ukrainian Canadian
Congress. Indeed, until his final days, the primate joined other
Ukrainian clergy in Canada in championing their homeland's Orange
Revolution, which finally helped bring the reformist Viktor Yushchenko
to office.
Friends and family noted that Archbishop
FEDAK died just as a
new Ukraine was being born.
"We got along fabulously," enthused Archbishop-Metropolitan Michael
Bzdel, primate of the much larger Ukrainian Catholic Church in
Canada. "He was very quiet and peaceful but approachable and
co-operative." The two clerics, along with other bishops in Winnipeg,
were part of an ecumenical conference that met four times a year
to discuss spiritual issues and iron out differences.
He recalled the "open warfare" between Ukrainian Catholics and
Orthodox in Winnipeg in the 1920s and '30s. Archbishop
FEDAK
helped implement "a beautiful rapprochement. He was what both
our churches needed."
Over the years, Ukrainian Catholics and Orthodox in Winnipeg
prayed together many times on feast days. They also joined to
recall the internment of Ukrainians during the First World War
by the Canadian government, and to honour the millions of Ukrainians
who perished in Stalin's forced famine of 1932-1933.
Archbishop
FEDAK reached out to fellow Orthodox Christians, too.
In 1990, he established Eucharistic union between his church
and another branch of the Eastern rite, the Patriarchate of Constantinople.
During that time, his church became a member of the Canadian
Council of Churches.
He also initiated the establishment of the Permanent Conference
of Ukrainian Orthodox Bishops Beyond the Borders of Ukraine.
He participated in creating a Conference of Orthodox Bishops
of Canada and
an Orthodox-Roman Catholic dialogue. In 1998, he
hosted the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Winnipeg.
William FEDAK was not yet 3 when his parents and five siblings
arrived in Canada from Ukraine, settling in tiny Sheho, Saskatchewan.
As a young man, he decided on education as a career. Armed with
a teaching certificate, he taught in mainly rural schools in
Saskatchewan for 14 years.
In 1932, he married Paraskevia (Pearl) Timoffee, and later returned
to school to study theology. He was ordained a priest in 1944
and served parishes in rural Manitoba before being assigned in
1948 to Grimsby, Ontario, to serve seven parishes.
In 1951, he began a 29-year tenure at St. Vladimir's Ukrainian
Orthodox Church in Hamilton, Ontario; the church grew under his
leadership from 47 families to more than 500, and was elevated
to cathedral status.
Archbishop
FEDAK proceeded through the ranks swiftly. In 1978,
he was consecrated Bishop of Saskatoon and vicar of the Central
Eparchy, or diocese, comprising Saskatchewan and Manitoba. In
1983, he was elevated to the rank of Archbishop of Toronto and
the Eastern Eparchy. Two years later, he was elected Metropolitan
and primate of the church, receiving the title of "His Beatitude."
His ascension to the church's top post was a watershed, said
Mr. SKRYPNYK of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. "Though he wasn't
born in Canada, he was brought here at a very young age and was
seen as a Canadian bishop. That was important in the life of
the church."
As chaplain to the Canadian Ukrainian Youth Association, young
people often referred to Archbishop
FEDAK as "the Met." Said
his son: "He liked that." And, as a man who'd always lived simply,
"he couldn't believe that people would pay $4 for a cup of coffee."
In 2003, he was invested as an officer of the Order of Canada.
He submitted his resignation as primate only last November, and
it was to have taken effect this July. Not only did his years
not trouble him, but he scouted out others of similar vintage.
At visitations, he was usually presented with a dozen roses.
In later years, he made a habit of asking the oldest woman present
to come forward. After some good-natured arguing, the recipient
would collect the bouquet.
The closest he came to a motto, said his son Emil, was the following:
"If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty
in the character. If there is beauty in the character, there
will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home,
there will be order in the nation. If there is order in the nation,
there will be peace in the world."
Wasyly FEDAK was born November 1, 1909, in the village of Kadubivtsi
in Ukraine's southwestern Bukovina region. He died on January
10, 2005, in Winnipeg of natural causes. He was 95. He was predeceased
by his wife and is survived by sons Emil, Jerry and Eugene.
The Orthodox Rite of Burial of a Hierarch will take place at
Holy Trinity Metropolitan Cathedral in Winnipeg, beginning this
Friday at 7 p.m. Priests will read passages from scripture all
night, until 10 a.m. Saturday morning, when the liturgy and funeral
rite takes place, followed by interment and a memorial luncheon.
C... Names CS... Names CSI... Names Welcome Home
CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-03-30 published
Wilfred BIGELOW,
Heart
Surgeon: 1913-2005
Canadian doctor who was the first person to look inside a beating,
human heart developed the pacemaker and pioneered the use of
hypothermia in heart surgery
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, March
30, 2005, Page S9
Toronto -- The frigid Canadian winter of 1941, a Toronto hospital
and a 28-year-old surgical intern who had just helped amputate
a man's frostbitten fingers. Wilfred (Bill)
BIGELOW's curiosity
was piqued: How and why did extreme cold destroy human tissue?
The Manitoba-born University of Toronto graduate searched the
available medical literature and, surprisingly in a country where
winters are cold enough to kill, found little about frostbite.
Spurred by his surgery professor's challenge, Dr.
BIGELOW finally
found sources who knew something about frostbite. He learned
that cold alone doesn't cause gangrene. Rather, tissue dies when
blood stops moving, and people can tolerate extreme cold without
damage as long as some blood continues to course through their
veins.
But the Second World War intervened, and Dr.
BIGELOW was soon
off to serve as a front-line surgeon with the Canadian army in
England and northwest Europe. On his return, he spent a year
studying in Maryland at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, where
pioneer heart operations on "blue babies" born with defective
hearts were being performed, with mixed results. This prompted
Dr. BIGELOW, with his prewar studies in localized hypothermia,
to investigate whether it might be possible, as he would later
write, to cool "the whole body, reduce the oxygen requirements,
interrupt the circulation, and open the heart." If cold itself
is not harmful to flesh and organs, he reasoned, then it would
be safe to slow circulation to a near standstill so that surgeons
could operate on nearly empty blood vessels.
Back at Toronto General Hospital in 1947, he and a small team
obtained a room in the basement of the Banting Institute to carry
on the research. Approval for the project had been granted in
an atmosphere of some skepticism. At the time, a drop in body
temperature was considered dangerous, if not lethal. As a first
step, the team discovered that lowering the temperature of an
extremity reduced its metabolism and oxygen requirements.
Then, in 1949, they made their first open-heart attempt. A dog
was immersed in cold water inside a cut-down oil drum, and the
temperature of its body lowered to 20 degrees. The animal's heart
was pink and healthy, but it wasn't beating and its circulation
was stopped for 15 minutes. Dr.
BIGELOW tapped the heart tentatively
with an electrical probe. All four chambers responded with one
convulsive throb. He tapped it again. Another beat. The organ
then continued beating without blood -- a first -- and then with
blood. The dog was rewarmed and survived.
The episode led him to think that a device that could deliver
a gentle jolt of some sort, without damaging the muscle, would
enhance the hypothermia experiments.
That's how Dr.
BIGELOW became known as one of the world's leading
pioneers in the use of hypothermia in heart surgery and in the
development of the pacemaker, which he co-invented with fellow
Canadian cardiovascular superstar John Carter
CALLAGHAN, and
an electrical engineer, Jack
HOPPS, found through the National
Research Council in Ottawa.
In 1950, Dr.
BIGELOW was the first person to look inside a living,
beating human heart. He was astonished. The organ bore little
resemblance to the diagrams and descriptions of his medical school
lectures. "We knew there would be a valve flapping back and forth,
but we weren't prepared for the dynamic ring that contracts forcefully
in co-ordination with the valve. And the valve itself was far
different from what we expected," he told journalist June
CALLWOOD
in 1985.
Dr. BIGELOW and Dr.
CALLAGHAN electrified their colleagues when
they presented their findings in 1950 at a meeting in Denver
of the American Surgical Association. "There was no discussion,"
Dr. BIGELOW recalled years later. "It was one of the very few
basic medical discoveries where no one stood up to say they'd
done something similar."
Their presentation stimulated worldwide research and, two years
later, a successful operation using hypothermia was performed
in the United States. After this, "a steady stream of surgeons
and scientists from around the world came to see our first Canadian
open-heart surgery and to visit our Banting and Best Institute
laboratory," Dr.
BIGELOW reported, including 19 of Japan's top
heart surgeons.
The first thing the Japanese doctors wanted to see was the old
25-gallon oil drum sawed in two that had served as the crucible
for the canine experiment.
The next thing the visitors wanted to see was the world's first
heart pacer -- a table-top contraption that weighed about 15
pounds and measured a foot long and several inches wide. The
pacer, too, was co-developed by Dr.
BIGELOW -- to stimulate the
hearts of his experimental dogs when they were slowed down by
the cooling.
By 1959, a Swedish doctor had used transistor circuitry and successfully
implanted a pacemaker the size of a hockey puck beneath a patient's
skin. But, for years, pacemakers were known everywhere as "Toronto
machines."
(The invention of a lithium battery by a Buffalo electrical engineer
in 1972 launched the pacemaker as a modern medical and technical
miracle for countless thousands of people around the world. Today's
pacemakers measure about four centimetres by three centimetres
by half-a-centimetre thick and can be implanted in 30 minutes.)
About 1960, the two prevalent techniques of the day -- operations
using heart-lung pumps and hypothermia -- were combined and used
by surgeons around the world on a daily basis. In 1967, both
methods were used by South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard,
who performed the world's first transplant.
Today, ultra-cold chemical solutions are injected into the coronary
arteries during surgery to protect the heart further.
Dr. BIGELOW pioneered several other cardiac surgical procedures
and, in 1956, established the first complete three-year to four-year
training program for cardiac surgeons. He headed the renowned
cardiovascular surgical team at Toronto General Hospital for
20 years. He received two dozen major honours and awards, including
the Order of Canada in 1981, and was named to the Canadian Medical
Hall of Fame in 1997. He authored two books, Cold Hearts and
Mysterious Heparin, and wrote more than 100 medical papers.
A self-effacing man, Dr.
BIGELOW insisted that some of his early
experiments failed dismally. For instance, he spent 10 years
trying to discover how groundhogs were able to hibernate, but
gained little except a deep respect for groundhogs. He called
the invention of the pacemaker a "spinoff" from the hypothermia
experiments.
All the same, he was a walking, talking hero to young Canadian
doctors. To Anthony
GRAHAM, now a cardiologist at St. Michael's
Hospital in Toronto and a professor of medicine at the University
of Toronto, Bill
BIGELOW was always a giant among surgeons. In
the early 1970s, Dr.
BIGELOW made it his business to quietly
persuade potential recruits to sign on to the surgical staff
at Toronto General Hospital and had invited Dr.
GRAHAM, who had
recently returned from studying in California, to drop by his
office. The visit turned out to be a tour of Dr.
BIGELOW's "collection"
that he had laid out in hopes of sparking interest in young doctors.
"He had built a little museum in his office that was full of
the gadgets he had made over the years," said Dr.
GRAHAM.
There,
all lined up and neatly presented, were pacemakers in various
stages of developments, early dilators and other devices that
had played their part in medical history. "All of it was really
neat to see. As a Canadian, he made a staggering contribution
to his field. The things we see as commonplace today were revolutionary
then."
As it turned out, Dr.
GRAHAM did not join Dr.
BIGELOW's staff,
but the two men came to know each other through their involvement
in the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. "He was a gentle,
caring man," said Dr.
GRAHAM. "
Not at all like the surgical personality
we often think of as stereotypical."
For his part, Dr.
BIGELOW was aware of a larger picture that
lay beyond the day-to-day demands of a busy surgeon. "The moral
responsibility of introducing a new operation is real," he wrote
in Cold Hearts, the medical history of his work that was published
in 1984. "I sometimes look back with a shudder. Working beyond
the accepted limits of conventional medicine with few guidelines
and no one to share responsibility or offer counsel was a very
lonely feeling."
Wilfred Gordon
BIGELOW was born in Brandon, Manitoba, on June
18, 1913. He died in Toronto on March 27, 2005, at 91. He leaves
a daughter and three sons. He was predeceased by his wife, Ruth.
A memorial service is scheduled for April 23 at 2 p.m. at Toronto's
Rosedale United Church.
C... Names CS... Names CSI... Names Welcome Home
CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-04-15 published
William ARCHER,
Lawyer And Politician: 1919-2005
Toronto alderman was 'subtle, intricate -- one might even say
devious -- but clever.' He failed to become mayor yet won respect
as a dogged public servant who always did his homework
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Friday, April
15, 2005, Page S7
Toronto -- While the rest of the country has to reach for a thesaurus
to find the words for how much it hates Toronto, William
ARCHER
was a rare breed: a man deliriously in love with the city.
Toronto was his town, every nook and cranny of it. An unabashed
policy wonk, his encyclopedic knowledge of arcane bylaws, municipal
regulations and rules of procedure came in handy in his years
as a Toronto alderman, controller and mayoral candidate -- especially
when he peppered his fellow councillors with pointed questions.
He saw himself as "one who has kept an eye on things, one who
has raised questions," as he related to this newspaper in 1974.
"The fact that I might raise questions has had an effect on people."
At times, it was "hard to see what effect that has, apart from
irritation," wrote one city hall reporter of the day. "Much time
is taken up with items he has raised."
The word "gadfly" came up now and then in relation to Mr.
ARCHER,
but it's one former Toronto mayor David
CROMBIE dismisses.
"He was much too serious to be a gadfly," recalled Mr.
CROMBIE,
now president and Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian Urban
Institute. "He provided very solid advice. We used to call him
'the grey eminence.' He was very serious about his politics."
And maybe even a little mischievous. At a 1974 council meeting,
with Mr. CROMBIE absent, Mr.
ARCHER called for a number of roll-call
votes for reasons no one could quite understand. Then, the tactic
became clear: He was racking up Mr.
CROMBIE's absentee record,
which, at the time, stood at about 17 per cent.
"Subtle, intricate -- one might even say devious -- but clever,"
pronounced The Globe and Mail.
A Toronto alderman from 1958 to 1974, with the exception of three
years from 1966 to 1969, Mr.
ARCHER was remembered by colleagues
as dogged, almost obsessive about digesting the mass of the dry
arcana city politicians confront every day.
"He was one of the few who did an enormous amount of homework,"
recalled Mr.
CROMBIE, who was elected alderman in 1969 and was
Toronto's mayor from 1972 to 1978. "There were a lot of people
who would show up to meetings having read the executive summary
or sort of skimmed [reports]. But Bill was very thorough -- a
detail man -- one of the few who actually read the by-laws."
Mr. ARCHER's wife of 47 years, Gwen, is more blunt: "He had a
mind like a rat trap. He could listen to two radios, the television
and read the paper at the same time. He was so honest, it was
sickening. And he'd talk to a fence post if it would talk back."
Even so, one colleague, alderman Karl
JAFFARY, described Mr.
ARCHER as "good at government but not at politics." Mr.
CROMBIE
once introduced Mr.
ARCHER as "perhaps not the best politician,
but by far one of the best and most devoted public servants this
city has ever seen."
Born in Hamilton into a family of Anglican priests, Mr.
ARCHER
worked in Toronto as an office boy while still a teenager, and
later as a junior with the Imperial Bank of Canada. During the
Second World War, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer
Reserve, and served in the Atlantic and Pacific. He left the
service with the rank of lieutenant-commander and never lost
his love of the water, sailing seven-metre Star sailboats for
years and enjoying a life membership in the Royal Canadian Yacht
Club.
He attended McGill University in Montreal and Osgoode Hall law
school in Toronto, excelling at both in debating, and established
a Bay Street law practice before the political bug bit.
In 1958, he was elected to Toronto city council and
to Metropolitan
Toronto council, and served as Toronto's controller from 1963
to 1966, the year he made a run for mayor. After a 12-week campaign,
he polled a respectable 41,000 votes, but lost to fellow controller
William DENNISON, who proved a careful and quiet mayor. Some
blamed Mr.
ARCHER for causing the defeat of the more flamboyant
incumbent mayor, Phil
GIVENS, and
as Mr. ARCHER told his supporters
on election night, "We shook the city up quite a bit."
As former Toronto mayor, recent Senate appointee Art
EGGLETON,
remembers the '66 campaign, where Mr.
ARCHER's slogan was "
ARCHER
listens, learns... leads."
"He followed it, though he didn't always go the conventional
way," Mr. EGGLETON recalled. "Not everyone agreed with him, but
he was man of his convictions."
Mr. ARCHER returned to his law practice after his defeat but
surfaced in 1969 with three headline-grabbing feats: In May,
he spent a weekend as a derelict in Toronto's Cabbagetown neighbourhood,
living on handouts and sleeping in a flop house -- all designed,
he said, to gauge the city's services to the destitute. "It was
the most lonely and exhausting weekend of my life," he told reporters.
In July, he drove a taxi for a week. "Well, see, I'm doing it
to learn more about my community," he explained as he handed
out a six-page transcript of his recorded thoughts and impressions.
"And let me tell you, it's the loneliest job in the world. I
mean it." His tips went to the Brothers of the Good Shepherd,
who put him up during his homeless weekend.
In August of that year, he walked the length of Toronto's waterfront
to get to know the harbour.
To anyone cynical enough to suggest these were publicity stunts,
Mr. ARCHER had an answer: Honni soit qui mal y pense (roughly,
evil to him who thinks evil). Whatever it was, it worked, and
in the 1969 elections, Mr.
ARCHER was back on council. "His politics
were old-fashioned progressive conservative, and I mean that
as a complement, a type that's almost lost now," says Mr.
CROMBIE,
whose term on council overlapped with Mr.
ARCHER's until 1972.
"He was progressive on social issues and pretty strict on economic
and financial issues. He was a man of principles -- his own."
In all, Mr.
ARCHER represented three midtown and downtown wards,
and served on a slew of influential committees and boards, including
works, transportation and planning. He fought for better pensions
for municipal employees, improvements to welfare and was chiefly
responsible for building the city's new fire boat. He also co-ordinated
the Yonge Street mall, a popular pedestrian walkway closed to
traffic that lasted for a few years in the early 1970s.
He clashed with council on two major issues: a 45-foot height
bylaw and the decision not to have separate elections for Metro
and the city. He called the latter "the greatest tragedy of this
council."
Mr. ARCHER lost to a left-wing candidate in the 1974 election
but the next year, he was appointed commissioner of a provincial
review of the Niagara region, followed by many years on the Toronto
Historical Board. In 1997, he received the Toronto Award of Merit.
His fight against the status quo did not wane. In 1986, a task
force on which Mr.
ARCHER served suggested more than a dozen
changes to the municipal voting process, including holding elections
on a Sunday in October, with separate election days for mayor,
council and school trustees.
Mr. ARCHER once said that voters make a few mistakes, but not
as many as politicians. "I only know I needed to do what I considered
the right thing," he said, "whether I stood alone or not."
William Lee
ARCHER was born in Hamilton on September 25, 1919,
and died in Toronto of heart failure on March 6. He was 85. He
is survived by his wife, Gwendolyn (née
BAMFORD,) and a daughter,
Janet. A service will be held at a later date.
C... Names CS... Names CSI... Names Welcome Home
CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-05-14 published
Brereton GREENHOUS,
Historian 1929-2005
Ottawa academic raised Canadian hackles with a controversial
book that showed First World War ace Billy
BISHOP 'was a very
brave man who was also a very bold liar'
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Saturday, May
14, 2005, Page S9
If Brereton "Ben"
GREENHOUS loved a good rhubarb, as his Friends
and colleagues attest, he got a big one three years ago when
he was accused of smearing a Canadian icon.
Trouble was, this was no half-baked, armchair history by a revisionist
quack, but a meticulously researched 232-page work by a professional
historian that concluded that Canadian First World War flying
ace and virtual household name Billy
BISHOP was a fraud, a calculating
and "mighty" liar, and wholly undeserving of the British Empire's
highest military decoration, the Victoria Cross.
Through 25 years as an historian at the directorate of history
in the Department of National Defence, Mr.
GREENHOUS authored
and co-authored many popular and professional works, ranging
from regimental histories, chronicles of the battles at Dieppe
and Vimy, Canada's contributions to the Second World War, and
official histories of Canada's air force.
But it was his 2002 book, The Making of Billy Bishop, for which
he will be chiefly remembered by many, and reviled by some. Expanding
on a monograph in the prestigious Canadian Historical Review
titled "The Sad Case of Billy Bishop, V.C.," which he had written
more than a decade earlier, Mr.
GREENHOUS accused Mr.
BISHOP
of exaggerations, fibs and flat-out lies, claiming that only
27 of the storied airman's 72 victory claims withstood close
scrutiny. Mr.
BISHOP's "was still a very impressive performance,"
he wrote, "but nothing like the great hero he was made out to be."
For many Canadians, the book was an outrageous reprise of the
1983 film by Paul Cowan, The Kid Who Couldn't Mississippi, which
sparked an inconclusive Senate investigation.
For Mr. GREENHOUS, ground zero was June 2, 1917. Mr.
BISHOP,
a 23-year-old captain in the Royal Flying Corps already credited
with 22 aerial wins, took off from northwest France at dawn in
his single-seater Nieuport 17, intending to strike a German aerodrome,
solo. His most famous exploit had it that he shot down three
enemy aircraft, two just as they were taking off. The audacious
pilot sustained return fire, beat a hasty departure below four
enemy scout aircraft, and landed an hour later, his own plane
in tatters.
Two months of investigations later, King George V presented Mr.
BISHOP with the Victoria Cross at Buckingham Palace. He was one
of just three Canadian World War I pilots to be awarded the coveted
Victoria Cross, and it was the only one bestowed in the absence
of eyewitness testimony.
For Mr. GREENHOUS, there was one big problem: The mission never
happened. He cited, among many things, a lack of German records
and eyewitnesses, Mr.
BISHOP's own combat report on the raid
(in which he was unable to identify the location of the airfield)
and the fact that the young pilot had a checkered past. After
all, he acknowledged in his autobiography that he had cheated
on his exams at the Royal Military College. Besides which, Mr.
GREENHOUS pointed out, that on the day Mr.
BISHOP claimed to
have engaged the Red Baron in a dogfight, Richthofen had just
scored his 50th win and was grounded pending personal kudos from
the Kaiser.
As for the damage to Mr.
BISHOP's fighter, Mr.
GREENHOUS strongly
suggested that the pilot touched down in France soon after taking
off, and sprayed his own plane with bullets to substantiate his
story. Fellow historians, already piqued by the other accusations,
had a field day with this one, asking what kind of sane pilot
would deliberately weaken an already structurally flawed aircraft,
and noting that it would have taken two people to restart the
plane: one in the cockpit and the other to swing the propeller.
" 'I say, Pierre, would you mind coming over here and pulling
my prop after I have shot up my aircraft?' I don't think so,"
sniffed Lt.-Col. David
BASHOW, a fighter pilot and assistant
professor of history at the Royal Military College who dismissed
Mr. GREENHOUS's book in these pages as "frankly mean-spirited,
full of unsubstantiated conclusions and heavy with innuendo."
Col. BASHOW declined to comment for this article, conceding that
while Mr. GREENHOUS raised awareness of Mr.
BISHOP, there was
a "fundamental disconnect" between the two historians.
Through thick and thin, Mr.
GREENHOUS stood his ground. "Mr.
BISHOP was a very brave man who was also a very bold liar and
he made up most of his claims, including his famous Victoria
Cross raid," he said in a 2002 interview. "His superiors were
trying to build a hero in order to match [the German pilot] Von
Richthofen, the Red Baron, and so they encouraged him to exaggerate
his claims."
Headlines blazed, Canadians were aghast that a national treasure
could be so besmirched, and military historians scrambled to
rebut. Veterans said they felt like they'd been kicked in the
gut. How convenient for Mr.
GREENHOUS, many of them snipped,
that voices from the Great War, including those who had flown
with Mr. BISHOP, had been all but silenced by mortality.
Mr. GREENHOUS, a large bear of a man who disarmed many with his
gentle manner and soft British accent, never shrank from the
controversy, even amid calls for his federally-funded head. "Ben
loved to start a good fight and he was never one to tolerate
political correctness," chuckled Hugh
HALLIDAY, a historian who
co-wrote a short history of Canada's air force with Mr.
GREENHOUS.
"As many of us do as we get older, we have an increasing intolerance
for bullshit. And Ben could sniff it out."
Mr. GREENHOUS was a "very sound" historian but was "off the mark
in one respect," Mr.
HALLIDAY conceded: He tried to prove a negative.
Even so, while "there is no proof" that Billy
BISHOP pulled off
his raid, there is also none that he didn't.
Mr. GREENHOUS came to history relatively late in life, having
studied at Carleton and Queen's universities in his late 30s.
He arrived in Canada en route to New Zealand but was waylaid
in Ottawa after meeting his future wife. He never left, save
for two years of doctoral study in Dublin.
That was after a youth filled with travel and adventure. Too
young to serve in the Second World War, he was drafted into the
British army in 1947 and worked in an intelligence unit in Austria
during the Cold War.
He made his way to the then-British colony of Malaya to manage
a rubber plantation, and later served as a peace officer and
liaison between the national police force and the British Army
during the Malaya Emergency, a 12-year-long Communist insurgency.
On his return to Britain, Mr.
GREENHOUS preferred an unconventional
mode of travel: He walked across Afghanistan with a caravan.
Back home, he fished for lobster, with little success.
In the end, most military historians remained unconvinced but
some came to an entente with Mr.
GREENHOUS's theory about Billy
BISHOP:
The lack of information to prove Mr.
BISHOP's claims
was the same lack of evidence that supported Mr.
GREENHOUS's thesis.
"We had a difference of opinion," said Steven
DIETER, a graduate
student at the Royal Military College and former historian at
the Billy Bishop Heritage Museum in the flyer's native Owen Sound,
Ontario "But that's part of being an historian. You put it out
there for public scrutiny, and he was unafraid to do that."
For many, it was a shame it took such acrimony to focus attention
on a Canadian hero.
Brereton GREENHOUS was born June 12, 1929 in Bishop's Castle,
Shropshire, England, and died in Arnprior, Ontario on March 31,
2005 of liver cancer. He was 75. He leaves his wife and one son,
Carl, a professional hockey player and coach in England.
C... Names CS... Names CSI... Names Welcome Home
CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-05-27 published
Ted ARCAND,
Diplomat: 1934-2005
Outspoken Canadian ambassador to Lebanon during the 1982 invasion
by Israel was a 'hero in Beirut' and the last Western diplomat
to leave
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Friday, May 27,
2005, Page S7
Surveying the charred rubble of his West Beirut residence one
July day in that wretched summer of 1982, Ted
ARCAND pronounced,
"This is the work of a child of Israel." It was a bit more than
seven weeks into Israel's wrenching invasion of Lebanon and siege
of Beirut and the Canadian ambassador's fifth-floor apartment
in the seaside Muslim sector of the Lebanese capital had sustained
heavy fire and blast damage when an Israeli jet attacked a building
across the street.
It was "unbelievable that people are treated like this," Mr.
ARCAND lamented, noting that 80 people had been killed in the
raid. "So much for pinpoint bombing."
Israel's behaviour had disappointed him: "I always had an enormous
admiration for the Israelis, their musicians, their men of science,
which I try to think of despite my travels in south Lebanon,"
he told the Associated Press. "I have seen all the human misery...
and I wonder where the Israel I knew has gone." To his detractors,
Mr. ARCAND failed to understand Israel's plight, or didn't care
and in a most undiplomatic fashion. Some charged that his
remarks betrayed a glaring lack of impartiality and maybe even
sympathy toward the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Others lauded him for sheltering over 100 Palestinian women and
children in the Canadian embassy, and for his principled and
singular courage, evidenced by the fact that he was the last
high-level Western diplomat to leave West Beirut.
Why did he stay when he could have easily bugged out, probably
with Ottawa's blessing? Partly because the Department of External
Affairs, as it was then called, did not order him and his skeleton
staff out of Beirut until August 2, 1982 -- nearly two months
after the Israeli incursion began, and then only to the town
of Jounieh, about 20 kilometres north of the capital -- but also
because he had "a deep sense of duty," said his son, Jean-Louis,
who was then just 17 and went through the ordeal with his parents.
"He was scandalized and shocked by what was going on. [But] people
from his generation were profoundly idealistic Canadians, part
of the Trudeau generation. He was a typical example of a francophone
who did well by dint of the Trudeau years. These people really
believed in their jobs and in representing their country."
His boss, then external affairs minister Mark
MacGUIGAN, backed
him up. "He was doing a great service for his country... for
the cause of world peace," Mr.
MacGUIGAN told the House of Commons
in August of 1982, stressing that Mr.
ARCAND was ordered out
for his own safety. Indeed, just a few weeks earlier, the House
unanimously adopted a resolution -- a very rare occurrence --
praising Mr.
ARCAND for his "tireless dedication and unflinching
devotion to duty."
Mr. ARCAND described Beirut as "a living hell... truly a scene
from Dante's Inferno." With tears welling in his eyes, he said
the destruction caused by Israel's land, sea and air bombardment,
"would make Berlin of 1944 look like a tea party." He also criticized
the early withdrawal of peacekeeping forces from West Beirut,
saying the move was a major factor leading to the massacres in
September of 1982 of at least 800 Palestinians, including many
women and children, in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps at
the hands of the Phalange, a Christian militia.
A mainstay of U.S. network newscasts, Mr.
ARCAND once stuck his
telephone out the window of his residence and asked the reporter
on the line, "does that sound like a ceasefire to you?"
As Mr. MacGUIGAN wrote in his memoirs, Mr.
ARCAND stayed behind
in Beirut to assist those who needed visas and to help keep up
the spirits of the populace. As a result, he "suffered Israeli
indignities not visited on any other ambassador." Because he
had to cross Israeli barricades to bring supplies into West Beirut,
his car was stopped and searched repeatedly, despite the fact
that it had diplomatic licence plates and flew the Canadian flag.
Such searches were "in total contravention of the Vienna accords
on the treatment of diplomatic personnel. The Israeli government
knew that and was aware of what was going on but was either unable
or unwilling to bring [then General Ariel] Sharon and the military
to heel," Mr.
MacGUIGAN wrote.
In the end, the department persuaded Mr.
MacGUIGAN to accept
an "insincere letter of regret from [then Israeli prime minister
Yitzhak] Shamir."
Mr. ARCAND was urged to stand his ground, at least until the
order to move came through. That same day, one of two local embassy
employees who had asked to stay for personal reasons was shot
to death.
Two days later, Canada delivered a formal diplomatic protest
to Tel Aviv, calling on Israel to stop its bombardment. "He was
a hero in Beirut. The fact that he stayed made him an enormous
hit with the citizens," said Peyton
LYON, a foreign-affairs analyst
and long-time critic of Israel who knew Mr.
ARCAND from the Middle
East Discussion Group, an Ottawa salon for retired diplomats.
"But he never got the recognition he and his wife deserved for
staying behind."
Born in the wheat-farming region of eastern Alberta, Mr.
ARCAND
studied history at Laval and McMaster universities. It was at
the latter where he met wife, the English-born Jennifer
GARNER-
ASHMORE,
whose family was scandalized that she married a devout Catholic.
A career diplomat who joined the foreign service in 1957, Mr.
ARCAND had postings to Czechoslovakia, Cameroon, Tanzania, the
Vatican and Denmark under his belt before being assigned as ambassador
to Lebanon (with concurrent accreditation to Jordan and Syria)
in 1979, in the thick of the country's civil war. Despite regular
firefights between Muslim and Christian factions, car bombings
and sniper attacks, "life was fairly agreeable," recalled his
son, now an economist with the French government. "A lot of people
simply adapted."
Mr. ARCAND was among the first Western diplomats to discern a
groundswell of Islamic fundamentalism. Officially, Canada forbade
contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization at the time
unofficially, related his son, Mr.
ARCAND had extensive dealings
with the organization, including with Yasser Arafat.
His son believes that mandarins in Ottawa assumed his father
had gone soft on Palestinians. "That's why people tend to get
transferred. You end up being more of a representative to people
you are accredited to than of your own country."
Following the tumult of Lebanon, Mr.
ARCAND was sent to Hungary
and followed that with a four-year stint in Ottawa as chief of
protocol. After that, he returned to the Holy See, this time
as ambassador. He loved the job. "The Vatican for him was most
efficient intelligence-gathering organization in the world,"
his son said. "It was pure political work."
Back in Ottawa for good in 1993, Mr.
ARCAND did a series of jobs
at External Affairs involving protocol and security but his heart
wasn't in it. His wife died the same year, said his son: "He
could not fathom serving abroad without her."
Théodore Jean
ARCAND was born in Bonnyville, Alberta., on June
25, 1934, and died in Montreal on April 16, 2005, of a heart
attack. He was 70. Besides his son, he leaves three sisters.
C... Names CS... Names CSI... Names Welcome Home
CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-06-13 published
CSILLAG,
Ferenc▼
(June▼ 24, 1955-June 10, 2005)
Ferko passed away June 10, 2005 at 9: 10 a.m. after a courageous
battle with cancer. Through it, he was surrounded and supported
by his family, Friends, colleagues, students and staff. Professor
and Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of
Toronto at Mississauga, Ferko was an exceptional scholar internationally
renowned. He was a leader and trained several generations of
students and graduate students. He liked people and his Friends
are many and all over the world. Above all he was a family person
loved dearly at home. He is survived by his devoted mother Eva
VERTES, his beloved wife Marie-Josee
FORTIN, his three children
Balint CSILLAG,
Bori▼
CSILLAG and Julia
CSILLAG and his stepson
Ian MERRILL-
FORTIN.
The▼ family will receive Friends at Cardinal
Funeral Homes (92 Annette Street; 416-762-8141; www.cardinalfuneralhomes.com)
Tuesday, June 14, 2005, from 16: 00 to 21:00. A remembrance ceremony
will be held at 19: 00. In lieu of flowers, sympathy may be expressed
by donations to the Canadian Cancer Society (www.cancer.ca).
C... Names CS... Names CSI... Names Welcome Home
CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-07-21 published
Joseph RAYA,
Cleric,
Scholar And Writer 1916-2005
Melkite Greek Catholic Archbishop sought peace in the Middle
East, marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and was beaten by the
Ku Klux Klan. He retired to a small Ontario village and, this
year, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Thursday, July
21, 2005, Page S7
Toronto -- Archbishop Joseph
RAYA would have loved it. Yesterday,
July 20, would have marked the 65th anniversary of his becoming
a deacon in the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, one of the minority
Eastern rites of Catholicism, and the 64th anniversary of his
ordination as a priest. Today is also the 40th day -- a biblically
significant number -- following his peaceful death in the town
of Barry's Bay, Ontario at the age of 88.
To boot, yesterday was the feast day of St. Elias the Prophet.
In Israel, and
in Archbishop
RAYA's native Lebanon, the day is
commemorated with night-long fireworks displays because Elias
is believed to have ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot. So
last night, not far from the peaceful setting of Madonna House,
the Catholic lay community in Combermere, a village 200 kilometres
west of Ottawa to which Archbishop
RAYA retired in 1990, there
was a display of fireworks along the Madawaska River to celebrate
a life spent preaching peace and non-violence. Besides, the bishop
loved fireworks.
It seems there isn't much, or anyone, Archbishop
RAYA didn't
love. He is remembered for an easy smile and for loving unconditionally,
perhaps even inordinately. "He was a great, loving human being,"
recalls Lesya Sabada-Nahachewsky of the department of religious
studies and anthropology at the University of Saskatchewan, who
is writing a biography of Archbishop
RAYA. "He knew that one
of the hardest things to do -- probably the hardest -- is to
love and forgive the enemy."
He lived that Christian ethic, literally, during and after at
least two beatings administered by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
It was the early 1960s in Birmingham, Alabama, and Archbishop
RAYA was a parish priest in one of the most segregated cities
in the American south. He was a friend of Martin Luther King
Jr. and had linked arms with him and other black leaders in civil-rights
marches. He was also an outspoken critic of segregation, including
at his own church. As a result, Archbishop
RAYA received three
hooded visitors at his rectory one hot night. He was dragged
out of town and thrashed.
"While they were beating him, they called him a nigger lover,"
says Prof. Sabada-Nahachewsky. "And he responded, 'Yes, I am
a nigger lover, and I am a Ku Klux Klan lover too.' "
Just 14 months ago, the ailing cleric took a phone call at Madonna
House. "Is this Father Joe?" the creaking voice queried. It was
one of the Klansmen. He had tracked down his erstwhile victim
to rural Ontario to ask forgiveness. Since Archbishop
RAYA was
in the forgiveness business, it was granted.
Friends and followers recall a globetrotting priest best known
for seeking reconciliation between Christians, Muslims and Jews
in the Middle East, and for his translation of the Byzantine
liturgy from Arabic to English. For his life's work, he was nominated,
just prior to his death, for this year's Nobel Peace Prize.
Joseph RAYA was born in Zahle, in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, on
the Feast of the Assumption ("I was not yet born when my blood
started praying," he later wrote). Following primary studies
in Paris and ordination from the White Fathers' seminary in Jerusalem,
he taught in his native town and was later assigned to become
superintendent of schools in Cairo.
He immigrated to the U.S. in 1950 and, from 1952 to 1968, served
in Birmingham in the thick of the historic and often violent
battle for civil rights. "Few major decisions were made in the
civil rights struggle without his participation and blessing,"
wrote Karl Friedman, a member of Birmingham's Jewish community,
in documents supporting Archbishop
RAYA's candidacy for the Nobel
Prize.
Recognizing the need to modernize his church, he translated the
Byzantine missal from Arabic to English. A decade later, he produced
an English rendition of Byzantine Daily Worship, which won hearty
endorsement from his Orthodox counterparts and is still considered
the standard. His first connection to Madonna House, founded
in 1947 by Russian baroness Catherine de Hueck Doherty and now
a community of about 200 laypeople and priests who lead lives
of poverty, chastity and obedience, was in 1959, when he became
its first associate priest.
He served as a research aide during the historic Second Vatican
Council of 1962-1965, which sought to update the church.
Consecrated an archbishop in 1967 with the title of Metropolitan
of Akko, Haifa, Nazareth and All Galilee, he moved to northern
Israel and took up the Palestinians' cause in the sensitive period
following the 1967 Six-Day War. In August of 1972, he ordered
all his Galilean churches closed one Sunday and directed what
was until then the largest demonstration by a non-Jew in Israel
when he led 24,000 Muslims, Christians and Jews on a peaceful
march on the Knesset in Jerusalem to demand the return of residents
to two Arab villages that had been evacuated in the 1948 War
of Independence.
"He cultivated life while he inhabited deadly realities," commented
Prof. Sabada-Nahachewsky. "His peaceful, nonviolent approach
to conflicts really endeared him to people on both sides of often
bitter disputes." Indeed, Archbishop
RAYA became a popular figure
among Israeli peaceniks. But he also angered his own higher-ups
when he sold church lands to Arab farmers at bargain prices.
In 1974, he abruptly quit (though he kept the title and office).
Various accounts of his life and his own letter of resignation
provide cryptic reasons for the resignation, but the trigger
was straightforward.
"It was interference from higher authorities within the Vatican
and his own hierarchy," explains Prof. Sabada-Nahachewsky. He
felt, she added, that the Vatican favoured Roman Catholics and
ignored its Eastern siblings. "His problem with the Vatican was
that it was colonizing Eastern Christians there."
He then established a permanent residence at Madonna House, wrote,
and taught at various institutes of higher learning, including
St. Paul's University in Ottawa. The bucolic life lasted until
1985, when he was asked to return to war-torn Lebanon to teach
at a seminary and later, to head a diocese in the country's south,
where he helped plant thousands of trees and vineyards.
His return to Madonna House in 1990 was for good and he used
the time to write more than a dozen books on Byzantine liturgy,
culture and worship. "God is not an old bachelor in the sky,"
he would insist. "God is relationship!"
God also had a sense of humour, he reasoned, and so did he. Rev.
Ron CAFEO,
Archbishop
RAYA's aide-de-camp for the last 25 years,
recalls: "He used to carry a card saying that he wanted to donate
his body to science. Then, during one hospital trauma, we were
changing his gown and he saw himself in a full length mirror...
naked, and exclaimed, 'Oh, my God! Ron, tear up that card! Nobody
would want this body!' And that was the end of that."
Despite heart troubles, he continued attending overseas synods
of Melkite bishops, the last in 1998. "He was always pushing
his Melkite church to be more authentic to its roots," Father
CAFEO said.
Archbishop
RAYA's manifold spiritual skills were perhaps best
summed up in his eulogy by Bishop Ibrahim M.
IBRAHIM, head of
the Melkite Catholics in Canada: "He never stopped being a generator
of peace, an engine of hope, a fountain of generosity, an ocean
of honesty, a forest of pride, a fortress of charity, a planet
of knowledge, a Melkite dynamo and a garden of love. He was all
of that and much more, because he had Christ living within him
and because he reflected the bounty of the
son of Manitoba"
The bishop's own advice was plain enough, though it's worth wondering
how many of us could live it: "Give a little, it costs a lot.
Give a lot, it costs a little. Give everything, it costs nothing
at all."
Joseph Marie
RAYA was born in Zahle, Lebanon, on August 15, 1916.
He died of heart failure on June 10, 2005, in Barry's Bay, Ontario,
at the age of 88. He leaves one brother and several nieces and
nephews.
C... Names CS... Names CSI... Names Welcome Home
CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-11-15 published
James McLEOD,
Writer,
Lawyer And Teacher (1947-2005)
University of Western Ontario professor who was regarded as 'the
conscience of the family law bar and judiciary in Canada' was
misunderstood as a sexist reactionary
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Tuesday, November
15, 2005, Page S9
Toronto -- It's no small feat to be compared in one's lifetime
to libertarian journalist H.L. Mencken and right-wing radio host
Rush
Limbaugh.
James
McLEOD just sought to make the world a better
place but, on at least one occasion, was adjudged to have done
the opposite.
A prolific writer, editor, appellate lawyer and professor at
the University of Western Ontario's law school for 33 years,
Prof. McLEOD was remembered by colleagues as Canada's pre-eminent
barrister and scholar of family law. Those close to him recall
a frighteningly encyclopedic knowledge that could be summoned
in an instant, with clarity, accuracy and wit. His mastery of
family law was so prodigious and widely known that a judge once
openly wondered whether Prof.
McLEOD slept with a dictaphone.
Known to Friends as Jay and to family members as Gary (his middle
name,) Prof.
McLEOD's name was virtually synonymous with Canadian
family law and all its arcana. As editor-in-chief of Reports
of Family Law for 27 years, he screened tens of thousands of
cases -- virtually every written family law ruling in the country.
And as author of more than 1,000 case commentaries (known as
annotations), he helped shape and develop important legal concepts.
Those annotations were the stuff of legend; while highly regarded,
they were not always flattering.
"Much as a producer of a new Broadway play waits anxiously to
read the reviews by the critics the next morning, judges were
always apprehensive about what Prof.
McLEOD might think of their
decision and whether they would pass his rigorous standards,"
wrote long-time colleague, co-author and self-described tag-team
partner, London, Ontario, lawyer Alfred
MAMO, whose firm Prof.
McLEOD had joined for 17 years to write opinions and handle appeals.
One tribute to Prof.
McLEOD's "phenomenal" stature in family
law is the fact that his writings have been quoted with approval
by virtually every court in the land with jurisdiction in family
law, and on numerous occasions by the Supreme Court of Canada,
Mr. MAMO said. "To a large degree," he added, "Jay was the conscience
of the family law bar and judiciary in Canada," and his comments
were "the gold standard" for legal analysis in family law.
Sometimes, his parsing of a case was longer than the case itself.
Toronto family lawyer Harold
NIMAN, a long-time friend whose
daily e-mail exchange with Prof.
McLEOD would begin at 5: 30 a.m.,
recalls a court ruling this year on whether a set time a child
spends with one parent should be calculated in hours or days.
The decision was contained in half a page. Prof.
McLEOD's annotation
ran for four pages "as he analyzed in his Einstein-like way the
abstruse existential territory of time-space and relativity,
and whether sleeping and being in school qualified" as time spent
with a parent.
Prof. McLEOD was "often like a dog with a bone when it came to
a legal issue.... He was without a doubt the most energetic and
entertaining speaker I have ever heard. He could pack more into
a lecture than any person I have heard or seen. I was so exhausted
after hearing him speak that I often needed to have a nap," said
Mr. NIMAN, whose firm Prof.
McLEOD joined as counsel in 2003.
"Jay was the H.L. Mencken of family law."
He was able to reduce the most intricate and forbidding legal
case to its "barest human essentials," wrote University of Western
Ontario colleague Rande
KOSTAL in the student newspaper Nexus.
"He regarded the law as a way -- an imperfect way -- of imposing
some rational order on the unruly tragicomedy of everyday life.
And he strove, with legendary success, to be the funniest man
on the funniest subject of them all: the rituals of human love,
marriage and parenthood."
To others, he wasn't always so funny.
In the late 1980s and early '90s, Prof.
McLEOD championed the
"causal connection" theory of spousal support, which posited
that a person shouldn't be obliged to support an ex-spouse unless
the marriage "caused" or contributed to the ex's need for support.
His theory was promptly attacked as reactionary and sexist; according
to a 2000 profile in Lawyer's Weekly, he was once introduced
at a conference as "family law's answer to Rush Limbaugh." (He
was also reportedly pelted with buns at a dinner.) A band of
family law practitioners even wrote and performed a protest song,
The Ballad of Jay McLeod.
A 1992 Supreme Court of Canada decision put an end to the theory
and, although Prof.
McLEOD later said he regretted that it had
been used to hurt long-term spouses (almost always middle-aged
women), he defended it: "All the causal connection theory said
was, 'You come into marriage as individuals. You leave marriage
as individuals. And you shouldn't have a right to support from
the other person unless somehow the circumstances that cause
you to need money are somehow related to the relationship," he
said in the Lawyer's Weekly piece. "That was it."
Born to a full-time homemaker and a labourer who had served in
the wartime Canadian navy, he was the oldest of five siblings
and the first member of his family to attend university. And
he did so with a vengeance. After two years as an undergraduate
at Western Ontario, he enrolled in law school (because there
was "no market for Robin Hood," he would later quip), and placed
first in each year, going on to win the Gold Medal by a wide
margin in 1971. He earned a master's degree in law at the University
of London in 1972, the year he joined University of Western Ontario's
faculty to teach corporate and commercial subjects, and two years
before his call to the Ontario bar.
In 1978, he was invited to annotate and edit the Reports of Family
Law, and he never looked back. "Once I got going in the area
and started to write these things, all of a sudden it dawns on
you, 'My God, in three pages you can have a lot of fun saying
this stuff,' " he recalled. "It took on a life of its own. The
annotations basically built and created me."
He went on to edit other legal publications, including those
on child custody and matrimonial property. Many lawyers eagerly
awaited his pithy and popular weekly on-line newsletter, This
Week in Family Law. When he died, he was the University of Western
Ontario law school's associate dean for administration and a
respected teacher at the university's Ivey School of Business.
While taking one of Prof.
McLEOD's third-year classes, an older
student, a single mother of two, turned to her friend and wondered,
"Is he always such a jerk?"
The word became a "term of endearment," chuckles Margaret
McSORLEY,
who married her professor in 1981. Years later, the two legalists
found themselves on opposite sides of a case, he representing
the wife, she the husband. They soon negotiated an agreement.
"He talked a mile a minute and would always make you laugh,"
says Ms. McSORLEY, a family lawyer who was named a judge of the
Ontario Court of Justice in 2003. "But what a stickler."
Indeed, Prof.
McLEOD was a long-time proponent of rigour in family
law. "We are law, too, and I want it treated that way," he said.
Even the Supreme Court of Canada was criticized for laxness.
"I think this court is a discretion court and that hides a multitude
of sins," he said five years ago. "I don't like undisciplined
power or uncontrolled power. I like rules. I like some form of
clearly structured discretion."
He helped set some of those rules, winning important cases before
the Ontario Court of Appeal, including Elliot v. Elliot, which
set a precedent on compensatory support in the province.
He didn't relax much, apparently. Some golf, maybe an old movie.
Mostly, he worked. He wanted to make a mark. "I'd hate to think
that I would go through life and was nothing but average as I
did it," he told Lawyer's Weekly. "So I have got an opportunity
doing this stuff, and I try to use it."
James Gary
McLEOD was born in Guelph, Ontario, on November 29,
1947, and died in New Hamburg, Ontario, on October 4, 2005, of
a heart attack. He was 57. He leaves his mother, Pauline
McLEOD,
his wife, Margaret
McSORLEY, five children and four grandchildren.
C... Names CS... Names CSI... Names Welcome Home
CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-11-25 published
Marianne BLUGER,
Poet: (1945-2005)
A victim of breast cancer, she died the day she published her
10th volume of poetry, titled The Eternities
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Friday, November
25, 2005, Page S9
Toronto -- Marianne
BLUGER wrote poetry because, as she once
said, it was all she was ever good at. Only those very close
to her know whether that bit of characteristic modesty was really
true. The rest of us just know that she was a very, very good
poet.
Although not a household name, Ms.
BLUGER published 10 volumes
of clean, precise, evocative verse ranging from intense lyrical
poems to delicate, spare examples of haiku and tanka (traditionally,
31 syllables in five lines). She was among Canada's leading and
most respected practitioners of Japanese poetic traditions, admittedly
not a big community, but her work won a Canada Council Arts Award
and the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry. She had a strong
following in the United States, where she won first prize in
the annual Tanka Splendor contest, and
in Japan, which honoured
her with the Hoshito-Mori Prize.
She worked until the breast cancer, first diagnosed 13 years
ago, claimed her, correcting her poems by ear as her husband
read them at her bedside. She died on the day her 10th volume
was launched in Toronto. It is titled The Eternities.
A deeply religious, even mystical Anglican, Ms.
BLUGER also drew
on her Jewish heritage, a long experience with Zen meditation,
and western political activism. Her haikus and tanka have been
likened to photographs or paintings, providing quick snapshots,
but in three dimensions. Known for their Zen-like simplicity
and grace, they describe mundane events such as highway driving
and the onset of winter as things of beauty. As one critic said,
they are about how to see.
"There was absolutely no B.S. in her work, no pretense at all,"
said Richard Stevenson, an old friend of Ms.
BLUGER's who teaches
poetry at Lethbridge Community College. "It was all stripped
down to the barest elements. She made it look easy."
She wasn't published until 1981, when a collection titled The
Thumbless Man is at the Piano made its appearance. She was 36
at the time. Other volumes included Gathering Wild (1987), Tamarack
& Clearcut (1997), a book of haiku illustrated with photographs
by Rudi Haas, and Scissor, Paper, Woman (2000). A 1998 volume,
Gusts, was the first book-length collection of tanka published
in Canada, and inspired a journal by the same name devoted entirely
to the form.
"Hats off to you, Marianne, for showing the rest of us untutored
louts how it's done," enthused Mr. Stevenson in reviewing this
year's publication of Ms.
BLUGER's book of tanka, Zen Mercies/Small
Satoris. "This book, rightfully, should inspire generations of
poets interested in the unvarnished, real McCoy."
Like this lean offering from Gusts:
In a ruined orchard
among drenched leaves
I found you these
mist-silvered
fat blue plums.
Mr. BLUGER's poems reflect a deep spirituality and connectedness
to nature, notes Marilyn
ROSE, a Brock University expert on 20th-century
Canadian women poets. While John McCrae's In Flanders Fields
has become a kind of anthem for these occasions, consider Ms.
BLUGER's cut-to-the-bone haiku, Remembrance Day, from Early Evening
Pieces (2003).
bagpipes wheeze
through the cenotaph mist
a thin line of vets
As Prof. ROSE points out, loss is conveyed in just three lines,
11 words and a single image. Economical? More than any editor
would dare dream.
Don't be fooled, though. That sort of austerity takes passion,
the same kind that drove her love for "that poor radical, Jeshua,
the Christ" in The Eternities, which is mostly a homage to her
father, Walter Vladimir
BLUGER. A mathematician who died in 1986,
her father was a convert to his wife's Anglicanism but did not
divulge that he had been a Jewish Holocaust survivor until his
daughter was an adult. Born in Berlin to parents who had fled
Russian pogroms, he escaped to Britain but was interned in a
prison camp. Two ships later took the inmates to safety, one
vessel going to Canada and the other to Australia. The latter
was sunk, with all aboard.
For a German Jew's daughter
how exactly was she to conduct the
business of life
when sipping a soda at the mall
she would feel fraught happiness
as some kind of criminal failure
of consciousness
Add
Zen to the mix. In the late 1960s, Ms.
BLUGER dropped out
of medical school to marry a Korean refugee and Zen master. That
was after she had turned down an offer to study philosophy at
Oxford following her graduation from McGill University, where
she befriended the poet Louis Dudek.
Though meditation and Zen's stillness appealed to her and influenced
her work, the troubled marriage didn't last. Her poem, The Zen
Master's Wife, hinted at the trauma.
On the other hand, a robust personality seemed to become even
fuller:
On my personal
Jewish Zen Christian
Calendar
every day Pesah
every day Easter
As for making a living, Ms.
BLUGER spent 25 years administering
the Ottawa-based Canadian Writers' Foundation, which provides
assistance to authors in financial need.
It was only in her late 30s that she came to see her talent as
God-given.
"Poetry moves me to a kind of reverence," she once wrote. "When
I engage with poetry, I become contemplative and mystically transported
to a deeper awareness, to a kind of enlivened, prayerful consciousness
and to gratitude...
"Poetry soothes and heals me... all I am any good at is poems."
In 1991, she married Larry
NEILY, an avid birder and fellow nature
lover whose on-line updates on his wife's failing health during
her last two months moved readers to tears.
Ms. BLUGER co-founded Christians Against Apartheid and the Tabitha
Foundation, which brings humanitarian aid to Cambodia and has
helped thousands of women there set up small businesses. She
ran her Ottawa church's Sunday school for years, and visited
the sick and elderly.
Not much frightened her, says Mr.
NEILY, "but she was often bought
to tears by the meanness of other people."
She did, however, see mostly good in people, recalls fellow Ottawa
poet Ronnie R.
BROWN. "
She was happiest to acknowledge people
and tell them she cared for them. I never saw anyone face death
with such radiance. She profoundly believed she would meet with
us later and that her work would live on. And it will."
Indeed, a posthumous volume, Nude With Scar -- the manuscript
she edited on her deathbed -- is due out next year.
Marianne
Sasha
Bluger
NEILY was born in Ottawa on August 28,
1945, and died there of cancer on October 29, 2005. She was 60.
She leaves her husband, her mother, two children, one grandchild
and three siblings.
C... Names CS... Names CSI... Names Welcome Home
CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-11-28 published
James GRAFF,
Teacher And Activist (1937-2005)
Philosophy professor was an ardent advocate of Palestinian rights
who believed in putting his teachings into action
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Monday, November
28, 2005, Page S11
Toronto -- James
GRAFF died as he had lived: Uncompromisingly.
Asked whether he wanted to be resuscitated following surgery
last month for an old tumour that had turned malignant, he queried
the doctor, "Resuscitated to what?" He would rather die, he averred,
than do anything but live at full throttle.
A professor of moral and political philosophy at the University
of Toronto's Victoria College for 40 years, Prof.
GRAFF believed
in putting his teachings into action. A passionate and tireless
advocate of Palestinian rights, he poured most of his energy
into public awareness and alleviation of the plight of Palestinian
children living under Israeli occupation and in the Arab world.
Whether that was popular did not faze him, apparently. Once,
in the early 1980s, he found a note that had been slipped under
his door, threatening to blast him into "orbit." He shrugged
it off in his typical even-keeled fashion, and Friends indulged
his rather dark sense of humour by presenting him with a coffee
mug bearing an image of the space shuttle Columbia.
His last task was helping to organize a three-day conference
on "morally responsible investment" in Israel, held in Toronto
last month, and denounced widely by Jews and Christians for ignoring
Palestinian violence and engaging in not-so subtle Israel-bashing.
While Prof.
GRAFF did use trenchant (but not anti-Semitic) language
to describe Israel's treatment of Palestinians and other Arabs,
he also criticized the Palestinian Authority's record on human
rights -- at a cost to the movement that may never be known.
In 1984, he set up and led the Near East Cultural and Educational
Foundation of Canada, a volunteer group with charitable status
that sought to broaden Canadians' understanding of the Middle
East and to provide aid in the region.
From 1986 to 1996, Prof.
GRAFF represented Near East Cultural
and Educational Foundation on the North American Co-ordinating
Committee for Non-governmental Organizations on the Question
of Palestine, a body he vice-chaired and which met regularly
at United Nations headquarters in New York (except for two meetings
in Canada that he initiated, one in Montreal in 1990 and one
in Toronto in 1994).
According to Reverend Robert
ASSALY, an Anglican priest in Ottawa
who regarded Prof.
GRAFF as a mentor and served with him on the
North American Co-ordinating Committee, concerns about how Palestinians
were treating their own began to stir among non-governmental
organizations around the time of the Oslo peace accord in 1993.
"Jim hated [violence]," Reverend
ASSALY recalled. "Not only did he
speak out against the violence, he spoke out against the violent.
He and I kind of got the whole Non-governmental Organization
movement on the Question of Palestine tossed out of the United
Nations for that."
Around 1994, when the Palestine Liberation Organization morphed
into the Palestinian Authority, "we started going after them
publicly at the United Nations on their human rights record,"
Rev. ASSALY recounted. "They fought us tooth and nail."
The Palestinian leadership tried to manipulate elections to the
co-ordinating committee year after year, but the North Americans
wouldn't bite. "As much as they tried, they couldn't take control.
They wanted to silence us on the human rights record."
Prof. GRAFF quit as vice-chair of the committee after the 1995
conference, not out of frustration, but because of poor eyesight,
a condition that began when he was 15 and ended with his being
legally blind. In any event, by 1997, fed-up Palestinian diplomats
at the United Nations dissolved their connections to Non-governmental
Organizations working on the Question of Palestine, believing,
for better or worse, they weren't needed any more.
Prof. GRAFF may have seen it coming. Four years earlier, he warned
that Non-governmental Organizations faced "a crisis of direction"
in how to act in a world following the first Gulf War. Before
the war, it had seemed there would be a breakthrough in the Palestinian
problem. Now, it didn't look so hopeful.
"It is not an overstatement to say simply that... Jim has been
an icon in the authentic movement for peace and justice in the
Middle
East,"
Reverend
ASSALY stated. "He modelled what, for me,
was a staunchly principled position, always, on everything. Jim
was, in the best sense, uncompromising."
Prof. GRAFF earned his undergraduate degree at Lafayette College
in Easton, Pa., followed by a masters and doctorate both from
Brown University in Rhode Island. He taught at Victoria College
from 1963 until his official retirement in 2003, but was still
teaching a fourth-year course on war and morality days before
he died.
Friends and colleagues can't pinpoint a specific time or event
that triggered his passion for Palestinians, but feel it could
have been a sightseeing trip he took to Israel in the mid-1970s.
He began a torrent of activity, forging alliances and Friendships
with such thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Edward Said.
Over the years, the intifadas, the 9/11 attack and the Iraq war
kept his pen and conscience busy. In 1993, and again in 1997,
he wrote to Hillary Clinton, in the wake of the former U.S. first
lady's vaunted book, It Takes a Village, offering a richly footnoted
litany of atrocities that, he said, had been committed against
Palestinian children by Israeli security forces, and reasons
why Israeli offers of peace should be regarded with suspicion.
"Maybe," he suggested, "you could sum all this up by saying:
'Bill, it takes a village, not a bantustan.' " Mrs. Clinton never
replied.
James Allan
GRAFF was born on June 30, 1937, in East Orange,
N.J., and died in Toronto on October 23, 2005, of cancer. He
leaves his wife, Aida, and two children. A memorial service will
be held at the Victoria College chapel, University of Toronto,
at 4 p.m. tomorrow.
C... Names CS... Names CSI... Names Welcome Home
CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-12-14 published
Garth TAILOR/TAYLOR,
Doctor And Humanitarian (1944-2005)
As president of
ORBIS
Canada, the ophthalmologist from Cornwall
circled the globe in a flying eye hospital to personally treat
thousands of Third World patients
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special▲ to The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, December
14, 2005, Page S9
Toronto -- The call to Ontario in 1982 came from Garth
TAILOR/TAYLOR's
beloved native Jamaica. Did Dr.
TAILOR/TAYLOR, an ophthalmologist in
Cornwall, Ontario, know of a new flying eye hospital committed
to curing blindness and eye diseases in developing countries?
He had never heard of such a thing, he replied, but he would
look into it.
Two years later, Dr.
TAILOR/TAYLOR was president of
ORBIS
Canada, and
a quiet practice in a quiet town was supplemented with a calling:
eliminating preventable blindness around the world.
It was all aboard the state-of-the-art
ORBIS
Flying
Eye
Hospital,
a converted DC-10 with a high-tech mobile surgical suite and
lecture theatre that's billed as the world's only airborne eye
hospital and training facility.
ORBIS is an international non-profit humanitarian agency that
grew from a vision that Houston ophthalmologist David Paton had
more than 20 years ago. More than one million people have received
direct medical treatment, and some 93,000 health-care professionals
have received training through its programs in more than 80 countries.
At the time of his death, Dr.
TAILOR/TAYLOR had completed 111 missions
with ORBIS, the last to Changsha, China, in September. As the
organization's busiest volunteer eye doctor, he treated thousands
of patients and trained many more doctors and surgeons in cornea,
cataract and refractive procedures, including the treatment of
ocular parasites, in more than 40 countries.
"ORBIS doesn't go to get rid of all blindness; it's developmental,"
Dr. TAILOR/TAYLOR said in 1997. "We teach them to do the surgery, or
we teach them to teach others in their country."
The philosophy jibed well with his, a Chinese proverb he was
fond of repeating in his Jamaican lilt: "Tell me and I will forget
show me and I may remember; involve me and I will understand."
Dr. TAILOR/TAYLOR's maiden mission in 1982 was to his birthplace, Jamaica.
"I found my nirvana aboard my first
ORBIS flight," he would recount.
"By treating avoidable blindness, people don't just get back
their sight, they get back their self-esteem."
He also credited the organization with making him a better doctor.
"He was this skinny kid from Montego Bay with a big, easy grin,"
remembers the current president of
ORBIS
Canada,
Ottawa retina
surgeon Brian
LEONARD, who interned with Dr.
TAILOR/TAYLOR at Ottawa
Civic Hospital. "We considered him a legend. No one knew more
about global blindness."
Sadly, there's much to know. The World Health Organization estimates
there are 45 million blind people on the planet, and 135 million
with low vision; 90 per cent of the world's blind live in developing
countries, with nine million in India, six million in China,
and seven million in Africa; every five seconds, someone in the
world goes blind. A child goes blind every minute. A 2003 report
warned that global blindness is set to increase over the next
20 years, to 76 million individuals. What fuelled Dr.
TAILOR/TAYLOR
was the sobering fact that as much as 80 per cent of global blindness
is avoidable -- 60 per cent treatable and 20 per cent preventable.
Dr. TAILOR/TAYLOR first landed in Canada at the age of 20, on a scholarship
to the East Ontario Institute of Technology in Ottawa to study
biochemical technology. "We all had to work on frogs," recalls
his wife, Beverley, who met Dr.
TAILOR/TAYLOR at the institute in the
mid-1960s. "You could tell he had a talent for surgery. His frog
was always perfect."
But he quit the program when a spot he had applied for earlier
at the University of the West Indies' medical school opened up
in Jamaica. He graduated in 1970 and returned to Ottawa, followed
by a residency in ophthalmology at Queen's University in Kingston.
In 1976, after becoming the first black ophthalmologist to graduate
from Queen's, Dr.
TAILOR/TAYLOR planned to return to Jamaica to set
up practice, but political turmoil forced him to reconsider.
Instead, he hung out a shingle in Cornwall, where he honed his
expertise in microscopic eye surgery, cornea transplants and
laser eye surgery, became chief of ophthalmology at Cornwall
Community Hospital, and taught ophthalmology at Queen's, a 90-minute
drive away.
With ORBIS,
Dr.
TAILOR/TAYLOR spent up to 14 weeks a year volunteering
in the Third World, and he recruited other Canadians as volunteer
surgeons and staff. As for the plane, it took the 25 crew members
doctors, nurses, pilots and technicians -- nine hours to convert
it into a hospital each time it landed. "I have done everything
except fly the plane," Dr.
TAILOR/TAYLOR said a few years ago. "I've
cleaned toilets, done surgery and washed the plane."
In Third World countries, the aircraft must provide power (with
its own generator), clean water (through a sterilization system)
and clean, filtered air. A satellite dish permits communication
with anyone in the world. In many countries, security is ensured
by soldiers with machine guns who patrol the tarmac around the
plane.
As well, 17 cameras, eight microphones and 54 video monitors
permit viewing surgery for 50 observers in the plane's theatre
(with potentially hundreds more in a remote location) and allow
for interaction with the surgeons in the operating room. Surgeries
are also recorded, edited and burned onto Digital Video Disks
for distribution in the host country's ophthalmic community.
Instead of the studied calm of a normal operating theatre, the
atmosphere aboard the plane was "bedlam," said Dr.
LEONARD, who
accompanied Dr.
TAILOR/TAYLOR on 14 missions. "There were engineers,
technicians, translators running around, and questions flying.
We could feel the jet blasts from other planes taking off. And
Garth would push people to their limits." But he never saw Dr.
TAILOR/TAYLOR lose his cool.
Well, maybe once. It was in Africa, and a local official refused
to board an internal flight until his palm felt a crisp $100
bill. "Garth couldn't stand that," Dr.
LEONARD recalled. "He
had a little chip on his shoulder, which we loved. But he would
never rant about a personal problem."
Dr. TAILOR/TAYLOR loved to play dominoes and consume, as well as bake,
rum-soaked fruitcakes (his parents had a bakery in Jamaica).
To anyone not used to meeting an eye doctor who was black, he
offered a great icebreaker: "Hi, I'm Dr.
TAILOR/TAYLOR, in living colour."
The ice didn't always break. Once, in Swaziland, a white man
from South Africa balked at having Dr.
TAILOR/TAYLOR operate on his
son. The man eventually gave in to his pleading son, and the
boy's sight was restored. "I welcome the uninformed, the misguided,"
Dr. TAILOR/TAYLOR told Maclean's magazine, which named him to its honour
roll last year. "It gives me the opportunity to set them straight."
This year, he was awarded the Order of Jamaica. In October, he
was the keynote speaker at Eyes on Jamaica, a program to support
ORBIS
Canada's plans to build an eye-care facility at the Bustamante
Hospital for Children in Kingston, the country's capital.
Dr. TAILOR/TAYLOR was also a co-founder of Can
SEE, the Canadian arm
of the aid agency Surgical Eye Expeditions, and he donated a
week annually aboard the Canadian National Institute for the
Blind's Eye Van, a mobile clinic designed to bring eye care to
remote areas of Northern Ontario.
Friends and colleagues recall a man who accepted many kudos with
humility. One simple letter from a patient touched him deeply,
though, because it so sublimely expressed the impact of Dr.
TAILOR/TAYLOR's
work: "I write this letter to you because prior to meeting you,
I couldn't see to write."
Garth Alfred
TAILOR/TAYLOR was born on April 29, 1944, in Montego Bay,
Jamaica, and died on November 19, 2005, after emergency surgery
at the Ottawa Heart Institute. He was 61. He leaves his wife,
Beverley, and children Leanne and Gregory.
C... Names CS... Names CSI... Names Welcome Home
CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-06-13 published
CSILLAG,
Ferenc▲
(June▲ 24, 1955-June 10, 2005)
Ferko passed away June 10, 2005 at 9: 10 a.m. after a courageous
battle with cancer. Through it, he was surrounded and supported
by his family, Friends, colleagues, students and staff. Professor
and Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of
Toronto at Mississauga, Ferko was an exceptional scholar internationally
renowned. He was a leader and trained several generations of
students and graduate students. He liked people and his Friends
are many and all over the world. Above all, he was a family person
loved dearly at home. He is survived by his devoted mother Eva
VERTES, his beloved wife Marie-Josee
FORTIN, his three children
Balint CSILLAG,
Bori▲
CSILLAG and Julia
CSILLAG and his stepson
Ian MERRILL-
FORTIN.
The▲ family will receive Friends at Cardinal
Funeral Homes, 92 Annette Street, 416-762-8141, (www.cardinalfuneralhomes.com),
Tuesday, June 14, 2005 from 16: 00 to 21:00. A remembrance ceremony
will be held at 19: 00. In lieu of flowers, sympathy may be expressed
by donations to the Canadian Cancer Society (www.cancer.ca).
C... Names CS... Names CSI... Names Welcome Home
CSILLAG - All Categories in OGSPI
CSISZAR o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-01-20 published
CSISZAR,
Ethel
Passed away peacefully, on Wednesday, January 19, 2005, in her
home, at age 83. Ethel, loving wife of the late Leslie (Laszlo).
Beloved mother of Eva, George (Irma) and Stephan (Irene). Cherished
grandmother of Andrew. Ethel will be sadly missed and fondly
remembered by all of her family and Friends. Resting at the Ogden
Funeral Home (St. Clair Chapel), 646 St. Clair Ave. W. (west
of Bathurst) on Friday from 4-8 p.m. A complete funeral service
will be held in our Chapel on Saturday afternoon at 1: 00 p.m.
Cremation.
C... Names CS... Names CSI... Names Welcome Home
CSISZAR - All Categories in OGSPI