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VALPY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-08-10 published
Alan (Doc) GALLIE, Northern Adventurer 1915-2005
Mining engineer made history by moving an entire town across 245 kilometres of frozen muskeg in northern Manitoba
By Michael VALPY, Wednesday, August 10, 2005, Page S6
Alan Edward (Doc) GALLIE was a Canadian mining engineer of pioneer legend, a dashing adventurer of the North, a passionate outdoorsman and an engaging charmer in his youth who could roller-skate his way into the hearts of beautiful young women.
He made history by moving an entire town over 245 kilometres of frozen muskeg in northern Manitoba. He revelled in working beside men named Half-Ear Andy, Rubbernose Ragolski, Bonehead Joe and Alphabet Smith.
He snow-shoed through a valley at night pursued by wolves ("The fastest I ever snow-shoed," he later told his daughters), walked away more than once from plane crashes in the wilderness and on one occasion trekked alone into the bush to bring out a deranged, homicidal prospector.
In the latter part of his 42-year career with Sherritt Gordon Mines Ltd. -- now Sherritt International -- he was vice-president of marketing, travelling the world to sell Canadian nickel.
Doc GALLIE was a tall, fit man -- 6-foot-4 -- with enormous self-confidence who made Friends wherever he went. He had a sunny view of life. His maxim was that he wanted the world to be nice. He was a doer, a builder who hated merely watching things happen.
Throughout his professional life, he was engaged in programs awarding bursaries and scholarships to Canadian engineering students and finding jobs for them at home when they graduated so that they would not leave the country. He did not like old people, his family said of him. He wanted to be around the young.
Mr. GALLIE acquired the nickname of Doc as a student at Upper Canada College when one of the masters asked him if he was the son of Toronto's internationally renowned orthopedic surgeon Dr. William GALLIE. Young Alan GALLIE said yes, and he was known as Doc ever after.
While he was still at Upper Canada College, his mother arranged a date for him for a school dance with the daughter of one of her Friends. Doc GALLIE roller-skated over to the girl's house, knocked on the door, was admitted into the front hall and, as he later said, down the stairs to meet him came the most beautiful creature he'd ever seen -- Mary MITCHELL.
Doc GALLIE decided to become a mining engineer after hearing tales of the Northern Ontario mining town of Cobalt told over lunch one day by a medical colleague of his father's who practised in the community.
As a student at University of Toronto, one of his engineering professors, H.E.T. HAULTAIN, asked the young man to be his assistant on a trip to Africa in 1936. Prof. HAULTAIN lectured him each morning on the 21-day ocean crossing so that he wouldn't fall behind in his studies, then took him to some of the continent's great mines.
In Bulawayo, Rhodesia -- now Zimbabwe -- he took time off to go roller-skating in a local rink, collided with a pretty girl, knocked her down, helped her up and dated her.
Back home, after graduating with honours in 1938, he started work with Sherritt in northern Manitoba and shortly thereafter telephoned Mary MITCHELL in Toronto to ask if she would be ready to marry him in two weeks. Mary said yes, while her mother, overhearing the conversation, said no.
They married in the chapel of Bishop Strachan School and she became his life's closest companion, fellow adventurer and equally passionate aficionado of the outdoors.
After a honeymoon in New York and holiday celebrations at home for Christmas, Mary accompanied her new husband into the bush where their first home was a mine-office tent shared with the company geologists with the new Mrs. GALLIE assigned the job of camp radio operator.
That first winter of their marriage, the temperature dropped more than once to 40 below. "When our Samoyed dog climbed into bed with us at 3 in the morning, I knew it was time to put more wood in the stove," Mr. GALLIE later wrote.
From Manitoba, Mr. GALLIE was sent in 1941 to manage an iron mine at Josephine, near Wawa, Ontario The mine was under a lake and, in 1946, the lake bed unexpectedly let go and flooded the mine. Mr. GALLIE wrote his engineering master's thesis on why it happened.
In 1947 -- now with two young daughters, Joan and Brenda -- he was reassigned to northern Manitoba, and five years later supervised the unprecedented feat of closing down an exhausted mine, in Sherridon, and moving the equipment and the entire town site 245 kilometres north over winter roads to a new ore body at Lynn Lake (where a third daughter, Ann, was born).
Mr. GALLIE was made assistant to the president of Sherritt Gordon in 1958, a job he said neither he nor the president felt had any purpose.
At that time, "no one [in the company] was really doing anything about selling the product," Mr. GALLIE noted. All the company's contracts were with U.S. steel companies and the U.S. government, and they were coming to an end.
So Mr. GALLIE basically invented a job for himself as vice-president of sales and spent the next two decades selling the company's output around the world.
At home in Canada, Alan and Mary GALLIE indulged in their hearts' passions of canoeing, bird watching, fishing and the garden of the 150-year-old Cape Cod saltbox home they bought at Claremont, northeast of Toronto. When Mrs. GALLIE died in 1998, Mr. GALLIE sold their Toronto home and moved permanently to "The Saltbox," close to the Glenmajor fishing camp he belonged to and loved.
He lived an active life at The Saltbox until a few days before his death.
He was 90 when he died, surrounded by family members in the home of his daughter, oncologist Dr. Brenda GALLIE. He'd had a martini a few hours earlier, made jokes and chatted with his family about what they were doing. He said he was looking forward to death as his next adventure.
Alan Edward (Doc) GALLIE was born on February 13, 1915, in Toronto. He died of lung cancer on August 6 in Toronto following a short illness. He was 90. He is survived by his daughters Joan McDONALD and Brenda and Ann GALLIE, grandchildren David and Christopher McDONALD and Frances and Gordon JEWETT, and nieces and nephews Barbara LEA, Frances KEY and Jane, Louise and Ian GALLIE. Funeral service is 2 p.m. today at Grace Church-on-the-Hill, Toronto.

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VALPY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-12-09 published
Kay KRITZWISER, Journalist: (1910-2005)
Reporter who started out as a 17-year-old editor of a children's magazine became a fearless feature writer, provocative art critic and 'a kind of Welcome Lady' for The Globe and Mail, writes Sandra MARTIN
By Sandra MARTIN With files by the late Donn DOWNIE, Friday, December 9, 2005, Page S9
When most women reporters were writing about teas, weddings and the latest in hemlines, Kay KRITZWISER was reporting on immigrants' problems, starving children, battered babies and the status of the working woman. She was among the first women reporters in Canada to compete head-to-head with her male counterparts. The newspapers she worked for were better because of her verve and insight.
"The lady knows how to bat an eyelash, swivel a hip, show off an ankle or arch an eyebrow," the late Richard "Dick" DOYLE said about her in a tribute in which he described her as the "daughter of Cartier, the sister of Givenchy -- the nemesis of Levi Strauss." He went on to deconstruct her devastating brand of seduction and betrayal as an interview technique.
"A rustle of silk announces her arrival, a breathless voice begins the interview, a laugh like Bacall's punctuates the questions. Tiny gasps greet the most mundane of responses to her guileless prodding into the dark recesses of the hapless fellow on the other side of her note pad. How gently she applauds the confession, how sympathetically she receives the acknowledged weakness.... Until the interview appears in print."
Veteran Globe journalist Michael VALPY remembers meeting her in the 1960s. "Kay was an incredibly elegant, warm, sophisticated woman, a female boulevardier with a healthy soupçon of Auntie Mame. She dressed very stylishly. I recall seeing her at events in hat and gloves -- I mean, not decades ago but as a matter of course. She was a rarity in journalism, an intellectual, well-read, an engaging conversationalist. I think of her as sparkling."
None of that famous style belies her success as a fearless feature writer and an engaging and provocative art critic. Art historian David Silcox, now president of Sotheby's Canada, predated Ms. KRITZWISER as an art critic at The Globe. "She was a very, very good reporter, more than a critic, but she was always curious and she loved writing about art and artists. She was somebody who was known and respected and liked by artists, curators and collectors."
Former Globe art critic John Bentley MAYS met her in the newsroom after he was appointed art critic of The Globe in 1980. "I came upon this birdlike lady with sharp clear eyes and a great smile and she said 'I'm Kay KRITZWISER,' he said. "That meant something to me because she was the witness to a generation of Toronto and Canadian artists dominated by Harold Town and the Isaacs Gallery."
She was a great chronicler of that period, he said, as a feature writer who could do wonderful interviews. "She knew the game and the players very well."
Kathleen Alice MULLAN was born in Regina five years after Saskatchewan joined Confederation and while Sir Wilfrid Laurier was prime minister. She was one of seven children of Joseph MULLAN, an Englishman who had served in the Boer War before immigrating to Canada, and his wife Lucy.
Ms. KRITZWISER began writing as a teenager, submitting articles to The Torchbearers Magazine, a supplement designed to encourage young writers that was part of the Regina Leader-Post's Saturday edition. After taking a secretarial course, she worked for an insurance company before being appointed, at the age of 17, the editor of the Leader-Post's young people's magazine.
She became a full-time reporter, but quit in 1933 to marry Harold H. KRITZWISER, a reporter and editorial writer at the paper. He was in his early 40s when he died of a heart attack in 1946, leaving Ms. KRITZWISER with a six-year-old son, David Erik to raise.
She went back to the Leader-Post as an editorial writer and wrote K.M.K.'s column three times a week. It appeared on the editorial page and was "about anything and everything" that caught her fancy, but usually about social and current affairs, according to her son, who is now a freelance writer in Vancouver. She was hired away by The Globe and Mail as a feature writer in 1956.
The late Oakley DALGLEISH was editor of the newspaper at the time, but her real mentor was the late Dick DOYLE, who was the first managing editor of the Weekly, The Globe magazine that began publication on May 4, 1957.
In his memoirs, Hurley-Burly, Mr. DOYLE recalled assigning her to write "the human side" of a big series on immigration. She was "a kind of Welcome Lady who gave special attention to the day-by-day problems of the newcomers and their old Canadian neighbours, the resident White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants who didn't always know what to expect of the recent arrivals," Mr. DOYLE wrote. He said her major impact came, though, with a series on child welfare, "The One Who Never Grew Up."
Ms. KRITZWISER had a distinctive style that defied the conventional rules of daily journalism. She spurned the "who, what, where, when and how" first paragraph, preferring instead a scene-setter or an anecdote that would get the reader into the story. The essential facts would still be there, but the reader was permitted to swallow them in small gulps while she told her story.
"When Shirley Ann Barnhardt, in the first few weeks of her life, went to live in one of the Sunset cabins on Highway 17, a mile west of the town of Pembroke in Renfrew County, there were still a few stubborn roses blooming among the painted jockeys and ornamental birds in the circular garden," she wrote in a classic example of her style. "The hills of the upper Ottawa Valley were a backdrop for the white frame cabin and not too far away ran the Ottawa River. It promised to be a fine place to put out a baby's pram come the next summer."
She followed up that painterly opening with a zinger of a second paragraph: "When Shirley Ann Barnhardt died on January 27 in the seventh month of her life of malnutrition, dehydration and pneumonia, an icy wind blew in a broken window of the squalid cabin and the rose bushes scraped in the wind above the snow. A dog sniffed at frozen garbage outside the door. Inside, the cold air blowing in from the river could not clear the smell."
In his analysis, Mr. DOYLE wrote that the "poignancy of the scene set the stage for a ruthless examination of society's failure to provide even the flimsiest protection for the helpless."
The subjects of many of Ms. KRITZWISER's stories are still in the headlines today. In 1959, when credit cards were a new and a largely unfamiliar phenomenon, she wrote that they would eventually replace cash. In 1961, she spotted Metro Toronto's urban sprawl and the problems it created for the commuter. She noted, as others are still noting, that commuters are wedded to their cars and will take them to work regardless of parking costs and inconvenience.
Although much of her work appeared in the old Globe magazine, she was frequently assigned to cover Royal tours when they were regarded as big news by Canadian newspapers. She was also often asked to interview visiting celebrities. The list included Edward G. Robinson, Liberace, Cary Grant, Truman Capote, Elvis Presley and Zsa Zsa Gabor. Her byline also appeared on book and movie reviews.
She was best known in the latter part of her career as an art critic, a position for which she had no formal training. When she was offered the job, after The Globe's art critic, Pearl McCARTHY, died in 1965, she said, "I don't know anything about art," according to her son. "Well, you can learn," her son remembers Mr. DOYLE retorting.
She held the post for a decade until she retired in 1975. Turning 65 didn't mean she stopped working. She went to India, China, and South America, either privately or on assignment as a travel writer, for The Globe and other outlets. As well, she wrote extensively about the arts, read widely and kept up with a wide circle of Friends, until illness finally slowed her down in her 90s.
Kay KRITZWISER was born in Regina, Saskatchewan., on February 25, 1910. She died in Toronto yesterday of cancer. She was 95. She leaves her son David and his wife. A memorial service is being planned in Toronto.

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VALSAMIS o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-12-13 published
VALSAMIS, Elaine (née SAVAGE)
It is with deepest sorrow that the family announces Elaine's passing on Monday, December 12, 2005, at age 55, surrounded at home by her family and Friends. Elaine had a natural ability with children and dedicated her life to young people with special needs who meant so much to her. Her kindness and thoughtfulness will always be treasured by the many hearts she touched. She is fondly remembered by her beloved husband John and their children Michael, Richard, Joanna, and Nicholas. She was a loving daughter of William SAVAGE and late Gladys SAVAGE, and a dear sister of Susan (Bill) MEYER and Janet (Malcolm) OAKES, and a wonderful aunt to many nieces and nephews. Elaine will be missed by all of her family, Friends, colleagues and students. Visitation will be held on Wednesday, December 14 from 3-5 and 7-9 p.m. at the R.S. Kane Funeral Home (6150 Yonge Street, at Goulding, south of Steeles). A funeral service will be held in the chapel on Thursday, December 15, 2005 at 11 a.m. Interment York Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to The Temmy Latner Centre for Palliative Care.

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