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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-01-09 published
Joe HAMPSON, Folk Musician (1928-2006)
Bassist with The Travellers wrote protest songs and was a spectacular dancer
By F.F. LANGAN, Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S9
Joe HAMPSON played with the folk group The Travellers for more than 40 years, and last played with them at the Canadian Auto Workers convention in August last year. "The Travellers are the entertainers of choice for union conventions and New Democratic Party meetings," said his daughter Randi HAMPSON, a Toronto family lawyer. "He had a deep involvement all his life with many causes. I remember growing up with the ideas of Cesar Chavez and the Californian farm workers. There was always something like that around the house." Talk About Peace was Mr. HAMPSON's signature song, an anti-war ballad he wrote during the Vietnam era.
There's a whole lot of people in this old world living on nothing but hate /
If things don't change around pretty soon, it's going to be too late.
Those are the first two lines of the song, and these are the last two before the chorus: You better listen to the people when they talk about peace, / Hear the children when they call.
"It's as relevant today as it was 35 years ago," said his wife Sharon.
The Travellers hit their peak of popularity during the protest era of the mid- to late 1960s and early 1970s, which coincided with the Vietnam War. "The group was popular on university campuses during the 1960s and early 1970s, corresponding with the years of campus unrest, and its LP of labour songs, A Century of Song (1967), established The Travellers' profile in the Canadian labour movement," says the Canadian Encyclopedia of Music. Centennial year, 1967, was one of the busiest for The Travellers, and they performed more than 100 concerts across Canada.
All during his time with the group, Mr. HAMPSON wrote music, not just for The Travellers but for his wife, who is the Sharon of the group Sharon, Lois and Bram. Although it might be easy to slot Joe HAMPSON as a bearded folk singer, he was much more. For one thing, there were few years when he could make a living just playing for The Travellers, so he did other work.
For a long time he was a carpenter building sets on dozens of movie projects in Toronto. He also renovated houses as a general contractor working all over Toronto and designed furniture.
He was a computer fiend who got into personal computers just as the first models were coming out in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He spent a lot of time advising his Friends and family on their computer problems.
Joe HAMPSON grew up Indianapolis, Indiana He didn't have much of a socialist background. His father Joseph owned a coal mine and was once given a terrible beating by striking coal miners. He had gone out to reason with them but they made him run the gantlet and hit him with baseball bats and sticks.
His mother Dorothy played the piano in silent-movie houses, although she soon gave that up since Joe was born four months after the first "talkie" hit movie theatres, doing away with the pianist's job. His mother did make sure he had grounding in music.
He was also religious as a young man and trained to be a clergyman. Although he died "a pseudo secular Jewish atheist" -- his wife's description -- he studied to be an Episcopalian (Anglican) priest at the University of Western Kentucky. After he dropped out, he moved to Los Angeles and drifted into the edges of the entertainment business.
At one stage he applied to join into the U.S. military but was turned down because of a trick knee. In spite of the bad knee, he mastered ballroom dancing, working for the Arthur Miller dance studios -- and competing in dance contests with the owner's wife, Catherine Murray, as a partner. Joe HAMPSON was a spectacular dancer all his life and loved to show off. He last did a turn on the dance floor at a wedding in May of last year.
He opened several studios for the Arthur Murray group, including one in Oklahoma City. As well as teaching dancing, he also played in bands. One of his musical partners, John Horton, recalled he walked into the Gourd Club in Oklahoma City in 1957 and asked if he could join in.
"I told him no. But he persisted [and] noticed we had an old stand-up bass that was in pretty bad shape. He asked if he could repair it, would we let him play? He fixed it and joined us," said Mr. Horton.
This was the beatnik era, when poetry recitals and folk music filled coffee houses. Mr. HAMPSON and John Horton played folk music with a few groups, the main ones being The Wayfarers and the Phoenix Singers. One of the early partners in the group was Mason Williams, a guitar player who composed the hit Classical Gas and was a regular on the Smothers Brothers' television show.
They branched out and played at rodeos as back-up for an actor called Dale Robertson. He was famous for his role as a Jim Hardie, a troubleshooter in the television series Tales of Wells Fargo. Mr. Horton recalled that they didn't play country music at rodeos, but stuck to folk.
On one occasion, the two men were playing back-up for a black group in Virginia Beach, Va. It was 1963, and Mr. Horton remembered Martin Luther King had been through town just the week before. When they went to get their motel rooms, the owner told them there were no rooms for the black musicians.
"We said you can have our rooms," recalled Mr. Horton. All of a sudden there were no rooms for anyone. The two men decided they couldn't ignore the issue so they called the sheriff who settled the dispute by escorting everyone to a friendlier motel.
There was a more pleasant incident a couple of years earlier when the group was playing in Denver and Mr. HAMPSON spotted a young folk singer in the audience. He announced that he was going to marry her, and he did, although it was two years later.
She was Sharon TROSTIN from Toronto. At first the couple lived in Indianapolis, but Mr. HAMPSON was asked by the singer Jimmy Rodgers -- whose biggest hit was Honeycomb -- whether he wanted to play with his group. Joe and Sharon HAMPSON moved to Los Angeles. After a couple of years she became homesick and they returned to Toronto and stayed there. It was 1964, and the next year Joe HAMPSON joined The Travellers. He stayed in Canada for the rest of his life.
Along with playing bass in The Travellers, he was trained as a timpanist -- someone who plays the kettle drums, triangles, glockenspiel and other percussion instruments in a symphony orchestra. He was listed as a timpanist with the musicians' union and 10 years ago he started playing with the North York Concert Orchestra. They honoured him at a concert in December.
Joseph Lawrence HAMPSON was born on February 19, 1928, in Indianapolis. He died of lung cancer, although he had quit smoking decades ago, in Toronto on November 30. He is survived by his wife Sharon, his daughter Randi and his sons Geoff and Joe.

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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-06-12 published
Canada's youngest pilot was a natural flier who became a top jet jockey
It was all he ever wanted to do, and in 1938, he became the youngest licensed pilot in the country. He enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and later joined Trans Canada Airlines. When he finally switched to jets, it was 'better than sex'
By F.F. LANGAN, Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S9
Toronto -- Just hours before Allied troops landed on the beach in Normandy on D-Day, Flying Officer Frank VINES dropped 16 paratroopers and four canisters of supplies behind German lines. Just a few years earlier, he had been celebrated as Canada's youngest licensed pilot.
On June 6, 1944, Mr. VINES was a transport pilot flying Dakotas, the military version of the DC-3. On the night of June 5, he had to wait until 11 p.m. to take off since the sky was still bright at that time of year. The flight took 3½ hours and his log book mentions being hit by machine-gun fire from the ground along the way. His log also details another flight, on June 6, during which he was hit by flak from a Royal Navy ship -- "a small burst off the rear bulkhead" -- that damaged the tail of the aircraft.
"After he dropped his cargo, the plane nosed down because it had been hit in the elevator trim. They had to pull up so hard on the yoke he felt his arms were going to fall off," said his son, John VINES. "He could only do it for five minutes before the co-pilot took over."
Years later, Mr. VINES said he believed the drop zone was about 50 kilometres inland -- probably near the town of Caen in Normandy.
There were many other trips across the Channel during the Normandy campaign. On June 20, he returned to France, this time landing to pick up wounded soldiers. Margaret ECKER, war correspondent for Canadian Press, reported on the flight and the story appeared on front pages back home.
"Six Canadian soldiers were among the first battle casualties evacuated by air yesterday from the front line in Normandy to emergency hospitals in England. Less than two hours after a big transport plane lifted them from a casualty clearing station on an airfield within range of sniper's guns, the men were in bed in a tented air evacuation centre in the English countryside."
Ms. ECKER then listed the soldiers who were leaving France and the pilots who were flying them.
"Among the men who fly the England-France route when it becomes the milk run for carrying supplies across the Channel and bring back the wounded are F.O. Frank VINES, who took a planeload of paratroops across the channel on D-Day."
Later that year, during the campaign in Northwestern Europe, he was involved in dropping paratroops into Arnhem in Operation Market Garden, the Allied military failure documented in the movie A Bridge Too Far.
Although he was an experienced pilot before the Second World War, Mr. VINES almost didn't get to fly in Europe. He was so anxious to go overseas that he contrived to almost get himself court-martialed. It worked.
His problem started when he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. At 19, he had been too good a pilot with too much flying experience after having qualified for his pilot's licence when he was just 17 -- at the time, the youngest pilot in Canada.
He started pilot training at 14 at the Lambeth Flying Club outside London, Ontario, and made his first solo flight six months later in a De Havilland Moth biplane. He was ready to be granted his pilot's licence when he was 15, but authorities made him wait, saying he too young.
As a boy, he had been aviation crazy. He took his first flight at the age of 6 when his parents, both English immigrants, took back to England. There, he and his father went up in a plane at Blackpool, the sea resort.
His father was a locomotive engineer with the Canadian Pacific Railway and was transferred to Goderich, Ontario, where Frank later went to high school. A friend, George PARSONS, remembered a peaceful, idyllic boyhood. Their only act of rebellion, he said, was to occasionally skip school for a little snooker, a game they played all their lives. By that time, Mr. VINES and his father were both learning how to fly. The pair used to drive together to the flying school, but it was the son who received his licence first.
Mr. VINES graduated from high school in June, 1940, 10 months after war broke out. He promptly joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, which was desperate for pilots and glad to have him. He reported to the air base at Trenton, Ontario, the following month, expecting to be sent overseas almost right away. Instead, because of his flying experience, he was made an instructor.
He was eventually stationed at Windsor, Ontario, as part of the Commonwealth Air Training Plan. As one of Canada's largest contributions to the war, the program trained 200,000 pilots and air crew from across the Commonwealth at airfields across the country.
The routine for Mr. VINES involved taking young men and training them to fly in a Fleet Finch biplane before moving on to more advanced training, such as the more powerful single-wing Harvard. "After six months of instructing, I thought anybody could do it -- and wished they had. It was just the monotony of it. You'd get a guy to where you thought he could fly and you'd lose him [to an active posting]. Then you started all over again with another bunch of students," Mr. VINES told author Ted Barris for the book Behind the Glory.
Despite the monotony of flight training, it could still be dangerous - many students and instructors were killed in flying accidents. After a couple of years doing it, Mr. VINES seemed no closer to being posted to an overseas squadron. So he and a friend took action.
"Frank and I got in a couple of Fleets and flew low formation over the Dominion Day event," Brick Bradford told Mr. Barris. "We did a slow roll and a couple of loops over the park" near the St. Clair River. Below them, senior Royal Canadian Air Force officers stood on a reviewing stand, outraged at the antics. The pilots' purpose was to let the brass know they were anxious to get overseas.
According to Mr. PARSONS, however, the incident had an even more dramatic effect.
"The way Frank told me was a little different," Mr. PARSONS said. "They flew their planes under the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor and Detroit. While the stunt demanded some skill, Royal Canadian Air Force brass saw it as reckless and the two of them were almost court-martialled."
But the flying partners got the desired result and were soon sent on real missions. For Mr. VINES, that meant flying Hudson bombers out of Halifax on anti-submarine missions, and then a sea voyage to England, before being posted to Gibraltar. He was assigned to 233 Squadron of the Royal Air Force, where he flew Hudsons against U-boats in the Atlantic.
Nine months later, he transferred to Transport Command, flying Dakotas from a base in Wiltshire in southwestern England. It was from there that he so often crossed the English Channel to France. In January of 1945, he joined Ferry Command and delivered bombers and Dakotas across the Atlantic to bases in Scotland and Cairo. He did that until August, 1945.
When the war ended, he VINES returned to Canada and joined Trans-Canada Airlines, the forerunner of Air Canada. He started in May of 1946, flying Lockheed Lodestars, DC-3s and larger DC-4 airliners.
At that time, Ottawa introduced a new pilot rating called the Airline Transport Pilot Licence. Mr. VINES's number was 000002, meaning he was the second pilot in Canada to get it. "He used to say the person with licence 000001 was the man from the Department of Transport who certified him," his son said.
In 1948, he left Trans-Canada Airlines and became a private pilot for Massey Harris, the tractor manufacturer. Flying Lockheed Lodestars and the amphibious Grumman Goose, among other aircraft, his passengers were almost always all directors and executives of the firm.
He stayed with Massey Harris until 1954, when he became chief pilot for Pittsburgh Plate and Glass, Canada. There, he flew everything from a DC-3 to a keenly anticipated DH-125 jet. "I asked him what the new jet was like," his son recalled. "He thought for a moment and replied, 'John, It's better than sex.' " Pittsburgh Plate and Glass cut back on its corporate jet fleet in the recession of 1981, after which Mr. VINES freelanced as a corporate pilot.
In retirement, he owned a couple of sailboats and was an active sailor until a couple of years ago. Although he was a methodical man when it came to flying and sailing, he had a whimsical side otherwise - he had a storehouse of hundreds of jokes in his memory, and was always telling funny stories.
Frank William VINES was born on February 18, 1921, in Toronto. He died at Oakville, Ontario, on May 25, 2007, of emphysema, although he gave up smoking 30 years ago. He was 86. He is survived by his wife Helen and his son John.

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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-07-19 published
Ron BENDER, 60 Educator
Math teacher one of first to receive Prime Minister's Award
By F.F. LANGAN, Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S9
Knowlton, Quebec -- Ron BENDER was a math teacher who taught generations of high-school students, some of whom struggled with algebra while others were gifted in calculus. One of his students was Steve MacLean, the astronaut.
Along with being a math teacher, and then department head, Mr. BENDER also marked advanced tests for gifted students in contests run by the University of Waterloo. "The idea was to create 10 problems for students to solve. They were so difficult neither Ron nor I could solve them all in the exam time frame," said Jeri LUNNEY, a math teacher who worked with Mr. BENDER. As it turned out, only the brightest students could get seven out of 10.
"He was recognized as a first-class teacher within the first five years of his career, Ms. LUNNEY said. "He was charismatic, passionate and an excellent communicator."
Few of Ron BENDER's students forged brilliant careers. Most were plodders who were afraid of math. "Let's face it, he had kids who didn't want to be in his class," said his wife, Sharon Ann. "But if he could show a student something, and get the switch to go on, it really made his day."
Mr. BENDER knew that, in the modern world, an understanding of math beyond basic arithmetic was essential.
"I would go by his classroom and he would be using a ball to explain the concept of a sphere," said Moe RODRIGUE, who started teaching with Mr. BENDER and went on to become principal of West Carlton Secondary School. "A lot of math teachers just pick up homework and assign homework. Ron wasn't like that. He was a natural teacher and involved with his students."
Ron BENDER grew up near Timmins, Ontario, where his father worked for the highways department and his mother was a housewife. A bright lad, he skipped a couple of elementary grades and then travelled an hour each way to attend high school in Timmins. When there was activity after school, he would sometimes stay in town with an aunt.
In 1964, he won a full scholarship to study math at the University of Waterloo. He graduated four years later and began teaching at Merivale High School in the Ottawa suburb of Nepean. It was at Merivale that he taught Steve MacLean, who went on to earn a doctorate in physics. It was also where he met his wife, the school secretary. They married in 1970.
In 1973, he moved to nearby Gloucester High School. The BENDERs bought a house and a parcel of land in Carp, Ontario, where they raised their children and could work outdoors. "He loved a well-stacked woodpile," Mrs. BENDER said.
Mr. BENDER also liked to visit his hometown. "He came to teach in the Ottawa area and, for the first few years, always thought he would go home some day."
After Gloucester High School, Mr. BENDER was made head of mathematics department at Earl of March Secondary School in Ottawa's western suburbs. Later, he moved to the new West Carleton Secondary School as head of the math department. "I never remember a day when he complained about going to work," Mrs. BENDER said.
In 2000, Mr. BENDER retired but remained involved in mathematics. He worked at the University of Ottawa, tutoring first-year engineering students who were weak in math.
Over the years, he received many awards for his teaching. In 1993, he was in the first group of teachers to receive the Prime Minister's Award for Teaching Excellence in Science, Technology and Mathematics. The University of Waterloo gave him the Descartes Award, named after the 17th-century French mathematician, René Descartes.
Ronald Cecil BENDER was born in Matheson, Ontario, on October 12, 1946. He died of leukemia in Ottawa on June 13, 2007. He was 60. He is survived by his wife, Sharon Ann, and their children Matt and Amy.

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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-08-15 published
Ron WYATT: Pilot, Farmer and Insurance Agent
He didn't just become a pilot - he covered them
By F.F. LANGAN, Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S9
Ron WYATT turned two of his hobbies into a lucrative business. A private pilot and weekend farmer, he joined the Flying Farmers, a club made up of full- and part-time farmers who flew their small planes from private farm landing strips and other small airfields across the country. Soon, he wasn't just flying with them - he was covering them through his small insurance agency, which expanded into aviation almost exclusively.
The Flying Farmers first got off the ground in the United States in 1945, but the idea soon spread north - the Saskatchewan chapter, for example, was started in 1955 when an American member on his way home from a fishing trip stopped to refuel in Estevan, Saskatchewan., and started chatting with the locals.
The Ontario club was started in 1963 by Peter IRWIN, an Air Canada pilot with a farm just north of Toronto's airport. That year, there were 50 members. Mr. WYATT, who flew a two-seater Piper Tri-Pacer, soon joined.
He set to work remedying one of the problems with private aviation at the time: finding insurance.
"Back then, insurance wasn't mandatory as is today, but it was more expensive if it was outside a group plan," said Barbara CARROLL, who is the current president of Ontario Flying Farmers and worked for Mr. WYATT's company for many years.
"It also had to be a pretty specific policy," she said. "It covered people with private planes who kept their aircraft on their own property, in most cases, and flew from grass strips often to larger airstrips. For example, my husband John flew his Aeronca Champ from our grass strip to LaGuardia in New York."
The group policy Mr. WYATT came up with saved the pilots at least 25 per cent. It kept the Flying Farmers covered and happy, and also propelled his business into other aviation ventures. For instance, he had a chance encounter with someone from the Soaring Society of America and was soon insuring gliders and their pilots.
Insuring pilots and planes was a complicated business, Ms. CARROLL explained. Each state had its own insurance regulations, so Wyatt International Insurance Inc. had to register in each of the states where it did business. For a while, Mr. WYATT had an office in Britain, but he found it was a stretch.
He upgraded his own plane and bought a Cessna Cardinal, a more powerful version of the popular Cessna 172, a four-seater, single-engine aircraft. During trips to visit clients in the United States, he took rides in gliders, although he never owned one.
"Have you ever been up in a glider? It's the most wonderful feeling," said Mary WYATT, who flew with her husband and accompanied him on many of his trips. Mr. WYATT sold insurance to almost 3,000 North American glider owners before selling that part of his business to a U.S. company in 1990.
The Flying Farmers business eventually dropped off. At its peak in the early 1970s, there were more than 700 members of the Ontario chapter, representing about 350 planes. Today there are just 128 members, with as few as 20 planes.
"Young people just aren't into flying the way their parents were," Ms. CARROLL said.
Ronald WYATT was born in Toronto in 1926. His parents, both from England, were in bad financial shape and left their son with a babysitter. When she died, he went to her sister, Margaret WALLACE, and her husband Joe, who lived on a farm near Drayton, 100 kilometres west of the city.
Mr. WALLACE died when Ron was 12, and he and the woman he called his aunt moved into town. After high school, Ron went to teacher's college and started working at a small school near Drayton.
He continued teaching in other public schools and became principal at Quaker Road Public School, near Welland, Ontario But he wanted to make more money, so he took a job as office manager for the Canadian Indemnity Insurance Co., in downtown Toronto.
Mr. WYATT rose to manager of personnel before buying a small general-insurance agency of his own in the late 1950s. He ran the firm from an office in Willowdale. In 1972, he bought a farm in Zephyr, north of the city, and commuted to work. He later moved his office to the farmhouse.
On his farm, he raised Appaloosa horses and rode with the Zephyr Squires Club. He played the guitar, sang and performed with musical groups, and was in the choir at the local United Church.
Ronald Arthur WYATT was born in Toronto on August 12, 1926. He died of a heart attack on May 30, 2007. He was 80. He is survived by his wife, Mary, his daughter Mary Ellen and son Bob.

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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-08-24 published
Pilot was one of the first to fly bombing missions against Germany
Already in the Royal Air Force when the war started, he finished two tours of duty in 15 months before being sent to Canada to train air crews. Years later, he sold real estate in Toronto
By F.F. LANGAN, Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S8
When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Toby BASKETT was already one of the Royal Air Force's most seasoned operational pilots. Flying dangerously slow and obsolete aircraft, he was among the first to bomb Germany.
He was also among the first to be decorated. In September, 1940, he won a Distinguished Flying Cross for piloting a Handley Page Hampden bomber on a daring raid against a German industrial target. One of his fellow officers, Air Commodore John MITCHELL, described it as "an extraordinary raid on the Dortmund-Ems Canal, at a very low level, destroying lock gates on this all-important artery for German industry."
Flight Lieutenant BASKETT was involved in at least four raids on the canal that year. Later in the war, the canal and its dam were successfully attacked by more advanced Lancaster bombers using a special bouncing bomb that was portrayed in the film The Dam Busters.
The early raids were flown by much smaller bombers just after the fall of France, a time when Britain stood alone in Europe against Germany. Mr. BASKETT flew mostly twin-engine Hampdens, which, along with the Whitley and Wellington bombers, was all that the overstretched Royal Air Force could muster against German targets. With the Battle of Britain raging, fighters were needed for defence, so the missions went without benefit of escorts.
Their opponent, the Luftwaffe, was the world's most modern air force and flew at full strength, with the result that about half of the 1,400 Hampdens built were lost to flak and German fighters. It was also a tricky aircraft to fly and many went down in accidents.
"The Hampden was a death trap," Mr. MITCHELL said from his home in Lymington, England. "There was a narrow fuselage and the crew sat one behind the other. It was almost impossible for one pilot to take over from another."
The Hampden also laid mines in ports and canals in Europe. In his logbook, Mr. BASKETT records "gardening," a code word for laying mines. He laid ordnance (the "vegetable") in Dutch and French ports and in the Kiel Canal, a strategic waterway that links the Baltic with the North Sea.
Mine laying was hazardous work because the planes had to fly slow and low - 150 metres or less - making them easy targets. He was also involved in trying to thwart the German invasion of Norway in April, 1940. "Ordered to attack enemy battleship off coast of Norway," he wrote in his logbook. "Unable to locate target."
Mr. BASKETT's other targets included German air bases and at least one town. In 1974, he read a book about bombing missions during the early part of the war and it occurred to him that he might have been the first. He contacted the Royal Air Force Historical Branch and sent details of one particular raid.
"On May 11th, 1940, I took off from Royal Air Force Hemswell in Hampden L.4109 of No. 61 Squadron, 5 Group, to bomb the Cross Roads in Munchen-Gladbach," Mr. BASKETT wrote, adding how the flight took four hours and 45 minutes. "I wonder if your records confirm that I had the doubtful privilege of being the first Royal Air Force type to drop a bomb on German soil in the war?"
The reply, when it came, said the first attack was on the German island of Sylt on March 19, 1940. Nominal in nature, it was in retaliation for German bombs that fell on the Orkney Islands in Scotland. The first raid "against industrial targets" took place May 10, 1940, the night the Germans invaded France and just a few short hours before Mr. BASKETT lifted off for his target, a manufacturing centre in Westphalia now known as Moenchengladbach.
Code words are sprinkled through his logs. Another entry mentioned "testing George" - Steve Harris, chief historian for the Department of National Defence in Ottawa, explained this meant Mr. BASKETT was experimenting with an automatic pilot. Mr. BASKETT was later stationed at Goderich, Ontario, the site of some top-secret Royal Air Force testing.
"Goderich was where a lot of research was going on with secret technology, on things such as advanced navigation," said Ted Barris, author of Behind the Glory: Canada's Role in the Allied Air War.
In 1942, all Hampdens were withdrawn from bombing duty and transferred to Coastal Command, where they were assigned to patrol shorelines and search for submarines. Many of the bombers were sent to Canada for use in training and were flown by four Royal Canadian Air Force squadrons - two examples still survive, the most complete of which is at the Canadian Museum of Flight in Langley, British Columbia As well, about 150 Hampdens were built at plants in Quebec and Ontario.
Much of Toby BASKETT's life reads like a trip through the last days of the British Empire. Born in England, he soon went to India, where his father was working in the police force. He was sent home to boarding school at Bedford School, near Bambridge. His father died while he was at school and the family moved to Australia.
After working at many jobs, including sheep farming and gold mining in New Guinea, Mr. BASKETT returned to England to learn how to fly. In 1936, he took a short-service commission in the Royal Air Force, expecting to remain for just three years. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he stayed on.
His fighting war was over by the end of 1940, however. That December, he sailed to Halifax on a troop ship. He served as a staff pilot at a Royal Air Force training base at Port Albert, on the shore of Lake Huron near Goderich, Ontario The unit had been transferred there from Kent, England, and later became part of the Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
"The location of the base must have been a political decision," said Mr. MITCHELL, who was also based there. "The weather was terrible with snowstorms coming in from the lake."
Other assignments in Canada included a posting to Nova Scotia, where he trained pilots to fly the Hudson bomber in anti-submarine patrols, and to Boucherville, Quebec, where he gave instruction on the Catalina flying boat. "They needed pilots with fighting experience to pass on their knowledge to the new pilots," Mr. Barris said.
It was in Canada that Mr. BASKETT met his wife, Vivian TEMPLE. She was a Red Cross volunteer during the war and they met at a dance. Their daughter, Lynne BODDY, said that during their courtship, her father would fly over her mother's Muskoka cottage and drop messages in bottles. At their wedding, Royal Air Force officers acted as ushers and Mr. MITCHELL stood up as best man.
At the end of 1944, the couple left Canada for the Bahamas. Mr. BASKETT was posted to Nassau, where he served as commanding officer of an Royal Air Force Transport Command base that was used to train pilots on Dakotas, the military version of the Douglas DC-3. At the time, the governor of the Bahamas was the Duke of Windsor, who had given up the British throne in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson. "Mother was pregnant and lost the baby. She had a note from the Duchess expressing her condolences," said Lynne BODDY.
In August of 1945, Mr. BASKETT returned to Canada to work at Transport Command at Dorval airport, outside Montreal. He returned to England on the Queen Mary in October.
When the war ended, he left the Royal Air Force and worked in Jamaica for a couple of years as manager of British South American Airways, a short-lived airline that operated civilian versions of wartime bombers. In 1947, he rejoined the Royal Air Force and served in a number of global hot spots, including Kenya and Egypt.
In 1957, he left the Royal Air Force again and moved to Toronto, where he went to work selling real estate for Martin and Meredith. He took a while adjusting to a calm, middle-class life in Canada, but loved visiting Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. He also did wood carving and sketching, and kept a cartoon diary.
Toby BASKETT was born Cyril Alexander BASKETT at Bedford, England, on September 19, 1911. He died of pneumonia in Toronto on June 24, 2007. He was 95. He is survived by wife Vivian and daughter Lynne. He also leaves brother Geoffrey.

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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-09-01 published
Ambassador to North Atlantic Treaty Organization later ran Atomic Energy of Canada Limited and 'took no prisoners'
An outspoken envoy to five countries, he was an articulate Cold War advocate of the alliance who also came to champion Canada's nuclear power-plant ambitions
By F.F. LANGAN, Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S12
Ross CAMPBELL was a blunt-spoken diplomat who believed in the Cold War nuclear realities of North Atlantic Treaty Organization and then later switched to running Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, the powerful Ottawa-backed entity that makes and exports Candu reactors.
Appointed ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1967, the posting came after a career spent in overseas jobs all over the world from Oslo to Ankara to Tokyo - not to mention a place at the top of the External Affairs hierarchy in Ottawa.
By all accounts a ferocious champion of his responsibilities, wherever they occurred, Mr. CAMPBELL was once described by The Globe and Mail as an "outspoken and irreverent fellow."
It was a view supported by many of his colleagues, who said it was one of his strengths to speak his mind. "He took no prisoners in an argument," said Alan Gotlieb, former Canadian ambassador to the United States. "He was the ablest person ever to serve in External Affairs… Without question."
Mr. CAMPBELL came from a Toronto family of achievers. One of his brothers became a senior executive at Canadian Pacific, and Mr. CAMPBELL himself had a law degree by the time he was 21. However, by that time the Second World War had intervened and rather than opening a law practice he volunteered for the Royal Canadian Navy. It was August, 1940, and a time when the Royal Canadian Navy was still so small it could not easily absorb recruits. Instead, he was lent to the Royal Navy for most of the war.
They trained at HMS Raleigh in Cornwall where they became known as the Raleighites. Included in their number was some of the most decorated Canadians in naval service, including Hampton GRAY/GREY, the only Canadian sailor awarded the Victoria Cross in the Second World War.
"Ross CAMPBELL was one of 150 young men who joined the navy under a scheme that allowed them to train with the Royal Navy when Canada did not have the facilities for training so many volunteers," said Alec Douglas, former official historian for the Canadian Forces and author of the official history of the Royal Canadian Navy in the Second World War.
In their naiveté, the Raleighites expected to be commissioned officers as soon as they landed in England. Instead, they were given a taste of seafaring life as ordinary seamen on Royal Navy ships. One of the ships Mr. CAMPBELL served on was the HMS Churchill, a 1,325-tonne, flush-deck destroyer the Americans had provided to the British under the Destroyers for Bases Agreement reached at Halifax in 1940. Built in 1919 and glaringly obsolete, Mr. CAMPBELL thought the vessel unfit for duty in the stormy North Atlantic. "Would anyone believe a 62-degree roll registered on the bridge in a gale off the west coast of Scotland," he wrote. "Those boats were never meant for the North Atlantic, or any open sea."
To his relief, Mr. CAMPBELL was transferred to Motor Torpedo Boats, or MTBs, and eventually won a Distinguished Service Cross for gallantry. The fastest vessels in the Royal Navy, the 21-metre-long boats were powered by three 1,100 horsepower engines and could reach speeds of 48 knots. He served on four different Motor Torpedo Boats in the English Channel, and then in North Africa where they attacked German convoys crossing the Mediterranean to supply Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps. After the German defeat at the Second Battle of El Alamein in late 1942, Mr. CAMPBELL and his unit were sent back to England in advance of D-Day in June, 1944.
"The flotilla was in action every night, engaging everything from one-manned torpedoes launched against the flanks of the invasion fleet to R-boats, a sort of outsized E-boat [the German equivalent of Motor Torpedo Boats] with superior armament," he wrote. "A successful engagement with R-boats, three of us against nine of them - we stopped four - won me my Distinguished Service Cross."
In an action off Le Havre in July of 1944, his boat was attacked and set on fire. The crew managed to save the boat but he and others were badly burned and seriously wounded. The boat was towed while under fire and then brought back to England.
"It was a severe trial for an addicted cigarette smoker," wrote Mr. CAMPBELL, who afterward spent a great deal of time in hospital in England.
He ended the war as a lieutenant commander and joined External Affairs in Ottawa, starting with postings to Norway, Denmark and Turkey. Along the way he was variously a special assistant in Ottawa, the head of the Middle East division there and assistant under-secretary of state for External Affairs. As an ambassador, he served in Yugoslavia, Algeria, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Korea and Japan.
It was his job as ambassador to North Atlantic Treaty Organization that was probably his most important diplomatic post. As part of the job, he served as Canada's representative on the Nuclear Planning Group within the alliance and lectured on strategic studies at both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Defence College in Rome and at the National Defence College in Kington, Ontario
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization posting came at a time when some members of the Liberal cabinet under prime minister Pierre Trudeau questioned the value of North Atlantic Treaty Organization and even mused about leaving the alliance.
That would be a mistake, countered Mr. CAMPBELL, who suspected some cabinet members shared the foreign-policy attitude that "a social worker is just as necessary to a healthy community as a policeman." It was a view that particularly infuriated him.
Without North Atlantic Treaty Organization, he argued, the Soviet Union would be able overwhelm the countries of Western Europe. "Canada's membership in North Atlantic Treaty Organization is our admission card to the negotiating tables of the Western Alliance," he wrote in an article in Maclean's magazine.
There were even reports, later denied, that Mr. CAMPBELL threatened to resign over the issue. A Globe and Mail editorial attributed the report to a misinterpretation of Mr. CAMPBELL's spirited defence in a principled fight with politicians.
Mr. Gotlieb, who served as ambassador to Washington from 1981 to 1989 but at that time was the undersecretary of state for External Affairs, said Mr. CAMPBELL brought all the weight of his arguments to bear. "He was trying to stiffen up the peaceniks in Ottawa. He was outspoken and took a hard line on how to deal with the Soviet Union."
Some of his greatest battles were with politicians and civil servants who underestimated the Soviet threat, Mr. Gotlieb said.
Interestingly, Mr. CAMPBELL was still at it more than 20 years later. In an op-ed piece in The Globe in May of 1992, he criticized Donald Macdonald, a defence minister in the Trudeau cabinet, for declaring North Atlantic Treaty Organization had outlived its usefulness. "Canada's decision to play a leading role in the creation of North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the 1940's owed as much to the experience of two world wars, when the lack of collective arrangements encouraged aggression, as it did to the then-emerging Soviet threat."
After his North Atlantic Treaty Organization assignment ended in 1972, Mr. CAMPBELL was appointed ambassador to Japan at the time when Tokyo had become one of Canada's most important diplomatic posts. Japan was nearing the height of its trade supremacy, and Ottawa was anxious to be part of the opening up of the entire region to development.
In 1975, he retired from the diplomatic corps and was appointed chairman of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. Suddenly, his knowledge of all things nuclear and his skills as a diplomat all came together, and he and his wife were on the A-list of Ottawa diplomatic receptions and dinners.
For a while, he was also acting president of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited as well as its chairman. At times he needed some of his fighting skills as much as ever to defend the nuclear-power company from charges of corruption. The most glaring incident was a $20-million fee paid to an agent who sold reactors to South Korea. members of Parliament were outraged that some of the money had been paid into a Swiss bank account.
The arrangement had been made in 1972, three years before Mr. CAMPBELL arrived at Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. He told a parliamentary committee that he saved $1.6-million by renegotiating the agent's contract.
During his time at Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, he sold Candu reactors to countries such as Argentina and South Korea, both countries where he had been ambassador, plus another to Romania. He also tried hard to close a deal with Japan, but to no avail. The Japanese Atomic Energy Commission changed its mind, making the announcement while Mr. CAMPBELL was in Tokyo working on the deal. Mr. CAMPBELL said the federal government's waffling over nuclear safeguards had hurt Atomic Energy of Canada Limited sales. At one stage, in typical fashion, he said the Candu nuclear reactor was going the way of the Avro Arrow - thanks to politicians.
Mr. CAMPBELL was also said to be bitter about the cancellation of a separate contract with Argentina. In that case, he blamed a careless remark by External Affairs minister Flora Macdonald for prompting Argentina to cancel its Candu order and buy West German reactors instead.
After stepping down as chairman, Mr. CAMPBELL stayed on as director of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited and as president of Atomic Energy of Canada International, which also sold Candu reactors overseas.
After leaving Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, Mr. CAMPBELL ran his own consultancy business. Age slowed down his body, but not his mind.
"He went to work every day of his life," said Mr. Douglas, former official historian for the Canadian Forces. "He never failed to go into the office."
Fastidious about his appearance, Mr. CAMPBELL showed up daily at his Ottawa office dressed as though he was on duty at any one of the five embassies he had been ambassador.
Mr. CAMPBELL was an officer in the Order of Canada and a life member of the Rideau Club in Ottawa. He was in the first group of veterans named to the Veterans Hall of Fame.
Ross CAMPBELL was born in Toronto on November 4, 1918. He died of heart disease in Aylmer, Quebec, on August 15, 2007. He was 88. He is survived by his wife, Pippa, and by his sons Hugh and Timothy.

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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-10-25 published
Fighter pilot became college president and put education in his sights
Royal Canadian Air Force flyer returned from the Second World War determined to get a university degree. He found success in business and passed on his lust for knowledge to a generation of students
By F.F. LANGAN, Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S7
Mel GARLAND was a man who did well at everything he did, and he did an awful lot. A fighter pilot, a businessman and a civil servant, he was also a visionary who helped develop community colleges and trade schools in Ontario.
Mr. GARLAND was the second president of Durham College, a community college at Oshawa, east of Toronto, from 1980 to 1988.
It was a time when the community college system was vigorously expanding. Set up by the Ontario government in 1967, Durham was one of about 20 new tertiary-level schools. The object was to provide students with a practical education that would lead to good jobs, and to improve the province's standard of living. That is why Mr. GARLAND promoted two- and three-year applied engineering programs, and worked to get Durham College - the school closest to a large auto plant - to set up a robotics lab.
"He was a strong believer that a modern society needed knowledge workers above all else, and in particular, leaders in technology," said Gary POLONSKY who succeeded him as president of Durham College. "Mel expanded programs in engineering technology and trades."
As part of running Durham College, he worked at establishing the Skilled Trades Centre in nearby Ajax, Ontario A part of Durham College, it now has about 2,000 students learning to become everything from electricians and plumbers to millwrights and metal fabricators.
Mel GARLAND grew up in Port Dalhousie, Ontario, where the family lived in the same house for 60 years. Both his parents were immigrants from Glasgow, and his father worked as a maintenance foreman at Thompson Products. As a boy, young Mel and his best friend, Pete BELFORD, liked to sneak onto the local tennis courts to play. The president of told them they could play for free if they performed odd jobs around the club. Eventually, the two of them played at the St. Catharines Tennis Club, where one year they won the doubles championship. Later, they went on to win the Niagara District championship.
Mr. GARLAND and Mr. BELFORD did a lot of things together, and remained Friends for life. As youngsters, they joined the Boy Scouts, and once shared first place in a competition. Mr. GARLAND eventually became a King's Scout, the top honour a Scout can earn. They once hitchhiked to Montreal and, when they were old enough, went to Hamilton together to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force and serve in the Second World War.
In 1942, Mr. GARLAND was selected for pilot training. At flight school, the same things that had made him a good tennis player - sharp eyesight and quick reflexes - singled him out as a fighter pilot. Just before he went overseas, he went to a tennis club dance and met a young woman named Marguerite ALLEN. They saw each other every night before he left.
He arrived in England in February of 1944, at the age of 21. At that stage in the war, fighter pilots had two main jobs: protecting bombers on their way to Germany, and preparing for the Allied invasion of France. Almost as soon as he arrived, 403 Squadron moved to Tangmere, a Royal Air Force station in West Sussex, to be closer to the English Channel.
By this point, Mr. GARLAND was a flying officer. He and the rest of the squadron were equipped with the latest version of the Spitfire fighter. Armed with cannons and machine guns, this version was a much more deadly weapon than the one that flew in the Battle of Britain. Flying low-level missions over France was also deadly for the pilots.
The squadron moved to an airfield at Dieppe, France, on June 16, just 10 days after the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Almost exactly a month later, Mr. GARLAND's plane was hit by flak while on a mission. At first he thought he could land the plane, but a fire broke out and he was forced to bail out. For a few seconds, he was trapped up in the cockpit and feared his parachute would not open but managed to alight in a field, convinced he was safe. To his surprise, he was soon surrounded by German soldiers.
He spent three weeks as a prisoner of war, though never in a camp. The Germans were in retreat and marched Mr. GARLAND and the other prisoners across France, sometimes covering as much as 40 kilometres a day. In the confusion of the retreat, Mr. GARLAND escaped. He slept in the barns of sympathetic French farmers and slowly made his way back to the Allied lines.
He soon found himself home in Canada, since the Royal Canadian Air Force never sent an escaped PoW back into service, fearing they would be shot if recaptured. But the war in Europe was soon over, and Mr. GARLAND resolved to make use of veterans scholarships and get an education. Before the war, he had finished high school but lacked the money to go to university. The scholarships allowed him to go to Queen's University in Kingston and he graduated in the class of 1948½ (to speed up their schooling and catch up with life, veterans were allowed fall graduation).
While at Queen's, he married Marguerite (with Mr. BELFORD as best man) and the couple set off for Boston. He been accepted to the Harvard Business School, even though he had already used up most of his credits under the veterans' scholarship scheme. To make ends meet, Marguerite found work and he got a night job at the Harvard Library.
After Harvard, they returned home. Mr. GARLAND started work at General Electric Canada. He later worked at General Bakeries and Ford Canada, during the period when the auto maker was building its assembly plant in Oakville, Ontario
Even then, he was concerned about Ontario's ability to compete in the world. In 1967, he became chairman of the education committee of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce, the same year the community college system was founded.
In 1974, Mr. GARLAND joined the Ontario government as executive director of industry and then executive director of trade. It was the beginning of two decades of devotion to fine-tuning Ontario's industrial infrastructure. He carried on with the same mission at Durham College.
"The lack of skilled people to fill the manpower needs of industry is a real problem," he said in 1980, the year he was appointed president. "It's in the schools that we can turn attitudes around to make these skilled jobs desirable careers."
Under his leadership, the school began expanding its industrial facilities.
"He focused on bringing the latest technology to the classroom and constructing a new state-of-the-art robotics lab, the precursor to our Integrated Manufacturing Centre on campus today," said Leah MYERS, president of Durham College. "Mel was known as an entrepreneurial and consummate professional who set high standards for himself and those around him."
Although he was a man with many careers, his neighbours in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke remember him as a strong family man who was devoted to his six children. Neighbour and close friend Ron Quick said his biggest success was raising his brood and a marriage that lasted 60 years.
His oldest daughter, Linda, said he had an easy manner with both his own children and others on the block. "Much can be said for my father's many achievements, but he was the kind of dad who says after dinner, 'Let's play some ball,' " she said. "We would troop out to the side of the yard for a pickup game of baseball and, within minutes, kids from up and down the street would be joining us. Dad would be the only adult out there."
The flags at Durham College flew at half-mast the week Mr. GARLAND died. His friend Mr. BELFORD, who never left Port Dalhousie, attended the funeral.
Melvin Lloyd GARLAND was born in Port Dalhousie, Ontario, on October 19, 1922. He died on September 3, 2007, in Ancaster, Ontario, of complications from Alzheimer's disease. He was 84. He is survived by his wife, Marguerite. He also leaves daughters Linda, Jane, Jennifer and Pat, and sons David and Greig.

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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-11-02 published
He was among the first doctors in Canada to perform dialysis
Irish-born renal specialist who had trained in the U.S. introduced the experimental treatment to Kingston hospitals. Sometimes, he even built his own equipment
By F.F. LANGAN, Special▲▼ to the Globe and Mail, Page S8
Peter MORRIN was a Canadian pioneer in kidney dialysis who in 1967 performed one of the first successful uses of blood purification, or hemodialysis, in Kingston.
Although trained as a nephrologist - or kidney specialist - the Irish-born doctor did not want to get involved in hemodialysis when he first arrived at Kingston General Hospital. At the time, the equipment was large and complicated, and Doctor MORRIN maintained that dialysis would only work if applied by a properly trained team with the right apparatus. But a dramatic incident in the emergency room forced him to act before he was ready.
A badly injured car-accident victim arrived at Kingston General suffering from kidney failure, among other things. Dialysis might save him. As it turned out, an unused dialysis machine lay in the basement of the nearby Hotel Dieu Hospital. Volunteer fundraisers had donated the machine after a patient died of kidney failure and it had sat, untouched, ever since.
The trouble was, no one in Kingston was familiar with the thing - except for Doctor MORRIN, that is. Nine years earlier, he had been a member of a university medical team in Missouri that had been among the first in the world to achieve hemodialysis and he knew what he must do.
"We borrowed the Kingston General Hospital van and drove over to the Hotel Dieu where we found the kidney dialysis machine covered with dust and brought it back to Kingston General Hospital. I plugged it in, switched it on and it seemed to be in working order," recalled Doctor MORRIN in a memoir in 2004. "The operating room staff cleaned it, and we set it up in the one of the operating rooms."
It took eight hours to prepare the dialysis machine, which turned out to be tragically too long for the patient. By the time the machine was hooked up, his condition had deteriorated and he died.
"This event galvanized the hospital to establish a hemodialysis team and draw up the necessary protocols and procedures. The next patient with acute renal failure did not meet such a tragic end," relates a profile of Doctor MORRIN from the Kidney Foundation of Canada.
The next patient was another accident victim, a 21-year-old man who had rolled his car and spent six hours in a ditch before anyone noticed him. He was dying, and one of his problems was kidney failure. Doctor MORRIN and a urologist, Andrew BRUCE, stayed with the young man for six hours during the treatment. He survived.
Dialysis is used to mimic the functions of the kidneys, cleaning the blood, among other things. It is not a perfect replacement for a kidney, but treatment on a dialysis machine is enough to keep a patient alive. Dialysis can be used for patients with temporary or permanent kidney failure.
Peter MORRIN was the son of two Dublin doctors. He was sent to school in England at Ampleforth College, a Catholic boarding school run by the Benedictine Order. He returned to Ireland for university, studying medicine at University College, Dublin. In 1954, he graduated first in his class and studied in Liverpool for several months. He then went to work for two years at Boston City Hospital in Massachusetts.
After that, he moved to St. Louis, Missouri, for more postgraduate work and it was at the Washington University School of Medicine that he became a part of a team that was among the first anywhere to achieve hemodialysis. The 1958 procedure saved the life of a 9-year-old.
From there, he went on to become acting director of the renal division at the Barnes Hospital in St. Louis in 1960. Always a keen rugger player in Ireland, he hooked up with the local rugby club and it was through that connection that he met his wife, Mariella.
A year later, he arrived at Queen's University to be a lecturer in the department of medicine and to join the staff of Kingston General. After working in general medicine, he established the hospital's renal program and the nephrology division.
Along the way, he began experimenting with dialysis machines of his own. Applying what he had learned in Missouri and adding everything he had since figured out for himself, he began to put together his own equipment.
In 1965, he invented his own dialysis machine, said his friend, Ross Morton. Doctor MORRIN called it the King Med machine.
"He also had to mix his own chemical solution in a big steel drum," added Doctor MORTON, a professor of medicine at Queen's. "He put in water and added the correct concentration of chemicals. Now it's done automatically, but then it had to be done by hand."
In the end, it was not until 1967 that the Kingston dialysis unit opened. At first, it was just a four-bed unit located upstairs from the X-ray department. Today, the unit has eight nephrologists on staff and provides dialysis to 250 patients in Kingston, as well as another 100 patients in seven satellite centres and at homes in eastern Ontario from Brockville to Belleville.
Along with his specialty in nephrology, Doctor MORRIN was also a medical ethicist. From the outset, many ethical questions arose about who would receive dialysis and who would not. To be refused was to receive a death sentence.
Hospital boards made decisions on who would be given dialysis, since the machinery, the chemicals and the medical specialists were in short supply. Sometimes, hospitals would choose men over women because men were the breadwinners. It was something that always troubled Doctor MORRIN.
"In the early days of dialysis, you had to be between the ages of 15 to 45 to qualify - with no other serious disease apart from the renal failure. It was done by a committee," said Doctor MORTON. "Peter was a very fair man and worked on the basis that anyone who could benefit from the treatment should get it. He always struck the right ethical balance."
In his academic career, Doctor MORRIN started as a lecturer in medicine at Queen's in 1961, and rose to become a full professor by 1977. He took a sabbatical year in 1975-76, studying at the Institute of Nephrology in Paris.
Peter MORRIN was an outgoing man. All his life he retained the soft accent of educated Dublin, but he could mimic the many other Irish accents. If he listened to an Irishman speak, he could pinpoint the county of his birth - be it Kerry, Sligo or Wexford.
He was also a great storyteller and raconteur. At his engagement party in St. Louis he was cornered by some Americans who seemed to think all Irishmen were peasants, priests or Bing Crosby.
"So, Peter, why did you come to America?"
"Well, because the bull died."
His audience was astonished.
"Well, you see," he continued, straight-faced," I was engaged to be married to a lovely Irish girl. But in Ireland, the bride's family must provide a dowry. Then, the night before the wedding, the bull - the dowry - died. So we couldn't get married, and I had to leave Ireland."
Mariella, his fiancée, soon broke up the bull session.
A devoted family man, Doctor MORRIN was involved in the lives of his three sons as children and adults. He took up sailing, first buying a sailboat and then a book on how to sail. The family sailed out of the Kingston Yacht Club and one son, Hugh, went on to represent Canada at the 1981 world youth championships in Portugal. Doctor MORRIN was also a keen fly fisherman.
In 1995, he retired from clinical work and full-time teaching. The Peter Morrin Prize in Nephrology, established by colleagues and Friends on his retirement, is awarded annually to the fourth-year medical student at Queen's University obtaining the highest overall standing in nephrology.
Peter Arthur Francis MORRIN was born in Dublin, Ireland, on October 8, 1931. He died at Kingston, Ontario, on October 3, 2007, of injuries suffered in a head-on car accident that occurred while on his way home from a day spent fly fishing. He was five days short of his 75th birthday. Doctor MORRIN is survived by his wife, Mariella, and his three sons, Peter, Hugh and Robin.

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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-11-08 published
He flew in combat in Germany and mercy missions in Africa
By F.F. LANGAN, Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S9
Jack PATTERSON, was a Canadian pilot who flew in two wars. The first was the 1939-45 war during which he flew bombing missions over Germany, and the second was to deliver relief supplies in the Nigerian Civil War.
John PATTERSON grew up in Dawson Creek, British Columbia, where his parents ran a general store. They held high ambitions for their children. Bill, the eldest son, became a doctor; the same was expected of young Jack. Instead, at 17, he lied about his age and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force.
He qualified as a pilot and was soon in England flying heavy bombers with 431 (Iroquois) squadron. On one mission, he helped spare Cologne Cathedral from unnecessary damage. The crews had been briefed to use the famed spire to line up for an industrial target and, at the last minute, it seemed to him that his bomb aimer was going to blast the cathedral itself. He managed to take evasive action, he told his family years later, and the bombs fell elsewhere.
Near the end of the war, his Lancaster was attacked by an ME-262, the world's first jet fighter. Usually, that meant certain death for a slow bomber but luckily his gunners shot down the jet.
After the war, he attended the University of British Columbia. Following graduation, he moved to Montreal where he ran a driving school for a time yet could not resist the lure of flight. He soon found himself working for Wheeler Aviation, which later became Nordair, flying Douglas DC-3s and DC-4s to the Arctic.
In 1968, he helped a church group called Canair Relief to buy one of Nordair's obsolete propeller-driven Lockheed Constellations so it could fly aid to Biafra, the losing side in the Nigerian Civil War. One thing led to another, and he took a leave of absence to fly the Super Constellation for Canair. For one thing, he felt sorry for an organization that knew so little about aircraft or the logistics of moving a plane and its spare parts halfway around the world.
"Good intentions gone bad left PATTERSON furious at church groups on the way over," recalled Toronto journalist Peter Worthington, who went on the first trip for the Toronto Telegram. "The church groups overloaded the plane without telling the captain."
Departing from Gander, the plane had barely achieved liftoff, Mr. PATTERSON later wrote in a memoir. "Nearly towards the end of the runway… we staggered into the air. It took us almost 25 minutes to get the airplane up to 5,000 feet."
Later, it turned out that the Newfoundland government had donated a Volkswagen and loaded it on without his knowledge. The extra weight meant the plane had to make an emergency stop at the Azores to refuel.
Jack PATTERSON his crew and their plane were based in Sao Tome, the Portuguese islands off the west coast of Africa. From there they flew to the Uli airfield in Biafra, carrying food and medical supplies as often as three trips each night. They operated at night since the Nigerian Air Force, using Egyptian pilots, flew their MiG fighters only during daylight hours.
Sometimes, Mr. PATTERSON landed his plane while under attack. "Three bombs went off about 300 yards off our starboard side," Mr. PATTERSON later wrote. "I knew from experience that the bombs paralleling the runway could do us no harm."
Even so, the plane was one night hit by shrapnel and lost an engine. The crew had to fly the crippled plane to Britain for an overhaul. The British, who were supporting the Nigerian government, threw them out but they found an obliging repair firm in France.
Without telling the church group - though he felt certain they knew - Mr. PATTERSON delivered high-octane aviation gasoline to a Swedish mercenary named Count Carl Gustav von Rosen who used it to mount attacks on Nigerian airfields. A Catholic, Mr. PATTERSON joked he brought in the fuel when Protestant relief organizations were paying the freight.
By the time he left Africa, he had logged 567 hours piloting 162 flights into Uli airport. In total, Canair Relief flew in 183,973 tons of aid, not counting the contraband aviation fuel.
He returned home and continued to work at Nordair until 1984, when regulations forced him to retire at 60. After that, he and a colleague leased a Lear Jet and flew for a charter airline. He gave that up when his vision deteriorated, but continued to fly his own Cessna 172 for pleasure. By the time he gave up the controls for good, he had logged 33,000 hours - the equivalent to spending three years and 10 months aloft.
John Stockton PATTERSON was born on October 3, 1924, in Regina. He died of lung disease, and from complications of a fall, in Toronto on October 27, 2007. He was 83. He is survived by his wife, Gloria, and by four children from an earlier marriage: Linda, Jack, Glenn and Lise. A daughter Lorraine, died in 1971.

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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-11-21 published
Volker SEDING, 63 Artist
He spent decades photographing animals behind bars
By F.F. LANGAN, Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S10
Toronto -- Volker SEDING used to visit the Berlin Zoo as a boy after the Second World War. To get there, he passed women in the street stacking up rubble from the destruction caused by Allied bombing and Russian artillery shells that levelled the city. At the zoo, he liked to talk to an ape in its cage.
Later, as a photographer, he travelled the world capturing images of lonely animals in city zoos. The photographs from his project are now part of the permanent collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and at other museums in the United States and Europe.
Mr. SEDING, who was thrice married and devoted more than 25 years to taking museum-quality photographs, was one of the top artistic photographers in Canada. Some of his pictures are black and white, some are colour, while still others were shot in black and white, then painted by hand. Most were shot on a large-format Linhof camera that used plates. After each exposure, a new plate was inserted in the back of the camera. Later, he modified it with a special adapter that accepted a custom-made roll of film. He was technically skilled and built his own cameras from parts. He kept only the negatives he considered his best.
"In his lifetime, he kept maybe 200 to 250 negatives," said Stephen BULGER, owner of the Toronto gallery where Mr. SEDING exhibited his work. "Some photographs, such as the zoo series, were in editions of 75. Others were in editions as limited as five or eight."
Mr. SEDING spent decades on his zoo project, yet considered only 60 photographs worthy of it. Many of them provide the illustrations in his book Captive.
"SEDING told me he would wait by a chosen cage for hours and usually even days in order capture a certain revelatory motion or movement," said Gary Michael Dault, who wrote the text for Captive.
Mr. SEDING's second wife, Janet DAWIDOWICZ, who is also a photographer, often accompanied him. "We might visit four zoos and he would only take an image if he thought everything was perfect. The light had to be right and he was such a perfectionist, the images were hard to find," she said. "He knew ahead of time which image he was looking for, and he only shot what he wanted."
The photographer's reasons for concentrating on animals in zoos were quite simple.
"Since I was a kid, the zoo has always been a magical place," Mr. SEDING once wrote. "Where else can one go where life on this planet is presented in such density? Sadly, it is also a place where some of the animals make their last stand.
"To me, there is still time for contemplation for what is left of the animal world and in this sense, the camera here is simply a research tool."
After zoos, his next favourite subject was old buildings, usually in run-down neighbourhoods of Toronto, Montreal and New York. The series was called Mainstreets, and like the Zoo Portfolio, it took him years. If a building had been updated, he concentrated on the first three floors to capture what the structure looked like before its gentrification.
Later, he tried another technique. Using a super-wide lens, he turned the camera on its side to take a vertical shot. That way, he could concentrate on a single building, rather than its streetscape.
He also did studio work and liked to take portraits of people sometimes blurring the faces -- and worked on still life images, including hand-painted work of fruit floating in the air. More experimental images came from working with plywood, which he covered in wet cement. When it dried, he would place Chinese herbs on the surface and move them around until he achieved what he felt was balance. Then he'd take a photo of it. "Sometimes he could do one in an afternoon. Other times, it took him a month," said Mr. BULGER.
Volker SEDING's early years were spent in a city under siege. Canadian and British bombers hit Berlin by night, Americans by day. His early life was coloured by the war and its bleak aftermath. His father was an engineer who did not serve in the military.
"He often spoke of the hardships of growing up in postwar Berlin," Ms. DAWIDOWICZ said. "German history was difficult for him, but he married two Jewish women."
Mr. SEDING studied film and photography at art school in Hanover. He then apprenticed to photographers and did some work for German movie director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. One day, he saw an advertisement in a newspaper for a photographer's assistant in Corner Brook, Newfoundland.
"I had this romantic vision of Canada as the last frontier. I wanted to meet people who lived close to nature," he told a reporter in 1980. He arrived at Gander Airport in February and was struck by the beauty of frozen lakes and a landscape of stark pine trees.
Mr. SEDING once referred to his job in Corner Brook as being "the town photographer." He got married there and after a year or so, he moved with his wife, Diane, to Ottawa where he made documentaries and industrial films, mostly for Crawley Films.
In the late 1970s, he began concentrating on fine-art photography. He became successful, but never rich. Early photographs sold for about $450; later ones fetched as much as $5,000.
In the past year, Mr. SEDING suffered from kidney stones. He was treated, but the pain continued. His doctors told him not to worry. By the time he learned he also had cancer, he had three weeks to live.
Volker SEDING was born in Berlin on January 2, 1943. He died of cancer in Toronto on October 21, 2007. He was 63. He is survived by his wife Barbara Levy, and by his son Mark from an earlier marriage to Diane Williams. He also leaves sisters Gisela and Brigitte.
A memorial will take place at the Stephen Bulger Gallery, 1026 Queen St. W., Toronto, at 4 p.m. on Sunday.

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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-12-01 published
Battle of Britain fighter pilot won DFC twice and a rare DSO
Having learned to fly at the Montreal Flying Club, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force along with many other members after Canada entered the Second World War. He was soon in the thick of the action
By F.F. LANGAN, Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S11
Knowlton, Quebec -- Wing Commander Dal RUSSELL was one of the last surviving Canadian pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain, and one of most highly decorated Canadian fliers of the Second World War.
He was a 23-year-old pilot officer when he started flying Hurricanes with No. 1 Royal Canadian Air Force Squadron (later known as Royal Canadian Air Force 401 Squadron) on August 19, 1940. By the end of September, 1940, he had destroyed more than five German aircraft.
After several of his victories he sent telegrams home to his parents in Montreal. "Tommy [Flying Officer Thomas Little of Montreal] and I got our first Dornier," said part of a 27-word telegram. In mid-September another said: "Cigarettes and food arrived. Many Thanks. Got my third Hun yesterday. Heinkel bomber. Love to all."
In almost every telegram sent home he asked for cigarettes, food and, in one case, a sleeping bag. Every telegram, press clipping and letter that arrived were kept in scrapbooks by his sister Jane. When she went overseas to join her two brothers, their mother took over the record-keeping.
The reality of battle was much less cheery than the telegrams. Wing Commander RUSSELL later described the fear and danger of aerial combat: "When you are in the thick of a fight at 20,000 feet, and travelling at a speed of 400 miles per hour through a sky filled with hostile aircraft, you haven't time to think about much but keeping the other fellow off your tail, avoiding a collision and getting a German within the reach of your eight machine guns. You try to draw a bead on him and watch out behind you at the same time. Your mouth is as dry as cotton somehow, and the palms of your hands are dripping wet."
His ground crew nicknamed him Deadeye Dick for the number of German bombers and fighters he was credited with damaging or destroying. They painted the legend "Ace of Spades" on his Hurricane for luck. Like many allied fighter pilots, he was certain he shot down or damaged more planes than he was given credit for.
"Claimed two shot down and four badly damaged. But I am quite sure we got five in all. Yesterday, August 28th, we were told that our bag was three shot down, and three disabled; so that is a good start anyway," he wrote in a letter home.
A handsome man, he featured in a Canadian Press story about a visit to his base on September 26, 1940, by Air Marshal Billy Bishop, the First World War flying ace. The reporter described him, though did not mention him by name, after he landed during an inspection of the base.
"Air Marshal Bishop examined one of the Hurricanes which was in the scrap. An even dozen holes and scars on its propeller and fuselage showed its pilot, a blond curly-haired youth [Mr. RUSSEL], had been in the bomber's bullet stream."
By the end of October, 1939, the British, Canadian and Polish pilots had won the Battle of Britain and forced German to cancel its plans of invasion. The squadron had destroyed and damaged more than 70 aircraft, while losing 16 Hurricanes and three pilots.
Mr. RUSSELL was a certified war hero, the first of three Royal Canadian Air Force officers to be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. To Ottawa, that made him more valuable as a walking recruiting poster, so they brought him home for a tour of cities and towns.
"See and hear about the Royal Air Force from One of Them," read a poster for a meeting on August 9, 1941, that charged admission to raise money for the war effort. Flight Officer RUSSEL, DFC, was the star speaker. He also wrote articles for newspapers.
Along with his propaganda efforts he was training for a special mission with the Royal Canadian Air Force. Promoted to the rank of squadron leader, Mr. RUSSELL was in command of a secret mission to prepare pilots in flying U.S. P40 Kittyhawks. After initial training in Ottawa, and in Camp Borden north of Toronto, they moved to a base at Sea Island near Vancouver.
After that, the squadron was transferred to bases in Alaska, but for some unknown reason Mr. RUSSELL did not accompany them. His letters home at the time reflect bitterness about not being sent on one of the few missions in the war in which Canadian fighter pilots were pitted against the Japanese.
Instead, he soon found himself back in Europe, this time flying Spitfires. Many of his missions were spent escorting bombers and in 1943 he won a second Distinguished Flying Cross. The award came shortly after his promotion to Wing Commander. "This officer as Wing Leader has led his wing on a large number of escort sorties without the loss of single bomber to enemy fighters," the citation said. "The high praise earned by the wing for its skill is largely due to the great devotion to duty and ability displayed by Wing Commander RUSSEL."
In April of 1944, he requested a demotion to squadron leader so that he could fly combat mission in the invasion of France, which everyone knew was coming. As a wing commander he would likely have been assigned to a desk.
On D-Day, June 6, 1944, he flew many missions over Normandy but, as it happened, the Luftwaffe was almost entirely absent. In all, he spent eight hours in the air doing sweeps of the beaches to protect troops. He wrote home of watching the fighting on the ground: "The tank battles are quite amazing… a job I would hate to have. They looked like a bunch of ants crawling around, hiding between the hedges and trees and suddenly opening fire with devastating effect on some poor Hun that happened along."
Four days later, he flew to a forward airfield in France and became the first Spitfire pilot to land in recaptured France. "First Spit pilot to make successful landing in France," read the entry in his logbook for June 10, 1944.
Less than a month later, at the peak of the fighting in Normandy, he was again made a wing commander and put in charge of No 126 wing. A large unit comprised of four Royal Canadian Air Force squadrons, the promotion meant he was more or less grounded.
"I will be doing very little flying, which will please you both, I am sure," he wrote to his parents, who by that time were also worrying about his brother, Hugh, also an Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot.
Even so, he still managed to go on three missions in September and seven in October. An entry in his logbook on October 4, 1944, describes a victory by his pilots against a German jet, the Me 262. "401 Squadron destroyed the first jet job ME 262 in the Royal Air Force."
In late 1944, he was awarded a Distinguished Service Order, a rare distinction medal for an Royal Canadian Air Force officer. "In recent intensive air operations the squadrons under the command of Wing Commander RUSSELL have completed a large number of sorties," the citation read. "Within a period of three days a very large number of enemy transport vehicles were attacked, of which 127 were set on fire and a bigger number were damaged. In addition, four hostile aircraft were destroyed and seventeen tanks and nineteen other armoured vehicles were damaged. By his masterly leadership, sound judgment and fine fighting qualities, Wing Commander RUSSELL played a good part in the success achieved. His example inspired all."
June of 1944 was also a month of tragedy for the RUSSELL family. They received word that Hugh RUSSELL had been killed in an encounter with German fighters. In 1945, Dal RUSSELL returned to Canada and by the end of the year he had left the Royal Canadian Air Force and was working in a sales job.
Dal RUSSELL was born in Toronto but moved to Montreal when he was eight months old. His father's family ran Russel Steel, while his mother, Mary LABATT, was from the famous family of brewers. In Montreal, he attended Selwyn House and then went to boarding school at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, where he proved to better at football and hockey than at algebra. (Years later, when he was awarded the DFC in the Battle of Britain, the school declared a half-day holiday in his honour.)
After graduating, he went back to Montreal where he got a job and took up flying. He joined the Montreal Flying Club and learned on a Gipsy Moth biplane at the Carterville Airport.
Canada declared war on Germany on September 10, 1939. It was a Sunday, and Mr. RUSSELL was home for the weekend visiting his parents. He and most of the other members of the Montreal Flying Club joined the Royal Canadian Air Force by the end of the week. Mr. RUSSELL enlisted on Friday, September 15.
They were soon in Britain, flying Canadian-made Hurricanes. "We became so used to our Hurricanes that they were very nearly part of us," he told a reporter at the time. "We flew by instinct, without consciously handling the controls."
In all, he flew 286 operational sorties in three tours of duty. He was never shot down and the most notable damage he suffered was to the canopy of his Hurricane. Curiously, it had been hit by spent shell casings from the machine guns of a fellow Royal Canadian Air Force pilot.
Along with his two DFCs and the DSO Mr. RUSSELL was awarded France's Croix de Guerre with Silver Star, the Order of Orange-Nassau with Swords from the Netherlands and the Czechoslovak War Cross.
After returning home, he worked for Sperry Gyroscope in Montreal and served as a director of Labatt Breweries. In the 1960s, he and his wife Lorraine bought a shop called Heaney's, an upscale linen store. They later expanded the business and opened a shop in Toronto.
After retiring in the mid-1980s Mr. RUSSELL and his wife spent a great deal of time at their farm in Dorset, Vt. He practised fly-fishing on a pond stocked with trout in preparation for salmon fishing expeditions. He was invited to hunt by Friends, but after returning from the war he never again liked shooting. He also gave up flying, having found recreational aviation too expensive for his tastes.
In the 1990s he and his wife settled in Knowlton in Quebec's Eastern Townships.
Blair Dalzel RUSSELL was born in Toronto on December 9, 1916. He died after a stroke in Knowlton, Quebec, on November 20, 2007. He was 90. He leaves his children, Diana, Blair and Charles.
He also leaves three Canadian Battle of Britain pilots: Robert Barton of New Westminster, British Columbia; John Stewart Hart of Naramata, British Columbia; and Henry SPRAGG of Dundas, Ontario

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LANGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-12-20 published
He was the voice of the Blue Jays and 'a producer's dream'
Blessed with a rich voice and split-second timing, he covered Toronto's major-league baseball team for decades. Over the years, he also manned microphones for ABC, NBC and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
By F.F. LANGAN, Special▲ to The Globe and Mail, with files from Canadian Press, Page S8
Toronto -- Don CHEVRIER had two things going for him. He was born with one of them; he learned the other.
The deep voice booming out from his 6-foot-2-plus frame made his life easier as a sports announcer, and he came to use it like an instrument. And he had split-second timing, which is essential in live television. That was a trick he learned. When the word came from the control room to stretch a broadcast, he could keep talking without losing a beat. If things had to be shorter, he could do language arithmetic in his head and cut words on the fly.
"His great gift was that wonderful deep voice, but he also knew how to use it," said Tom McKee, who first worked with Mr. CHEVRIER as an announcer covering the Toronto Blue Jays, and then as a producer who called the shots from the control room.
"Chevy was a producer's dream. When you asked him to shave seven seconds off, he could do it without the audience ever knowing. If you needed some fill, he added as much time as you wanted. He was unique," said Mr. McKee, who directed Mr. CHEVRIER for about 10 years.
On April 7, 1977, he became the announcer on the first Toronto Blue Jays broadcast. The game was one of the most interesting he ever called. Not only was it the start of major-league baseball in Toronto, but it snowed that day at the old Canadian National Exhibition stadium.
Then the Blue Jays beat the Chicago White Sox 9-5, and an excited Mr. CHEVRIER described two home runs by Doug Ault that helped win the game. The rest of the season was nowhere near as thrilling, as the Blue Jays finished in last place.
Jays president Paul GODFREY described Mr. CHEVRIER as one of the pillars of the organization's early days. For one thing, he managed to make the games more exciting than they really were in that inaugural season. "When the team loses 100 games in its first year, the television broadcaster has to make sure the fans keep coming back, even though they were outclassed by most of the opposition," he said.
Mr. CHEVRIER went on to broadcast Blue Jays games until about 1990, returning from time to time to make guest appearances. By all accounts, his last Jays broadcast was made for CTV in 1996.
Don CHEVRIER was raised in Edmonton. Despite a lifelong fascination with sports, he was never much of an athlete, by his own admission. "I decided when I was 15 there was an easier way to earn a living than by running up and down a field or skating in a rink, so I became a sportscaster," he once told The Globe and Mail.
He started broadcasting while still a teenager, describing the action of live high-school sports on the radio. Neighbour Robert Goulet, the future Broadway star, helped him land his first real job, with radio station CJCA in Edmonton, where he was paid about $30 a week to write the sports program and announce scores.
For a while, he had plans to attend university but somehow stayed glued to the microphone. "The manager of the station talked my mother out of it, saying, 'He'll learn far more on the job here with us if he goes full-time than he would at college.' He was exactly right," Mr. CHEVRIER once said. "I wasn't quite 17 when I started. I got $125 a month to start and when I went full-time I got $225, and thought I had all the money in the world."
By the time he was 20, he was the voice of the Canadian Football League's Edmonton Eskimos, doing play-by-play for home games.
After Edmonton, Mr. CHEVRIER began the wandering minstrel act of the young broadcaster, jumping from station to station and city to city in pursuit of bigger paycheques and a bigger market. He worked at CFRA in Ottawa, where along with doing daily sportscasts he called live coverage of the Ottawa Roughrider games.
His next stop was CJAD in Montreal, where he was given the rather grand title of sports director. It was a fancy job description for announcer.
In 1966, Mr. CHEVRIER joined Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto, working in radio and then television. The next year, he became a front-line network sportscaster and never looked back. He was 29 and making $60,000 a year, a phenomenal amount of money at a time when Statistics Canada put the average annual male salary at $5,334.
The bulk of Mr. CHEVRIER's earnings came not from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but from ABC in the United States, where he was the anchorman on the weekend radio show, World of Sports. He commuted to New York, leaving Toronto every Friday night and arriving home before midnight on Sunday.
At ABC, Mr. CHEVRIER didn't do play-by-play, the kind of work he liked best. Instead, he was the anchor of five-minute segments, talking to sports personalities and reporters in the studio or on the phone. Every weekend, he did doing 22 separate segments. It was hard work and he earned his money.
By 1970, he was doing play-by-play commentary for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation-television games in the eastern division of the Canadian Football League.
When the Olympics were in Montreal in 1976, he served as the commentator for boxing events, including the gold-medal win by (Sugar) Ray Leonard. He also worked with renowned American sportscaster Howard Cosell.
Over the years he covered every sport imaginable, including synchronized swimming. (He joked to one of his colleagues that in general, swimming wasn't difficult - you just had to put one arm in front of the other.) If he had one disappointment, it was that he never got to do Hockey Night in Canada - for sports broadcasters, the biggest job in the country.
By all accounts, his punishing schedule and peripatetic, sportscasting lifestyle put a strain on personal relationships. Along the way he met a young woman named Donna, and fell in love. They married, but later divorced.
He also had few hobbies outside of sports. Unlike many of his colleagues, he seldom played golf. Chevy, as he was known to his Friends and his fans, did love to visit Las Vegas to play the slot machines. "He actually won a lot of money in Vegas," said a friend.
In 1992, he retired and moved to Florida, but liked to keep his hand in broadcasting. At first, he hoped to land an on-air spot for the Tampa Bay Lightning when they were an expansion team in the National Hockey League. It would have been an easy commute his home in Palm Harbor was just a half-hour drive from Tampa. Instead, he became one the first announcers to cover the games of the Ottawa Senators, which was also new to the league. It turned out to be a much longer commute.
Semi-retirement suited him. Even though he went without full-time gigs, he had always been a hustler and managed to make a good living. He resumed his old association with ABC radio and the network put a special line into his house that allowed him to broadcast from there -- to listeners, it sounded as if he was in a studio. He did much the same work he had done in New York 25 years earlier, but without ever leaving home.
"He was making more money working weekends than he did full-time back in Canada," said friend and colleague Steve Armitage.
Mr. CHEVRIER's great voice and fluid commentary, along with his connections in sports broadcasting, meant his name was always on the radar when someone was needed. In 2002, he was back broadcasting at the Olympics. "He made a comeback of sorts in television," said Mr. Armitage, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation sportscaster based in Vancouver. "Don was NBC's curling commentator at Salt Lake City. They didn't realize curling would be so popular." Many colleagues credit Mr. CHEVRIER's commentary for that popularity.
Four years later, he returned to NBC to cover curling at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin. The network was planning to use him again at the 2010 Games in British Columbia.
Donald Barry CHEVRIER was born in Toronto on December 29, 1937. He died on December 17, 2007, in Florida of complications from a blood condition. He was 69. He is survived by son, Jeff, and daughter, Melanie.

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