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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-03-01 published
Kenneth DEANE,
Officer And
Security
Expert (1960-2006)
Former Ontario Provincial Police officer enjoyed a promising
career in a paramilitary squad until he shot and killed native
protester Dudley
GEORGE in 1995. He left the force in 2002 and
died in a traffic accident on Saturday
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S7
Toronto -- Kenneth
DEANE's life was changed -- some would say
ruined -- by an incident that's now known as Ipperwash. On September
6, 1995, he shot and killed Anthony (Dudley)
GEORGE at Ontario's
Ipperwash Provincial Park during what was Canada's most important
Indian protest since Quebec's Oka crisis of 1990.
Until that night, Mr.
DEANE of the Ontario Provincial Police
had an exemplary record, one that had helped smooth his way into
the exclusive ranks of the Ontario Provincial Police's tactical
rescue unit. As acting sergeant, he was leading a highly trained,
four-man team of marksmen on the night he shot Mr.
GEORGE.
"The whole sequence took place in 20, 30, 35 seconds," Mr.
DEANE
said at his trial in July of 1997. He was convicted of criminal
negligence causing death. In his 2001 book, One Dead Indian,
Toronto
Star reporter Peter
EDWARDS recounted the Ontario Provincial
Police officer's description of what led up to the shooting.
Mr. DEANE said he saw flashes of light coming from the barrel
of a weapon inside a school bus that protesters were using to
barge into an Ontario Provincial Police riot squad.
"It was an attempt to shoot a police officer," he told the court.
However, he chose not to open fire because of the many officers
who were in the way. "I saw a distinct muzzle flash originate
from the interior of the bus."
The book went on to describe the actual firing of the weapon
and Mr. DEANE's testimony that Mr.
GEORGE was armed and had presented
a threat. "I observed him shoulder a rifle and in a half-crouched
position, scanned [the rifle] over our position." Mr.
DEANE said
he fired three shots from his highly accurate, Heckler and Koch
sub-machine gun "as quick as I could."
"He [Mr. GEORGE] immediately went down on one knee and immediately
got back up."
Still on the road, Mr.
GEORGE looked to his right and left and
walked a few steps, Mr.
DEANE testified. He then did something
rather odd for someone who was mortally wounded, with a broken
collar bone, cracked ribs and a punctured lung, Mr.
DEANE said.
He testified that Mr.
GEORGE raised his arm and threw the rifle
into a grass-covered field, leaving himself unarmed and exposed
to police fire.
Although Mr.
DEANE had provided a detailed description of the
rifle, another tactical rescue unit officer who was just metres
away during the incident testified that he had observed Mr.
GEORGE
holding "a pole or stick." The officer also said that the only
muzzle flashes he saw had come from his own gun. Hundreds of
other shots were fired that night, all by the police, and the
Ontario Provincial Police has since arrived at the view that
the protesters were not armed.
For his part, Mr.
DEANE fired a total of seven shots. Four had
been aimed at other protesters and three at Mr.
GEORGE.
One bullet
missed, one struck him in the lower leg, and the last found his
torso.
Though Mr.
DEANE spoke in a calm and self-assured manner, the
judge at his trial did not believe him. Mr. Justice Hugh
FRASER
as much as called him a liar and ruled that Mr.
GEORGE had been
unarmed. He rejected the notion that Mr.
DEANE had an "honest
but mistaken belief" and found that Mr.
GEORGE did not have a
weapon when he was killed. He said Mr.
DEANE had concocted his
evidence "in an ill-fated attempt to disguise the fact that an
unarmed man had been shot."
Judge FRASER, who also ruled that some other police officers
had falsified evidence to support Mr.
DEANE, found him guilty
and sentenced him to a conditional sentence of two years less
a day, plus 180 days of community service but no house arrest.
Mr. DEANE appealed the conviction to the Supreme Court of Canada.
In February, 2000, the court ruled there were no grounds for
a new trial. He did win a small victory, however. The Supreme
Court denied an appeal by Crown prosecutors who had sought jail
time instead of the conditional sentence.
"I still believe Ken
DEANE was an honest police office who was
hard done by by the justice system," lawyer Norman
PEEL, who
had represented Mr.
DEANE at the trial, said yesterday. "He was
misjudged as being cold and withdrawn when, in fact, he was just
quiet." After the conviction, Mr.
DEANE continued in the Ontario
Provincial Police. Among other things, he was a bomb-disposal
expert and a specialist in fighting biker gangs and terrorists.
His fellow officers came to his defence, believing he had been
victimized.
"He was an asset to the Ontario Provincial Police," said Inspector
Robert BRUCE, who at that time believed Mr.
DEANE "should remain
in the position that he's in."
But
Ipperwash continued to haunt Mr.
DEANE.
"I sincerely apologize to the family and Friends of Dudley
GEORGE
and to his community for causing the terrible loss that they
have been forced to endure," he said at a discipline hearing
in September of 2001. For all that, he always maintained he had
done nothing wrong the night Mr.
GEORGE was shot and he fought
to stay on the force.
It was a battle he lost. In October, 2001, he pleaded to a charge
of discreditable conduct under the Police Services Act. Four
months later, an inquiry by police adjudicator Loyall
CANN forced
him to resign. Ms.
CANN, a former deputy chief of the Toronto
police force, said the shooting of Mr.
GEORGE had resulted in
"the most serious conviction" ever recorded against an Ontario
Provincial Police officer.
"What could possibly be more shocking to society than to have
a sworn, fully trained and experienced police officer, while
on duty, in full uniform [and] using a police-issued firearm,
kill an unarmed citizen," said Ms.
CANN.
She ordered him to resign or be fired. He quit the next day and
later found a job working in security at an Ontario Hydro nuclear
station. More recently, he was Canadian sales manager for Canadian
Allen-Vanguard Response Systems, a publicly traded company that
provides state-of-the-art anti-terrorist equipment and systems.
Kenneth DEANE grew up in London, Ontario, the
son of the late
Robert DEANE and Katherine
DEANE.
One of six children, he had
long dreamed of being a policeman. After leaving high school,
he studied law and security at Fanshawe College and then joined
the London police force. He was next accepted by the Ontario
Provincial Police and quickly became involved with the tactical
rescue unit, the special squad deployed in hostage-taking situations
and in emergencies.
At his trial, a fellow officers described the patience Mr.
DEANE
had displayed during a hostage situation in Dryden, Ontario,
when a man with a rifle threatened two women. The incident ended
without violence. "He does not react emotionally, said Staff
Sergeant Brian
DEEVY, also a member of the tactical rescue unit.
"I have never seen him lose control."
Mr. DEANE had also served with Ontario Provincial Police officers
sent to help deal with the Oka crisis, and in 1991 had attended
an incident at Grassy Narrows in Northern Ontario when an Ontario
Provincial Police officer was shot dead.
The killing of Mr.
GEORGE caused an outcry against the tactics
and actions of the Ontario Provincial Police and the government
of Ontario. It triggered the Ipperwash inquiry that has been
sitting since July of 2004 under Mr. Justice Sidney
LINDEN.
Mr.
DEANE was scheduled to appear at the hearing next month and his
testimony was keenly anticipated.
In the type of coincidence that feeds conspiracy theorists, Mr.
DEANE is the third Ontario Provincial Police officer involved
in the Dudley
GEORGE shooting to be killed in a traffic accident.
Sgt. Margaret
EVE, who tried to negotiate with the natives at
Ipperwash before the shooting, died in a crash involving a transport
truck on Highway 401 near Chatham, Ontario Inspector Dale
LINTON,
the commander who gave the orders to Mr.
DEANE's team, was killed
in a single-vehicle accident near Smith's Falls in October of
Mr. DEANE was killed in a traffic accident on Highway 401 near
Prescott in Eastern Ontario. Snow squalls had caused vehicles
to slow or come to a halt and his Ford Explorer clipped a tractor
trailer that was blocking the road. Before he could extricate
his vehicle, a second highway truck travelling behind him was
unable to stop and the sport utility vehicle was crushed.
Kenneth DEANE was born in October of 1960. He died on February
25, 2006. He was 45. He leaves his wife, Lucie
SIROIS.
Also an
Ontario Provincial Police officer, she was injured some years
ago while investigating a traffic accident. Additionally, he
leaves his brother Bill and sisters Barbara, Nancy, Sue and Judy.
A funeral is set for 11 a.m. tomorrow in Sudbury, Ontario
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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-03-10 published
Peter BERRY,
Naval
Officer (1923-2006)
During the Second World War, he had a hand in sinking three U-boats
and later became a pilot on Canada's last carrier
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S9
Toronto -- Peter
BERRY was just a couple of years out of Lisgar
Collegiate in Ottawa when the Canadian destroyer he was on sunk
a German U-boat in the English Channel. H.M.C.S. Kootenay and
its sister ship, H.M.C.S. Ottawa, helped by a British corvette,
sank the German submarine U-678 on July 6, 1944, just off the
English coast near the seaside resort of Brighton.
The chase had taken more than two days and sub-lieutenant
BERRY
was awake for almost all of it. He was the operations officer
working in a room just below the bridge. Chasing down a submarine
wasn't as easy as it looked in the movies. It took hours, even
days, and required sonar and radar and all the other leading-edge
technology of the time.
"He worked at a table with a mechanized control underneath with
lights that calculated the course of the ship. He worked to plot
the course of the submarine we were chasing," said Ray
CREERY,
later a captain in the navy who also served on the Kootenay with
Mr. BERRY during the war. "I don't think he could have had more
than a couple of hours sleep, here and there."
The Kootenay was one of the top submarine hunters in the Royal
Canadian Navy and sub-lieutenant
BERRY was on board for all three
of her kills. The next two U-boat sinkings were in the Bay of
Biscay, on August 18 and
August 20. Mr.
BERRY was mentioned in
dispatches.
When Peter
BERRY joined the Royal Canadian Navy he was assigned
to the Kootenay in the North Atlantic. The warships ran from
Saint John's, Newfoundland., to Londonderry in Northern Ireland.
By chance, he and Mr.
CREERY served on the same ship. They had
been in Grade 7 together at Rockcliffe Park Public School in
Ottawa. The winter of 1943-44 was particularly bitter, and Mr.
CREERY remembers gales so strong that the under-powered merchant
ships they were escorting would make no headway. "We had to go
and round them up and bring them back into the convoy. Maybe
the toughest part was refuelling the warships at sea from tankers."
In the spring of 1944, the Kootenay and other ships were taken
off convoy duty and assigned to Escort Group 11, one of the specialist
submarine hunting groups in preparation for the invasion of Normandy.
There were 126 Canadian vessels involved in D-Day, June 6, 1944.
The Kootenay was patrolling the western approaches to the English
Channel, acting as a blocker against German U-boats.
"Escort Group 11, of which Kootenay was a part, was the most
successful inshore submarine hunting group in the Normandy campaign,"
says Marc Milner, professor of history at the University of New
Brunswick and author of The U-Boat Hunters, The Royal Canadian
Navy and the Offensive against Germany's Submarines.
After the war, Mr.
BERRY stayed in the navy and eventually became
captain of H.M.C.S. Algonquin, a destroyer. The Algonquin was
a V-class destroyer that Canada bought from the Royal Navy. It
remained in service until 1970.
One of his first post-war assignments was on land as flag lieutenant
to Admiral Rollo Mainguy. Part of the time that involved living
in the admiral's house in Halifax. His son, Dan Mainguy, who
also went on to become an admiral, recalls the slightly older
Lieutenant
BERRY and his prodigious appetite. "He would empty
the fridge, eating plates of chicken and huge amounts of ice
cream, but he never gained weight," he said. "He was kind of
unique in that he became a pilot after being an observer. He
served in that wonderful era when we had aircraft carriers."
Mr. BERRY served on many ships in his post-war career, including
H.M.C.S. Magnificent and H.M.C.S. Bonaventure, both aircraft
carriers. Peter
WORTHINGTON, the Toronto Sun columnist, also
served as a naval flier and remembers him as a dashing figure
who managed to remain a bachelor until he was 33.
Peter BERRY was born in Shanghai where his father worked for
Sun Life Insurance. The family returned to Canada when Peter
was about 2. He went to private school, Ashbury College, for
a year or so, but his father thought he was too involved in sports
and so sent him to Lisgar Collegiate. Mr.
BERRY went to Queen's
University to study engineering but quit to join the navy.
After leaving the navy in 1964 with the rank of commander, he
retired to his farm at Milton, just outside Toronto. It was more
than a hobby farm and there the family tended a large flock of
chickens as well a herd of beef cattle. His children remember
he liked to execute navy-style, kitchen haircuts -- much to their
embarrassment when they showed up at school.
Mr. BERRY tried a number of different business ventures, including
a project to build a small submarine that could navigate under
the Arctic ice. He also translated his love of British sports
cars into a car dealership in Mississauga, Ontario One half of
it sold British Leyland products, the other half Volkswagens.
When British Leyland went under, both dealerships closed.
Mr. BERRY had many narrow scrapes throughout life, both in the
navy and in civilian life. In September of 1948, he was an observer
aboard a Fairey Firefly, when it ran off the deck while landing
on H.M.C.S. Magnificent. He and the pilot were picked from the
water. The incident was recorded by someone on deck with a camera.
Many years later, he was helping out on a neighbour's farm when
he severed his arm with a post-hole auger. The arm was later
successfully reattached.
As he was being wheeled into the operating room, Mr.
BERRY quipped
to his wife, "Well, we always wanted a Lord Nelson in the family,"
a reference to the one-armed British Admiral who won the battle
of Trafalgar in 1805.
Peter Cushing
BERRY was born in Shanghai on October 24, 1923.
He died in Milton, Ontario, on February 13, 2006 after complications
from a fall. He leaves his wife, Anne, a daughter and three sons.
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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-03-23 published
Michel CHEVALIER,
Teacher,
Soldier And Businessman (1924-2006)
Quebecker of high-born French origins ended up a professor but
had been a D-Day artilleryman and a political hopeful
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S7
Toronto -- Michel
CHEVALIER did so many different things in life,
he is almost impossible to pigeonhole. He ended as a professor,
earning a PhD in his 40s after having earlier quit university.
Along the way, he was a soldier, a businessman and a somewhat
prescient politician.
The CHEVALIER family was an oddity in Quebec. They came from
France in the 19th century, not the 17th. Michel
CHEVALIER's
grandfather arrived in Montreal to found a branch of the French
financial institution Credit Foncier. Michel's parents distrusted
the influence of the Catholic Church in 1920s Quebec, so they
sent their children to English-language private schools.
His mother, Alice
GEOFFRION, was the daughter of a prominent
Montreal lawyer. One ancestor on that side of the family was
Sir Antoine
DORION, a prominent player in Quebec politics who
was briefly joint premier of the united province of Canada in
August of 1858. In the next decade, he opposed Confederation
but eventually served in a Liberal cabinet and became chief justice
of Quebec.
When the Second World War began, Michel
CHEVALIER was scarcely
15 but keen to get into the thick of the fighting. Many young
men longed to be officers so, a little more than a year later,
he faked his age and qualified for officer training. He graduated
a year later and was eager to head overseas as soon as possible
but ran into a colonel who had known his father during the First
World War.
"You must be Jacques," said the colonel, referring to his older
brother. When the colonel discovered Michel was only 17, he put
a stop to him going overseas.
Michel then resigned his commission and re-enlisted as a private
soldier. He was sent overseas, trained in England and landed
with the 13th Canadian Field Regiment, Royal Canadian artillery,
on D-Day, June 6, 1944. He was wounded twice during fighting
in Europe.
After the war, Mr.
CHEVALIER enrolled at McGill University but
felt too restless for student life and lasted about a month.
It was during this time that he first met his future wife, Jean
MacGREGOR. He proposed marriage after their first meeting. She
turned him down, and he took off on a long trip through Africa
and Latin America. He came home three years later to find she
had changed her mind. For a while, he worked at Alcan in the
public-relations department, where he objected to the lack of
French-speaking smelter managers.
"He pushed so hard, he was fired from Alcan," long-time friend
High Pawson recalled. "He was a forward thinker and called the
shots on what was going to happen in Quebec long before it happened."
It was around then that Mr.
CHEVALIER wrote a rather prescient
letter to a Tory member of Parliament, J.M. Macdonnell, saying
the Progressive Conservatives needed to win support in Quebec
or the country faced the prospect of unending Liberal rule. In
his letter of 1950, he used the old-fashioned term Canadien to
describe Quebeckers. "It is true that the Canadien vote can,
in rare instances, be stampeded away from the Liberals, but there
is no denying that this kind of support scatters just as fast
as it is gathered," Mr.
CHEVALIER wrote, adding that the country
needed a strong second party.
Later, he started his own company, a business that organized
conferences. It was a success, and his brother joined him as
a partner in Chevalier Associates. They worked out of the elegant
Prince of Wales Terrace on Sherbrooke Street (it was later torn
down).
In the mid-1960s, Mr.
CHEVALIER decided to return to school.
He earned a master's degree and then a doctorate in city planning
at the University of Pennsylvania. He returned home to be a professor
at the Université de Montreal in the Institute d'urbanisme. At
the same time, he joined the faculty at Toronto's York University
to teach environmental studies.
"Michel was very focused on ideas and always thinking ahead,"
said Fred Carden, one of Mr.
CHEVALIER's doctoral students at
the Université de Montreal. "For example, he was talking about
horizontal management 10 to 15 years before it became a hot topic
in government circles."
At the same time, Mr.
CHEVALIER became involved in municipal
politics. He worked with the Montreal Citizens Movement, a group
that challenged Jean Drapeau's one-man rule at City Hall, with
good effect. But while they got some new councillors elected,
their number was insufficient to temper the Montreal mayor's
ego and power. Mr. Drapeau went ahead with the 1976 Olympic Games,
which the city and province are still paying off.
On the city level, Mr.
CHEVALIER mostly worked behind the scenes
but did have one foray into organized politics. In 1972, he ran
for the Progressive Conservatives in Argenteuil-Deux-Montagnes,
the federal riding near the confluence of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence
where his family had long owned a farm. He didn't stand much
of chance; his opponent was Francis Fox, a future minister in
Pierre Trudeau's cabinet, and the Liberals swept Quebec to win
56 of 75 seats. He had fallen victim to the very circumstances
he had predicted regarding Liberal hegemony in Quebec.
Much of Mr.
CHEVALIER's childhood and adult life were spent at
a family farm at Oka, Quebec After the troubles at Oka, the family
sold most of the property. Mr.
CHEVALIER left the Université
de Montreal in 1988 but stayed on at York until his retirement
in 1992.
Michel Philippe
CHEVALIER was born in Montreal on July 1, 1924.
He died in Toronto on January 15, 2006, after a long stay in
hospital. He is survived by his wife, Jean, and four children.
He was predeceased by a daughter in 1991.
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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-04-11 published
Ian SINCLAIR,
Last Of
The
Railway Titans: (1913-2006)
He ran Canadian Pacific almost single-handedly, operating the
giant company at a time when it was still the most powerful corporate
force in the country
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S9
He was Canadian Pacific's last titan. Ian
SINCLAIR ran Canadian
Pacific from 1969 to 1981, a time when it was still the most
powerful company in the country and owned everything from the
railway, a shipping line and a hotel chain, to an airline and
oil-and-gas assets. In 1988, he was identified as one of six
Lords of the Line, a book by writer-historians David Cruise and
Alison Griffiths that put him right up there with the first presidents
of Canadian Pacific Railway: George
STEPHEN,
William
VAN
HORNE,
Thomas SHAUGHNESSY,
Edward
BEATTY and Norris Roy (Buck)
CRUMP.
Ian SINCLAIR was a tough and demanding boss at Canadian Pacific
Enterprises. "We don't go to work at Canadian Pacific, we report
for duty," he once said and cracked down on office workers goofing
off in the middle of the day. He did not want to see them loitering
around the concourse of Windsor Station, the head office of the
Canadian Pacific Railway. In his view, being seen in the favourite
public gathering spot of the railway employees outside of lunch
hour or coffee breaks could be a firing offence. Later in his
career, he was known as Big Julie, but it's unlikely anyone ever
called him that to his face.
Unlike many corporate leaders of the day, Mr.
SINCLAIR was outspoken
on public issues and even a bit of a Canadian nationalist. He
got on so well with prime minister Pierre Trudeau that he was
named to the Senate after he retired in 1984.
The empire Ian
SINCLAIR ruled over had started out the Canadian
Pacific Railway. The Canadian Pacific Railway picked up a lot
of its assets in the 19th century, including a land grant of
25 million acres to build the railway. Much of the land was sold
to settlers, but oil was later found on the railway's properties.
Hotels were built along the way, as well as a shipping line to
bring immigrants and goods to Canada. By the time he left, the
railway no longer took passengers, the airline was gone and the
company had strayed so far from its roots that it had invested
in huge swathes of forest. The trees were a mistake but, even
so, Ian SINCLAIR had increased the assets of the Canadian Pacific
Railway and made it easier for the company to be broken into
five pieces in 2003.
Mr. SINCLAIR rose to prominence under Buck
CRUMP.
Both men were
tough and confident leaders of Canada's greatest company. Mr.
SINCLAIR
joined Canadian Pacific Railway in 1942 in Winnipeg. His father
had come from Scotland to work in the repair shops of the Grand
Trunk Railway, one of the railways that made up rival Canadian
National. Ian
SINCLAIR went to the University of Manitoba, where
he took a degree in economics and then another in law.
His first job at the Canadian Pacific Railway was as an assistant
solicitor and he quickly made his mark. Four years later, he
moved to head office at Windsor Station in Montreal. Mr.
SINCLAIR
was known as the Perry Mason of railway law, for his resemblance
to the burly television lawyer and for his dogged defence of
railway interests in a series of royal commissions and tribunals.
At that time, it was still a railway world. Mr.
SINCLAIR and
other top executives would travel across the country in private
railway cars kept on sidings in Windsor Station. Ian
SINCLAIR
straddled the era of the steam engine and the diesel locomotive
a struggle with the unions over who was to man the trains was
one of his great victories.
The job, as he saw it, was to get rid of firemen. Steam engines
required an engineer to drive the train and a fireman to feed
the boiler. With the end of steam and the introduction of diesel
electric trains, there was no need for firemen, but the union
contract still called for them. It was a textbook case of feather-bedding.
Mr. SINCLAIR won his case against the unions and the firemen
were gone. In 1960, he became vice-president of law at Canadian
Pacific Railway. He was next put in charge of the operating and
traffic departments, so that by the time he was made president
in 1969 there wasn't a piece of the railway he didn't know. He
was 52.
Mr. SINCLAIR was a textbook workaholic who read the Globe and
Mail and Report on Business first thing every morning and loved
his job. "Some people may think that work is distasteful, but
not I. I'm very happy when I work," said Mr.
SINCLAIR. To him,
running Canadian Pacific Railway was a group exercise. "Sometimes,
we have our disappointments and we back off and take another
look. Then we solve something -- when we make it good -- that's
when work's most enjoyable."There were many problems to solve
at the start of his reign. Canadian Pacific Railway wanted to
get out of the passenger business. People were using highways
and planes to get around and railways across the continent were
dying. As a result, Via Rail was born as a merger of the passenger
services of Canadian Pacific and Canadian National.
That did not mean there weren't profitable parts of the business.
In 1958, Canadian Pacific Oil and Gas, the predecessor to PanCanadian
Petroleum -- later Encana -- was formed with the purpose of reassembling
the land, which had been leased to oil companies.
Four years later, Mr.
CRUMP created a subsidiary called Canadian
Pacific Investments, which was given all of Canadian Pacific's
non-transportation assets (a structure designed to keep those
interests off limits when Canadian Pacific had to undergo review
by federal regulators). The new subsidiary's mandate was to acquire
and develop resource operations.
The chief architect in the execution of this was Mr.
SINCLAIR,
who oversaw a period of unprecedented growth at Canadian Pacific.
At the start of 1970, Canadian Pacific's asset value was $2.2-billion.
A decade later, it was $13-billion, a spectacular growth even
allowing for inflation. In the same period, Canadian Pacific's
annual revenues swelled to $10-billion from $616-million, moving
Canadian Pacific to No. 1 from No. 6 in the corporate size sweepstakes.
And he did it all in a way that is denied today's corporate executives.
David O'BRIEN, the last man to run the entire Canadian Pacific
empire, said in 2001 that life was different for Chairman
SINCLAIR.
"I knew Ian
SINCLAIR when I was a young boy. I don't think he
met with more than three analysts the whole time he was running
Canadian
Pacific," said Mr.
O'BRIEN. "
Now, they're banging down
your door every day."
Though Mr.
SINCLAIR became a politician late in life, he was
often frustrated by politics. In particular, he disliked the
victory of the separatist government in Quebec and how it had
hollowed out the business centre of Montreal. One after the other,
companies fled for Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver.
Corporate▼ chronicler Peter Newman told a story of visiting Mr.
SINCLAIR
in his office at Windsor station and interviewing him across
the giant oak desk once owned by Sir William
VAN
HORNE, the man
who built the Canadian Pacific Railway. Mr. Newman asked him
about the corporate exodus from Montreal.
"What's left in Montreal?" bellowed Mr.
SINCLAIR, pounding his
desk. "This damn desk."
That gruff personality was usually misunderstood, his daughter,
Christine SINCLAIR, said yesterday. "In fact, he was a shy person
and had trouble approaching people unless he already knew them."
She said he enjoyed gardening, particularly roses, and revelled
in chopping wood. "He loved to see a cord of word stacked neatly."
All things considered, Mr.
SINCLAIR probably would have taken
to retirement earlier if Mr. Trudeau had not come calling. In
1983, Mr. SINCLAIR was made Senator
SINCLAIR, just as he was
leaving Canadian Pacific after 42 years. He surprised many of
his corporate Friends by supporting the National Energy Policy
and fighting free trade. He said the Americans were protectionist.
Mr. SINCLAIR was one of the toughest businessmen of his generation,
and one of the most colourful. He stood well over six feet and
once weighed as much as 240 pounds, bringing columnist Allan
Fotheringham to describe him as "a linebacker who stumbled into
the chairman's office by mistake."
For that, he did commit some spectacular errors. The man who
engineered Canadian Pacific's enormous growth also made giant
blunders. Among his mistakes was a missed opportunity to buy
MacMillan Bloedel in 1979. A proposed buyout of the forestry
giant prompted a corporate brawl between premier William Bennett
and Mr. SINCLAIR. "B.C. is not for sale," declared Mr. Bennett,
who had visions that MacMillan Bloedel would become little more
than a branch office of the Montreal company whose railway had
opened up the West.
Years later, Mr. Bennett confided that Mr.
SINCLAIR had rubbed
him up the wrong way -- much too arrogant, he said.
Another mistake was Mr.
SINCLAIR's 1981 attempt to buy Hobart
Corp. of Ohio, the appliance maker. For years, Canadian Pacific
had wanted to establish a manufacturing arm, and by all accounts
it was to be the foundation of that core business. Reports at
the time suggested Mr.
SINCLAIR mishandled the situation.
For all that, he didn't make many mistakes in office. While other
North American railways failed in the transition from steam,
Mr. SINCLAIR did his job -- he made Canadian Pacific hugely profitable.
Ian David SINCLAIR was born in Winnipeg on December 27, 1913.
He died on Oakville, Ontario, on April 7, 2006. He was 92. His
wife Ruth died in 1994. He is survived by his four children,
Ian, Susan, Christine and Donald.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-05-06 published
Don CAMERON,
Broadcaster: (1923-2006)
Master of the 'insert commercial' parlayed his well-modulated
tones into a successful career in radio and television
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S11
Long before television came to Canada, and decades before simulcasting,
which replaces U.S. ads with Canadian commercials when programs
run at the same time, there was the insert commercial in radio.
Don CAMERON was master of the insert commercial, a skill that
required flawless timing to squeeze a Canadian ad in, replacing
the American one.
"Insert commercials were unique to Canadian network radio. All
commercials for food and drugs had to conform to Canadian rules,"
says Lyman Potts, a broadcast historian. "While the U.S. announcer
read his piece, the Canadian announcer, at a point of entry,
usually Montreal or Toronto, read the approved Canadian commercial
for Canadian audiences of the U.S. network program."
The insert commercial phase of Mr.
CAMERON's career lasted 10 years.
He was 21 when he started, but within a decade he was commuting
between Canada and the United States, doing radio and later television
programs, and making serious money doing commercials and voiceover
work in New York.
Don CAMERON grew up in downtown Montreal on Chomedy Street near
the Montreal Forum. His father ran a moving and delivery business
called Mansfield Express. The family lived a comfortable existence.
Young Don went to Montreal High, several blocks to the east.
To get there, he would have walked along Sherbrooke Street past
fashionable stores and the shops of shirt makers and tailors.
It was perhaps there he picked up some pointers on style. All
his adult life, Mr.
CAMERON was an immaculate dresser.
Few people went to university in 1940 -- there were only 35,000 undergraduates
in the entire country -- but Mr.
CAMERON went to McGill, where
he graduated in commerce. Although he was a radio and television
performer all his life, Mr.
CAMERON was a canny businessman,
and always lived well.
"He was very astute. A dollar didn't slip by him," said Walter
Gurd, who knew Mr.
CAMERON as a young man when they played in
various bands together in Montreal. This was before the era of
disc jockeys, and a live band was a must at dances.
While studying finance at McGill, he took acting and voice lessons
on the side from Rupert Caplan, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
producer. Mr.
CAMERON landed a job as a part-time announcer at
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation while he was still at McGill,
the studio being about halfway between McGill and home.
The acting training came in handy. In the 1950s, Mr.
CAMERON
landed a part-time job playing a role in daily Canadian soap
opera, Laura Ltd.
After McGill, he worked for a short time at the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation but then joined
CJAD, a new private radio station,
when it opened in late 1945.
Soon he was the host of a popular program called Make Believe
Ballroom. The show, which originated in New York in the early
1940s, was copied across North America. There was always a local
announcer, inserting local colour and choosing the music.
The program started with Glenn Miller's Make Believe Ballroom
Time. "In Canada, both Toronto and Montreal have their own sessions
of the Ballroom running about an hour and half in the morning
and from to two to 2½ hours in the evening," wrote Mr.
CAMERON
in 1946. "The morning program should contain bright, peppy music
to brighten up the day for housewives. A somewhat different approach
is used on the evening… to supply pleasant background when people
eat."
This was when radio had no competition from television and wouldn't
for another six years. Mr.
CAMERON's description of his job comes
from a guest column he wrote in the weekly Montreal Standard.
He was replacing the then-unknown Mavis Gallant while she was
on vacation. It was a breezy column and centred on Mr.
CAMERON's
two main loves: broadcasting and making money.
"Most disc jockeys earn a guaranteed basic salary, but as an
incentive, some stations pay a commission for each new sponsor
added to the program. Thus… a Canadian disc jockey's income can
range anywhere from $2,500 to $12,000." That is $29,700 to $142,400
in today's money.
Soon, Mr. CAMERON was making that kind of money, commuting to
both Toronto and New York. In Manhattan, he did live and recorded
commercials for major clients such as Kraft, and Proctor and
Gamble. He did so well, for a couple of years he kept an apartment
in Manhattan.
Back in Toronto, he became the announcer on The Billy O'Connor
Show, which starred Juliette, who would later have her own television
program on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Later, she
was replaced by Sylvia Murphy, who remained a friend of Mr.
CAMERON's
all his life. Both of them stayed with the program when it moved
to television.
The radio version of The Billy O'Connor Show was recorded on
giant 16-inch vinyl discs -- holding 15 minutes a side -- and
shipped across Canada so it could be played at the same time
in every part of the country. The disc was called an "electrical
transcription." The government regulator of the day tried to
ban the technology to try to keep out U.S. radio programming.
Mr. CAMERON was also the host of the Canadian version of To Tell
The Truth, featuring three guests, only one of whom was the real
person. He also commuted to Cleveland for 10 years to host a
weekly quiz show on television there.
In 1966, he started working for
CKFM in Toronto and stayed, hosting
his own afternoon broadcast until 1991. "Don
CAMERON was a product
of the era that gave us such classic announcers as Charles Jennings
[Peter Jennings's father], Jack Dennett, Earl
CAMERON,
Elwood
Glover and Frank Willis," said Mr. Potts.
"They were articulate with modulated, quiet, dramatic voices
that enabled their listeners to hear every word."
Throughout his career, Don
CAMERON dabbled in business and looked
after his money. In the early 1960s, he invested in the Canadian
rights for Ko-Rec-Type, chemically treated paper that allowed
typists to correct mistakes. He also had his own production company,
packaging radio programs and acting as an agent for other announcers.
Mr. CAMERON and his wife spent a lot of time travelling. He always
liked to spend September in London. For many years they had a
place in the Bahamas at Spanish Wells, but they sold when they
found the trip to the Caribbean too taxing. He spent winters
in Vero Beach, Florida
Donald CAMERON was born on September 19, 1923, in Montreal. Although
he gave up smoking 15 years ago, he died of complications from
lung cancer on April 7 at a hospital in Oakville, Ontario He
was 82. He wife, Bea, died several years ago. He is survived
by a brother John, from whom he was estranged. He loved London,
England, and asked that his ashes be spread on the River Thames.
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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-06-26 published
Jim McDANIEL,
Telecommunications
Expert (1918-2006)
He started off by delivering telegrams on a bike and then sent
them via Morse code. He rose to the heights of
CNCP communications
and embraced the Telex, fax machines, computers and the cellphone
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S8
Toronto -- Jim
McDANIEL was one of the best-known faces on Canadian
television during the 1970s and 1980s. He was a paid-up member
of Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists
but never worked for a network. He did appear in a long-running
series of commercials promoting Telex, then the fastest way for
companies to send messages to each other.
He had a rugged face, more that of a character actor than a leading
man, and a trademark brush cut. He would walk straight up to
the camera and announce: "This is Jim
McDANIEL for Telex," and
then go on to tout the product from
CNCP
Telecommunications.
Mr. McDANIEL's face was as familiar as Don Cherry's is now, popping
up between periods on Hockey Night in Canada and as a regular
spot in the first commercial break on The National. When he first
decided to retire in 1983, Telex was still king, pumping out
messages between corporations and banks and business offices
everywhere at six characters a second. Mr.
McDANIEL left just
as the fax machine came in.
"The fax killed the Telex business. It used to be a $150-million-a-year
business. It dropped off in just a few years to almost nothing,"
Mr. McDANIEL said. He worked for the same company for well over
60 years. He came back after his first retirement and worked
into his 80s, always for a different version of the same company,
which morphed from Canadian National Railways to
CNCP
Telecommunications
and then to Unitel. It is now a part of Rogers Communications
Inc.
Jim McDANIEL was a working-class lad from Toronto. His father
was a senior construction foreman who worked on such projects
as the Bowater Plant in Corner Brook and the Bloor Street viaduct
in Toronto. He died when Jim was just 7, which meant he had to
start work early in life. He went to Danforth Technical School,
but only as far as Grade 9. His first job was delivering telegrams
by bicycle in downtown Toronto for the Canadian National Railway.
"He rode the bicycle 365 days a year, and winters were a lot
harsher back then," said his son Grant.
His pay was $8 a week, though he also got tips. After three years
he became an office boy, working a split shift. "They were legal
back then," Mr.
McDANIEL told an interviewer in 1995.
He started at 8 in the morning, stayed until noon and then resumed
at 5 and worked until 9. In his spare afternoon, he studied typing
and how to transmit Morse code. Instead of delivering telegrams,
he learned how to send them.
Mr. McDANIEL quickly moved up the ladder so that by the end of
the 1930s he was a telegrapher. His salary tripled to $24 a week.
He developed the fastest telegraph "fist" in the company. In
his late 70s, he still kept an old sending key on his desk and
liked to show visitors just how fast he could rattle out a message.
During the war, Mr.
McDANIEL joined the Royal Canadian Air Force
and was sent off to aircrew training school in Manitoba. There,
someone discovered his skills with the telegraph key. Anyone
who could pump out that many words in Morse code was a valuable
wartime asset.
He was promptly shipped off to Washington where he took a course
in how to manage codes, coming top in his class. After that,
he became a cypher clerk, communicating in code from generals
in the field and sending them to their military and political
masters in Washington.
"It's pretty exciting to know about the invasion of Sicily three
weeks in advance," Mr.
McDANIEL recalled.
The war changed his life in many ways. Later, it would launch
him on his career in sales and then television. But, first off,
it taught him that to keep his mind sharp he needed to keep his
body in shape. During the war, young men spent a lot of their
spare time drinking.
"We used to spend too much time staying up late at night," Mr.
McDANIEL
said. So one morning he walked into a gym in Washington and was
hooked on exercising. He went through a strict physical regimen
right up until the last months of his life. It showed. Even in
his late 80s, when Jim
McDANIEL took his shirt off, he had a
wiry, muscled physique that shamed men 60 years younger.
Back in civilian life after the war, he moved quickly through
the ranks, at one stage taking the 1950s equivalent of a executive
M.B.A., a compressed course in everything someone would need
to know to be a manager. All of a sudden, the telegram delivery
boy had become general sales manager for
CNCP telecommunications.
One of his big assignments was helping sell and then supervise
the installation of the first computer messaging system for Trans
Canada Airlines, which became Air Canada. Just after it was installed
in 1964, much of Canada was fogged in and the airline was able
to track its aircraft as never before.
Then came the move from selling face to face to selling on television.
"I didn't know anything about advertising," Mr.
McDANIEL said
modestly. "But they put me in charge."
After a while, he was put on camera. Along the way he also became
a public spokesman for
CNCP and the Telex business. He travelled
across Canada making speeches, using his familiar face and open
personality to boost the company's image.
Mr. McDANIEL didn't retire for long. For a while he was a computer
ombudsman for a group called the Canadian Information Processing
Society. "I have in my heart a sensitivity of how bewildering
all this new technology is for people who know little about computers
but are affected by them," he said at the time.
With a staff of six volunteers, he handled complaints from the
public and small-business owners who were experiencing problems
with a computer. Organized into local chapters, Canadian Information
Processing Society had 4,500 members across the country.
"I'm not going to be a knight riding a horse with a spear," he
said of his new job. "The computer ombudsman is sort of a court
of last resort to appeal to if someone is threatened or confused
by this faceless device."
He then went back to work, as a sales consultant. He moved from
Telex to selling dedicated fax lines and then switched to high-speed
data lines to promoting the use of the personal computer, predicting
they would reduce office drudgery, which they did.
Many of his postretirement years were spent fighting the Bell
Canada telephone monopoly. He made speeches, travelled to Ottawa
and lobbied, and used his media image to promote competition.
One of his most satisfying successes was helping to bring competitive
long-distance calls to Newfoundland in 1993, the year Unitel
won the right to provide that service in the province.
Before the introduction of the cellphone in Canada in 1985, Mr.
McDANIEL
led a CNCP
Cellular
Communications bid for a licence. Eventually,
he worked for Rogers after it took over the company.
Mr. McDANIEL was an early riser. For many years he was the first
man in the gym at the Cambridge Club in downtown Toronto. He
would park his Cadillac on York Street around 5 a.m., work out
in the gym and then be back to pick up his car before the 7 a.m.
no-parking curtain came down. Always a snappy dresser, he usually
allowed himself at least one good cigar a day, and could be seen
in the downtown business district enjoying a puff on his way
from lunch.
He was a keen golfer and helped run the Toronto Hunt Club course.
He was also a devout Roman Catholic and went to mass before going
to the gym on Sundays.
James Christian
McDANIEL was born in Toronto on March 27, 1918.
He died of cancer in Toronto on June 18, 2006. He was 88. He
is survived by his wife, Carol Ann, and by his children, Marc,
Sandra, Michelle, Valerie and Grant.
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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-06-30 published
Wesley HILL,
Riverman: (1930-2006)
He knew Niagara Falls almost from the day he was born and pulled
more than 450 people out of the Niagara River -- most of them
dead
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S9
Wesley HILL was a riverman, the last of the line in his family.
He saved 50 people from drowning in the Niagara River, and pulled
out at least 400 bodies. He helped his father put a rope around
a body in the river when he was 9 or 10 years old.
He knew Niagara, the falls and the river, almost from the day
he was born. He was a baby in his mother's arms watching from
the shore as his father tried to run the rapids of the Niagara
River below the falls, the most dangerous stunt next to going
over Niagara Falls itself. Red
HILL had pulled it off once before,
but this time he almost died.
The design of his barrel was too heavy and he was caught in the
vortex of the whirlpool below the falls. He was trapped there
for two hours as his barrel slowly filled with water. At one
point he waved a distress signal -- a Union Jack -- but his death
seemed certain.
His son, Red Jr., put a rope around his waist and went into the
water and attached a hook to the barrel, then swam back to shore.
It took 12 men to pull Red Sr. to safety.
Twenty years later Wes
HILL, by now an experienced riverman,
warned his brother not to go over Niagara Falls in a makeshift
contraption called "The Thing." It was a collection of 13 giant
inner tubes, canvas straps and fishing net, which Red Jr. thought
would be light enough to float over the water.
As Pierre Berton tells the story in his book, Niagara, his older
brother Red Jr. was on his way to the Rapids Tavern to fortify
himself with a few beers before his attempt to go over the falls.
"I'll see you later," said Red. "No you won't," replied Wes.
It was August 5, 1951. Red
HILL went over the Falls with 200,000 spectators
on the shore of the river and the falls. His "Thing" was smashed
on the rocks. Red
HILL
Jr.'s broken body was found the next day.
It was after this that the Niagara Parks Commission barred any
more stunts. The fine for an attempt is $10,000.
"He thought he could make a little money. I told him the contraption
was so light that it would hit the water and stop and he'd shoot
right out of it and that's what happened," said Mr.
HILL.
Another brother, Major (a name, not a rank) tried to go over
the falls but ran aground on his way. He died while in jail on
a minor offence. Still another brother, Corky, worked on the
construction of a tunnel for a hydroelectric project. On the
second day on the job he was struck by a falling rock and killed.
Wes HILL always said he had no patience with people trying to
go over the falls. "I'll never have anything to do with these
stunts. It's a better life working for a living."
Some of the work he did on the river involved consulting for
movies. He worked on Blues Brothers 2000, Canadian Bacon and
documentaries such as Niagara: Miracles, Myths and Magic. To
get a view of what it would be like to go over the falls, he
helped design a system using eight aluminum barrels each holding
a camera. They all survived the 53-metre drop into the gorge.
One man went over the falls wearing just a parka and lived to
talk about it. Kirk
JONES went over the falls in October of 2003.
Wes HILL said he wasn't that surprised.
"For years I said it was going to happen. I said somebody is
going to go over and live," he told The New York Times. But he
said it was a fluke. He had already pulled out two deer and dog
that went over and lived. The secret is to go over near the banks.
"If you go over in the middle, you've got tons of water coming
on top of you."
All the attempts involved the larger Canadian Horseshoe Falls.
No one could survive a drop over the American side, which has
house-sized boulders piled up against the face of the waterfall.
The HILL family were "rivermen" who knew the dangerous waters
and gorges of Niagara Falls and the Niagara River so well that
when there was trouble the
HILLs were called. Wes
HILL's grandfather
was the first. He worked as a gardener for the Niagara Parks
Commission and became a volunteer rescuer, or riverman. Some
of the money for the work came from undertakers who paid $50 to
$75 for a retrieved body.
But they saved the living too. Red
HILL
Sr. won four lifesaving
medals, thought to be a record. He used his knowledge of the
rivers near Niagara for more than rescue work. He was a rum runner
during Prohibition. Mr.
HILL said his father told him that if
the U.S. Coast Guard came too close they would dump the liquor
overboard.
"I remember scuba diving the river in 1955. We found bottles
of whisky with the corks still in them. It tried the stuff. It
tasted strong -- real strong," Mr.
HILL told The Globe about
10 years ago.
Wes HILL was the last of the family to work the river, pulling
people -- most of them dead -- from the Niagara River after they
had been carried over the falls.
Niagara Falls has had a reputation as a honeymoon capital since
the 19th century. On a visit in 1882, the writer Oscar Wilde
quipped: "Niagara Falls must be the second major disappointment
of American married life." But the falls also vies with the Golden
Gate bridge in San Francisco as the suicide capital of North
America.
About 20 people a year end their lives by going over the falls.
The favourite time is in the late afternoon, the favourite day
Monday and the most popular month is September. The number isn't
exact because some slip into the water unnoticed and their bodies
are never found.
About 10 years ago, high-powered jet boats replaced some of the
daring work done by men like Wes
HILL.
Until then they had their
techniques for picking up a body. Wait.
"The body would be in the centre of the whirlpool and it would
go round and round," Mr.
HILL told an interviewer. "We had to
wait until it came close enough to shore, maybe 100 to 150 feet,
then swim out and put a rope on it."
Wesley HILL was brought up in Niagara Falls. His father died
when he was young and he left school at 16 and went to work at
the Niagara Wire Weaving plant, running a machine that made gear
for the giant hydroelectric systems around Niagara. When that
plant closed he moved on to other local factories.
But he was known for what he did away from the factory.
"He did volunteer rescue work on the river," said his wife Sarah,
who is modest about her husband's achievements. "And for the
last eight years he worked part time for the park police."
Although Wesley
HILL came from a line of daredevils, he did not
approve of stunts. In the past 20 years two men each went over
the falls twice and lived.
"It's been conquered time and time again. If someone else conquers
it, he's not a hero. He's a fool."
Wesley Bryant
HILL was born in Niagara Falls, Ontario, on May 14,
1930. He died of a blood clot in Niagara Falls on June 12. He
was 76. He is survived by his wife Sarah, his daughter Diane
and his three sons, Douglas, Daniel and David, none of whom are
rivermen.
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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-07-15 published
Carol ERB-
GINGERICH,
Aid
Worker (1939-2006)
To the fierce tribesman of Afghanistan, she was the 'vision woman'
and was left to do her work unmolested. For years, she helped
restore the sight of thousands of people in East Africa, Ethiopia,
and Central Asia
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S9
Toronto -- Carol
ERB-
GINGERICH left the security of life in small-town
Ontario to help people in some of the most desperate places in
the world. She chose to work in countries that were not only
poor, but often destabilized by wars, famine and drought.
She spent 20 years in the field -- and another 13 in Canada --
helping tens of thousands of children and adults avoid blindness
and curing people who were otherwise destined to lose their sight
due to otherwise preventable disease.
Ms. ERB-
GINGERICH lived most of her time overseas in Afghanistan
and Ethiopia. In both places she found herself in the middle
of a war zone and each time was forced to leave.
Her longest tour of duty was in Afghanistan. She first went there
in 1975 with the Christian Blind Mission International. The group
had an arrangement with Muslim authorities there: They could
do medical work, but they must not to try to convert anyone to
Christianity.
She worked for almost 10 years in Afghanistan, living in Kabul
near the mission's main clinic, but also travelling to remote
parts of the country where she saw hundreds of people a day for
treatment of eye diseases.
"She would go out into tribal areas, which were quite dangerous.
The tribes knew she was the vision woman and left her alone."
said Dave McComiskey, the executive director of Christian Blind
Mission International Canada. "She was very brave."
The Christian Blind Mission describes itself as "the leading
agency in the world preventing and curing blindness as well as
enabling people with disabilities in the poorest countries of
the world, regardless of race, gender, age or religion." It has
performed six million cataract operations and runs 1,000 programs
in 102 countries.
Although untrained in medicine, Ms.
ERB-
GINGERICH learned how
to help patients in the clinics. While she made her opinions
known if she disagreed with how the organization was being run,
she went out of her way to be kind to the people she was helping.
One day in Afghanistan, a widow invited her to her home for dinner
after Ms. ERB-
GINGERICH had treated one of her children. However,
the Canadian aid worker had to put off the visit for two or three
days. Ms. ERB-
GINGERICH later told her family that the woman
was poor beyond the imaginings of Canadians, but had spent her
money on an egg. She had cooked it and put it aside on a window
ledge. When the Canadian aid worker arrived days later, it was
still there, covered in flies.
"She prayed that she wouldn't be sick as she ate it, not wanting
to hurt the woman's feelings and knowing what a sacrifice she
had made to cook her the meal," her brother, Phil
ERB, said.
"She managed to get through it."
In 1979, the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and many
aid workers packed up and left. Ms.
ERB-
GINGERICH was determined
to stay, and continued her work. However, in 1981, after two
of its workers were slain, the charity recalled its staff and
Ms. ERB-
GINGERICH returned to Canada.
Carol ERB was born into a Mennonite family near Goderich in Southwestern
Ontario. Her brother said the family was religious, but not strict.
"We're of Amish descent but we have cars, use electricity and
drive tractors," Mr.
ERB said. "Carol didn't force her beliefs
on anyone, but she was a religious person and had an extremely
strong faith."
Young Carol lived an idyllic rural life, working on the family
dairy farm. She went to high school at Clinton Collegiate Institute
and afterward started work at Gingerich Sales and Service, an
appliance dealer in nearby Zurich. A Gingerich son would become
her husband several years later.
One
Sunday in 1972, Ms.
ERB went to the Mennonite service at
her local church and heard a sermon about how people should try
to make a difference in the world. She was so moved by the message
that, first, she volunteered with the Mennonite Central Committee
in Canada, and then worked for the Christian Blind Mission overseas.
Her first overseas job came in 1975 when she was made an assistant
to the medical director of the Noor Eye Institute. Funded in
part by Queen Noor of Jordan, the agency helped people in poor
countries, many of them Muslim. She soon started working in the
clinics in the field.
Most eye diseases people suffer from in poor countries are easily
treatable, such as river blindness, which is caused by a parasitical
worm that is spread by a fly, which breeds in fast-flowing rivers.
The fly transmits the disease when it bites humans, inserting
the eggs under the skin that produce thousands of larvae, which
spread throughout the body, including the eyes.
Another disease is trachoma, which spreads easily within families.
Infection commonly occurs in childhood and eventually causes
the eyelashes to turn inward, scarring the cornea.
Cataracts are also commonplace. One of the basic treatments for
children is a capsule of vitamin A, which lasts for three months
and protects against cataracts.
Through the charity, Ms.
ERB-
GINGERICH would arrange for cataract
operations at a cost of $33 for a lens, an impossible amount
for most people in countries such as Afghanistan and Ethiopia
where the average person earns about $3 a day.
While Ms. ERB-
GINGERICH was in Muslim countries she tried to
keep to local customs, dressing modestly and covering her hair.
For all that, she did allow that some of attitudes toward women
bothered her.
"She was a little bit of a rebel," said her brother, remembering
his sister's quick wit. "Once, an Afghan man asked her why her
face wasn't covered. She said she felt like telling him if she
had a face like his she would cover it up."
On another occasion in Kabul, a taxi driver was taking her to
an eye clinic when he was stopped by a policemen who threatened
him and took his receipts for the day. Ms.
ERB-
GINGERICH, who
spoke the language, asked the officers to stop but they ignored
her. Later, when she arrived at the clinic she paid the taxi
driver his fare, plus the amount the police had taken from him.
The taxi driver burst into tears and asked her, "Why are you
doing this for me?" She replied, "Because God loves you."
After she returned to Canada from Afghanistan in 1981 she renewed
her Friendship with Cyril
GINGERICH, whose family ran the store
where she had once worked. The couple married in December of
1983. Rather than return to life at the store, Cyril joined his
wife on her missions to combat blindness and
in January of 1984
they spent their honeymoon travelling to Ethiopia.
Once there, the pair worked out of Addis Ababa as regional representatives
of the Christian Blind Mission International. With Ethiopia as
a base, they supported and worked in clinics throughout East
Africa, helping more than 40 Christian Blind Mission International
projects. They remained until 1991, when rebels overthrew the
Ethiopian government.
"Carol and Cyril were in the middle of the fighting and, once
again, she found herself forced out of a country where she wanted
to work," Mr. McComiskey said.
Eight years later, her husband died suddenly and Ms.
ERB-
GINGERICH
decided to return to work in Pakistan and Afghanistan. She continued
to work in clinics helping the blind, but also became more intensely
involved in the lives of some Afghan families.
"She met some Afghan refugees who were frightened of the Taliban
and had fled to Pakistan. One of them had been beaten because
his beard wasn't long enough," Mr.
ERB said. "She helped two
families of refugees come to Canada. They are still here and
leading productive lives."
Two days after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United
States, Ms.
ERB-
GINGERICH was removed from Peshawar in Pakistan.
The next year, she returned to Afghanistan and was shocked by
what she found.
"As I write this report, I'm in Kabul, a city where 58 per cent
of the people have not lived longer than five years. It's a city
of refugees… It's over 28 years since I first arrived in this
beautiful country. There are no landmarks that I recognize because
so many areas are completely bombed out. As I walked through
my former place of work, which was once a beautiful 100-bed eye
hospital, I wept."
One of the last things Ms.
ERB-
GINGERICH did was to organize
a conference in Kabul to launch an eye-care program aimed at
abolishing preventable blindness in Afghanistan by the year 2020.
Throughout her decades of work in poor countries, Ms.
ERB-
GINGERICH
lived a simple, austere life. Her brother remembered she had
a favourite aphorism: "God will never ask you how many clothes
you have in your closet. But he'll ask you how many people you
helped to clothe."
Carol ERB-
GINGERICH was born on October 23, 1939, in Stanley
Township, Ontario She died of cancer in Zurich, Ontario, on June 5,
2006. She leaves five sisters, including her twin, and two brothers.
Christian Blind Mission International Canada has named a scholarship
fund in her honour.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-09-11 published
Brian NOLAN:
Producer,
Teacher And Writer (1932-2006)
With his friend Peter
JENNINGS, he was among a corps of Canadian
broadcasters who took American networks by storm. He returned
home to help transform the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
and to teach at Carleton University
By F.F. LANGAN,
Page
S11
Toronto -- Brian
NOLAN was only a few metres away when Jack Ruby
shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas police station at 11: 26
on the morning of November 24, 1963. He was the CTV field
producer working with Peter
JENNINGS, then a 25-year-old reporter,
and cameraman Larry Brown.
It was one of the most dramatic moments in the lives of the three
men who had rushed from Ottawa to Dallas to cover the assassination
of U.S. President John Kennedy. Their work soon found Mr.
JENNINGS
and Mr. NOLAN working for ABC News in New York. They were
in the vanguard of many Canadians who worked in U.S. television
news. Their training and, for on-air people, their neutral accents
made Canadians ideal candidates for the Am-Nets, as the American
networks are known in the television biz.
On some assignments, their Canadian passports did not hurt either.
One of Mr.
NOLAN's big television scoops was the Soviet suppression
of Prague Spring -- the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in
August of 1968. He and a German cameraman, Jorg Weiland, filmed
Soviet tanks in the streets of Prague and managed to get their
footage over the frontier when it was closed to all other crews.
Anchored by Mr.
JENNINGS, it was broadcast from ABC's London
bureau as a U.S. television exclusive.
Mr. NOLAN's career included much more than a four-year stint
with a U.S. network. He was a pioneer in television news in Canada
and worked for all three Canadian networks: the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation -- where he was a producer on This Hour Has Seven
Days in the mid-1960s -- CTV and Global.
In 1972, he wrote the Nolan Report for Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation News in which he suggested changes that had already
been adapted by U.S. networks, such as the use of satellites
to bring news material from overseas instead of shipping reports
by air. "It is inconceivable that the corporation would demand
that its radio news service collect overseas news by mail instead
of using transoceanic circuits," Mr.
NOLAN wrote. "In essence,
this is what the present policy demands of the television news
service."
Many of his suggestions were subtle, such as the use of actuality
sound from the field instead of silent footage or, even worse
in his view, phony sound effects. Most were ideas that could
come only from someone with a real understanding of television
news. "Almost all his recommendations came to pass. He was quite
prophetic," said Bill
CUNNINGHAM, a foreign correspondent and
chief news editor of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation at
the time.
A true television pioneer, Mr.
NOLAN was a field producer before
anyone even came up with the name. A field producer travels with
a camera crew and a reporter to make editorial decisions, and
also figures out such logistical problems as how to get the footage
to a "feed point" where it can actually make it on to a newscast.
"NOLAN almost invented the job of field producer. And he was
one of the first television producers to use the bird [satellite]
on a daily basis to put Peter
JENNINGS on the air from London
for the ABC nightly newscast," Mr.
CUNNINGHAM said. "He was
known to be so honest that producers from the other networks
trusted him to run the satellite pool feeds because they knew
he wouldn't cheat them out of their satellite time."
Brian NOLAN grew up in Hamilton, Ontario His father, Joe
NOLAN,
was a plumber and a local legend known as Pike who played for
the Hamilton Tigers, as one of the two professional football
teams in the city was known at the time.
As a young man, Brian joined the U.S. Army "for the adventure,"
as he later told one of his sons. His unit was about to be shipped
to Korea when he was plucked out of the infantry and given a
job of writing for Stars and Stripes, the U.S. military newspaper.
He did end up in the Korean War, but as a solider-reporter rather
than as a combatant.
In 1953, he returned to Hamilton to settle into his old life
and wonder what to do next.
"He was sitting in a pool hall reading a book when one of the
regulars came over to him and said 'I've never seen anyone in
here reading. Do you want a job at a newspaper?' " said his son
Philip, in recounting the family legend of how his father landed
his first newspaper job. "He started work at The Hamilton Spectator."
Mr. NOLAN stayed at the Spectator for three years as a police
reporter, sports reporter and general news reporter and the left
to work for the Hamilton radio station CHML. He liked to
tell a studio story about one night in February of 1959 when
a plane crash killed the rock 'n roll stars Buddy Holly, Richie
Valens and the Big Bopper, a Texas disk jockey turned singer
whose real name was Jiles P. Richardson. Mr.
NOLAN had wanted
to break into the regular programming to make a news flash, but
the sportscaster, an older man with no appreciation for young
rock stars, refused. By all accounts, something close to a fist
fight occurred before the bulletin finally went to air.
In 1961, Mr.
NOLAN moved to his first television job and joined
CTV News, which produced its national newscast out of CJOH
in Ottawa. It was there that he teamed up with the young Mr.
JENNINGS.
They travelled all over North America with forays into Europe.
One of Mr.
NOLAN's first big stories was the building of the
Berlin Wall. As field producer, he also doubled as a second cameraman,
carrying a Swiss-made, 16-mm Bolex camera. It was lightweight
and held just a little more three minutes worth of film, but
its quality added something to his reports. On November 29, 1963,
Mr. NOLAN, just back from Dallas, took his Bolex to Ste. Therese,
Quebec -- just north of Montreal -- to film The wreckage of a
DC-8 there. Later, he and journalist Patrick
WATSON made a documentary
of the crash that killed 118 passengers and crew.
When Mr. JENNINGS made the jump to ABC News, Mr.
NOLAN didn't
follow right away. He enjoyed working on This Hour Has Seven
Days, co-hosted by maverick broadcasters Mr.
WATSON and Laurier
LaPierre. The program was irreverent and quite unlike anything
seen on television. It caused such controversy -- especially
in Parliament -- that it lasted only two years.
"Brian started at the beginning of the program, making short
and long documentaries. He came to story meetings with great
ideas that were almost always accepted," Mr.
WATSON said.
After
Seven
Days, Mr.
NOLAN went to ABC News as a senior
producer and moved to New York with his family.
"As soon as he started working for ABC News we hardly saw
him," said his son Philip, who expresses no bitterness. He and
his two brothers are now camera operators for television news.
"One night the phone rang. He put it down and said 'You're not
going to believe this. They shot Bobby Kennedy.' He was gone
for a week."
A short while later, Mr.
NOLAN moved his family to London. He
was made senior producer for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
It was during this period that he produced many of Mr.
JENNINGS's
news reports and handled the complexities of early satellite
feeds to New York.
In 1971, he left ABC News and returned to Canada. He wrote
the Nolan Report and, a short time later, went to Global television
where Mr. CUNNINGHAM had become vice-president of news. One of
their coups was a 90-minute documentary called The Last Nazi.
It was about Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and the man who
ran Nazi Germany's armaments program.
"CUNNINGHAM and
NOLAN just picked up the phone and called Speer
and got the Canadian television rights for his autobiography,"
recalled Mr.
WATSON, who was the writer and interviewer on the
program. "They called me and asked me if I would work with them.
And Brian and I were off to Europe for several weeks."
The documentary won many awards in Canada and was nominated for
an Emmy in the United States.
After he left television he took up teaching and writing. In
1978, he took a job at the school of journalism at Carleton University
and remained there for 18 years. More recently, he indulged an
interest in military history and wrote seven books, including
a well-received biography of Buzz Beurling, the enigmatic Second
World War fighter pilot from Verdun, Quebec He also wrote a biography
of Donald Brittain, the legendary documentary filmmaker from
the National Film Board.
In his later years, Mr.
NOLAN showed an entrepreneurial streak
and, with his wife Holly owned a mustard shop and a restaurant
in Ottawa. Last week, a wake was held at the restaurant, which
is called L'Ange, on the Sparks Street Mall.
Brian NOLAN was born in St. Catharines, Ontario on January 18,
He died of lung cancer in Ottawa on August 31, 2006. He was 74.
He leaves his wife Holly, a daughter Catherine and three sons,
Philip, Mike and Paul.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-09-11 published
Ray ARSENAULT:
Producer And Director (1929-2006)
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television pioneer who shaped
Hockey Night in Canada into what it is today tackled anything.
'You name it, he did it'
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S11
Toronto -- There wasn't much that Ray
ARSENAULT didn't do in
the early years of television in Canada. The first few years
of his career ranged from working at one of the first private
television stations in Canada to figuring out how to run ads
on the early Hockey Night in Canada. He worked for every network
in the country as well as for many independent companies.
"He always believed good television had nothing to do with technological
advances and all you ever needed and still do is teamwork, timing
and a good yarn. He was a great storyteller and a playful soul,"
said his daughter Adrienne
ARSENAULT, a Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation News foreign correspondent.
Ray ARSENAULT produced one of the first live television events
in Canada in September of 1954 after the 16-year-old swimmer
Marilyn BELL was feted at city hall in Hamilton. The television
station was CHCH and it had only started broadcasting in
June of that year, less than two years after Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation-television had gone on the air.
Mr. ARSENAULT was in charge of working out how to do something
that would have been easy in radio but was so far untried in
television. City hall was too far from the station to run a cable
so they used a microwave dish. "I remember setting up the microwave
dish in the clock tower and pointing it back at the station,"
said Bill LAWRENCE, then a technician at CHCH who went on
to become a well-known weatherman. "Ray was the one who directed
the entire thing."
Mr. ARSENAULT had been one of three men with American experience
hired to produce the first programs at CHCH. He had arrived
from Detroit to find a primitive operation with two cameras.
"Someone would say we want to do this, or cover that, and Ray
would be the one to figure out how to do it," Mr.
LAWRENCE said.
"We were all pupils of his and he was an educator in the early
days of television in Canada."
A month after the Marilyn
BELL program, Mr.
ARSENAULT had to
work out the logistics of a special broadcast on hurricane Hazel.
Later, at Hockey Night in Canada, he worked for MacLaren Advertising,
which owned the rights to the series. One of his colleagues recalled
how they came up with a see-through logo for advertisers that
could be superimposed over the picture. They would place it in
front of the camera lens, then switch to it for a shot of the
beer company or service station.
The hockey games were live but so, too, were the commercials.
Holed up in a small studio in Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens, Mr.
ARSENAULT
would direct Murray
WESTGATE, who played the friendly Esso gas
station owner, to give his trademark salute, "Happy Motoring."
When a break in the play occurred, they would cut away to an
ad. It had to be perfect, since it was live.
Perhaps one of Mr.
ARSENAULT's toughest jobs was producing a
daily situation comedy for CTV. It was called The Trouble
with Tracy and could be best described as a kind of I Love Lucy
knock-off. It was a co-production of CTV and
an American
studio to see whether it was possible to produce a daily sitcom.
"It was the first Canadian-produced sitcom, and I played the
ditsy blonde," said Diane Nyland
PROCTOR. "He was really good
with actors, in spite of all the pressure. There was never an
angry word between cast, directors and crew."
In spite of the Quebec name, Ray
ARSENAULT was from Detroit.
His father was part of a generation of Quebeckers who found work
in the auto plants of Detroit. Ray went to local schools and
learned television at Wayne State University. He joined the U.S.
Marines in the late 1940s and remained until just before the
start of the Korean War.
After returning home, he started working at WWJ, a television
station in Detroit. It was an era in television when everyone
who worked in it seemed to do everything. Mr.
ARSENAULT learned
a lot in a hurry. He quickly became a studio director, a job
that demands the ability to run several things at once and yet
remain calm. If a director is nervous, it soon shows in the face
of the actor or television announcer.
For all that, one of the biggest things to happen to him at CHCH
was to meet a young woman named Bette, who worked on the technical
side of things. They married about two years later. He soon took
his directing skills to MacLaren Advertising where he worked
on Hockey Night in Canada but it wasn't long before he moved
back to television.
In 1961, Mr.
ARSENAULT was hired as executive producer at CFTO,
Toronto's first private television station. He was in charge
of ensuring things got on the air, trained new studio workers
and produced daily programs.
"He was very skilled with live television in the days before
we could edit videotape," said Murray
CHERCOVER, who was Mr.
ARSENAULT's
boss at CFTO and then hired him for many projects when he
was head of the CTV network. "Ray could go into a studio
or live event with five or six cameras and edit by cutting and
dissolving from camera to camera as he went along, and keeping
to time.
"He did everything in television from documentaries to situation
comedy. You name it, he did it"
As an independent producer and director, he also worked on the
popular King of Kensington series. He was a founding member of
the Director's Guild of Canada.
Raymond ARSENAULT was born in Detroit on December 28, 1929. He
died of a pulmonary embolism in Toronto on August 27, 2006. He
leaves his wife, Bette, and daughter, Adrienne, and sister, Mary.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-10-17 published
Lister SINCLAIR:
Broadcaster,
Playwright (1921-2006)
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation personality and intellectual
closely identified with the radio program Ideas loathed being
called a Renaissance man, yet excelled at almost everything
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S11
Toronto -- His voice, writings and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Radio plays were heard by Canadians for seven decades. In the
end, though, Lister
SINCLAIR was best known as the man who hosted
Ideas for 16 years. Although he was part of a team, listeners
thought of Ideas and Lister
SINCLAIR as one, since his sense
of curiosity and vast knowledge were reflected in the program.
Yet, he was more than that. To an earlier generation, he was
the writer of more than 400 feature-length radio plays, and hundreds
of other shorter works that ranged from wartime propaganda to
children's stories.
In the early days, his plays were as important on radio as documentaries
are today. In fact, the American magazine Variety, in describing
one of his plays as "boffo," said it was as smoothly written
as a documentary.
The play, Hilda Morgan, dealt with a young woman whose fiancé
is killed in a car accident. She is pregnant, and her sister
suggests an abortion -- without using the actual word. The play
caused an uproar in the House of Commons, the type of outrage
now reserved for documentaries that carry a definite message.
It was Lister
SINCLAIR's rule to "always be on the side of the
victim."
Whenever reporters wrote about him, they always seemed to mention
his age. At first, it was because he was so young for someone
to have done so much. "At 27, Lister
SINCLAIR is already well
known as author, actor, critic, mathematician and linguist,"
said a publicity blurb in April of 1948.
Two years later, Time ran a piece on the "Bombay-born Lister
SINCLAIR, 29, who had three of his original radio scripts dramatized
on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Stage 50 last week."
By 1956, it was along the lines of "At 35, Lister
SINCLAIR is
one of the principal contributors to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's
radio and television drama series."
Almost 40 years later, the air of amazement was still evident.
In 1995, a profile in The Globe mentioned that, at 74, Mr.
SINCLAIR
had been at it for 50 years and "shows no signs of slowing down."
While he will always be associated with the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation▲ mainstream, Mr.
SINCLAIR represented a kind of eccentric
(he wrote most of his scripts longhand) who was almost a caricature
of the professional intellectual. He called himself an "omnibrow,"
rather than a highbrow.
Over the years, he wrote many books and articles but was best
known for the spoken word. With his beautiful voice, he could
explain complex ideas in simple sentences.
The first time Canadians heard that voice was when he was acting
on radio. Later, he hosted and narrated The Nature of Things
he even came up with the name -- when it first went on television.
In that same period, he also took a comic turn on Wayne and Shuster,
the hugely popular comedy show. There he changed a bit, and chose
to sound Canadian. He once described himself as "a pretty good
second-rate actor. But unlike first-rate actors like John Drainie,
I couldn't turn into someone else."
Lister SINCLAIR had an unusual start in life. He was born in
India, but never really knew the place. His father, William
SINCLAIR,
was a chemical engineer working in India. At 18 months, Lister
was sent home to Britain to live with an aunt. Years later, he
said perhaps his mother had worried he might come down with tropical
diseases.
His English aunt proved to be somewhat overprotective, even cruel.
He did not see his parents again until he was 7, when they came
home on extended leave. At 8, he was packed off to Colet Court,
a boarding school that served as a feeder for the great English
public school of Saint Paul's. Though young Lister did poorly at
prep school, often coming last in his class, he was clever at
math and won a scholarship to Saint Paul's. Among his fellow students
were the grandchildren of Sigmund Freud, the family having fled
the Nazis to settle in London.
Later in life, he told of a savage beating he suffered for talking
back to a matron, a woman who worked at the school. One of the
masters, her boyfriend, beat him so badly with a pool cue that
he broke a bone at the base of the boy's spine. The master was
fired over the incident.
Mr. SINCLAIR was bitter about his lost childhood, having been
all but abandoned by his parents, yet never dwelled on it. He
understood that, from their point of view, it was a great thing
to be educated at one of Britain's top schools. Meanwhile, when
he was not away at school, his aunt continued to rule his life
and once refused to allow him to go on a supervised scout trip
to France.
For all that, his parents did weigh in from time to time. In
the summer of 1939, his mother, reassured by a travel agency
that there wasn't going to be a war, arrived in England and booked
a trip to New York to attend a World's Fair. They sailed on the
Normandie, a luxurious French ship that was then the fastest
liner on the North Atlantic run, landed in New York to see the
fair and then headed for Buffalo, New York They were visiting
Niagara Falls as part of a package tour, when Britain declared
war on Germany. It was September 3, 1939, and mother and son
were stuck on the wrong side of the Atlantic. The father was
isolated in India, so the two of them set off for the West, first
to Washington state and then north to Vancouver. They travelled
by bus.
Mr. SINCLAIR enrolled at the University of British Columbia during
his first week in Canada. To his Canadian classmates, he must
have appeared rather odd (he walked with a cane and had a strange
English accent), and yet at University of British Columbia he
made some of his first meaningful Friendships.
"He seemed pretty old and knew everything," said Pierre Berton,
a fellow student at University of British Columbia. "We always
figured he swotted up on things the night before so he could
tell us exactly what it was that Mozart had said to Beethoven.
He was a non-stop talker and a very fast reader… he remembered
everything he ever read."
Later, Mr.
SINCLAIR went to the University Toronto to study for
a master's degree and in 1942 he made extra money by teaching
math to undergraduates and by acting at the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation. He was part of what became known as the "Vancouver
Exodus" of young intellectuals who headed for Toronto during
the 1940s.
At the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, he first wrote war
propaganda, for there was no question of him joining the war
effort. He was lame from a back injury -- not from the beating,
but from falling down stairs -- which was why he walked with
the aid of at least one cane. One of his first acting jobs was
to imitate Germans in such works as Nazi Eyes on Canada. It was
narrated by Lorne Greene, the chief announcer at the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation who was known as the Voice of Doom,
and featured actress Helen Hayes.
Mr. SINCLAIR soon began writing plays and he entered a period
of great productivity. As a trained mathematician, he liked to
say that math and drama had much in common. After all, both were
the arrangement of ideas.
In all, he wrote more than 700 radio plays, some very ambitious.
One of his favourites was about Socrates, the Greek philosopher.
"Of course he liked it," said a former Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation colleague. "He was so much like Socrates -- someone
devoted to teaching and talking. Socrates never wrote anything.
Lister did, but it is nothing compared to the words he spoke
in plays and
on Ideas."
After radio, Mr.
SINCLAIR moved to television, where he was sought
after as a performer as well as a writer. He had to cut his hair,
trim his beard and not dress like a bohemian. While many of his
radio programs are on tape in the archives, his earlier television
programs were broadcast live and vanished, unrecorded.
"I do wish I had more of these things on tape. One thing that
I much regret, for example, is a television drama that, in fact,
was one of my better television programs. It was called Beethoven.
Lorne Greene played Beethoven before he left for Hollywood. But
there was no kinescope [copy]. It's completely gone."
Pierre
Berton, who died in 2004, told The Globe that Mr.
SINCLAIR
could have easily joined Lorne Greene and Canadians who went
to Hollywood.
"I think he regrets that he didn't go to Broadway in the fifties.
There was no theatre here to speak of when he was writing. He
wrote wonderful [radio] plays. He got good reviews and an audience."
For a time, Mr.
SINCLAIR considered trying his luck in London's
West End but instead stayed in Canada, producing and writing
a greater variety of material than perhaps anyone else in the
country.
"I'm interested in pretty well anything, but finance is low on
the list," he told The Globe. "I'm also not very interested in
selling." Even though he knew his limitations, that was not enough
to stop him from trying what he must have known he was not good
at -- running things. Perhaps the strangest period of his long
career was a spell in Canadian Broadcasting Corporation management.
It read like one of his plays in three acts: the opening farce,
the melodrama and the final tragic act.
It all began to unfold in 1968 when Laurent
PICARD, an academic
who later became dean of the Faculty of Management at McGill
University in Montreal, was made an executive vice-president
at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1972, Mr.
PICARD
became president and decided he needed someone creative to run
the network's English-language services. He fastened on Lister
SINCLAIR and made him executive vice-president of English services.
Suddenly, Mr.
SINCLAIR, a man who had never managed more than
a small broadcast production, found himself in charge of a vast
bureaucracy. A producer had never risen so high the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation hierarchy. "It was a disaster," said
one of his Friends. "The rumour was, he went to Coles and bought
a book on management. He was not suited to it."
Mr. PICARD soon realized his mistake and conflicts began to erupt.
After two years, Mr.
SINCLAIR was downgraded to vice-president
of program policy and development. Two years later, he was out
of management altogether and describing administration as "a
branch of anthropology." It was the only period of his life that
could be categorized as a failure.
He soon went back to doing what he did best -- writing, performing
and producing programs, especially ones that dealt with difficult
subjects. He became a frequent guest on Morningside at a time
when the host was his friend Don Harron. Together, they did ambitious
stuff, such as imaginary tours of 18th-century Venice, complete
with the sound effects of oared gondolas.
At an age when many people start to think of retirement, Mr.
SINCLAIR
took on the job of host of Ideas. For 16 years, he was the voice
for more than 2,000 programs, hundreds of which he wrote and
produced himself. He was often late for recording sessions and,
if the programs were his own scripts, he worked to the last possible
deadline.
Mr. SINCLAIR was also a fixture on the program Court of Opinion
and helped organize the Association of Canadian Television and
Radio Artists. Now known as A.C.T.R.A., it represents thousands
of Canadian performers.
His private life was sometimes as complex as his professional
life. Lister
SINCLAIR was married three times, and had several
relationships that ran for years. He had two sons from different
marriages, remained close to one but was estranged from another.
He said he found family life difficult which, given his own formative
years, is not surprising.
Soon after settling in Toronto, Mr.
SINCLAIR and wife, Alice,
whom he had met at University of British Columbia, became part
of an artist's community in Kleinberg, north of Toronto.
"The community was called Windrush and the houses were designed
by Bill McCROW, who was a set designer at the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation,▲" said Peter
SINCLAIR, a technology entrepreneur
who is his son from his first marriage.
Alice SINCLAIR lived in the house until her death and, although
Mr. SINCLAIR moved out, he never went far. He made lasting Friendships
in Toronto and was elevated to the status of national icon, a
characterization he despised right along with the even more loathsome
"Renaissance man."
Mr. SINCLAIR shed the awkwardness of youth and became an attractive,
middle-aged man. Women were often intensely attracted by his
casual style, diffident manner and quick mind. He lost little
of his appeal in old age.
He was awarded the Order of Canada in 1985.
Lister Shedden
SINCLAIR was born in Bombay on January 9, 1921.
He died in hospital in Toronto yesterday. He was 85. He is survived
by his sons Peter and Andrew.
L... Names LA... Names LAN... Names Welcome Home
LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-10-18 published
STEWARD/STEWART/STUART,
William
Alexander "
Bill"
(Life Member Of The Toronto Real Estate Board, Rolls Royce Owner's
Club, Royal Automobile Club Of England)
Passed away peacefully with his family by his side, at the Village
of Erin Meadows Long Term Care Centre, on Sunday, October 15,
2006, at the age of 92. Bill was the dearly loved husband of
the late Mary Louise
EASTMAN. Loving Dad of Mary
STEWARD/STEWART/STUART-
ROSS
and William David (Bill)
STEWARD/STEWART/STUART and the late Jane
HUNTER.
Much
loved grandfather of Jennifer and J.J., Rebecca and Cameron,
David and Maxine, Samantha, Andrew and Sarah, and great-grandfather
of Seaton Stewart and Alex Mary. He will be fondly remembered
by his dear friend Mary
LANGAN, and his extended family and Friends.
Special thanks to Gail, Penny, Donovan and the entire staff at
the Village of Erin Meadows for their extraordinary compassion
and care. Friends may call at the Turner and Porter Butler Chapel,
4933 Dundas Street West, Etobicoke (between Islington and Kipling
Aves.) on Wednesday from 2-4 p.m. and 7-9 p.m. Funeral Service
to be held in the Chapel on Thursday, October 19, 2006, at 1 p.m.
Private interment Park Lawn Cemetery. If desired, memorial donations
may be made to the Heart and Stroke Foundation.
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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-11-28 published
Larry HENDERSON,
Broadcaster And Editor: (1917-2006)
He was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's first regular
newsreader on what became The National, only to leave for becoming
a household name. He later became editor of The Catholic Register
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail; Globe and Mail
archives, Page S9
Toronto -- For five years in the 1950s, Larry
HENDERSON owned
the most famous face in Canada. As the first regular anchor of
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's national television news
from 1954 to 1959, his steep brow and distinctive mustache were
known from coast to coast. He later went to work for other broadcast
outlets, including CTV News, then switched careers by becoming
a conservative and outspoken editor of The Catholic Register.
But it was on early television that he made his mark. "There
isn't much doubt that, in Canada, the name
HENDERSON means television
news," said Maclean's in September of 1957. Twice a day, at 6: 45 p.m.
and 11 p.m., he would read the national news on the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation, which was then the only television
network in Canada.
His newscasts left a lasting impression on a young Peter
MANSBRIDGE
growing up in Ottawa. "We bought our first television in 1956 and
all I remember is Patti Page and Larry
HENDERSON," said Mr.
MANSBRIDGE,
now the lead anchor on The National. "He was my introduction
to television news. There was a lot of Larry
HENDERSON reading,
and the odd picture back then."
At the time, all television announcers had started out in radio,
with the information coming from wire services and the front
pages of newspapers. The first newscasts were more like bulletins
rather than today's glitzy programs. To ensure that viewers paid
attention to the news and not to a single face, the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation distributed the job among a roster of
announcers. Newscasts were only five minutes long and seldom
incorporated any film. If footage could be found, it was usually
presented in the style of a Movietone newsreel without sound,
except for what might later be added in the studio.
That all changed with the arrival of Larry
HENDERSON. He had
come to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation with a background
in theatre and music. Raised in Montreal, he was educated in
the city's Protestant school board system. His father was a wool
merchant, and his mother was an artist who encouraged her son's
musical and acting talents.
As a boy, he put on plays, wrote scripts and played the piano.
He won a scholarship to McGill University, where he studied music.
After graduating, he decided to try his luck on the English stage
and took a freighter across the Atlantic. He arrived in Britain
with $50 in his pocket and fetched up in Birmingham, where he
worked in a factory before landing a job in local theatre. One
of the highlights of his acting career was to perform with a
young Alec Guinness in Romeo and Juliet in Perth, Scotland. Then
the Second World War broke out and the theatre closed, forcing
him to return to Canada.
He used his theatrical training to work as an announcer for the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, studied electrical engineering
and joined the Officer Training Corps. In 1943, he was commissioned
a lieutenant in the Canadian Army signal corps and served as
a signals officer in Italy and northwest Europe.
In 1945, with the war almost over, he was recalled to direct
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's shortwave International
Service that was broadcast to the troops. Shortly after that,
he returned to an announcer's job at the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation.
He left the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the late 1940s
and worked for radio station CFRB, producing a program called
Headliners, 10-minute radio items from overseas that ran five
times a week on 24 Canadian radio stations.
In 1949, he married Joan
ANNAND, whom he had met at the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation. Two years later, they set out for Europe.
Armed with a recording machine, they retraced the steps of the
Canadian army through Italy and produced segments for Headliners.
An admirer of American broadcaster Edward R. Morrow, Mr.
HENDERSON
patterned his broadcasts on that style.
In 1950, he spent six weeks in Korea. As the first Canadian broadcaster
sent to cover the Korean War, he was accredited to U.S. General
Douglas MacArthur's headquarters and toured Japan, Hong Kong,
Indochina, India and Yugoslavia, all the while filing reports.
He also turned out a similar international series for Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation Radio called Passports to Adventure.
In 1954, Mr.
HENDERSON returned to the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation to pitch an idea to Mavor Moore, Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation-television's program director. An accomplished photographer,
Mr. HENDERSON's scheme was to run his slides on air with commentary.
Mr. Moore heard him out but had other ideas. Instead of the travelogue,
he decided to hire Mr.
HENDERSON as the first permanent reader
of national television news in Canada.
The policy of using a herd of announcers had not worked, and
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was looking for someone
permanent to anchor the news. At the same time, though, the corporation
was nervous about allowing a television personality to develop,
and it discouraged Mr.
HENDERSON from doing much more than present
the news. The newscast was expanded to 15 minutes, and Mr.
HENDERSON
began reading his scripts over film. His role grew and he became
one of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's first television
correspondents to report from the field.
Mr. HENDERSON made several visits to the Middle East, including
one to Egypt in April of 1956. That summer, Egypt's Gamal Abdel
Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, and soon Britain, France
and Israel went to war against Cairo. The camera equipment of
the day was bulky. Mr.
HENDERSON travelled with Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation cameraman Bob Crone and all the necessary gear they
needed to record interviews.
Like many announcers of the time, Mr.
HENDERSON's background
was more theatrical than journalistic. This was before the era
of the teleprompter. Mr.
HENDERSON would memorize a script for
at least an hour before the broadcast. That way, he would seldom
have to look down at it.
It wasn't long before he was being recognized on the street,
and soon developed ideas of his own. His plan was to work exclusively
on The National. For its part, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
continued to distrust anyone who resembled a broadcast star and
made every effort to discourage him. Somewhat short-tempered
by nature, and perhaps feeling constrained by Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation policy, Mr.
HENDERSON became the enfant terrible
of Canadian television. He had a reputation for swearing on air,
and for speaking so quickly when prompted to speed up that the
audience heard only gibberish. He once stormed off the set when
a piece of footage failed to roll.
In 1959, he left the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation after
a dispute over his contract. Mr.
HENDERSON had proposed that
he anchor only the National; the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
wanted him to do other things as well. "Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation star Henderson dropped," read the headline in The
Toronto Telegram.
He went to work for radio station CHFI in Toronto and television
station CHCH in Hamilton. Later, he joined CTV National
News as a commentator on international affairs, and the weekend
newsreader. It was during this period that he became interested
in Catholicism.
"My father met a priest in Ottawa in the late 1960s and started
talking to him about his faith," said Graham
HENDERSON, who lives
in Toronto. "When he converted to Catholicism, the whole family
was shocked. My mother brought us up as Presbyterians [and] he
had been an atheist."
After he left broadcasting full time, Mr.
HENDERSON ran a school
for broadcasting and did other work, including going to Africa
for the Canadian International Development Agency to help set
up Tanzania's broadcasting system.
In 1973, Mr.
HENDERSON began writing articles for The Catholic
Register, a Toronto-based publication that ranked among the oldest
English-language Catholic weekly newspapers in Canada. He became
editor the following year and steered the newspaper to a prominent
role in the Canadian anti-abortion movement.
In 1981, he raised a furor by directing the Register to accept
paid advertisements from an anti-abortion group recommending
that voters reject Tory candidates in the Ontario election. Campaign
Life had placed ads to say Conservative candidates were poor
choices for voters and blamed then-premier William Davis for
supporting Pierre Trudeau's constitutional package, including
a Charter of Rights. Entrenchment of the Charter, it warned,
would lead to abortion on demand, homosexual marriages, adoptions
by homosexuals, and the loss by women of financial support from
their husbands.
In 1985, the Register urged Ontario voters to spoil ballots in
that year's provincial election. It was an attitude not supported
by the Archdiocese of Toronto, and the writing was on the wall.
Mr. HENDERSON left the paper the next year after having increased
subscriptions from 30,000 to 60,000, replaced by an editor with
more moderate views.
Mr. HENDERSON had the satisfaction of seeing his replacement,
Peter HOWELL, resign in little more than a year. By all accounts,
readers did not find favour with what they perceived as new liberal
views and wrote to tell him so. "Nobody likes getting hate mail,
but that's what it amounts to," Mr.
HOWELL said.
In contrast, many of the letters had praised Mr.
HENDERSON for
upholding traditional church views.
Mr. HENDERSON was not finished. He joined Challenge, a Catholic
monthly magazine, as managing editor and retired in 2002.
Larry HENDERSON was born in Montreal on September 4, 1917. He
died in Toronto of unspecified causes on November 26, 2006. He
was 89. He leaves his sons Graham and Ross. His wife, Joan, died
in 1980.
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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-12-05 published
Joe LORIMER,
Air
Canada
Pilot (1916-2006)
A flying instructor at the outset of the Second World War, he
never flew in combat but trained many others who would. He retired
in 1976 with 21,676 commercial hours under his belt
By F.F. LANGAN,
Special▲ to The Globe and Mail, Page S11
Toronto -- Joe
LORIMER was sure he was going overseas when he
volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force in the week that
Canada declared war on Germany in September of 1939. He was fit,
eager and, most of all, an experienced pilot.
The
Royal
Canadian Air Force had other plans. Mr.
LORIMER not
only knew how to fly, he was also a flight instructor. That made
him too valuable to send overseas, so he was put to work training
pilots. He spent his entire working life flying, first as an
instructor during the war, then as a captain for Trans-Canada
Airlines and Air Canada, flying just about every type of aircraft
they ever used, from 10-seat Lockheeds to 400-seat Boeing 747s.
Mr. LORIMER grew up in Kerrobert, Saskatchewan., a town about
100 kilometres west of Saskatoon, where his father was in the
coal business and managed to prosper even in the 1930s when times
were tough. There, young Joe led a storybook Prairie life, playing
hockey, curling and singing in the church choir. He graduated
from high school in 1933 and went to Saskatoon to learn to fly.
He soon became an instructor at the Saskatoon Flying Club.
When war broke out, Canada and Britain had a pilot shortage.
Mr. LORIMER, not surprisingly, possessed urgently required skills.
On December 16, 1939, the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan
came into being. Canada had lots of space and private airfields,
so, in the words of the war propagandists, it became "the arsenal
of democracy." Canada also carried the bulk of the cost, spending
$1.5-billion compared with Britain's $54-million. By the end
of the war, 131,553 aircrew had been through the system.
Mr. LORIMER started training pilots at his home base in Saskatoon.
Eventually, though, he was also posted to Trenton, Ontario, and
later Fort William (now Thunder Bay). His logbook shows he trained
pilots in the Tiger Moth, a fairly primitive open-cockpit biplane
that was easy to fly. Later, his own rating as an instructor
moved up a few notches and he provided advanced training on twin-engine
Oxfords and Avro Ansons.
In March of 1942, he became an employee of the Winnipeg Air Observer
School, as its chief flying instructor. It was there that he
met his first wife, Esther
ROBERTSON, who had joined the Winnipeg
Flying Club -- not to learn how to fly but because it was a place
said to have good dances.
Although appreciated by their civilian bosses and by the war
planners in Ottawa, most instructors hankered to see action,
later suffering the postwar stigma of not having flown in combat.
Perhaps reflecting that, a poem (author unknown) was found among
Mr. LORIMER's papers. Called The Flying Instructors' Lament,
it went, in part, like this:
What did you do in the war, daddy,
How did you help us to win?
Circuits and bumps and turns, laddy,
And how to get out of a spin.
Woe and alack and misery me!
I trundle around in the sky,
And instead of machine-gunning Nazis,
I'm teaching young hopefuls to fly.
We never get posted to fighters,
we just get a spell on the Link.
So it's circuits and bumps
from morning till noon,
and instrument flying till 10.
In late 1942, Mr.
LORIMER was seconded from the air-training
program and ordered to join Trans-Canada Airlines, which was
then short of commercial pilots. For the rest of the war, he
was stationed in Winnipeg, flying such aircraft as the Lockheed
Lodestar. Less than two years later, he was made captain.
After the war, Mr.
LORIMER went on loan to Thunder Bay Airlines
for a short while, then returned to Trans-Canada Airlines to
fly the four-engine DC-4, known as North Stars in Canada. These
larger, pressurized planes carried about 60 passengers and could
easily fly over mountains and through bad weather. They were
followed by the more advanced Viscount turboprops and then the
airline's first jet, the DC-8. In later years, Mr.
LORIMER became
a "check" pilot on the DC-8: His job was to check whether pilots
trained on new equipment were good enough to fly them. "To become
a check pilot required a combination of competency and seniority,"
recalled Jack Jones, who was once chief pilot for Air Canada.
"Joe was a superb pilot."
Mr. LORIMER experienced one of his most harrowing experiences
aboard a DC-8. On a training flight out of Vancouver, lightning
knocked a basketball-sized hole in the plane's nose. But Mr.
LORIMER
managed to land safely.
In 1973, he was loaned to Air Jamaica and lived in Kingston,
from where he plied routes back to Canada. He ended his working
life flying jumbo jets, his favourite plane. His last run occurred
on July 28, 1976, a Toronto-to-Vienna flight that included his
entire family. By that time, he had logged 21,676 commercial
flying hours.
For many years, Mr.
LORIMER lived on a small horse farm in Langley,
British Columbia He was a keen golfer and coached a junior curling
team that won a national championship. One quirk of his personal
life was that he held the longest standing continuous bank account
with the Royal Bank. His father had opened it for him when he
was born; on his birthday this year, the bank gave him a special
commemorative plaque.
His wife died in 1969. In 1977, he married Avon
VAN
EXAN, the
widow of an Air Canada pilot.
Joseph Earl
LORIMER was born on July 17, 1916, in Kerrobert,
Saskatchewan. He died of age-related causes in Mississauga, Ontario,
on September 27, 2006. He was 90. He is survived by his wife,
three daughters and three stepchildren.
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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-12-30 published
McGROARTY,
Herbert
Thomas
Joseph (1918-2006)
Herbert
Thomas
Joseph
McGROARTY passed away gently and peacefully
at Sunnybrook Health Centre on Thursday, December, 28th, 2006,
surrounded by his loving wife and family.
son of the late Florence
Lawlor McGROARTY and the late James
McGROARTY, he is lovingly
remembered by his wife of 65 years, Margaret (née
LANGAN;) his
three daughters: Maggie, Deborah and Maura; his eight sons: Herbert
Jr., Bruce, Jerome, Darcy, Mark, Shawn, Brian and Kevin; his
thirty grandchildren and twenty-three great-grandchildren, their
spouses and a host of Friends. He was predeceased by brothers
James and Andrew
McGROARTY. A leader in his community, Herb served
as President of the Leaside Hockey Association, President of
the Leaside Baseball Association, President of the Leaside Lions
Club, President of the St. Anselm's School Parent Teacher Association,
and as Municipal Councillor of the Borough of East York. During
World War 2, he served his country as a Lieutenant in the Irish
Regiment of Canada Reserve. He was a cherished member of St. Anselm's
Parish and the Knights of Columbus. A successful businessman,
Herb was President of H.T. McGroarty Inc. in partnership with
his wife, Margaret. He was a Designated International Appraiser
as well as a Real Estate and Insurance Broker. An accomplished
athlete, he was an avid golfer, tennis, badminton and squash
player. Of all the accolades you could give to him, the foremost
would be his unconditional love for and devotion to his family.
All who knew him, Friends and family, enjoyed his humor, wit
and engaging charm. He gave selflessly to his church and community
and touched hundreds of hearts and lives. He took the time to
listen and was a mentor to all his children. He always said the
best decision he ever made was marrying his lifelong love, Marg.
Visitation will be held at Heritage Funeral Centre, 50 Overlea
Blvd., (416-423-1000) on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 from 2: 00 to
9: 00 p.m. A Mass in celebration of Herbert's life will be held
at St. Anselm Roman Catholic Church, McNaughton and Millwood
Road, Toronto on Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007 at 11: 00 a.m. with
Rev. Brian Clough officiating. In lieu of flowers, the family
would be grateful for donations to be sent to The Good Shepherd
Ministries, 412 Queen Street East, Toronto, M5A 1T3.
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