L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGABEER - All Categories in OGSPI
LANGAN o@ca.on.grey_county.owen_sound.the_sun_times 2005-06-29 published
POGE,
Ronald
Roy
World War 2 Veteran, served in the Royal Air Force (Per Ardua
Regiment). Peacefully at Grey Bruce Health Services in Owen Sound
on Sunday, June 26th, 2005. Ron
POGE of Owen Sound, at the age
of 82. Beloved husband of Brenda (née
NICOLL.) Dear father of
Brenda LANGAN
(Jim) of Bramalea, David (Mary) of Port Credit,
Lorraine GONNEAU
(Garth) of Bramalea and Yvonne
LAMB (Dale) of
Owen Sound. Sadly missed by eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Also survived by a brother Alfred of Essex, England. A Celebration
of Life for Ron will be held at the Royal Canadian Legion, Branch
No. 6 Owen Sound on Saturday, July 9th from 2: 00 to 4:00 p.m.
at which fellow Veterans are especially welcome. In lieu of flowers,
the family would appreciate memorial donations to the Cancer
Society, Grey Bruce Regional Health Centre Foundation or the
Royal Canadian Legion Poppy Fund, which may be placed through
the Tannahill Funeral Home, 376-3710.
Page A2
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2005-01-03 published
HELENIAK,
Richard
Paul
Peacefully into the arms of Angels surrounded by his family at
the L.H.S.C. South Street Campus, London on Saturday January
1, 2005 at the age of 53. Beloved husband of Cheryl
(BICKELL.)
Loving father of Matthew, Kristen, Michelle and Jennifer. Richard
was the cherished
son of Maria
HELENIAK and the late Marian
HELENIAK.
He will be sadly missed by his brothers John, Stan and wife Edith,
Ron and wife Joy as well as his many nieces and nephews. Son-in-law
of James and Betty
BICKELL.
Richard will also be greatly missed
by all of his other family members and many Friends whose lives
he had so deeply touched. As an owner of Norwich Packers, Richard
was deeply involved with the cattle business and devoted a large
part of his life to the betterment of the Beef Industry. Richard
was highly respected and revered by his colleagues and was a
much sought after speaker at annual meetings and conventions
as well as a judge at numerous competitions. He was involved
with many organizations and charities and was a member of both
the Knights of Columbus and the Norwich Legion. Friends and family
will be received at The Arn-Lockie Funeral Home, 45 Main Street
West, Norwich on Tuesday and Wednesday from 2-4 and 7-9 p.m.
Funeral Mass of Resurrection will be held at Saint Mary's Roman
Catholic Church, 51 Venison Street, Tillsonburg on Thursday January
6th at 10: 30 a.m. with Father Michael
LANGAN as Celebrant. Rite
of Committal will be held at Tillsonburg Cemetery. Donations
to the Woodstock Hospital Foundation, Canadian Blood Services
or Saint Mary's Church would be gratefully acknowledged by the
family. A Legion service will be held on Tuesday evening at 6: 30
p.m.; Prayers will be said on Wednesday evening at 6: 30 p.m.
Arn-Lockie (519) 863-3020.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2005-02-09 published
EVANOFF,
Blondine
S. (née
DEBOEY)
Peacefully but suddenly on February 8, 2005, Blondine S.
EVANOFF
passed away at the Tillsonburg District Memorial Hospital. Loving
mother and best friend to Carol
EVANOFF of R.R.#1 Otterville.
Blondine was predeceased by her husband and best friend Nick
EVANOFF (1968,) and her parents Edward
DEBOEY (1985) and Celestine
DEBOEY (1984.) She was a member of the Catholic Women's League
of Saint Mary's Roman Catholic Church, and was an avid lover of
all animals. The family welcomes Friends and family to visit
with them at Ostranders Funeral Home, 43 Bidwell Street, Tillsonburg
(842-5221) on Thursday, February 10, 2005 from 2-4 p.m. and 7-9
p.m. C.W.L. Prayers to be held Thursday at 3 p.m. and Parish
Prayers to be held Thursday at 7 p.m. A funeral Mass for Blondine
will be celebrated at Saint Mary's Roman Catholic Church, 51 Venison
St. W., Tillsonburg on Friday, February 11, 2005 at 11: 00 a.m.
Father Michael
LANGAN officiating. Interment Tillsonburg Cemetery.
Memorial donations (payable by cheque) may be made to Saint Mary's
Roman Catholic Church, Tillsonburg, Caressant Care Nusring Home,
Courtland, and the Tillsonburg District Memorial Hospital. Personal
condolences may be sent to www.ostrandersfuneralhome.com
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2005-02-14 published
MATTHYNSSENS,
Blanche (formerly
VERSTRAETEN)
Blanche (VERSTRAETEN)
MATTHYNSSENS
(Delhi) passed away peacefully,
surrounded by her family at the Tillsonburg District Memorial
Hospital on Sunday, February 13, 2005, in her 94th year. Blanche
was born in San Antonio, Texas on December 17th, 1911. She was
a member of the Saint Mary's Church, the C.W.L., Tillsonburg, and
Sacred Heart Church, Langton and also a member of the Delhi Belgian
Club. Together with her husband Albert, she farmed tobacco for
several years at R.R.#1 Delhi.
Loving mother and mother-in-law of: Diana and Noël
GHESQUIERE,
Tillsonburg; Anita and Dr. David
HILLNER,
Tillsonburg and Ginny
VERSTRAETEN,
South
River.
Blanche was proud to be called "Meme"
by her grandchildren Dan and Liz
VERSTRAETEN,
Marc
VERSTRAETEN
and Liz, Linda and Gary
MATTAN,
Wendy and David
HOLMES, Michael
and Deana GHESQUIERE,
Marc and Jennifer
HILLNER, Bonnie and Billy
GAGNON and Tammy
GODDEN and Roger. Also survived by several great-grandchildren,
nieces and nephews. She was predeceased by her parents Abel
VAN
DE VYVER and Clementina
BLANCQUAERT and by her first husband
Roger VERSTRAETEN (1945,) her second husband Albert
MATTHYNSSENS
(1990) and recently by her son Marcel
VERSTRAETEN
(February 4,
2005); she was also predeceased by her four sisters: Aline (Jean)
VAN
DEN
BROECK, Yvonne (Albert)
MICHIELSON, Margaret (Philemon)
BOEL, Elza (Albert)
BRAECKE and a niece Rosita
VERBOVEN. Friends
and relatives are welcome to meet with the family on Tuesday
from 2: 30-4:30 and 7-9 p.m. at the Verhoeve Funeral Home, 262
Broadway, Tillsonburg (842-4238). C.W.L. Prayers are Tuesday
at 4 p.m. Parish Prayers are Tuesday evening at 7: 30 p.m. Funeral
Mass of a Christian Burial on Wednesday at 11: 30 p.m. at the
Saint Marys Roman Catholic Church, 51 Venison Street West, Tillsonburg
by Reverend Father Michael
LANGAN.
Interment▼ to follow in the Tillsonburg
Cemetery. Memorial donations (by cheque) payable to the "Heart
and Stroke Foundation" or the charity of your choice would be
gratefully acknowledged.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2005-02-16 published
THERRIEN,
Doreen
Patricia
(GILLESPIE)
Peacefully, surrounded by her loving family, on Monday, February
14th, 2005 Doreen Patricia
(GILLESPIE)
THERRIEN of Tillsonburg
in her 76th year. Born January 10th, 1930, Swan River, Manitoba,
daughter of the late Patrick
GILLESPIE
(Old
Chelsea, P.Q.) and
the late former Dora
DURAND
(Crookston,
Minnesota, U.S.A..) (Doreen
was a member of the Saint Mary's Catholic Church and dedicated
Co-Proprietor and employee of the Beaver Lumber and Building
Supplies, Tillsonburg). Much loved wife and best friend of 46
years of Paul A.
THERRIEN.
Much loved devoted mother and mother-in-law
of: Jeff THERRIEN and partner Mary Ellen
KROETSCH,
Pender
Island,
British Columbia, Cindy
TOWNSEND and partner Hank
STUYT, Kent
THERRIEN,
Todd
THERRIEN and wife
Phyliss, all of Tillsonburg.
Loved and proud "Jabba" of Ben, Bailey and Kelly Townsend; Keegan
THERRIEN;
Kelsey and Jessie
THERRIEN, Blake and Connor
THERRIEN
David, Mary and Jeff
STUYT. Dear sister of: Lillian
MacNEIL of
Regina,
Saskatchewan,
John
GILLESPIE of Kelvington, Saskatchewan,
Percy GILLESPIE
(Janet) of Vanderhoof, British Columbia, Sr.
Marilyn GILLESPIE of Guelph, Ontario, and Wayne
GILLESPIE of
Vanderhoof,
British
Columbia Survived by in-laws: Gerry
THERRIEN
(Eleanor) of Midland, Ronald
THERRIEN (Mary) Port Colborne, Sister
Laura THERRIEN, Rome, Italy and Ellen Jean
SHERK of Ridgeway,
Ontario. Doreen is predeceased by her brothers: Lyle (1984),
Terry (1995) and Lorne
GILLESPIE (1995.) Friends and relatives
are welcomed to meet with the family on Wednesday 2 to 4 p.m.
and 7 to 9 p.m. at the Verhoeve Funeral Home, 262 Broadway Tillsonbury,
(519) 842-4238. Parish Prayers are Wednesday evening at 7: 30
p.m. Complete Funeral Mass on Thursday at 11 a.m. at the St.
Mary's Roman Catholic Church, 51 Venison Street West, Tillsonburg
by Reverend Father Michael
LANGAN.
Cremation to follow. Inurnment
in the Tillsonburg Cemetery Columbarium Wall at a later date.
Memorial donations (payable by cheque) to the "Canadian Cancer
Society" would be gratefully acknowledged by the family.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2005-04-03 published
HORVATH,
Anthony "
Tony"
Anthony "Tony"
HORVATH.
Passed away peacefully at Tillsonburg
District Memorial Hospital on Friday, April 1, 2005 with his
family at his bedside Tony
HORVATH of Tillsonburg in his 77th
year. Beloved husband of 51 years to his dear wife and best friend
Marie HORVATH (née
HOELZLI.) Dear father of Rose
HORVATH and
her companion Leon
VANHAVERBEKE of Tillsonburg; Dianne (Rick)
TROTTIER of Petrolia. Cherished and much loved "Papa" to Brianne
and Brittany
DEPUES;
Kristen and Ryan
TROTTIER. Dear brother
of Steve (Helen)
HORVATH of Tillsonburg, and nephew to Blanche
VARGA of Tillsonburg. Also survived by several nieces and nephews
and cousins. Tony was predeceased by his parents Joseph and Agnes
HORVATH, and two brothers Joe and John
HORVATH in Hungary. The
family welcome Friends and family to visit with them at Ostrander's
Funeral Home, 43 Bidwell Street, Tillsonburg (842-5221) on Monday,
April 4, 2005 from 2-4 and 7-9 p.m. Mass of Christian Burial
will be celebrated at Saint Mary's Roman Catholic Church, 51 Venison
St. W., Tillsonburg on Tuesday, April 5, 2005 at 11 a.m. Rev.
Father Michael
LANGAN officiating. Interment Tillsonburg Cemetery.
Parish prayers will be offered at Ostrander's Funeral Home on
Monday afternoon at 2 p.m. At the family's request memorial donations
(payable by cheque) may be made to Tillsonburg Hospital or St.
Mary's Roman Catholic Church, Tillsonburg. Personal condolences
may be sent to www.ostrandersfuneralhome.com
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2005-04-05 published
STENGER,
Anna
T. (née
LEKAI)
Anna T. STENGER
(LEKAI) of Tillsonburg at the Tillsonburg District
Memorial Hospital on Monday April 4th, 2005 in her 87th year.
Loving mother of Agnes
McLAIN of Tillsonburg. Dear grandmother
of Alex, George and Joe
McMASTER.
Loving great-grandmother of
Crystal, George, William and Jennifer. Predeceased by her parents
Michaly and Elizabeth
(STAUB)
LEKAI, her husband Karl
STENGER
(1993), five sisters and two brothers as well as sons-in-law,
William McMASTER and James
McLAIN.
Anna's family will receive
Friends at the Ostrander Funeral Home, 43 Bidwell St, Tillsonburg
(519-842-5221) on Tuesday, from 2-4 and 7-9p.m. Funeral Mass
for Anna will be celebrated at Saint Mary's Roman Catholic Church,
Tillsonburg on Wednesday, April 6th, 2005 at 11 a.m. with Fr.
Michael LANGAN celebrating. Parish prayers will be recited Tuesday
evening at 7 p.m. Right of committal in the Tillsonburg Cemetery.
If desired memorial donations may be made tot he Heart and Stroke
Foundation or the Diabetes Association. Personal condolences
may be sent at www.ostrandersfuneralhome.com
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2005-05-17 published
STEER,
Kathryn
Ann (née
SMITH)
Peacefully, at the Tillsonburg District Memorial Hospital on
Monday,
May 16, 2005, Kathryn Ann
(SMITH)
STEER of Tillsonburg,
formerly of Niagara Falls, Ontario in her 43rd year. Born January
15, 1963 in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. Beloved daughter of Ken
and Angela
SMITH of Niagara Falls, Ontario. Kathy was a well-respected
and well-liked music teacher at Annadale School, Tillsonburg
and was a member of Saint Mary's Church, Tillsonburg. She also
served with the Tillsonburg Cultural Commission. Beloved wife
and best friend of 20 years of Edward
STEER and much loved mother
of Kevin and Victoria. Dear sister of Andrew
SMITH and financée
Shannon of Niagara Falls. Survived by her mother-in-law Martha
STEER of London and the late Karel (1979.) Also survived by a
brother-in-law Dr. Robert
STEER and his wife
Gail of London and
two sisters-in-law Fran
STEER and her partner Mary of Dartmouth,
Nova Scotia and Carol and her husband Doug
VANWATERSCHOOT of
Whitby and nieces, nephews and cousins. Friends, colleagues and
relatives are welcome to meet with the family to share memories
of Kathy on Wednesday 2-4 and 7-9 p.m. at the Verhoeve Funeral
Home, 262 Broadway, Tillsonburg, (519) 842-4238. Funeral Mass
of a Christian Burial to be said on Thursday at 2 p.m. at the
Saint Mary's Roman Catholic Church, 51 Venison St. W., Tillsonburg,
by Reverend Father Michael
LANGAN.
Interment▲▼ to follow in the Tillsonburg
Cemetery. Instead of flowers, memorial donations (payable by
cheque) to the Canadian Cancer Society would be gratefully appreciated
by the family. Parish Prayers are Wednesday evening at 7: 30 p.m.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2005-05-18 published
VAN
HOVE,
Yvonne
Marie (née
MAHU)
It is with heartfelt sadness that the family regrettably announces
the passing of our precious wife, mother and grandmother, Yvonne
Marie VAN
HOVE of R.R.#2 Tillsonburg, peacefully, at the Tillsonburg
District Memorial Hospital on Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 in her
70th year. Born in St. Boniface, Manitoba, December 7th, 1935,
daughter of the late Louis
MAHU and the late former Helen
WYNANT
and sister of the late Charles
MAHU
(February 13, 2001.) Yvonne
was a member of the Saint Mary's Church and C.W.L. and the Delhi
Belgian Club Ladies Auxiliary. Much loved wife and best friend
of 48 years of John
VAN
HOVE.
Loved mother and mother-in-law
of Carolynn and her husband Dennis
VANDEPOELE and their children:
Sabrena and Branden of Tillsonburg, Dennis
VAN
HOVE and his wife
Ann and their children: Ainslea and Alegra of R.R.#2 Tillsonburg
Carmen and her husband John
McDERMID and their children: Alexis,
Jonathon and Deidra of Brantford. Friends and relatives can meet
with the VAN
HOVE family on Thursday from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. and
7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Verhoeve Funeral Home, 262 Broadway,
Tillsonburg (842-4238). Funeral Mass of A Christian Burial to
be said on Friday at 11 a.m. at the Saint Mary's Roman Catholic
Church, 51 Venison St. W., Tillsonburg by Reverend Father Michael
LANGAN.
Interment▲▼ to follow in the Tillsonburg Cemetery. Memorial
donations (payable by cheque) to "Saint Mary's Church" or the "Tillsonburg
District Memorial Hospital Foundation" or any charity of your
choice would be gratefully acknowledged by the
VAN
HOVE family.
C.W.L. Prayers are Thursday at 4: 30 pm. Parish Prayers are Thursday
evening at 7: 30 pm. "Mothers are God's angels, but remember,
they are on loan and one day in the future, God will call them
home."
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2005-05-24 published
WALKER,
Sylvia
Diana (née
BOC)
Peacefully, with her family, at her bedside, after a courageous
battle with cancer. Sylvia Diana
WALKER, of Tillsonburg on Sunday,
May 22, 2005, in her 67th year. Born in Welland, Ontario, September
2, 1938. Dear daughter of the late John
BOC
Sr., and the late
former Lily
KOUCAR.
Resident of Tillsonburg, since 1951. Member
of Saint Marys Roman Catholic Church, Tillsonburg and the C.W.L.
Dear wife and best friend for 49 years to Jimmy
WALKER.
Loving
mother and mother-in-law of Tammy
HICKS - London, Jamie
WALKER
- Tillsonburg, J.D.
WALKER and his wife
Tanya - Timmins. Dear
sister of John
BOC - Tillsonburg, Beverley
WALKER - Eden. Proud
grandmother of 4 grandchildren Brandon
HICKS,
Katlyn
HICKS, Elliot
WALKER,
Paitra
WALKER and by several cousins, aunts. A special
thank you for your kindness through the years to Vicky
LUKI,
Sarie OVERBEEK,
Pat and Gina with C.M.H.A. Resting at the Verhoeve
Funeral Home, 262 Broadway Tillsonburg (519-842-4238). Funeral
Mass of Christian Burial, to be said on Wednesday, May 25, 2005,
at 11: 00 a.m. at Saint Marys Roman Catholic Church, Tillsonburg,
by Reverend Fr. Michael
LANGAN.
Interment▲ to follow at Tillsonburg
Cemetery. Memorial donations (by cheque only) to the Canadian
Diabetes Association, the Canadian Mental Health Association
or choice. Visitation Tuesday 2-4: 30 p.m., 7-9:00 p.m. C.W.L.
Prayers Tuesday at 4 p.m. Parish Prayers Tuesday at 8: 00 p.m.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2005-06-10 published
DANIEL,
Ron
It is with great sadness that Ron
DANIEL passed away at the Stratford
General Hospital on Thursday June 9, 2005 surrounded by his family.
Loving husband and best friend of Shirley
DANIEL for over 50
years. Beloved father to Derrick
DANIEL and his friend Barb
MOLNAR
of Tillsonburg, Rhonda
PATTERSON and her husband Bob of Brampton,
and Heather
KENNEDY and her companion Michael
WALZACK of Milverton.
Ron was a loving grandfather to several grandchildren. He is
survived by his sisters Ruth
McKAY and her husband Gord of Ingersoll,
Carolyn CASSIDY of London, Jenette
GOFTON and her husband John
of Tillsonburg, Cheryl
DONEFF and her husband Herb of Tillsonburg,
brother-in-law Jim
LOGGER and his wife
Gloria of Glencoe, and
several nieces and nephews. Ron was predeceased by his grand_son
Daniel KENNEDY.
Ron worked at Livingston Industries from the
young age of 18 up until he retired. He was also a longstanding
member of the Knights of Columbus. The family will receive Friends
and family at Ostrander's Funeral Home, 43 Bidwell Street, Tillsonburg
on Saturday June 11, 2005 from 7-9 p.m. and
on Sunday June 12,
2005 from 2-4 and 7-9 p.m. Parish prayers will commence Sunday
evening at 7: 00 p.m. Mass of Christian Burial for Ron will be
held at the Saint Mary's Roman Catholic Church, Tillsonburg on
Monday
June 13, 2005 at 11 a.m. Reverend Fr. Michael
LANGAN officiating.
Interment Tillsonburg Cemetery. Memorial donations may be made
(payable by cheque) to the Canadian Cancer Society or the Heart
and Stroke Foundation. Personal condolences may be sent to www.ostrandersfuneralhome.com
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2005-10-16 published
LANGAN,
Marie▼
Cecelia▼
At Marion Villa, London on Friday, October 14, 2005. Marie Cecelia
LANGAN of London in her 89th year. Survived by her sisters Helen
STEPHENS and Rheta
BOTHWELL and sister-in-law Leatha
LANGAN.
Predeceased▼ by her parents Frank and Margaret
LANGAN and her
brothers Jack and Joseph
LANGAN and her niece Lynda
BREEDON.
Dear aunt of Gayle
TOON,
Joanne
WINTER and Doug
STEPHENS, Ron
BOTHWELL and his wife
Peggy,
Margaret
GARDINER and her husband
Ron and Tara
LANGAN.
Also▼ survived by great nieces and nephews.
A funeral service will be held at Denning Bros. Funeral Home,
Strathroy on Monday October 17 at 1 p.m. with Fr. John
SHARP
officiating. Interment in Bornish Cemetery. Visitation will be
held from 12 p.m. until time of service. Donation to Marion Villa
would be appreciated. A tree will be planted as a living memorial
to Marie.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2005-11-03 published
BOTHWELL,
Rheta▼
Francis▼ (née
LANGAN)
Suddenly at the Dearness Home on Wednesay, November 2, 2005.
Rheta Francis
(LANGAN)
BOTHWELL of London in her 83rd year. Beloved
wife of the late Ron (Tiny)
BOTHWELL (1967.) Loving mother of
the late Lynda
BREEDON (2002,) loving grandmother of the late
Craig BREEDON (2001.) Survived by son Ron (Peggy)
BOTHWELL, grandmother
to Penny, Melanie and Billy
BREEDON,
Patricia▼
BOTHWELL and Phil
REMBER,
Ronnie▼ and Belkis
BOTHWELL, Nicole,
Samantha▼ and Terry
BOTHWELL, great-grandmother of Lexi
BREEDON-
DEGRAW.
Sister▼ to
Helen STEPHENS and sister-in-law Dean and John
GALLANT, sister-in-law
Leatha LANGAN.
Predeceased▲▼ by her parents Frank and Margaret
LANGAN, her sister Marie
LANGAN, her brothers Joseph and Jack
LANGAN,
Keith▼ and Mary
BOTHWELL, Barbara and Ted
WELCH, Howard
and Eleanor
BOTHWELL. Survived by many loving nieces and nephews.
Visitation will be held Saturday, November 5 from 12-2 p.m. at
the Denning Bros. Funeral Home, with the funeral service at 2
p.m. with Fr. John
SHARP officiating. Interment in All Saints
Cemetery, Strathroy. Donations to the Heart and Stroke Foundation
would be appreciated. A tree will be planted as a living memorial
to Rheta.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2005-12-21 published
LANGAN,
Reverend
Father
Michael
Entered into the joyful presence of our God of the Galaxies,
December 19, 2005, Reverend Father Michael
LANGAN, 72, of Tillsonburg,
Ontario. Born in Sarnia, Ontario, February 17, 1933. He was ordained
to the priesthood, May 30, 1959. Survived by his sister, Maureen
and her husband James
O'DRISCOLL,
Burlington.
Beloved uncle of
Patricia MONTPETIT,
Naughton:
Kathleen
O'DRISCOLL, Picton; Timothy
O'DRISCOLL,
Burlington and Daniel
O'DRISCOLL, Kitchener.
Predeceased
by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. T.A.
LANGAN,
Sarnia and by his brother
Rev.
R.
Jerome
LANGAN, (1982.) Fr. Mike will be lying in state
at Saint Mary's R.C. Church, 51 Venison Street West, Tillsonburg
on Thursday, December 22, 2005. You are invited to pay your respects
from 10: 00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. and
on Friday morning from 9:00
a.m. to 10: 30 a.m. Funeral Mass of a Christian Burial on Friday,
December 23, 2005 at 11: 00 a.m. at Saint Mary's R.C. Church, Tillsonburg.
Bishop Ronald P.
FABRO, Diocese of London, Celebrant. C.W.L.
Prayers on Thursday at 3: 00 p.m. Parish Prayers on Thursday at
7: 00 p.m. Knights of Columbus Prayers on Thursday at 8:00 p.m.
Interment in Tillsonburg Cemetery. Memorial donations (payable
by cheque) to the Father Langan Parish Centre or Saint Mary's Youth
Ministry. Verhoeve Funeral Homes, 262 Broadway Street, Tillsonburg
(519-842-4238) in charge of arrangements.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.strathroy.age_dispatch 2005-10-18 published
LANGAN,
Marie▲
Cecelia▲
At Marian Villa, London, on Friday, October 14, 2005, Marie Cecelia
LANGAN of London, in her 89th year. Survived by her sisters Helen
STEPHENS and Rheta
BOTHWELL and sister-in-law Leatha
LANGAN.
Predeceased▲▼ by her parents Frank and Margaret
LANGAN, her brothers
Jack and Joseph
LANGAN, and her niece Lynda
BREEDON. Dear aunt
of Gayle TOON, Joanne
WINTER and Doug
STEPHENS, Ron
BOTHWELL
and his wife
Peggy,
Margaret
GARDINER and her husband Ron and
Tara LANGAN.
Also▲ survived by great-nieces and nephews. A funeral
service was held at Denning Bros. Funeral Home, Strathroy, on
Monday,
October 17 at 1 p.m. with Fr. John
SHARP officiating.
Interment in Bornish Cemetery. Visitation was held from 12 p.m.
until time of service. Donations to Marian Villa would be appreciated.
A tree will be planted as a living memorial to Marie.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.strathroy.age_dispatch 2005-11-08 published
BOTHWELL,
Rheta▲
Francis▲ (née
LANGAN)
Suddenly, at the Dearness Home, on Wednesday, November 2, 2005,
Rheta Francis
(LANGAN)
BOTHWELL of London, in her 83rd year.
Beloved wife of the late Ron (Tiny)
BOTHWELL (1967.) Loving mother
of the late Lynda
BREEDON (2002,) loving grandmother of the late
Craig BREEDON (2001.) Survived by son Ron (Peggy)
BOTHWELL, grandmother
to Penny, Melanie, and Billy
BREEDON,
Patricia▲
BOTHWELL and Phil
REMBER,
Ronnie▲ and Belkis
BOTHWELL, Nicole,
Samantha,▲ and Terry
BOTHWELL, great-grandmother of Lexi
BREEDON-
DEGRAW.
Sister▲ of
Helen STEPHENS, and sister-in-law Dean and John
GALLANT, sister-in-law
Leatha LANGAN.
Predeceased▲ by her parents Frank and Margaret
LANGAN, her sister Marie
LANGAN, her brothers Joseph and Jack
LANGAN,
Keith▲ and Mary
BOTHWELL, Barbara and Ted
WELCH, Howard
and Eleanor
BOTHWELL. Survived by many loving nieces and nephews.
Visitation was held Saturday, November 5 from 12-2 p.m. at Denning
Bros. Funeral Home, with the funeral service at 2 p.m. Fr. John
SHARP officiating. Interment in All Saints Cemetery. Donations
to the Heart and Stroke Foundation would be appreciated. A tree
will be planted as a living memorial to Rheta.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-01-15 published
Earl CAMERON,
Broadcaster: 1915-2005
The man with the distinctive, rich voice and famously unflinching
face lent authority to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
in the early days of television broadcasting. Never a journalist,
'I just read the words'
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▼ to The Globe and Mail, Saturday, January
15, 2005 - Page S7
Toronto -- Earl
CAMERON used to tell the story of how he once
walked into a store and found a salesman staring at him.
"Fellow who reads the news on television looks just like you.
Ever watch him?"
"No," said Mr.
CAMERON, not telling a lie since he couldn't watch
himself while he was doing his job.
Early on, he discovered the strange kind of fame that comes with
appearing on television. Like the salesman, people thought they
knew him but weren't sure.
"People often look at me in the street. They want to say hello,
but aren't sure whether I'm somebody's brother or a guy they
met recently at a party."
Earl CAMERON was a classic Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
announcer, the voice of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's The
National, which, in the early part of his tenure from 1959 to
1966, was the only national television newscast in the country.
If Lorne GREENE was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Voice
of Doom, then Earl
CAMERON was probably its voice from Mount
Olympus -- listened to and trusted by the viewers.
"If Earl said it, you knew it was true and that, even with all
the miseries, all was well with the world," said Knowlton
NASH,
who read The National long after Mr.
CAMERON.
"He was the last anchor who was part of the old school of broadcasting,"
said Mr. NASH from his winter home in Naples, Florida "No matter
how awful the news -- and he broadcast during the war -- he was
always a reassuring presence, giving the impression there were
better things ahead."
Mr. CAMERON will long be regarded as "the anchor's anchor" by
the corporation. "His skill and professionalism contributed greatly
to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's reputation for credibility,
objectivity and dependability in our newsgathering and broadcasting,
and in our role as Canada's national public broadcaster," said
Richard STURSBERG,
Canadian
Broadcasting
Corporation-television's
executive vice-president. "He was truly a legend."
All told, Mr.
CAMERON read more than 1,500 Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation newscasts. His audience believed that if Mr.
CAMERON
said something -- anything -- then it had to be true. One woman
went so far as to say, "he couldn't convince me that black is
white, but if he said it, then I would certainly give it some
thought."
Back in the days when news on television was a few talking heads
and too many words, Mr.
CAMERON appeared on the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation's 11 p.m. news broadcast and became a national institution.
He read the news from a script, not a teleprompter, and was famous
for his diction and flawless delivery.
His fans included those with an ear for perfectly spoken English.
In 1966, television columnist Dennis
BRAITHWAITE wrote in The
Globe and Mail that "I consider him a uniquely talented news
reader, the only one at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
who, in my hearing, has never made a mistake in phrasing or pronunciation."
Earl CAMERON was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan., during the
early months of the First World War. He inherited his magnificent
voice from his father, Ernest, who was described as having "one
of the finest undiscovered bass-baritones in North America" by
Sir Arthur Benjamin, the British composer who toured North America
judging choral contests.
The▼ elder Mr.
CAMERON wanted Earl to become a teacher like his
brother and two sisters. Earl did go to Saskatchewan Teachers
College, but soon decided the vocation wasn't for him. He liked
to tell a story of his brief career in the classroom. "I was
hired to teach in a little town called Kildare. This was during
the great Western drought of the '30s and it hadn't rained in
Kildare for a long time. My second day on the job there was a
downpour of 3½ inches. I figured I had done enough for the town,
so I left."
Perhaps it wasn't a great idea at the height of the Depression,
for he next found work shovelling coal for $18 a week. After
that, he worked on the railway for 25 cents an hour. His break
came when he heard of an audition for a summer job as an announcer
at CHAB, the local Moose Jaw radio station.
"I had about 70 others competing against me for an announcing
job. The whole public speaking class at the Young Men's Christian
Association," quipped Mr.
CAMERON, who had a droll sense of humour
despite his unflinching, stone-faced persona. His distinctive,
rumbling voice won him the job, and it quickly became permanent.
He soon moved to
CKY in Winnipeg and stayed there for four years.
The station was owned by the Manitoba Telephone Co. but, as it
happened, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation also used the
staff and facilities there and Mr.
CAMERON quickly made a good
impression. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation promptly lured
him away and, in 1941, he arrived in Toronto. It wasn't long
until he was reading the National Radio News.
After television arrived, Mr.
CAMERON served as the backup for
Larry HENDERSON, who was the reader at 11 p.m. When Mr.
HENDERSON
quit in 1959, Mr.
CAMERON was given the job of reading the National
News.
For the next seven years, he was a familiar face, opening the
program with a nod of his head, a hint of a smile and a quiet
"good evening." It was a no-nonsense approach to a no-nonsense
subject, and both Mr.
CAMERON and the network liked it that way.
Then he got down to the serious stuff (commercials were not allowed
during the news) and he worked hard to avoid the slightest gesture
or change in inflection that might betray an emotion or a personal
opinion. If the program's editors provided him with a "kicker"
to end the newscast, he would permit himself an expression that
might suggest a chuckle.
He was the anchor, a term that didn't make it into the Oxford
English Dictionary until 1965, from 1959 to 1966. In many ways,
he was the last of a breed.
"Earl was devastated when they decided to go with a journalistic
anchor rather than a traditional broadcaster," says Larry
STOUT,
who was then a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation news writer
and reporter. "He didn't think of himself as a journalist, but
rather as a broadcaster."
That got him into a bit of trouble. Like other announcers, he
was allowed to do commercial work. Mr.
CAMERON had two big clients
Crest toothpaste and Rambler, a car made by American Motors.
The toothpaste ads caused some complaints of bias -- by politicians,
among others -- and in 1965 Mr.
CAMERON was given a choice: no
more jobs doing ads if he wanted to keep his high-profile job
reading the 11 o'clock news.
In the end, he chose the news over toothpaste, but a year later
he was dumped anyway. Mr.
CAMERON's replacement as the main reader
on The National was Stanley
BURK/BURKE, who had worked as a foreign
correspondent. Mr.
CAMERON took over rotating duties that included
reading the early evening news that went across the country.
He also introduced the opinion program Viewpoint.
Earl CAMERON was always strictly a newsreader. He wasn't allowed
to change a comma of copy. It was a union regulation and not
one he minded. "I just read the words."
While his diction may have been perfect, he was wrong on the
direction that television news was taking. In 1967, he told the
Toronto Telegram, "I've heard that Huntley and Brinkley and Walter
Cronkite say that the era of the broadcast journalist is ending
and here the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is just trying
to start it."
The tradition at almost all television networks now is that the
main newsreader is not "just an announcer" but someone who has
advanced through the ranks as a reporter. The change did not
occur overnight. Stanley
BURK/BURKE quit and was replaced by announcers,
including Lloyd
ROBERTSON.
Peter KENT, a field reporter, read The National after Mr.
ROBERTSON
and he was followed by others of similar background. For all
that, Mr. CAMERON and Mr.
ROBERTSON were remembered as newsreaders
by the audience and by the comedy troupe
SCTV, which played on
their names in a running sketch that featured rival anchors Earl
Camembert and Floyd Robertson.
After Mr. CAMERON's demotion from his television job, he was
still one of two readers for The World at Six on Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation Radio. And he stayed on, introducing Viewpoint until
it was cancelled in January of 1976. A few months later, Mr.
CAMERON retired after 32 years -- and the world seen through
a Canadian television screen was never the same again. "He was
very, very Canadian," said Mr.
NASH. "As
Canadian as wheat."
Earl CAMERON was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan., on June 12,
1915. He died Thursday in Royal Victoria Hospital in Barrie,
Ontario, after a lengthy illness. He was 89. He is survived by
his wife, Adelaide and son Harold. He was predeceased by his
son Clark, who died in a car accident in 1984. Funeral services
will be held on Saturday.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-01-29 published
Bob MacDOUGALL, Royal Canadian Air Force Flier And Priest 1924-2004
Shot down over the North Sea, he made a pact with God, accepted
the German surrender in Denmark and then came home to take his
vows and work among hardened criminals. Later, he starred on
100 Huntley Street as a evangelical priest
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Saturday, January
29, 2005 - Page S7
No one wants to be the last man killed in a war.
Hitler had just four days to live when Bob
MacDOUGALL found himself
floating in the dark in the North Sea. Flying Officer
MacDOUGALL
had about another 60 years to live, most of them as a Jesuit
priest, but all he knew then was that the Second World War was
almost over and his situation was desperate.
Minutes before, he had been the tail gunner in a Halifax bomber,
carrying war material to the resistance in Denmark. The crew
was with 644 Squadron and had left their base in Dorset in England
at 10 p.m. on April 26, 1945. To remain undetected by German
radar, the plane flew between 50 and 100 feet above the water.
"When we hit the west coast of Jutland, we had to climb," remembered
Father MacDOUGALL in an interview in 1988.
A short while after they made their drop, they were hit by fire
from the ground. According to Sandy
BARR, a pilot who now runs
the Squadron's historical website, their pilot ditched the plane
just off the coast. All six crew members -- one Canadian, three
New Zealanders and two Brits -- made it out alive.
The frigid water numbed his legs. Later in life, vascular problems
would confine him to a wheelchair. Father
MacDOUGALL wasn't particularly
religious then, but as he struggled in the water, he formulated
a pact. Years later, he told his brother Ian that he had made
a promise to God. "He said, 'Save me from this and I'll spend
my life doing good.' He was saved, and he kept his promise,"
said Ian MacDOUGALL.
After a spell in the water, the crew was picked up by Danish
fishermen. As soon as the crew members landed, they left the
fishermen, since the Germans shot anyone who helped a downed
airman. Father
MacDOUGALL wandered for a day or so, following
instructions from the fishermen to look for a church steeple,
since there he might find a sympathetic minister.
"I came to a brook and crossed over, but failed to see a German
sentry on the other side. He raised his gun and brought me to
a halt," recounted Father
MacDOUGALL. He and at least one other
crew member were arrested and put in a prisoner of war camp.
Their internment didn't last long. On May 7, 1945, far away at
a schoolhouse in the French city of Rheims, senior representatives
of Hitler's defeated forces signed a ceasefire and the war in
Europe was over.
In Denmark, the Germans wanted to surrender, but not to the Russians,
who were fast approaching from the East and had already occupied
an offshore island. The German command resolved to surrender
to a British or American officer, preferably a general or even
a colonel. They scoured their prisoner of war camps and all they
could come up with was a 21-year-old Canadian flying officer
who only days before had been swimming about in the North Sea.
His officer rank was the second-lowest in the Royal Canadian
Air Force, equal to a lieutenant in the army.
And that is how Bob
MacDOUGALL came to accept the surrender of
the German garrison in Denmark. He was carried through the streets
of Vejle, the town nearest his PoW camp, and hailed as a liberator.
At that moment, no one was more surprised than he. A month later,
the picture of the celebration found its way back home and the
face and name of "F/O Robert
MacDOUGALL of 107 Henry Street, Halifax,"
was splashed across the front page of the Halifax Chronicle.
Father MacDOUGALL grew up in Nova Scotia but was born in Saskatchewan,
where his father worked as a bank manager. The family moved to
Halifax when he was a tot. Ralph
MacDOUGALL was a businessmen,
and although not rich, he was successful enough to raise a brood
of children and send them all to university. He was a Presbyterian
but his wife
May
WEBB was a Roman Catholic, so young Bob went
to Saint Thomas Aquinas elementary school and St. Patrick's high
school.
His mother died when he was quite young and his father married
Gertrude MacNEIL, also a Catholic. Together, they raised his
six children, as well as two more the couple would have together.
Bob MacDOUGALL joined the Royal Canadian Air Force from high
school. He was the third member of his family to join, and all
three went overseas -- his brother Bill as a soldier in the army
and his sister Betty as an army nurse. Like everyone who joined
the air force, he hoped to be a pilot. Instead, he became a tail
gunner, the most vulnerable crew position on a Second World War
bomber.
On his return to England from Denmark, he visited his sister
at the hospital where she worked. In their happiness, a rather
raucous party developed during which "he wrecked my bicycle,"
she recalled.
When he reached Halifax, Bob
MacDOUGALL decided to attend St.
Mary's University, where he was active in organizing the hockey
team and also played football. Mindful of his promise to God,
he considered becoming a journalist and instead opted for the
priesthood. In 1950, he joined the Jesuits, the largest of all
Roman Catholic religious orders. Many of his Friends bet he wouldn't
last.
"It was tough for a war veteran who had seen the world to settle
into that routine," said Elmer
MacGILLIVRAY, who attended the
Jesuit
Novitiate with Father
MacDOUGALL. "He was older than everyone
else and the rules were tough for him."
Life was lived in silence, from rising at 5: 30 a.m. to chapel
at 5: 55 a.m., followed by prayer from 6 to 7 a.m., a mass, and
then breakfast 30 minutes later. "You could ask for sugar, but
otherwise it was total silence," said Mr.
MacGILLIVRAY, who later
gave up the priesthood.
Because of his age and experience, Bob
MacDOUGALL was ordained
after 11 years instead of the usual 13. One of his first assignments
was Loyola High School in Montreal. There he coached sports teams
and taught several subjects, including Latin.
In one session, the boys learned to conjugate scio, the verb
to know. In Latin, the words "I know," "you know," "he knows"
are scio, scis, scit, with the "c" pronounced as an "h." His
14-year-old pupils fell about laughing at the sound of scit.
To help them get over it, Father
MacDOUGALL had them conjugate
the verb aloud 30 times. The giggles soon disappeared.
Father MacDOUGALL had a varied life. He taught in schools, worked
in parishes, was the priest at a veterans hospital and even worked
as a missionary in South America. For several years, he served
as the chaplain at Stoney Mountain Penitentiary near Winnipeg.
There, he started a choir and convinced parishes in the area
that his singing prisoners posed no danger. One of those he convinced
was Elmer MacGILLIVRAY, who was then the parish priest at St.
Ignatius of Winnipeg.
"On one trip, he stopped and he lost one prisoner when he escaped
for a while. He was embarrassed about that," said Mr.
MacGILLIVRAY
who now lives in Edmonton.
Working at the maximum-security jail was tough and Father
MacDOUGALL
sometimes found it depressing to deal with hardened criminals.
Often dismissed by cynical and intractable convicts as just another
man in a dog collar to offer them empty promises and meaningless
rituals, Father
MacDOUGALL came to believe he was a failure and
that the promise he made on that black, North Sea night had come
to nothing. He was convinced he was a catastrophe as a prison
priest and had not done good or helped any in his congregation.
The truth, of course, was quite different. Until he learned otherwise,
he grappled with more immediate demons at Stoney Mountain and
found himself drinking too much. In the end, Father
MacDOUGALL
succeeded in conquering both depression and alcohol.
Perhaps the most astounding part of Father
MacDOUGALL's religious
life was his born-again status as a Christian evangelist. That
occurred while working in a parish north of San Diego, California.
Afterward, he remained a Roman Catholic and a Jesuit but embraced
the scripture, the words of the Bible, and became the only Roman
Catholic priest to preach on 100 Huntley Street, the Toronto-based
evangelical Christian television channel.
He appeared on hundreds of television shows and started his own
Food for Life program. Many conventional Catholics found his
evangelism shocking and lodged complaints, but he persisted.
"There are Catholic evangelicals, and he served them," said Rev.
Jacques MONET, the archivist at Jesuit headquarters in Toronto.
Father MacDOUGALL was unapologetic about his evangelism. "I know
God wanted me to be an evangelist to the world -- my Roman Catholic
world," he said. A natural performer, he appeared on television
and at prayer meetings, sometimes in his Roman collar, other
times in an open-necked shirt.
Even his brothers and sisters, all of them religious Catholics,
were sometimes startled at what their brother was up to. For
all that, they are intensely proud of the homeless mission he
set up in Toronto.
"I think one of the highlights of his life was setting up the
Good Shepherd Refuge on Queen Street East near Parliament [in
Toronto]. He wanted to feed the street people, and he worked
at gathering food from local restaurants to feed them" said his
brother Ian. "He started it in the mid 1970s and it's still open."
He made good on that promise.
Robert Leonard
MacDOUGALL was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.,
on February 27, 1924. He died on December 26, 2004. He was 80.
He is survived by his brother Ian of Brampton, Ontario, his brother
Lorne of Truro, Nova Scotia, and by his sisters Bette
COLFORD
and Margaret
BOUDREAU of Halifax.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-02-09 published
Bob McADOREY,
Broadcaster: 1935-2005
Deejay who helped determine what Toronto's youth listened to
in the sixties went on to enjoy a 27-year run as a popular and
irreverent figure on Global television
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, February
9, 2005 - Page S9
Toronto -- If you knew Peggy Sue, you knew Bob
McADOREY.
That's
because, with his pile of curly hair and horn-rimmed glasses,
the Toronto disc jockey was a ringer for Buddy Holly, the songwriter
and singer from Texas whose song was a hit in 1959. The two men
were born 10 months apart --
McADOREY in 1935, Holly in 1936
and actually met in the mid-1950s when Mr.
McADOREY was a
disc jockey in Guelph, Ontario, and the singer was on a tour
of Canada.
"His job was to introduce Buddy Holly at a concert at Kitchener.
When he went on stage, the crowd went wild, and Bob though 'Gee,
I didn't know I was this popular,' " remembered his sister Pat
RUSSELL. "Of course, they thought he was Buddy Holly."
For decades, Mr.
McADOREY was the entertainment commentator on
Global Television; he retired less than five years ago. But in
an earlier era, he was a household name in Southern Ontario.
In 1960, just a few months after Buddy Holly died in a plane
crash in 1959, his look-alike joined Toronto's
CHUM.
Almost overnight,
Bob McADOREY became the top disc jockey at
CHUM, the No. 1 rock
station in the country. He was astonished when the station paid
him what he was asking for -- $7,200 a year (about $50,000 in
today's money, according to the Bank of Canada's inflation calculator).
"Bob McADOREY, whose face is as well known in Toronto as Mayor
Givens, has the most power to dictate what pop music Ontario
teens listen to," wrote the Toronto Telegram in 1966.
Not only was he the on-air man in the key 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. slot,
he was also the music director. He chose the records the other
six disc jockeys played. He and the other disc jockeys decided
on CHUM's
Top▼ 10, which sent kids to record stores to buy records
with a big hole in the middle and a song on each side. They spun
at 45 revolutions a minute and were called 45s.
"He alone commands what goes on the hit parade in Canada," wrote
The
Globe's
Blake
KIRBY in 1968. "Middle-aged squares who run
record stores use the
CHUM chart, the weekly list of what
McADOREY
is playing and plugging as a buying guide."
Along the way, he shared the footlights with such big-name visitors
as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
The CHUM hit parade made records such as The Unicorn by the Irish
Rovers. Mr.
McADOREY, a sentimental Irish-Canadian, pushed the
record, which sold 140,000 copies in Canada and a million in
the United States. But he didn't like everything on the
CHUM
chart. It was a business, after all.
"We're playing records here which I just can't bear to listen
to, but I wouldn't let that influence what goes on the air,"
Mr. McADOREY once told The Globe and Mail. His sister said that
when he went home after work, he was so sick of rock 'n' roll
that he put earphones on and listened to classical music.
Like many successful big-city disc jockeys, Mr.
McADOREY also
ran dances on the weekends -- events with such names as Bob McAdorey's
Canadian Bandstand or Canadian Hopville. He and a couple of other
disc jockeys owned a company called Teen Scene Ltd., which put
on dances in towns all over Southern Ontario.
After a long spell on
CHUM,
Bob
McADOREY either was too old --
he was well into his 30s -- or too tired, and so he suddenly
found himself fired. Unlike the regular corporate world, where
people resign, in radio they are just plain sacked. Disc jockeys
almost wear it as a badge of honour.
"There are no hard feelings," he told an entertainment writer
in 1972 after he had been sacked from
CFTR following a stint
at CFGM. "I was told that it was either the station's new music-and-contests
format or me." Within days, he had rejoined radio station
CFGM.
A few years later, he morphed into television. No one told him
that radio types, from the hot side of the Marshall McLuhan equation,
are not supposed to be able to make the switch to the cool world
of television. He perched on his stool in 1973 and performed
for about 27 years.
Bob McADOREY was born within earshot of the Niagara Falls. His
father worked as a machinist on the railway and the whole family
lived near both the tracks and the roundhouse at Niagara Falls,
Ontario
For the rest of his life, Mr.
McADOREY maintained a love
affair with trains and rode them at every opportunity.
He went to high school at Stamford Collegiate. An Irish Catholic,
he was one of two non-Protestants in the class. The other was
Barbara FRUM, later the host of The Journal and
As It Happens
on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The two would spend the
religious class in another room, enjoying their time off.
In Grade 12, Mr.
McADOREY started work at the local radio station,
doing a program in the early morning before class. "One day,
the station manager told me to go on air and do the play-by-play
of a local baseball game," he told the Toronto Star in 2000.
"I didn't know the players' names and I didn't know much about
baseball, so I sat in the bleachers and interviewed the spectators
and it seemed to work."
After that, he was hooked. For a time, he worked all over --
including radio station
CJDC in remote Dawson's Creek, British
Columbia
Even then, he was fairly outrageous. "
CJDC had access
to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation feeds," he said in 2000.
"But nobody monitored us, so we sold everything -- the one o'clock
time signal to a jewellery store, the Queen's Christmas Message
brought to you by Sammy's Bar and Grill."
But it was soon after he had moved to Guelph, Ontario, that things
really began to happen and he hit the big time at the age of
24 by working for
CHUM.
Though he may have been at the top of the pop game in the Toronto
of the sixties, he also became a national figure at Global as
it expanded from a base in Southern Ontario to become the country's
third network. He never applied for a job in television, it was
just chance.
Bill CUNNINGHAM, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation foreign
correspondent brought in to run Global News, hired him after
he saw him speak during a tour of the new television station.
At the time, Mr.
McADOREY was working for Alan
SLAIGHT, a prescient
broadcaster who had run
CHUM, bought
CFGM and was one of the
early owners of Global. Mr.
CUNNINGHAM's plan was to lighten
up the newscast and hire a kind of humourist-commentator. Thus,
Mr. McADOREY covered entertainment and did light pieces for the
newscast, heading out with a cameraman to find what he could.
Once, during an Air Canada strike, he drifted out to Toronto's
Pearson International Airport and happened to find Terminal 2
entirely deserted. The scene made irresistible camera fodder.
The pair had time to erect an impromptu bowling alley and roll
a few balls before the party was broken up by patrolling policemen.
The show was an enduring success. It helped that Mr.
McADOREY
was good-looking, possessed a great voice and was totally unaffected
and unpretentious. Behind the scenes, though, Global was in turmoil
and not just financially.
The network kept trying to reinvent itself. One idea was to bring
in an untried newsreader, Suzanne
PERRY, who was one of Pierre
TRUDEAU's press aides and whose son, Matthew
PERRY, went on to
fame in the sitcom Friends. Sadly, Ms.
PERRY was put on air before
she was ready and that experiment failed.
A short while afterward, the network tried something called News
at Noon, with Bob
McADOREY doing entertainment, Mike
ANSCOMBE
the sports, and John
DAWE, business. The three of them joked,
made fun of each other, and did and said things you weren't supposed
to see on television. All of a sudden, they had a huge audience,
unheard of at that time of day.
"We broke new ground with 300,000 viewers at noon," said business
reporter John
DAWE. "
Then it expanded and we did the 5: 30 news
as well. We worked together for 14 years."
As he matured, Mr.
McADOREY lost his Buddy Holly looks. Instead,
he was often mistaken for another famous person with glasses
and a mass of curly hair -- Ken
TAILOR/TAYLOR, the Canadian ambassador
to Iran who sheltered American colleagues during the 1979-80
hostage crisis.
At Global, the news department kept trying new things and new
people, though the on-air staff remained pretty much the same.
One producer didn't like the jocular format. And Mr.
McADOREY
didn't like him. He rebelled by being provocative on air.
"It's Friday, and I didn't really feel much like working today.
The boss is out of town so I took it easy this afternoon, stretching
out in my office, reading and daydreaming," he began his part
of the 6 p.m. newscast on April 8, 1983. It got him fired.
"Unprofessional and insulting to the viewers," read the note
from his pompous producer. The viewers thought otherwise. Phone
lines buzzed and letters landed on all the right desks. Two weeks
later, the producer was fired and Bob
McADOREY was rehired.
As host of Entertainment Desk from 1991 to 1997, he guided it
through many lively segments. Among the most memorable was the
appearance of comedienne Judy Tenuta. "[She] pretty well took
over the show, which bothered some viewers but not me," he once
said. "Her wild style made for bizarre television. Most of the
interview was done with Judy sitting on my lap making semi-lewd
comments."
For all that, he never did like producers. At the time of his
retirement in July, 2000, Andrew
RYAN of The Globe and Mail asked
him what advice he would give to aspiring young entertainment
journalists. "Producers are dorks, actors are jerks," Mr.
McADOREY
answered. "The only ones worth talking to are directors."
Having been asked to retire, he said he had no expectations of
a gold watch. Rather, "how about a gold boot up the butt? Retirement
was not my idea. I always thought I had a few more good years
left."
Instead, he chose to retire quietly at his home in Niagara-On-The-Lake,
Ontario His main hobby was reading and he was something of an
authority on James Joyce. An Irish nationalist, he had a lifelong
obsession with the great Dublin writer.
Robert Joseph
McADOREY was born in Niagara Falls, Ontario, on
July 24, 1935. He died on February 5 at St. Catharines, Ontario
He was 70 and had suffered prolonged illness. He is survived
by daughter Colleen, sister Pat and brother Terry. He was predeceased
by his wife and by two of three children.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-02-28 published
Karl RENNER,
Aristocrat And Broadcaster: 1917-2005
Grandson of modern Austria's first chancellor, he came to Canada
as an 'enemy alien' and stayed to broadcast propaganda to Germany.
Later, he worked for Radio Canada International
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Monday, February
28, 2005 - Page S6
Toronto -- Karl
RENNER never meant to come to Canada. He was
sent here at the start of war as an internee, an "enemy alien"
kept behind barbed wire in one of several camps for Germans and
Austrians, many of them Jews, who were living in England when
the Second World War broke out in 1939.
Although not a vengeful man, Mr.
RENNER did get back at the Nazis.
He later helped to create Canadian war propaganda, German-language
radio broadcasts aimed at sowing doubts in the German population,
and stayed on for most of 65 years.
The
Nazi race laws were one of the reasons Karl
RENNER and part
of his family fled to England. The other was that they couldn't
abide living under Nazi rule. Although his father had been a
practising Protestant, the Nazis classified him as Jewish. "As
far as the Nazis were concerned, he was Jewish," said Frances
ASHLEY,
Mr.
RENNER's sister. The classification applied to his
son, too.
In May, 1940, the British didn't have time to decide who was
a threat and who wasn't. They put them all in internment camps,
such as on the Isle of Man, and then shipped them to Canada.
"The
British panicked," said broadcaster and writer Eric
KOCH
who went to England from Germany in the mid-1930s. "We were interned
by the British and sent to Canada."
Both men spent about two years in "enemy alien" camps. Later,
Mr. RENNER would joke that although they were given the same
rations as men in the Canadian Army, they ate better. The chef
from the Ritz in London was among the detainees at his camp at
Farnham in Quebec's Eastern Townships.
The internees arrived in May, 1940, and settled down to life
behind the wire. Soon, however, Ottawa questioned whether they
should be treated as prisoners of war and in mid-1941 reclassified
them as refugees. The government also realized they could be
useful. Some, like Mr.
RENNER, were given a chance to work.
He spent a short time at the spy school at Camp X outside Toronto
where he polished his propaganda skills. From 1943 on, Mr.
RENNER
and others wrote and broadcast propaganda aimed at the German
population in a unit with the ominous name of the Psychological
Warfare Committee. The Canadian Censorship Board also asked Mr.
RENNER and many others to translate letters to and from some
of the 32,000 German prisoners of war held in camps in Canada.
What they gleaned was often used to advantage in their radio
broadcasts. The service began transmission during Christmas,
"What distinguished the German-language material was that it
was prepared by very bright persons who understood German, could
empathize with the German population as well as the prisoners,"
wrote Arthur
SIEGEL in his History of Radio Canada International.
"Karl RENNER, the Censorship's Board's contributor to psychological
warfare, had himself been an internee when he first arrived in
this country, although he was a refugee from the Nazis."
Even 10 years after the war, Canadian officials glossed over
the treatment given to Germans and Austrians who had fled the
Nazis. "A native of Vienna, Karl came to Canada in 1940 and worked
for a time with the National War Services in Ottawa," read the
announcement when Mr.
RENNER was named a correspondent for the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation International Service, implying
he arrived as a happy immigrant.
Karl RENNER was a man of polished manners and a sharp wit, a
product of a privileged childhood in Vienna and a direct connection
to the culture of central Europe. In Canada, where he lived for
most of the past 65 years, he was always the life of the party.
He loved his connection to European socialist aristocracy. "We
don't have to work, we're socialists," was a favourite throwaway
line. And he had a string of them.
"He had beautiful manners, spoke several languages and was a
beautiful dancer," recalled Joan
IRWIN, a retired journalist
who knew him in Ottawa and Montreal. "He was very aware of his
family background. He lived two-thirds in the present and one-third
in the past."
Karl RENNER's socialist connection came through his maternal
grandfather, Karl
RENNER, the first Chancellor of the Republic
of Austria. He was born Karl
RENNER-
DEUTSCH (his father, Hans
DEUTSCH, had hyphenated the two names) in Vienna in 1917. The
year of his birth shaped his life. The Austro Hungarian Empire
was at war with Britain, Canada and the rest of the Empire, France
and Italy and soon the United States. When it ended, so did the
Empire that stretched from parts of Poland in the north to Trieste
and the Adriatic in the south, covering 11 ethnic groups. Vienna
went from being the centre of a polyglot empire of 50 million
people to being the capital of a poor man's Switzerland with
just three million people.
Karl RENNER, grandfather of the man who has just died in Ottawa,
was the son of a Moravian peasant and a prominent socialist politician,
first elected to Parliament in 1907. In her book, Paris 1919,
University of Toronto historian Margaret
MacMILLAN details how
Karl RENNER, who was leader of a peace delegation at Versailles,
used his charm to save chunks of land for the new Austria. "Karl
RENNER, a cheerful, portly man, fond of good food and drink,
card games and dancing," was how Ms.
MacMILLAN described the
Austrian chancellor.
By all accounts, it also described his grand_son, Karl
RENNER,
who had long since dropped both the hyphen and his father's name.
Big-picture politics continued to shape young Karl
RENNER's life.
When that other Austrian, Adolf
HITLER, took over his native
country in 1938, young Karl
RENNER fled to England. His grandfather
remained in Vienna under a kind of house arrest throughout the
war and re-surfaced in 1945 to help Austria maintain its delicate
balance between the Soviet Union and the West.
In England, the grand_son of the old Austrian Chancellor was a
social hit. His dancing skills made him a favourite at balls
his Austrian airs added a cosmopolitan sparkle, helped out by
anti-Nazi views.
After his internment and then freedom in Canada, Mr.
RENNER returned
to London and worked for an oil company, travelling across Europe.
In 1948-1950 he worked for the International Refuge Organization
in Italy. During his time in Europe he maintained his Canadian
connection, making freelance radio reports to the International
Service.
In the mid 1960s, he returned to Montreal to serve as public-relations
officer for the service. By then, the Cold War was at its height
and much of the service was broadcasting to the Soviet Union.
Mr. RENNER's ambition was to become head of the department but
worried his connection to a famous socialist family might have
done in him. "Socialism and communism were seen as closely related
during the Cold War," said his wife, Juliet
HARRISON.
Some of
his Friends thought he was thwarted, in part by his own louche
image.
"He loved to give the appearance of never working very hard,"
said Mr. KOCH.
His old friend Joan
IRWIN remembered that Al Johnson,
the Saskatchewan-born president of the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation, was not fond of the smooth Karl
RENNER.
"Al Johnson thought Karl was frivolous," said Ms.
IRWIN.
And,
in many ways, he was. Years of diplomatic parties gave him a
weakness for drink. One of his affectations was to carry a silver
flask filled with vodka. Eventually, one by one, he gave up his
vices.
Some time in the mid-1970s, Karl
RENNER moved to Ottawa. He loved
it there. The Austrian embassy treated him as a near deity and
he was invited to many receptions. Recently, the current ambassador
paid him a visit.
He visited Austria often, staying with his mother at the family
home near Vienna. When his mother died, the house was dedicated
to his grandfather and made into the Renner Museum.
Karl RENNER was born in Vienna on February 7, 1917. He died in
Ottawa on January 26, 2005. He was 87.
He is survived by his wife and by a sister who lives in California.
He asked that some of his ashes be buried beside his parents
in Austria, and the rest spread at Lake Memphramagog in Quebec's
Eastern Townships.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-04-16 published
Stanley MANSBRIDGE,
Civil
Servant: 1919-2005
Royal Air Force navigator decorated for his part in a critical
bombing raid on a Nazi missile site later settled in Canada to
become an influential civil servant in Ottawa and Alberta
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Saturday, April
16, 2005, Page S9
Toronto -- The Flying Log Book of Wing Commander Stanley Mansbridge
reads like a shorthand history of the air war over Europe. The
log books were kept by every pilot and navigator, some more thorough
than others. The blue-covered book was meticulously maintained,
filled with detail, and demonstrated the kind of commitment to
good organization that later propelled him to the heights of
Canada's civil service.
Starting as a novice navigator, he recorded his flights in such
smaller two-engine aircraft as Ansons, Fairey Battles and Blenheims
before graduating to heavier machines, Hampdens, Wellingtons
and finally the four-engine Lancaster. The bombing runs and flights
over enemy territory -- operations -- are written in red ink,
the training and transport flights in blue.
Each entry in the logbook occupies just one line, maybe two for
a big mission. It gives the date, type of aircraft, name of the
pilot, the "duty" or job Stanley
MANSBRIDGE was doing, and a
description of the mission.
The operation on the night of August 17, 1943, is one of the
raids that merits two lines, naming the target and the size and
number of bombs dropped by the Lancaster. The entry reads, "Peenemunde-
8 x 1000 G.P. 5 X 500 M.C.; Very Successful -- Large Fires."
The target was 1,000 kilometres from bomber bases in Britain
and the flight took six and half hours there and back. His squadron
was in the third wave, so the German defenders, fooled earlier
by a phony raid on Berlin, were ready. Of the 12 aircraft in
his squadron, only eight returned. The target was protected by
a thicket of anti-aircraft fire from the ground and German night
fighters in the air. Peenemunde was the secret location where
Nazi scientists built the V-1 flying bomb (the world's first
cruise missile) and the V-2 (the world's first ballistic missile).
The raid destroyed the rocket factory and killed many scientists,
including Dr. Walter Thiel, the designer of the rocket engines.
Flight Lieutenant
MANSBRIDGE, as he was at the time, knew the
raid was important, but didn't know it was one of the key air
attacks of the war.
"Peenemunde one of the two raids by the Royal Air Force that
changed the course of the war," says Steve
HARRIS, director of
History at the Department of National Defence in Ottawa. "It
slowed the development of the V-1 and V-2 by at least two months.
Had the V-2 been ready on time, the Allies might not have been
able to hold the beaches in Normandy."
The war in Europe might have continued for years without the
invasion of Normandy in June of 1944. The first V-1's, known
as doodlebugs, were launched against Britain on June 13, 1944,
a week after the D-Day invasion. Many were shot down. It wasn't
until September of 1944 that the more deadly V-2's were launched.
They carried a 975 kilogram warhead and their supersonic speed
meant they were impossible to shoot down.
"It seems likely that if the Germans had succeeded in perfecting
and using these new weapons earlier than he did, our invasion
of Europe would have proved exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible,"
wrote General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme allied Commander in
Europe.
Stanley MANSBRIDGE flew with the Royal Air Force. He had been
born in a Canadian military hospital in England in 1918, son
of a Canadian father and a British mother. His father, Harry,
served with the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry during
the First World War and, among other battles, fought at Vimy
Ridge.
After the war, the family lived in Toronto for a few years but
his mother longed for home and they all moved back. Stanley grew
up in the London suburb of Richmond, where he became an accomplished
cricket player. He passed the British equivalent of high school
and then went to work for Lloyd's Bank. There, he took banking
courses that helped with his later career.
In 1939, he joined the Royal Air Force which happily latched
on to his gift for numbers and detail and made him a navigator.
The Royal Air Force was not disappointed. His unerring ability
to find his way to the target and back in all conditions earned
him the role of senior navigator in his squadron, a job that
held heart-stopping responsibilities. Essentially, the navigator
was the heart and mind of each bomber and was all but in command.
The crew relied on the pilot's flying skills to get them off
the ground, over the target and returned to earth in one piece
yet knew in their bones that it was the navigator who gave him
his instructions. Only the navigator understood the mysterious
art of how to find their way in the dark to a hostile target
and then return them safely home. In the case of Stan
MANSBRIDGE,
he was also accountable for an entire squadron that on any one
mission mustered as many as 25 aircraft, each with its own navigator
and each of whom was under his supervision.
His total time in combat involved two tours of duty, which meant
50 "operation" flights over enemy territory, including a 1941
mine-laying mission in the North Sea that disabled the German
battle cruiser Gneisenau (with its sister ship, it had sunk 22
merchant vessels). Altogether, he made 340 flights during the
war. Perhaps the most unusual was to deliver 600 pounds of Royal
Mail to Gibraltar in a Lancaster bomber.
Some of his major missions included the raid on Hamburg that
set the city afire and a long-distance raid on the Skoda munitions
works in Czechoslovakia. A night mission against a German radar
factory surprised the Germans by carrying on to bases in North
Africa rather than turning for home and into the gun sights of
waiting nightfighters.
The raid on Peenemunde was Mr.
MANSBRIDGE's last operation and
soon after he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. He
then went to the Royal Air Force staff college and it was during
that period he married his sweetheart Brenda. Unlike other wartime
flyers who rushed into marriage, he had put off the wedding because
he had seen so many of his Friends leave young widows after failing
to come back from a raid. Ever the careful organizer, he decided
to wait until after his second and final "tour."
From staff college, he was assigned to Bomber Command headquarters
in High Wycombe outside London where he worked under Air Marshal
Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the tactician and father of the "1,000-bomber
raid" who, after the Battle of Britain, became the force to be
reckoned with in Royal Air Force strategy. Fittingly, as a newly
minted member of headquarters "brass," Mr.
MANSBRIDGE was promoted
to wing commander, which is the air force equivalent of a lieutenant-colonel.
After the war, he turned down a permanent commission in the Royal
Air Force and went to work for the British civil service. His
specialty was organization. From 1950 to 54, he and his young
family lived in the Federated Malay States where Mr.
MANSBRIDGE
worked to set up the civil service for the soon-to-be-independent
country of Malaysia. It was a time of professional rewards at
work and personal satisfaction at home. With young children under
foot, his large Kuala Lumpur home was made busy by the hubbub
of family life. By then his two older children had been born
Wendy, who would take up nursing, and Peter, who would grow
up to become one of Canada's best known broadcasters.
While in Kuala Lumpur, Mr.
MANSBRIDGE played for the state cricket
team and won colours for his contribution as a fast bowler. It
was from there that he decided to move to Canada, a country he
hadn't visited since he was a boy.
The family moved to Ottawa where they put down new roots and
welcomed the addition of a third child, Paul, who is now a supermarket
executive. Mr.
MANSBRIDGE soon made himself valuable to the federal
government as a kind of trouble shooter for the Civil Service
Commission, moving from one department to the other when they
needed re-organization. "He was an expert in finding out what
was wrong in government departments and making them more efficient
in what they do, whether it was Malaya or in Ottawa," said Peter
MANSBRIDGE, who before he joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
had been inspired to train as a Royal Canadian Navy pilot.
By 1960, Stanley
MANSBRIDGE was deputy chief of organization
and methods for the Civil Services Commission and was made its
chief in 1964. In 1971, he joined the department of Health and
Welfare where he was assistant deputy minister under Marc
LALONDE.
Al JOHNSON, one of the most powerful mandarins in Ottawa during
the 1960's and 1970's appreciated Mr.
MANSBRIDGE's organizational
skills. "He was assistant deputy minister of administration at
National
Welfare," remembered Mr.
JOHNSON, who was the deputy
minister and who is now retired in Ottawa. "Stanley was our financial
watchdog. It's not a job that always makes you popular, but he
was well liked since he was such an amiable person."
In 1976, he went to Edmonton for a meeting with Peter Lougheed.
Mr. MANSBRIDGE later recalled that the Alberta premier insisted
on one-on-one interviews with any senior people he hired. He
passed muster and became the province's chief deputy minister
of Social Services and Community Health, a job he kept until
"The
Province of Alberta was very fortunate to have Mr.
MANSBRIDGE
play a senior role with the Government of Alberta during the
time I was premier," Mr. Lougheed said last week from his office
in Calgary.
It was a period of intense debate between the federal and provincial
governments over matters of health and welfare. Mr.
MANSBRIDGE
wrote many papers on these issues, some of which appeared in
the Canadian Journal of Public Administration.
After leaving his job in Edmonton, Mr.
MANSBRIDGE moved to Victoria
where he taught public administration at the University of Victoria.
Several years ago, he moved to London, Ontario, to be closer
to his family.
Stanley Harry
MANSBRIDGE was born on May 29, 1918, in Folkestone,
England. He died in London, Ontario, on March 27, 2005. He is
leaves his wife Brenda and by his children, Wendy, Peter and
Paul.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-05-07 published
George SALVERSON,
Playwright: 1916-2005
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's first drama editor wrote
a thousand radio plays, switched effortlessly to television and
wrote a hit musical
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Saturday, May
7, 2005, Page S9
Toronto -- He was Canada's king of radio drama in its golden
age. George
SALVERSON wrote about a thousand radio plays in a
career that began in 1945 and lasted until long after the arrival
of television. He was a volume man who never kept count and,
in fact, held few copies of his work. Week after week, Mr.
SALVERSON
generated a one-hour Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio
play with a careful story line and perfect dialogue. The phrase
"writer's block" didn't exist for him; he was a freelancer and
he had to eat.
He did have a routine, though. For many years he worked for Stages,
the main Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio drama of the
week. His work week started on a Tuesday or a Wednesday with
an idea. It could be something in the news, such as prison reform
or mental health. Radio dramas were used to deal with social
issues the same way television documentaries or long news items
are today.
After the idea was nailed down, Mr.
SALVERSON would write one
act a day, with almost all his plays having three acts. That
left him ready for the rehearsal, which took all day Saturday.
During and after the rehearsal, he and the director, either Esse
LJUNGH or Andrew
ALLAN, would work polishing the script.
"The live performance was on Sunday," remembers Alfie
SCOPP who
was one of the actors. "We could come dressed casually for the
rehearsal, but when we went live at 5 o'clock on Sunday we had
to be dressed in a suit and a tie."
Studio G on Jarvis Street in Toronto would be filled with as
many as 20 actors, including such well-known names as John
DRAINIE,
Aileen SEATON and Bud
KNAPP. No matter how long their part, actors
were all paid $45 a performance.
One example of the radio play as social commentary was a series
called Return Journey, which Mr.
SALVERSON wrote in 1951. It
was based on research done at Kingston Penitentiary on how hard
it was for a released prisoner to make it on the outside. The
story tells how a prisoner was afraid of the outside world but
also afraid of failure and a return to behind bars.
He did much of the research for that particular play while on
his honeymoon in Kingston, Ontario His wife
Olive
SCOTT, went
by the stage name of Sandra
SCOTT, and acted in many of his productions.
"George was always amazed that this glamorous actress married
him," remembers his friend Mr.
SCOPP.
The work on his honeymoon showed how an idea could be plucked
from the headlines. In a recent e-mail to his daughter, Julie,
he said the early Canadian Broadcasting Corporation almost invented
documentary drama for radio. "Now it's routine in Law and Order."
Later when Mr.
SALVERSON moved to television, he used the same
techniques for coming up with story ideas. Once he met a man
he knew who had been a successful advertising executive but could
no longer find work because he was over 45. "The trouble is,
I'm over-age and over qualified," the man told Mr.
SALVERSON.
The same line came out of the mouth of Walter, the fictional
version of the ad man in the television play, The Write-Off.
Mr. SALVERSON spoke to people in the business world, talked to
employment agencies and tried to find out just how many Walters
there were in Canada. He figured there to be at least 500,000
under-employed older people.
"The real Walter attended one of the taping sessions and he walked
into the control room as Rudi [director Rudi
DORN] was directing
the firing scene," recalled Mr.
SALVERSON in a 1968 interview.
"When I asked him was this anything like the way it really happened,
he gave me a long look and remarked, 'Have you ever been through
a nightmare twice?' "
George SALVERSON's early life read like an improbable script
for a radio play. His father, the
son of Scandinavian immigrants,
worked for the Canadian National Railway and the family lived,
at one time or another, in Port Arthur, Ontario, Winnipeg, Regina,
Saskatoon, Edmonton, Kamloops, British Columbia, Vancouver and
Victoria. Fortunately, he spent enough time in Port Arthur to
go to high school there. His mother, Laura Goodman
SALVERSON,
wrote and published 10 books. She won the Governor General's
Award twice -- for her novel The Dark Weaver in 1937 and then
for her autobiography Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter
in1939.
Even so, George
SALVERSON never wanted to be a playwright. He
set out to be a newscaster and was headed in the right direction
when he got his first job at
CFAR in Flin Flon, Manitoba He performed
every role at the tiny radio station, including writing and reading
the news. The highlight of his newscasting career occurred on
December 7, 1941, when he told the 7,000 people of Flin Flon
of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and he did it dressed
in a suit.
His second job came along in what was then the biggest city in
Western Canada -- Winnipeg. But at
CKRC, they had other plans.
He could read the occasional newscast if he liked, but it wasn't
news readers they wanted. They had plenty, thanks. What they
needed was a playwright, someone who could knock off a quickie
radio drama and also take a part or two.
His first play was a success, and Mr.
SALVERSON soon found himself
doing the writing, acting, producing and sound effects. He resolved
to perfect his dramas, drifting over to the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation to pick up pointers on how to write believable dialogue
and interesting story ideas.
For a couple of years, Mr.
SALVERSON wrote, produced and directed
plays for Eaton's, when the department store used radio dramas
to sell its wares. Then, in 1948, he was given work by the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation and moved to Toronto. Among his first
shows was Paper Railroad, a play based on his father's work life.
From the time he arrived in Toronto he was never short of works
or awards. He won a first in the Canadian Radio Awards of 1948
and, the following year, received another from Ohio State University.
In 1949, he adapted Dracula for radio, a play that starred Lorne
GREEN,
Alan
KING and Lister
SINCLAIR.
When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation turned to television
in the fall of 1952, Mr.
SALVERSON was soon writing both radio
and television plays and he became the network's first drama
editor. One of his plays, The Discoverers, was performed on the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and
on Kraft Theatre in the
United States. The play was about Banting and Best's discovery
of insulin.
Later on he wrote documentaries as well as dramas for television.
Perhaps his most famous was Air of Death. "That changed the course
of public affairs programming on television," said Jane
CHALMERS,
vice-president of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio. "In
October of 1967, this documentary report, written by George,
and dealing with air pollution in Canada, aired on Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation-television, pre-empting the top-rated The Ed Sullivan
Show."
His script laid the subject bare and resulted in a lawsuit.
"Dad worked for six months helping the lawyers and the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation with the lawsuit. They won their case,"
said Julie
SALVERSON. "He used to joke it was the only time he
had such steady work."
He wrote one production for the stage, the musical The Legend
of the Dumbells, which was produced at the Charlottetown Festival
in 1977. It was about a Canadian troupe of First World War entertainers
and used songs from the era. It travelled to the National Arts
Centre in Ottawa and the Elgin Theatre in Toronto and continues
to be staged.
When Studio G closed in July 1993, before the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation moved to its new Toronto headquarters, he wrote a
10-minute sketch for radio. It was called End Credits.
For many years, Mr.
SALVERSON taught writing at Ryerson University
in Toronto and, in the process, found that some people were unteachable.
He told his daughter Julie, in one of their many e-mails, the
story of a 50-year-old novelist who wanted to turn one of his
books into a screenplay. He just couldn't do it.
"When I dramatized, I always went into the scene myself. I was
sitting there doing the acting. And away went the characters,
whooping it up. My writer friend remained a writer. He stood
outside the scene and tried to tell you what was going on. And
nobody felt anything."
As he grew older, George
SALVERSON kept his mind in shape with
mental exercises. One of them was memorizing The Rubaiyat of
Omar Khayyam. He could recite any verse on command, and was working
on memorizing it backwards. He also wrote a lot of limericks.
On the Saturday before he died, he had a new one for Alfie
SCOPP.
It went like this:
A well-endowed woman from Brussels
Had a veritable plethora of muscles,
She said with some pride,
There are others I hide,
And bring them out only in tussles.
He also wrote a book called Around the World in 80 Limericks,
with bits of doggerel for each of the world's major cities. He
wrote until the end.
George SALVERSON was born in St. Catharines, Ont, on April 30,
1916. He died on April 9, 2005, after a fall at his apartment
at the Performing Arts Lodge in Toronto. He was 88. A public
memorial service will be held there at 6 p.m., Monday, May 9.
He is survived by his daughter Julie and son Scott. His wife
died in 2000.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-05-16 published
Lloyd STEWARD/STEWART/STUART,
Aviator: 1920-2005
Unassuming lad from Saskatchewan never expected to be an pilot.
He got more than he bargained for, both in combat and in the
bush, and yet always rose to the occasion. He ended his career
as chief pilot for Imperial Oil
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Monday, May 16,
2005, Page S9
Toronto -- Lloyd
STEWARD/STEWART/STUART was a boy from a ranch in Saskatchewan
who went on to be a bush pilot and captain of a corporate jet
fleet. His first flight into the bush meant landing an old Tiger
Moth biplane equipped with floats on the lakes of northern Saskatchewan.
And while that might seem a bit risky, Mr.
STEWARD/STEWART/STUART cut his teeth
on far tougher stuff, having flown Spitfires in the Royal Canadian
Air Force during the Second World War.
Late in the war, he tangled with an experimental jet fighter,
and shot down a Focke Wolfe 190, the most dreaded German Luftwaffe
fighter. The fastest radial-engine aircraft ever built, the FW-190
was a plane that Spitfire pilots such as Flight Lieutenant
STEWARD/STEWART/STUART
feared even more than the better-known Messerschmitt Me 109.
His victory had come as a comfort -- two days earlier, Mr.
STEWARD/STEWART/STUART
had lost an aircraft and been forced to bail out over Germany.
"He was caught in a tree with his parachute, but the branch gave
way and he was let down gently," said his son Barry
STEWARD/STEWART/STUART,
an Air Canada pilot. "He didn't know which side of the line he
was on, so he started walking in what he thought was the right
direction. A German civilian with a pitchfork met him. Dad offered
him a cigarette, he said 'Danke' and went on his way."
As it happened, Mr.
STEWARD/STEWART/STUART had chosen the right path. A U.S.
jeep picked him up and he was back with his squadron that same day.
The incident with the jet fighter occurred some weeks later.
One of Adolf Hitler's promised "terror weapons," it was a German
Me 262. Powered by two jet engines, it possessed a speed of 540
mph versus 408 mph for a late-model Spitfire. Though the Spitfire
was no match for the jet, this particular Me-262 had the misfortune
to drop out of the clouds in front of Mr.
STEWARD/STEWART/STUART's
Spitfire.
He reacted in an instant, fired off a burst and damaged the jet,
though it was uncertain whether it crashed.
The youngest of four siblings born in the Qu-Appelle valley,
as a child Lloyd
STEWARD/STEWART/STUART never dreamed he would be a pilot. His
father's family had moved from Carleton Place outside Ottawa
to Saskatchewan in 1883, more than two decades before the territory
became a province. Young Lloyd went to school in a one-room school
house, but the family rented out their ranch for a few years
during the Depression and moved into Regina.
There he went to the old Regina Central Collegiate, and later
to a private school called Luther College. The family paid for
part of his tuition with sides of beef. After high school, he
worked on the ranch for a year and then went to Normal School,
or teacher's college, where he graduated in June, 1940.
He applied immediately to the air force. Always a modest man,
he figured his farming background might make him useful on the
ground, fixing aircraft as a fitter or rigger. So it took him
by surprise when the Royal Canadian Air Force recruiter said
they needed pilots and told him to come back in a few months.
While he was waiting, he taught school to nine students in a
one-room schoolhouse at Liberty, Saskatchewan. At Christmas,
he went back to see the recruiter and found he was wanted right
away. He began flight training in Regina in January, 1941.
One year later, he was with Royal Canadian Air Force 412 squadron
in England, flying Spitfires. On August 19, 1942, he fought German
planes over Dieppe as part of the air cover meant to protect
the Canadian Army's infamous failed raid on the French Port.
He flew three sorties that day, trying to make sure troops could
make it off the beaches and back to the ships. The air battle
was almost as one-sided as the land battle. The Royal Canadian
Air Force and Royal Air Force lost 119 planes to the Luftwaffe's
46 to suffer one of the worst aerial defeats of the war.
Later that year, he was seconded to the Royal Air Force and posted
to the Mediterranean island of Malta, where the British were
desperately holding off attacks by the Germans and Italians.
Fighting was ferocious and he was shot down. His flight of four
Spitfires was over Sicily just before the Allied invasion in
July, 1943, when they were attacked by 15 German fighters. The
lead Royal Air Force pilot was killed, two Spitfires got away
and Mr. STEWARD/STEWART/STUART bailed out.
As he floated down, he had a perfect view of an invasion fleet
that was lined up for six kilometres or more off the coast of
Sicily. He landed in the sea and was picked up by a British ship
that was busily involved in an invasion and could not be concerned
with returning a pilot to a base more than 100 kilometres away
across the Malta Channel. With one thing and another, Mr.
STEWARD/STEWART/STUART
did not get back to his unit for many days. His squadron didn't
know where he was, while back in Saskatchewan his family was
told he had gone missing in action.
"Family legend is that, on hearing the news, his mother's hair
turned white overnight," his son said.
Mr. STEWARD/STEWART/STUART managed to set matters straight a week later, but
it was too late to save his mothers hair.
After his posting in Malta, he went to a fighter base in Scotland
as a tactical fighter instructor. By then, he had done about
25 missions, which was the required number for a tour. He signed
up for a second tour and in between was granted a month's home
leave. He sailed for Halifax on a troop ship and then took a
long train ride home to Saskatchewan. The clock started running
the moment he left the ship and stopped when he returned to Halifax.
In the process, he happened to miss a lot of action. While he
was away, the D-Day landings in Normandy occurred, and by the
time he returned, his squadron was based on the Continent. He
spent the rest of war flying over France, the Netherlands and
Germany, all the while thinking about what he would do when it
was all over.
He had taken overseas a book called Trees in Canada, and he always
kept it by him. He had it in mind to become a forester, and after
war applied to Saskatchewan Department of Forestry. As it happened,
they needed pilots and he was soon in the air again. He quit
when the provincial government decided on a round of pay cuts
and he went to work for Territories Air Service, flying out of
Fort Smith, then the capital of the Northwest Territories. He
found that he loved the North and was never happier.
In 1952, Mr.
STEWARD/STEWART/STUART joined Imperial Oil and flew Beavers, Otters
and such larger propeller-driven aircraft as the Lockheed Lodestar
and the DC-3. Four years later, he moved to Toronto, bought a
house in Etobicoke and was soon piloting company personnel. He
graduated to corporate jets in the early 1970s, and in 1974 became
Imperial Oil's senior pilot. He flew executives and engineers
into remote locations across the country. On one occasion, he
took a side trip to pick up the Duke of Edinburgh in Greenland
and fly him to Canada.
After his retirement in 1980, he kept busy as secretary-treasurer
of the Canadian Fighter Pilots Association, and was a keen and
successful stock-market investor. In his early days as a bush
pilot, he bought and sold penny stocks in mining and oil, but
as he grew older, he stuck to the blue-chip variety. His favourite:
Imperial Oil, which he had started buying as part of a company
stock program.
Lloyd Arthur
STEWARD/STEWART/STUART was born in Southey, Saskatchewan., on March
23, 1920. He died in Toronto on April 16. He leaves sons Owen
and Barry; brother, Alan; and sister, Netta. His wife Eleanor
died last year.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-06-02 published
Gisela VON
RICHTHOFEN,
Aristocrat,
Farmer: 1909-2005
Born into German nobility, she grew up within a stone's throw
of the Kaiser, experienced life under the Nazis and then emigrated
to Canada where she became a three-time Ontario dressage champion
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail Thursday, June
2, 2005, Page S9
Baroness Gisela
VON
RICHTHOFEN was born into the German aristocracy,
but spent more than half her life in Canada, much of it on a
farm outside Toronto. The freedom of the rural life in Canada
was in sharp contrast to the world into which she born.
She lived for all but 8½ years of the 20th century. Just her
name, VON
RICHTHOFEN, provides a hint of her life. Manfred
VON
RICHTHOFEN, known as the Red Baron, was the top fighter pilot
of the First World War. But when the famous
VON
RICHTHOFEN was
killed in April of 1918, Gisela was just 8 years old and knew
as much about the Red Baron as any other German child. He was
a cousin of her future husband.
She was born Countess Gisela
VON
EINSIEDEL, one notch up from
a baroness on the nobility scale. She was the first great-grandchild
of Prince Otto
VON
BISMARCK, the Iron Chancellor who forged the
German Empire in the mid 19th century.
The wars of the 20th century shaped her life. Her father survived
the First World War; other members of her family did not. One
brother was killed in France in 1940. Another brother, a fighter
pilot, was shot down three times, the last time over Stalingrad
in 1942. He was taken prisoner by the Russians and did not return
to Germany until 1951.
As the wife of a diplomat she was a witness to the intrigue of
the Second World War. Her first husband was posted to Warsaw
before the start of the war and then to Paris during the German
occupation. One of her close Friends -- and godfather to her
son Manfred -- was Adam
VON
TROTT, the diplomat executed for
his part in the failed plot to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944.
Gisela grew up on an estate in Saxony near Berlin. One of her
neighbours was the German empress. When she was about 8 years
old, one of Gisela's Friends dared her to climb the wall to the
estate next door. Her pluck impressed the empress and she was
invited to tea.
At the start of the First World War she saw her father off with
his cavalry regiment, though she was more interested in the horses.
"I was 5 years old and I went with my mother to the barracks
and saw him go off to war," she wrote years later. "The horses
being loaded on the train was what fascinated me. I was too young
to have a perspective of what the war meant."
She spent the war on an agricultural estate near Heidelberg.
After the war, her father worked as an estate manager and then
for an agricultural-equipment firm. During the 1920's, Germany
was ravaged by a post-war economic collapse and her family lost
much of their land. Instead, Gisela went to university and, at
22, was the youngest woman to graduate from the University of
Berlin law school. She didn't practise long since the Nazis came
to power in 1933 and they didn't approve of women in professions.
In 1936, she married a diplomat, Oswalt
VON
NOSTITZ, and had
the first of six children. After the fall of France in 1940,
she moved with him to Paris but during that time the marriage
collapsed. She soon wed Baron Wolfgang
VON
RICHTHOFEN, an officer
in General
GUDERIAN's tank regiment who, before the war, had
owned an art gallery in Berlin.
By the time the final months of the Second World came around,
Gisela and her three children were staying on the Bismarck estate
of Varzin in Pomerania and feared the approach of the Soviet
army. Her husband Wolfgang, with the help of her ex-husband,
managed to get a car with Japanese diplomatic licence plates
(there were almost no civilian cars on the road) and mounted
a rescue mission. The baron slipped away from his post for several
days (an act punishable by firing squad), and used formaldehyde
to fuel the car, since gasoline was impossible to find.
"My stepfather was Absent Without Leave and he had to use the
back roads to avoid Gestapo checkpoints," recalls Manfred
VON
NOSTITZ, who went on to a career in the Canadian diplomatic service
as high commissioner to Malaysia and ambassador to Pakistan and
Thailand. "In Berlin we experienced some of the heaviest bombing.
My mother was always very cool under pressure. At one stage she
moved us from one shelter just before it was destroyed by bombs."
Life in Germany after the war was harsh. The
VON
RICHTHOFEN family
was homeless, being from what would soon be called East Germany.
For a while, they lived in rooms in a small castle in Ramholz
with a friend from Baron
VON
RICHTHOFEN's regiment. At school,
the children were harassed.
"I remember my mother once saw a chicken roaming free, grabbed
it, killed it and cooked it for us. For the most part, we survived
on cabbage, which I still can't stand," said Mr.
VON
NOSTITZ.
The VON
RICHTHOFENs decided to emigrate. "My parents didn't feel
at home in western Germany. They said they saw former Nazis in
positions of authority, people like lawyers and doctors, and
didn't want us growing up with them," said Carmen
VON
RICHTHOFEN.
In 1951, the family bought an 80 hectare farm near Campbellville
outside Toronto and arrived with little money. Mrs.
VON
RICHTHOFEN,
as she was almost always called in Canada, set out to make her
new life a success. Later, her husband concentrated on training
race horses, but at first they ran a mixed farm with everything
from dairy cattle to field crops and chickens. She took night
courses at the Ontario Agricultural College in nearby Guelph.
Along the way, Micaela, the last of her children, was born.
Her mother, Bismarck's grand-daughter, also lived in the house.
Mrs. VON
RICHTHOFEN cooked for 10 people and sewed clothes for
her children and for herself. Yet, for all that, her years on
the farm were among her happiest. For one thing, it meant a renewal
of her love for horses. In the early days on the farm, she jogged
trotters up and down Guelph Line, then a dirt road with little
traffic and at age 50 she taught herself dressage.
From 1964 to 67, she won three Ontario dressage championships.
She continued riding until she was 84. On her 75th birthday,
her daughters Carmen and Micaela worked for hours posing her
on a horse in her dressage outfit. The idea was to mirror a photograph
taken of her ancestor Otto
VON
BISMARCK on his 75th birthday.
Mrs. VON
RICHTHOFEN and her husband left their farm in 1985 and
moved to Toronto.
Gisela Sybille Frieda Else Marguerite
VON
EINSIEDEL was born
in Creba, Saxony, Germany, on July 25, 1909. She died in Toronto
on April 4, 2005. She leaves her children Christine, Veronika
and Manfred
VON
NOSTITZ and Carmen, Nikolaus and Micaela
VON
RICHTHOFEN.
Her husband died in 2000.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-06-21 published
Herb COONS,
Aviator And Engineer 1918-2005
Royal Canadian Air Force pilot used his DC-3 transport plane
to break up an attack by Japanese Zeros. His tenacious action
earned him another Distinguished Flying Cross
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Tuesday, June
21, 2005, Page S9
Herb COONS was one of the few Canadian pilots to serve in the
war against Japan. He was decorated for flying his unarmed Dakota,
the military version of a DC-3, straight at a Japanese fighter
plane.
On January 15, 1945, Squadron Leader
COONS was leading seven
Dakota aircraft in a history-making mission over Burma. They
were dropping fuel and other supplies to elite British and Indian
jungle troops, known as the Chindits, who were fighting behind
enemy lines. Never before had a large fighting force been supplied
entirely from the air.
The Royal Canadian Air Force planes were attacked by seven Japanese
Zeros. "As one of the Zeros bore down on
COONS's aircraft, he
waited until it was only 400 yards away, then, with super-human
effort, he yanked the lumbering transport into as tight and as
steep a turn as he could," wrote Arthur Bishop in his book, Courage
in the Air, a series of stories about Canadian air heroes.
The
Zero slipped by and Mr.
COONS repeated the manoeuvre four
more times. When the fighter gave up and attacked other planes,
he flew at the Zero to draw fire away from his colleagues. Mr.
COONS repeated the trick, but was so low his wing scraped the
jungle canopy. The fighters called off their attack and he managed
to limp back to the airfield in India with a large section of
the wing missing. The action resulted in a "bar" to a Distinguished
Flying Cross he had earlier won. (The bar, in effect, was a second
Distinguished Flying Cross.)
There were two Royal Canadian Air Force squadrons (435 and 436)
sent to the Burma campaign in December of 1944. There was political
pressure in Ottawa to have the squadrons return as soon as they
arrived. For one thing, politicians (and even some senior Royal
Canadian Air Force staff) thought flying in Southeast Asia was
"as restful as a holiday at a luxury spa," according to Robert
FARQUHARSON, a University of Toronto professor who later wrote
a book about the Royal Canadian Air Force in Second World War
Burma.
"For the squadron as a whole, this January 12 encounter with
the enemy was a rude and abrupt awakening to the reality of war,"
he wrote in For Your Tomorrow: Canadians and the Burma Campaign
1941-1945. "Six squadron member had been killed, five wounded,
two aircraft shot down, and one badly damaged."
It was dangerous work flying across unmapped mountains and uncharted
jungles. "The real problems for us were flying in the mountains
and the monsoon weather," Prof.
FARQUHARSON once told Legion
Magazine. "We got pretty good at looking ahead and seeing where
the darkness in the clouds was and flying around it.
"One day I misjudged which way it was moving and it turned out
it was coming towards me. One moment we were going up at about
5,000 feet a minute and the next we were going down at the same
rate. The co-pilot and I both had our feet on the dashboard and
were pulling on the stick to get out of the downdraft. We then
climbed to get free of the mountains."
Pilots and crew, often supplemented by ground crew who volunteered
to go along as "kickers" to help push out cargo, regularly made
two and sometimes three flights a day. "We had to fly every day,"
said Prof.
FARQUHARSON. "
The army depended upon it... Up in the
north in the mountains we were dropping supplies all the time.
As the army moved south, the land became flatter and we landed
more than we dropped."
Herb COONS, who was born on a farm in Matilda Township, grew
up in eastern Ontario. His family was descended from Pennsylvania
Dutch settlers who had migrated north. His father died when he
was a still in public school. His mother later married a teacher
who became a high-school principal and then a professor at Queen's
University in Kingston. The family lived in several places in
eastern Ontario, including Napanee and Collins Bay.
After high school, Mr.
COONS went to the University of Toronto,
where he was studying mining engineering when the Second World
War broke out. He finished his year, then joined the Royal Canadian
Air Force in June of 1940 (two brothers followed him). He was
commissioned a flying officer 10 months later and was assigned
to the Royal Air Force's Coastal Command as a navigator on Sunderland
flying boats.
The Sunderland was designed as an airliner, a double-decker plane
with sleeping quarters and a galley to prepare hot food. Amphibious,
it took off and landed on water. The military version was used
in long-range, anti-submarine patrols. A large, four-engine plane
one of them once landed on the Atlantic to rescue 34 seamen
from a torpedoed merchant ship -- it carried a big payload of
bombs and depth charges for use against U-boats.
The Sunderlands were slow at 110 knots, but bristled with firepower.
With 14 machine guns pointing in every direction, the planes
could hold their own against German fighters. German airmen called
them Fliegende Stachelsweine (flying porcupine).
Herb COONS was in a Sunderland that shot down a Focke-Wolfe Kurrier,
Germany's only four-engine bomber. On the other hand, two of
his aircraft had to ditch in the ocean. Flying Officer
COONS,
as he then was, distinguished himself by pinpointing the position
of the Sunderland so the crew could be rescued. Three times,
his Sunderland was attacked by fighters. On one occasion, the
plane caught fire and he put it out. It was one of the actions
that won him his first Distinguished Flying Cross.
"When on another sortie, the bomb room caught fire... this officer
gallantly assisted in extinguishing the outbreak," read part
of the citation for his Distinguished Flying Cross. "Flying Officer
COONS is an extremely cool and efficient navigator whose courage
and devotion to duty have been most praiseworthy."
One of his Friends and fellow airmen said Mr.
COONS later described
the action with an understated modesty. "There was a fire between
me and the door," he told Wally
DUMONT. "I had no choice but
to put it out."
Mr. COONS flew in long-range missions from bases in Northern
Ireland and as far south as Sierra Leone in West Africa. Flights
were as long as 20 hours, and the 11-man crew came to appreciate
the Sunderland's on-board galley. Some crew members would sleep.
Navigator COONS was once woken up and called to the cockpit.
The plane was over Spanish territory and was being fired on by
anti-aircraft guns. "Where are we?" asked the confused pilot.
"I'd say we're over enemy territory," replied Mr.
COONS.
Eventually, Mr.
COONS was selected for pilot training and sent
home to Canada to learn how to fly. From there he was assigned
to the Far East campaign. Until then, like many Canadians, he
enjoyed his time in Britain. His Canadian accent meant the class-conscious
British couldn't pigeonhole him. As a farm kid from eastern Ontario,
he relished spending his leave at a posh estate in England's
Lake District. Only once during the war did he manage to meet
up with both his brothers, who were also in the Royal Canadian
Air Force. His brother Gib was a Spitfire pilot who survived
his younger brother Willis, also in Coastal Command, did not.
Herb COONS was not always easy to get along with, said Gib
COONS.
The temperament that would make a man fly a slow unarmed plane
at a fast, armed fighter came out later in life. "He could be
abrasive."
After the war, Mr.
COONS returned to the University of Toronto
and finished his degree. Although he had worked in underground
mines during summers before the war, he went into civil engineering.
In the early 1950s, he read in the newspaper that E.P.
TAILOR/TAYLOR
was turning Toronto-area farmland into the suburb of Don Mills.
He decided to approach the financier Taylor directly.
"He walked into his office and said he could do the surveying
for him," said his son, Bill. "After a long meeting, Dad got
the business. Later, he had as many as 40 people working for
him and they also surveyed sections for the new 401 highway."
Mr. COONS's business career had its highs and lows. He later
got involved in some mining projects where he both made money
and lost money. Always a curious man, he took a course in computer
programming long before the advent of the International Business
Machines Corporation Personal Computer. He had wanted to understand
how computers worked.
Mr. COONS stopped working about 10 years ago. He spent the last
five years of his life in Fredericton living with his daughter
Nancy and her family.
Herbert Lindsay
COONS was born near Morrisburg, Ontario, on February
13, 1918. He died in Fredericton on April 29, 2005. His wife,
Doris COOKE, died 10 years ago. He is survived by his daughters
Nancy, Linda and Annalee and by his son Bill.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-07-15 published
Harold RENOUF,
Ottawa
Mandarin: 1917-2005
Plucked from a successful Halifax accounting firm by Pierre Trudeau,
he tackled inflation with the Anti-Inflation Board and the oil
industry through the National Energy Program, then made
VIA's
trains run on time
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Friday, July 15,
2005, Page S7
Harold RENOUF was an accountant and company director from Halifax
who left corporate life at the peak of his career for a stint
in public service and ended up running two of the most controversial
agencies of the Trudeau era: the Anti-Inflation Board and the
Petroleum Monitoring Agency.
Rising prices and wages were a hot topic of the 1970s. One of
the critics of the government at the time was Mr.
RENOUF, then
president of the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants.
In the federal election of 1974, Tory leader Robert Stanfield
ran on a platform of bringing in wage-and-price controls to control
inflation. The prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, mocked him with
the throwaway line: "Zap, you're frozen."
It was one of the issues that won Mr. Trudeau a majority government.
But, by the following year, inflation was far from frozen. It
was running at an annual rate of 10.6 per cent. Mr. Trudeau changed
his mind and introduced wage-and-price controls in the fall of
At the time, the Anti-Inflation Board was headed by Jean Luc
Pepin, a defeated Liberal candidate and former cabinet minister.
Mr. Trudeau wanted to make a change, but there was a matter of
regional representation to be considered. In the end, the man
the prime minister wanted was from Atlantic Canada. He was Harold
RENOUF, an accountant with Liberal Party connections who had
criticized government policy on inflation.
"When Trudeau called him on Thanksgiving weekend of 1975, Dad
said to us: 'I guess I've got to put my energy where my mouth
is.' And he accepted," said Janet
RENOUF, his daughter. He retired
as chairman of H.R. Doane, the accounting firm where he had worked
since 1938, and moved to Ottawa.
When Mr. Pepin left as head of the Anti-Inflation Board, Mr.
RENOUF took over as its second chairman. There was much debate
at the time whether the government's anti-inflation policies
had any effect or whether the natural slowdown of the economy
would have produced the same results.
The policy was not popular. Business did not like controls on
its prices and profits, and unions didn't like caps on pay increases.
Stewart Cooke, head of the United Steelworkers union, said all
the controls did was bring in a recession.
Mr. RENOUF defended the Anti-Inflation Board's policies, pointing
out that the average wage increase in 1975 was 21 per cent but,
by early 1978, pay hikes were down to 7.5 per cent. And furthermore,
the Anti-Inflation Board had rolled back $370-million in corporate
dividends. The Liberal government gradually wound down the Anti-Inflation
Board. In 1978, 27 months after they were brought in, the controls
were lifted. Then, in March of 1979, the finance minister, Jean
CHRÉTIEN, renamed the body the National Commission on Inflation.
Mr. RENOUF was made chairman of the new organization, but, by
then, its powers were sharply reduced.
The inflation watchdog soon died altogether when the government
switched its attentions to a new bugbear: high oil prices. Mr.
RENOUF was at the forefront of that policy, too, and, in 1980,
was named head of the Petroleum Monitoring Agency. Its job was
to collect information on the oil and gas industry, including
measuring what percentage of it was Canadian owned.
The agency was the operating arm of the government's national
energy program, brought in by energy minister Marc Lalonde. That
policy created an even more virulent reaction from the public
than had wage-and-price controls. In Western Canada, it was detested.
Later, the National Energy Program would be blamed for reducing
Alberta's share of the overall Canadian economy from 14 per cent
to a little more than 10 per cent, though the plummeting price
of oil -- from $40 (U.S.) in 1980 to $11 in 1986 -- was also
responsible.
A diminutive man, Mr.
RENOUF was a capitalist at heart, and the
criticism of his fellow business leaders upset him. But he was
also a man who, once on a mission, did what he set out to do.
In this case, it was to increase Canadian ownership in the oil
and gas industry.
"He was shocked at the reaction [in Western Canada] and he felt
badly about it," said Ms.
RENOUF. "
But he had a sense of doing
what was right for the greater good."
Mr. RENOUF found out about the oil industry's reaction early
on. In October of 1980, he went to Calgary to speak to certain
business executives who looked on the government's policies as
a form of nationalization. The accountant from Halifax tried
to reassure them.
"I cannot state that we will always agree with industry on substantive
matters, but I can promise co-operation, independence in our
actions and attitudes," Mr.
RENOUF told that skeptical Alberta
audience. "Although I cannot be out front of my minister on the
substance of Canadianization programs, it should be obvious that
an accurate assessment of ownership levels will be essential."
His audience did not find that obvious at all, and never came
round to Ottawa's way of thinking on energy.
After the energy posting, his last major government job was in
Montreal as chairman of Via Rail. There, he used to say he was
proudest of a small achievement, saving the murals by famous
Canadian artists painted on the inner walls of some long-distance
rail cars. When he and the president of Via heard they were going
to be destroyed, they moved quickly to preserve them.
His family joked that he kept trying to retire, and did so five
times before finally returning to Halifax and his beloved cottage
at Pictou Landing.
Harold RENOUF was the
son of a sea captain, a master mariner
named John
RENOUF, who gave him a lifelong love of boats and
the ocean. He was born in Sandy Point, a tiny community on Newfoundland's
southwest coast that no longer exists but whose dunes and salt
marshes remain such a favourite location for migrating birds
that there is now a movement to turn it into a nature preserve.
There was a lot of French in his background. His mother's maiden
name was LEROUX, and
RENOUF was originally a French name. The
family traces its lineage to Jersey, the largest of Britain's
Channel Islands off the French coast. Young Harold's line of
the RENOUF family left Newfoundland around 1920 and moved to
Halifax. He later studied commerce at Dalhousie University.
In 1938, he joined the accounting firm of H.R. Doane and became
a partner in 1942. He was chairman of the firm from 1967 to 1975,
when he left for the Anti-Inflation Board. Even before then,
he had been involved with government commissions and studies,
among them the royal commission on gasoline and diesel pricing
in Nova Scotia and the royal commission on the milk industry.
The latter was partly responsible for setting up a marketing-board
system for dairy farmers in Canada.
Mr. RENOUF was on the board of a number of private companies,
including two British insurance firms. An anglophile, Mr.
RENOUF
enjoyed travelling to directors' meetings in London. A devoted
family man, he often extended his visits to private vacations
(a scrupulous number cruncher, he always paid his own way) in
which he brought along his wife or met some of his children already
in London.
When they were growing up, he tried to introduce his children
to as much theatre and music as possible. The family would travel
to Boston, New York City and Stratford for museums, theatre and
plays. At home, he funded a trust to endow part of the New Glasgow
Music Festival, an annual event to encourage young musicians
from northern Nova Scotia. The winner of the festival receives
a silver bowl and a cash prize from the Rose Bowl Trust funded
by Mr. RENOUF.
Mr. RENOUF liked to fish for trout on Lawlor's Lake in Guysborough
County, Nova Scotia, and read mysteries and adventures -- in
particular, the swashbuckling sea stories of Patrick O'Brian.
In 1979, he was made an officer of the Order of Canada and, in
1981, was awarded an honorary doctorate from Dalhousie.
Harold Augustus
RENOUF was born on June 15, 1917, in Sandy Point,
Newfoundland. He died in Halifax on July 4, 2005, after suffering
a heart attack. He is survived by his wife, Dorothy, and his
four children, Janet, Ann, Robert and Susan. A memorial service
is planned for Monday at St. Andrew's United Church in Halifax.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-08-23 published
Bill HARCOURT, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Producer 1925-2005
Newspaper reporter who switched to broadcasting launched Newsmagazine,
Ombudsman, Tuesday Night and Marketplace
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Tuesday, August
23, 2005, Page S9
Bill HARCOURT pretty well invented the television documentary.
An experienced reporter and editor who cut his teeth working
for Canadian and British wire services, he helped develop two
areas of television news: live specials and long features.
He started working in television news in 1960, only eight years
after it came on the air in Canada and by 1969 he was the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation's main man on the biggest story of the
year -- if not the decade. In late July of that year, astronauts
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon and Bill
HARCOURT
spent 26 hours straight in a control room masterminding coverage
for a captivated Canadian audience.
As the head of News Specials, he co-ordinated coverage from the
United States and across Canada. It was a complex broadcast,
hosted in Canada by the eccentric Gordon
DONALDSON, a Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation reporter with a thick Scottish brogue.
What Mr. HARCOURT was doing was, in fact, creating what is now
called a long-form documentary, building excitement into the
empty space when the astronauts were just travelling. He had
experience with live television -- political conventions and
elections -- still the most difficult form of broadcasting since
mistakes can't be edited.
The documentary form of television was something he helped mould
at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, first as a producer
with Newsmagazine, travelling around the world with a cameraman,
soundman and reporter, then with a weekly documentary series,
Tuesday Night.
"He made a real contribution, in my book, to establishing the
documentary on television. There was already the National Film
Board of Canada form, but the television documentary had to be
invented," said Michael
MacLEAR, a television reporter and documentary
maker who worked with Mr.
HARCOURT in the 1960s.
"Bill HARCOURT is one of the great unsung heroes of news and
current affairs," said Mr.
MacLEAR. "And he was my favourite
executive producer."
Well-read and confident, he let the reporter get on with telling
the story -- all of which made him easy to work with. All his
former colleagues mentioned his good manners and even temper.
Ray HAZZAN, who was executive producer of Newsmagazine before
Mr. HARCOURT took the job, said he was so polite and well dressed
that others took to calling him The Senator.
Bill HARCOURT grew up in Guelph, Ontario, the
son of doctor.
He graduated from Guelph Collegiate Institute and went on to
Loyola College in Montreal.
During summers Mr.
HARCOURT worked on passenger ships on the
Great Lakes. At that time, it was a popular form of travel from
ports such as Toronto, Detroit and Duluth. He started as a cabin
boy and worked his way up to chief purser.
One of the ships on which he was purser was The Noronic, known
as the Queen of the Great Lakes. As it happened, a disastrous
fire aboard the Noronic was also his first and only front-page
story at the Kitchener Waterloo Record where he had taken a job
as a junior reporter. The ship was moored overnight in Toronto
when a little after 2 a.m. on September 15, 1949, fire raged
through its five decks. Of the 571 passengers -- mostly Americans
sailing from Detroit -- and 174 crew on board, 119 died.
As luck would have it, Bill
HARCOURT was in Toronto that night
and reported the tragedy back to his newspaper. "It was particularly
tough for Bill," said his wife, Nada
HARCOURT. "He knew many
of the crew members on board the Noronic."
A short while later, Mr.
HARCOURT went to work for Canadian Press
in Toronto and almost right away moved to New York to cover two
different beats: the United Nations and Broadway. For him, it
was no trouble to juggle show business and international politics
and that impressed his boss, Gil
PURCELL, who wanted him to come
home and report from across Canada. Instead, Mr.
HARCOURT went
to London and worked on the North American desk at Reuters.
After five years, he returned home to a job at the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation where he was made a writer and line-up editor on
The National, but soon moved to Newsmagazine, a weekly half-hour
program that took an in-depth look at stories.
Michael MacLEAR recalled there were two types of stories that
made it on Newsmagazine: longer-form news items on stories of
the day, and features. During the 1960's and early 1970's, Mr.
HARCOURT accompanied such Newsmagazine reporters as Mr.
MacLEAR
and William
STEVENSON to cover stories in South Africa, Vietnam
and Russia.
"He was much under-estimated," said Mr.
STEVENSON, who went on
to write A Man Called Intrepid, the story of the Canadian spymaster
William STEPHENSON. "
One of the reasons he was so easy to get
on with was that he didn't need to bolster his importance as
so many executive producers do."
In late 1969, after the success of the moon walk and Newsmagazine,
Mr. HARCOURT became executive producer of Thursday Night, the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's flagship documentary program.
The show later changed its broadcast night and name to Tuesday
Night.
In January of 1974, Mr.
HARCOURT started the program, Ombudsman,
with Robert
COOPER, an unknown 28-year-old lawyer. With Mr.
COOPER
acting as a crusader for the little guy, Ombudsman was a first
in Canadian broadcasting.
"He was very serious about his work and kept the program out
of legal trouble," remembered Mr.
COOPER. "I think I was nervous
and difficult at first but he was patient."
After seven years on the program, Mr.
COOPER went on to be a
successful producer in Hollywood where he still works. "I learned
from Bill how to take a subject that seems to be educational
and earnest and turn it into compelling television."
In 1977, Mr.
HARCOURT also took over as executive producer for
Marketplace, the long-running consumer-affairs program. It was
perhaps the only time one person was executive producer of two
major network programs at the same time. He finished his Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation career at The Journal, where he worked
as a senior adviser.
William Vernon
HARCOURT was born on January 23, 1925 in Guelph,
Ontario. He died on August 7, 2005. He is survived by his wife
Nada, daughter Shelagh and brother John.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-08-31 published
James JEROME,
Politician and Judge: (1933-2005)
He was king of the hill as Speaker of the House of Commons but
less successful as a federal judge. Appointed in a blip of election-day
patronage, he encountered unaccustomed criticism
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, August
31, 2005, Page S9
James JEROME was a popular Speaker of the House of Commons who
seemingly could do no wrong until he became a federal judge.
Mr. JEROME was the first Speaker chosen from an opposition party,
he introduced television coverage of the Commons and he wielded
a fair but firm hand during Question Period. Then, in an unusual
spasm of election-day patronage, he was made associate chief
justice of the Federal Court of Canada, where he came under unfamiliar
attack. He stepped down in March of 1998 after his slow handling
of war-crimes cases.
James JEROME spent his early years in Kingston, Ontario, where
his father was a construction engineer. Later, the family moved
to Toronto, where James went to high school, the University of
Toronto and Osgoode Hall Law School.
After law school, Mr.
JEROME moved to Sudbury, Ontario His first
step into politics was winning a seat on city council. He then
ran for the Liberals in a by-election in May of 1967 and lost
but won in the 1968 general election, the year of Trudeaumania.
He was re-elected in 1972, 1974 and 1979. Though the Liberals
lost that election, he retained his seat with a majority of 12,000
votes.
Along the way, he had taught himself French to advance his political
career and it probably helped land what some call the best job
in the House of Commons. The post of Speaker comes with a staff
of 3,000 and includes a rent-free, country estate called Kingsmere
and a social life as glittering as that of the Governor-General.
The
Commons first elected Mr.
JEROME the Speaker in September
of 1974 after the Liberals had won a majority government. Yet
it wasn't a unanimous vote for the new Speaker. In an interesting
footnote, Robert
STANFIELD, leader of the opposition, refused
to second his nomination.
Mr. JEROME remained in power through the long Trudeau Parliament.
His most lasting change to the House of Commons was bringing
in television coverage in 1978, which he said led to "a far higher
quality of journalism in reporting the proceedings of the Commons."
His ground rules for broadcasters were eventually copied by other
parliaments, including the British House of Commons.
As Speaker, he managed to steer clear of problems. He was involved
in only a few major battles while ruling as arbiter of taste
and as master of debates in the Commons. He did, however, get
into a fierce war of words with The Globe and Mail when the Speaker
sided with a 1976 vote by the parliamentary press gallery to
bar Canadian Press managers who were working as reporters during
a strike. Parliamentarians said The Globe had committed a "gross
libel" against the Speaker. The newspaper's view, as expressed
in two editorials, was that the Speaker shouldn't be allowed
to decide who can or cannot sit in the press gallery.
In October of 1979, during the short-lived Tory government of
Joe CLARK,
Mr.
JEROME refused to recognize Warren
ALLMAND after
the former Liberal cabinet minister showed up in the House wearing
a turtleneck sweater under a tweed jacket. Mr.
ALLMAND wasn't
happy, but before he get to his feet to complain, he first had
to rush out and borrow a tie.
"Men in this House should have the same freedom of dress as women,"
Mr. ALLMAND eventually responded, pointing out that cabinet minister
Flora McDONALD was not wearing a tie. The Speaker was not moved
and cries of "Wear a dress, Warren," arose from the government
side.
Mr. JEROME's election as Speaker during a Conservative government
had been a minor triumph. In June of 1979, the Tories won a minority
government and, in a surprise move, prime minister Joe
CLARK
allowed Mr.
JEROME to remain in the Speaker's chair.
It was the first time in Commons history that a Speaker had been
chosen from an Opposition party, a testament to the high esteem
in which Mr.
JEROME was held on all sides of the House and a
recognition by the Tories of the benefits of reducing potential
Opposition votes by one in a minority situation.
As it turned out, the arrangement did not last. The Clark government
was defeated in a no-confidence vote that December.
A general election was called for February 18, 1980, and Mr.
JEROME chose not to run. Instead, as Canadians went to the polls,
Mr. CLARK named him associate chief justice of the Federal Court
of Canada. Since the Conservatives were, in theory, still in
power, they likely made the appointment at the request of the
Liberals. It was a most unusual development, as outgoing prime
ministers seldom make appointments on election day. In this case,
it seemed all parties had agreed to making a judicial appointment
for the sake of the retiring Speaker.
His new job, however, was not so cozy. As a judge, he soon found
his decisions open to criticism. His biggest troubles arose during
his last years as a Federal Court judge. Two incidents exposed
the question of whether former senior politicians and government
officials should be named to the bench.
In 1996, the chief justice of the Federal Court, Julius
ISAAC,
had a dinner meeting with a senior official of the department
of justice who complained that Mr. Justice James
JEROME was taking
too long in the deportation hearings against three alleged Nazi
war criminals.
The chief justice then intervened privately with Judge
JEROME.
Later, the Supreme Court ruled that Judge
JEROME and another
judge could not have any further connections with the case. Around
the same time, Judge
JEROME became involved in another controversy,
related in part to the war-crimes case.
In making a comment about a case involving an aboriginal band,
Judge JEROME was reported to have said he would never put a native
judge on a native case and would never put a Jewish judge on
a war-crimes case. This remark caused outrage from Jewish and
aboriginal leaders, and a rebuke by the then-justice minister,
Anne McLELLAN.
Both incidents led to a reform of how judges were named by the
federal cabinet. For a time, at least 10 judges in the federal
court's trial and appeal divisions had been former federal members
of Parliament or government employees -- including Judge
ISAAC,
who was a former employee of the Department of Justice.
The appointments had been made by the Liberals during their long
run in power from the 1960s to the early 1980s. On his last full
day as prime minister in 1984, Pierre
TRUDEAU appointed two cabinet
members to the court. Two weeks later, his successor John
TURNER
appointed another former cabinet minister. The practice had made
the court the object of criticism over its independence from
the government.
In 1998, changes were finally made to the way judges are named.
"Now, it would appear to be impossible to name a cabinet minister
as a judge," said Ian
BUSHNELL, a retired law professor from
the University of Windsor who wrote the history of both the Supreme
Court and the Federal Court. "He [Mr.
JEROME] was caught up in
the patronage binge of the Trudeau/Turner era. No one who was
appointed was a dud or a failure. As a judge, Mr.
JEROME was
certainly adequate."
Even so, it was as Speaker that he had shone. After his retirement
from the Commons, Mr.
JEROME wrote a memoir titled Mr. Speaker.
In a review of the book, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reporter
Larry ZOLF recalled Mr.
JEROME's years in the House: "Few parliamentarians
have ever been as popular with members of Parliament, reporters
or constituents as the Toronto Irish Liberal member from the
mining constituency of Sudbury....
JEROME's sensibilities are
certainly missed in the carnival atmosphere into which the House,
alas, has lately degenerated."
In his private life, Mr.
JEROME was very much the family man.
After he moved to the Speaker's house north of Ottawa, he bought
a family cottage on Ramsey Lake near Sudbury. Mr.
JEROME was
an accomplished piano player and loved card games, especially
bridge and gin. He was a keen golfer and he and his family skied
at Camp Fortune near Ottawa.
James Alexander
JEROME was born on March 4, 1933. He died in
Ottawa on August 21 of Huntington's disease. He is survived by
his wife Barry Karen and his children, Mary-Lou, Paul, Jim and
Megan. Another son, Joseph, died in an accident in 1986.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-10-14 published
James KENNEDY, Airman, Car Dealer And Arts Patron: (1918-2005)
Shot down over Europe in 1944, he later helped build an arts
centre
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Friday, October
14, 2005, Page S9
When it came to luck in bombing runs over Europe, Jim
KENNEDY
was one of the rare ones. Of every 100 aircrew that flew in heavy
bombers, only 24 survived unscathed. Many were killed over Europe,
others were badly injured and some ended up as prisoners of war.
James KENNEDY was the one airman in 100 who bailed out and made
it back to his base in England. In late May, 1944, about two
weeks before the Allied invasion of Normandy, the Lancaster bomber
in which Flying Officer
KENNEDY was the navigator was shot down
while on a bombing mission to Metz in Alsace-Lorraine, French
territory annexed by Germany in 1940.
Shot down near Paris, all the crew parachuted to safety, but
only Mr. KENNEDY avoided capture. He found himself alone in a
wooded area with his escape kit, which included a needle and
thread, a razor, soap and a compass.
Jim KENNEDY followed instructions airmen were given: Bury your
parachute and contact the local parish priest. He did and was
soon in the hands of the French Resistance. Since he didn't speak
French, he posed as someone who couldn't speak at all as he travelled
across France toward Spain.
"He and the brave young French woman guiding him walked right
through the centre of Paris. Challenged by a German, the woman
flew into a rage about German bullying, saying her brother was
a mute and terrified -- and it worked," said Geoff
GODDARD,
Mr.
KENNEDY's son-in-law.
The progress of an airman evading capture was never a secret.
The British had a special group, Military Intelligence 9, set
up just to deal with making sure captured airmen made it out.
There were several routes, the shortest one from Brittany in
northern France to Cornwall in England. Jim
KENNEDY took the
long route over the mountains to Spain.
Five weeks after being shot down, he crossed the Pyrenees. This
was dangerous; the entrances to the mountain passes were guarded
by the Germans and the Vichy French. Once in Spain, he contacted
the British authorities and was back in England around June 29.
That day, his family in Canada received a telegram to say he
was safe.
Military intelligence interrogated returning airmen, to find
out details of their escape and to stop Germans from infiltrating
any spies (which never actually happened.) Mr.
KENNEDY was allowed
to return to his squadron, though he never flew another mission.
Almost all airmen who evaded capture were not allowed back to
regular operations in case they were captured and disclosed anything
about the escape route.
Jim KENNEDY was born in Vancouver. His father had been a prospector
in the Yukon, but later opened a general store in New Westminster,
British Columbia When that failed in the Depression, the family
moved to Windsor, Ontario After finishing high school in Windsor,
Jim worked as a salesman in a local store until he joined the
Air Force in 1942.
After the war, Mr.
KENNEDY went to work for the Ford Motor Co.
of Canada and moved up in the marketing department, relocating
to Winnipeg, Montreal and then Toronto. He ended at Ford headquarters
in Oakville, Ontario, as director of passenger-car marketing.
In 1960, he took over a failing Ford dealership in Oakville and
renamed it Kennedy Ford.
The dealership became a success, moving locations as it expanded
and prospered. He was the sole owner of, and ran, the dealership
until 1983, when he sold the franchise to his sales manager.
It is still named Kennedy Ford.
Like a character from a Sinclair Lewis novel, Mr.
KENNEDY was
involved in all levels of his community, from Oakville and Ontario
provincial politics -- where he was a diehard Tory -- to raising
money for the local arts centre. He and other business leaders
would discuss politics and the future of the city over a few
games of cribbage and lunch at the Oakville Club. He was also
a member of the local Rotary Club.
One of Mr.
KENNEDY's lasting achievements was helping to build
the Oakville Centre for the Performing Arts (he served as its
founding chairman in 1974). At first, he had wanted to convert
Oakville's old Odeon Theatre; when that didn't work, Mr.
KENNEDY
raised a lot of money, including a large donation from Ford,
Oakville's largest employer. The theatre opened in 1977.
"It was designed by Ron
THOM, of Shaw Festival fame, and it remains
one of the finest smaller theatres of its type," said Ron
PLANCHE,
a Liberal Party organizer in Oakville at the time. "Without Jim's
leadership, the theatre would have ended up as just another two-rink
arena."
James F. KENNEDY started his car dealership the same year John
F. KENNEDY was elected president of the United States. Mr.
KENNEDY
always liked to use the initials J.F.K., and that's what many
members of his family called him.
After he sold his business, he spent half the year in North Palm
Beach, Florida, the other half in Oakville. This meant that he
could play golf 12 months a year -- and he did.
James Flood
KENNEDY was born in Vancouver on May 8, 1918. He
died in Oakville on September 24. He is survived by his wife,
Margaret, and his daughters Kim and Shannon.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-11-01 published
David BAZAY,
Journalist (1939-2005)
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ombudsman started out as a
bilingual reporter who specialized in human-interest stories.
He liked to wear funny hats on camera when he disapproved of
an assignment
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Tuesday, November
1, 2005, Page S9
Toronto -- David
BAZAY was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's
second ombudsman. For 10 years, he dealt with thousands of complaints
from the public about everything from the contents of radio and
television programs to the perceived bias of reporters.
Though he came from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation himself,
Mr. BAZAY didn't always side with the network. In the last report
he issued, he said the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation should
follow the example of the British Broadcasting Corporation and
publish a complaints page on its website.
"David always had an open mind, both as a reporter and as ombudsman.
He wouldn't rush to judgment," said Vince
CARLIN, who takes over
as ombudsman in January and who worked with Mr.
BAZAY at Canadian
Broadcasting
Corporation
Montreal in the 1970s. Mr.
BAZAY was
to have retired this month but had agreed to stay on until Mr.
CARLIN took over.
Mr. BAZAY grew up in Elma, Manitoba, near Winnipeg, where his
father ran a general store. He graduated from the University
of Western Ontario in 1961 and then went to Montreal, where he
studied at the Université de Montréal, perfecting his French.
He worked for The Canadian Press for three years before heading
to Paris to work as a freelancer, filing reports for the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation, among others. He joined the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation in Montreal in 1972 as a regional reporter
in local television news. He quickly graduated to the post of
national reporter, covering Quebec during the 1976 election when
the Parti Québécois took office.
Mr. BAZAY was not only bilingual, but had a deep understanding
of French culture through his wife, Viviane, and her family.
He spoke French at home with his wife and their two children.
He was also involved in a strawberry-farming business with his
father-in-law and brother-in-law. During the summer, Mr.
BAZAY
would work on weekends and during his vacation at the family
"u-pick" farm south of Montreal.
While working on his farm, Mr.
BAZAY thought about how television
covered the news. He felt the audience was bored with pictures
of news conferences and clips of politicians. He found a way
to tell stories that held people's interest and still conveyed
the same information.
"He specialized in human-interest stories and would always find
something to illustrate an issue," recalled Bill Casey, who,
as a cameraman, worked with Mr.
BAZAY in Montreal from 1976 to
1980. "David found a man in the Gaspé who was a federalist married
to a separatist. He and his wife would argue in the kitchen,
and it became a metaphor for the tensions in Quebec leading up
to the 1980 referendum."
After the referendum, Mr.
BAZAY was assigned to Paris, where
he covered Europe and the Middle East.
"He was one of the first reporters to arrive after the massacre
at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon," said John
Owen, who was foreign editor of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
News at the time. "I can still remember the tone of his voice.
Calm, without adjectives, just describing the horror there."
In September of 1982, Lebanese Maronite Christian militias had
entered the camps and massacred hundreds of Palestinian who lived
there.
Because he was fluent in French, Mr.
BAZAY was able to report
for both the French and English networks of the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation. At home and overseas, he had adopted an unusual
habit of signalling whether he liked the story he had been assigned.
If he disapproved of it, he would wear a funny hat -- either
a tuque or a beret -- on camera. In those days, he filmed his
pieces at the last minute, so editors couldn't change the shot.
When he returned to Canada, Mr.
BAZAY became a producer, eventually
becoming executive producer of the national news and chief news
editor in 1993. He became ombudsman on November 1, 1995.
Away from work Mr.
BAZAY was a keen golfer and skier. He enjoyed
fly-fishing and would often go salmon fishing with a friend near
Bathurst, New Brunswick He spent much time of late at a family
cottage north of Kingston, Ontario
David BAZAY was born in Winnipeg on July 12, 1939. He died of
a heart attack in Toronto on October 30, 2005. He was 66. He
leaves his wife, Viviane, and his children Dominique and Thierry.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-12-05 published
Businessman established Top 40 radio, MuchMusic
A money-losing station at the outset,
CHUM became broadcasting
empire
By Fred LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Monday, December
5, 2005, Page A3
Allan WATERS, who died Saturday at the age of 84, started Top
40 radio in Canada, making a huge success of
CHUM, the small
money-losing Toronto radio station he bought in 1954. He built
his stake in
CHUM into a radio and television empire that included
Toronto's CITY-TV and other television stations across the country.
CHUM went on the air in 1945 and was Toronto's fifth radio station.
It broadcast on a weak signal and only from sunrise to sunset.
Mr. WATERS, who had made some money in advertising and the pharmaceutical
business, bought the station in 1954 from a man he worked for,
Jack PART.
He took his time learning the radio business and the station
began to break even. He increased its power to 50,000 watts --
the maximum allowed in North America. He also started to listen
to recordings of the kind of radio stations that were making
money in the United States. He liked the style of the Storz family
of Omaha, Neb., which is credited with inventing Top 40 radio
on their U.S. stations.
In a speech in May of 1957, Mr.
WATERS told the small staff at
CHUM: "I haven't been in the radio business as long as anyone
in this room, but if I was in the shoe business and operating
a poor shoe store, I think I would find out who is running a
good shoe store and copy his style.
CHUM is going to be patterned
after a Storz station. As Storz owns five stations and is first
in each market, it's actually not a bad pattern to follow."
All
Shook Up by Elvis Presley was the No. 1 song on
CHUM's
Top▲
40 radio when it started on May 27, 1957. Within five weeks,
CHUM's slice of the audience went from 5 per cent to 24 per cent.
By 1958, its 1050
CHUM was the No. 1 radio station in Toronto.
By 1968, CHUM
Ltd. was listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and
Mr. WATERS was a rich man.
He was born in east-end Toronto. At 16, he finished school and
went to work as an office boy for $16 a week. Mr.
PART, his employer,
ran a successful patent medicine operation. Mr.
WATERS worked
his way up the ladder in sales and advertising. All his life
he would say modestly, "I'm just a salesman."
The war interrupted his business career as he served overseas
with the Royal Canadian Air Force from 1942 to 1946. He returned
to work for Mr.
PART, who had also started York Broadcasting
and established
CHUM at the end of the war.
CHUM's success allowed the
WATERS empire to expand. He had the
rights for Muzak in Canada. In 1963, he started
CHUM-FM and later
bought a television station in Barrie, north of Toronto. He was
frustrated when he was not allowed to move the station's transmitter
closer to Toronto to tap into the larger metropolitan market.
Expansion into television came slowly. He bought into the Maritimes,
but failed to win regulatory approval to buy
CFCF in Montreal.
With his television stations he became one of the owners of CTV,
the private television network that at the time was a kind of
co-operative.
Perhaps his biggest success in television occurred in 1981, when
he bought the floundering
CITY-TV. He left the charismatic Moses
ZNAIMER in charge, but the station was owned by
CHUM
Ltd. It
expanded into pop video with MuchMusic, as successful and innovative
as Top 40 radio in the 1950s. This decade, 1050
CHUM.com became
the world's first all Internet radio station.
"Everyone criticized him when he [went with the Top 40 format],"
his son, Jim
WATERS, said on the weekend. "They said: 'Allan,
you must be crazy. You're not going to really play that loud
music are you?' Even my mother criticized him."
The son, now chairman of
CHUM, said his father had a knack for
picking winners, whether it was Top 40 radio or a new local television
format.
"I think a very significant move that Dad made was buying
CITY-TV
in Toronto. We weren't in television. The move into specialty
television was groundbreaking with MuchMusic," Mr.
WATERS said.
Allan WATERS didn't have a gift for picking records or television
programs, but he knew how to pick people who did.
"His great talent wasn't as a programmer, but as a salesman.
Mr. WATERS was a super salesman. He had a system where he knew
what every salesman and every station was doing week by week,"
said Senator Jerry
GRAFSTEIN, who co-founded
CITY-TV and worked
with Mr. WATERS for decades.
His personal life was the opposite of his business life. While
the music was flashy, he was not; while his station thrived on
publicity, he was a private person. MuchMusic was hip; he sported
a crew cut and glasses. Most entrepreneurs and business people
in Canada are listed in Who's Who, but there was never an entry
for Allan WATERS. He wasn't interested.
He also thought long hours were a waste of energy. Most days
he went home to his wife at 5: 30. "If you work 20 hours [a day],
you're doing too much or you're doing something wrong," he told
a reporter.
Mr. WATERS was a frugal man. For many years he walked to work
from his home in the neighbourhood of Leaside. His office was
relatively modest. His companies almost never borrowed to make
purchases. And in a business that thrives on global glitz, he
never invested outside Canada.
He was generous and loyal to his employees and in a business
where hiring and firing was the norm, even some disc jockeys
and announcers -- such as Gord
MARTINEAU at
CITY-TV -- stayed
with his stations for decades. Mr.
WATERS did part company with
announcer Larry
SOLWAY after the boss refused to allow him to
discuss a sex manual on the air. Later,
CHUM
Ltd. would own Sex-TV.
At his death, the
CHUM empire Mr.
WATERS built owned and operated
33 radio stations, 12 local television stations and 21 specialty
channels, including MuchMusic and Space. It also controlled other
sideline businesses, including Muzak.
When he died peacefully in his sleep Saturday morning in hospital,
he was surrounded by family, including his wife of more than
50 years, Marjorie. He also leaves two sons; Ronald, deputy chairman,
and Jim, chairman of
CHUM
Ltd.
The funeral is private. A public
memorial will be held on Wednesday in Toronto.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-12-10 published
Max CARSON,
Doctor And Pilot (1923-2005)
The sole survivor of a mid-air collision by two Halifax bombers
became a family physician who delivered 2,000 babies
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲ to The Globe and Mail, Saturday, December
10, 2005, Page S9
Toronto -- Pilot Max
CARSON was the only survivor of a crash
of two bombers over Belgium in the winter of 1944. The man who
later went on to become a doctor was just 21 at the time. He
was flying an Royal Canadian Air Force Halifax when it collided
with an Royal Air Force Halifax during a night raid on Duisberg,
Germany.
The flight had been his 35th mission, after which he and his
crew were supposed to go home. In his memoirs, Mr.
CARSON recalled
that one of his crew had a premonition about the last sortie.
He was right. It was the night of the collision.
"I had no warning from any of my crew, and I felt this plane
crash into ours," wrote Dr.
CARSON.
His plane caught fire and
the floor beneath him gave way. "I fell through the flames clear
into the sky. As I looked up, I could see my airplane on fire.
I counted to 10, pulled the ripcord and my parachute opened."
He survived because, as the pilot, he was probably one of the
few to be wearing his parachute. For the others, the tight space
on board meant their parachutes had to be hung on hooks. In a
collision, there was no time to put them on. The 14 other men
died.
Dr. CARSON almost didn't survive the landing. At the time, his
name was KRAKOVSKY, which he changed after the war. He landed
among a group of American soldiers who were fighting the Battle
of the Bulge, the last major German offensive in Europe. When
they heard his name they suspected he was an English-speaking
German parachuted in to cause havoc.
By luck, one of the Americans was from Buffalo, and he quizzed
the flier from Toronto. They soon realized he was the real thing
and he was back at his base in England on December 27, eight
days later. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and
returned home.
Max CARSON was born in Northern Ontario, the
son of Jewish immigrants
who later moved to North Bay to join 30 or 40 other Jewish families.
His father ran a rooming house, but the Depression meant that
tenants were often unable to come up with the 10 cents-a-night
rent. So, in 1932, the
KRAKOVSKYs packed their belongings into
a truck and drove to Toronto.
In his memoir, Max
CARSON listed the various places his family
had lived in Toronto. On Markham Street, his family of eight
shared a house with another family of four. In the basement,
he kept a hockey stick and perfected his shot using lumps of
coal. He was a die-hard Toronto Maple Leafs fan, and once talked
his way into a seat in the reds at a special night for young
fans at Maple Leaf Gardens.
Maxie, as he was known, was a whiz at school. In Grade 7, he
got 100 per cent in arithmetic "when most of my Friends flunked."
He went to high school and technical school, then worked in a
series of dead-end jobs. In 1942, he joined the Royal Canadian
Air Force with his brother, Morris, who became a bomb aimer.
After the war, Dr.
CARSON was promised a job by a man who was
impressed with his Royal Canadian Air Force exploits. But when
the man learned he was Jewish, he changed his mind. Dr.
CARSON
felt so frustrated that, on June 8, 1945, he and his brother
changed their name to
CARSON. It cost $75 each.
Max CARSON finished high school at a special postwar school set
up for veterans. In September of 1947, he enrolled in medical
school at the University of Toronto. After interning, he went
into partnership with Sid
DAVIS on Parliament Street in Cabbagetown.
He practised in that same Toronto neighbourhood for more than
40 years and delivered more than 2,000 babies.
In retirement, he worked on his memoirs, which he wrote because
he knew nothing about his own grandparents and wanted his descendants
to know some details.
He was active in veterans groups and was always proud of his
contribution in bringing the war to an end. "I like to think
that maybe I'm the guy that flew the plane that dropped the bomb
that broke Hitler's back."
Max CARSON was born in Cobalt, Ontario, on September 15, 1923.
He died in Toronto on September 3, 2005. He was 81. He is survived
by his wife, Nan, and their five children.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-03-13 published
Cancer battle claims admired journalist
By Antonia
ZERBISIAS,
Media
Columnist
The▲ wonder is, Bill
CAMERON did not author his own obituary.
For here was a man who is acknowledged as the greatest writer
of his generation of Canadian journalists, whose words graced
the page, the stage, the screen, the classroom and, of course,
the airwaves.
CAMERON, 62, died at his Toronto home just after midnight yesterday,
after a 20-month struggle with esophageal cancer, surrounded
by his wife, Cheryl
HAWKES, and his children Patrick, 22, Rachel,
21, and Nick 15.
"He was trying to hold us in his arms," said
HAWKES yesterday.
"But he was too weak."
Respected, admired, and loved,
CAMERON was, what friend and former
Canadian
Broadcasting
Corporation colleague Fred
LANGAN called
yesterday, "a triple threat," the consummate anchor, journalist
and writer.
But he was more than that.
From his start as a freelance entertainment critic for Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation and CTV, to penning an editorial column
at the Toronto Star at the age of 25, to editing for the nascent
Global news, to anchoring at Citytv in the 1970s, to covering
foreign assignments and co-hosting for Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation's nightly newsmagazine The Journal, to anchoring
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation-television's local news, to
fronting Newsworld's morning show, to writing novels and ghosting
documentary scripts for others, to playing the anchor on the
Comedy Network's Puppets Who Kill, there was no journalism job
CAMERON could not do -- and do well.
"Who the hell is good at all those things?" asked Mark
STAROWICZ,
the producer who hired
CAMERON in 1983 to report and fill in
as an anchor on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's The Journal
and Midday.
Which is why, when the Journal went off the air in 1992, it was
CAMERON, tapped to succeed the late Barbara
FRUM as host, who
delivered the eloquent goodbye to viewers: "I'd like to leave
you with the words you find on the back of the cheque you get
at any coffee shop in Canada. Thank you for letting us serve
you."
What CAMERON had was a voice, and even at the end, when he could
barely use it, he still slapped on his make-up to host his i-channel
talk show, as well as act as fill-in interviewer on Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation Radio's As It Happens.
His last big interview was with the Dalai Lama, for the documentary
The Dalai Lama: The Power of Compassion that aired last week
on i-channel.
"He was a master of the interview," said Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation's Peter
MANSBRIDGE, who recalled
CAMERON giving him
some pointers last fall at a party in his honour.
About 200 Friends and colleagues, from all the networks and the
print media where
CAMERON had worked, gathered at Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation to show their support.
"He really kept his sense of humour," said Global's Peter
KENT.
"He'd go through the chemo sessions -- and was brutalized by
them -- but then he'd come up for air and talk to Friends and
inquire about others."
"Everybody has this idea that he was such a serious guy," said
Valerie PRINGLE, with whom he worked on Midday. "But I remember
when the opportunity came up to interview Big Bird, he wrestled
me to the ground and said, 'It's mine.'
"I can remember he was doing an interview, with a cop or something,
and he said, 'Well, I've shoplifted, I've smoked dope,'"
PRINGLE
laughed. "We all just dropped our coffees."
What CAMERON cared about was his family and journalism.
"He worshipped his wife and children," said
PRINGLE, describing
a Valentine's Day tribute that
CAMERON had published. "It just
made you cry. I thought this guy was so madly in love with Cheryl,
I can't even stand it."
In fact, it was love at first sight.
HAWKES met him in 1980, when she was doing a freelance profile
on him for Star Week magazine.
"He followed me out of the restaurant and tried to talk me out
of writing the story," she said yesterday. "He said 'I don't
need publicity; I need to marry you.'"
They were wed four months later. But he would leave her often
to take on dangerous assignments for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
flying in and out of the hellholes of the world.
STAROWICZ described one assignment in which
CAMERON was talking
to the camera, with bombs exploding around him, but he barely
flinched.
In fact, "he was talking in perfect paragraphs."
But it seems that
CAMERON, who has held the journalism ethics
chair at Ryerson University, also worried about the ethical hazards
of war reporting.
As he wrote in 1990, "That's the dreadful suspicion: That we
dip into the surface of deep events, paddle with our feet, guard
our comforts, patronize our contacts, exploit great tragedies
for the good of our careers, and get the story wrong."
CAMERON wanted to get the story not only right, but also exactly,
perfectly, precisely right.
"He had one of the most discerning ears," said Citytv's Mark
DAILEY, who worked with
CAMERON when he was the anchor of the
10 p.m. newscast. "He was a very important part of our early
conscience at Citypulse."
MANSBRIDGE remembered one evening co-hosting with
CAMERON on
the Journal. It was a time of intense rivalries between the National
and the newsmagazine and few people expected the pairing to go
well.
But, said
MANSBRIDGE, in the middle of a technical interview
on a financial story,
CAMERON slipped him an idea, which improved
the segment.
"That underlined that this was a guy who cared about the product,
who cared about how we did things,"
MANSBRIDGE said.
"He studied acting which is one of the reasons he could be a
little arch on television,"
LANGAN said. "He knew how to manipulate
words more than the average announcer."
A journalist to the end,
CAMERON documented his battle with his
cancer for an upcoming feature in Walrus magazine. His most recent
piece was a witty look... at caskets.
That's why it is so surprising he didn't leave some notes for
the occasion of the death, one he knew was coming much too fast
and too soon.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN - All Categories in OGSPI
LAN surnames continued to 05lan006.htm