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DUNNE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-09-01 published
McLEAN, Matthew Pollock
Born in Glasgow, Scotland on December 6, 1923. Died peacefully on August 30, 2005 at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver. Matt served overseas in World War 2, an experience that was forever with him. He will always be remembered for his kind and gentle manner, his love of family, his sense of humour and his tomatoes! His many works of art (watercolour, oil and pen and ink) will be a lasting legacy to his talent and creativity. He will be greatly missed. Matt was predeceased by his parents Archibald and Emily and brothers-law, Gregory, Alan and Robert. He leaves to mourn his wife and friend of 52 years, Varvee, loving daughter, Connie (Kathy) and son, Duncan. He is also survived twin sisters Cathie (Mark) DUNNE, Chrissie (David) LETHAM, sisters-in-law, Shirley RUTHERFORD, Mary SIMMONS and Kelly SIMMONS as well as nieces and nephews, Maureen, Michael, Ron, Andy, Mary, Ralph, Rex, Tessa, Brooke, Shannon and their families. He will be remembered fondly by many other family members and Friends. Special thanks to the staff of St. Paul's who always treated him with such kindness and dignity. It was most appreciated. Funeral Mass will be held on Friday, September 2, 10: 00 a.m. at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, 2465 Crown Street (10th and Crown), Vancouver. Graveside Service to be held at Valley View Memorial Gardens, 14644 - 72nd Ave., in Surrey at 12: 30 p.m. A reception will follow at Woodgrove Clubhouse, 2588-152nd Street, Surrey. In lieu of flowers, please make a donation to the Heart and Stroke Foundation or other charity of your choosing.
Kearney Funeral Home (604) 736-0268

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DUNNE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-03-17 published
WICKETT, Carol Lois (née HILL)
"God could not be everywhere, so he made mothers" Bravely after a brief illness, Carol passed away peacefully on Monday, March 14, 2005, in her 73rd year with family by her side. Predeceased by her husband Ralph Baxter WICKETT. Proud mother of Dean GARRETT (Karen,) Wayne GARRETT (Jackie,) MaryLou MOOREHEAD (Gordon,) Heather GARRETT and Jeffrey WICKETT (Jodi;) Loving second mom of Donald WICKETT (Margaret) and Stephen WICKETT Sr. (Georgia) Cherished grandmother of Michael and Ross GARRETT, Brenda COWIE (Brent), Stephen WICKETT Jr. (Kristy), Kelly DUNNE (Jamie), Christine and Catherine WICKETT and Great-grandmother of Jaida, Kaitlyn, Shayna, Jessica and Nicholas; Dear sister of Cathy PAGET (Ralph,) Doreen HILL and the late Annilee ROBSON (Ken.) Carol will be sadly missed by her many nieces, nephews, family and Friends and fondly remembered by former colleagues and students as a devoted grade 1 teacher. Tea biscuits, car rides and cuddle time will be deeply missed by Baxter. We would like to thank all of the kind and caring staff at the Mississauga Trillium Health Centre. For those who wish, donations made to the Canadian Cancer Society would be greatly appreciated. A Memorial Service to celebrate Carol's life will be held at the Turner and Porter Yorke Chapel, 2357 Bloor St. W., at Windermere, Saturday, April 9, 2005. Visitation from 2 p.m. until the time of the Funeral Service in the Chapel at 3 p.m. Reception to follow Service at 4 p.m. at The Old Mill Inn, Westminster Room. "High Rollers Mom! You could not have done a better job if you tried!"

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DUNNE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-04-09 published
CROSBY, Mary (née DUNNE)
Retired from Metro Toronto Separate School Board. Passed away peacefully on Friday, April 8th, 2005 at the Gibson Long Term Care Centre, at the age of 84. Predeceased by her beloved husband Ken and son Joe. Sadly missed by her children Thomas, Michael (Erica), Stephen, Peter, and Mary-Jo; grandchildren Jessica, Matthew, Ken, Andrew, Brian, Ben and Jon. Predeceased by her brothers Patrick and William and sister Helen STORMS. Friends may call on Saturday from 7 to 9 p.m. and on Sunday from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. at the R.S. Kane Funeral Home, 6150 Yonge Street (at Goulding, south of Steeles). Funeral Mass to be held on Monday, April 11th, 2005 at 10 a.m. at Blessed Trinity Roman Catholic Church, 3220 Bayview Ave. (north of Finch). Interment Holy Cross Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, donations to either ShareLife or Heart and Stroke Foundation would be appreciated.

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DUNNE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-04-23 published
TEOLIS, Helen
Peacefully at the McCall Centre, Etobicoke on Friday, April 22, 2005, at the age of 88. Helen, beloved wife of the late John TEOLIS. Loving mother of Joanne and her husband Ted SIMICK, John and his wife Beth. Fondly remembered grandmother of Michelle and her husband Steve DUNNE, Jason and his wife Josee, Kelly, Cortleigh and her husband Kevin VOWLES, Johnny and great-grandmother of Kayla, Skye, Meagan, Ryan and Taryn. Mrs. TEOLIS is resting at the funeral home of Skinner and Middlebrook Ltd., 128 Lakeshore Rd. E. (1 block west of Hurontario St.), Mississauga on Sunday from 2-6 p.m. Funeral Mass in St. Christopher's Church, 1171 Clarkson Rd. N., Mississauga on Monday, April 25, 2005 to 10: 30 a.m. Private interment Holy Cross Cemetery, Thornhill. In lieu of flowers, memorial donations to the Heart and Stroke Foundation would be greatly appreciated.

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DUNNELL o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2005-02-05 published
PAYNE, William▼ John▼ " Bill▼"
Peacefully, at Bluewater Health, Norman Street Site, Sarnia, Friday,▼ February▼ 4, 2005, William John "Bill" PAYNE, 70, of Sumac Lodge, Sarnia, formerly of Crediton and Thedford. Beloved husband of the late Lois Ruth (CLARKE) PAYNE (1996.) Loved mother and mother-in-law of Bob PAYNE and Corry ELLIOT/ELLIOTT of Parkhill, Cheryl and Rob DUNNELL of R.R.#2 Dashwood, Ken and Laurie PAYNE of Watford, Bill PAYNE Jr.▼ of Crediton, Jim PAYNE and Shelly WHITE/WHYTE of Lucan, Brian and Dawn PAYNE of Windsor, Tracy PAYNE and Dennis EVANS of Thedford, Kevin and Theressa PAYNE of Parkhill. Loved by his many grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. Dear brother and brother-in-law of Clara and Ron WADE, Marion▼ PAYNE, Lillian JOYCE, Liz and Bruce CURRIE, Georgette▼ and Allan CAMPBELL, Edna and Don CLARKE, Bob PAYNE, Sharon and Dave MEDD, Shelly and Tim SULLIVAN. Remembered by his many nieces, nephews and their families. Predeceased by granddaughter Aimee PAYNE (1998,) parents William and Marion (COUSINS) PAYNE. Resting▼ at the T. Harry Hoffman and Sons Funeral Home, Dashwood, with visitation Monday, 2 to 4 p.m. and 7 to 9 p.m., where the funeral service will be held Tuesday, February 8, 2005 at 11 a.m. The Reverend Sheila MacGREGOR officiating. Interment Crediton Cemetery. If desired, memorial donations to the Alzheimer Society or charity of choice would be appreciated. Condolences at www.hoffmanfuneralhome.com

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DUNNELL o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2005-02-07 published
PAYNE, William▲ John▲ " Bill▲"
Peacefully, at Bluewater Health, Norman Street Site, Sarnia, Friday,▲ February▲ 4, 2005, William John "Bill" PAYNE, 70, of Sumac Lodge, Sarnia, formerly of Crediton and Thedford. Beloved husband of the late Lois Ruth (CLARKE) PAYNE (1996.) Loved father and father-in-law of Bob PAYNE and Corry ELLIOT/ELLIOTT of Parkhill, Cheryl and Rob DUNNELL of R.R.#2 Dashwood, Ken and Laurie PAYNE of Watford, Bill PAYNE Jr.▲ of Crediton, Jim PAYNE and Shelly WHITE/WHYTE of Lucan, Brian and Dawn PAYNE of Windsor, Tracy PAYNE and Dennis EVANS of Thedford, Kevin and Theressa PAYNE of Parkhill. Loved by his many grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. Dear brother and brother-in-law of Clara and Ron WADE, Marion▲ PAYNE, Lillian JOYCE, Liz and Bruce CURRIE, Georgette▲ and Allan CAMPBELL, Edna and Don CLARKE, Bob PAYNE, Sharon and Dave MEDD, Shelly and Tim SULLIVAN. Remembered by his many nieces, nephews and their families. Predeceased by granddaughter Aimee PAYNE (1998,) parents William and Marion (COUSINS) PAYNE. Resting▲ at the T. Harry Hoffman and Sons Funeral Home, Dashwood, with visitation Monday, 2 to 4 p.m. and 7 to 9 p.m., where the funeral service will be held Tuesday, February 8, 2005 at 11 a.m. The Reverend Sheila MacGREGOR officiating. Interment Crediton Cemetery. If desired, memorial donations to the Alzheimer Society or charity of choice would be appreciated. Condolences at www.hoffmanfuneralhome.com

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DUNNELL o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-11-09 published
He made his mark on city and nation
By WARREN Gerard, Special To The Star
Beland HONDERICH rose from plain beginnings to become one of the most influential Canadians of his day, using his power as publisher of Canada's largest newspaper to influence the agenda in politics and business at every level.
At the same time he set new standards for informed, in-depth, responsible reporting.
HONDERICH, publisher of the Toronto Star for 22 of his 52 years at the paper, died in Vancouver at 86 yesterday following a stroke.
HONDERICH was a fiercely private man, almost reclusive, but that didn't keep him from being an impatient perfectionist, a leader whose principal ethic was work.
The Star was his life, his passion.
Among his many honours, and one he treasured, was his election in 1986 to the News Hall of Fame by journalists across Canada for leading "Canadian newspapers into a new direction, taking readers backstage to explore and explain the current events that shaped their lives."
HONDERICH left the publisher's office in 1988, going on to become board chairman of the newspaper and its parent company, Torstar Corp. He retired from that position in 1994, but maintained an office across from the newsroom on the fifth floor at One Yonge St. until 1999.
Beland Hugh HONDERICH was born in Kitchener on November 25, 1918, and grew up in the nearby village of Baden. He was proud of his pioneer roots -- Mennonites from Germany who found religious freedom in Waterloo County in the early 1800s.
"My father was a man who stood for religious freedom, and I am proud to follow in his footsteps," HONDERICH once said.
His father, John HONDERICH, was ostracized in the staunchly traditional Mennonite community because he and young Beland went to hear a speaker from another Amish sect. The shunning, as it was called, meant that other Reform Mennonites were forbidden to sit down to eat with them or to shake their hands.
Nor did his father quite fit in with his thrifty, hard-working neighbours in other ways. A sometime beekeeper, homespun village philosopher, printer and pamphleteer for liberal causes, he was "not a very good provider" in a community where work was next to godliness.
His mother, Rae, was the family's main breadwinner. She was the local telephone operator, a job that included the use of a train station in Baden which served as a home for the HONDERICHs and their six children. HONDERICH recalled that the family never went hungry, but there was little money for anything but food.
He gathered coal along the railway tracks to heat their home and carried water in summer to gangs of workers repairing the roads. In the mornings, he worked around the Canadian National Railway station, sweeping and cleaning up for 40 cents a day.
Despite winning a regional debating championship with his sister Ruth -- they defended the proposition that the Soviet way of life was superior to the American way -- he struggled to pass high school entrance examinations.
HONDERICH didn't do well in high school. And it didn't help that he had to hitchhike 16 kilometres to and from school in Kitchener. As a result, his attendance was spotty and his marks were poor. He was demoted in his second year to a commercial course "where at least I learned to type."
Discouraged, he dropped out of school and got a job as a farmhand at the beginning of the Great Depression, much to his mother's displeasure. "You can do better than that," he recalled her saying on more than one occasion.
The farm job didn't last. His introduction to reporting came about because his father was hard of hearing and took his son to public meetings and political rallies to take notes. It taught the young HONDERICH, who was later to battle deafness himself, to write quickly and accurately.
He inherited a Kitchener-Waterloo Record paper route from one of his brothers, which led him to become the paper's correspondent for Baden at 10 cents a column inch. He created news by organizing a softball team and covering its games for the paper.
When he was 17, fires on successive nights destroyed two barns owned by a prominent Baden farmer. Arson was suspected and the young HONDERICH's coverage so impressed his editors that they offered him a tryout as a cub reporter in Kitchener at $15 a week.
He showed up for work in a mismatched jacket and pants and with his two front teeth missing from a tough hockey game the night before. He didn't shine as a reporter.
The publisher, W.J. MOTZ, concluded after a week that HONDERICH was in the wrong line of work and told city editor Art LOW/LOWE/LOUGH to fire him. But LOW/LOWE/LOUGH saw something in the youngster and persuaded MOTZ to give him a second chance.
LOW/LOWE/LOUGH worked HONDERICH hard. He gave him an assignment each evening to go along with his day job. Ed HAYES, who worked at the Record in those days, recalled in an interview that HONDERICH (or "Bee" as he was nicknamed) was determined to succeed.
"Each reporter was supposed to turn in a story every afternoon at the end of his shift. Bee wasn't satisfied with that. He'd turn in two, three or more.
"He was the darling of the city desk."
As time went by, he improved, becoming more and more confident. He was also developing into a perfectionist. So much so, in fact, that he'd bet an ice cream with an assistant city editor that he would find nothing that needed to be changed in a HONDERICH story.
At first, he recalled, it cost him a lot of ice cream cones, but later he rarely had to pay off.
In those early days at the Record, HONDERICH knew he had a country bumpkin image. So when he had saved enough money, he went to a quality menswear store and asked the manager to show him how to dress. He bought a dark pin-striped suit, complete with vest, and that look became his uniform in life.
A fellow staffer at the Record recalled HONDERICH borrowing a bike from a delivery boy and speeding off to an assignment in his pin-striped suit.
And co-workers described him as a loner who rarely headed for the beer parlour with the boys after work, though he was known to sip a scotch on special occasions. Mostly, he went to Norm Jones' restaurant for a milkshake.
Though he spent most of his time working, he taught Sunday school at a Presbyterian church, and served as secretary for a minor hockey league.
This involvement brought him into contact with Milt DUNNELL, the legendary Star sports columnist, who had made a name for himself at the Stratford Beacon Herald before heading for Toronto. He told HONDERICH that the Star was looking for reporters to replace those who had enlisted to serve in World War 2. HONDERICH, who had been rejected by the Royal Canadian Air Force and merchant marine because of poor eyesight and hearing, applied to the Star in 1943 and was hired as a reporter for $35 a week.
He was proud that the Kitchener city council gave him a vote of thanks for his fair reporting. And MOTZ, the publisher who thought he would never make it in the newspaper business, begged him not to go.
Stepping into the grandly marbled lobby of the Star's building at 80 King St. W., HONDERICH recalled that he was "scared as hell." But he was in the right place. This was the world of Joe ATKINSON.
As publisher, Joseph E. ATKINSON had guided the paper through most of the first half-century and was seen by friend and foe alike as one of the country's leading reformers. It turned out that the publisher and his new employee had some things in common.
Both had come from large, impoverished, God-fearing families in small-town Ontario, and quit school early to put food on the table. "One thing I had in common with Joe ATKINSON," HONDERICH recalled, "is that I knew need."
There was a major difference, however. ATKINSON was a star of Canadian journalism in 1899 when the new owners of the Toronto Evening Star hired him at 34 to run the paper. HONDERICH was 24 when he arrived at the paper, an unproven asset at the time.
But he didn't take long to prove himself. His work was soon noticed by Harry C. HINDMARSH, ATKINSON's son-in-law and the man who ran the newsroom.
HINDMARSH sent HONDERICH to Saskatchewan for the election that brought Tommy Douglas and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (later to become the New Democratic Party) to power in 1944.
The next year he was sent back to do a progress report on North America's first socialist government. His stories were so enthusiastically some thought naively -- positive that the Saskatchewan government asked permission to reprint them.
They also caught the eye of Joe ATKINSON, whose reform ideas were at home with the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation's, although he never endorsed the party at election time. HONDERICH was marked as someone worth watching. He was asked to fill in as an editorial writer, the newspaper job he enjoyed most of all.
Some critics said HONDERICH's writing lacked flair or style. But it was clear. He explained complicated matters in simple, accurate terms. His idea was to dive right into a story, delivering the promise of the headline in the first paragraph.
In his reporting career, HONDERICH covered a wide variety of assignments, collecting his share of scoops, enough to impress HINDMARSH. In 1946, he called in HONDERICH, congratulated him on a story, then remarked, "Oh, by the way, the financial editor left today. I'd like you to start as financial editor on Monday."
"But I don't know the difference between a stock and a bond," HONDERICH replied.
"You'll learn," HINDMARSH said.
HONDERICH told HINDMARSH he would take the job on the condition that he be allowed to go back to feature writing if it didn't work out.
"If you don't make a go of it, you'll go out the door," HINDMARSH said in a menacing way.
It goes without saying that HONDERICH made a go of it.
One of the first things he noticed from his new desk was a tailor at work in a building across King St. He decided his business section would write for that tailor, for the ordinary person.
His News Hall of Fame citation noted: "He led in turning the writing and presentation of financial news into a readable subject in terms that interest the average reader." He criticized the stock exchange, questioned banking methods, recommended profit sharing, and supported credit unions and other co-operatives.
But when there were major stories to be covered, HINDMARSH often took HONDERICH out of his financial department and sent him all over the globe -- to Newfoundland on the eve of its joining Canada, to Argentina where press freedom was under attack, to Asia with Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent for the first round-the-world trip taken by a Canadian prime minister, and to Britain for the funeral of George VI.
In 1948, HONDERICH, along with 12 other employees, chartered the first Canadian local of the American Newspaper Guild. As president of the union, he signed the first contract with the Star.
Some members of the union were suspicious, however, thinking that as financial editor he was "a company stooge" trying to make sure the Guild didn't fall into the hands of disgruntled left-wingers.
They weren't aware, however, that he knew all about bad working conditions because he had done both day and night assignments as a young reporter in Kitchener.
He served three terms as Guild president and helped win better pay and working conditions. Later, on the other side of the negotiating table, he continued to believe in the need for an organized newsroom, although that view was severely tested in a bitter strike in HONDERICH had become a major force in the newsroom when ATKINSON died in 1948 after nearly 50 years as publisher of a racy paper with principles.
His death, however, created a crisis at the paper. ATKINSON's will had left the Star to a charitable foundation to be administered by his trustees. However, the Ontario Conservative government passed the Charitable Gifts Act, which said no charity could own more than 10 per cent of a business.
The government may have viewed the will as an attempt to escape death duties, but more likely the legislation was an attempt to muzzle the Star, a liberal thorn in the Tory side.
Nevertheless, it became a distinct possibility the paper might be sold to outside interests. Bidders, including beer baron E.P. TAILOR/TAYLOR, were lining up for a chance to buy what had become Canada's most profitable daily.
The Star was granted stays of execution however, and HINDMARSH, the founder's son-in-law, succeeded ATKINSON until his own death in 1956. In the HINDMARSH years, the paper seemed to lose direction and much of its fairness, particularly in the reporting of politics. The paper's reputation was going downhill.
Meanwhile, HONDERICH had been appointed editor-in-chief in 1955 and a couple of years later he was appointed to the board, after HINDMARSH's sudden death. It put him in the position of becoming an owner of the paper.
Walter GORDON, an accountant who was to become finance minister in Lester Pearson's Liberal government, worked out a plan for the trustees to buy the Star by putting up $1 million among the six of them, including HONDERICH. The paper was valued at $25.5 million.
At the time, the sale price was the most ever paid in Canada for a newspaper, and it turned out to be a steal. Under HONDERICH's leadership, Torstar, the Star's parent company, would become a more than $1 billion enterprise over the next 30-plus years.
For readers and the staff, the HONDERICH years had begun, although he didn't take over as publisher until 1966. Immediately, however, he went about remaking the paper. Headlines didn't scream any more, and the silly and the sensational disappeared from the paper.
HONDERICH was putting his stamp on the Star. Reporting only the facts wasn't good enough. He demanded thorough backgrounding of stories to make them understandable to the average reader. Or, as he said, for "my barber."
He created a great newsroom that included sports columnist DUNNELL and leading Canadian writers such as Pierre BERTON, Peter NEWMAN, Charles TEMPLETON and Nathan COHEN, as well as award-winning cartoonist Duncan MacPHERSON.
HONDERICH returned the Star to the principles of Joseph E. ATKINSON, including a reform-centred editorial policy. Unemployment, affordable housing, adequate welfare benefits, medicare, pensions, minority rights, the need for an independent Canada -- these became subjects he demanded be dealt with on a daily basis.
In one of his rare public appearances, he told a group of editors in 1961 that "the basic function of a newspaper is to inform, to tell the public what is happening in the community, in the nation and in the world. You will notice I did not use the word, entertain." He felt that television had made entertainment a secondary function for newspapers. "How much better then, to concentrate on what we can do best, and that is to inform the public."
The change was most evident in the Star's treatment of politics and economics. The background feature gradually became commonplace in North American journalism, and a poll of U.S. editors rated the Star one of the world's 10 top foreign papers.
Critics of the HONDERICH way -- many of them highly placed in the paper -- couldn't wait for HONDERICH's grey, humourless Star to fail, but they were doomed to disappointment, just as surely as the Star's competitor -- the unchanging Telegram -- was doomed to extinction.
Not only did the Star's circulation grow, so did its profits.
Honesty and integrity were words that most people associated with HONDERICH. But many on his staff found him a demanding taskmaster, an uncompromising and often difficult man to deal with. There was never any doubt that Beland HONDERICH was the boss. He wasn't one for chit-chat.
Early in his career as publisher, he all but cut himself off from the social whirl of movers and shakers. He admitted to becoming almost reclusive after finding himself challenged at social functions and parties to defend Star policies he felt needed no defence, especially since he had put them into place.
But he never felt that way about the public at large. The so-called Little Guy could get him on the phone more easily than a celebrity could. His home number was in the book. And in the days when the Star was an afternoon paper, it wasn't unusual for an evening editor to get a call from HONDERICH, who in turn had received an irate call at home from a reader whose paper hadn't been delivered.
The paper would be delivered by taxi, and the taxi company was instructed to report to the editor the moment the paper had arrived. Then HONDERICH would phone the reader to make sure he was satisfied.
The first part of his 12-hour working day was spent poring over page proofs, quarrelling about leads of stories, questioning something in the 25th paragraph, asking for more background, and demanding follow-ups.
He was articulate, often painfully so for the person at the other end of his complaints. His editors took great pleasure when he demanded "antidotal" leads. He meant anecdotal leads.
Notes with the heavy-handed BHH signature on them rained from his office.
The difficulty everyone had in pleasing him and the way he prowled the newsroom won him the nickname "The Beast." And he was called "Drac" by some editors who thought he, like the vampire, sucked the staff dry.
When the paper departed from what the reader had come to believe was a Star tradition, he took to the typewriter to explain the reasons himself. In 1972, for example, he put his initials on an editorial that explained why the Star was supporting Progressive Conservative Robert Stanfield over Liberal Pierre Trudeau in the federal election.
In his rare public appearances, the nasal flatness of his voice often disguised the passion he felt for a subject. However, he was an effective spokesman for the causes he championed. In defending the Star's strong stand on economic nationalism, he told the Canadian Club it was based on the need to preserve the differences between Canada and the United States.
"I think our society tends to be more compassionate, somewhat less extreme and certainly less violent," he said. "We put more emphasis on basic human needs such as health insurance and pensions."
He warned that increased U.S. ownership of Canadian resources would endanger our ability to maintain those differences.
In a 1989 speech at Carleton University in Ottawa, he caused a stir when he argued that objectivity in newspapers was neither possible nor desirable.
"No self-respecting newspaper deliberately distorts or slants the news to make it conform to its own point of view," he said. "But you cannot publish a newspaper without making value judgments on what news you select to publish and how you present it in the paper.
"And these value judgments reflect a view of society -- a point of view if you will -- that carries as much weight, if not more, than what is said on the editorial page."
Just as ATKINSON used the news pages to popularize reform ideas, HONDERICH used them as a weapon in his own causes.
One example was his reaction to a document leaked to him outlining then-prime minister Brian Mulroney's government strategy on free trade. It said the communications strategy "should rely less on educating the public than getting across the message that the free trade initiative is a good idea -- in other words a selling job."
HONDERICH made sure all aspects of free trade were put under the kind of scrutiny the government wanted to avoid, particularly the possible effects on employment and social benefits.
Simon REISMAN, the bellicose chief trade negotiator, accused HONDERICH of personally waging a vendetta against free trade. He said HONDERICH used the Star "in a manner that contradicts every sense of fairness and decency in the newspaper business."
In reply, the unrepentant publisher said: "The role of a newspaper, as I see it, is to engage in the full and frank dissemination of the news and opinion from the perspective of its values and particular view of society. It should report the news fairly and accurately, reflect all pertinent facts and opinions and not only what the official establishment thinks and says."
As publisher, he demonstrated an impressive business savvy for a man who once said he hardly knew the difference between a stock and a bond. In 1972, he moved the paper to new quarters at One Yonge St.
And later, in his position as chief executive officer of the parent company, Torstar Corp., he acquired Harlequin Enterprises, the world's largest publisher of romance books, and 15 community newspapers to add to the 14 the Star already owned in the Toronto area.
At the same time, HONDERICH still was very much making his mark in journalism. He was the first in Canada to introduce a bureau of accuracy and to appoint an ombudsman to represent the reader in the newsroom. In a wider sense, he was the main force behind the establishment of the Ontario Press Council, where readers can take their complaints to an independent body.
As well as his election to the News Hall of Fame, he was honoured in other ways, receiving doctors of law degrees from Wilfrid Laurier and York universities, and the Order of Canada in 1987.
HONDERICH was married three times, the last time on New Year's Day 2000 to Rina WHELAN of Vancouver, the city where he lived until his death. He had two sons: John, who followed in his father's footsteps to become publisher of the Star, and David, an entrepreneur and one daughter, Mary, a philosophy and English teacher. He also had six grandchildren.
Even into his eighties, HONDERICH exercised daily and loved to play bridge, golf and fish.
Charles E. PASCAL, executive director of the Atkinson Charitable Foundation, recalled golfing with HONDERICH after he had entered his eighties. PASCAL was in his mid-fifties.
"I expected to be slowed down by playing with a couple of guys in their seventies and one in his eighties," PASCAL said. "Bee, as with everything else, played golf with determination, focus and tenacity. I was quite impressed with his golfing. He was very competitive."
After HONDERICH stepped down as publisher in 1988, and as a director of Torstar in 1995, he lost none of his zeal for pursuing causes. He did this through the Atkinson Charitable Foundation and his own personal philanthropy.
"His role on our board was absolutely essential, forceful, radical," PASCAL said.
"I had the sense that the older he got he became more and more impatient. He was impatient, just impatient, about all that is yet to be done by governments and others to reduce the inequities for those who are disadvantaged through no fault of their own."
He was generous in his giving and, as was his character, he had no interest in public recognition or praise.
"He just had no time whatsoever for personal recognition," PASCAL recalled.
"I think he would have liked to have been around forever if for no other reason than to contribute more."
At HONDERICH's request, there will be a cremation, after which the family will hold a small private gathering to celebrate his life.

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DUNNER o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-04-29 published
GOBERIS, Victor " The Gobe"
Peacefully on Thursday, April 28, 2005 at the Humber River Regional Hospital - Church Site, in his 84th year. Loving, devoted soulmate of Helen for 57 beautiful years. Unbelievably classic father to James and Susan (Sani) DUNBAR. Cherished father-in-law of Peter (DUNNER) and Kris. Devoted grandfather of Connie (Mark BEATTY), Melissa (Ryan SLY), Jessica DUNBAR, Denne GOBERIS and great-grandfather of Victoria and Rebecca BEATTY. The Gobe will be forever remembered by his sister Anne Baker, brothers John and Charles, brother-in-law Ted Syrec, sisters-in-law Yvonne, Rachel, Eleanor and Laura Barnett and their families. Friends may call at the Ward Funeral Home, 2035 Weston Rd. (north of Lawrence Ave.), Weston from 2-4 and 7-9 p.m. on Saturday. A complete service will be held in the funeral home chapel on Sunday at 2 p.m. Cremation. If desired, donations to your favourite charity would be appreciated by the family. Condolences and memories may be sent to victor.goberis@wardfh.com

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DUNNETT o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-02-14 published
HOOGENBOOM, Arie
God called home our beloved husband, father, pake, brother and friend on Saturday, February 12, 2005, peacefully at his home at Parkview Meadows, Townsend, in his 84th year. Beloved husband of Hilda ten Dam (DEBOER) and dear father of Leonard HOOGENBOOM of Elmvale, Letty and John McNEIL of Wyevale, Wilma HOOGENBOOM of Richmond Hill, Paul and Karen HOOGENBOOM of Woodville, Ed HOOGENBOOM of Richmond Hill, Irene HOOGENBOOM of Richmond Hill, Peggy and Peter HILL of Nelson, British Columbia, Sam HOOGENBOOM of Lefroy, Mark and Colleen HALLINK of Cambridge, Ray DEBOER and Doreen of Hamilton, Pete and Karen DEBOER of Jarvis, Marg HELDER and the late Jake of Jarvis, Tina and Leo VANTUYL of Welland, Trish DEBOER of Waterford, George and Sue THEODOROU of Dunnville and Jim and Betty DUNNETT of Townsend. Arie is also survived by many loving family members in Holland and by 37 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren. Arie was born in Lemelerveld, Overijssel, Holland in 1921 and immigrated to Canada with his wife and son in 1948 after World War 2. Arie spent many years farming and logging in the Ottawa Valley and north of Toronto and came to the Jarvis area in 1972 where he joined the DeBoer family and spent many years farming and being an active member of his church, most recently serving as an elder at the Christian Reformed Church in Jarvis. Arie will always be remembered for his strong faith in God, his joy of life, his stories, his joke telling and his laughter, and his love of hockey, country music and politics. Arie's presence will be sadly missed by many here on earth but all of the angels will be rejoicing in Heaven. Friends are invited to call at Cooper Funeral Home, 19 Talbot Street, Jarvis on Monday 2-4 and 7-9 p.m. Funeral Service for Arie will be held at Ebenezer Christian Reformed Church on Tuesday at 1: 00 p.m. Interment Chalmers Stone Church Presbyterian Cemetery.

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DUNNETT o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-07-02 published
DUNNETT, Mary Valetta (née HEPWORTH)
At Northumberland Hills Hospital, Cobourg, June 25th, 2005 in her 86th year. Mary DUNNETT (née HEPWORTH,) beloved mother of Barbara and son-in-law David JONES. Loving grandmother to Christopher. A private family service will be held at Groveside Cemetery, Brooklin. In lieu of flowers, the family would appreciate a memorial gift to either the Alzheimer or Canadian Cancer Society directly, or through Ross Funeral Chapel, Port Hope. Warm thanks to family, Friends and health care professionals for their support and expressions of sympathy.

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DUNNIGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-02-07 published
BLAKELOCK, John Clifford "Jack", Naval Officer R.C.N.
Served aboard H.M.C.S. Ottawa and H.M.C.S. Prince David in World War 2. Passed away at Oakville Trafalgar Hospital on Saturday, February 5, 2005 in his 88th year. Beloved husband of Helen. Loving father of Jim (Susan), Janet (Kerry), Ian, Kathy (John), Diane, Andrew (Victoria). John will be lovingly remembered by his grandchildren Emily and Clara, Richard, Jennifer Reimann, and Joanna, Melissa and Stephen HOGG, Brian and Laura DUNNIGAN and Finlay and Seamus and two great-grandchildren. A memorial service will be held at Saint John's United Church, Randall Street, Oakville, on Wednesday, February 9th at 11 a.m. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital, Saint John's United Church or the charity of your choice.

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DUNNING o@ca.on.grey_county.owen_sound.the_sun_times 2005-06-30 published
HINCH, Eleanor▼ (née DUNNING)
Beloved wife and best friend of the late Dr. Joseph B. HINCH, died peacefully at home on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 after a short illness. Dear loving mother of Terry HINCH (Barb,▼) Cindy▼ PLACIDO (Tony) and Marilou WIGHT (Ric.▼) Cherished grandmother of Kristin (Brian) and Trevor; Nicholas; Lisa and Michael. Dear sister of Joan O'CONNOR, Aunt▼ of Daniel (Margherita,) Joseph and Mark O'CONNOR. Eleanor will be sadly missed and fondly remembered by all who knew her. Friends will be received at the R.S. Kane Funeral Home, 6150 Yonge Street (at Goulding, south of Steeles), Toronto, on Thursday, from 2: 00 to 4:00 and 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. and on Friday from 2: 00 to 4:00 and 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. Funeral Mass will be held at St. Gabriel's Roman Catholic Church, 650 Sheppard Avenue East on Saturday, July 2nd, 2005 at 11: 30 a.m. Interment Mount Hope Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to The Monastery of Mount Carmel Society of the Little Flower, 7021 Stanley Avenue, Niagara Falls, Ontario, L2G 7B7. Condolences - www.rskane.ca
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DUNNING o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2005-09-22 published
HODGINS, Eleanor Mary Constance (née ELLERY)
On Wednesday, September, 14, 2005 at the Concordia Hospital, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Mrs. Eleanor Mary Constance HODGINS (nee ELLERY,) aged 91 years, of East Park Lodge, Transcona, Manitoba, beloved mother and grandmother passed away quietly. Born in 1914 at R.R. No. 2, Mount Elgin, Ontario, Mrs. HODGINS lived most of her life in a rural setting near Ingersoll and Thunder Bay, Ontario, until she and her belated husband moved to Transcona in 1986. Mrs. HODGINS is survived by her children, Alice FORD of Edmonton, Alberta, Charles (Ted) and wife Donna of Hope, British Columbia, Ellen (Audrey) HODGINS of London, Ontario, William and wife Brenda of Lacombe, Alberta; also surviving are eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren; one brother and one son-in-law Ernie DUNNING. She was predeceased by her husband John David in 1995 and by a son John Allan, age six years in 1952. Viewing took place in Winnipeg at Neil Bardal Inc., 984 Portage Ave., Aubrey Street entrance, Wednesday, September 21, beginning at 7: 00 p.m. Funeral service will be held at 1:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 22, at the Henderson Highway S.D.A. Church, 1314 Henderson Hwy., with Pastor Jeff Potts officiating. Interment to follow at the Transcona Cemetery. Should Friends desire, in lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Heart or Stroke Associations. Neil Bardal Inc. (204) 949-2200.

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DUNNING o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-06-30 published
HINCH, Eleanor▲▼ (née DUNNING)
Beloved wife and best friend of the late Dr. Joseph B. HINCH died peacefully at home on Tuesday June 28th, 2005 after a short illness. Dear loving mother of Terry HINCH (Barb,▲▼) Cindy▲▼ PLACIDO (Tony) and Marilou WIGHT (Ric.▲▼) Cherished grandmother of Kristin (Brian) and Trevor; Nicholas; Lisa and Michael. Dear sister of Joan O'CONNOR, Aunt▲▼ of Daniel (Margherita,) Joseph and Mark O'CONNOR. Eleanor will be sadly missed and fondly remembered by all who knew her. Friends will be received at the R.S. Kane Funeral Home, 6150 Yonge Street (at Goulding, south of Steeles) on Thursday from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. and on Friday from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. Funeral Mass will be held at St. Gabriel's Roman Catholic Church, 650 Sheppard Avenue East on Saturday July 2nd, 2005 at 11: 30 a.m. Interment Mount Hope Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to The Monastery of Mount Carmel Society of the Little Flower, 7021 Stanley Avenue, Niagara Falls, Ontario, L2G 7B7. Condolences -
www.rskane.ca R.S. Kane 416-221-1159

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DUNNING o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-02-12 published
COCOMILE, Kathyrn Ellen
Peacefully, at her home in Richmond Hill on Friday, February 11th, 2005 at the age of 60 years. Beloved wife of Fred. Dear mother of Anthony and his wife Diane, Lisa and her husband Gerard LAVIOLETTE, and Betty-Ann COCOMILE. Loving grandmother to Nicolle and Dante and Julia and Robert. Dear sister of Bill and Margie McDONALD, Rose Marie and Peter SCOTT, Betty-Anne and Gil MOREAU, Brian and Marian McDONALD and the late Eleanor DUNNING. Predeceased by her parents Leo Edward and Ellen Eizabeth McDONALD. Friends may call at the Marshall Funeral Home, 10366 Yonge Street, Richmond Hill (4th traffic light north of Major Mackenzie Drive) on Saturday 7 to 9 p.m. and Sunday 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. A Funeral Mass will be held at Our Lady Queen of the World Church, 10411 Bayview Ave., Richmond Hill on Monday, February 14th at 10 a.m. Interment Holy Cross Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, donations to National M.E. / F.M. Action Network Fibromyalgia, 3836 Carling Ave., Nepean, Ontario K2K 2Y6.

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DUNNING o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-02-26 published
CREIGHTON, Donald Hugh " Don"
Peacefully at Lakeridge Health Whitby on Thursday February 24 2005. Donald Hugh CREIGHTON " Don," aged 75 years. (Past Master of the Supreme Court of Ontario) (Deputy Judge of Small Claims Court.) Beloved husband of Bette CREIGHTON. Loving father of Wendy and her husband Bruce DUNNING and Donna CREIGHTON. Cherished "Grampa" of Abbey and Rebecca. Devoted to his profession for 45 years. Member of the legal aid panel and provider of extensive pro bono work throughout his legal career. Visitation will be held at The Northcutt Elliott Funeral Home 53 Division St. N. Bowmanville from 9: 30 a.m. until time of service. Funeral Service will be held in our Chapel 11 a.m. Monday February 28th 2005. Cremation. Donations in Don's memory may be made to The Kidney Foundation or The Diabetes Association. www.northcuttelliott.com

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DUNNING o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-05-18 published
OLIVER, James Duncan
It is with deep sorrow that Jim's family announces his death, in his 84th year, at Weston, Ontario on May 16, 2005, Jim, cherished husband of Christina. A retired Staff Inspector with the Metropolitan Toronto Police, serving 33 years, following which he was an Advisor with the Ontario Police Commission for 6 years. A Veteran of World War 2, he served with the 93rd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. During the landing in Normandy, he was commissioned in the field and mentioned in the dispatches. After the war, he remained in the military serving with the King's African Rifles in Kenya and in India during the riots. Jim resigned his commission from the British Army in 1948, following 12 years of service, when he immigrated to Canada. Beloved father of Jean and her husband John DUNNING, Christine and her husband Lee MANNING, John and Margaret. Proud and loving grandfather of Lee, Michael, Robbie, Brian, Lisa, Cailey, Lindsay, Julie, James and Meaghan. Jim leaves behind a sister Elizabeth, resident of Scotland. A good husband and father, he will be dearly missed. Friends will be received at the Ward Funeral Home, 2035 Weston Rd. (north of Lawrence Ave.), Weston 2-4 and 7-9 p.m. on Thursday, May 19th and Friday, May 20th, 2005. Service in the Chapel Saturday, May 21st, 2005 at 11 a.m. Cremation. Interment Glendale Memorial Gardens. In memory of James, donations to the Kidney Foundation would be gratefully appreciated by the family.

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DUNNING o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-05-21 published
BRANDON, Rita Marie (née SHAY/SHEA)
Peacefully at home on Friday, May 20, 2005, in her 57th year, after a short battle with cancer, Rita left us with her family by her side. Dearly loved wife of Bob. Loving mother of Annette (Jeff) HANTON, Christine DUNNING, Rob and Natalie BRANDON. Lovingly remembered by her grandchildren Aaron, Laurie, David, Nadine and Christopher. Rita will be sadly missed by her mother Rita SHAY/SHEA and her brothers Mike (Carol) and Albert (Debbie) SHAY/SHEA, her in-laws Linda (Kim) CARR and Jean (Pat) KEHOE, and by all of her nieces and nephews. Honouring Rita's wishes, cremation has taken place. A memorial gathering celebrating Rita's life will be held on Sunday, May 22, from 2: 30-5:30 p.m. at the Newcastle Funeral Home, 386 Mill St. S. (exit 440, just north of 401 at the lights, 1-877-987-3964). If desired, memorial donations may be made to the Canadian Cancer Society. Expressions of sympathy may be made online through www.newcastlefuneralhome.com.

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DUNNING o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-06-30 published
HINCH, Eleanor▲ (née DUNNING)
Beloved wife and best friend of the late Dr. Joseph B. HINCH died peacefully at home on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 after a short illness. Dear loving mother of Terry HINCH (Barb,▲) Cindy▲ PLACIDO (Tony) and Marilou WIGHT (Ric.▲) Cherished grandmother of Kristin (Brian) and Trevor; Nicholas; Lisa and Michael. Dear sister of Joan O'CONNOR, Aunt▲ of Daniel (Margherita,) Joseph and Mark O'CONNOR. Eleanor will be sadly missed and fondly remembered by all who knew her. Friends will be received at the R.S. Kane Funeral Home, 6150 Yonge Street (at Goulding, south of Steeles) on Thursday from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. and on Friday from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. Funeral Mass will be held at St. Gabriel's Roman Catholic Church, 650 Sheppard Avenue East on Saturday, July 2nd, 2005 at 11: 30 a.m. Interment Mount Hope Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to The Monastery of Mount Carmel Society of the Little Flower, 7021 Stanley Avenue, Niagara Falls, Ontario, L2G 7B7. Condolences www.rskane.ca

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-11-21 published
MacDONALD, Marjorie Eva (OFFORD)
Peacefully at St. Vincent De Paul Hospital, Brockville, on Saturday November 19, 2005. Marjorie OFFORD, beloved wife of the late Paul MacDONALD. Fondly remembered by sister-in-laws Marcie BEAUBIEN and Mary DUNPHY. Also survived by several nieces and nephews. The family will receive Friends on Monday from 2-4 and 7-9 p.m. Mass of Christian Burial will be held at Saint John The Evangelist Church on Tuesday, November 22, at 11: 00 a.m. Rite of Commital, Saint John's Cemetery. Donations in Marjories memory may be made to the Gananoque Humane Society or to the Saint John's Restoration Fund.
Online condolences at www. tompkinsfuneralhome.ca

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-01-03 published
The King of Danforth-Woodbine
Butcher knew customers' names, gave jobs to kids
Realtors touted shop as a plus in neighbourhood
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▼ Writer▼
For one week last November, the neighbourhood around Danforth and Woodbine Aves. was dipped in gloom.
Many people stood on the sidewalk outside Royal Beef -- a neighbourhood mecca since 1992 -- waiting for the passage of the funeral cortege from nearby St. Brigid's Church. Close to 2,000 more had gone to the church to say goodbye.
Paul ESTRELA, 46, their butcher and their buddy, had died.
They were both ESTRELA's customers and his Friends -- there was never any differentiating. A big, handsome guy with a boom box of a voice, he'd hail them by name from behind the counter at the back of his butcher shop.
"No lawyers today. We're not serving lawyers," ESTRELA would holler at Jay JOSEFO, a regular Saturday morning customer and a lawyer. There he'd be, grinning, framed by the stuffed animal heads on the wall behind him -- all mementoes from mentors, he'd say, insisting he never picked up a gun himself.
Once ESTRELA demanded to see a note from JOSEFO's wife before selling him rib steaks cut as thick as JOSEFO wanted. And so JOSEFO's wife Wendy wrote ESTRELA a note: "Dear Paul: Jay has my permission to have Jay-sized steaks."
"He had fun and you had such fun going there," JOSEFO said, recalling ESTRELA.
Customers came from all over the city to the shop ESTRELA ran with his wife Carmen. Others came every week from Collingwood, while some trekked to Toronto once a year from Buffalo. Most Saturdays, Royal Beef seemed like a crowded and very lively social club, with customers greeting each other in between kibitzing with Paul and catching up with Carmen.
Local real-estate agents often talked up Royal Beef as a great reason to buy a house in the area. ESTRELA was hailed in Toronto Life magazine, as well as in this newspaper, as a treasure -- one of the city's best butchers, an old-fashioned, savvy professional. He refused to sell meat that hadn't been aged 30 days, and once told a reporter he could cut meat four different ways: Italian, Canadian, German and English.
ESTRELA named his store after the Royal Winter Fair, where he won a butcher contest in 1982.
"He will be so missed," said Lucie JOHNSON, who first came into the store with her kids in strollers. "My kids are Royal Beef babies. That's what all his customers called our kids. Once you came here, you couldn't buy meat at a supermarket."
ESTRELA made a point of giving jobs to kids from the neighbourhood. "They would come here from school and tell Paul they wanted to work here, always because of Paul," said Carmen, who runs the shop's deli section.
For six years, Duncan McIROY and his brother walked by the store on their way to school. "Paul would be opening up and he'd toss me an orange," he recalled. McIROY started going into the store for sandwiches -- "I wasn't a big fan of the ones my mom made and it was $2 for the best sandwich you've ever seen" -- and they started talking.
One Halloween, ESTRELA pointed to a huge pumpkin at the front of the store and told McIROY he'd give him a job if he could figure out a way to take it home. McIROY ran home, grabbed his brother and a wagon, and the pair heaved and hauled it up and took it away. ESTRELA kept his part of the deal, hiring the 13-year-old McIROY six months later.
"My main job was to clean up, fetch him his cappuccinos and let him yell at me," McIROY, now 21, said about the man he calls his best friend. "If he had been as big as his voice, he'd be 8 feet tall."
ESTRELA was also 13 when he started working at the meat counter of Darrigos, a now-defunct Italian chain of supermarkets. He had just moved to Canada from Portugal with his parents and six sisters, and he learned not only to slaughter and skin animals but to speak Italian. That came in handy when he began courting a 16-year-old Carmen, whose Italian mother was a customer at the store. They married when she was 17 and he 19.
"My parents still held hands," said their daughter Bridgette, 22. She worked with her father in the shop on Sundays -- retail down time they spent talking and just "hanging out," she said. The ESTRELAs also have a son John, 26.
ESTRELA spent 11 years as a butcher at a Dominion grocery store until he opened his own place on Valentine's Day in 1984, on Woodmount Ave., around the corner from where Royal Beef was eventually established.
"There wasn't anyone who thought he would make it there, but Paul had the determination of a young bull, a warrior," said Gord DOUCETTE, a friend and fellow butcher. Until ESTRELA opened his own store, the two used to fish every Sunday morning on the Duffins Creek in Pickering, then grab bacon and eggs at Ted's Restaurant on Old Kingston Rd.
After ESTRELA opened his own place, DOUCETTE would come by every Monday morning for coffee and some shop talk. ESTRELA used to say DOUCETTE was the older brother he never had.
A year ago, ESTRELA was featured in the Star extolling the virtues of a new cut of steak, the tri-tip. "It's going to take off once people find out about it," he predicted at the time. As usual, he was right.
A month later, ESTRELA was diagnosed with cancer. He took three days off work, and startled customers wondered where he was. When word got out, offers of help poured in.
"People were saying, 'Anything you need, drives to hospital, anything,'" Bridgette said.
When ESTRELA told DOUCETTE, his friend promised to keep the business going. He closed down his own business and now runs the Royal Beef meat counter.
A little more than a week after ESTRELA's November 7 death, the lights came back on at Royal Beef.
"I couldn't stay away," Carmen said. "All my customers, we just needed to come together."

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-01-10 published
She saw hope in every street kid
Karen POSITANO a passionate and stubborn advocate
Worked to start training programs, needle exchange
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Perhaps this anecdote can best sum up the many parts of Karen POSITANO, a petite and driven dynamo, an original, as well as a world traveller, insomniac, wife, mother of three and champion of every street kid who came by Youthlink Inner City, the drop-in resource centre and outreach program where she worked for almost 16 years:
It was 1994 and POSITANO was in Amsterdam at a world A.I.D.S. conference. She had met up with Hélène LALONDE, her buddy since their teenaged days in Ottawa when they lived innocently but recklessly and knew everyone, including bikers and drug dealers. She and LALONDE, now a consultant often working for the Canadian International Development Agency in developing countries, were standing at a bus stop when a passerby shrieked: "Karen POSITANO!"
It was Gwendolyn, a stripper POSITANO knew from Toronto who was in Amsterdam working at a live sex show.
"Karen POSITANO?" echoed one of the other people at the stop.
Turns out this person was with the World Health Organization and had been seeking POSITANO to sign her up as a speaker at a Rio de Janeiro conference for street kids, and she'd been hard pressed to locate her, as POSITANO had spent much of the last two days marching on the street with prostitutes.
"Yeah, she left me at the hotel," said her youngest daughter, Jill ROCHON, with a laugh. She was 14 at the time. "I was safe there, she knew that."
POSITANO was well known internationally. She was invited to make presentations at another world A.I.D.S. conference in Vancouver as well as at various H.I.V. and A.I.D.S. prevention and hepatitis C gatherings throughout North America.
In Toronto she was a member of Councillor Olivia CHOW's children and youth committee.
What she was renowned for was her tenacity, her push and her passion. After her first marriage failed and she lost her bid to convince a court to change her children's surname to hers, she took the matter to the Supreme Court.
"When she decided to do something, you just got out of the way," said her second husband, Gerry ROCHON.
"She definitely had a stubborn streak," said her eldest child, Karyn, 31. It is why she and brother Cain, 30, have the surname POSITANO.
In the early '80s, POSITANO and ROCHON and the three kids moved to Ottawa from Vancouver where they had been living. There she worked full-time and went to school full-time, getting a degree in criminology plus her master of social work. She also organized and played in a women's baseball league, acted in university theatre, took dance classes and travelled to exotic destinations such as Thailand.
She began working with street youth at Youthlink Inner City as part of the job placement for her social work degree; she was so enthusiastic about the work that not only did she convince her family to move to Toronto, she also created her own full-time employment there.
"Inner City was the root of her work. It catered to youth no one else would, those with mental health problems, prostitutes, drug users," said Rebecca BASSEY, a friend and former employee.
POSITANO never let anything stand in the way of getting more programs or more program dollars for the youth she saw every day at her office. Her funding proposals were legendary -- succinct, persuasive and usually written a month before the deadline -- but her first work for Youthlink was the production of two very radical education videos for street youth.
STD Street Smarts and Street Wise Women came with a warning of "frank language and explicit imagery" because the penises in the videos were real.
"Some people might say her style was abrasive," said Liz GREAVES, Youthlink executive director, "but she shot straight from the hip."
In 1999, she blasted the Mayor's Task Force on Homelessness, of which GREAVES was a member, for ignoring the plight of homeless youth.
"She was absolutely right," GREAVES said. The task force subsequently commissioned a report.
Fearless and always on the cutting edge, POSITANO was an early advocate of Youthlink's work in harm reduction. The agency was the first in the city to run a needle exchange program.
In 1998, she was one of the organizers of a program for squeegee kids, a new headline-grabbing demographic that was unsettling if not scaring many people in the city. While police were cracking down on homeless people in public places and the provincial government was bringing in the Safe Streets Act, POSITANO was part of a group lobbying Toronto politicians for resources to help these youth. The result is a fully federally funded training program teaching computer skills called the Youth Skills Zone.
In 1995, POSITANO was promoted to supervisor, responsible for a staff of about nine at Youthlink Inner City's drop-in/resource and outreach program. She started the Sock Swap, gathering cast-offs from families and Friends to recycle to the street kids. Before the centre got its washer and dryer, she'd take all the dirty socks home to wash them. She also started a monthly supper club for street youth with hepatitis C.
An early proponent of the peer educator program, in which clients work 10 hours a week at the drop-in and do outreach with other street or addicted youth, she conceived and won funding for the advanced peer education program.
This is a year-long full-time staff position, "one of the most important positions we have," according to Inner City supervisor Diana WALKER. "I think Karen saw hope in everyone who walked through the door."
POSITANO raced through her life, taking each of her children on a coming-of-age trip to Europe, meeting up with LALONDE in Kenya, Brazil and Egypt, holidaying with BASSEY in Jamaica and with her husband in Morocco, and finding thrift stores wherever she went. She volunteered with Habitat for Humanity building houses in Fiji, Uganda and India, where she met Mother Teresa. Once a month, she spent her Saturday mornings working in the Big Sisters thrift shop at Lawrence Ave. W. and Avenue Rd. More than once she climbed the C.N. Tower stairs for the United Way.
For kicks, she was an extra in David Cronenberg's The Naked Lunch, stalked celebrities on the red carpet at all the Toronto Film Festivals, dragged family and Friends to rock concerts, and plundered furniture discarded in Forest Hill and Rosedale. She and ROCHON bought, renovated and sold nine houses together. She also loved organizing and decorating them.
"She packed a lot in," said ROCHON. "It was as if she almost knew she wouldn't have a long life."
She'd beaten cancer of the uterus 14 years earlier, so she was typically upbeat when she was diagnosed two years ago with breast cancer.
"She had the kind of personality that you just thought she would beat it," said LALONDE.
"She always said it was no big deal," added BASSEY.
And they believed her even when she suffered a heart attack a year ago that almost ended her life. POSITANO rallied enough to sometimes make it back to work and to her office with the window that looked out on to the kitchen and eating area of the drop-in centre.
"I used to update her, make her feel at home because she didn't know a lot of the clients now," said John LAFORME, a crack addict and regular at Youthlink for four years. POSITANO always encouraged him to get the help he needed and last month he left for a detox facility in Quebec. "I'm doing it for me and for Karen," he said. "I've been in drop-ins and agencies across Canada and Karen was one of the best drop-in workers ever. She took the time to get to know you."
Ten days before she died, at her home on the afternoon of October 1 at the age 52, POSITANO attended a Youthlink managers' meeting. A day or so later, she sent Liz GREAVES an email saying she was going to lick cancer. "There was such a fierceness to her," GREAVES said.
POSITANO wanted to live long enough to see her first grandchild, and she did. Karyn named her newborn daughter Kalina, Hawaiian for Karen.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-01-17 published
A man of letters -- and passion
Edited Armenian paper before moving to Canada
Architect also wrote book about William Saroyan
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Two careers, two countries, one passion.
Call it pride, if you will, of place or of history but certainly of a people. Bedros ZOBYAN was an architect and crusading newspaper editor born and raised in the Turkish city of Istanbul who used both of his careers to nurture and nudge his fellow Armenians closer to their heritage and culture.
Five years ago, long after he and his wife and daughter had immigrated in 1967 to live quietly in Don Mills, as well as after retiring from the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce where he designed everything from buildings to bank machines, ZOBYAN once again took up his pen.
He wrote a book about the three-week trip he took in May 1964 with William Saroyan to find the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and playwright's Armenian ancestral home.
Towards Bitlis with William Saroyan was published by an Armenian publisher in 2003. The cover features a photo of Saroyan sitting on a rock in the rugged Anatolian countryside alongside a signpost stating: Bitlis 10.
The pair went from Istanbul via Ankara to Samsun on the Black Sea. They stopped at Lake of Van (considered to be as sacred a place as Ararat to Armenians). Venturing into remote villages where Armenians had lived before the genocide of 1915, they found Armenian children being raised in primitive conditions by Turkish and Kurdish families.
In Bitlis, Saroyan located the foundations of his family's home, with some help from villagers hoping this rich American was going to lead them all straight to a hidden cache of gold. (He didn't.)
Although ZOBYAN told his family that Saroyan took notes during their trip, the author never directly wrote about it, although he did write a play called The Istanbul Trilogy. ZOBYAN, however, wrote up a series about the trip for his newspaper called: "60,000 Kilometres in 16 Days with William Saroyan."
For years people told him he should write a book based on those articles. And when he finally did start writing, he became immersed in the work.
"While he was working on the book, nothing else existed," said his wife, Seta.
It took three years. A perfectionist, he typed, copy-edited and typeset the book, along with choosing and laying out the photos, then sent it to the publisher in Istanbul. When the publisher sent back the galleys, ZOBYAN proofed every comma.
"Every day I came home from school and my grandfather would be typing. Every day," said Amara POSSIAN, 15. "My grandma too, both of them always had red pens."
American Armenians had arranged a special book launch for October 2003 in California, but ZOBYAN was too ill to attend. When he died at 82 of pancreatic cancer this past December, he had received dozens of letters from Armenians around the world thanking him for writing the book.
It is considered much more than a travel book.
"It's part of our history," says his friend, Arta YUZBASIAN, an Armenian artist living in Toronto. "It was very well received within the Armenian diaspora, especially in the U.S."
A dignified and diffident man, ZOBYAN was well respected within the Armenian community in Toronto.
"People looked up to him," said Berc LULECIYAN, a deacon at the Holy Trinity Armenian Church, who attended high school with ZOBYAN in Istanbul.
In 1958, ZOBYAN was commissioned by the patriarch of St. Gregory the Illuminator Church to build a new church in the old authentic Armenian style on the site in Istanbul of the old church that had been expropriated to make way for a highway. He rescued and reincorporated the ceramic tiles from the original chapel, marble stones, and reused the carved stone cross belonging to the 500-year-old church.
It was -- and continues to be -- the only one of Istanbul's 28 Armenian churches that displays the austere, powerful lines and massive stonework that marks Armenian church architecture. The church's Catholics wrote him commending his work.
"My father built the most important church in Istanbul," said his daughter, Hasmig POSSIAN, 53.
But he was having more fun as a journalist working at the Marmara, a daily started in 1940 by Seta ZOBYAN's father, a well-known foreign correspondent. The young couple took over the paper in 1950. One of two Armenian dailies in Istanbul, it had a circulation of 5,000 but a considerably larger reach in terms of influence.
ZOBYAN lobbied in its pages to save the church he would go on to rebuild; his scoop on the guilty verdict of the court martial trials of the Democratic Party president and its prime minister landed him in prison for two days. Seta ZOBYAN pulled every string she had to get her husband released.
"Without bribery he would have been in jail months and months," she said.
They lived a good life for a time, attending balls, receptions for visiting royalty, the ballet and concerts. "I translated for Petula Clark when she was getting a leather coat made," his daughter recalled. She also danced with Eric Burdon, lead singer of the Animals, when she was 14 and her father took her on his press pass to a club.
But after the military coup of 1960, many Armenians left Turkey, including many of their families. In 1965 they sent their daughter to Toronto, to St. Clements School, where they believed she would be safe and get a better education.
Two years later, they immigrated, but it wasn't until 1970 that they sold the paper.
"That still hurts," said Seta ZOBYAN.
Neither practised journalism in Canada: Bedros ZOBYAN went to work for the large architectural firm of Page and Steele building the Commerce Court towers, and Seta ZOBYAN found a job in market research. She now works part-time as a court translator and interpreter.
In the 1970s they visited Saroyan at his home in Fresno, California. He had two houses, one in which he lived and one in which he wrote. After Saroyan died of cancer in 1981, his homes became the site of a museum dedicated to his works and his Armenian heritage.
ZOBYAN made sure the museum received copies of his book; he'd hoped to translate it into English for Armenians living in California and Europe.
"I will translate it," Seta ZOBYAN said. "That was his wish and I will try and make it come true."

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-02-07 published
'Gentlest' artist shared many gifts
Scholarship to be named in honour of Brad Johnston
Animator killed during family visit to town in B.C.
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
They were best buddies as well as brothers and no one thought anything about it when they decided to head out for a beer and a game of pool after a big Saturday night family dinner in Parksville, British Columbia, a small town 20 minutes up the coast from Nanaimo on Vancouver Island.
The JOHNSTON boys used to go there as kids on visits from their home in Pickering and dig for crabs along Qualicum Beach. A quiet corner of paradise for retirees and tourists, it's the last place one would expect a murder to occur.
But Ian and Brad JOHNSTON picked the wrong pub that night.
A few of the locals didn't like the cut of the jib of the two Torontonians in town visiting their 90-year-old grandmother and followed the pair out to the parking lot of the Rec Room Night Club at closing time. Police were called but not in time. Both brothers had been beaten, but Brad JOHNSTON was severely injured. He died two days later, January 10, at Victoria General Hospital. Five men have been charged with manslaughter and one count of assault causing bodily harm.
Brad JOHNSTON was 24, and he had never been in a fight in his life.
"He was the kindest and gentlest kid you'd ever want to meet," said his father, Stuart JOHNSTON. " It's just who he was. I don't think I ever heard him say an unkind word."
"I can't ever remember him getting into trouble with anyone," said Ian JOHNSTON, Brad's older brother by 25 months. "Everybody loved him. He was soft spoken and always living in his imagination."
JOHNSTON was an artist. He left behind a stack of sketchbooks about four feet high at his father's Toronto lakeside condo where he had been living for the past 4 1/2 years. He drew in bars, he drew in restaurants, even on road trips with his buddies. He carried his sketchbook everywhere. One of his last sketches was of his father sitting in Air Canada's Maple Leaf lounge, wine glass in hand, as the family waited for their flight out west.
"In fact, it was the only sketch he ever did of me," said Stuart JOHNSTON.
Brad JOHNSTON drew achingly beautiful life drawings, but he was also a tattoo artist: he created five of the seven mythic tattoos on his brother's left arm and designed the delicate flower around the ankle of his girlfriend Alyssa SODEN. And he was an airbrush artist whose work graced many motorcycle helmets and goalie masks.
A gifted sculptor, he had fashioned a clay horse's head for his father and stepmother Bernadette (they own a horse racing and breeding farm in Orangeville, Ontario), a cat for his mother Sherrie and a candle holder for Ian, for what would turn out to be his last Christmas.
Thoughtful, something of an aesthete, he studied and often pondered life's unknowables. "He was like a prophet and had more faith than anyone I know," his girlfriend wrote in the email telling Friends of his death.
JOHNSTON immersed himself in worlds of his own making. As one of four artists working on an animation series being produced and developed by RM Productions, an animation company based in Mississauga, he was bringing to life futuristic characters and their fantasy worlds. He helped create Defenders of the Scroll, a half-hour action-adventure animation series that comes with the tag line: In some places, you should be afraid of the shadows.
In the case of Demon Chasers, a half-hour sci-fi humour animation series he worked on, the world is Asator and it is described on the website as "a utopia in every sense" except that "as is the case with most utopias, someone had to come along and spoil it."
Right now, both series are strictly in the pitch phase.
"I hope to see the RM projects go into full production for television release," wrote friend and fellow animator Kevin STOTT in an email from Thailand. "It would be a joy to see his work on television."
The two had been classmates at Max The Mutt Animation School in downtown Toronto. School owners Maxine SCHACKER and Tina SEAMAN still remember JOHNSTON at his intake interview five years ago. Tall (6-foot-4) and at 140 pounds so slight he moved with the grace of a smaller man, a flush had spread across the smattering of freckles on his fine-featured face as his mom recalled how he used to draw over the walls at home.
He got in, but he had to work hard. He didn't pass every course the first time round, SCHACKER noted. "He was so quiet, so modest and unassuming," SEAMAN recalled. "There was a nice sensitive line to his line drawings in his final portfolio."
After JOHNSTON graduated in 2003, he supported himself with a few contract animation assignments but also modelling jobs, a couple of stints as an extra in movies and working summers on the harbour cruise ships.
"Some of us used to tell him to borrow some money and open up a tattoo shop, get a practical job," said Graham "Whitey" ADDISON, a bartender. He first met JOHNSTON in Grade 9 at Dunbarton High School in Pickering. ("I don't know why we became Friends. I was rowdy, we were so opposite.")
But JOHNSTON always replied that he would never compromise. "His dream was art," ADDISON said.
An avid video gamer, JOHNSTON was working with some others on the prototype of a new game. "He was like a wizard: he could break down any game from an artist point of view," his brother said. According to Stuart JOHNSTON, he had also been sketching characters for the new work of a British author.
But his special project was a trilogy, an illustrated novel along the lines of Lord of the Rings. He had already devised the storyline and had drawn many of the characters.
Ian JOHNSTON is a chef, but he has promised to complete his brother's trilogy.
"I will finish his story and put it out there," he said. "It shouldn't be sitting in a box when his ideas are so brilliant."
There will be a scholarship in his name at the animation school and a namesake in the red-haired colt born on his father's horse farm a few days after his death. And there is also this, part of a poem he wrote when he got up Christmas morning. "May the spirit of giving live on in you, /even if for no reason./And to those of you now come and gone; /those no longer with us./I'll see you when I get there, until then, /Merry Christmas."

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-02-14 published
Const. Bill McCUTCHEON: Leader of the band
Police officer led host of parades
At 6-foot-4, he had the carriage of a warrior
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
For years he was the leader of the parade. Metro Toronto Police Pipe Band drum major Bill McCUTCHEON was at the head of the Santa Claus parades, Labour Day parades, Warrior Day parades, Grey Cup parades, the march past at the Police Games, the opening of the Royal Winter Fair and Kitchener-Waterloo's Oktoberfests.
At the annual Police Games held on summer nights at the Canadian National Exhibition, he led the march past; during the popular Musical Ride, the force's mounted unit did the charge straight at McCUTCHEON, standing two or three paces ahead of his band. The crowd always erupted as the horses stopped at what looked like just 10 metres before the man holding his ground with his mace held high.
He loved the spectacle more than they did.
Six-foot-4, he had the carriage of a warrior, the thrown-back head of a lion leading his pride whether he was leading the parade past the mayor of small town Ontario or Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at the storied Braemar Royal Highland Gathering of Scotland.
"He was a great big strapping fine-looking man," said Jocko THOMAS, the Star's legendary police reporter. "Millions saw him leading parades."
"He looked really sharp in front of the band," said former band piper John BREMNER. "He was a great guy to follow."
BREMNER and McCUTCHEON were young police officers in neighbouring downtown precincts when they signed up for a newly revived Metro Toronto Pipe and Drum Band in 1964. Originally started by Thomas ROSS in 1912, the marching band was disbanded in 1939, when Canada went to war. In a nod to its history and its original founder, the new police band chose the red Ross plaid as its official tartan.
Within months of joining, McCUTCHEON was elected drum major, responsible for not only leading the parade but also for the "dress, deportment and discipline," as BREMNER put it, of the 40 to 50 members.
"He was a stickler for punctuality," BREMNER remembered. "If Bill promised to be there at 2 p.m., we moved at 2 p.m."
McCUTCHEON retired from the band in 1975, when he retired from the police -- "we wished he could have stayed with us," said BREMNER -- but he kept marching at the head of the pack for the Ontario Royal Canadian Legion Pipes, Drums and Colours.
A year earlier, he had been asked to lead the Legion massed bands at Florida's New Year's Eve Rose Bowl parade, a huge honour at a time when the streets were painted white for the televised nighttime parade. He returned two more times: in 1976 and then in 1991.
In 1978, McCUTCHEON led the Ontario Royal Canadian Legion Pipes, Drums and Colours along the 10-kilometre route of the Tournament of Roses Parade, lined with 1.5 million cheering spectators in California. They made repeat appearances in 1981, 1989 (when McCUTCHEON had just undergone treatment for cancer of the colon six weeks before) and in 1994.
They marched the dusty main street of Tijuana, Mexico, and in the Cavalcade Parade down Princes St. in Edinburgh. They were cheered at the Punch Bowl and Hula Bowl in Hawaii. The first time they appeared at Braemar, they marched past the Duke of Fife because Queen Elizabeth was mourning the assassination of her uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, but on their third tour of Scotland in 1990, it was the royal couple on the stand.
A local newspaper photographer caught Prince Philip leaning forward and peering at McCUTCHEON's medals when he was presented to the pair.
"It was Bill's police service medal and police war veteran medal, that's what Philip was interested in knowing about," said McCUTCHEON's wife, Hilda.
But McCUTCHEON's favourite parade was always Toronto's Santa Claus Parade. No contest.
His daughters would be bursting with pride.
"We'd scream from the sidelines when we saw him," said Karen ZWARYCH. "He always looked straight ahead, but he always gave us a wink. We knew he knew we were there."
"I would say to all the people next to us 'That's my Dad,' " said Janice FATTORE.
Sometimes, if there was a break in a parade, Hilda McCUTCHEON would tell her daughters, "Bet that's your father."
He loved making an entrance, even though he insisted in a 1975 interview for a police magazine that he wasn't "the type of show-off who struts like a peacock."
McCUTCHEON had a cache of stories: the time the band was marching at the Greenwood Race Track and they turned left and he went straight ahead, or the times he missed the toss of the mace.
"It's the guys in the band who make it the hardest on you, like the piper who has threatened to buy me a baseball glove," he told the police magazine.
In his memoirs, McCUTCHEON described marching in Nathan Phillips Square to mark Police Week. He was doing "the walk" manoeuvre with his mace -- stabbing the ground to the left and right as he marched -- when the mace became embedded in a crack between the concrete slabs. He kept right on marching without his mace, then turned the startled band around and led them back where he retrieved the mace on his return.
During another Yonge St. Daffodil Day parade, the mace slipped out of his hand and bounced down the road. When he bent to retrieve it, his feather helmet fell off. The crowd gave him an ovation as he caught it.
The son of a streetcar driver, McCUTCHEON grew up in west Toronto. He always loved uniforms: he belonged to the Boys Brigade and, when he was 17, he lied about his age to enlist in the air force but never saw any overseas action, much to his disgust. A neighbour suggested he join the police. The neighbour was Jack ACKROYD who would go on to become Toronto's chief of police. He loved being a police officer, but it was when he joined the pipe band and later the policemen's chorus that he combined both his passions. Possessed of a spectacular rich bass voice, he had long sung at church minstrel shows and as a soloist in the choir at then Westmoreland United Church. During his 28 years with the force, he sang the national anthem at the Police Games and was the soloist at the annual police Remembrance Day ceremony at Yorkminster United Church.
He sang at both daughters' weddings and, always, around the house. Until last October, he sang with the Seranato Singers, a seniors singing group, stopping only because he was having trouble breathing. Having survived a bypass in 1978, colon cancer and an operation for an aneurism in 1998, he died January 20 at age 78 of melanoma.
At his funeral, members of the Toronto police chief's ceremonial unit were honorary guards and fellow police war veterans the pallbearers. A piper played behind the hearse and at the gravesite.
The family buried him with the mace he had carried for more than 40 years.
It was their way to ensure that he got to lead his last parade.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-02-28 published
Beauty used brains to outwit Nazis
Barbara KOPANIAK lived a fearless life
Polish activist saved compatriots
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Like many eastern Europeans who came to Canada to rebuild lives shattered by World War 2 and its aftermath, Barbara KOPANIAK lived a quiet life here, deliberately and gratefully.
She tended to the home for her husband Jozef, a brilliant Polish scientist who found lesser work at Ontario Hydro and teaching part-time at Ryerson, then a technical college, and she raised and encouraged her only child, Marguerite, now a medical doctor with a post-doctorate degree in immunology.
She died last month at 85.
Only her style -- her regal carriage, the way she always stood for family snapshots at a slight three-quarter turn, one leg slightly bent, model-like, the clothes bought at department stores sales that seemed couturier on her, hinted that she was the granddaughter of wealthy nobility, the daughter of a successful and idealistic copper mine and property owner.
Her extraordinary eyes also gave her away -- they flashed and spoke of adventure and courage. Last September her daughter threw a party. She realizes now it was because she wanted her then frail, failing mother -- her best friend and soulmate -- to be well again.
"My mother was so young at heart, so vital, so classy," said Dr. Marguerite KOPANIAK. She used to have to drag her Friends away if her mother was telling stories.
At the party, she looked across the room. Barbara KOPANIAK was surrounded by five of the most handsome men there.
"They were fascinated. You could see they were really listening to her. They were leaning in to her. They weren't shifting their weight from one foot to the other, the way men do when they are bored at parties."
No wonder. The stories, like the woman, were extraordinary.
In January 1940, Bronislawa KROL was 20, a fair-haired beauty, the youngest of four children and the only one still living at home in the southern town of Czeladz, when she was approached by a former Polish officer who asked if she was willing to fight the German enemy.
Czeladz was in Silesia, an area adjacent to the Czech and German borders, and was part of an underground escape route for Poles to France via Hungary.
KROL's upper-class parents were Polish patriots who had funded and worked on an underground Polish newspaper advocating liberation from Russia. A wealthy property owner, her father, who died at a young age, was also a volunteer firefighter who refused to collect rent from tenants experiencing hard times. Steeped in altruism and idealism, KROL had been attending various clandestine youth meetings, as all around her Germans were arresting many of the town's leaders and taking them to Auschwitz.
False documents and passes were needed to whisk others out of the country to safety before they, too, were taken away to certain death. The man asked KROL to befriend Hieronim PALICA, who worked for the German-run municipal authority and had access to the Germans' lists of people about to be arrested. KROL was supposed to recruit him -- but first she had to ascertain where his sympathies lay.
She finagled German lessons with the man, during which she said disparaging things against Poles until one night, pale and shaking with rage, he stood up and said to her: "I would like to strangle snakes like you."
Thus began a relationship with PALICA that resulted in hundreds of Poles being saved from Auschwitz, many of whom were sheltered in her parents' home until they could be spirited across the border. As well, KROL demanded from a school friend, the son of the local baker, free loaves of bread. She'd pack them in a suitcase and go to the prison. Young and beautiful, she would look at the guards with her mesmerizing eyes, tell them she was visiting her brother, or perhaps her fiancé, and when they let her in, as they invariably did, head straight to the sick bay where she passed out the bread.
It was 4: 30 a.m. on August 15, 1941, when the Gestapo banged down her family's front door with the butts of their machine guns. Asleep on the couch, KROL leapt out the window of the ground-floor apartment, catching her scarf on a lilac tree, and hid in some raspberry bushes.
She watched the German officer eye her scarf, then deliberately stand in front of the window to block the sight of it as he ordered his men to search the rest of the large apartment. (Her mother was arrested and released eight months later.) KROL became a fugitive, following the Brynica River out of town, hiding in tunnels near the copper mines and in market-day crowds in neighbouring towns.
She was smart and savvy -- having strangers buy her train tickets because she feared the authorities had posted her photo, finding an empty villa in a forest where she slept -- but she also depended on the kindness and courage of strangers. An artist who housed her for two nights wept when she left before she could paint her portrait.
Without any documents, KROL used her wits, guile and beauty to stay alive and reach Warsaw, where she worked for the resistance. She got identity papers in a false name by pretending to be from a town the Germans had burned to the ground. "I have one witness, I need just one more person to sign," she said to strangers on the street.
When she was caught illegally crossing a border, she drew herself up -- regally -- to her full height of 5-foot-4 and said: " Gentlemen, look at me. I am a mess. Take me where I can wash up." They did she escaped.
When she once unwittingly walked into a room where German officers were waiting to entrap resistance workers, she smiled brilliantly when asked for her identity papers, fumbling through her purse. "I must have changed purses," she said. The officer didn't buy it. She kept talking, flashing those eyes, offering him a cigarette as she lit one for herself. When he accepted, she knew she might be able to escape. "What am I supposed to do with you?" he asked her. "Let me go," she said. "Okay, but run fast," he answered.
She rode in German, not Polish, train cars because she reasoned there was less chance of being asked for her papers. But one time, sitting by the window, smoking her habitual cigarette even though she suffered from tuberculosis, she watched the reflection of a German officer approaching her. "Is this your luggage?" he asked. She was terrified but never lost her sang-froid. Exhaling slowly, smoke curling from the corner of her mouth, movie-star fashion, she didn't even deign to turn and look at him as she replied with a haughty "Yes." He walked on to the next compartment.
Told to post a machine gun to a partisan in another town, she asked a friend, another pretty young woman, to go to the post office with her. They wore their best dresses, KROL hired a horse-drawn carriage, bought cherries. They were the picture of carefree youth when they pulled up to the post office. When the bedazzled clerk threw the parcel on the weigh scales, there was a metallic clunk. "Oh, something went clunk," her friend said. "The scale went clunk," said the quick-thinking KROL.
Marguerite KOPANIAK believes her mother saved hundreds of Jewish lives with her resistance work, which ended August 1, 1944 with the 63-day Warsaw Uprising. After the war, her mother returned to Czeladz and ordinary life. But the people there hadn't forgotten what she did. If she was in a store, townspeople would beg to help carry her parcels. A tram driver once stopped, stood, placed one hand across his heart and saluted her with the other.
After the town was taken over by Communists, she organized a march to honour the old Poland -- and was consequently forced into hiding. She was allowed to return only after the entire town signed a petition and threatened a general strike. She married Jozef KOPANIUK, a man as passionate and idealistic as she. In 1968, when students were protesting throughout Poland, he called a meeting of the 700 employees in his factory, told them to support the students' cause, and resigned. It was 1970 before the Communists allowed them to leave the country, another year before they came to Canada.
People were always asking Barbara KOPANIAK to write a book, to tell the world her stories. It's the stuff of movies, they'd tell her. More to the point, so was she, as beautiful and dashing as a Hayward or a Bacall. She refused them all, because, as she always said about her experiences: "It had to be done. How could you not?"

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-03-07 published
Clara CIRASELLA forged circle of Friends
Ailing woman's devoted pals formed care group
There were lineups to see her before she died
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Clara CIRASELLA decided she wanted to die as she lived: surrounded by Friends.
She collected people. She was fun and funny and had an infectious, winning grin. She made a point of getting to know just about everyone who crossed her path, be they young or old, gay or straight, the telephone repair person or the pair of homeless women who frequented Annette St. when she lived there.
She lived full throttle, growing up in Cooksville (now Mississauga), later screaming through its streets in her Austin Mini, then hurtling herself at different times throughout Europe, South America and southern Africa, always laughing, always in-your-face opinionated and always with her camera.
She made her money through real estate -- buying young and buying smart -- and after a couple of unsuitable 9 to 5 jobs, by selling promotional products. She was the company's top salesperson in the country. But she also set up a photography studio in the gracious home she bought at Avenue Rd. and Eglinton Ave. W., where she could indulge in her passion for portraits and especially the wedding photos that allowed her to expose her sentimental side and her own love of family.
Her first diagnosis of cancer in 1995 emboldened her. "I'm alive," she told her many, many Friends. "This is a second chance. I'm going for the gusto." It carried her through a bone marrow transplant in the year 2000. That and her mischievous sense of humour. To startle her nurses, she left joke-store fake lit cigarettes under the hospital bedding and nonchalantly placed a lifelike plastic white mouse on her shoulder.
But the transplant meant that when the cancer reoccurred a couple of years later, her only treatment to control the tumour growth was radiation and there wasn't much that was positive about the prognosis.
And just after Christmas 2003, her health took another dip, the crisis occurring during a rare time alone. She phoned her older brother, Carman, who raced to her home and phoned the ambulance. She was rushed to Princess Margaret Hospital, hospitalized, diagnosed with a tumour in her spleen and given a blood transfusion.
She never forgot the feeling of being ill and frightened and solo and decided she would never experience it again. This champagne-loving people person had been doing some serious reading about care teams while in Princess Margaret Hospital, and she had decided that she, too, would like to have people in place, not so much to help her, she rationalized, as to help Roxana MARTINEZ, her partner of seven years, who was holding down two jobs as well as taking on the increasingly exhausting task of caregiver.
CIRASELLA turned to a friend she knew to be organized as well as compassionate.
"I was very honoured when she picked me," said Anne KEREKES, a friend of 15 years who became the volunteer co-ordinator of a care-giving group called the Simba Circle. Simba means lion in Swahili and CIRASELLA chose the name for its strength as well as its memories of a life-changing safari photography tour she experienced in southern Africa.
CIRASELLA was an astute judge of character: KEREKES and her partner, Elaine FORD, became part of the core of a group of 25 Friends who received an information package in February 2004, entitled: You have been invited to join A Care Group for Clara CIRASELLA. Each member filled out a sheet itemizing his or her strengths and interests and availability.
The team was organized into two clusters. Those in Group A were assigned tasks. Some accompanied CIRASELLA to her Tuesday medical appointment; her brother shovelled her driveway; FORD took her to Home Depot and was always good for a laugh. Others provided foot rubs, Boston cream pie and Essiac tea. Rina MANCINI, a friend since they were pre-teens, helped with her finances, her sister-in-law with income taxes. Members of Group B visited CIRASELLA and were instructed to call her directly while KEREKES brokered who did what via email and issued weekly updates to everyone in the Circle.
"I loved the group. When I was at work, they took my place," said MARTINEZ.
"I'd send out an emergency email and get five or more responses within the hour," KEREKES recalled.
Joining the Simba Circle were Friends from university, Friends from her travels, ex-girlfriends, business associates, MARTINEZ's two children, even a friend she'd made at age one. "After a while, what I came to understand, was that what seemed to me to be a confusing blur of names, was to Clara, the integral relationships which formed the substance of her life," a friend from university, Gwen JENKINS, noted.
Typically, CIRASELLA soon posted a message in the weekly email to her Circle, reminding them that she was available to give as well as receive help.
"Keep in mind this Circle is Not all about me but an opportunity for all of us to help each other as life comes up," she wrote April 7 of last year. "Please remember that I am very willing to reciprocate whenever I can, I can keep people company on their doctor's appointment and /or a whole list of other things."
But by June 21, some of the rules had to be amended.
CIRASELLA was becoming tired from fielding so many phone calls from Friends. KEREKES had to institute new protocol: phone her to book a visit with CIRASELLA. Then, three days later, KEREKES emailed the Circle that CIRASELLA's cancer had spread to her lungs, that their friend needed "uplifting" and "fun visits" and not too many questions about her health.
Again, typically, CIRASELLA rallied and hired a contractor to build an addition for entertaining onto the back of her house. "I plan to kick butt from here on in," she wrote September 9. But on November 4 she told the Simba Circle she had been diagnosed with acute myoblastic leukemia and by December 22, KEREKES's weekly email stated that "visits are now for comfort and watch over Clara, not necessarily social."
But as usual, CIRASELLA cooked Christmas dinner for her Friends. On New Year's Eve, though, it was Chinese takeout. And when a fatigued CIRASELLA took to her bed, everyone scrambled on to it with her to greet midnight with champagne and noisemakers and toast their brave friend.
During the last Saturday she spent at home she decided she and Gwen JENKINS would make stew. "Of course, according to Clara, I was doing everything wrong," JENKINS said. "You'd think after 20 years (of Friendship) I would know you don't peel garlic."
CIRASELLA was admitted into Princess Margaret Hospital for the last time January 24. She died February 1 at age 51, but not before she said goodbye to all her Friends and families. There were lineups to see her. KEREKES remembered arriving at the hospital late from work -- 7 p.m. -- and having to wait until after 9: 30 to get in to see her friend.
The Simba Circle was coming full circle.
"The Circle allowed us to go through this with her," said FORD. "The group experienced something very profound together."
"This has taken away a little bit of my fear of dying," said MANCINI.
Carman CIRASELLA believed the Simba Circle prolonged his sister's life by months. And Clara CIRASELLA was adamant, even in her last hours, that they continue the Simba Circle after her death to help support MARTINEZ and to help others start their own Simba Circles.
They have already begun to do that.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-03-14 published
Crossing the finish line his specialty
Bill LINDO swam, cycled and ran almost to the end
Top triathlete was also a successful businessman
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
This is a story of a life in the fast lane. A very long fast lane.
Bill LINDO, 83, is believed to have been Canada's oldest triathlete, entering and often winning the Olympic distance races of 1.5-kilometre swims, 40-kilometre cycles and 10-kilometre runs.
He thought it was easier than marathon running -- although he did a lot of that as well, including a personal best on April 13, 1981, his 60th birthday, at the prestigious Boston Marathon.
He'd been planning to stop running marathons after that one -- he always over-trained and he always sustained some injury or other -- but he did so well, easily conquering Heartbreak Hill at Mile 22, and felt so good crossing the finish line, he decided to revise that plan and keep on running.
There were plenty more finish lines for LINDO. He ran marathons in Toronto, Ottawa, New York, Chicago, a couple of more times in Boston, and he had the T-shirts to prove it. In 1992, when he was 71, he competed for the Canadian national team at the world championship triathlon event held at Deerhurst Inn in Muskoka, the first time ever in Canada. He crossed that finish line looking as if he had just run around the block.
Perhaps that is what it felt like, too. LINDO had been training hard for that meet, three hours a day, six days a week, swimming six, cycling 120 and running 80 kilometres. Actually he'd been training to compete in Hawaii's famous Iron Man, infinitely more gruelling as it includes a full marathon run, and he'd been travelling around the province's triathlete circuit. He was spotted at a Guelph event and urged to try out for the national team. He qualified, but he had to be talked into competing at the world championship because it meant he would have to miss the Iron Man event.
"He told us that he couldn't say no, that they were giving him all this great stuff," his daughter Elaine LINDO said. "Red-and-white warm-up pants, swimsuit, hat, singlet, all kinds of stuff. He couldn't resist."
He was the only Canadian competing in the over-60 age categories there were nine athletes over 70. Wearing red and white and the number 1104, LINDO came fourth.
"He was the hometown hero. Everybody knew who he was," Elaine recalled. She remembered that the crowds went wild when her father came into view. "When he crossed the finish line, he looked so fresh, like he could do another triathlon. The Japanese guy could barely make it across the line."
The photo Elaine took of her father crossing the line is reproduced here. Of all the photos of all his finishes, this one was his favourite. He was upright, he was fresh and he was laughing.
LINDO died at home on January 13.
"He liked winning his categories to the point where he was the only one in his age category," said another daughter, film director Eleanore LINDO. "He wanted to compete until there was no one left."
But then LINDO decided what he really liked about the triathlon was biking, so for his 75th birthday, and in honour of what was supposed to be his retirement, he flew one of his titanium racing bikes to Amsterdam, where he rode around Holland. He then flew to Paris and rode through that city and France, and then on to to Switzerland, where he told his family he biked halfway up the Matterhorn.
Sure, they said. But maybe he really did, as his wife Bernice and their seven children well knew.
LINDO started getting fit sometime around his 50th birthday. He was out on the golf course kibitzing with some Friends and business colleagues when he commented on the girth of one of the men. Then he found out the man wore waist size 44: the same as LINDO. He joined the Y -- his family thinks it might well have been the next day -- taking up racquet ball, then squash.
Then he joined the Fitness Institute the first year it opened and got really serious about his workouts. Around the club he was famous for his endurance and fitness level, especially on the stationary bike, where he could go faster and longer than the professional hockey players working out next to him.
"Dad used to say they were wusses," said daughter Christine MILCAWICH. Here was a man who used to bike from his Beach-area home to Picton Provincial Park, bike around the park and then back home, all on a Sunday afternoon. "He had to do everything full force."
LINDO had at least two collisions with cars while training; the emergency-room doctors at Toronto East General Hospital once teased Bernice that she had brought her husband in more than all of their seven kids combined.
Sometimes he'd come in from training sessions looking tired and drained. "But he'd walk up the stairs, have a shower and be fully recovered when he came back down," his wife said.
Five years ago, he and Eleanore took up tennis. "He used me as a backboard," said Mayfair Lakeshore Racquet Club tennis coach Scott HURTUBISE. "He was remarkable. Only a small handful of people have his agility and tenacity."
LINDO grew up in Toronto's east end, where he was known as the "singing delivery boy," working at the grocery store of his buddy Steve STAVRO's father, at the corner of Queen St. E. and Coxwell Ave. A dropout after Grade 11, he was serving in Italy driving a supply truck in the middle of the action at Anzio when he vowed that if he got out of the war, he was going to settle down, get married and make something of himself. His mother decided she knew just the right girl, whom she took with her to the train station to welcome home the returning soldier. He and Bernice settled in his old family home at 11 Cherry Nook Gardens and had seven children in 10 years.
He worked in sales for a chemical company for years, taking his university degree in chemistry at night. In the early 1960s, LINDO formed a can distribution company that became the second largest in the country. His flagship company, TML Industries in Pickering, is run today by daughters Christine and Marguerite, and by Peter, his only son.
LINDO and his best friend Joe WOMERSLEY also started up Linwo Industries, a chemical packaging company. "Bill was a wizard at figures. He could set up a big quote in his head in 10 minutes," WOMERSLEY said. Entrepreneurial and adventurous, they also kick-started the first company in the country to make aerosol packaging, then another business making heavy-truck accessories, and later a company manufacturing the first artificial fireplace logs in Canada.
If things were getting tense at a meeting, or slow at a convention, LINDO would stand on his head and sing "Old Man River." If circumstances permitted, he'd stand on his head, drink a beer and belt out the song.
LINDO ran his businesses the way he ran his races, one after another after another. Soon he and WOMERSLEY were setting up a plant in Edmonton making plastic gallon jugs for antifreeze and another facility in Buffalo to wind 2.4 million cases of Stretch 'n' Seal for Colgate Palmolive in five years.
Then there was the Weed As You Walk weed killer. Dr. Maggie's Pet Food Supplement was his last business venture.
LINDO was still working four days a week and working out even more often when he was diagnosed with cancer. The last year of his life was the only time in which he'd ever been sick. Eleanore said he never gave up on the idea that he would do another triathlon. As his long-time friend WOMERSLEY said, "His heart was like a diesel motor. You can't stop that running. It was only his body that disintegrated and in the end gave out."

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-03-21 published
He made every day a good hair day
Yorkville hair colourist worked until age 91
Bon vivant and master of his craft beloved by clients
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Legendary hair colourist Pierre TESSIER was on the job up until the week before he was admitted to hospital where he died three weeks later on February 17. Even though he was 91 years old, he never had any intention of ever stopping work.
At The Private World of Mary Tripi, the upscale Yorkville hair salon where he was employed for the last decade of his life, there's a sweeping spiral staircase that leads up to a big, bright room overlooking the old fire hall across the street. Every morning he would pause at the top of the stairs, an erect dapper figure, immaculate in one of his starched shirts and silk cravats, and beam at his co-workers. Mary TRIPI herself works at the station at the top of the stairs.
"It was a wonderful smile," she said.
A client recommended she hire TESSIER but warned her he was old. "Then I met him," she recalled. "He wasn't old. He had a magic. He was the age he was -- but also he wasn't."
He loved this world of artistry and egos, power and pampering, where four days a week he engaged in the curious intimacy forged between a woman and the man or woman she trusts with her hair.
TESSIER may have been the last colourist in Toronto using a technique for highlighting he had learned from his father and grandfather in his birthplace of France: a laborious process involving cotton balls and hours of his client's time. "Very old school," said his colleague, Nicholas VRETTAKOS. " You need a lot of patience. But he had more than 60 years experience. He was a master at what he did."
His workstation was the fourth chair in the colourist row, between Monique SANJAREI and VRETTAKOS, who both adored him. He was in the middle of things, where he liked to be.
On his lunch breaks he would look out over the salon with its cool green walls and softly lit mirrors, where women in salon wrappers, hair combed in damp furrows back from unadorned faces, feel safe, protected.
"I was addicted to him," said Sherry Eaton DREW. TESSIER streaked her hair for 37 years. "It was horrifically slow but absolute perfection."
She was stopped by strangers on the streets of Rome, Paris and London and asked for the name of her hairdresser, she said. "He was a maestro."
He turned down a request from actor Maggie Smith to do her colour when she was performing at Stratford. She wanted him to go to Stratford; he thought she should come to the salon. It didn't happen and he didn't care.
"He didn't need the accolades of doing Maggie Smith's hair," said his friend, Carole WILSON.
TESSIER became Friends with a good many of his clients. They were all blindly loyal to him: Margann ANDREWS followed TESSIER through four hairdressing salons to Tripi's, where TESSIER arrived with a file of 350 names of clients willing to pay upwards of $250 for colour and highlighting.
"He always made me feel special," ANDREWS said. "He saw the beauty in everything: people and paintings."
Carolyn WALKER began as a client in 1974. "I found him totally interesting," she said. WALKER had worked for the U.N. in Geneva they found they had much in common. "It was never gossip, never empty talk. He was a man of substance. His conversation was about ideas and culture and travel and food."
And, if asked, about his adventures.
The son of a barber and hair salon owner, and the grand_son of a wigmaker for the Paris Opera, TESSIER's own career began in the late 1920s when he apprenticed at a Paris salon from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m., when it was busy repairing the coiffeurs of the women who worked at the bordello below. He quit to join the army and see the world for the next three years. Back in Paris, he was working in the storied salon at the Georges V hotel, when World War 2 broke out.
By 1940 he was a prisoner of war, interned in a stalag near Baden-Baden, from which he escaped twice, one of those times disguised as a woman. But when he and a buddy were recaptured the second time, they were moved to a higher security Prisoner of War camp near Düsseldorf and shackled together in a small cell for weeks. As soon as they were released, they escaped again. They thought they had made it into Belgium; they hadn't and were recaptured.
Again he escaped, this time during the Allied air raid on Cologne in 1943 and with the help of the Resistance, got to England where he joined de Gaulle's Free French. On D-Day he was hitting Sword Beach with commandos, but when the war was over, he didn't settle down and return to the salon. Instead he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion because he wanted to travel.
He was posted in North Africa and later Indo-China where he was captured and held prisoner again. And one more time, he escaped. But it took him two years to get back to the Legion's outpost in Morocco, he often said.
He was ready to get back to work. He rejoined the staff at the Georges V hotel, later moved to Monte Carlo and Cannes where he famously did Marlene Dietrich's hair. He met and married a beautiful Parisienne ballerina named Lucienne with whom he had a son. But in 1957, restless again, he moved the family to Montreal where he had a new job as head of the newly opened salon at the Ritz-Carleton hotel.
But 10 years later, he moved to Toronto. Alone. His wife had died, after a long battle with cancer. And his son? TESSIER rarely told people this, but his son returned to France and refused to speak with his father, whom he accused of not spending enough time with his dying mother. TESSIER never heard from him again, although he tried on at least two occasions to locate him.
This was not one of the stories he ever told his clients; instead he would chat about his travels, the latest art show or ballet or French film in town. But only when asked. He was a quiet man by nature, focused on his work.
In Toronto he met Anna WILSON, a glamorous Scotswoman in the fashion business. They were an elegant pair, hosting sparkling dinner parties featuring French recipes prepared by TESSIER and only the best wine.
"They were modern people, so interested in everything going on in the city," recalled Carole WILSON, who married Anna WILSON's son Patrick. A francophone from Quebec, Carole WILSON was taken under TESSIER's wing. Their Friendship continued until his death, even after WILSON was divorced from his stepson and after Anna WILSON's death.
"He was like a father to me," she said. "We were his family."
TESSIER worked in some of Toronto's best-known salons -- for Vicki Runge, Gerald and Lloyd, Monroe's in the Colonnade -- before joining Mary Tripi. When he turned 80, dozens of his clients and colourists whom he had trained turned up at Bumpkin's Restaurant for a surprise party. When he turned 90, the staff at Mary Tripi took him out to dinner and gave him a surprise trip to the Greek islands. On his 91st birthday (last April 13) he slipped away to Montreal to see an art show and old Friends. Last September, he rented an apartment in Montmartre and wandered through his old haunts in Paris.
When he fell ill with pneumonia at the end of January, clients and colleagues rushed to his bedside. His hospital room resembled a garden, one said. WILSON was there every night. WALKER spent hours by his bedside.
Sherry DREW was there every day for two weeks -- "He was my friend. How could I not?" she said -- until she had to travel out of town four days before he died. She walked down the hallway weeping because she knew she would never see him again.
She and the staff of Mary Tripi are fundraising for a scholarship in TESSIER's name. It will go to a student of hair colouring. They believe it is a fitting tribute to a man who always did his best work so that women, as DREW put it, "can go out feeling wonderful and invincible."

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-03-28 published
He helped bring CanLit to the world
Gordon ROPER sneaked books on to curriculum
Group of Friends read to professor who went blind
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Gathered around Mollie CARTMELL's kitchen table in Peterborough are the chair, associate chair and past chair of Trent University's department of English, talking about the man who has meant the world to them and who helped bring the world the study and appreciation of Canadian literature.
Prof. Gordon ROPER had been teaching at the University of Toronto's Trinity College some 45 years ago when he found a circuitous if not somewhat duplicitous way to slip the study of home-grown Canadian novels into Trinity's previously wholly Anglophile curriculum.
These three -- and many, many others in academia -- are the products of that subterfuge, a generation of scholars and former students who proudly and wryly describe themselves as "Roperized."
They were also the core of a group called Roper's Readers, eight people who read to the 93-year-old at a set time each week, because ROPER had become blind about 25 years ago and because, they all said, ROPER was simply wonderful company.
"He made it always a pleasure, an unalloyed pleasure," said James NEUFELD, chair of Trent's department of English literature. "You'd knock at the door of Applewood (the retirement home where ROPER lived until he died in his sleep on February 20) and he would leap up, stride to the door, thrust his hand out. 'James, so good to see you.' Why wouldn't you go?"
"When he talked to you, he wasn't a blind old man," said CARTMELL, a retired high school teacher who met ROPER 15 years ago while writing a history of the local Young Men's Christian Association. She read him newsmagazines and papers Friday evenings, and treasured his conversation and commentary. "He turned me on to The New Yorker magazine, for which I will be eternally grateful."
The group started in earnest and on a schedule in 1997, after the death of ROPER's beloved wife, Helen. ROPER fell into a deep despair, a shocking revelation for NEUFELD, who had idolized ROPER since he took an English course from him his first year at Trinity College. It was NEUFELD who called Gordon JOHNSTON, associate chair of the English literature department and also a former Trinity student of ROPER's, as well as Mike PETERMAN, past department chair and currently a visiting scholar at Princeton in Canadian studies, and suggested they set up a regular timetable for visiting and reading. Others soon joined, including Peterborough Mayor Sylvia SUTHERLAND.
Tuesdays were NEUFELD's time; Mondays, JOHNSTON read poetry with him; Thursdays, PETERMAN and ROPER often read and discussed PETERMAN's current writing: "It was a special bond and terrific for me. I could hear myself making headway or getting caught. He would make suggestions; he was my best reader."
The last time they were together PETERMAN read from Leaven of Malice, a book by Robertson DAVIES that he's been teaching in his Princeton course on Canadian literature. DAVIES was one of ROPER's oldest and fastest Friends. "I said to him that I thought the novel held up well -- that it was bracing and funny -- and he was thrilled."
And that was ROPER's secret. He was the gentlest of critics he valued literature, studying it with a rigorous intellect but also with a genuine and generous affection. He made neither waves nor academic headlines; his scholarly output was small by some standards, but careful and precise, and always illuminating. Gabrielle Roy said his introduction to her classic novel Where Nests the Water Hen was the best critical piece on her work she'd ever read. Initially a student of American literature who was fascinated by Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Samuel Clemens, ROPER wrote an introduction to Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter because when he began teaching in 1948 there was no text available of this work for university study.
He was chair of English at Trinity College, a member of the graduate faculty at the university, a senior founder of Massey College and responsible as Senior Fellow Emeritus for developing the Massey College library, later renamed the Robertson Davies library. Northrop Frye and E.J. Pratt were his Friends. Governor General Adrienne CLARKSON was a student who phoned his nursing home last year when Peterborough was flooded to make sure ROPER was all right.
"Our class was small -- about 10 of us -- clustered around a table beneath the mullioned windows under the eaves. But as a result, years later, I never hear the word 'ambergris' (a waxy substance secreted by sperm Wales that's added to perfume) without thinking about Dr. ROPER explaining the elaborate metaphor of Ishmael's world," she wrote from Rideau Hall when she learned of ROPER's death. "He taught me not only literature, but also the meaning of caring about literature."
ROPER's greatness was displayed in the classroom. "He could give a whole lecture on the words 'Call me Ishmael,' said JOHNSTON. ROPER was a high-school dropout; he often joked it was the basis of his Friendship with Robertson DAVIES, also a doctor of letters without a high-school diploma. They met at a meeting at Peterborough's Y, when ROPER, from the back of the room, tossed off one of his trademark puns. ROPER took out his first library book when he was eight. When he was in Grade 10, the head librarian at Peterborough's library gave him the keys to the basement stacks because he was spending so much time there instead of across the street at Peterborough Collegiate Institute.
Nevertheless, ROPER attained his PhD in American literature in 1944 from the University of Chicago and was teaching there when he received the offer from Trinity College. At the time, ROPER had to work hard to obtain permission to teach a course on American literature, but by the early 1960s he'd manage to slip in two Canadian volumes at the end of that course. "It was a toehold," said NEUFELD, but not enough for ROPER, who hatched a plot with a colleague in the divinity school to devise a course of Canadian content he called "Spiritual Issues in Literature."
"That's how he got Canadian literature on to the syllabus," said NEUFELD. "It was one of the best courses I ever took. I taught CanLit at Trent on the basis of that course."
JOHNSTON remembered how ROPER smuggled Margaret Laurence -- another friend -- on to campus to address a class just after she had written The Stone Angel, one of a generation of Canadian books that jump-started the entire CanLit industry. In 1969, ROPER returned to Peterborough to teach at the fledgling Trent University. He was back in the classroom, where he was happiest, and he was closer to the family cottage on Roper Island on Stoney Lake where he and Helen spent summers with their children, Mark and Susan.
Later he suffered a colostomy, angina and blindness, but he remained upbeat and busy. When Roper's Readers decided to honour their friend last fall at the annual Rooke Reading Series by inviting the public to hear them read to him -- "and get a taste of our pleasure in doing it," as CARTMELL put it -- ROPER started making a suggestion, here, then there.
"He started to choreograph it," said JOHNSTON, with a laugh. One of his suggestions was that they read from the works of a local nature writer. It was a good one, they all agreed. "He always had in mind what he thought would be good for the community to hear."

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-04-04 published
Romance writer troubled by memories
Barbara BROUSE added depth to bodice rippers
Memoirs recall mother's abuse, servants' kindness
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
As Abra TAILOR/TAYLOR, she created a world in which love's raging passion always overcomes deceit, betrayal and flame-haired predators (aka the other woman), in which the oh-so-handsome (but distant) count will finally sweep our heroine, the small grey-eyed governess, into his rippling arms and, with a shudder, a groan low in his throat, cover her mouth with burning kisses.
She was one of the world's best-selling romance writers.
As Barbara BROUSE she had to be: her own marriage was disintegrating and she was single-handedly keeping four children and a grand house going in Rosedale.
It was the early '80s and she was part of a romantic revolution, one of a stable of writers injecting new realism -- and more than one plot line -- into bigger and bolder love stories. Now there were throbbing groins, restless hands, sex scenes and heroines who were definitely not virginal.
She wrote the first of Harlequin's Super Romance novels: End of Innocence ("Rafael's eyes had darkened and directed their attention toward the region of her breasts... her heart beat like a winged thing..."). Later she was a solid performer for Silhouette and wrote as Araby SCOTT for Avon publishers.
"My editor-in-chief met Barbara at a Romance Writers of America conference and I remember her calling me with so much excitement in her voice saying 'Guess who I signed up for our list? Abra TAILOR/TAYLOR.' It was a coup at the time," said Alicia CONDON, a former senior editor with Silhouette Books.
CONDON edited TAILOR/TAYLOR's book Hold Back The Night, which became a huge seller for the U.S. publisher.
"It had an emotional depth and drama to it that was not common at that time in contemporary romance; it was a book that really struck me," CONDON remembered.
The story featured a young woman who falls in love with a sculptor. There is a misunderstanding and she has his child without him ever knowing.
The copy editor who worked on the book told CONDON it was the best book she'd ever read. CONDON herself wrote to BROUSE in a letter: "This book wrings tears out of me every time I read it."
From 1979 to about 1984, BROUSE wrote dozens of romance novels, many of which were translated and published in Japanese, Italian, French, Portuguese and Swedish. They were never just tales of girl-meets-older-'n'-wealthier-man, and she was never just a dilettante tossing off fanciful froth between lunch engagements.
"She was up every morning at 5 a.m. writing until 5 p.m. and then she would make dinner for all of us. We'd all descend on her in her study after school wanting to know what we were having for dinner. She really did keep it all together," said her daughter Gillian BROUSE.
A former advertising copywriter, Barbara BROUSE thoroughly researched the locales for her stories, whether she had been there or not. She displayed all her books on a shelf behind her desk and enjoyed getting letters from her fans. "They would tell her that she touched their lives," said Gillian. "They don't say that when you write an ad for a refrigerator."
But five years after she began writing, she stopped. She never wrote another romance. It was years before she wanted to write another book -- and when she did, it consumed her.
After she fought her way back from a stroke that robbed her of her ability to speak, BROUSE began a long journey of introspection that resulted in her need to tell her own story. She wrote three volumes, The Drumming, Lion In The Drawer and Dolly, of polished but raw, painful stories of childhood abuse.
More than anything she had written, she wanted these published. After immersing herself in the fiction of love conquers all, she wanted desperately to tell a true story of overcoming cruelty. But when she died at 73 of a heart attack on February 23, she still hadn't found a publisher.
BROUSE was born in Indore, India; her Canadian father was a missionary doctor who tended to many of the prisoners of war made famous in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai. He was also Lord Mountbatten's physician. She was sent away to an Irish boarding school when she was six, then came to Toronto to attend Brown public school, Bishop Strachan School and the University of Toronto.
She was hired by Simpson's to write advertising copy, but after she met and married Leo BROUSE, the couple started their own advertising agency, Lionel T. Brouse and Associates. It was a good time to be in the advertising game. "It was very creative and a lot of fun then," said Margaret BREAK. She and her husband Paul were great Friends with the couple, who were at the centre of the social set of the '60s. They were golden: he was urbane, witty and charismatic; she was beautiful and talented. She wrote the lyrics for the jingle "It's hard not to think of the Bay" and "Kleenex knows noses."
She worked from home, where she looked after their four children: Andrew, now a researcher and PhD candidate at University of Plymouth the twins Gillian, a marketing consultant currently on maternity leave, and Susan, a casting director in Vancouver, and Terance, a communications consultant.
In a house teeming with books and children, she made up stories about a gang of crazy alley cats for her own brood. But when their ad business took a downturn, her marriage showed the strain. Leo BROUSE, who died in 1999, took to sleeping all day and roaming the house at night, a drink at hand. Barbara BROUSE bought a box full of romance novels, studied them and started writing. The marriage officially ended when she stopped writing them.
She sold the big house in Rosedale and all the antiques. "Barbara scoffed at all that anyway," said her friend Buck HENRY, a hairdresser. They met when he came to look at some of the antiques she was selling.
BROUSE was barely into her 60s when she was felled by a massive stroke in 1997. Her carotid artery completely closed down; she could not remember any words and she had to learn how to speak all over again. No one understood the process. In fact, doctors told her she might never be able to walk or talk again.
Henry and the four children took turns being with her in the hospital. He remembers the despair of watching his friend struggling and failing -- to say even a one-syllable word.
"I remember Gillian saying to me 'I just want my Mom back,'" he said.
Her children recall her trying to tell them something after the stroke. Someone handed her a piece of paper so she could spell it out. She wrote "moves," then crossed it out, "woves," crossed it out as well. They started guessing words. Finally someone said "loves." "Yes," she said, pointing in turn to each of her children. "Love, love, love, love."
Her love of language may have saved her: she read and memorized the poetry she loved until the sound of those words became familiar to her again. When her father died in 1994, she turned to writing to revisit her childhood and recover the memories of the abuse she remembers receiving at the hands of her mother. It was also the way she wanted to thank the servants in the family home in India, whom she was convinced saved her from even worse trauma.
"Nobody was helping her do this, her writing was helping her," said her friend Peggy STAMP, who is a therapist. "It turned out to be the route to her unconscious."
But many of her Friends were uncomfortable when BROUSE talked about her latest writing. They had been fine with her escapism writing, the romance novels with the inevitable happy endings, but were threatened and frightened by her memoirs.
Some of them didn't believe her, and she spent years researching and trying to verify her memories.
The three unpublished volumes are her life's work. Not the hundreds of thousands of novels sold round the world by Abra TAILOR/TAYLOR or Araby SCOTT. Her children understand that; they say they are determined to find a publisher for their mother's last and most important words.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-04-18 published
Noël YOUNG had vision for daycare
He wanted a seamless day for schoolchildren
'Incurable' optimist devoted life to youngsters
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
A playful, joyful giant of a man, Noël YOUNG dedicated his life to children, their care and their welfare -- even though it was all theoretical until the birth of his own daughter just six years ago.
Mieke was an amazing gift, he used to say, and this wasn't theory, nor just the words of the smitten father he was. Four years before she was born, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour and given a few months to live. Perhaps it was his sunny, optimistic nature, perhaps it was something else, but YOUNG married his partner, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation writer Ann JANSEN, after his diagnosis and New Year's Eve surgery, and lived another 10 years. He died March 8 at age 51.
"When he was first sick, we never thought (having children) was a possibility," JANSEN said. "But he stayed well and the desire to have children is a very strong one. "
And he was someone who had a very strong sense of possibility.
"Cancer wasn't the only thing Noël had that was incurable. His optimism was," said Geoff WILLIAMS, a friend from their high school days in Scarborough. "Until close to his death he rarely expressed frustration or spoke of being upset with having cancer."
What did concern him -- greatly -- was establishing a child-care program for school-aged children within a federally funded universal child-care system. His vision was a seamless school day for children, in which they could go to one place for school and daycare. He was a founding member of the School Age Care Association of Ontario and the author of a 1994 book Caring for Play: The School and Child Care Connection.
He was the sparkplug behind a conference in Toronto six years ago and the driving force behind the association newsletter "Exploring Environments".
"He was very involved in things for children, advocacy for children, not-for-profit children's care," said Martha FRIENDLY, who saw him the day after the federal budget was announced in February. He had been staying in the palliative care unit at Toronto Grace hospital since the beginning of the year and by then was having some trouble speaking, but he wanted to know if the budget included finally -- funding for child care.
FRIENDLY is chair of the University of Toronto Childcare Resource and Research Unit, but she was one of a group of parents starting up the Alternative Primary School in about 1982 when she hired YOUNG to help with its faltering daycare. "He was tall -- about 6-foot-4 -- with a big, bushy head of red hair and I thought he was just the cutest guy. I tend to make snap judgments. I thought 'Okay, here's the guy (we need).'"
YOUNG told the hiring committee he wasn't strong on administration and that became a running joke. He was a creative, compassionate, imaginative and inspirational child-care worker: he started an outdoor education program in which the daycare kids experienced overnight outdoor camping, he designed a school-aged child-care program that focused on what the kids were interested in, including Friday afternoon swim lessons, but he never could pull together a budget.
It was the same when he arrived in the early childhood education program at George Brown College in 1987, ready to shake things up at a school known for its focus on the infant and toddler stages. He envisioned school boards and child-care centres working together to provide the seamless day, and it now exists at the early childhood education program funded by the province and run by George Brown at Ryerson public school.
YOUNG also initiated an innovative Canadian social history project, collecting archival photographs and organizing them into stories of child care, health, women's work, poverty and racism he often shared with classes at the college.
"He was trying to engage students in a more meaningful way of learning about history, and for early childhood education students to understand why we have the health care we have," said Pam DOYLE, his friend and colleague at George Brown.
She worked on the project with YOUNG in 1998. "He once affectionately referred to me as 'his staff,'" she recalled. "It was a faux pas he didn't make again."
But it was also typical of YOUNG, who could talk his, mainly female, colleagues into helping out and usually into doing the majority of the detail work on the many projects, conferences and causes he believed in. He got away with it because of his infectious idealism, youthfulness and exuberance. Still his Peter Pan-like ability to have the women in his life look after all its practicalities had a female friend at George Brown threatening to make up T-shirts proclaiming "I'm not Wendy."
He grew up in a family of women. "When he was born, everybody was thrilled," said his sister Betty VEITCH. He was the youngest child and only boy, and his three sisters fought over who was going to take him to school on his first day.
His father was an Anglican Church minister, idealistic and often away administering to the needs of his parishioners, something that wasn't lost on his son. When YOUNG was about five, he disappeared one day. The family finally found him having milk and cookies at the home of the church organist who lived with her elderly sister. He told his frantic mother he was "doing visiting just like Dad does."
YOUNG began working with children at the former Bolton Camp for underprivileged children and at the Eastview drop-in centre in downtown Toronto while attending the University of Toronto. He graduated -- eventually. "This was typical of how he approached academia: he liked it in theory better than practice," said WILLIAMS.
YOUNG started up and lived in a number of communal houses in the city: "From the first house on Follis to the apartment above the shawarma shop on College, in the house that shook in high winds on Clinton, and during brief diversions to the foreign lands east of the Don Valley Parkway, Noël managed to bring groups of people together in various degrees of harmony," WILLIAMS noted.
YOUNG and JANSEN made their home in a co-op near University of Toronto and a Starbucks, where YOUNG used to take his plastic travel mug every morning for a fill-up. He got to know the staff there so well, one of them started babysitting Mieke and another signed up in George Brown's youth services program. "He was a natural mentor," his wife said.
When he moved into the palliative care unit, the Starbucks staff arranged delivery of coffee to him.
His surgery last fall wasn't successful, but it might have given him an extra month or so of life, which he put to use. His was a family devastated by cancer: both his twin sisters died of it (Gwen had breast cancer and Lorraine ovarian cancer). His father had died of pancreatic cancer and his mother died of leukemia. Only Betty VEITCH survived kidney cancer.
Trinity Hospice organized a care team for YOUNG that was soon overflowing with Friends.
Pam DOYLE was a team member. "He still had ideas to the end. He still wanted to get people to work on committees. He said the team was life-giving; we were in awe of him."
When he still could, he did paddling exercises in his bed because he was hoping he might be able to go on one more canoe trip to Killarney. With DOYLE, he worked out the details of the Noel Young Award, which will be awarded to a student in George Brown's early childhood education program who has shown a commitment to advocacy and action.
About 450 people attended his memorial celebration at Trinity St. Paul's Church last month. There were cards and condolences. One was from Martha FRIENDLY's daughter Abigail, now 25 and studying in London, England. She was one of the kids at that daycare in 1982 where YOUNG first worked. She used to pretend she wasn't feeling well at school so she could sit with YOUNG in the daycare. "I always thought you were a giant," she wrote.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-04-25 published
Age did not dim advocate's fire
Mae HARMAN worked tirelessly for social justice
Her north Toronto house was the site of many a meeting
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Mae HARMAN reached her full potential only when she retired almost 20 years ago and became a full-time advocate.
She had certainly been successful as a supervisor at University Settlement House and for years as a member of the University of Windsor's social work department, but she found her real vocation as a straight-talking letter-writing, speech-making, banner-bearing thorn in many a government's side.
"Mae has been a model advocate for me and for other members of the Canadian Pensioners Concerned," said Bruce MUTCH, who met HARMAN in 1986, the year after she joined the board of the feisty non-partisan advocacy group.
"Even her voice mail was a plea for harmony in living."
She could write thoughtful, considered and knowledgeable position papers. She could and did write snippy and/or exasperated letters to government ministries and newspapers.
"It's a great relief to know, thanks to Mike HARRIS, that the real value of education is in learning how to market yourself. What fools the thinkers and teachers have been for thousands of years, putting their efforts into studying and researching in the arts and sciences. No wonder teachers are so despised by our government," read one of them.
As her grandnephew, Peter MURRAY, said, "Her weapon was the fax machine."
HARMAN volunteered for the Ontario Coalition of Senior Citizens Associations, the Ontario Health Coalition, Care Watch and the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario. She was a powerhouse for the University of Toronto social work alumnae, ensuring that social justice issues were always addressed in its newsletters. She was both fearless and tireless.
In September 2002, she was behind what MUTCH described as a "major comprehensive missive" submitted to the pre-budget consultations of the federal government's standing committee on finance.
"The prime concern of government should be to ensure that the rights and basic needs of all citizens are met, thus ensuring greater levels of prosperity and the highest quality of life for all Canadians," she wrote in part.
"It is time to put the Canadian people first. Business looks after itself very well. They have had priority with the government. A significant change in priorities is in order."
She wasn't afraid to take to the streets to make her point.
"She was often out at demos," said Dorothy MacKINNON, another Canadian Pensioners Concerned board member. "There was one with the Ryerson students umpteen years ago and we went there with our banner. The students were so surprised. They thanked us."
HARMAN marched to Queen's Park protesting Mike Harris's Common Sense Revolution during the Days of Action. In 1996, while in Ottawa drawing up battle plans to fight rumours of pension cuts, she told a reporter: "We are tired of being called greedy geezers and grasping grannies. We're not just in this for ourselves. We are parents and grandparents, and we care about our children and grandchildren, and we want something to be there for them when they reach retirement."
Her small north Toronto house was the site of many meetings, and it was loaded with plaques recognizing her volunteer work. She received her last award this past November, from the Ontario Society (Coalition) of Senior Citizens' Organizations, for her efforts on behalf of seniors and the disabled.
This past February she died at home of cancer. She was 84 and still fighting. She had been working on a draft of a speech about compulsory retirement, to which she was adamantly opposed. Her niece, Joan MURRAY, recalled how someone inquired of HARMAN how she was feeling about a month before her death.
"Angry," was the reply.
HARMAN was born in the parlour of the family farm in King Township. Her parents were hardworking though somewhat complacent farmers, but her older brother Leonard, who married the local schoolteacher, was a catalyst for discussions about social justice. His sister became secretary of the Temperance Farm Radio Forum, their local rural discussion group and one of many across the country sponsored by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio and farm organizations.
HARMAN recently had talked about finding a letter dated 1942 from Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie KING. It acknowledged her remarks about the health system.
The first member of her family to attend university, she graduated from the faculty of social work at the University of Toronto in 1946 and worked for the Young Men's Christian Association in Winnipeg and Toronto before joining University Settlement House. "To Mae, each person was a person of worth," said Harry MORROW, who was her boss at the time. "She didn't do for people. She did things with them."
Later, at the University of Windsor, she was well known for mentoring and hosting dinner parties for exchange social work students from Hong Kong, but everyone agrees it was when she moved back to Toronto and took up volunteer work that she really hit her stride.
"She really got her fire," said MORROW. " There had been no indication she was this crusading type when she had been working."
She thrived in her new neighbourhood: she was the lady in the witch-and-spider earrings handing out candy every Halloween and she regularly threw big parties to which everyone was invited. When she was being treated for cancer, she would sit in her living room -- languishing in her bedroom was not her style, according to MURRAY, her niece -- as Friends and neighbours came in through the open front door. Long an advocate of a strong home health- care system, she benefited from it and her team of caregivers.
MURRAY said the night before HARMAN died, she had fallen off her bed. A friend called 911 and four handsome firefighters arrived to put her back in bed. At least that was HARMAN's version. "We were having a bit of a party," she told MURRAY. She died the next morning, in that bed, petting her cat, Joy.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-05-09 published
Lisa BROWN, 41, suffered in silence
But family speaks up about the depression that killed her
'I looked for it. I could never see it,' anguished father says
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Lisa BROWN was a cherished daughter, beloved sister, generous friend -- all those clichés of death notices, but in this case all so true. She was also a suicide.
The 41-year-old woman with the flashing dark eyes, and gleaming thick curls she hated and her mother loved, killed herself in her St. George St. apartment last October 14. Two days later, her parents, Dan and Fran BROWN, who live in Waterloo, received her apartment keys in the mail, along with the rent payment stubs.
Their life has never been the same since.
Along with the despair and pain of losing a child, they have been haunted by guilt and feelings of failure because they couldn't protect her, the "if onlys" and the "what ifs" and all the "why, why whys?"
Not long before she ended her life, Lisa BROWN was at her parents' home downloading music from the Internet, telling her mother with affectionate exasperation that she was wearing the wrong shade of lipstick -- again. "Isn't that what all daughters do?" Fran BROWN says, smiling at the memory.
Now they know their daughter was depressed, although she never indicated it to them. "I looked for it. I could never see it," Dan BROWN says. Fran BROWN calls it "the mask" and wonders if Lisa hid her depression because so much of society is uncomfortable acknowledging it.
The family decided they wouldn't hide the cause of Lisa's death at the Toronto service, Fran BROWN instructed the rabbi to acknowledge her daughter's final act along with "her beautiful life," and her older brother Paul addressed it in his eulogy.
"What we are all hoping for is that the message is out there that this is a disease like any other," he says.
"If Lisa had had heart illness or cancer, we would have discussed it," Fran BROWN says. "But she had a brain disorder and the brain is part of the body. Why on earth isn't brain disorder discussed? Why do people turn their backs?"
Compounding her pain is the fear she has seen in the eyes of some of her neighbours and Friends. Suicide is one of society's last taboos, but the code of silence it invokes also wounds. Fran BROWN has come to believe it may even contribute to the stigma of a mental illness, let alone the act of a suicide.
And that is why she and her family agreed to talk to media about Lisa.
"I have to help raise awareness in order to lower the ugly stigma," Fran BROWN says. "The only way it won't happen to others is if we don't sweep it under the rug any more. I'll be the voice Lisa didn't have."
Waterloo Region bereavement counsellor Dena MOITOSO says having a community acknowledge the death is an important part of mourning and a necessary part of grieving for the families. "Suicide describes the death, not the life. But if we as society aren't able to talk about the death, then we can't talk about the life."
MOITOSO leads three bereavement groups a year made up exclusively of relatives of suicides. "Unfortunately they are always full," she says.
The latest figures from Statistics Canada record 3,681 suicides in 1997, or a rate of 12.3 per 100,000 population. The World Health Organization has deemed suicide a global crisis. The suicide rate is up 60 per cent in the last 45 years, catapulting it to a place among the three leading causes of death of people aged 15 to 44.
MOITOSO believes it helps families to understand the medical basis of the suicide act, otherwise they take on the burden of blame for themselves.
"We as a society need to know there is a malignant form of depression and a benign form of depression," she says.
Lisa BROWN grew up in a home with all the prerequisites of a happy girlhood: the ballet and piano lessons, the family ski days, the collection of dolls from around the world and 6 Elisa Place, the two-storey, red-shuttered dollhouse with the tile roof her parents made for her on her 6th birthday. They have kept the essay she wrote in Grade 8 on children with special needs -- "other kids wrote about their holidays," her mother recalls with fierce pride.
She studied business at the University of Western Ontario, sharing a house on Central Ave. with three other girls, including Laurie MORGAN, her best friend. After graduation she was off to Israel, where she spent a year in a kibbutz, and was involved in a serious relationship.
Back in Toronto, she worked for Ontario Hydro, then National Trust. It was a job, not a career, her parents think. It was not something she talked about, MORGAN says.
"I tried to ask her about work, but she would just say it was fine," says MORGAN, a teacher and mother of three girls living in Caledon East. "It was difficult to have a conversation focused on her even for a brief time."
Lisa BROWN was that rare breed, a gifted listener, who was genuinely interested in the minutiae of her friend's and family's lives.
When she visited, Lisa would arrive at the bus depot loaded with gifts for MORGAN's girls.
They called her "Auntie Lisa" and she always seemed to know which Groovy Girl outfit was the coveted one and the latest, greatest book.
She was helping MORGAN write a memoir about her homesteading ancestors, doing line edits, researching sources, taping a relevant documentary.
Two years ago, she was the powerhouse behind her mother's driveway hosta plant sale that raised several thousand dollars for a nearby facility for disabled children.
Mother and daughter were so close they were each other's best Friends, but Fran began to worry when her daughter lost her job three years ago and never found another one. Always quiet, Lisa became a private, guarded person.
Laurie MORGAN didn't know Lisa had lost her job until 18 months ago, when Fran BROWN told her. "I tried many times in an indirect way to talk about it," she says. She and Lisa had a "giggly" phone conversation just a week before her death. "Had I thought (suicide) was a possibility I would have been knocking her door down."
She says she has vowed to finish her family's story and dedicate it to Lisa.
To help himself understand his sister's death, Paul BROWN joined Bereaved Families of Ontario where he is taking courses so he can facilitate the association's new seminars and meetings for bereaved adult siblings.
Her parents are setting up a memorial fund in Lisa's name to help raise awareness and lower the stigma of depression. Fran BROWN wants to speak to service and community groups and visit schools.
"I will do this for you and the millions out there suffering in silence," she recently wrote late one night in a note to her daughter. "Together, sweetheart, we will make a difference."
Cheques for the Lisa Brown Memorial Fund can be made out to the Benjamin Foundation and sent to c/o the Lisa Brown Memorial Fund, 3429 Bathurst Street, Toronto, Ontario, M6A 2CE.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-05-16 published
Bernie SHARE, 74: Kitsch king of Queen St.
His antique store a neighbourhood clubhouse
'He was so positive, so uplifting'
By Catherine DUNPHY, Staff Reporter
Bernie SHARE's funeral on April 17 was fit for the king he was. His partner, Susan, moved some of his favourite things -- Iranian carpets, the carved ornamental side tables, the bobble-headed hula dolls, the jelly mould in the shape of a naked female torso, the elf cookie jar and salt and pepper set, and five of the 40-plus cowboy hats he owned -- down Queen St. W. into four rooms of the Bates and Dodds funeral home.
SHARE, 74, was the man who owned a neighbourhood mecca. Officially it was an antique store called Gallery and Innovations; unofficially the cluttered storefront with its wondrous wares tumbling out onto the sidewalk on the south side of Queen near Niagara St. was a neighbourhood clubhouse for the denizens of this neighbourhood and customers from all over the city.
Everybody knew the guy with the English accent in the three-piece suit and the cowboy hat, and lots of them referred to him as the King of Queen St. He'd owned one store or another in the area for well over 25 years and it was in one of them 23 years ago that he met Susan. A single mom of three boys working as a waitress in the area, she'd often walked past the store but rarely stopped. "I thought it was a weird junk store," she said, unaware of the valuable chandeliers and art deco pieces often piled one on top of the other inside.
But one day she spotted an Iranian carpet and, uncharacteristically, knew she had to own it. SHARE readily agreed she could take it and pay him the $600 in four instalments. "I was impressed. He'd never seen me before and he trusted me," she recalled.
But that was how he worked.
"I don't think he even kept a ledger. I'd admire something; he'd say 'There's a crack in it.' He'd say something was $300. You'd say 'You sure'? He'd say $275," said Agnes HANNA, a neighbour and former teacher at the local Givens Shaw public school. He gave her many items for her kindergarten classes.
"I'd see a set of maracas, a teddy bear, a little chair, for the kids. 'Take it,' he'd say. 'Take it.'"
For her own Queen St. home, HANNA once spotted a late 1800s chaise longue in the rain out in front of the store with only three legs. SHARE got the fourth leg carved for her.
He would sit inside at the front of his store, a cup of coffee in his hand, surrounded by antiques and kitsch. The chairs would change, as they were sold, but the feeling was the same: this was a living room in which anyone was welcome to sit and chat. "Like an old village gathering," HANNA said.
Neighbourhood artists used to drop by, often for career advice. The talks often went on past closing time, turning into coffee-fuelled discussions of art and life and truth that lasted till midnight. In the summer, the salons, for that's what they were, moved outside and SHARE would sit there on the sidewalk amid his treasures, in suit and Stetson -- looking as if he were dressed for a wedding, HANNA said -- and talk to just about anyone passing by.
Often there was music. Susan remembers a time when a passing musician noticed a guitar SHARE had brought outside and asked if he could play it. Soon he was joined by a musician who lived next door, then by another local talent. Encouraged by SHARE, they played on... till 3 the next morning. Neighbours and strangers came, sat, sang, laughed and chatted. It was a night of magic that could only happen in the big city and that was always happening at the store and around SHARE.
Which is why Susan was determined to take that feeling to the funeral home. Together she and SHARE had a combined family of 11 children, but SHARE also knew street people and people from showbiz from when he used to supply props to movie and theatre sets. Many of these people came to say goodbye and stayed to celebrate their friend. Three members of the talented O'Hara family were there: actress Catherine, singer-songwriter Mary Margaret and SHARE's former neighbour, Marcus, from when he owned the Squeeze Box Club next door.
Several of the local restaurants spontaneously sent over trays of food, as his friend and neighbour Roger CLOWN wandered through the rooms plucking SHARE's favourite Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson tunes on his banjo. "It was a carnival atmosphere. Dad would have loved it," said his daughter Maxine SHARE- STROM.
People signed the guest book, scribbling all over and in the corners what he meant to them. Two of his Friends, Sheldon WAGNER, a psychiatrist, and musician Rick CAPREOL spontaneously sat down together for several sets of the blues.
And most everyone there had a story. An Iranian gentleman said SHARE was the first friend he and his wife, an Iranian princess, made in Canada. One of SHARE's business colleagues recalled delivering props to the then O'Keefe Centre for a show featuring Diane Keaton. SHARE assured him they could go to the stage door, that Keaton knew him. His colleague was skeptical and the security guard there was downright hostile, readying for a heave-ho, when suddenly a throaty female voice behind him called: "Bernie. Hi." It was Keaton.
SHARE was born in Flushing, Long Island, in 1930 to conservative Jewish parents who returned to England when he was 5. He was 25 and a talented but reluctant tailor when he married his first wife, Annette. They came to Canada in 1960 and opened up an antique store on Queen St. E. at Larchmount. They had a second store in the area that Maxine SHARE- STROM ran when she was 11.
She remembers being so excited to tell her father she had sold a six-place setting of Wedgwood china for $12. "He just smiled at me and said 'Good for you, honey,'" Later he showed her the setting in the reference book, telling her that it may have been worth "a little more" (it was worth probably $1,000 at the time) but that this was a good lesson for her to learn the value of things.
"That was my father. He was so positive, so uplifting," she said.
At the time, he was driving a cab to augment the family's income. SHARE- STROM remembers waking up some mornings to find a stranger asleep on the sofa, another fare down on his luck whom her father had brought home for a few days.
He moved the two stores to the Queen and Sherbourne Sts. area, and added a third across the street. All were called My Place. Later he crossed Yonge St. to set up another shop, this one on Queen St. W. closer to Bathurst St. SHARE- STROM had just graduated from high school, but she also opened a store there, across the street from her father's. "I am my father," she said. "Dad taught me to be fearless."
SHARE- STROM describes herself as the second daughter of SHARE's first "litter" of six children: five girls and a boy. Later, after his marriage ended, he had two more daughters from another relationship before meeting Susan and virtually adopting her three sons.
Now one of them, Kerry SARTZETAKIS, will be running the business with Susan.
She won't close. She can't. SHARE's presence is everywhere in this store, with its bric-a-brac, books, hat boxes, African carvings, brass beds, Czech glass and Raggedy Ann dolls. One of his cowboy hats is hanging on a peg. His chair is still at the front of the store. And his portrait sits atop one of the stacked dressers, overtop the shelf holding his favourite collectibles: the elf salt and pepper shakers, the hula dancers. In it Bernie SHARE is smiling -- and wearing his black cowboy hat.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-05-30 published
Victoria EVANS, 81: Baker left a recipe to savour
Vicky EVANS was known for her fresh pastries
Ran restaurant with her husband for 20 years
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
At Victoria EVANS's funeral on April 25, her daughters passed out her recipe for pogacha, a Macedonian egg bread that won her a first prize at a long-ago Robin Hood Bake Festival and which she always gave out to all her Friends and relatives every Easter and Christmas.
But both Dena NICOLOFF and Gina EVANS say it should have been the recipe for one of their mom's pies, especially her fat and filling apple pie, which won her a first-place ribbon, this time from Black Creek Pioneer Village.
Vicky, as she was often called, was known all over East York and beyond -- for her pies. With her husband, Ted, she owned, worked in and lived above Ted's Restaurant, which anchored the corner of Pape Ave. and O'Connor Dr. for 20 years until it was sold in 1969.
She was up every morning before 5 a.m. to open the restaurant, a cheery morning person who greeted her regulars with a big smile and a steaming pot of coffee.
At 7, when her husband came down to take over, she went upstairs with breakfast for her kids. "Seven bells," she'd say to John, Dena and Gina as she served up dollar-sized pancakes, or French toast, or poached eggs, always garnished with fruit, little touches of her artistry.
The kids off to school, she'd clean up the apartment, throw in a load of laundry and head back downstairs by 9: 30 a.m. Often she would go straight down to the basement where she'd hand roll pastry.
Ted's Restaurant was known for Ted EVANS's steak and kidney pies, but it was famous for Vicky EVANS's apple, cherry, lemon meringue, raisin, coconut cream, banana cream, cherry cream with peaches, blueberry, blueberry cream rhubarb and pumpkin pies.
But especially the coconut cream and apple pies.
A supporter of her Macedonian culture and of every Macedonian church in town, she would always bake an extra 20 or 30 pies for their church bazaars.
"People would wait for her to enter with her pies and they would start buying them before she had even reached the bake table," NICOLOFF said. "There would be shouting: 'I want one of Vicky's pies!'"
An uncle who was a chef as well as a fruit grower in the Niagara Peninsula taught her how to make pies, but EVANS was creative, always experimenting with her recipes. Neither daughter has figured out how to replicate their mother's winning formula.
"Because they were in the restaurant business, the recipes were in quantity, calling for things like three bushels of apples and 20 pounds of sugar," said Gina EVANS.
She is searching for a computer program that reduces recipes appropriately so she can collect her mother's recipes that made 60 pies at a turn, amend them and make a book out of them in her memory.
"I want to call it 'Victoria's Table,'" she said.
There were always dozens, fresh and fragrant and ready for the lunchroom rush.
When word got out that the EVANS were retiring and selling their restaurant, a group that called itself "the morning gang" presented Vicky EVANS with a large, engraved trophy.
"To Vicky," it read. "The sweet gal/who lights our day/The best of luck/In every way."
Ted EVANS loved the restaurant business, was a good cook and "believed in filling the plate," NICOLOFF recalls, but he was never a people person.
"It was because of my mother we had customers," Gina EVANS said.
When they were younger, the children worked in the restaurant too. They all started out washing dishes, cutting the eyes out of the potatoes before throwing them in the cutter, scraping leftovers into the slop pail -- which went to a local farmer and the fat from the grill into a container which was sold to a company that manufactured cosmetics.
John, who is a lawyer, was a waiter and a short order cook; Gina, who has an M.B.A., also waited on tables, but Dena, who became a teacher, stayed in the basement operating the potato peeling machine and helping her mother with the pies because she was always too shy to talk to the customers.
It was a hard life. Family time was in the pre-dinner lull at 4 p.m., when both parents would retreat upstairs to the apartment. Ted EVANS would doze in his chair, Vicky EVANS would iron, the girls would watch The Edge of Night and The Secret Storm before starting their homework and practising the piano.
Their mother's day was usually over, but Ted EVANS stayed up every night to close the restaurant at 2 a.m. and drive his staff home. The restaurant was open from 7 a.m. till 2 a.m. every day of the year except for Christmas Day.
Victoria "Vicky" TENEKOFF met her future husband, then known as Metody GELENTSOFF, when both were working at Eaton's. When he couldn't get a job, GELENTSOFF changed his name to Ted EVANS and got hired to dye shoes. They married in 1944 and opened Ted's Restaurant four years later.
In the beginning, Ted's was nothing more than a counter and two tables at the front. Vicky EVANS took an accounting course and typed all the daily menus and the specials and the restaurant grew to seat 60, with booths and a family dining room at the rear.
Sometime before 1992, NICOLOFF realized something was wrong with her mother.
Her mother was entertaining guests and went to prepare the food. When NICOLOFF went into the kitchen, she found her mother standing in the middle of the kitchen unsure of what to do.
Victoria EVANS was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease two years later.
Bedridden for the last five years, she had been unable to talk, although her daughters and daughter-in-law were always at her side, playing her favourite Macedonian folk songs.
In the 10 days before she died at age 81, the woman who lived up to the credo that you honour your guest with food could neither eat nor drink herself.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-06-06 published
Terry LITOVITZ, 56: 'Powerhouse' educator
Terry LITOVITZ cared for students
'Really smart' and inevitably right
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
A strong woman. Bold. Intimidating.
That's what everybody said about accountant and educator Terry LITOVITZ.
And not just her students, although everyone who ever took her first-year accounting class during her 25 years at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus came away from them shaking.
She didn't suffer fools or foolish notions. If she thought something was stupid, she said so. And inevitably she was right.
"She was just smart. Really, really smart," said Felicia LITOVITZ, 25, her youngest daughter who works in public relations for a Toronto entertainment conglomerate. Her older daughter, Aviva, 28, is working on her Ph. D. in chemistry at Cornell University. "I always loved her, but I was scared of her too until I was about 10. She was a powerhouse."
LITOVITZ used to tell her daughters, with a grin, that she never wanted to be called nice.
Glen McFARLAND was in LITOVITZ's first-year accounting class 10 years ago. "I was absolutely petrified," he recalled. "The class was intense and she was intimidating."
He remembers LITOVITZ asking who had completed the discussion problem and only about a half dozen raised their hands. "You're wasting my time," she told the rest of the class. "Get out now."
The freshmen were stunned. Nobody moved.
"All right then," LITOVITZ said, "The six of you who completed the problem come with me to my office. We'll talk about it there."
McFARLAND is now a partner with a Scarborough chartered accountancy firm, a member of the university management school's advisory board and a hirer of co-op accounting students just like he once was. He credits LITOVITZ for giving him, as well as hundreds of other accounting students, the grounding they needed for their work.
"Once you got over the fact she was so strict, you realized she was doing it all for you," he said. "Students were always her number one concern."
Most students caught on to her care and commitment to them.
In 1991, they created an award specifically for LITOVITZ for outstanding effort and performance in education, which the University of Toronto Commerce Management Students' Association presented to her. One year later, she was the recipient of the annual Scarborough College Teaching Award for being a "tough but fair and compassionate instructor."
The pupils also named the campus student association room -- the hub of their scholastic life -- after her.
"She made it clear stupidity annoyed her," said her friend and teaching colleague Sandra DAGA. " That's why students were scared of her. When they found out what she was about, they saw her kindness and thoughtfulness. She always gave good advice, if you asked the questions properly and didn't waste her time."
Her office was filled with cards, gifts and doodads from students. As study supervisor, her door was always open -- just leave the small talk behind, though. Widowed 15 years ago when her husband, Howie, died from cancer, she faced her own diagnosis of breast cancer five years later. Until two years ago, she carried on teaching, continuing her supervisory work via telephone and email from her Thornhill home. She was 56 when she died March 6.
"She was critical to the success of the program," said Sandford BORINS, a professor who was hired as department chair in 1990 to build, if not rescue, the management program at the Scarborough campus. At the time there were no full-time professors in the program and he set out to right this. LITOVITZ, who was a certified chartered accountant, and later, the recipient of an M.B.A. taken at night school, was an instructor, the lower status stream within the academic world.
"People in the teaching stream can make a real contribution, if they're as good as her. I learned from Terry that not everybody has to have a Ph. D.," BORINS said. "She was always three steps ahead. There were just a handful of people I could get really good advice from and she was one of them."
"She was impossible to sum up because she was so big," said her daughter Felicia.
Terry LITOVITZ was just 5-foot-2 -- but she had always been extraordinarily driven. Her father, Moishe or Morris KWASNIEWSKI, a paratrooper and war hero with the Polish underground movement, had been a highly ranked Communist civil servant who could give his wife and first daughter a fine home with a grand piano, a fountain in the foyer large enough for Terry to learn to ride a bicycle, a summer place, and a car and driver at their disposal.
But sometime after the Hungarian Revolution he learned he had fallen out of favour with the Communists in Moscow, and fled to Israel where he worked in a factory. In 1960, the family came to Canada, where they owned and operated a series of convenience stores. They worked from 7 in the morning to midnight, seven days a week and it fell to Terry to look after her younger sister Barbara and brother, Bernard, who was born when she was 13.
"My father was incredibly demanding," said Bernard KWASNIEWSKI, who is now an attorney living in San Francisco. "Once Terry came home with a mark of 99 per cent and he wanted to know what happened to the other 1 per cent."
Luckily, his daughter was extraordinarily bright, breezing through high school and easily attaining a Bachelor of Commerce degree from University of Toronto in 1972.
Still, she told her own daughters she always hated school and opted to study chartered accountancy instead of law or medicine because it necessitated fewer years of study.
For three years, she worked in the Toronto office of Coopers and Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers) where she was the only female auditor. Her brother remembers her telling him about one company dinner at which she sat beside the chairman and was the only female in the room as well as the only person who didn't have a cigar by their plate.
"Being Terry, she complained loudly, and was given a cigar, which she smoked," Bernard said. She had been smoking Gauloise cigarettes after a trip to France.
She dropped out of the corporate fast track for a job doing in-house education, research and recruitment for a Toronto accounting firm, where she learned that she loved teaching. A member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario, she taught part-time at York University, University of Toronto and George Brown College. She had been on the faculty of University of Toronto at Scarborough since 1980.
While taking her M.B.A. at York, and getting the top grade point average of her year, at the same time she made sure she was available for her daughters' school field trips at Rockford Public School.
When she was diagnosed with cancer, she made it her mission to survive long enough to ensure her daughters grew into strong women, her brother said. She was in remission for eight years and even took a long-awaited trip four years ago to Australia and New Zealand where she went water rafting, jet boating and hiking.
But then doctors told her the cancer had returned and had spread onto her spine. Felicia transferred from McGill University to the University of Toronto to spend time with her mother. "We were close. I called her every day and saw her most weekends," she said. " It was important for me to make the most of the time we had."
She told Felicia she wanted to give her enough advice for the next 10 years of her life, and her daughter believes she did.
LITOVITZ used her remaining time to completely organize her affairs. "I was probably the world's most redundant executor," her brother said. "She never fell apart. She just kept going."
One of her last acts involved her students. She created the Terry Litovitz Merit Award in Management with an endowment that has since been augmented by contributions from her former faculty colleagues, staff at the university, Friends and family.
Officially, the award will be given to a student entering the bachelor of business administration program straight from high school with excellent marks and who has demonstrated leadership skills.
"We know what Terry wants," said Daga. "It's to go to someone who appreciates that this course prepares you for a profession and that it is not just to get easy marks. There's a difference."
The first recipient will be announced later this month.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-06-13 published
Dorothy THOMAS stormed city hall
One of reformer group elected to council in 1972
She started poop and scoop program in Toronto
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Once upon a time, when Toronto was younger and believed in itself much, much more, a group of urban idealists stormed city hall. They called themselves reformers and they got into the council chamber by getting themselves elected. David CROMBIE was their leader, a man dubbed Toronto's "tiny perfect mayor" by the media of the day, and great things were expected and sometimes even delivered.
Now, these reformers were feisty and forward-thinking -- they were people like the late Colin VAUGHAN, an architect turned activist, lawyers Dale MARTIN and Karl JAFFARY, renegade thinker John SEWELL. And three of the newly minted aldermen -- for that was the job title of councillor in those days -- were women.
But only two -- Anne JOHNSTON and Dorothy THOMAS -- made it through the first term of office. JOHNSTON, who retired from municipal politics at the time of the last election, says that was only because they learned to be tough and because they had each other.
"I met her December 4, 1972, the night we were all elected. There was a spontaneous gathering of all the reformers at city hall and I remember Dorothy was wearing a hat and she came up to me and said: 'You and I are going to be Friends,'" she said.
They were a gang of citizen politicians who believed they were going to create a livable, even lovable city, but THOMAS was right about at least one thing that night: she and JOHNSTON were Friends until May 9 this year, when THOMAS died of cancer at Dorothy MIKOS was the proud daughter of very proud Hungarians. Her father, a tailor, and her mother, a talented seamstress, came to Canada in the 1930s. Theirs was the classic immigrant story, according to THOMAS's only child, Nye THOMAS, a lawyer and policy director of the Ipperwash provincial inquiry. His grandparents worked hard in Spadina Ave. sweatshops so their children would never have to and were thrilled when their daughter went to the University of Toronto.
THOMAS discovered journalism there -- it was the heyday of the varsity press -- as well as Ralph THOMAS, another journalist who would become a well-known Canadian filmmaker. Now living in California, he is best known here for Ticket To Heaven and The Terry Fox Story. Dorothy THOMAS left university before she graduated to work at the Toronto Star, where she was an arts reporter under the watch of the legendary entertainment editor Nathan COHEN.
She was a stay-at-home mom living in a fourplex on Wineva Ave. in the Beach when she joined up with a group of residents to successfully fight the construction of the Scarborough Expressway, which would have cut right through her neighbourhood.
THOMAS served two terms on Toronto council, from 1972 to 1976 and from 1981 to 1985, representing the old Ward 9 until ousted by a tag team of Paul CHRISTIE and Tom JAKOBEK. She had been one of the founders of the City of Toronto's Person's Day Award and had headed the Mayor's Task Force on the Status of Women.
"She was an excellent politician," said Barbara CAPLAN, a former Toronto city clerk. "She could build consensus across political ties."
JOHNSTON said her friend initiated Toronto's poop and scoop program, an achievement not among those noted on the condolence motion passed by council 10 days after THOMAS died, but not without its significance.
"She owned the public works committee," said JOHNSTON. " She was always the chair. She liked it because it was working on neighbour stuff."
Attractive and articulate, THOMAS was also blunt. "There was no filter with her, ever," her son said.
She made headlines when she and Alderman Dale MARTIN visited Calgary in 1985 for the 48th annual convention of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. "The whole of downtown Calgary shows an amazing lack of planning," she said. Ralph KLEIN was the mayor then and he summoned photographers to record him standing in front of Calgary City Hall wearing boxing gloves and dissing the smug politicians from the East.
THOMAS didn't back down. "It's very ugly in Calgary," she told the Star. "It even makes (Metro planners) look good."
By then a single mom working punishing hours, THOMAS still made a point of being home every night to have dinner with her son. When she quit politics the first time, it was to spend time with Nye. When she left municipal politics for good, she moved to Euclid Ave. and got a job heading and helping clean up the Metro Licensing Commission, serving on the subsequent Toronto Licensing Tribunal until 2003.
A spectacular cook and a stylish hostess, she was often asked to donate her talents to fundraising events. A dinner party for four catered by Dorothy THOMAS was always a hot ticket at silent and not-so-silent auctions for the New Democratic Party. She was generous with her money as well as time, donating to 60 charities, including the Canadian Marmot Foundation (because she thought no one else would, her son said).
Her dinner table was a natural gathering place for Friends and their families. For 10 years she met one Wednesday night every other month with a group of powerful women such as June CALLWOOD, Doris ANDERSON and Sylvia OSTRY, and for twice as long as that, she was part of a poker player gang of Friends that included fellow activist Ethel TEITELBAUM, who often travelled with THOMAS.
"She was a complicated woman who attacked a lot of people who loved her. But we hung in there because she was loyal and wonderful company -- witty, generous. I always thought she was beautiful," said TEITELBAUM.
Last fall they had travelled to Sicily, one of THOMAS's must-see destinations. "We had a ball," said TEITELBAUM.
But THOMAS, who disliked doctors, was in pain and in fact had been suffering for some time. When she was finally diagnosed with cancer at Christmas, it was too late. THOMAS was admitted to Princess Margaret Hospital, where she had hundreds of visitors. "They said they had never seen anything like it," said CAPLAN, who was soon sending out regular emails about THOMAS to 125 recipients.
In recent years, THOMAS had moved to Port Hope and had been immersed in developing the Port Hope Ecology Garden.
THOMAS never got home again: she spent 17 weeks in hospital, latterly at the Toronto Grace where she celebrated her 67th birthday with Friends. She wasn't in pain, but she was unable to read or watch much television, and every morning she would wake up and be angry that she was still around. "She wanted to leave the arena," CAPLAN said.
She insisted both Nye and his wife, Karen, go to China on a long-awaited trip to bring home Mei Leigh, their adopted daughter and her first grandchild. She died two days after they left Canada.
Her many Friends are gathering tonight at 7 p.m. at the Gladstone Hotel for her memorial. There will be good food, wine, Friends reuniting, laughter and only four speeches. Her son says it is where and how she would have wanted it.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-06-20 published
Kay SNELGROVE, 84: Intrepid spy and courier
Part of legendary spy operation
Kept quiet about her wartime work throughout life
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Every family has its secrets. And had the 1976 bestseller A Man Called Intrepid, not been written, Kay SNELGROVE's family might never have learned of hers.
As a teenaged schoolgirl attending Emerson College in Boston and regularly going back home to Saint John, New Brunswick, to visit Friends and family in the early years of World War 2, she helped deliver dozens of covert messages from Britain's war offices that ultimately went to those of American president Franklin D. Roosevelt.
She was part of the largest intelligence operation in history run by Canadian Sir William STEPHENSON, secret envoy for British prime minister Winston Churchill and the man code-named Intrepid.
After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, catapulting the Americans into the war, she was pulled out of school and brought home. Like many women, she went to work for the war effort; unlike many women, she was a code runner, a young woman with war knowledge considered so vital, she was assigned an Royal Canadian Mounted Police undercover officer to accompany her to and from her work at the naval yards.
She had taken an oath of secrecy and she kept it until author William STEVENSON's book was published. It described what is generally believed to be a masterful campaign by Britain to draw the U.S. out of its isolationist policy into the war effort to defeat the Nazis. STEPHENSON ran it out of the British Security Co-ordination Office in Rockefeller Center. Its cable address was Intrepid. But SNELGROVE took no joy in telling her children about what she did in the war.
It was the late '70s and by then she was a single mom living in Brampton raising June, her youngest and the only child still at home. Her country club and cocktail-party lifestyle had ended in 1969 when her husband, Don, left her and she became one of the first women of her set to divorce and downsize to a lifestyle that came without the backyard pool.
She'd picked up the pieces and applied for her first job since she was married, as a receptionist at the Brampton Daily Times, a now defunct Thomson newspaper. SNELGROVE had stunned her boss when she had put down the name of Ken Thomson himself as a reference. She went on to head the paper's classified ad section until she retired in 1986.
Reading STEVENSON's bestseller was "bittersweet" for her, her daughter Mary NORWOOD said.
According to her son, David SNELGROVE, when the book came out she realized she could finally talk about what she did -- but the only person she wanted to talk to about it had died in 1972.
"She always said she regretted never talking to her father about it," he said.
Because she always believed -- but never knew for sure -- that it was her father who volunteered her for the secret agent job.
Thomas MARTIN was a successful consultant working for the federal government rescuing foundering companies in the Dirty Thirties.
Although a lifelong Tory, he was a close colleague of and often on call to Liberal prime minister Mackenzie KING, whom his only child took to calling "Uncle Mac."
Her mother, Rose, an opera singer in Britain, made sure her daughter had every lesson imaginable: jazz, piano, ballet, tap, even acrobatic dance. She grew up in increasingly comfortable and influential homes in the West, then Montreal, where she became Friends with a young man named Pierre Elliott Trudeau whom she always called Elliott, and on to Saint John, where the family lived two blocks from the home of K.S. Irving and where she pitched on the same baseball team as two of his sons.
Talented, athletic and a whiz with numbers like her father, Kay MARTIN graduated from high school at 15. She never understood why her father insisted she attend Emerson College in Boston, where she studied dance and theatre with a great-grand_son of Davy Crockett.
She was in her second year when she was taken to the basement of a museum in Saint John where a man swore her to secrecy, told it had been cleared with her father, and conscripted her to serve her country.
That's how a tiny (she was 5-foot-1 and 99 pounds) convent-educated college girl became a King's Courier, blithely carrying white envelopes across the border. She knew only what she had to do she never knew who else was involved or what purposes the documents she was delivering served.
From her home in Saint John, she'd call a particular cab to drive her to the train station. When it arrived she would say to the driver, "Do you have something for me?" He would reach back over the seat and hand her a sealed envelope she'd put in her school papers.
She never told her children how she knew which Boston cabbie to hail, but once in the cab she had merely to say, "Take me to my dorm," and the driver would ask if she had something for him. And so it went, for two years, until 1941, her senior year, when she got a call demanding she come home for American Thanksgiving.
In Saint John, she again went to the museum basement where she was given another white envelope but this time told what message it contained, and then given different instructions and a combination of numbers and letters to memorize. She never forgot the message: It stated a large flotilla of Japanese battleships was heading for either Pearl Harbor or San Francisco, estimated time of arrival was December 6 or 7.
And she was to deliver that message to the British consul.
On December 6 she was studying in her dorm when her frantic roommate burst in announcing the Japanese bombing. "Pearl Harbor or San Francisco?" MARTIN blurted. It was the first time she had let anything slip and she thought it had gone unnoticed. But a half-hour later, her roommate wanted to know how MARTIN knew where the bombing was. She thought fast and said, "There are only two American naval bases on the west coast," which satisfied her roommate.
Almost immediately, she got a phone call ordering her home. With four months to go before she completed her degree and being of an independent nature, she refused, but the next day discovered her bank account had been emptied and closed, and when she returned to her room, a train ticket had been left on her bed. She never did graduate but went to work ostensibly as a secretary back in Canada.
Again, she was told where she would be working: at the New Brunswick Captor II naval base. Her job description was as a civilian secretary, but it was a cover for her work as an intelligence officer decoding cipher machines for critical naval operations. Once, she was hauled back to the base to run some codes on a suspicious ship in the Bay of Fundy with an outdated code. She identified it as an American vessel that had crossed the international dateline, and saved it from being blown up.
Decades later, she went into therapy to help with her resurfacing nightmares about working triage -- boarding ships to document the human devastation of war -- but when the war ended, she re-entered civilian life with gusto. The '50s found her living a Leave It To Beaver kind of life with the executive husband and three kids.
"She became Mrs. Mom," said NORWOOD.
Her mother taught her how to serve hors d'oeuvres at their parties, but she also taught her how to do a mean cartwheel. When daughter June YOUNG wasn't going to be able to take a night school gym class because of low enrolment, Kay SNELGROVE signed on and took the course. "I got a 79 and she got 84," said YOUNG.
When YOUNG started dating, her mother mentioned that she had been taught how to kill a man with a hatpin. Once, she showed her son an old bullet and told him it had been given to her at the end of the war by a man who said, "This had your name on it, Katie. We got him."
David SNELGROVE did some research on the Internet and found the bullet is a type issued to many European World War 2 military officers. "It could have been a true story," he said. " It's a great story and I don't have any reason not to believe it."
His mother was parsimonious with her war stories, however, never mentioning names, and tight-lipped about identifying details, as she had been trained to be. She never saw her role in the war as heroic. "I would say Mom felt it was her duty," said NORWOOD. "She sure loved her country. She loved being a Canadian."
SNELGROVE died April 25 in Brampton. She was 84 and had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease. She used to say she should write her memoirs, but she never did, perhaps because she was true to her word and kept her secrets.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-06-27 published
George BANCROFT, 82: Mentor and role model
George BANCROFT, 82, opened doors for black students
Former University of Toronto prof fought for diversity in the workforce
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
A commissioner with the Ontario Human Rights Commission, executive director and senior policy adviser to the minister of multiculturalism and citizenship in charge of 125 staff and a $16 million budget, one of the seven-person team who wrote the groundbreaking Hall-Dennis report on Ontario's education, professor emeritus for scholarship at the University of Toronto, author, editor and contributor to a dozen papers and books, chair of umpteen educational community groups and professional organizations.
That's not all.
Hundreds of students credit George BANCROFT for their post-graduate degrees in education.
Claire ALLEYNE, registrar at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, said he was a "stalwart" in the black community, a dignified, old-school role model for the many he mentored.
"He was a fighter, but he did it by putting forth an educated, well-reasoned argument," she said.
Poet and University of Toronto professor George Elliott CLARKE hailed BANCROFT as one of a generation of black intellectuals whose work set high standards and opened doors for generations of black academics.
"These were the forebearers, the torch bearers, the door openers," he said. "We owe people like George BANCROFT a great debt."
BANCROFT was also the founder of the Harry Gairey scholarship awards (which has now been folded into the Harry Jerome Awards for outstanding black youth), one of the founders and a board member of Caribana as well as the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews. He was also a popular keynote speaker known for telling it like it is, not as people, even those listening, wanted it to be.
The latter trait is why his family believes he never received some of the appointments they think he should have. Plaques and honours from Indo-Canadian organizations, First Nations and Chinese-Canadian groups line the walls of his North York home, yet when he died May 16, at 82, BANCROFT had not received an Order of Canada nor a Senate seat, each of which his admirers had lobbied for on his behalf.
"He would have liked that," said his wife, Carole. "George was always passionate about seeing more blacks in stronger positions."
At university convocations, he would scan the crowd of graduates for black faces. He believed, fervently, that education would empower and promote young blacks within Canadian society.
"Where are they?" he would say to Carole. "They should stop dancing and start studying."
Friends have told her that while her husband was not afraid "to speak the truth to the powerful," he could also be quite acerbic about what he called the "race-relations industry."
In a 1984 edition of Graduate, University of Toronto's alumni magazine, he wrote of his decision to leave his tenured professorship and campus for "a rather palatial office with Her Majesty's Government of Ontario."
"I am a member of what is euphemistically called the visible minorities -- a wretched term," BANCROFT wrote. "As a result of increasing demand for significant rather than token recognition of minorities and to refute, 'you people do not apply,' Friends prevailed upon me to do so. I do not pretend reluctance. I wanted to enter what seemed to me to be the world of practical affairs."
But he missed his academic freedom and after three years he returned to U of T.
Even in the 1970s and 1980s, when multiculturalism policies were sweeping the country, BANCROFT often challenged what he saw as examples of stereotypical thinking. At one dinner attended by influential policy- makers and politicians, he ruffled feathers when he wanted to know why an Italian-Canadian couldn't be considered for the High Commission in Britain, as an example, instead of Italy.
"His main focus was how multiculturalism worked," said his son, George Jr., a 23-year-old student at the University of Toronto. "People shouldn't stay in their own groups all the time."
Upon learning of the appointment of Adrienne CLARKSON as Governor General, he personally wrote Jean CHRÉTIEN, prime minister at the time, expressing disappointment the post had not gone to a native Canadian.
In 1989, he was one of two commissioners of the Ontario Human Rights Commission calling for an investigation into the organization about its hiring practices after it became known that the head, Raj ANAND, had failed to hire any visible minorities for seven senior posts.
"I question why not a single non-white person was hired for the seven positions, especially considering the quality of some of the non-white candidates who applied," he told the Star in an article that noted that BANCROFT had "broken ranks" by speaking out.
BANCROFT called for an investigation of the matter. "The survival of the commission is at risk... (and) no taint can be attached," he said at the time.
BANCROFT came to Canada from his native Guyana in 1948.
"He was a young gentleman in white shoes, white suit, white panama hat and flamboyant ties who used purple ink," according to his older brother, Clarence, who said BANCROFT would have become president of the University of Guyana had he not followed so many of his countrymen to Montreal to study at McGill University.
He worked as a porter for Canadian Pacific Railways to finance that education, shining shoes, hauling luggage and learning how to hold his hand, palm up, close to his body, to receive the discreet tip.
"He talked to me about the emotions of that time. He was angry but never bitter," his son said.
Father also told son that many of the men with whom he worked became significant in their own right. Legendary head porter Harry GAIREY encouraged him to stay in school and BANCROFT never forgot. They were Friends until GAIREY died in 1993 when he was BANCROFT graduated from McGill with degrees in French and English, and moved to Toronto where he received his Master's degree and his PhD in educational theory. He taught at Forest Hill Junior High and Forest Hill Collegiate Institute for a decade -- although he had an unhappy work relationship with a principal there who never acknowledged his doctorate.
In 1967, he got a job in the U.S. at the faculty of education at New Jersey's Fairleigh Dickinson University but returned to Canada in 1969 to teach at U of T's faculty of education.
"He wanted to come back to Canada because it was less discriminatory although I hate that word -- than the U.S. and had an atmosphere in which he could make a better contribution," said Clarence, who is a retired school superintendent and church minister. George BANCROFT met his wife in 1976 at a Chopin black tie affair at Casa Loma.
She was a music teacher and graduate of the Royal Conservatory of Music, and he was a music lover who was studying the saxophone and piano, and less successfully, the violin. He was 60 when their son was born. He was ecstatic. "He thanked me for months for giving him an heir," she said.
After he retired he had more time for his hobbies: he was an enthusiastic collector of antiques and roadside treasures. "We have antique doors, pots, vases, tables chairs -- he liked finding things," said George, Jr.
The students continued to seek him out. They would come to him, to sit with him in his magnificent and cluttered study under the gaze of his collection of busts of Voltaire, Paul Robson, W.E.B. Du Bois and other great men to get help on their theses and work up their oral presentations with him. Even now, they telephone just wanting to come to the house.
"They still want to be connected with him," said Carole.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-07-04 published
Dr. Ian NAKAMURA, 44: A kind, gentle man
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
He was a doctor with heart -- a huge heart -- and in the end it killed him.
Dr. Ian NAKAMURA made house calls, lots of them. Every lunch hour he would slip away from the busy Richmond Hill practice he shared with his sister, Liane, to see his patients who were shut-ins, or frail, or unable or even unwilling to leave their homes.
Sometimes his workdays started at 7 a.m. -- because that's when patients could see him -- and often they ended long past 6 p.m.
"He'd call and say he was going to be a little late. That he was just stopping to see a patient on the way home," said his wife Silvia, with a rueful smile.
She knew that meant he would be having a very late meal when he finally got home. "He took care of everybody."
He lent money to a patient whose husband ran off with the car, baby seat and all, and the cash from their bank account. Because the parents of a child undergoing chemotherapy were worried about him coming into contact with people with colds and viruses in the waiting room, he went to their home. An elderly patient who had broken her foot was surprised to find the doctor at her door one day, bearing her pain medication.
He sat long into the night at the home of one man who was dying of colon cancer. There was little he could do medically by then, but he wanted to comfort the man's family. He stayed until after 2: 30 a.m., driving home in time to pick up his own family and head to the airport for their vacation and an early flight to Florida.
But first he phoned his sister, on a mini-vacation in Niagara-on-the-Lake with her own family, and extracted a promise from her that she would take over in his absence and go to the man's home to pronounce him dead when the time came. The man had wanted to die at home and Ian NAKAMURA was determined he would have his wish, which he believed meant not being taken to a hospital to be pronounced dead.
"He did that with every patient," said Liane NAKAMURA, also a doctor. "If someone's kid had an earache he'd call the next day. He didn't know where to draw the line. He gave out a lot of himself and in the end it took all his energy."
Ian NAKAMURA died May 12. He was 44 and he had forgotten how or was unable to heal himself instead of others.
"Within our family we thought he could never say no, even when it was bad for his health. His good-heartedness meant he had a higher level of stress," said his oldest brother, Glenn. "But he would tell us that it brought so much comfort to all those families."
Ian NAKAMURA suffered a stroke in January 2004, when he awoke one morning so dizzy he couldn't stand up. Doctors discovered he'd been born with a hole in his heart and put him on blood thinners to prevent further clots and strokes. He was off work for a record five weeks, but when he returned to the office he went back to his old ways. His wife, who worked with him in the clinic as a laser hair-removal technician, tried to block off some downtime for him in the appointment book.
"He would pace in the office, worrying why he didn't have any patients to see," she said.
Always a worrier, he had been under a great deal of stress since the previous summer when he was notified he was going to be audited by the Medical Review Committee. According to his sister, the red flag had been the number of house calls he made.
"He was outside the norm of house calls. He was doing one or two a day when most doctors don't do one a month," she said.
He was so devastated when he got the audit package in May 2003 that he couldn't come into work for three or four days. These audits are a contentious issue with the country's doctors, and both the Ontario and Canadian medical associations are on record as being strongly opposed to them.
"They do make you feel you are doing something wrong," Liane said.
In her brother's case, the auditors had spent a day in the office, poring through files and grilling him about various billing procedures. Expecting the worst, he had remortgaged his house in Maple while he awaited their decision.
"It was like a black cloud over his head," said Liane.
A week before NAKAMURA died, George SMITHERMAN, Ontario's health minister, got a standing ovation at the Ontario Medical Association's annual general meeting when he announced that the government had stayed proceedings for all audits in progress, as a result of an independent study submitted to it April 22 by former justice Peter CORY that concluded the physician audit system was detrimental to the province's health services.
The patients never knew that their gifted doctor was worrying about his own troubles.
"They all thought of Dr. Ian as their friend," said Silvia.
"And as family," said Liane.
Although Ian was 6 years older, she graduated from medical school just one year after him. Ian had dropped out of university in 1981 to return home to care for his mother who was bedridden with terminal cancer. "He lost a lot of time," said Glenn. "He had to start from scratch and reapply for med school."
He graduated from the University of Alberta's medical school in 1990, the same year he married Silvia.
He worked at a walk-in clinic and in the North York Branson hospital's emergency ward before he went into his own practice; he used to tell his sister he'd still be working emergency at Branson if she hadn't set up the clinic.
"I always thought it would be the two of us working together, just family," she said.
After five years they were each carrying a full patient load (about 2,000 each). Every day, Ian and Silvia's children, Kristen, 13, and Alex, 10, would come to the clinic after school, along with their cousins, Liane's children, Madison, 10, and Mackenzie, 3, all of them heading to the back where there was a television to watch their favourite soap opera, Passions, before doing their homework.
"They're like one family, with two fathers and two mothers," said Glenn.
But last December, Ian NAKAMURA underwent non-open heart surgery to try to close the hole. "Part of his goal in having the surgery was to get off the blood thinners so he could play football again," said Liane.
A season ticket holder for the Argos back when few other people were, he had been playing with the Fierce Rooters of the Metro Touch Football League for 20 years with guys he'd grown up with on Parent Ave. in Downsview.
But the procedure didn't work and in April he was admitted to hospital. "There was a risk of bleeding and that's what happened," said Liane. "It bled into his brain."
More than 1,000 people came to pay their respects to the family 600 attended the Monday morning service. Glenn told them Ian had donated his organs to five people in Ontario, one of whom was a 10-year-old. "A final act of love from a man whose capacity for caring was boundless," he said.
He was the one who bought their father a new van for his 65th birthday, bought Glenn a big-screen television for his 50th and then decided to give the same gift to the family of their brother, Nolan, who had died in 1999 at 45, on the day he, too, would have been 50. But he refused to let Silvia do anything big for his 40th birthday. He thrived on giving; receiving made him uncomfortable.
The family has set up an education trust fund for his children. Liane's husband, Anthony BELO, is administering it, c/o ITF Kristen and Alex, at the clinic at 10815 Bathurst Street, Unit 25, Richmond Hill, L4C 9Y2. Hundreds of his patients have contributed to it one wrote a cheque for $5,000 -- perhaps because this was to be the only way they could ever thank Dr. Ian NAKAMURA for all those house calls and extra attention.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-07-08 published
BURTT, B. Marie
The death of B. Marie BURTT of Toronto, occurred on July 6, 2005 at the Scarborough Centenary Health Centre. Born on October 29, 1928 in Burtt's Corner, New Brunswick, she was a daughter of the late Charles E. and Jennie S. (FOSTER) BURTT. Marie was retired from the job she loved, where she had worked as a bookkeeper with a law firm in Toronto for over twenty-five years. She continued as a volunteer bookkeeper with her local church. She is survived by two brothers, Ashley BURTT (Anna) of Fredericton, New Brunswick and Ralph BURTT (Sadie) of Fredericton, New Brunswick; three sisters, Gertrude REID of Royal Road, New Brunswick, Inez GORMAN of Quispamsis, New Brunswick and Kathleen HALLAM of Toronto and several nieces and nephews. Besides her parents, she is predeceased by four brothers, Edwin, Cecil, Alton and Raymond; and three sisters, Annie BURTT, Hazel DUNPHY and Shirley CRANDALL. The public visitation will take place at Church of Christ, Burtt's Corner, New Brunswick on Saturday morning, from 10: 00 till 11:00 a.m. A Funeral Service will be held from the Church on Saturday, July 9, 2005 at 11: 00 a.m., with Pastor Graham Crandall officiating. Interment will take place at Burtt's Corner Community Cemetery. For those who wish, remembrances made to the Burtt's Corner Church of Christ Building Fund would be appreciated by the family. Personal condolences may be offered through www.yorkfh.com

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-07-11 published
Jim FERGUSON, 65: 'Dad' to 200 kids
Household of five off spring enriched with foster kids
Jim FERGUSON 'always had time for us'
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Jim FERGUSON was an ordinary guy with a passion for soccer -- but because he was from Scotland he called it football -- a love of and pocket full of chocolate buttons, a particular Scottish brand of sweets, and a hobby involving the building and maintenance of a backyard fish pond at his Ajax home. In other words, nothing special.
But try telling that to the more than 200 children to whom he and his wife Audrey were foster parents.
Ken ZHI, 21, adored the man he called "Bond" after the James Bond movies both loved watching together. Now a student at Humber College taking architectural technology, he was 13 and his brother 8 when the two came to live with the FERGUSONs. Neither boy could speak a word of English when they arrived, but the FERGUSONs made them feel like family.
"He was more than a dad to me," ZHI said. "He kept his promises to me more than my father, who was too busy with business for me. Bond always had time for us."
FERGUSON died June 1 of cancer. He was 65. At the time of his death, there were four foster children -- boys -- living with them. There still are.
"The kids have been wonderful," Audrey FERGUSON said. "They've taken over watering plants, emptying the dishwasher, the little things."
ZHI was still living in the FERGUSON home when Jim FERGUSON was diagnosed 3 1/2 years ago. At one point they all believed he had only 24 hours to live. "We never considered stopping having foster children," Audrey said. "Ken was wonderful; he was here then and he took over."
It was 1977 and the youngest of the FERGUSONs' five biological children -- Karen, Kim, Keith, Kirsty and Karl -- was 8 when one of the kids came home from school with a pamphlet calling for people to become foster parents.
"I didn't know at that point that you got paid for it -- about $5 or $7 a day at the time, I think," Audrey said. "We were very poor, but I thought our kids aren't that bad, maybe we can take another."
The family was living then in a rented four-bedroom Agincourt townhouse. A house painter by trade in his native Edinburgh as well as a onetime semi-pro soccer player, Jim FERGUSON had succumbed to his wanderlust and immigrated to Canada in 1969, where he went to work in the factory of a large engineering firm here. (Later he worked 25 years for General Motors until his retirement 14 years ago.) The family had no car and FERGUSON kept in shape by running to and from his job.
For three years the FERGUSONs had lived in a four-bedroom Ontario Housing unit.
"Jim was very old-fashioned. He wouldn't let me work," his wife said, until she insisted the family move from what she considered to be a bad environment for her children to the Agincourt apartment and then to their first home in Markham. Audrey FERGUSON worked part-time in the morning or afternoon, and all five kids worked after school at a local pizzeria at one time or another to get what they needed.
"We all played competitive hockey and soccer," said daughter Kim FERGUSON, recalling how her parents were at all of their tournaments in the United States.
Their first foster child was a 10-year-old named Tanya, who became Friends with the FERGUSONs' biological daughter Kirsty. After Tanya came baby Michael, who was very sickly. "I thought he'd never live," Audrey said.
"He was crying, crying, crying," said Kim, now a social worker. "Dad took him and soon both of them fell asleep in the chair."
Jim and Audrey FERGUSON had to team feed one pair of very weak twins who required an ounce of formula per hour; she would feed and he would take them in turn to burp them, even after he had warned his wife against taking in babies, telling her he knew she would have trouble giving them up when they were adopted.
He was right.
"It was heartbreaking when they left," Audrey recalled. She used to take a pill and go to her bedroom, where she would "cry it out" cradling the child's pyjamas or some other item she'd deliberately kept as a memento. Her husband was also upset, but he was the one who "got on with it," cooking one of his everything-in-the-pot spaghetti dinners for the other children and running the house.
"Jim handled it better, but he felt it with a lot of the kids," she said.
They fought to keep Jessie, who had come to them as a 4-day-old newborn. "I just loved this child. We tried to cancel the meeting. It was pure panic," Audrey recalled, but when they met her prospective adoptive parents, they had to admit she was going to a fine home. Jessie's mother has made a point of keeping in touch with the FERGUSONs, recently inviting Audrey to Jessie's Grade 8 graduation.
But not all of the children were compliant and loving. There have been temper tantrums, punching, screaming and spitting in their home. At one point Audrey was black and blue from her knees to her toes because of being kicked. One child stole all of Audrey's rings -- Jim gave her a diamond at the birth of each of their children -- and gave them to his father, who then pawned them.
"They lost all the jewellery, but they kept those kids," said daughter Karen KETTUNEN, herself a foster mother.
"It's a difficult time for a lot of the kids; they miss their parents," Audrey said. "All you can do is sit and comfort them."
And that is what Jim FERGUSON did.
Unassuming, laid-back and accepting of who they were, he would watch television with the children, quietly and inevitably winning their trust.
son Keith remembered his father lying on the floor in their television room, holding the family's pet budgies. "The kids loved that."
In recent years, the family stopped taking in babies and had been fostering older children, all boys. They took to calling the FERGUSONs, who have 10 biological grandchildren, Grandpa and Grandma as well.
FERGUSON often took them golfing. After retirement, he returned to Scotland for visits twice a year and transformed the living room of the house into what he called the Edinburgh room, with photos and memorabilia from his hometown. But he spent most of his time in the kids' television room or downstairs playing pool with them.
They'd just do normal, family-type things together.
Ken ZHI remembered buying fish for the fish pond and chasing out a bat that was trapped in the basement, laughing but scared at the same time, too, then being thrilled when he and his brother were the ones who caught it.
"He used to say to me that we were more than a family to them," he said.
Jim FERGUSON was buried wearing a watch ZHI gave him at his first Christmas with the family.
His death hit the FERGUSONs' foster kids hard. One of the boys living with them stopped eating, another was visibly upset.
"Poor wee soul," said Audrey, who wants to continue being a foster parent for at least a few more years. "I assured them nothing will change."

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-07-18 published
Beach's 'guardian angel' difficult, beloved
Street person would have lineup waiting to talk
Customers took care of the scrappy Steve Whale
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
For years he was there, outside the Beach ValuMart on Queen St. E., perched on a canvas stool someone had given him, wrapped in multiple layers of donated clothing and hand-knit scarves no matter what the weather, the copies of the Outreach newspaper he was selling carefully encased in plastic, the coins from his sales filling up a battered coffee cup.
"God bless," he'd say if you stopped to say hello, even if you didn't buy a paper.
And though this was the Beach, putatively an epicentre of smug yuppiedom, and even though he was a street person, a recovering alcoholic and binge crack user, Steve WHALE belonged there and was beloved there. There was always somebody talking to him heck, sometimes there was a lineup to talk to him.
"I considered him my brother; we would talk about everything," said Michael SOMERS, an insurance broker. "I'd sit for hours with him, me cross-legged on the sidewalk, like a little kid."
Still, one or two people complained to the grocery store management during the six or seven years WHALE was outside the store most afternoons and early evenings.
"Some people felt Steve was sitting there begging, which he really wasn't," said Elaine ROBERTS, the front-end store manager.
He used to carry home the groceries of an elderly blind woman he was always good for a quarter for the pay phone.
"You don't have to do that," he'd say to bicyclists about to lock their bikes to a post. "I'll watch 'em for you."
And then there were the dogs. He loved them, knew them all by name, and took care of them when their owners ducked into the store.
He was a quirky guy: a diabetic who liked his coffee with 14 packets of sweetener, a big hockey fan who almost swooned the day one of his customers gave him a signed Maple Leaf sweater and two tickets to a game.
He made sure everyone knew he worked a full day, selling the street newspaper at Yonge and Charles Sts. most mornings, often visiting Sanctuary, a drop-in for street people and the homeless, before taking the streetcar almost to the end of the Queen St. line.
And he made sure people were up to date on the declining state of his health; he had throat cancer, though there was never any point in lecturing him about his chain-smoking. He was living in the New Edwin Hotel -- and his Beach Friends learned not to get him going on what he thought about shelters or men's hostels, or the Mike Harris government, for that matter -- but when he was hospitalized four years ago with a serious bout of pneumonia, he lost his chance at government housing.
Back at his post, still coughing, still smoking, he would tell anyone who asked what had happened. He wasn't complaining, but a couple of Beach residents who understood how social services worked lobbied on his behalf and got WHALE a subsidized bachelor apartment in a handsome development almost kitty-corner from where he worked.
WHALE was overjoyed. "I've got my own bathroom and kitchen," he would say. Soon he had so many pots, pans, appliances and furnishings from his Beach Friends, he had to beg people to stop giving him things. He slept on a pile of blankets on the floor, because he wanted to.
Some of his customers used to take him to the movies at the local Fox Cinema. Others made a point of doing the annual Beaches Jazz Festival with him.
About three years ago, WHALE needed radiation treatment. Every day for five weeks, retired educators and Beach neighbours Doug VAN HAMME and Ken LAUDER drove him down to Princess Margaret Hospital where they waited with him, and then drove him back to the Beach again. LAUDER's 92-year-old mother knit WHALE a scarf and toque every year, and LAUDER often delivered WHALE home-cooked meals.
"He was a difficult guy, but every story he told about his life all ended with him acknowledging his fault and his mistakes, which all had to do with drinking and drugs," LAUDER said. "It was never anybody else's fault. How could you not like and respect someone like that?"
WHALE told LAUDER he grew up in the east end of Toronto, the son of a butcher who never made it through Grade 8 because he played hooky from school. He had a lot of jobs: he might have been a postman and he might have once worked at the former Greenwood racetrack. He told LAUDER his favourite job was driving a truck up to northern Ontario. He was a scrapper, the kind of guy who never walked away from a fight, and he got fired a lot.
He told some he was alone in the world; to others, he admitted he had a family. LAUDER discovered WHALE's son and namesake when he once accidentally called the wrong hotel looking for Steve WHALE.
When his cancer returned in 2003, WHALE moved back to the New Edwin. "He said the people there knew him and would take care of him," LAUDER recalled.
He cussed more than one nurse right out of his room, said Jim PAPADACOS, the owner and operator of the New Edwin. But PAPADACOS and his staff were protective of WHALE, as LAUDER and VAN HAMME discovered one day when they tried to visit him. "Three very big, very tough guys blocked us until we convinced them we were his Friends," VAN HAMME said.
WHALE's tongue had thickened and he was having trouble speaking, though he kept coming out to his spot on the sidewalk on some of the coldest and cruellest days this past winter. But in early April, he was rushed from the New Edwin Hotel to Mount Sinai Hospital.
"He refused St. Mike's Hospital -- that was typical Steve," LAUDER said with a laugh.
The last time he and VAN HAMME saw WHALE, he was excited about the impending visit of his long-estranged son. He said he wouldn't speak to him whenever they bumped into each other at the Good Shepherd Refuge.
WHALE died soon afterward. LAUDER doesn't know the exact date because none of WHALE's Friends from the Beach qualify as family and therefore they can't access that information. Nor does anyone know where WHALE is buried, though the city buries unclaimed bodies in unmarked graves in cemeteries throughout the city. No one is even sure how old he was; some think 56, others 64.
On the last day of spring, people gathered outside the ValuMart for a memorial service. The store donated 50 long-stemmed snapdragons to give to the participants, but there weren't nearly enough. The passing streetcars slowed and people stared at the growing circle of families, dogs, cyclists and shoppers around the spot where WHALE always sat.
Amanda JACKSON had tears running down her face remembering the man with whom she traded paperbacks and who helped her cope when a member of her own family was battling drugs. He was the first person she told when she decided to leave her marriage.
"All he said was 'Are you happy?'" she recalled. "He made me think of a little angel in the Beach. A guardian angel."
But it was Greg PAUL from Sanctuary who reconciled this Steve WHALE with the querulous shut-in who gambled on the ponies and could never completely kick his crack habit.
"Steve told me when he moved out to the Beach, he had found a community," he said. "He died knowing he was embraced by this community."

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-08-01 published
Performance was gift of rock star of a prof
U of T academic talented speaker
Charismatic man mad about films
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Namir KHAN was such a performer -- not just in bit parts in the films of his Friends Bruce McDonald and Peter Lynch, but also in the classroom at University of Toronto where he taught engineering students.
His first-year course about sustainable development, technology's history and its role in creating a brave new environmentally sensitive world was never popular with freshmen. Accustomed to almost perfect papers in maths and sciences, they were suddenly being asked by this tiny guy (KHAN was 5 foot 1) with two degrees in political science to think laterally, make connections and put it all down in essay form.
But KHAN was a charismatic man, a rock star of a prof who used to ride a motorcycle in a black leather jacket. More to the point he was a gifted speaker, someone who could -- and did -- stand in front of 250 students in Room 1105 in the engineering school's Sandford Fleming Building and without notes integrate their world with the thoughts of Martin Heidegger (his personal muse) along with ideas from David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (a film he'd watched hundreds of times) and then throw in references to pop culture, The Terminator and Toronto's bicycle paths.
He was a magus, pacing, gesticulating, his rich voice enveloping his entranced students, who would then clamour to get into the second- and third-year courses he also taught as a professor for the school's Centre for Technology and Social Development in the mechanical and industrial engineering department.
"He faced a bit of resistance from faculty and students. This was a course that had a less than positive effect on a grade point average," said his friend and teaching colleague Arnd JURGENSEN.
"But he was brilliant, simply brilliant, and he had an amazing ability to make complex arguments relevant and easily understood."
It helped that there were always a couple of students who would approach him after class to tentatively ask if he was indeed the undertaker in McDonald's Highway 61 or the East York landlord in Lynch's Genie-winning short film, Arrowhead.
On Sunday, July 10, Friends found KHAN dead in his Chinatown apartment. He was 50. He had stopped teaching last fall after being diagnosed with Korsakoff's syndrome, a brain disorder, but there was no conclusive cause of death stated in the coroner's report.
"He liked centre stage: in the movies, at lectures and at dinner parties, where at some point we would all be listening to Namir and enjoying every minute of it," said Wendy DIX, a former girlfriend. "He wore his knowledge lightly. He had fun with it."
"He would leave you charged," said his nephew Meraj DHIR, who is working on a doctorate in film at Harvard University in good part because of his uncle's influence. KHAN used to take DHIR, 29, and his younger brother Eshwin to all sorts of movies, and talk to them about the mise en scène, the historical underpinnings, the narrative arc, the director's eye, the rhythm and pulse of the piece.
Born and raised in India where he used to sneak out every Saturday to watch movies, KHAN was the youngest of six children. His Oxford University-educated father, the minister of education for his state, sent his children to Jesuit school and would often invite Hindu and Jesuit priests to dinner to broaden his children's education.
KHAN came to Canada when he was 18 and a year later enrolled at Carleton University for his undergraduate and master's degrees. That's where Toronto filmmaker Cynthia ROBERTS met him 25 years ago.
"Namir introduced me to great movies," she said. He took her to see Apocalypse Now on their first date.
In 1989 she introduced him to director Bruce McDonald. The two hit it off and McDonald hired KHAN on the spot to play a cinematographer in a movie. It wasn't a stretch for the movie-mad academic. Soon he became part of McDonald's regular coterie, playing the undertaker in Highway 61, a bartender in Dance Me Outside and a photographer in Elimination Dance.
In 1990 ROBERTS encouraged KHAN to write a screenplay with her three years later Jack of Hearts was produced. His last official credit occurred in 1997 when he did a voiceover in a film Called City of Dark, after which he recommitted himself to his academic work. He co-authored the books Healthy Cities, Sustainable Production and Healthy Work. He also edited the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society.
But he was as passionate as ever about movies at the time of his death. He was working on a screenplay and developing a mystery featuring a sleuth with Korsakoff's syndrome.
In his eulogy, DHIR said that had KHAN had time to complete any of those projects, he was convinced his uncle would have become a "nobel laureate for literature, or an Academy Award-winning screenplay writer, an internationally renowned celebrity professor, or a perennial inhabitant of The New York Times bestseller list."
Perhaps, but in the meantime, his true art was in his performances: the ones he gave to his students, his family and, always, his Friends.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-08-08 published
John GOVEDAS, 55: A force of nature with 88 keys
John GOVEDAS brightened up choir rehearsals
Pianist also brilliant composer and arranger
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
They are an unheralded lot, these accompanists in school gyms or drafty church basements hunched in balled sweaters over pianos that may or may not be in tune, playing for bored and/or restless choristers who may or may not be in time or on the same note.
Then there was John GOVEDAS.
A big man, a nutty professor of a guy, he would burst into rehearsals, streaming sheet music behind him -- and everything, including the choir he was about to accompany, was brighter.
"Behind your back he would be winding the kids up," said Margaret STANFIELD, the renowned and recently retired music director at Howard Jr. Public School. "He would make faces behind the conductor's back. He could be a distraction."
Before every school practice, the kids would crowd around GOVEDAS at the piano, giggling at the buck teeth and horns he added to the pictures he'd taken of them with his new digital camera. Then there was the fake hand that appeared at Halloween.
Indeed the clown who could break into The Simpsons theme song to crack up a choir hid the artist, the lyrical pianist, the composer, the arranger with the uncompromising standards and the need to hone musical expression to those same standards, to an always higher level.
"Either you could work with John or you couldn't. He was intimidating. He could wreak havoc at a rehearsal if he sensed you weren't strong or confident," said Shelagh COHEN, who could and did work with GOVEDAS for years, even after she left conducting in schools to work in administration for the Toronto public board's music department.
GOVEDAS went on to do all the accompanying work for the board.
"(His) piano was never relegated to a supporting role but was an integral part of the song," STANFIELD said in her eulogy to GOVEDAS, who died May 11. He was 55.
She was another music teacher/choir director who faced down GOVEDAS and won his Friendship. "I inherited him," she said when she went to Glen Ames school to teach. "I was told I should keep him, that he was brilliant. And that's what he was: brilliant."
The two worked together for 20 years, 16 of them at Howard school, talking over repertoire and interpretation and producing a long run of award-winning choirs from there.
GOVEDAS used to attack the piano, STANFIELD said. "He grunted, he groaned and sweated, as his page turners knew. He was a force of nature at the piano."
GOVEDAS accompanied school choirs all over town; among them those at John Wanless, Glen Ames, John Ross Robertson, Maurice Cody, Earl Haig and Gledhill schools. He accompanied adult singers as well in the High Park community choir, the Riverdale Youth Singers and the Milton Choristers. For a time he led a girls' choir in Hamilton and for 35 years he was choir director at his own church.
In his music-strewn apartment in High Park, he arranged and composed music on his electric piano. He wrote "I am the Song," a favourite with many of his school choirs. His 1996 version of "I'se the B'y" has been performed by choirs in Iceland and Australia as well as Newfoundland.
COHEN said she had to fight with GOVEDAS to show her that arrangement he insisted he'd written it for the high school voice, not that of an elementary school-aged child. And it was true that GOVEDAS, whose music degree from the University of Toronto was in choral composition, had a gift: he knew how to write for a child's voice, knew its range, understood that it is tricky for youngsters to hit a high G on an E or I vowel sound, although somewhat easier for them to manage it with the more open A, Ah, O or OOO vowel sounds. He knew how to make the rhythm fit the text, often frightening the conductors who knew there would be lots of meter and rhythm changes.
"The children found his music easy to learn, yet it was not easy music," said COHEN. " His music sat so well with the children's voice. And they adored his songs."
There were always accolades for his compositions at the annual Kiwanis music festivals. So COHEN persevered until her friend finally brought in a scratchy, scribbled manuscript of "I'se the B'y." It was the Maurice Cody school choir, under COHEN, who first performed the piece.
GOVEDAS had many commissions, writing music for families of all faiths to mark special occasions, and for both Howard and Northlea schools, long-time rivals at the Kiwanis festivals.
While music director at one Catholic church -- the Lithuanian Martyrs in Mississauga -- he was commissioned to write music for another, the Church of the Holy Resurrection. He once proudly showed STANFIELD the medal he received from the Lithuanian government for his contribution to his cultural heritage, and it was at church, the centre of community life for many Lithuanians, where he discovered his love of music.
When Lithuanian Martyrs was still located on College Street, it had a magnificent pipe organ that entranced a 6-year-old GOVEDAS waiting while his mother attended choir practice. When he was 10, his parents bought a piano; when he was 12, he was playing the organ at church; at 16, he got his first paid gig, playing for a wedding.
His brother Denis can't remember a time when John was not playing the piano at their home. That focus stayed with him for the rest of his life. "He was always so busy with his music, always running," said Denis.
But when John came to his home for Christmas in 2003, Denis knew something was wrong when his normally ebullient brother was subdued. And it was obvious he was in pain when he visited three months later.
"He kept procrastinating seeing a doctor," said Denis. "For John there was no other world than music."
By 2004, STANFIELD too was worried about her friend, especially as the February date for the annual Kiwanis festival neared. "He wouldn't let go," she said. "We were torn between saying to him that he must stop, but the feeling was that he would have given up sooner on life if he had been shut out."
Gaunt and grey-skinned, he was at the piano when Howard's primary choir, the Grade 3s, sang "Piping Down the Valleys Wild" and "The Brown Bird Singing," the latter a favourite of GOVEDAS.
"At the end they had to hold a high F note and they held it beautifully and I remember thinking I am going to hang onto this a little longer. It was an exquisite moment and John knew it too," said STANFIELD. " When they sang that last perfect note he smiled at them and nodded."
The choir won the award as best of its class, and GOVEDAS was determined to accompany his singers, as well as the choir from Earl Haig school, at the upcoming Spring Festival, the annual city-wide concert of school choirs that takes place each May at Massey Hall.
COHEN had also hired GOVEDAS for that concert to accompany the mass choir singing his piece "I am the Song," although by March she realized he wasn't going to be able to play. Still she sent the program to the printers with his name on it: "I thought I can't remove him now since it may dash his hopes and his determination."
But 10 days before the concert, GOVEDAS was moved into the palliative care unit at St. Michael's Hospital and COHEN and STANFIELD began talking about having him attend Spring Fest 2005 in a wheelchair. But when it was time for the concert, May 4, GOVEDAS was in a coma and unable to witness COHEN conduct the choir as they sang the piece he had written 11 years earlier for that same event.
It was performed just before the intermission and COHEN had arranged for the sound engineer to record and make a Compact Disk of the piece then and there.
"I went beating down Queen St. in all my finery and ran up to the 4th floor (at St. Mike's) and handed the Compact Disk to Denis," COHEN recalled. I spoke to John and told him it was a great show and that he had a lot of applause."
As Denis played the piece, COHEN said she saw "a little movement" of John's head, a "little wrinkle" of the brow. "I think he heard it," Denis said.
STANFIELD has put together a tribute Compact Disk "of all the songs I could find that were previously recorded and arranged or written by him." It is called A Tribute to John GOVEDAS and Howard school is selling it to raise money for an award in his name to be presented at future Kiwanis festivals.
And come spring, she will organize a concert to honour the man for whom the music never stopped.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-08-22 published
'Nobody's daughter' spoke up
Ann SZEDLECKI's Holocaust tale
Survivor told her story until the end
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Ann SZEDLECKI was a powerful and popular speaker for Toronto's Holocaust Centre.
"I think you are brave for standing up in front of a bunch of students to tell your story; it must have been hard to tell us some of those awful memories from your past," wrote one student from King City Secondary School.
"I don't think I would last as long as you did. Unlike me, you never gave up," wrote another.
"It opened my eyes and informed me about something I knew little about," a third student commented.
And a fourth wrote: "I believe that people like yourself, who struggled during the war, should speak out and share their stories."
But SZEDLECKI, who died of cancer May 7 at 79 and was buried on Mother's Day, had to be talked into telling her story. At 14 she was alone in Siberia, sentenced to six months of hard labour, her brother imprisoned for supposed political crimes, but she always said she was never in a concentration camp and therefore really wasn't a Holocaust survivor.
"At first she was a bit reluctant to talk, especially with an Auschwitz survivor like me," recalled Judy COHEN, who as co-chair of the Holocaust Centre's speaker bureau interviewed all potential speakers four or five years ago when SZEDLECKI was approached to tell her story.
"I said 'Ann, you lost your family. The end result is you are a Holocaust survivor of a different sort. It's good for people to know there are varied experiences.'"
That accomplished, COHEN had to then talk SZEDLECKI out of telling her story the way she was accustomed to: as an adventure story of a spirited young girl.
"I think she missed the point of her own suffering," said COHEN. "I told her to tell them the absolute truth and put it in an historical context, otherwise it is just a sad story. As I said to her 'You didn't enjoy the adventure.'"
SZEDLECKI listened and became a fine speaker, someone who understood that this kind of storytelling is more educational than cathartic.
"Her story became what it should be," said COHEN.
But first she wrote it down over the 10 years in which she attended Toronto author Sylvia WARSH's creative writing classes at the Bernard Betel Centre for Creative Living.
"My mother became a whole other person once she muttered the words 'I am a writer,'" said her daughter, Lynda KRAAR.
"She was a natural storyteller," said WARSH, who helped SZEDLECKI produce a 200-page autobiographical manuscript. "Look at page three, starting 'I am nobody's daughter.' It is great stuff."
Her manuscript begins as Ann FRAJLICH is leaving the Soviet Union after six years, leaving behind the unmarked grave of her brother Shoel -- dead at 23 from tuberculosis contracted as a result of being arrested for cooked-up political crimes, tortured and imprisoned -- and leaving with only a bag of dried bread, a jar of melted butter, a few clothes and size 12 shoes on her feet.
She is returning to her hometown of Lodz, Poland, even though her entire family had died in the Warsaw Ghetto.
"I am nobody's daughter, nobody's sister, nobody's granddaughter, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law, aunt or cousin," she wrote. "My past is all gone, it disappeared."
In 1940, her worried parents had sent her off with her brother to the Soviet Union where they would work for one year to "wait out, hopefully, the short war," as she wrote. They were transported to Ridder (later renamed Leninogorsk) in western Kazakhstan, in Siberia, about 500 kilometres from the Chinese border.
And it was true, she was a bit giddy over what she considered to be a great adventure, excited to be going to a new place and to be out on her own. She didn't even mind when she was put to work painting bathhouses and enrolled in school. But after her brother was arrested, she was thrown out of the school and ended up hauling bricks, then later peeling potatoes and washing dishes in a mining cafeteria.
When she took three days off work without permission to bury her brother in the frozen spring of 1943, she was sentenced to six months of hard labour in appalling conditions at a labour camp. She lugged railway ties to build a new line, shovelled snow to clear roads, cut down trees and freed logs from a frozen river, but she was also carrying the grief of her brother's death and her guilt that she wasn't with him when he died.
After being released she volunteered to work underground in the mines, loading the ore into wagons. She hated it but, typically, wrote instead about "the miracle of my survival" in which she left the pile of ore she was sitting on to boldly ask the foreman for a cigarette -- and just as he handed her a smoke, the pile collapsed. "I could've been buried under tons of ore," she cheerfully concluded.
"I can even go so far as claiming that smoking saved my life."
(The children and students to whom she later told that story just loved it.)
"Since she was 14, my mother has been invincible," said KRAAR.
She married soon after the war, a man who was 11 years her senior, a concentration camp survivor with the numbers forever burned into his forearm. Abraham SZEDLECKI was "a wounded, traumatized and sad guy," according to his daughter and the marriage was never a happy one, although it lasted until her death.
The couple moved to Canada in 1953 after three years living in Israel and both went to work in the garment district. He pressed coats, she sewed on buttons. But it wasn't long before the boss promoted her to bookkeeping duties in the office and even though she'd had no experience doing books, she learned fast.
Although Abraham stayed in the factory, she left her job in 1965 when a store out on Albion Rd. became available.
"She took out a loan for $5,000 -- this little Holocaust lady with Grade 7 education -- when all her Friends were saying don't do it," her daughter recalled.
For years, her women's clothing store was the most successful business in the Shoppers World Mall on Albion Rd. KRAAR -- SZEDLECKI's only child and travel companion on holidays -- had married and moved to New Jersey by the time SZEDLECKI retired in 1990.
"They were close, closer than I could imagine," said Masha AMI, KRAAR's best friend since they met at camp when they were 11.
"I could see they were not only mother and daughter but Friends."
The Friendship was always volatile, however, as both were strong, talented and stubborn women who liked to do things their way.
As SZEDLECKI and her husband had long been leading separate lives although continuing to share their Bathurst Manor area bungalow, she threw herself into volunteer work.
She had always been involved with her Masada chapter of Hadassah-Women's International Zionist Organization, but she began driving for the Kosher Meals on Wheels program and serving on a committee managing funds provided to survivors through the Jewish Material Claims Against Germany Inc.
She kept up her writing and her talks until the last year of her life.
Her husband, suffering from Alzheimer's, moved into a care facility, but she stayed where she was determined to be, in her own home. KRAAR said she kicked into overdrive, often staying for weeks to care for her weakening mother in her home.
SZEDLECKI died in her home listening to show tunes and singer Theodore Bikel.
And as far as KRAAR is concerned, her mother's story isn't over. She's writing a show about her mother's life. One song is finished, which KRAAR, an amateur musician and publicist, performed in a small club in New York City recently. It was part of Mamapalooza, a celebration of mothers.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-09-05 published
A crusader for organ donation
Liz MAXWELL never forgot gift of life she received
Always positive vigorous dynamo forever on the go
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
A few years ago, Liz MAXWELL and her husband, Mike TRUSZ, sat down and made a list of things they wanted to do. Although MAXWELL always referred to it as a work in progress, they came up with 30 items, most of which were pretty adventurous: See the Yukon, the Galapagos, hit the South Pacific, sail the Greek Islands, sail their own boat to the Bahamas.
They did quite a lot on that list -- and many other things that weren't on it -- before MAXWELL died of internal hemorrhaging at Mount Sinai Hospital on July 30, two days after she had laughingly dragged TRUSZ down the main street of Collingwood during that town's annual Elvis festival, one day after becoming suddenly and seriously ill.
She was only 56, a dynamo, a vigorous, athletic, fit woman who jogged, skied, played tennis, and rode her bike 20 or 30 kilometres several times a week on the Trans Canada Trail outside her home. She volunteered with families of victims of violence and her local association for community living, and crusaded for the environment.
What many of her shocked neighbours and Friends in Fenelon Falls had forgotten was that MAXWELL had been living on what amounted to borrowed time since December 22, 1992, when she received a liver transplant.
MAXWELL never did forget.
Every year she wrote to the family who had authorized the donation of their loved one's liver to let them know their gift was being well used.
Two weeks before MAXWELL died, her article about competing in the 1997 World Transplant Games on the Olympic site in Sydney, Australia, appeared in The Globe and Mail, timed to promote the upcoming 2005 Games in London, Ontario
In it she relived her liver failure, the transplant, the long year before she could walk, run and work again. She described standing on the starting line massaging her transplant incision that connected her always with her donor, and how her tears began with the starter's gun.
It is a polished gem of a story, written with skill and heart.
"She couldn't express her gratitude enough," said her youngest son, Cameron WEBSTER, 19. "She would have written a whole book if she could."
And MAXWELL had been working on an anthology of interviews with transplant recipients and donors, one of several writing projects she shared with her writing group. For two years, she drove to Toronto every two weeks to meet with them.
"She wanted to be a good writer; it was so important to her," said Gwenlyn SETTERFIELD. She wrote about living in the country, her prom dresses and travels with her father, a naval commander, but most of all she wrote about her transplant.
"She'd warn us: 'It's another transplant piece,'" Rose ZGODSINSKI recalled. "It was definitely her main message."
In 2002, MAXWELL wrote about attending the funeral of a son's favourite sailing instructor whose family had donated his organs to others: "These gifts contribute to the collective unconscious the certainty that there is in the world, in the purest sense, charity and love."
She was always willing to speak at schools and meetings about the organ donor program.
"She was a big advocate," said Dr. Les LILLY, a surgeon with the transplant program at Toronto General Hospital, where MAXWELL was one of 65 people who received new livers in 1992.
With one of the largest liver transplant programs in Canada, the hospital now performs more than 300 adult transplants a year with increasingly better results. In 1992, only about 70 per cent of recipients were expected to live more than a year. It's now about 90 per cent.
"The only thing holding us back is getting more donors," said LILLY. Canada has one of the worst rates of organ donations in the western world. And Toronto has the lowest rate of any Canadian city. "The fact that one-third of liver transplants use living donors shows you how desperate we're getting."
People like MAXWELL who promote the donor program are crucial to its success, he said.
"We have patients pushing 20 years. We expect indeterminate longevity," said Dr. Greg PAUL, who operated on MAXWELL. " Liver transplants are one of the most successful transplant procedures. Liz MAXWELL would be a testament to that."
She always lived full out. An athlete in high school and at Queen's University, she began her teaching career as a physical education instructor and was aware of nutrition and the benefits of jogging long before either became fashionable, according to TRUSZ, a retired high school principal.
Raised in Ottawa, she moved to Fenelon Falls with her first husband, Jim WEBSTER, 28 years ago.
When she and TRUSZ were starting to become involved, MAXWELL told him that she had a serious liver problem and that there would be no hard feelings should he want to leave. He stayed and they sailed together in the British Virgin Islands two years running and took what TRUSZ calls "a trip of a lifetime" to Newfoundland in 1991.
But early in 1992, her liver failed and she was in a coma for five days. "There were medical people who thought she wouldn't survive," said TRUSZ. She was put on the transplant list, taken off it and put back on when she had a setback that September. On December 21, she was making gingerbread houses with sons Graham, Jamie and Cameron when the phone rang
TRUSZ remembers it vividly. He was frozen on the stairs knowing it was a call from Risa CASHMORE, then the transplant co-ordinator at Toronto General Hospital.
An hour later they were driving to Toronto; 10 hours later, MAXWELL was being wheeled into the operating room. "It was amazing to see her progression after the transplant," said TRUSZ. " She struggled to walk to the washroom, but she set goals. Walk to the mailbox, then walk two blocks and back. She was very disciplined."
A year later she and TRUSZ married, she was back teaching and riding the trail bike TRUSZ had given her for Christmas. The family skied every winter; summers they sailed Georgian Bay in the Resolute, the 27-foot sailboat TRUSZ built. They travelled to Portugal and took the two youngest boys out of school to spend almost three months in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, when she won a silver medal in the three-mile race at the World Transplant Games.
Back home, she attacked life every day, taking her medication load twice daily but always living well, making sure her life was rich, balanced and complete, but never cutting herself any slack. "She'd always pick up her own tennis balls," Cameron said, recalling the time shortly after her transplant when a nurse was looking after her at home as her middle son, Jamie, began to choke on a sandwich.
"My mom was one month out of the hospital with a transplant, but she was up so fast and had him in the Heimlich manoeuvre. It was her nature. She was always there for us."
When a neighbour and fellow teacher also needed a liver transplant almost a year ago, MAXWELL counselled him on what to expect. "The only thing Liz had difficulty talking with me about were the dark moments," said Rowland BAXENDALE. "It was indicative of how she lived her life. Liz's days didn't have dark moments. She was a very positive person."
He never knew until her funeral that MAXWELL had visited him in intensive care right after his transplant, but he was always aware that she was showing him how to live by her own example.
"She is still teaching me a lot," he said. "I'm constantly reminding myself to deal with matters more enjoyably, to relish every moment as they happen."
MAXWELL lived up to her credo. Two years ago, she wrote each member of her family a note "expressing feelings that aren't often enough expressed," said TRUSZ. " She didn't take her good fortune lightly or for granted."

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-09-12 published
Vernon LANGLEY, 74: Lent a voice to addicts
Counsellor 'loved his clients unconditionally'
Studied singing and piano before life took a turn
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Vernon LANGLEY's rich tenor never rang throughout the great halls of Europe or even North America. He never flicked his tails as he sat down at a gleaming grand piano, as he may have once dreamed of doing when a musical lad growing up in Cape Breton.
Instead he made a life, for a while, as a high-flying, hard-living executive with a Montreal pharmaceutical firm and then at a Toronto headhunting operation, filling his empty core with back-slapping nights doing business in hotel bars that rapidly blurred into days and nights of boozy cravings and a terrible addiction.
But it was in this weakness that LANGLEY found his greatness.
Since 1975, he counselled and treated alcoholics and drug addicts. Thousands of them. He was so well loved and so respected that those who were returning for second and third chances at sobriety would ask for him.
"Vern LANGLEY was a man who never shamed, never judged. He loved his clients unconditionally," said Jeff STEIN, executive director of Just For Today, a Toronto outpatient harm-reduction facility for clients facing criminal charges where LANGLEY worked for seven years. "And if you have a counsellor who never judges you, you have a remarkable human being."
Counselling addicts can be "a tiresome, tireless and tiring process," STEIN said, yet he never heard LANGLEY raise his voice. He was especially effective at counselling the cross-addicted and those with a bipolar condition. "Vernon would instil hope in them," he said.
LANGLEY was a tall, lanky man with a big presence, who dressed in fine suits set off by one of his collection of 100 silk ties, wore burnished Bostonian loafers, and radiated class as well as concern as he counselled -- always with his eyes wide open men who had been crawling on their bellies after hitting rock bottom.
"He had a little office on the second floor," STEIN recalled. "Most counsellors would have the clients go up to them, but Vern made a point of always coming down and escorting them up."
Since 1975, LANGLEY had also worked for Alpha House, a residence for men addicted to alcohol and drugs. "He was a beautiful human being," said Donna WESTMAN, its executive director.
The two of them often went to prisons to interview inmates. "He had a way about him. As soon as he said hello and smiled, the cons knew he was okay. They could tell he wouldn't judge them," she said.
LANGLEY grew up in Port Hood, Nova Scotia, kitty corner from St. Peter's Church where Sister Honora gave him his first piano lessons. His family attended the United Church in the pretty coastal town, where his father was a barber when he wasn't fishing.
He was just a young teen when he began accompanying fiddlers on piano at church hall dances and kitchen parties. "He loved to sing and dance," said Marjorie LANGLEY, who is married to his nephew and lives in Antigonish, Nova Scotia "He played a mean piano at those house parties."
After teaching in a country school on the Nova Scotia mainland for a year or two, he headed to Toronto to take piano and vocal training at the illustrious Royal Conservatory of Music. He sang with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir for nine years and in church choirs for more than 40 years.
"I still remember him telling me how someone made a snide remark to him about coming from Cape Breton," said Father Don CAMPBELL, a lifelong friend who is a priest in New York City. The two grew up together in Port Hood and roomed in Toronto while going to school.
"Vernon didn't drink when we grew up. There wasn't even a tavern in Port Hood then, and when we were students in Toronto we didn't have the money or inclination to do that. We had a good time without it."
But that changed sometime after LANGLEY left the music school, although his Friends and family say they were never aware how big a problem alcohol was becoming to him. Even CAMPBELL didn't know why or when his oldest friend joined Alcoholics Anonymous, but when LANGLEY died -- on August 3 at age 74 in the Toronto East General Hospital -- he'd been sober for well over 30 years.
Another meaningful date was August 15, 1980, the day he became a Roman Catholic. LANGLEY's conversion may have been precipitated by the death of his younger brother, Orville, that year in a Toronto rooming house fire, but LANGLEY had also made a habit of visiting CAMPBELL in New York just before Easter every year, staying in a nearby hotel and attending several days of services at St. Paul the Apostle, a large church on Manhattan's west side. CAMPBELL would buy them tickets to an opera at the Lincoln Centre after the Holy Thursday service.
"He was drawn to the music of the church, but there was this spiritual dimension to him as well," said CAMPBELL.
It's very possible LANGLEY would have become a priest as well, had he not already become an addiction counsellor.
"Vernon had a calling. Vernon wanted very much to serve God. That was paramount and he considered being an ordained deacon," said Monsignor John MURPHY, who met LANGLEY in 1985. "But it may have occurred to him that that is precisely what he was already doing."
In 1997, LANGLEY was heading out for a lunch break on the Danforth, just outside the building where Just For Today was then located, when he collapsed. It was the first of a series of heart attacks that led to bypass surgery and a stint at Toronto Rehabilitation Institute before he could walk -- and work -- again.
He kept on working until about a year before he died, continuing to come home to Nova Scotia every September.
He moved into the Birtch Place Co-op on Queen St. E., a drug- and alcohol-free residence where he was a member of the board. It was here his family and Friends gathered after his funeral. They had been ushered into St. Michael's Cathedral to the hymn "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee" from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as sung by a dozen members of the boys choir.
"The music was beautiful," said CAMPBELL, who celebrated the mass. LANGLEY chose most of it before he died.
LANGLEY also asked CAMPBELL to celebrate his funeral mass in Port Hood, which takes place Saturday in St. Peter's, the Catholic church across the street from the house where he grew up. He is being buried in the Protestant cemetery near his parents and brother Orville.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-09-26 published
Bob BYERS, 58: Bike courier, outlaw
Died while on a delivery at 58
'He had all the Friends he wanted'
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
His buddies stopped traffic June 17, the day after he dropped dead on the job.
Bob BYERS was 58; one of the oldest bike couriers in town, an urban outlaw who traded in jobs more often than some people get haircuts but at the same time a mentor and father figure to any Lycra-clad, pierced kid starting out in the strange and dangerous rebel world where work is weaving 10-speeds through Toronto traffic.
Everybody knew him as Biker Bob, although some of the young ones took to calling him Old Bob -- probably because he was always good for a loan, even if the tab was up to $900, as was the case with at least one of the guys who hung around on their breaks outside the Duke of Richmond pub in the Eaton Centre.
More often than not, on Mondays Biker Bob would stand them to a round of beers with the winnings from his weekend chess games at the tables in the park near St. Michael's church.
This was his world; they were his family -- even his own family believes that.
"His second family was that courier community," said his sister Mary GORDON of Peterborough. "He found a way to be alone and in a group. It was the only way he could handle life, to be alone."
"The courier business was perfect for him, " said his younger brother Jim, a Toronto Transit Commission driver.
For the past three or four Christmases, Jim BYERS would find a frozen turkey on the porch, a gift from his brother, who refused every year to join the family for Christmas dinner. It wasn't a good time of year for BYERS anyway; it was a time when he usually lost his battle with booze.
"He was the family hermit, my uncle was kind of a recluse," said Kip GORDON. " But he lived the way he wanted to. He was a free spirit."
BYERS lived near his nephew and always stopped him on the street to ask about the family. "He was happy. He had all the Friends he wanted in the world," Kip GORDON said. "In that crowd no one asks unnecessary questions but they have unconditional loyalty to each other."
A long-faced grizzled guy with skinny legs, rock hard thighs and a beer gut, whose grey ponytail trailed halfway down his back, he was opinionated and stubborn and convinced he was right about most things.
He lived in one of the city's real lofts -- a 300 sq. ft. space accessed by a freight elevator that had no stove and was littered with bike parts. The bathroom was down the hall; inside BYERS had one chair and one plate that he ate from -- but it was Royal Doulton china.
He may have been an iconoclast and anti-authoritarian, but he subscribed to The Globe and Mail and he was a stickler for the rules of the road. He never rode on sidewalks and was humiliated on the one occasion he got a ticket (for failing to stop at a stop sign).
He was a complicated guy, hating bosses and unions, but loving to work.
A photo was taken of him on January 13, 1999, after the mayor of the time, Mel LASTMAN, called in the army to deal with the snowstorm that had socked Toronto -- but not Biker Bob.
"That was another part of Bob's pride -- he did it in winter," said Jim BYERS.
His bikes were stolen and banged up -- his last accident was three or four years ago when he was sent flying by a right-turning car. "He rode in a city that was dangerous and polluted and it was a thrill for him," said his nephew.
Toronto has had a thriving courier population since the heydays of the '80s, when at least 500 of them were working the city's streets.
It's been one of the main world cities for them, according to Wayne SCOTT of the Hoof and Cycle Active Transport Guild and a courier himself.
"We're as much a fixture in the downtown as the C.N. Tower or the Scotia Plaza," he said.
He was a legend among couriers and so after he died about 150 of them gathered to hoist a few to him, then hoist their bikes over their shoulders and trek down Albert St. to outside 20 Queen St. W., the site of BYERS' last delivery, to lay their bikes on the road and stop traffic -- their way to pay tribute.
"I was so happy when I heard that," said Kip GORDON. "He hated drivers."
One of five children, he grew up in Mattawa but left home at 16 and got a job in Toronto making a buck an hour working the stock room on roller blades at the Canadian Tire store at Yonge and Davenport.
He went back home to complete grades 11 and 12, then took off again, hitchhiking across Canada in 1966 before returning to sign up for the army.
He was rejected because of a heart defect incurred when he suffered from rheumatic fever as a child.
He married and fathered two children and went to work in the mines. When his marriage broke up after three years, he signed away his parental rights because his ex-wife's new husband was taking over, and began several adventurous years wandering around the country. In 1982 he settled down with a partner, and worked as a bookbinder until 1991.
"He ended up binding the Sears catalogue," said his sister Mary GORDON. "He tried to fit in at different times in his life."
But when this relationship ended, he became a courier.
He compromised his healthy work lifestyle by smoking and drinking too much. He knew he was living on borrowed time after a doctor diagnosed serious problems with his aortic valve five or six years ago and told him to alter his lifestyle to allow him to operate. BYERS never did.
He always told them he never wanted a funeral -- "Throw me off a bridge first," he'd say -- and his family obeyed his wishes. But on September 10 they held a memorial service for him outside on the lawn of Metropolitan United Church.
A lot of his courier Friends were there, their bikes forming a sort of honour guard.
"I think that is what he would have wanted," said Mary GORDON.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-10-03 published
Paul MacDOUGALL, 31: Much loved and admired
Door was always open at Paul MacDOUGALL Jr.'s
Even confined to bed, he made 'so much of life'
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Paul MacDOUGALL Jr. had Duchenne's -- a killer, a muscular dystrophy that shows up in about one in 3,500 young men, never girls, when they are just toddlers and the one that takes most of them in their teens or 20s.
MacDOUGALL was 11 days shy of 31 when he died August 18 -- and he lived larger than most.
Red-blooded, fun-loving, he loved rock 'n' roll; parties anytime, anywhere but especially at the Grey Cup and Super Bowl; sports and women, lots of 'em.
For his 16th birthday, he asked for and got a hooker. Same for his 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st. After that, his father said with a laugh, he was on his own. And with his blazing blue eyes, crooked grin, long dark hair and the kind of personality that attracted people like bees to honey, he did just fine.
"When he was 13 or 14, he joined the Canadian Electric Wheelchair Hockey Association," said his father. "He met a lot of girls there."
"I always thought Pauly was kind of a cool dude," said Angie BEBEE- WRIGHT, who played on a couple of his teams as well as against him. "He was a digger. If the ball was in the corner, that's where you'd find Pauly. He was aggressive as a player. He hit hard. Then he'd give you a wink, a grin and carry on."
"When I played against Pauly, he made me laugh. He would make faces. I was only able to score against him once," said Gwen REID, who was engaged to Paul Jr., until they realized they were better as Friends.
"Pizza and beer nights, talking to teammates during the game, whole audiences screaming 'Go' -- it's such a lot of fun," she said.
League electric wheelchair hockey has been going since the late '70s and the players, young men and women who all suffer from a neurological disorder such as cerebral palsy, spina bifida, brittle bone disease or Parkinson's, are graded into five categories based on ability. The top is being able to hold a stick on your own and take a shot; the lowest category can do neither. MacDOUGALL started as a category two forward and ended up playing as four, the second lowest level.
"[Electric wheelchair hockey] was the best thing that happened to him and to his family. About 50 of us were at the banquet every year," said Paul Sr., who has been a volunteer with the organization for about 17 years and coached his son's team for five years. Paul Jr. could talk pretty well anyone into anything and he talked his Dad into coaching, later into fundraising for the association.
MacDOUGALL's half brother, Clayton THOMAS, 20, now coaches the Dragons.
"I do it because it gave me an extra day with Pauly," he said.
MacDOUGALL was never a star player. He lost a lot of muscle control one summer early on in his hockey career and when he was 18, a friend came right at him during a game and flipped him in his chair. He broke his arm and could never hold a stick again. The friend was an angry young man, furious at his fate.
"And you know what?" said Paul Sr. "He forgave him. Pauly was never bitter. He just loved life totally."
As a kid, he would be strapped onto his father's motorcycle and the two would ride through the bush at the cottage, where he used to go for boat rides. His parents separated when he was 8, but he was adored by both his mother's and father's new families.
Paul Jr. was the kid from Sunny View public school chosen to present then prime minister Brian Mulroney with a bouquet of flowers. There were family vacations in Jamaica and California to see the Olympics and a deep-sea fishing trip from the Children's Wish Foundation to Hawaii. His dad gave him a wheelchair-accessible '76 black van for his 16th birthday, in which, he said, Paul Jr., and one of his cousins used to cruise town "picking up girls together."
He graduated from Sir William Osler high school, moved into a facility to learn to live independently and at 21 got a place of his own at Kingston Rd. and Main St. in the Beach. He was busy all the time, visiting his buddies, hitting the boardwalk, catching his favourite heavy metal groups at the Air Canada Centre and the Argos at the SkyDome.
His door was always open; night or day. Everybody always ended up at MacDOUGALL's place.
"It gave him a life he never would have had," said his mother, April THOMAS. "He got to live independently and grow up. It was as close to a real life as he could have had."
But his illness was also progressing. He was always in and out of hospitals. At 12, like most young men with Duchenne's, he had a steel rod put in his back to stop his spine from curving inward and crushing his lungs and heart. He was never able to sit comfortably again. About four years ago, he suddenly dropped 40 pounds, the veins in his lungs becoming as brittle as an 80-year-old's.
In hospital, he had to be vented with a feeding tube, which most people never get off. He did.
"He had a mind of his own," said April THOMAS.
Paul Jr. knew exactly what he was up against. His Friends had started dying at 23, 24. He lost his best friend, Clint McMANN, four years ago but he fought hard against the inevitable, refusing three times to get a tracheotomy to help his breathing, changing his mind at the very last minute on the operating table. To him it was the last resort, a sign the end was near.
In 2002, it was done as emergency surgery. He had been rushed to hospital and after the surgery was in a coma for four days. His family feared the worst, but when he awoke from the coma, "it was the same old Pauly," as his father put it. It was another 18 months before he was able to go back to his apartment, where he needed nursing care seven days a week and spent most of his time in bed. But he worked his world from there, phoning Friends and family up to five times a day, and planning outings to concerts.
"It's amazing how somebody can make so much of life from bed," said his mother.
"He once told me he was going to live to be in his 40s and I believed him," said his mother. "He had such a strong spirit to live and be alive... I will never see such determination again."

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-10-10 published
Norm KELLY,62: Teacher, friend, actor
Norm KELLY: educator, amateur thespian, 'good best friend'
Despite debilitating illness, he retained his interest in others
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
In the late summer afternoons, Norm KELLY was always on the pretty front porch of his flag-strewn house atop a little hill on Linnsmore Cr. in Toronto's east end. He'd be smiling and waving to the people streaming up from or toward the Greenwood subway station, and usually they'd be smiling and waving back.
Many of them stopped to talk to the friendly man in the power wheelchair, probably because it was hard to miss the notice printed on hot pink or neon green or orange computer paper pinned to both sides of the garden pergola right at the sidewalk.
"Norm on the porch says hello," it read. "Please say hello back."
On Fridays, he changed the signs. These ones read: "Please join us for tea and cookies on the porch."
Admittedly most of the people who did join them there were neighbours, but as one of them told KELLY and his wife, Barbara DATLEN- KELLY, they hadn't known one another before the couple moved onto the street in 1996. KELLY and DATLEN- KELLY invited all their neighbours over for a barbecue the minute they finished their renovations that year. After that, everyone would gather at their home every Christmas for their open house as well as for their annual barbecues.
In 2003, when the barbecues were becoming too big for DATLEN- KELLY to handle, they decided to have a dinner party every Saturday night from late June until the Saturday after Labour Day for a rotating cast of 12 to 16 people from all aspects of their busy and varied lives.
"Norm was just a very friendly guy," said DATLEN- KELLY.
He was more than that.
He was a community builder who not only organized his own funeral, he attended it.
He died at 62 on September 4 of multiple system atrophy, a crippling Parkinson's Plus disorder of relatively late onset, which robs people of their mobility and ultimately of their speech.
KELLY was 54 and a year away from retiring when he noticed he was having difficulty working the computer mouse.
It was a particularly devastating illness for KELLY, who had been a guidance counsellor with the Toronto Catholic District School Board and a real presence at Jean Vanier secondary school where he, 6-foot tall and 250 pounds, danced "The Sugar Plum Fairy" in a tutu at the annual Christmas assembly to cheers and howls from students.
"He was the highlight of the show," said KELLY's friend, former school principal Mike LEROUX. " But he also had the total respect of the kids."
KELLY also performed in 21 Broadway shows put on by Staff Arts, a group of talented and musical teachers and Catholic school board employees. His first show was Fiddler on the Roof; his favourite show was Guys and Dolls, where he was Nicely Nicely Johnson and got to sing "Sit Down, You're Rockin' The Boat."
He had never been a star; "Norm would say he was first on right, back row," said DATLEN- KELLY. He was too sick to be in this year's Beauty and the Beast, but he was in the four shows before that in his wheelchair. For Oliver in 2003, DATLEN- KELLY managed to find an antique wheelchair for him to appear in.
"He loved being on stage, everything off stage and everything backstage," said his friend Mary Jane McKEEN, who was part of his set painting crew. "I think the theatre gave him focus and kept him going."
He grew up in the Dundas/Dufferin area of Toronto in an apartment over the bakery run by his Scottish parents and began teaching after a one-year post-high school course. He studied at nights, earning a B.A. and eventually a masters' degree in education.
In 1972, he and his then wife, Mary Ellen, and daughter Sheila moved to University City, one of many young families attracted to the innovative townhouse and apartment complex south of Finch Ave., one of the city's first planned communities.
The developers had designed the complex with a vehicle-free promenade to encourage a feel of community, but it was KELLY who made that a reality. For 17 years he was head of the condo board, earning him his nickname the Mayor of University City.
It used to take him an hour to fetch a jug of milk from the store that was five minutes away because he stopped to talk to everyone.
He was always organizing something -- winter carnivals, dances and huge Canada Day celebrations. More than 5,000 people used to turn out, recalled former neighbour Terri HOPE, making it the second largest July 1 celebration in Ontario, if not Canada.
"Norm was the epicentre. He ran the best all-candidates meetings I've ever been to," she said.
He spearheaded the community's political fight to keep nearby lands for parkland and, with DATLEN- KELLY, helped run the Four Winds Sentinel, the longest running community-operated newspaper in North York until it folded after 17 years in 1993.
Married in 1995, he and DATLEN- KELLY had been together since 1979 and had just really moved into their new east-end neighbourhood when he began noticing symptoms. In the winter of 2000-01, he and HOPE wrote a letter to 50 Friends -- "Norm came up with the initial 50 or so names. Who the hell else could do that?" HOPE exclaimed -- asking for volunteers for a circle of support helping him with speech therapy.
For four years, they kept up that circle. "I probably got more out of it than Norm did," said his friend LEROUX. They'd vary the speech exercises by riffing about George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice to the tempo of "Who's On First." And Terri HOPE's husband Bob searched out naughty limericks for KELLY's exercises.
"Norm KELLY had this amazing group of Friends because he was such a good best friend," said Bonnie BERESKIN, the Baycrest Centre's speech therapist who helped coordinate the Circle of Support. "It was sort of like putting money in the bank. He had given a lot over the years."
BERESKIN said she'd been worried that people might drop out when KELLY's condition inevitably worsened. "I thought they would be afraid, but instead they devised new ways of helping him and started doing other things that were needed."
They organized cleaning crews for the house, brought over casseroles, took him places, and continued the therapy sessions even during the last two months of his life when KELLY finally lost his ability to speak.
"I would say Norm dealt with this in a state of grace," said DATLEN- KELLY. "He was determined to do everything he possibly could."
But last year, he decided it was time to move into a nursing home. He put up a sign on the pergola -- "I have chosen to go into a beautiful nursing home because I can no longer stay safely at home" -- and people were upset when they read it.
But KELLY always knew he would be coming back to the neighbourhood. For his funeral he specified he wanted a street party, the music he had loved to sing, and he wanted the hearse containing his remains to stop by and stay awhile. And that's exactly what happened.
"As we turned the corner, I could see the tables and chairs on all the driveways. Someone had put big plastic flowers out and I thought Norm would get such a kick out of it," said DATLEN- KELLY. "It was like he was welcomed back home. It was beautiful."

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-10-17 published
Angus BAXTER, 93: Genie of Genealogy
Started out by tracing his own yeoman roots
He inspired thousands to trace their family tree
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Thousands of Canadians have been able to trace their ancestry because Angus BAXTER's father died of a heart attack when Angus was 4. Growing up in England, he never knew that side of his family and years later, settled and thriving in Toronto with his own family, he decided to find out about them.
BAXTER did nothing by halves; he wrote enough letters to parishes and record offices to be able to trace his family back to 1340 and was content to discover he was descended from solid stock yeoman farmers in Westmoreland. He traced back the family of his wife, Nan, even further, to 1296, and discovered, as he used to say, that his forebears were "probably in the ditch tugging at their forelocks when the Pearsons went by."
Then he did some ancestral digging on the family of a friend, followed by some research, for a fee, for a wealthy family. Later, after enough people he knew came round asking for advice, he decided to write one of the first ancestor-hunting handbooks aimed at the general population.
He signed the copy he gave to his daughter Susan with a flourish and, typically, tongue-in-cheek. "To Susan," he wrote, "Whose roots go back to King Canute and Robert the Bruce" and signed it from "'the famous author' Angus BAXTER." He was joking, but he was also prophetic. How To Find Your Roots was wildly successful.
So too was his follow-up book How To Find Your British and Irish Roots, and the one after that, How To Find Your European Roots. Books on finding German and Canadian roots were published in 1987 and 1989, respectively. He wrote a special edition of how-to hunting tips for his American publishers. All together, his six books have sold close to 270,000 copies in Canada, the U.S. and Australia since 1978.
A member of several genealogical societies and respected by many more, he was nicknamed the Root Master General and the Genie of Genealogy. He got a kick out of the latter, possibly because he understood that where you come from is part of who you are, and that people deserve to know this information about themselves.
"He was a man who realized there was a hunger for this," said Doug GIBSON, his publisher at McClelland and Stewart. "People were eager to go in search of their roots. Angus was on the scene very early."
GIBSON said BAXTER also "infected" him with the desire to look up his Scottish ancestors.
BAXTER answered thousands of letters from people seeking help in their searches. Until his death at 93 on September 26, he had kept in touch with one woman whom he had helped research her birth family. She had been adopted and considered him "the father to me I never knew" she wrote in an email to BAXTER's daughter, Susan.
These days, the Internet has largely superseded the techniques and tips found in BAXTER's books -- although, as GIBSON said, BAXTER's "basic approach remains sound."
But in the '70s and the '80s, BAXTER's informal writing style, his use of anecdotes and his avuncular advice helped popularize the hobby of ancestor hunting. Witty, urbane, tall, lean and always impeccably attired -- his idol was Noël Coward -- he showed a real talent for offering up techniques and tips in soundbite-sized pieces.
He did more than 300 radio, television and print interviews, starting with a spot on Elwood Glover's Luncheon Date television show when it was filmed at the Four Seasons Motel on Jarvis Street, to a later appearance on the Today Show chatting to hosts Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric about his research into their roots.
"The network called us," said Joe GAROZNIK, of Genealogical Publishing Company. They were BAXTER's American publishers after William Morrow published his first book and they had no hesitation about which author would appear on the NBC morning show.
"Angus was by far the best in his ability to consolidate information and make it accessible," GAROZNIK said.
Ever since Roots, Alex Haley's book about the history of African Americans, was made into the phenomenally successful television series of the same name in 1977, Americans have been enthusiastically searching their lineages. "The Roots phenomenon changed genealogy from a study of hereditary society -- finding out whether you were descended from the Daughters of the American Revolution or some other linear society -- to a more general interest in one's heritage," GAROZNIK said.
That met with BAXTER's philosophy: He travelled all over the U.S. and Canada, speaking in libraries and church halls, while Nan sat at a small table in the back selling the books.
"They sold thousands of copies," GIBSON said.
The two had been a team ever since they met in Scotland. BAXTER had graduated from Bristol University intending to be a writer, roamed Europe for a while and then came back home to take on a series of offbeat but colourful jobs such as managing an ice rink. When war broke out, they both enlisted the first day. After she was made an officer, he decided he had better catch up and served out the war as a lieutenant-colonel with the London Scottish regiment.
They came to Canada in 1953 with their daughter Susan. The family took to Canada -- they moved into a house in Etobicoke, later bought a cottage in the Kawarthas. BAXTER managed the National Gift Show for years but retired at 58 because he and Nan wanted to see the world while they were still young.
In 1970, they started their year-long around the world trip, taking a freighter from New York City through the Panama Canal across the Pacific to Hong Kong before boarding another freighter that rounded southeast Asia to Singapore, where they caught a train to Burma.
Then they took a three-month bus trip from Kathmandu to London there's a photo of BAXTER crouching on a rock-strewn hill in Afghanistan surrounded by unsmiling men with weathered faces and on to Europe where they had pre-planned to meet their worried daughter in the summer of '71 in a bar in Trieste.
BAXTER decided on the spot they should show Istanbul to Susan, so the three hopped into a rented Volkswagen van after lunch, drove there and drove back some days later. "That was very like my father to do an impromptu thing," she said.
For 30 years, he and Nan took off every winter to travel.
"That's why Angus could even undertake those books on finding your European roots. He had travelled to every country and knew about them," said GAROZNIK. " Other books look at finding your roots in a specific place, but Angus's European roots book was the most ambitious book every written in genealogy from the standpoint of covering the planet."
BAXTER was 90 and Nan 87 when they took their last trip, to Malta. As BAXTER's sight was failing, it wasn't an easy trip for either of them. They returned to their home in the Fellowship Towers on Yonge St. knowing their travelling days were over.
That's also about the time that BAXTER stopped updating his books.
He had learned much, not only about genealogy but also about his own family. His daughter tells of one occasion when he was visiting the valley his family came from and found a heart carved in a beam of a derelict cottage. In it were a date and two sets of initials and he realized he knew which ancestors they were. The initials were carved when the farm was given to them as a wedding present more than 400 years ago.
"It gave him goosebumps," said Susan.
His family intends to scatter his ashes in that English valley of his ancestors.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-10-24 published
Jack HURST, 83: Loyal Beach knave
Community fixture at Queen and Beech
Greeted every passerby as 'Sire' or 'Milady'
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Does every community have a Jack HURST? A man who greeted every day with a grin, who greeted every single person he passed on the street with a salutation. A man so entrenched in his community he made newcomers feel as if they too belonged there just by saying hello to them.
And his community? Four blocks or so in the east end of the Beach. A small world, but his world.
For more than 50 years he lived there, first on Silver Birch Ave., in a fourplex that used to be the old Balmy Beach Club with his "dear Mum" as he always called Isabel HURST, who brought up four kids cleaning doctors' homes after her husband deserted the family. After "dear Mum" died in 1980 he moved one block to the west to a place on Willow Ave. For the past 10 years or so -- no one is sure how long -- he lived in a ground floor bachelor with a 12-foot ceiling on Beech Ave., in the building that also houses the Fox movie house.
He had the rolling gait of a sailor navigating a storm, a Tintin tuft of still sandy hair and, in fact, the same small, open face of the French cartoon character, and he died -- at 83 on September 13 -- in the veteran's wing at Sunnybrook hospital, wanting to be back home in the Beach.
He'd been ill and increasingly immobile for a year. It would take him three traffic lights to cross Queen St. E. to the Garden Gate restaurant (known to locals as the Goof) to join the self-styled Goof Support Network, six regulars who met for breakfast Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays for years.
"Jack was a really important member of the group because he made each day so bright and funny," said Doug RICHARDSON.
The two would talk about the Crusades, history, Einstein and, always, politics. HURST, a Trudeau-hating Tory, thought things were going to hell in a handbasket, grumbled about young people being on the wrong track and the rich guys moving in and spoiling his Beach -- and then would leave the Goof and stop and chat to these same children and rich guys.
RICHARDSON sometimes helped him cross back over Queen St. "We'd stand in the centre, shielding Jack from the traffic, and force people to stop," he said. "The guy had ulcers on his ankles and he couldn't move. He was in real pain."
But still HURST was out and about most days, carrying his battered soft-sided bag wherever he went. He'd stop off at the Remarkable Bean where George FOWLER would fix him a coffee. "He couldn't sit, his knees were shot," said FOWLER. " He'd stand here by the milk and cream and chat to the morning customers."
Susan FOWLER, George's mother and the owner of the coffee shop, kept an eye out for HURST. She'd greet him most mornings as she walked to work at 6 a.m. "Every day I wake up and am still breathing is a gift," he would say to her.
He was proud, he was certainly stubborn. He rejected all and any aid although there was a particular cab driver, an old school friend it is thought, who used to sit in his car in front of HURST's apartment just in case he needed to run an errand.
And the Queen St. streetcar drivers would wait for him when they saw him slowly, ever so slowly, inching his way to the streetcar stop at the corner. Some of the drivers used to help him into the car -- his knees were so stiff he had to enter and exit the car backwards.
A neighbour made him a railing with a hoop at the end so HURST could pull himself up the few steps to his home. A friend wanted to start a fund to buy him a scooter, but he didn't want one. Others also offered to buy him a motorized wheelchair, which he dismissed, saying he needed the exercise of walking.
He suffered to walk, but he needed to be out in his community, saluting the men with a "Good morrow, Sire," the women as "Milady" with a sweep of the arm and a slight bob, or simply as "Dearie." "I think I see an angel," he would say to the younger women. Always, he would tell them all, he remains their loyal knave and subject.
But for a public figure -- which is what HURST was at Queen St. E. and Beech Ave. where he would sit on the bench outside the corner natural food store, pant legs rolled up, legs out straight, telling everyone he was just getting some sun on the knees -- he was a very private man. "I was never allowed into his apartment," said Jerry SZCZUR, the Fox owner and his landlord. No one was.
He'd always been a packrat and latterly neither he nor his apartment was very clean. A neighbour bringing him some home baking last Easter said his door flew open when she knocked, revealing HURST lying on six or seven dirty mattresses on the floor in a room overflowing with empty pizza boxes and cans.
"He was obviously embarrassed and said he was sick," said Ruth Ellen BRUCE.
HURST had been a housepainter, who had painted BRUCE's home on more than one occasion. Because the Bruce home is high, he called himself Michelangelo and her two daughters "the angels." For years, he showed up at their house every Christmas and Easter with a garbage bag bearing gifts -- shortbread for the adults, dolls and later, books for the girls.
He was Rembrandt when he visited Diana ANDERSON's home those mornings and her husband, a psychiatrist, was "Freud" or " Governor."
"He had a route on Christmas morning," she said. "He'd have the same old jokes year after year. And he always told us how lucky we were to have (son) Jamie."
When he was growing up, HURST was known as Jake, and famous for the parties he gave and for being the fastest man on the rugby team at East York Collegiate. He enlisted in the army and was shipped out to England but never saw action because of his flat feet, a story he used to love to tell on himself. Never married, he trained as a teacher and taught for a couple of years before becoming a housepainter. For 10 years -- between 1965 and 1976 he was the manager at the Fox theatre.
"He was eccentric a touch," said his younger sister Dorothy MacDONALD, who lives outside Sudbury. "He lived his life the way he wanted to and he was a very happy man because he was doing what he wanted to do."
Her family often visited him when he lived with their mother, but when he moved out on his own, he discouraged visits to his home. Anyone picking him up to go to family events had to meet him at the corner.
"He was very independent," said John MacDONALD, Dorothy MacDONALD's son. "He always wanted to be in the Beaches and the family respected that."
When HURST fell ill in February and was hospitalized, the family was there, cleaning his apartment and spending nights and days in the hospital. When HURST wanted out of hospital, he was brought home for a month before his health failed again and he was re-admitted.
"When we were trying to assist Jack in his apartment, there was a constant parade of people going by asking after Jack," said MacDONALD, an architect in Kitchener-Waterloo.
He found out that his uncle had been helping people 20 years younger than he. Unbidden, he'd shovel the snow in front of his apartment building, the Goof and the local solar laundromat. He'd go grocery shopping at the Valu-Mart for a 90-year-old neighbour, even though it would take him, literally, hours to go the three blocks. And people would always offer to help him carry those groceries.
"To be exposed to the level of neighbourhood connect he had and continues to have, well, the Beaches is just a very special place," said MacDONALD. "In the end, we are all Jack's loyal knaves and subjects by virtue of his credos by which we live our lives."

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-11-07 published
Aslam CHOUDHARY, 68: Community builder
Architect, 68, left impact on Islamic Centre of Canada
Mosque designer was 'best friend' for a lot of people
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Thousands on their way to or from work on the Queen Elizabeth Way see it daily, a graceful and silent minaret on the South Service Road in Mississauga. It belongs to the Islamic Centre of Canada, the country's largest mosque in terms of congregants 1,000 usually attend the first session of the Friday midday prayers and as many as 800 are at the second session. It is also the Canadian headquarters of the Islamic Society of North America.
But to many Canadian Muslims it represents much more than that.
"When you have that kind of building in the community, it shows you have a presence," said Mohammad ASHRAF, Islamic Society of North America Canada's secretary general. "It means to us that Muslims are part of the Canadian population."
To Aslam CHOUDHARY -- the man who helped design the Islamic Society of North America Centre, had its master key, and who was on call 24/7 as its project manager -- it was the prize of his entire career.
Before the centre opened officially in May 2001, he told his friend ASHRAF he was honoured to be building a spectacular facility that not only housed Canada's largest prayer room -- as well as a state-of-the-art co-ed high school, professional kitchen and bookstore -- but was also close to his Oakville home and would be his family's place of worship.
"He always said it was the closest to his home and the closest to his heart," ASHRAF said.
"Whenever he entered the mosque, people came to him," said his wife Kulsoom, who inevitably ended up waiting a half hour or more for him to make his way to the door.
"He couldn't just walk out of there. He was always the last one there. People wanted to ask him questions," said his son Kamran.
"He loved it when people enjoyed the building," said his daughter Naela.
But CHOUDHARY was a man of many mosques. With his long-time partner, Guido LAIKVE, he designed additions to the Jamia Masjid Mosque in Mississauga and the Islamic Centre of Cambridge.
He was responsible for the new Masumeen Islamic Centre in Brampton, two mosques in Hamilton, a Hindu temple and community centre in Brampton, at least one mosque and a Hindu temple in downtown Toronto as well as the Emmanuel Lutheran Manor, a North York apartment complex, community centre and chapel.
"My father and Guido always joked they would get into heaven one way or the other," Naela said.
They'd been a team since the mid-'70s, when they began working together for the Ontario government and decided to take extra work on the side.
"All the Islamic projects, they were Aslam's. He had the contacts, he had lots of Friends who'd offer projects to him. He was really in touch with the Islamic culture," LAIKVE said. "But he put his heart and soul into the Islamic Centre of Canada in Mississauga."
CHOUDHARY was right there in 1996 when the deal closed -- they paid $1.5 million in cash -- and ASHRAF got the key to what was then a warehouse that LAIKVE said was "an absolute shambles."
But CHOUDHARY never saw it that way. He was determined it would become a beacon and a mainstay for his community, even as they fought community opposition for four years.
CHOUDHARY always told his family and Friends they would win, and they did, although it took many, many community meetings and two hearings at the Ontario Municipal Board. CHOUDHARY was on call night and day as it was built -- and beamed throughout the 2001 opening ceremony attended by a plethora of dignitaries including Mayor Hazel McCALLION.
Then, four years later, his family and more than 700 grieving Friends gathered at the mosque for his funeral.
CHOUDHARY died October 11 at age 68.
At 5, CHOUDHARY was already designing houses. The second oldest of nine children, he was 12 when his father decided to move his family from Kenya back to Pakistan and move the family into a house his son had designed for the family. CHOUDHARY returned to Kenya at 21 to help support the family after his father died.
He took a clerical job while studying architectural drafting at night and by 1964 was working for a Nairobi architectural firm. He was there when Kulsoom phoned, telling him they had to leave the country. It was 1968, Kenya had just gained its independence and the headline on the front page of the Nation that day read: "Britain slams her door on Kenya nation."
"Are you crazy?" he said to her.
They had three days to leave; the airport was jammed with men like him heading to Britain and leaving behind their families until they could afford to send for them.
CHOUDHARY got a drafting job in Birmingham almost immediately the family reunited five months later.
In his first year in England, CHOUDHARY ended up designing and supervising the construction of the Coventry Mosque, typically waiving all fees.
In 1969 he helped found the Muslim East African Association of Birmingham -- it's still going today -- and took over the design and construction of the Central Birmingham Mosque, the city's first purpose-built mosque.
He didn't see its completion before moving his family -- which now consisted of twin sons Kamran and Imran as well as Naela to Canada in 1975.
"We fell in love with Canada. We said 'This is like Africa' -- the lakes, the greenery. We told each other 'This is home now,'" Kulsoom said.
Almost immediately he began teaching Muslim children about their religion at sessions held for seven years in their apartment, then later on Tuesday nights in a friend's basement. He was one of the founders of the Canadian East African Muslim Association, which today boasts about 300 members.
Before taking early retirement, CHOUDHARY worked in the architectural section of the Ontario Realty Corp. and on a stream of projects with LAIKVE.
He was diagnosed with a rare form of brain cancer in July.
It was only at his funeral, in the mosque he nurtured to life, did his family meet many of the people he had helped -- a man he'd helped get a job, another he'd helped do a drawing, gratis, and the stranger who told his family that he had gone to their dad "for everything."
"He was a lot of people's best friend," said his wife, marvelling that men and women were approaching her at the mosque and kissing her hand. "That was all because of him."

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-11-14 published
Linda HACKETT, 56: 'Upbeat' volunteer
Even chemotherapy couldn't dull Linda HACKETT's appreciation of life
Her many Friends recall an indomitable spirit
By Catherine DUNPHY, Lifelines
Linda HACKETT was just one of 375 volunteers who deliver 30,000 copies of Beach Metro News community newspaper. She'd been distributing 80 copies throughout 59 Edgewood, the low-rise apartment building where she lived, since September, 2001 as reliable as rain.
The paper's general manager, Sheila BLINOFF, had no idea HACKETT was blind until one day last spring when she showed up at the office to have her picture taken for the paper with her new guide dog Ginny.
"She was always so upbeat," BLINOFF said. "She told me it was a good thing we were taking her picture that day when she had her hair because she was starting a new round of chemotherapy the next week."
It was not her first run-in with the disease. She beat back advanced skin cancer in 1980 by having skin and muscle removed from her shoulder, then fought breast cancer with a total mastectomy in March, 2003, followed by chemo and radiation later that year. When the cancer flared again the next summer, she signed on for more chemotherapy. But on May 25 she was told her cancer was back, and this time, it wouldn't be going away.
Nevertheless, two days later she attended the regular monthly seniors' lunch program run by Meals Here and There, where she announced it was Ginny's birthday, to great fanfare.
The next day she gamely went out in a borrowed wheelchair to the annual Beaches Triangle neighbourhood garage sale, where she scored a keyboard. She loved garage sales, but this purchase was a special find for her because the chemo she had been undergoing had left her fingers numb and she wanted to exercise them.
But that night -- May 28 -- she was felled by a massive stroke and hospitalized again. In mid-June the doctors told her she had three months to a year to live and would never walk again. She immediately demanded physiotherapy to prove them wrong even as she was admitted to Bridgepoint's palliative care ward. By July she was organizing a Yahoo group to co-ordinate her visitors.
When a young, inexperienced nurse confessed she didn't know what to do with a blind patient, HACKETT said to her: "We have a hug."
But she knew she was slipping away.
"Colleen, I don't want to die," she told her friend Colleen PEACOCK, who heads Meals Here and There, where HACKETT used to do volunteer office work.
HACKETT's husband, Craig NEWMAN, moved into her room to be with her in the last few weeks. He slept on a chair at nights, going home during the day only to care for Ginny.
"Linda was scared," he said. "I would be too, to be blind and not be able to see if a nurse went by, to ask for help. She would have done it for me."
She died September 22 at 56. Her death stunned her Friends. If anyone was going to beat cancer, they thought, it would be her. She kept telling them she would. "I'm a fighter," she'd say. "They (doctors) don't know me, I'm going to beat this."
Of course, a lot of courageous people dealing with a cancer diagnosis say words like that. But they aren't HACKETT, who'd had to fight for everything in her life, including being able to stay in her adopted homeland of Canada. Not only did she win that battle, she also exacted in the process a promise from a cabinet minister to change the law.
Fighting back, fighting hard, had been her credo, or maybe her mantra, certainly her modus operandi since she was 10 months old and had both her eyes removed when retinal blastoma robbed her of her eyesight.
She was a timid girl from La Jolla hanging around the University of California's Berkeley campus when Mike YALE first met her in 1968. He, too, was blind but, unlike her at the time, he was a firebrand. YALE was a journalist and activist involved in the free speech, anti-war movements who was visiting Berkeley after moving to Toronto and being accepted into law school.
"Lynn was shy. I don't think she had finished high school and didn't have a lot of prospects. She did a lot of babysitting then," YALE recalled.
Her abusive father had left when she was still a toddler; her mother was an invalid and she had been raised by protective grandparents. So he was shocked to find HACKETT on his Toronto doorstep six weeks later. They were together three years, during which time HACKETT got her first guide dog and they spent a year living and working a farm with sighted Friends.
They had broken up -- but remained good Friends -- when HACKETT got a letter from the immigration appeal board telling her she couldn't stay in Canada because she was an epileptic. YALE leapt into action, phoning 23 members of Parliament over one weekend at their homes or their offices. The late Alexander ROSS, who wrote a city column for this newspaper, also championed her cause.
"The Immigration Appeal Board has decided that Lynn HACKETT must be deported and it makes me ashamed of my country," he wrote in November, 1972.
"The maddening thing is," he wrote in the same column, "she was disqualified on grounds which even department officials agree are obsolete -- the prohibition against epilepsy, a condition which Lynn admits to, but which doesn't bother her."
When the smoke cleared, HACKETT was deported November 9, but allowed back into Canada 24 hours later on a special visa granted to her by then-Immigration Minister Bryce MacKASEY, who vowed to lift the immigration ban on epileptics during the next session of Parliament. "I made it. I'm really home," she told a Toronto Star reporter.
Then she proceeded to make quite a life for herself. After working for $75 a week doing telephone customer relations with the Capitol Record Club, she moved to A and M Records and then to a position as an overseas telephone operator with Bell. She took up bicycle riding with the Tandem Bicycle Club for fun, belonged to a ham radio club, made jewellery and loved camping. With Yale, she was involved in starting Blind Organization of Ontario with Self Help Tactics in 1975.
"The whole point of The Blind Organization of Ontario with Self Help Tactics was to educate blind people to stand on their own feet and fight for themselves," he said.
When she was laid off from Bell in 2000, she began volunteering. She helped sort shoes to be sent to Cuba for one charity and, in 2002, she brought her Braille writer to PEACOCK's office to take down phone messages. Soon she was reminding clients of the dinners and scheduling rides.
"She had it all organized on thick cardboard," PEACOCK said. "I was amazed. After a while I forgot she was blind."
She never missed the movie night at her church, Glen Rhodes United. The minister there, Susan THOMPSON/THOMSON/TOMPSON/TOMSON, was thrilled when HACKETT brought Ginny to the Sunday school and agreed to read at a special Lent candlelight service called Service of Shadows.
"I called Lynn and dictated the reading to her, she wrote it down in Braille, learned it and that night, out of the shadows, light appeared and her beautiful voice filled the room," THOMPSON/THOMSON/TOMPSON/TOMSON said. "It was magical."
THOMPSON/THOMSON/TOMPSON/TOMSON led the funeral service and PEACOCK provided a final resting place for their friend in her family's plot in nearby Saint John's Cemetery. Donations for a marker can be sent to Susan. J. THOMPSON/THOMSON/TOMPSON/TOMSON, c/o Glen Rhodes United Church, 1470 Gerrard St. E., Toronto.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-11-28 published
Curtis McLAREN, 17: Love of life was magic
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
There might be some who would say there was no magic in Curtis McLAREN's young life. His parents knew within two weeks of their third and youngest child's birth that he had heart problems of the sort that necessitated four operations in his first three years of life -- but all of them palliative, none of them healing, none of them ever presented as a cure.
He was born without a left ventricle, the chamber that works as the heart's main pump.
"We always knew it was non-fixable," said his father Stephen McLAREN, a family physician with a practice in the Markham subdivision of Cornell, where the family lives. "It's remarkable he was able to get as far as he did."
He was just 17 when he died October 17.
There was no cure for Curtis; there was never a cure. When he was 10 years old, sitting in his new sweater on Christmas morning reading the Guinness Book of Records he'd just received as a present, he suffered a massive stroke that left him unable to walk, talk or even sit up.
Its aftermath was the only time his family had ever seen him sad. They had wheeled him down to the public atrium at Sick Kids so he could feel the bustle and flow of the real world again. But instead of beaming at passers-by, as he always had, he was quiet and still.
"It was palpable," said Stephen. "He was upset and sad."
"People were looking at him," said his mother Patti.
He was given a pacemaker; otherwise he wasn't going to survive. And then Curtis got so excited about that operation because he thought he'd be getting fixed, finally.
Up until his stroke, he'd been a kid who was up for anything his older sister and brother, Laura and Rob, did. The family lived on Main St. in Unionville then and Curtis played on the Unionville T-Ball and baseball teams. He banged on his father's drums. He used to ride his bike outside pretending he was his hero Arnold Schwarzenegger on a motorcycle.
He was a kid with a huge grin, happy every single day, still at the age when he would morph in his mind into his action heroes living out grand adventures -- when he had to teach himself how to walk and talk again.
After six months as a day patient at the Bloorview MacMillan centre -- he refused to stay there; his parents drove him and picked him up every day -- he was walking, had regained his speech and the use of his left hand. "You could see stubbornness in his eyes as an infant," his father remarked.
He once told his mother that after his stroke he thought about his mortality every day, but no one would ever have known that. To the world and to his own tight-knit family, he was a focused, funny, sunny kid.
So the same weekend he came home from rehab, he got on his bike again. His father had to hook his hands to the handlebars. He rode up and down the street and then put it away. Forever. If it was the end of childhood, it was also the beginning of Curtis' great love. He discovered cards -- soon he was able to cut, shuffle and deal with one hand. Then it was card tricks, complicated ones, involving astonishing sleight-of-hand his parents could never work out, that wowed his school Friends.
He always had a deck of cards with him -- in his knapsack, pockets, his mother's car.
At lunch at Markville Secondary School, a group would always gather whenever he'd practise his tricks. He wasn't a showman or a showoff; he used his cards to engage people.
"He was always laughing; his laugh was infectious. When he was in my class and he was laughing, people wouldn't stare, they wanted to go to him because he just overflowed with happiness and joy," said Brian Fisher, who was Curtis' homeroom teacher in Grades 7 and 8 at Unionville Public School.
But recently he had started slowing down.
Just this past September, doctors at the Hospital for Sick Children sat him down and said to him: Here's your future. Your heart is failing. You can carry on as you are now, maxed out on all the meds the doctors can think of giving you, yet losing energy despite popping seven pills each and every day.
Or you can try for a heart transplant that might not work. No guarantees.
That night he sat in the kitchen with his parents and cried for only the second time in his life, they believe. Then he got up, went to his room and turned up the volume on a Jimi Hendrix CD ("Hendrix was his thing this summer," his father said), and when he came back down, sat in front of the television and watched The Family Guy.
"He was laughing and chuckling away at the show," said Stephen, "and went to bed happy."
Three days later he emailed his cardiologist: "Let's go."
One week before his scheduled date of October 24 to start the tests to see if he qualified for a transplant, Curtis and a group from his Grade 12 Computer Technology class were out shooting a movie for a project.
It was his favourite class; he was planning to study digital media arts.
They were shooting a mock news item -- a robbery at a bus stop and Curtis played one of the witnesses: in the bus shelter.
On his way back from the shoot, he collapsed and died instantly.
In the teen world of text messaging, word of Curtis' death spread instantly.
His former teacher, Brian FISHER, had become a family friend and decided he should go to Markville high school to try to comfort many of Curtis' Friends.
But students from the other three area high schools also showed up. FISHER said he talked with 150 distraught teens who were worrying and sad about not saying goodbye to Curtis. There was a bristol board card to sign. But everybody always remembered Curtis with his card tricks.
And that is how the idea was born. They would say their goodbyes they could tell Curtis what he meant to them with playing cards.
Within 12 hours, the students had been to every high school, distributed the cards to anyone who wanted to write something to Curtis, collected them, put them back in their packages and returned them to FISHER.
"They collected three full decks," said FISHER, who presented them to the McLAREN family.
They tucked them unread into the coffin with Curtis. At the funeral home, others placed more playing cards with messages on them into the open coffin. There were cards by his side; Curtis was practically covered with cards.
And someone, at some point, had tucked an ace up his sleeve.

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-12-05 published
Susan Jane ANSTEY, 59: A passion for horse riding
Passion for horses led to successful magazine career
Had wanted to create museum for equestrian sports
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
To Susan Jane ANSTEY, it was simple and always so: A horse is the most glorious, awe-inspiring, wondrous creature on the planet.
And so she built her whole life around them.
She grew up with them, rode them, jumped them, hunted on them, showed them, judged them, bought them, broke them. Later, as publisher of three important horse publications, she documented their wins, losses, owners, organizations, riders and regimens.
But most of all, she believed in them.
For ANSTEY, who died of cancer on November 9 at the age of 59, there was no such thing as a casual Sunday ride along the 16th Concession Rd. outside her home, Wyndstone Farm, in King Township.
Michael VAN EVERY, her partner for 24 years, described it this way: "She was a nut about the turnout of a horse. She couldn't ride down our road without spending a half-hour cleaning the tack, brushing the horse, the mane, flipping it over to the right-hand side. Her horses were always impeccable."
Added her daughter, Jennifer ANSTEY: "It was an issue of respect with my mother."
And love.
Susan Jane SCOTT grew up on the original Wyndstone Farm, a horse and cattle farm that was expropriated for what was going to be the Pickering Airport and ended up functioning as the holding barn for new animals of the Toronto Zoo. Her father, Lewis SCOTT, was a hard-driving developer who served as Master of the Hunt of the Toronto and North York Hunt, a fox-hunting club, for many years.
Everyone in her family rode -- it would have been unnatural not to -- but ANSTEY rode with passion, precision and panache. It helped that she was tall and blonde, but most people always said that no one looked better on a horse.
"She was so graceful on a horse," said Judy JONES, a friend since the two met in 1957 at the Eglinton Pony Club junior show. "She was poetry in motion and always upright, as if she had followed our mothers' advice to walk with your shoulders back, as if you had a book on your head."
After marrying broker Tom ANSTEY and moving to Vancouver, ANSTEY used to tell JONES she was fed up with the rain and having to ride indoors. When the marriage ended, she moved back east with her horse and Jennifer, then 2.
With her sister, she purchased The Corinthian magazine, an ailing publication at the time but still the newsprint Bible for most of Canada's horsey set. ANSTEY renamed it Horse Sport and took it to a slick, full-colour glossy monthly that rapidly took up pride of place on many coffee tables. Its circulation is 20,000, its influence much more.
Later, ANSTEY started Canadian Thoroughbred (circulation 15,000) and Horse Canada, a horse magazine for families and a huge hit with a circulation base of 35,000.
"Susan Jane saw what was and what was not working well, and through the magazines she used to lay out the issues for the equestrian community," said Jeff CHISHOLM, a horse owner, former chair of the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair and member of Jump Canada. "Her articles were always well-researched and she was an excellent writer. She could crystallize issues."
When ANSTEY was elected president of the International Alliance of Equestrian Journalists in 1994, she became the first woman and the first non-European to obtain that position, which she held for 11 years.
For eight years, she also chaired the media advisory committee of the Fédération Equestre Internationale, the international ruling body for equestrian sport. She belonged to its Nations Cup committee, despite representing a country that failed to qualify to field a show-jumping team at the last Olympics. (Canada was able to send only one show-jumping rider, Ian Millar of Millarbrook Farms.)
ANSTEY chaired a task force that led to the reorganization of the Canadian Equestrian Federation into Equine Canada, an organization that functions as a governing body and from which Jump Canada which sets standards around the jumping competitions -- was created.
"Jump Canada has done an awful lot. We have more good horse-and-rider combinations now in this country than we have had in the last 20 years," CHISHOLM said.
Bold, efficient ("there will be no lollygagging," she used to say to her daughter) and indefatigable, ANSTEY managed to also fill her days with riding, no matter where she was. She would often drive from Heathrow Airport near London to the English countryside for a fox hunt on a rented horse, en route to or from a meeting in Paris or elsewhere in Europe.
She loved the hunt, riding over fields and through forests as morning was breaking. She told JONES it was good for the horse's soul to get out and streak through the cool, crisp air. For years, she would join the Toronto hunt, twice a week every spring and fall, then go home, shower and arrive at her Aurora office by 9: 30 a.m. She stopped only when the hunt started later in the mornings.
When Jennifer was in Grade 9 at Toronto's Havergal College, her mother's alma mater, ANSTEY bought her a horse. "It was really nice, the best I've ever had," she recalled.
ANSTEY would leave work in Aurora, drive to Havergal, pick up her daughter and drive her to the barn in Schomberg to ride, before heading back to Aurora to work for a few hours before repeating the circuit to pick up and return Jennifer to school.
"She did it twice a week for two years," Jennifer said.
There are currently a dozen horses (plus a pony and a donkey) at Wyndstone Farm, many of them horses ANSTEY bought off the track to develop into show jumpers or field hunters.
"She always had young horses, she loved to watch them develop," Jennifer said. "Fun was something you had to work on, a life you are shaping and moulding."
After her mother gave her an ultimatum -- either she could work with her or the magazines would be sold -- Jennifer went to work for ANSTEY six years ago, gradually assuming greater responsibility at Canadian Horse Publications Inc., so much so that ANSTEY was planning to retire next year.
At the time of her death, she wanted to create a museum for equestrian sports and was considering writing a book on its history. She had been diagnosed with cancer only in April.
By the summer, she was failing and gave Jennifer her horse to ride in competition. VAN EVERY, ANSTEY's partner, had bought Baroness, a huge horse, the summer before and ANSTEY had competed on Baroness in the 1.2-metre circuit in the senior division in Collingwood then.
"Typical Mom," Jennifer said. "Riding a 7-year-old fairly green horse against experienced, schooled horses."
This past summer, Jennifer rode Baroness in eight horse shows, in the 1.3-metre junior amateur jumpers A or highest level circuit. "I had never jumped this big before," she said. "It was a big move for both of us."
The organizers of the Palgrave, Ontario, competition allowed VAN EVERY to drive his car to the north end of the grandstand, usually off-limits to spectators, so ANSTEY could watch her daughter compete.
Jennifer, in part, was competing so her mother could watch.
"She loved watching. We'd talk afterward about why I had a rail. She loved the training process and the horse's moods. She just really understood them."

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-12-12 published
Bill OWEN, 61: Street-level crusader
Bill OWEN fought to make Toronto more accessible
Patient, pragmatic teacher led battle for sloped curbs
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲▼ Writer▲▼
Bill OWEN left his mark on every street corner in this city.
He was the paraplegic powerhouse who brought reluctant City Hall bureaucrats around to a commitment to install sloped curbs. A cautious, graduated commitment, but a commitment.
It was 1970 and for wheelchair users it was huge.
"It was the one thing we really wanted to get done," said Bill STOTHERS, then a journalist who worked with OWEN on behalf of a fledgling organization known as ALPHA -- Action League for Physically Handicapped Advancement.
"We really wanted to be able to get around, but back then you would have to go down the block to find a driveway to get across the street and dodge traffic and then find another driveway."
OWEN, who died of cancer October 13 at 61, was a teacher at Ryerson who had a very logical, focused, strong but non-confrontational style.
He never took his issues to the streets. He took them to meetings, many meetings, where he would present papers and listen and negotiate a way through, around and over any objections to installing curbs featuring a slope instead of a drop to the street.
"They had never seen someone like Bill at City Hall -- alert, well prepared, highly educated and articulate and they didn't like it. Nobody wants to change. They were forced into it. Bill pushed them," said his wife Lucille OWEN.
There were many thousands of uncut curbs in the city. A pragmatic OWEN proposed to bureaucrats they install the slopes gradually, as old curbs were being replaced.
"Toronto was the first major city in North America to have a curb program like this," said Lucille. "Now they are useful for everybody, for mothers with strollers and people with those wheeled walkers."
It was the beginning of a coming of age for people in wheelchairs. Society was in the midst of dynamic change, led by the women's and black equality movements, which had thus far eluded people with physical handicaps.
Lucille thinks that was because all kinds of medical personnel from doctors to occupational therapists -- had been the traditional spokespeople for them and that consequently many with physical handicaps were uncomfortable speaking up for themselves.
STOTHERS said many people in wheelchairs didn't appreciate what he and his friend were doing either.
"People were very concerned about that at that time. They still are in a lot of places. Nobody wanted people to be rocking the boat," he said from his home in California, where he is deputy director for the Center for an Accessible Society. "We were known as the two Bills, as the troublemakers."
And they weren't about to quit while they were ahead. In October 1971, they organized another first -- a transportation conference featuring politicians from the three levels of government. At first, it looked as if it might falter -- STOTHERS says he remembers a local politician at the time remarking that maybe people in wheelchairs just shouldn't come downtown -- until an editorial in the Toronto Star endorsed the conference and its agenda of developing a system of transportation for the physically handicapped.
That weekend, they debated the merits of a para-transit system or a completely accessible subway and bus system and decided to opt for the para-transit while working long-term for a fully accessible system.
Initially to be used only for work and medical appointments, Wheel-Trans eventually expanded its services to include transportation for any purpose.
"Bill started using it for work the minute it was operational," his wife said.
He had been paying $35 for cab fare to get to work before. But there were others whose physical limitations prevented them from even using a cab. Wheel-Trans meant they could tell a prospective employer that, yes, they did have reliable transportation. It was easier for them to get work. It became easier for them simply to go out more.
"You were just free to go," said Lucille.
Newfoundland-born OWEN was 22 and working outside Fredericton, New Brunswick, at a summer construction job between his first and second years of grad school at Queen's University when an air compressor got away and rolled over him.
He'd been a keen hockey player in high school and university, president of the Arts and Literary Society, associate editor of the newspaper and co-editor of the yearbook at Mount Allison University. But he used to say the day after his injury he realized he'd become a second-class citizen, unable to enjoy any of the rights and freedom he used to have.
His family was supportive and Queen's was willing to make all kinds of modifications to accommodate him. "You get those solutions prior to the days of realizing that these were rights and that the university should be prepared to handle disabled individuals on a system-wide basis, to anticipate (that) people with disabilities will come to university," he wrote later.
In the same article, he wrote about how people expected him to be able to do wheelies in his chair to negotiate curbs. "You coped with your disability by incorporating yourself into the community without making changes to it."
He came to Toronto to complete his graduate degree and moved into one of the few apartments in the city that could accommodate wheelchairs -- for the most part. He had to remove his bathroom door and replace it with a curtain to get in.
He used to say circumstances had necessitated he become a professional disabled person with a more aggressive personality than came naturally.
But he was persistent, serving for many years on a mayor's task force on the disabled and the elderly, of which he was also the chair, as well as being on the board of the March of Dimes, and the Canadian Paraplegic Association, among other organizations. OWEN also threw himself into his academic pursuits, travelling and living at the University of Kentucky for a while to work on his doctoral dissertation on the early American writer James Fennimore Cooper, his other great passion.
He retired from teaching in 2000.
"Thanks to Bill, we're a lot better off," said Lucille. "This is not just a wife talking. He was the driving force behind the curb cuts. He transformed our lives."

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DUNPHY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-12-19 published
Joe SIMIANA, 52: Lived to ride
Joe SIMIANA loved his family, his job as a cop, and his motorcycles
By Catherine DUNPHY, Obituary▲ Writer▲
There was no way any of Joe SIMIANA's Friends or family were going to ride in his funeral procession in a limo. That would be disrespectful to the big-hearted cop from Peel Region. So they pulled up to the church November 2 in a thunderous wave of 15 motorcycles, ridden by fellow police officers and his family.
His wife Laurie THIBEAULT rode in his pickup, the burgundy and pewter 2000 Chevy 1500 with the extended cab. He got it three years ago, finally, after years of driving clunkers. Every time he took Laurie and their 5-year-old son Augustus for a ride in it, he'd turn to her and say "I love this truck" as soon as he'd hit the highway.
She rode in it to the funeral service with the windows down, so she could hear the thunder of the honour guard as she was going down the road. Her husband had loved motorcycles, especially the Moto Guzzi manufactured by Italy's oldest motorcycle maker.
SIMIANA had three of those, including the 1972 model he'd been restoring for the past two years.
"He wasn't very mechanical," said his brother John, who is.
But he was the centre of laughter, the first son in a sprawling, loving, bike-riding Maltese family of eight kids who grew up in Oshawa listening to motorcycle stories. "We were raised on stories of the war and motorcycles," said Veronica LARKIN, Joe SIMIANA's sister.
Like the one their grandfather rode in World War I. And the German-owned Moto Guzzi captured in Libya and sold to their father, Joe, by a British officer after World War 2. That motorcycle stayed in Malta when their parents immigrated to Canada in 1950.
In 1988 the three SIMIANA sons got together to get the motorcycle over here for their dad. Joe did the letter-writing. Negotiations were tricky because the Maltese government had its eye on it for its wartime museum, but the family wanted it for their dad.
In the huge clan -- as of last summer there are 37 grandchildren it was Joe SIMIANA who was the life of every party, the prankster, the kind of guy who had to race with the kids -- and beat them. They have a videotape of a race in which SIMIANA, neck and neck with his nephew Johnny, caught his nephew's foot to cross the finish line first.
He'd put a Cabbage Patch doll in a baby's snowsuit and hurl it across the room. "Here, catch," he'd say to his horrified mother, who thought it was one of her grandchildren.
A father to four girls, as well as Augustus, he was adored by his nephews and nieces. "I'm the master of disaster," he'd say, then start an arm wrestling contest, or sock-swapping, or race everyone into the lake, even though he was a lousy swimmer.
"All our brothers and sisters, their faces light up when they talk about their relationship with Joe," said his younger brother, John. "He walked on water for a lot of us."
In high school SIMIANA broke the Ontario high jump record; he was also a good baseball, football and hockey player. When he was 18, he was in a devastating motorcycle accident. "Just a couple of weeks after that accident with a cast on his hip he was gone on his motorcycle," said John. "He loved riding anywhere, anytime."
But he was a careful rider, who always rode in full safety gear.
He became a police officer right after high school. It's what he always wanted to do.
"In his mind being a cop was like being a Boy Scout and being able to do a good deed every day," said his wife, Laurie.
He was the kind of guy who shovelled his neighbours' driveways and raked their leaves.
His work ethic was legendary -- routinely he'd show up for his shift 45 minutes early. He never took a lunch. In one 10-year period he never took a sick day. He met Laurie, his second wife, when he was investigating a case with the fraud squad; he worked in the youth bureau, in intelligence, did a stint in homicide, and loved being a uniformed patrol sergeant.
"He was a great investigator," said Const. Steve KING, who worked with SIMIANA for years both in the youth and fraud squads. "He liked to get the bad guy. He would work until he got him."
He also liked to tease his partner. KING remembered coming back to their squad car after picking up some fraud documents to find his lunch neatly laid out on the front seat, with one bite taken out of the sandwich. "Just making sure it was safe to eat," SIMIANA would say with a grin.
SIMIANA bested KING's retaliatory joke on him -- KING had laughingly signed a photo of himself with "To Joe, All the best in your career" -- by whiting out the word Joe and selling personalized versions of it to fellow officers, lawyers, even judges, for a dime each as their membership into the "Steve King fan club."
Then he went one step further by printing and tacking up posters urging people to come out and meet Steve KING throughout the Aylmer courthouse where King was testifying.
A diagnosis of a rare viral illness two years ago forced SIMIANA into a no-stress desk job, but he was recovering well and had just received the medical clearance he needed to get back to what he believed was his real work in policing. He was going to start a new posting at the start of the next week.
On his way downstairs to lift weights in their Burlington home, he told Laurie he felt great and was thrilled about his new posting.
She told him she was proud of him whatever he did and that she loved him. He told her he loved her too.
Seconds later she heard his laboured breathing and raced downstairs to find he had collapsed. He died in her arms of a heart attack. He was 52; he had been a police officer for 31 years.
More than 1,000 people came to his funeral, including Peel police Chief Noël CATNEY, who had known SIMIANA for years. During the service, in a spontaneous gesture, CATNEY bent over Augustus, told him he was an honorary policeman and gave him his father's police hat.
Everybody says Augustus is just like his father, the same grin, the same fearless goofiness, the same deep-down pride. The boy took the hat, turned to his father's casket, and saluted.
Joe SIMIANA's Moto Guzzi is now at his brother John's house. "It's immaculate," he said. "A gorgeous piece."
Eventually, John SIMIANA said, he wants to organize a memorial motorcycle ride for his brother, with the proceeds going to the Heart and Stroke Foundation. So that someone will always ride the Moto Guzzi for Joe.

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