EGO o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-03-29 published
EGO,
Andrew
(Owner of Custom Engine Service, Keswick, Ontario) At Southlake
Regional Health Centre, Newmarket, on Sunday, March 27, 2005
at the age of 45 years. Andy
EGO of Sutton, loving spouse of
Henny RISEBROUGH. "
Andy" to Henny's children Jenn (Nate
MICHEL)
and Elton RISEBROUGH
(Natalie.)
Papa to Noah and Aidan. Dear
brother of Pat, Kim, Jim (Robin) and Tom. Uncle of Kyle and Kevin
EGO.
Predeceased by his parents Marie and Bill
EGO. Memorial
visitation will be held in the Taylor Funeral Home, 20846 Dalton
Road, Sutton from 7-9 p.m. Wednesday. Memorial Service in Knox
United Church, 34 Market Street, Sutton, Thursday at 4: 00 p.m.
Visitation in the church from 2: 00 p.m. Donations to the Canadian
Cancer Society or the Heart and Stroke Foundation would be appreciated
by the family.
E... Names EG... Names EGO... Names Welcome Home
EGO o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2005-07-06 published
GERRARD,
Doreen
Rosetta
(EGO)
E... Names EG... Names EGO... Names Welcome Home
EGOFF o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-05-29 published
Sheila EGOFF,
Librarian and Academic 1918-2005
Authority on children's literature goaded Canadian writers and
publishers to overcome the curse of mediocrity, writes Sandra
MARTIN. In the end, their books came of age and are now among
the world's best
By Sandra MARTIN,
Saturday,
May 28, 2005, Page S9
Children's literature is one of our international success stories,
so it's easy to forget how stony the field was in the middle
years of the last century. We published 47 children's books in
1968 compared to 3,874 American and 2,075 British titles, according
to an incisive paper written by librarian Sheila
EGOFF for the
Royal Ontario Commission on Book Publishing.
"There was a small handful of mostly boring books," remembers
Janet LUNN, author of The Root Cellar and Shadow in Hawthorn
Bay and the first children's editor to be hired by a Canadian
publishing company. "If you were going to stack them up against
what was coming out of the United States and Britain, it was
pretty tedious."
But stack them up against international standards was precisely
what Professor
EGOFF did in landmark books such as The Republic
of Childhood, Only Connect, Thursday's Child and Worlds Within.
"If you think a mediocre book can do something for children,
I'll ask you why a good book can't do it better," she was fond
of saying. Age did not temper her critical tastes.
In 1984, the year after she retired as professor emerita of youth
literature at University of British Columbia, she railed at the
offerings in the children's sections of many Canadian libraries,
arguing that it might be better for teenagers to read nothing
at all than something like Conan the Barbarian, "a pseudo-scientific
series about a macho hero who is racist and everything else."
One can only wonder how she would react to the current debate
about young people's literacy scores in Canada.
But Prof. EGOFF also loved a party, especially when the wine
was flowing. She was an inspired lecturer and a devoted friend
and colleague to generations of librarians, including University
of British Columbia professor Judith Saltman, broadcaster Bill
Richardson and writers Kit Pearson and Sarah Ellis.
"Her students were her family," said Ms. Pearson. But affection
didn't compromise her standards when it came to marking papers
or evaluating literary works. "I was almost afraid to submit
my first manuscript," Ms. Pearson said, "because I knew from
Sheila what a children's book should be."
"She had a way of deciding your destiny," said Ms. Ellis, who
was diverted from a career as a rare books librarian by her exposure
to Prof. EGOFF. "
Once you got in her gaze, there was no looking
away." Ms. Ellis, who still works part-time as a children's librarian,
admitted that she wasn't convinced that Prof.
EGOFF really liked
her award-winning novels. "Deep in her heart, she thought that
anything other than being a children's librarian is a bit of
a comedown."
"She captivated us," said Prof. Saltman this week. Eventually
Prof. Saltman became her mentor's research assistant, then her
collaborator and finally her successor at what is now called
the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies. "I feel
as though I have lost a third parent," she said.
Sheila Agnes
EGOFF was born in Auburn, Maine, the only daughter
of Dane and Lucy Joyce
EGOFF.
After her father, a Bulgarian immigrant,
drowned when Sheila was 1 and her brother George 4, her mother
moved back to her home town of Galt (now Cambridge) in southwestern
Ontario.
Money was scarce, said Prof.
EGOFF's nephew John. He
thinks this early hardship may explain why his aunt and his father
both had such an intense drive to succeed. His father turned
it inward, doing his utmost to provide for his family, while
his aunt strived for professional achievements, choosing a career
over marriage and family.
Prof. EGOFF, who grew up Catholic in a very Protestant town,
credited her passion for reading with her discovery of the local
public library at the age of 8. As a high school student she
worked there part-time for 25 cents an hour, before earning a
diploma in librarianship in 1938 at the University of Toronto.
She returned to Galt for a job in that same library before moving
back to Toronto in 1942 to work at Boys and Girls House under
those ace practitioners of her vocation, Alice
KANE and Lillian
H. SMITH (author of the classic text The Unreluctant Years.)
At the same time, she studied for her bachelor's degree, graduating
in 1948 from the U of T.
After taking a study leave from the Toronto Public Library, she
earned a library diploma at the University of London in 1949.
She was eternally grateful to her older brother George, says
her nephew John, for financing her postgraduate studies. Always
thinking, always planning and strategizing, Prof.
EGOFF was the
catalyst in negotiating the transfer of English librarian John
Osborne's famed collection of early children's books to the Toronto
Public
Library in 1949 in honour of Ms.
SMITH.
Thinking she needed a change, Prof.
EGOFF crossed the threshold
into adult services and put in a five-year stint as a reference
librarian (from 1952 to 57) followed by a move to Ottawa where
she worked for four years for the Canadian Library Association.
That's where she was on a sweltering day in 1961 when she received
a phone call from Sam Rothstein, founding director of the School
of Librarianship at the University of British Columbia.
As Prof. EGOFF loved to tell the story: It was 90 degrees, the
humidex was in the stratosphere and she was lying naked on the
bed in her tiny Ottawa apartment fantasizing about air conditioning.
Prof. Rothstein mentioned that it was balmy and 68 in Vancouver,
the Bolshoi was coming to town and how would she like to be the
fledgling faculty's specialist in children's literature and library
services? To which she allegedly replied: "When's the next plane?"
Prof. EGOFF taught at University of British Columbia for more
than 25 years, becoming the first full-time tenured professor
of children's literature at a Canadian university. In 1964, a
group calling itself the Children's Recreational Reading Council
of Toronto commissioned her to write a book about Canadian children's
books as its centennial project. William
TOYE, then trade editor
of Oxford University Press, agreed to work with her and to publish
the text. It was a fortuitous combination, for Mr.
TOYE, known
in the trade for his ruthless blue pencil and his insistence
on clarity, was himself an expert in the subject. It was the
beginning of a long editorial relationship and an even longer
Friendship that included three editions of The Republic of Childhood
and two of Only Connect: Readings on Children's Literature.
"Nobody with her authority or background had written about Canadian
children's books," he said this week. "She had read every Canadian
children's book and she certainly knew all the English and American
classics." What she brought to her discussion of children's books
was honesty, Mr.
TOYE said. "It wasn't that she was destructive.
She could see where the quality lay and where it was missing."
Back then most people expected to have our books praised and
encouraged simply for existing. "She was extremely crusty and
quite hostile," says Patsy Aldana, publisher of Groundwood Books.
"She was not a supporter of Canadian books, she was a supporter
of quality publishing and she felt, with quite a bit of justification,
that the books were very bad." Nevertheless, Ms. Aldana feels
that her "goading" had a "bracing" effect on younger writers
and publishers. "We felt very embattled and attacked, but I think
there was also a real sense that this is not how it has to be
and we are going to prove her wrong." And in the end, Canadian
children's books did come of age and Prof.
EGOFF "responded to
what we did and became a supporter of many of our authors."
Mr. TOYE agrees. "Children's books were her life and anything
she could do -- to talk to people about them, to write about
them, to teach -- she would do and in the process she changed
the standard of appreciation of children's books in Canada."
By the time Ms.
EGOFF retired in 1983, she had organized the
Pacific Rim Conference on Children's Literature in 1976 (bringing
participants from China, Japan and Australia as well as North
and South America), developed five graduate courses in children's
literature and library services, inspired generations of librarians,
and written or edited several seminal texts. Retirement certainly
didn't mean putting her vocation behind her. If anything, it
gave her more time to write and to edit and to work with "her
spies in the field" as she called the ranks of children's librarians
she had trained.
About five years ago, her eyesight failed because of macular
degeneration. Scores of Friends and students read to her, especially
the annual nominees for the British Columbia book award named
in her honour. She continued to write despite failing health
and, with the help of Wendy Sutton, finished the manuscript for
My Life with Children's Books, which will be published by Orca
Books this autumn.
Two weeks ago she phoned her old friend and editor William
TOYE
and asked him to write the preface to her memoirs. He said, "It
was a beautiful closure to our Friendship."
Sheila Agnes
EGOFF was born in Auburn, Maine, on January 20,
1918. She died of kidney failure on May 22, 2005, in hospital
in Vancouver. She was 87. She is survived by three nephews and
their families.
E... Names EG... Names EGO... Names Welcome Home
EGOFF o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2005-06-02 published
I Remember -- Sheila
EGOFF
By John MOFFAT,
Thursday,
June 2, 2005, Page S9
John MOFFAT of Cambridge, Ontario, writes about Sheila
EGOFF,
whose obituary appeared on May 28.
Sheila EGOFF entered my life when she was the inspirational mistress
of the children's department of the Galt Public Library and I
was one of her pediatric "bookworms." Her desk controlled the
entrance to the section and, from there, she exercised a wonderful
ability to spot and encourage "hard-core" readers among the grade-school
set.
In 1956, I ran into her again at the Toronto Reference Library
on College Street, where she was working at the time. She was
in the habit of holding soirees at her apartment, The Cawthra,
across the road from the library, and my wife and I were lucky
enough to be invited. The crowd was a diverse and interesting
group, the food was Italian, the wine was red, and one was obliged
to bring along a 78 record of an excerpt from one's favourite
opera. Sheila supplied one for us, The Nun's Chorus from the
Strauss operetta, Casanova, and to this day I think of her whenever
I hear it. I learned recently from Bernard
MAHLER, a mutual friend,
that her soirees were famous in the literary circles in which
she travelled.
In 2002, which was the last time I saw her, Sheila was one of
the keynote speakers at the 150th anniversary of the Galt Collegiate
Institute and her address was the highlight.
E... Names EG... Names EGO... Names Welcome Home
EGOFF - All Categories in OGSPI