CITROEN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-06-27 published
McKENNA,
Georgina
Julia
Passed away on Sunday, June 26, 2005 after a courageous struggle
with cancer. Sadly missed by her loving husband Brien and their
son Daniel, brother Stewart
CITROEN and sister-in-law Julie
CITROEN.
She will be fondly remembered by her relations and dear Friends.
At Benjamin's Park Memorial Chapel, 2401 Steeles Ave. W. (3 lights
west of Dufferin), for service on Tuesday, June 28th at 10: 00
a.m. If desired memorial donations may be made to Princess Margaret
Hospital Foundation for Palliative Care at 416-946-6560.
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CITRON o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-02-19 published
DARROCH,
Murray -- Dispatch
By Paula CITRON,
Saturday,
February 19, 2005 - Page M4
When
Murray
(Murr)
DARROCH was found dead in his Cabbagetown
apartment last month at the prime age of 50, the dance world
lost a troubled eccentric and innovator. The last decade of Mr.
DARROCH's life had been a downward slide, accelerated by a self-destructive
overuse of white wine and cigarettes.
Always a proud man and a loner, Mr.
DARROCH became even more
reclusive after a stroke in 2000 affected him physically and
mentally. Family and Friends believe that a gay-bash mugging
18 months ago, which he did not report to the police, finally
broke his spirit.
But at the pinnacle of his dance career, Mr.
DARROCH's star shone
brighter than most. He was a graduate of the School of Toronto
Dance Theatre, and later its administrator. He also taught a
very popular and gruelling stretch and strength class in the
evenings. In the late eighties, he was an associate artistic
director at Winnipeg's Contemporary Dancers.
It is, however, as a trendsetting choreographer that Mr.
DARROCH
is best known, and his original and avant-garde approach to dance
won him the prestigious Canada Council Jacqueline Lemieux Prize
in 1983. Mr.
DARROCH was among the first dance-theatre choreographers
in the country, incorporating text, props, costumes and pedestrian
movement into his acclaimed works. Quirky, satiric, subversive,
unpredictable, witty and always very dark, his choreographies
placed dance in a bizarre and fantastical world of theatrical
emotionalism, and would sometimes include full-frontal nudity.
Mr. DARROCH died on January 5 from falling in his apartment and
hitting his head, and wasn't discovered until a few days later.
As friend and dancer Paul
DEADDER points out, Mr.
DARROCH probably
would have relished the high drama of his death. Perhaps he might
even have made a dance out of it.
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CITRON o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-12-07 published
MERRIAM,
E.
May
At the South Muskoka Memorial Hospital in Bracebridge on Sunday,
December 4, 2005. May
MERRIAM in her 93rd year. Beloved sister
to Rowena (Fred)
RICHIE of Brooklin. Predeceased by her brothers
Henry and Rupert
MERRIAM and by her sisters Eve
MERRIAM and Pearl
CITRON. Survived by many nieces and nephews. A Service to celebrate
the life of May
MERRIAM will be held at Trinity United Church
in Gravenhurst on Friday, December 9, 2005 at 3 p.m. Cremation
has taken place. In memory donations to Trinity United Church,
Gravenhurst or to the South Muskoka Memorial Hospital Foundation
would be appreciated. Arrangements entrusted to the W.J. Cavill
Funeral Home, Gravenhurst.
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CITY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-05-03 published
Bob HUNTER,
Evironmentalist And Writer: 1941-2005
In 1971, he was assigned to cover a story about a nuclear protest.
Instead, he joined the group and co-founded Greenpeace
By Terry WEBER,
With files from Canadian Press; staff; Globe
and Mail archives, Tuesday, May 3, 2005, Page S9
He was a journalist, television personality, writer and political
candidate but most of all he was a co-founder of Greenpeace,
recognized by Time magazine as one of the 20th century's 10 top
eco-heroes.
In 1971, while on assignment for the Vancouver Sun, he was invited
to join a group taking a charter vessel to Alaska to protest
nuclear testing that the U.S. began on Amchitka Island in the
Aleutians in 1965. It had all started when Mr.
HUNTER had attended
a Sunday night meeting in a church basement, where he and a group
of likeminded Friends decided, there and then, to save the environment
and set up what he later laughingly called an organization. As
he left the podium, having been elected president, he yelled
out "Peace!" -- the mantra of the time -- and someone in the
audience responded with the word green. "Let's make it a green
peace," he yelled.
They scrounged up some money, bought an old broken-down fishing
boat, renamed it the Rainbow Warrior and set off to the Aleutian
Islands off Alaska to harass the mighty American military. They
didn't get there in time, the boat being a very slow boat to
anywhere, but the suspense devoured the front pages in British
Columbia and eventually the whole country. Having been a reporter
since he was 18, the venture was partly inspired by a quixotic
desire to file a story datelined "Ground Zero."
"I thought I was going to be a reporter, taking notes," he once
remarked. "In reality, I wound up on first watch."
He stayed for the 45-day duration of the voyage and subsequently
helped shape the beginning of the Greenpeace Foundation in 1972.
With the launch of the pro-environment activist group, he helped
bring public attention not only to nuclear testing but to the
excesses of whaling and seal hunting, as well as the dumping
of toxic waste into the oceans.
His forays into the face of danger were the stuff of high adventure.
The photographic record of Greenpeace encounters with Soviet
or French ships on the open ocean are often fuzzy and taken at
a distance. Apparently, one famous photo of a Russian harpoon
parting the hair of a protester as he bobbed through the ocean
swell in a flimsy inflatable boat showed the Greenpeace leader
himself. "That's
HUNTER,"
Gord
PERKS of the Toronto Environmental
Alliance told The Globe and Mail last year. Anywhere else, and
Mr. HUNTER "would be revered as a national hero," he added.
Personal heroics, however, were not something Bob
HUNTER chose
to exploit. Only the mission was important. In a Globe and Mail
report of the 1977 harpoon incident, he described the scene by
telephone but had failed to put himself in it.
The encounter was vintage Greenpeace. Protesters aboard the James
Bay, a former Canadian minesweeper, had succeeded in protecting
sperm Wales for almost four hours by piloting their dinghies
between the Wales and the harpooners. Finally, the Soviet boats
had massed together and let loose their harpoons. At least one
of the projectiles had passed low over the heads of protesters,
whose dinghy was keeping pace with a whale only metres away.
Saving
Wales lay at the heart of Mr.
HUNTER's early work as
an environmentalist. He was once moved to relate an incident
that, to him, spoke volumes about the creatures. In July of 1975,
lack of funds and an underpowered vessel had caused Greenpeace
to abandon a campaign to disrupt whaling off the California coast.
It turned out that their old fishing boat, the Phyllis Cormack,
owned a top speed of nine knots, while the Russians they pursued
were capable of 20 knots.
Even so, the protesters had somehow enjoyed great success --
but only because the Wales had come looking for Greenpeace.
Inexplicably, something had caused the animals to turn and seek
out the slower vessel.
"The Wales came right at our boat, and the chaser boat we were
following had to change course," Mr.
HUNTER later told reporters.
Eventually, Mr.
HUNTER left to join the Sea Shepherd Society,
which was seen as a sort of splinter group, but by then he had
charted a definable course for Greenpeace. After all, it was
he who adopted the term Rainbow Warriors to portray Greenpeace
activists, as well as the phrase Media Mind Bomb to describe
the activist impact on the public consciousness.
"I was the right person in the right place," the shaggy-haired,
grey-bearded Mr.
HUNTER once said of his pivotal role in Greenpeace.
"But when it's done, I think you can get into a habit of just
clinging to it because you don't know what to do next, whereas
I knew all along, I wanted to get back to what I was doing already."
In truth, his contribution was far greater than that. Mr.
HUNTER
possessed a genius for communication. The language of dramatic
imagery and gesture that Greenpeace pioneered grew directly from
his analysis of the late communications guru Marshall McLuhan.
"Tell me how many people you know who ever had an idea that good
and made it happen." Bob
HUNTER took the theory, applied it
to environmentalism and and so changed the world.
"Bob was an inspirational storyteller, an audacious fighter and
an unpretentious mystic," said John
DOHERTY, chairman of Greenpeace
Canada. "He was serious about saving the world, while always
maintaining a sense of humour."
Being an environmentalist, he told an audience at the University
of Toronto's Innis College in November, means always having to
explain to your children why you're so angry. "We're doomed!"
he shouted with gusto, his ponytail flying. "It's obvious that
the world is going to hell in a hand basket, as usual."
For all his zeal as a self-described "apocalypticist," he was
also capable of self-satire. "Save the three-legged purple salamander
from southern Saskatoon!" he gleefully urged his audience, which
included such luminaries as David Suzuki and Monte Hummel, president
of World Wildlife Fund Canada. "I'm all for it.
"My God, the planet is being destroyed while I lie here on my
waterbed; I must do something!"
Today, the organization has more than 2.5 million members with
a presence in 40 countries. He left Greenpeace in 1981 and turned
to writing and broadcasting to transmit his 'green' message.
In 1991, he won the Governor-General's Award for literature for
his book Occupied Canada: A Young White Man Discovers His Unsuspected
Past. He was the author of more than a dozen books. Earlier,
he had also written for the television shows The Beachcombers
and Danger Bay.
In his most recent public role, he was the ecology news specialist
for CHUM's
CITY-TV and CP24 television channels. He was perhaps
best known to Toronto viewers for Paper Cuts, a segment on the
station's popular Breakfast Television show, in which he wore
a bathrobe and commented on stories in the day's newspapers.
Viewers also knew him as
CITY-TV's environmental reporter and
as host of Hunter's Gathers.
In 2001, he ran unsuccessfully for the Liberal Party for a by-election
seat in the Ontario legislature and accused the New Democratic
Party of employing slanderous techniques against him in the campaign.
In 1999, Mr.
HUNTER had been diagnosed with cancer but refused
to have surgery. He began years of treatment at a Mexican cancer
clinic that specialized in non-conventional medical treatments.
In November, he told the University of Toronto audience that
he was happy, despite his eco-gloom and his own ill health. Things
were changing because people made a difference, he said. There
was still hope for the three-legged salamander. "The only thing
incurable about me," he confessed, "is my optimism."
Robert HUNTER was born in St. Boniface, Manitoba, on October
13, 1941, which happened to be Thanksgiving Day. He died of prostate
cancer in Toronto on May 2. He was 63. He leaves his wife, Bobbie,
and his children Will, Emily, Conan and Justine.
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CITY o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-06-01 published
Robert BURNS,
Graphic
Designer: 1942-2005
Creative wizard whose firm Burns Cooper Hynes made the logos
of corporate Canada instantly recognizable allowed cocaine to
ruin a brilliant career, writes Sandra
MARTIN
By Sandra MARTIN,
Wednesday,
June 1, 2005, Page S7
Robert BURNS was many things -- a graphic artist, a creative
thinker, a father -- but most of all he was a cocaine addict.
That fact obscured his talents and darkened his life for the
last 25 years, from the collapse of the high-flying design firm
Burns Cooper Hynes in the early 80s to the ruin of personal relationships.
As a designer he was the equivalent of a bandleader, said his
former partner, copywriter Jim
HYNES. "He was like Glenn Miller.
He knew the sound he wanted to create and he was a genius at
putting together the right ingredients to get that result." Other
people did most of the work, of course. "He used to call me the
donkey," said Mr.
HYNES "because I did a little work every day,
keeping the cart moving at all times while he would run, run,
run and then crash because he would be running at a pace that
nobody could sustain."
At his best, Mr.
BURNS was a virtuoso of the big idea -- the
central phrase or image that you could build a product or an
advertising campaign around. "He had heart, wit and intelligence,"
said Eric (Ric)
YOUNG a social and environmental communications
consultant. "That is a rare combination and it was invested in
all of his work, which was strategic and conceptual. He had real
passion and ambition and he brought fantastic energy and an aspiration
for greatness to every project."
"He could plug into another person and tune himself onto that
wavelength so perfectly that it was mesmerizing," said Mr.
HYNES.
"That was his greatest talent when he was building a very successful
organization, but it was also the talent that enabled him to
survive on the street and carry on with a lifestyle that most
people can only manage for a few years before they end up in
the graveyard."
Robert BURNS grew up in a working-class neighbourhood on the
outskirts of London. He was hard to handle as a teenager and
once made the newspapers after he and a couple of Friends were
arrested for urinating on somebody's front lawn. His parents,
fearing he was headed for trouble, made him enlist in the Royal
Air Force at age 15, to train as an airplane mechanic. Robert
frequently butted heads with his superiors, although he did find
success as a bugler and a fencer. Finally, he persuaded the Royal
Air Force that he was a conscientious objector and won a discharge.
He put together a portfolio and went to art school in London
on a grant for a couple of years. Like so many creative types
in the early 1960s, he fancied himself a folksinger. As well
as strumming a guitar, he ran an artist's booking agency called
Folksounds in Lewisham.
He met Canadian Ellen
ANDERSON (now an artist and social activist)
in 1965 as she "stepped off the plane" from Toronto. One of her
high-school Friends, who was working at the same agency, had
asked him for a ride to the airport. "We never parted from that
point," Ms.
ANDERSON said. They married and made plans to move
to Canada.
Mr. BURNS, then 22, needed a passport. At the registry office
he made a casual joke about his parentage and learned that he'd
been adopted as a baby. He felt betrayed, according to Ms.
ANDERSON,
who believes that confronting the truth about his birth was one
of the demons that Mr.
BURNS wrestled with for the rest of his
life.
In Toronto, Mr.
BURNS and Ms.
ANDERSON shared a house with a
number of artists. Mr.
BURNS found work as a graphic artist for
the CTV television network and then formed his own company called
Robert
Burns
Designs. Ms.
ANDERSON says her husband, who had
grown up with rationing and deprivation, was so bewitched by
the wealth of North America that he wrote a letter to a friend
back in England saying, "the streets are filled with cars as
big as houses."
Mr. BURNS left Ms.
ANDERSON in 1969 when she was pregnant with
their son Gabe. The breakup was cruel and acrimonious. By then,
Mr. BURNS was working on a freelance basis with Heather
COOPER,
an illustrator and graphic designer whom he'd met through photographer
Bert BELL.
They began a professional and personal relationship
that lasted 11 years, a creative partnership that brought them
a stellar list of clients, a lavish life style and a daughter
Sarah who is now 34.
Either separately, or together as the graphic design firm Burns
Cooper, they seemed to be involved in everything that was fresh
and innovative, from David Crombie's mayoralty campaign to Canadian
Brass, Roots and
CITY-TV. "
Being intensely creative was what
we were about," said Ms.
COOPER. "
Work was our passion and probably
the original reason for us being together."
Jim HYNES, then a corporate communications executive, arrived
in Toronto from Montreal in 1972 and hired them to develop a
new graphic identity for his company. Over the next three years,
the two men became close Friends. Finally, in 1975, Mr.
BURNS
persuaded Mr.
HYNES to quit his job and join him and Ms
COOPER
in a partnership that became Burns Cooper Hynes.
"Within the next five years we became if not the biggest graphic
design company in Canada certainly the best known and the most
prestigious," said Mr.
HYNES.
They produced corporate identities,
annual reports and sales materials for clients such as Northern
Telecom, Alcan, Imperial Oil, Cadillac Fairview and Canadian
Pacific airlines.
"He loved luxury. When he had money, it vanished instantly on
the most expensive things he could find." says Mr.
HYNES. In
those days it was not uncommon to end a meeting with an advertising
agency by doing a "mile-long line" of cocaine on the boardroom
table. "Everybody snorted coke," said Mr.
HYNES. "It was considered
completely harmless fun." But Mr.
BURNS moved on to injecting,
quickly draining the company to feed his rapacious habit.
"He changed our lives in a big way, first for the better and
then for the worse," said Mr.
HYNES. "I needed to get out of
the corporate world and I still remember that decade as the happiest
of my working life. Heather is a very reclusive person and for
her to sell herself as an illustrator was very difficult, but
Robert made her into a superstar. The first requirement of one
of Robert's big ideas was a great big poster by Heather
COOPER."
After the collapse of Burns Cooper Hynes in the early 1980s --
Ms. COOPER said it took her years to wind up dealings with creditors
and contractors -- Mr.
BURNS started a couple of other design
firms, but he never really recovered.
"I thought he might be able to control his addictions, said Ms.
ANDERSON, "but he had so many demons and drugs were the way to
keep them at bay." About a year ago he learned that he had at
least two types of hepatitis and he had terminal liver damage.
Although he had been living on and off the street for years,
lately he was living in a group home run by the Homes First Society
and had connected with outreach and religious workers at St.
James Cathedral in Toronto and a neighbourhood centre called
6 St. Joseph Street. Two weeks ago, he spent the day working
on a renovation project, went home to have some soup with a friend
and collapsed.
Robert BURNS was born in London, England on April 16, 1942. He
died of hepatitis and heart failure on May 14 after nearly 30
years of drug abuse. He was 63. He is survived by his first wife
Ellen ANDERSON and his son Gabe; and by his former partner Heather
COOPER, his daughter Sarah Cooper
BURNS and her family.
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CITY 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.
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