CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-07-02 published
She was the First Anglican woman elected a parish warden in Toronto
Raised in 11 foster homes, she became a teacher and counsellor
who championed the rights of aboriginal people, immigrants, gays,
the poor and the marginalized long before it was trendy
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S10
Toronto -- You'd think being shunted from one foster home to
another would make a person hard. Helen
GOUGH -- born illegitimate
at a time when that was a stigma -- spent her childhood in no
fewer than 11 foster homes, and emerged a gentle but tenacious
advocate with an outsized social conscience that was fired by
her mentor, Jesus. "Whatever I did, I did it as a Christian,"
she wrote in the preface to her unpublished memoirs. "I was a
Jesus freak. I wanted to lead that kind of life."
In doing so, Ms.
GOUGH "turned the Gospels upside down [by] turning
those who were down, up," eulogized Rev. Sara
BOYLES, priest
at Ms. GOUGH's beloved Holy Trinity Church in downtown Toronto.
"Helen turned the world upside down."
She did that, against all odds, by excelling in the so-called
helping professions: Teaching, counselling and activism for aboriginal
people, immigrants, gays, the poor and the marginalized. She
stood up for their rights long before it was trendy, often forsaking
her own fragile psyche.
Far from being a household name, except perhaps within the Anglican
Church's more progressive elements in Toronto, Ms.
GOUGH would
not have minded being labelled ordinary, though she was far from
it. "It's ordinary people, ordinary women, who have done much
of what it took to make this nation what it is," she stated not
long ago. "Ordinary people with extraordinary courage. Whatever
else I am, I'm a Canadian. I'm a Canadian woman."
She was the first woman elected a parish warden in the Anglican
Church of Canada's Toronto diocese, in 1971.
Her mother, also named Helen
GOUGH, play a pivotal role in her
fatherless and husbandless life. The elder Ms.
GOUGH, who died
in 1981, had been a Barnardo child, one of some 30,000 sick,
destitute or orphaned British children shipped to the colonies
as "seedling citizens of the British Empire" by English philanthropist
Thomas Barnardo to work on farms or as domestics. (Between 600 and
1,000 children were sent to Canada from the late 1800s to 1915.)
Helen senior, with still-fresh memories of time spent in an actual
English poorhouse, arrived in Southern Ontario in 1912 as a 10-year-old,
together with her younger brother, Arthur. She toiled as a servant
at seven different places until she turned 18, surviving on the
cheapest foods and not once being allowed to use an indoor toilet.
On her own in Toronto, she found work as a clerk at the Hospital
for Sick Children, and soon fell in with a crowd that included
a handsome, suave clothing salesman from Stratford. When she
became pregnant, he denied all knowledge of her, as advised by
his uncle, a judge. It wasn't until the younger Ms.
GOUGH was
in her late 40s that she discovered her father's identity; he
had become a fat drunk and died of a coronary when he was 60.
Too poor to raise her daughter, the elder Ms.
GOUGH, by this
time a live-in domestic, appealed to Catholic Children's Aid.
(The child's father was Catholic.) But if the agency took the
child in, she would be raised in an orphanage as a Roman Catholic.
Her mother declined. "It must have taken tremendous courage for
a woman to do that in 1930, and she was one of many who simply
refused," her daughter later wrote.
Instead, her mother turned to the Children's Aid Society, which
transferred the sickly baby to a woman whose sole task was to
nurse sick infants back to health. Then came long years of foster
care at nearly a dozen places, during which mother and daughter
saw each other only intermittently. By the age of eight, young
Helen had already attended Baptist, United and Roman Catholic
churches, but made up her mind that the Anglicans were for her.
She finally went to live with her mother when she was 15.
Ms. GOUGH's first taste of overt racism came while she worked
as a teenaged waitress one summer at the Pearson Hotel on Centre
Island. As she recalled, a short, self-important Englishman working
in the kitchen informed a Chinese dishwasher: "I'm not taking
any orders from a bloody Chink!" The Chinese man, a foot taller,
brought the dish he was holding down on the man's skull. The
plate shattered, and the blood coursed down the small man's head.
Both were fired, and the incident stayed with her forever.
She was 19 when she befriended Gerry
O'DONOGHUE of Toronto (later
Gerry RANSOM,) whose family adopted Ms.
GOUGH as one of their
own, and whose daughter Beverley was Ms.
GOUGH's goddaughter.
The same year, Ms.
GOUGH graduated from Toronto Teachers' College
and went to teach near Port Credit, Ontario That was followed
by four years of teaching status Indians and Métis at an "Indian
Day School" in Moose Lake, southeast of The Pas, Manitoba
Life was primitive and harsh, but for Ms.
GOUGH, it was happily
reminiscent of the Girl Guides camps she'd attended as a child.
The three teachers took turns doing the three main chores: one
week each on cooking, cleanup and "wood and water."
It was here that she became smitten with the shy aboriginal children,
and impressed with their determination to learn English. (There
is no mention in Ms.
GOUGH's memoirs of church-run residential
schools, where native children underwent horrific abuses that
led to multimillion-dollar legal payouts decades later.) After
teaching catechism and assisting with church services, she returned
to Toronto to deepen her spirituality by studying at the Anglican
Women's Training College. One summer, she took a job with the
federal government's Indian Affairs department teaching at an
Ojibwa-Cree settlement in Bearskin Lake, Ontario
In 1960, she began as an "Indian liaison worker" in the Toronto
diocese, helping aboriginals access "white" social service agencies.
It was half-time initially, "since no one really believed there
were Indians in Toronto," she would recall. She was a pioneer
of the first native centre in Toronto, and proudly outed a co-worker
who had referred to Ms.
GOUGH's client as "dirty and drunken&hellip
you know, a typical Indian."
The man who had made the remark "was not happy about being exposed,
but it was a great moment of insight for me," she remembered.
"It's important to speak truth to power when we are in positions
to do so. If we don't, who will?"
Around this time, Ms.
GOUGH noticed that she was prone to periodic
bouts of depression, preceded by highs that dropped to debilitating
lows, and an inability to control either. The condition led her
to years of psychotherapy and such treatments as psychodrama,
bioenergetics and Arthur Janov's primal therapy, during which
she began to face the pain of separation she'd experienced as
a child.
She went into social service work for the diocese, mainly on
housing conditions in Toronto, before returning to school at
35 to earn a B.A. at York University. She confessed that it was
the worst experience of her adult life. With a D average, "I
was so ashamed, I didn't go to my graduation or tell my mother
about it until much later." Despite that, she returned to York
a decade later to earn a master's degree in English, with honours,
and an essay prize.
Meantime, there was a flurry of action in Toronto: In 1968, she
was one of the original activists to develop Alexandra Park Co-op,
today a 410-unit housing project in downtown Toronto (she worked
alongside June Rowlands, who went on to become mayor of Toronto).
She then worked for the Young Women's Christian Association,
finding rooms for Caribbean domestics, before taking a job for
17 years with the Toronto Board of Education, working extensively
with immigrant parents. Her involvement with the Riverdale Intergenerational
Project brought seniors into schools as volunteers.
She embraced gay rights through what she called a particularly
Anglican resolution: "All may, none must and some ought." Tall,
gangly and sometimes physically awkward, she denied being a lesbian,
"although I feel more comfortable with women than men. If you
grow up in a series of homes, you don't learn to establish primary
relationships. There were boys I really liked but I saw myself
as plain. I was a wallflower at dances and very bookish. I made
good secondary relationships, but primary ones [were] much more
difficult."
In retirement, she seemed to accelerate, taking up travel, river
rafting, voice lessons and photography. She produced pictures
that testified to an almost child-like wonderment about the natural
world.
She saw her mission through a simple lens: If she was going to
do anything as a Christian, it was to respond to society's dispossessed.
"I was not there to hold office," she reasoned, "but to meet
people on the ground."
Helen
Noreen
Honora
GOUGH was born in Toronto on November 21,
1930, and died there of cancer on June 1, 2007. She was 76. According
to her wishes, only men washed her body prior to burial. She
leaves her adoptive family, the Ransoms, and many Friends and
admirers.
C... Names CS... Names CSI... Names Welcome Home
CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-07-21 published
Canada's pre-eminent dermatologist refused to take no for an
answer
She overcame the twin 'congenital anomalies' of being a Jew and
a woman by entering medical school and becoming the country's
best skin specialist
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S10
Toronto -- She was a mere slip - a hair over five feet tall,
maybe 50 kilos - from a small Prairie town in the middle of nowhere,
and was once told she suffered from two "congenital anomalies"
that ensured her failure. Even so, people who knew Doctor Ricky
Kanee SCHACHTER somehow lose their inhibitions when they describe
her (not in so many words) as having had balls. She didn't just
open doors for women in medicine, she kicked them down.
Diminutive in physical stature, a giant in her field and the
definition of moxie, Doctor
SCHACHTER was among Canada's pre-eminent
dermatologists, and tallied several firsts: She was the first
woman to head an academic division of dermatology in Canada,
the first female president of the Canadian Dermatology Association
(thus the first woman in Canada to lead specialists in her field)
and was the first female to win the Canadian Dermatology Foundation's
Practitioner of the Year award, in 2005.
As a woman and a Jew, she overcame tremendous obstacles at a
time when being either, never mind both, meant that higher education
was difficult, if attainable at all. But "these men and their
rules," as she once put it, were not going to stand in her way.
She became more determined than ever to become a doctor.
Her stunning success meant breakthroughs in the treatment of
her specialties, scleroderma and psoriasis. In 1976, Doctor
SCHACHTER
established the Psoriasis Education and Research Centre, renamed
four years ago the Phototherapy Education and Research Centre
at Women's College Hospital in Toronto, the first of its kind
in Canada.
Believing she could improve psoriasis sufferers' quality of life
on an out-patient basis - that people were more or less capable
of taking care of themselves - she first had to convince Ontario's
Health Ministry that ambulatory care was more cost-effective
than keeping patients in hospital. Her son, Doctor Daniel
SCHACHTER,
also a dermatologist, said her vision was to provide treatment
that did not disrupt patients' daily lives and which stressed
self-care - years before the concept existed. The facility remains
one of the largest centres of its kind in Canada, and treats
about 30,000 visitors annually. It has revolutionized the way
some chronic skin diseases are treated.
"She empowered nurses in a way they were never empowered before
to become not only caregivers but educators," noted Doctor Neil
SHEAR, professor of dermatology at the University of Toronto.
"She designed a clinic where people take responsibility for their
own care. That has a huge impact on patient outcome.
"Ricky was not only the right person, but in the right place
to really deliver a model of care that, even 30 years later,
is still innovative and cutting-edge."
In 1991, the Ricky Kanee Schachter Dermatology Centre was opened
at Women's College Hospital to treat and educate ambulatory patients,
after six years of fundraising. (Her reaction to the campaign's
establishment: "I thought I'd faint. I'm basically a shy person.")
Shy maybe, but definitely dogged, a trait acquired from her immigrant
parents - Russian father, Sam, and Austro-Hungarian mother, Rose
- who came to Canada to escape the anti-Semitism of Europe. They
had six children - the first died in childbirth - with Ricky
their only daughter.
Sam KANEE had arrived in 1903 to work on the Canadian Pacific
Railway. He settled in Melville, Saskatchewan., opened a general
store and eventually went into the grain business to establish
the successful Soo Line Mills.
Young Ricky had two role models as a child: her old brother Ben,
who went to Columbia University to study dermatology, and her
mother, who lovingly tended Ricky's younger brother Harry, who
had cerebral palsy. Harry, who died at 16 of chicken pox, couldn't
speak, and Rose
KANEE taught him to communicate through magazine
pictures.
Her other brothers were no slouches: Abe
KANEE was an executive
with Soo Line Mills. Sol
KANEE, who died in April, practised
law in Melville and was a former president of the Canadian Jewish
Congress. He also formed the first small-loans bank, served on
the board of the Bank of Canada longer than anyone and founded
the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.
Ricky, meantime, had skipped several grades, graduated from high
school at 14, and announced her plans for university. Her father,
an otherwise progressive man, countered that she would be taking
up a place for a man, and wanted his daughter to get married
and start a family. Ricky threatened that she would never get
married until she had a university education. Her father scraped
together the money.
She enrolled at the University of Manitoba, where she had her
first encounter with anti-Semitism - an "awakening," as she put
it in a 1995 published interview. "There was a sign in the women's
locker room: 'You Jews have taken over Winnipeg Beach but we
don't want you in our locker room.' " She transferred to the
University of Saskatchewan where the dean informed her that all
the universities in Canada, except in Halifax, had filled their
quota of Jews. Six weeks before her final exams, despite being
among the top three students, she was told she had to take an
IQ test. She refused. Then she was told she couldn't graduate
because she lacked a credit in physical education. "So while
everybody else was studying, I learned how to swim."
She completed two years in one and, armed with a degree in science
(and a swimming badge), she set out for medical school at the
University of Toronto. In her only interview with the dean of
medicine she was told there was no place for her because she
had two congenital anomalies: She was a woman and Jewish.
"What a silly man," she recalled. "I don't think I ever spoke
to him again. He didn't know how I felt about medicine. He didn't
know how hard my parents worked to send me to university. He
didn't know about my brother Ben. And he didn't know I had already
been accepted at U of T."
In 1942, she married Benjamin
SCHACHTER, a University of Toronto
biochemist who was researching female sexual hormones, and graduated
the following year. That was followed by two years of postgraduate
training in dermatology at Columbia University in New York. Her
association with Women's College Hospital began in 1946, and
in 1961 she was appointed associate professor in the University
of Toronto's faculty of medicine.
She challenged tradition, her grand_son Jonathan, 23, eulogized
at her funeral. One of her patients, a nun, had developed a scalp
condition from her veil, so in 1959, she wrote the Pope to complain
about the dress code for nuns. "Boba got a response, though not
from the Pope directly, granting permission for the nun to dress
appropriately to cure her condition." A few years later, Jonathan
added, the dress code for nuns was relaxed amid other reforms
of the Second Vatican Council. "She was by no means an ordinary
grandmother, nor an ordinary Jew or woman for that matter, but
she was a fiercely driven person who could do whatever she wanted."
That didn't mean she was hard. Health care, poverty and the disparity
between rich and poor were her greatest concerns, and her family
her greatest love (the names of her children and grandchildren
are on page one of a 24-page curriculum vitae).
"I learned so much from how she practised, how she handled patients
[and] got to know them all exceedingly well," said Doctor Vera
PRICE,
who'd been a teenaged patient of Doctor
SCHACHTER's, and later shared
her practice.
"To this day I insist that all my residents and fellows get to
know who they're treating. You have to know how to relate to
them… I certainly got this from her," added Doctor
PRICE, who now
teaches medicine at the University of California in San Francisco.
"[Patients] knew she loved them. She could be very strict and
not mince her words, but the tremendous caring was there."
Among her many honours were the 1994 Award of Merit from the
Federation of Medical Women of Canada, a 1995 award from the
Women's Dermatologic Society, and in 1998, induction into the
Order of Canada.
She retired several times, beginning in 1985, and stepped down
from teaching when she reached 65. "No problem," she pronounced
in 1995. "I just haven't accepted any salary for teaching the
past 11 years."
Asked once about the best advice she ever received, she replied:
"Don't take no for an answer - and I have passed it on to many
people."
Ricky Kanee
SCHACHTER was born in Melville, Saskatchewan., on
December 23, 1918. She died in Toronto on July 1, 2007. She was
88. Her husband, Benjamin
SCHACHTER, died in 2001. She is survived
by her children, Doctor Daniel
SCHACHTER and Bonnie
DRUXERMAN.
She
also leaves grandchildren Reva, Jonathan, Jesse and Cobi.
C... Names CS... Names CSI... Names Welcome Home
CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-10-27 published
His BamBoo club transformed the nightlife of restrained Toronto
Onetime freelance writer and his business partner took an abandoned
laundry and turned it into the cornerstone of Toronto's funky
Queen Street West scene through the 1980s and 1990s
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S11
Toronto -- Richard
O'BRIEN was the arbiter of cool in a city
that never stops obsessing over its image. Only he dared to pair
plates of redolent Thai spicy noodles and feverish jerk chicken,
washed down with a Tusker lager or two, with the throbbing beat
of a Zairean soukous band.
Maybe he was crazy like a fox, for the marriage between exotic
world music and Asian/Caribbean cuisine kept Toronto's landmark
BamBoo club pulsating for nearly 20 years. As The Globe noted
five years ago this month, when the BamBoo finally shuttered
its fabled doors, "long before the Gap and Starbucks sent Queen
Street West spiralling into a retail frenzy, stopping in at the
BamBoo for a beer or a bite was a rite of passage for city residents
and out-of-towners alike."
Indeed, the decidedly unslick 'Boo (once described, though lovingly,
as "a carefully crappy-looking dive") was the cornerstone of
Toronto's funky Queen Street West scene through the 1980s and
1990s, showcasing cutting-edge reggae, funk, R&B, Latin, jazz
and soul acts, and hosting some of the wildest private parties
staid Toronto had seen. The eclectic kitchen staff, meantime,
cranked out signature Caribbean, Indonesian and Thai dishes that
kept the joint at the top of virtually every "best-place-to-eat"
list in the city since the day it opened.
The music was loud, the place usually packed (and sweltering),
the food piquant and the atmosphere laid-back and aggressively
Third World. It worked.
In the days before random club shootings and refrigerator-sized
bouncers, the BamBoo was more a community centre for artists
and musicians. "And it was an awesome community," recalled Lorraine
SEGATO, lead singer for the long-defunct Parachute Club, which
played the BamBoo in July, 1983, to celebrate their debut release,
a month before the club officially opened.
(As Patti HABIB,
Mr.
O'BRIEN's friend and business partner for
some 30 years, recalled with some satisfaction, the place that
night "was jammed to the rafters, and it was totally illegal.
We had no liquor license and no running water. You'd never get
away with that kind of stuff today.")
What fascinated Ms.
SEGATO about the BamBoo was its timing. Toronto
"was just starting to bust out in terms of a cultural product
that was coming from all the immigrants. So the music scene was
really ripe."
"The timing was really extraordinary," she said wistfully. "It
was a confluence of energies. More importantly, it was home to
so many people who considered themselves either artists or, you
know, different. The 'Boo was this safe haven."
That's precisely how Mr.
O'BRIEN and Ms.
HABIB planned it.
"Richard never turned down artists or musicians," Ms.
HABIB said.
"People felt the BamBoo was their home because it was a very
relaxed atmosphere. No women ever had to feel scared. We never
had fights. It was a very warm place."
A bearish man who bore a striking resemblance to film director
Francis
Ford
Coppola and favoured retro Hawaiian shirts, Mr.
O'BRIEN
could be sarcastic and cantankerous (his favourite expressions
were, "Is everybody mental around here?" and "What's the big
deal?"). He was also gregarious and passionate, an unabashed
party animal and a lover of the arts. Even as a child, he showed
interest in art and theatre, said his 97-year-old mother, Catherine
O'BRIEN.
Adopted when he was four years old, he was a product of Toronto's
Catholic schools. At 17, he and a buddy hopped on a motorcycle
to see a girl in North Carolina. Mr.
O'BRIEN kept going, and
wound up in California in 1965. He bummed around, studied writing
and broadcast journalism, and played drums in a small jazz club
in San Francisco, where such giants as Miles Davis and McCoy
Tyner dropped in to record. Four years after leaving, he returned
to Toronto, sold some drawings and freelanced articles to newspapers.
He went to work for TVOntario, then the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation, where he got to interview reggae icons Bob Marley
and Peter Tosh.
In the late 1970s, Mr.
O'BRIEN started hosting a popular Toronto
booze can, the Dream Factory (where his friend Marcus O'Hara
launched the annual Martian Awareness Ball to coincide with St.
Patrick's Day. Little green men - get it?)
With Ms. HABIB, he also ran one the city's hippest speakeasies,
the legendary MBC. A lot of people joked that it meant "My
Booze Can," but the name was a playful dig at the inability of
Mr. O'BRIEN and some Friends to buy the nearby Embassy Tavern.
MBC, open only on Mondays and Thursdays, was a hit, featuring
live music until 6 a.m. with acts that included Rough Trade with
Carole Pope.
"We didn't just start a club with no background," Mr.
HABIB pointed
out. "We had been doing different events around the city and
compiling a mailing list."
The two also frequented a rooftop after-hours boîte called the
Paper Door, where Bruce Cockburn and Murray McLaughlin were regular
acts. Significantly, it looked down onto a dumpy building that
had had housed a Chinese laundry for 80 years but was used to
store wicker furniture.
"It was the most derelict place," Ms.
HABIB recalls with a laugh.
"It was condemned, had no running water, no heat and no floor
to speak of. But we said, 'Wouldn't it be a fabulous place to
throw a party?' "
To their surprise, the space was for rent, and in 1982, "Richard,
not me, put a [$2,500] deposit down on six-months' rent, thinking
he could build a club." The couple had three months to renovate
about 1,500 square metres of space.
Investors were brought in but money was short. The couple set
up a flea market of Christmas trees in an event dubbed "Tree
and Flea." Banks turned them down for loans, so another group
of investors came in with the funds needed to finish the job,
but charged a mob-like interest rate of 100 per cent over two
years (successfully paid).
Meantime, nothing in the club was new. The lime-green wrought-iron
front gates came from a wrecking company, and the banquette seating
was from the Drake Hotel. Toilets were bought for $50 from a
pinball parlour that was going under. The bar was salvaged from
an Irish social club in Buffalo.
After $85,000 in renovations, the place opened on August 26,
1983, and was christened the BamBoo as a tribute to its former
incarnation. There were lineups almost right away.
"It was always full," recalled Fergus Hambleton, lead singer
for Toronto's poster band for reggae, the Sattalites, who became
regulars. "It was partially that we're fabulous," Mr. Hambleton
said half-jokingly, "but other than that, it was also a time
when that club was right and the whole Queen Street thing was
developing."
In Toronto, the 'Boo was to the eighties music scene what the
El Mocambo was in the seventies or the Riverboat in the sixties.
On any given night, one could hear a Nigerian-style juju group,
a West African highlife act, ska, or a soca (soul calypso) band.
Sometimes, jazz greats Buddy Rich and DIzzy Gillespie would follow
reggae giants Bunny Wailer and Toots and the Maytalls.
The club couldn't have a liquor license unless it served food,
so veteran chefs Vera
KHAN handled the Caribbean fare, while
Wandee YOUNG did the Thai cooking. Both put their stamp on a
1997 cookbook, The BamBoo Cooks. And rumour had it that rocker
David Bowie simply had to have the BamBoo's ka kai soup whenever
he was in town.
It all made Mr.
O'BRIEN, in the eyes of Ms.
HABIB, "really, really
brave. When you're in his circle of people, 'no' doesn't come
into your repertoire. I had to be dragged into this circle of
the BamBoo, but when Richard was around, the possibilities were
endless. He'd think big, act big, and I think that takes a fairly
brave person."
Mr. Hambleton had a similar take. "Everybody at some point had
a screaming argument with Richard because he just had a big personality.
He brought an artistic flair to everything he did. He had a prodigious
knowledge of all cultural things. He blustered. But at the bottom
was this creative personality that was driven to share."
In 2000, Mr.
O'BRIEN suffered a debilitating stroke that caused
paralysis on his left side and put him in a wheelchair. The end
of the BamBoo came in the summer of 2002, when the building's
landlord announced he'd rented the space to another tenant, and
gave the club 90 days to vacate. There was a final farewell bash,
"Boo
Hoo" on October 31 that year. Mr.
O'BRIEN wasn't all that
upset. "He thought it was a good sign to get out of Queen Street,"
Ms. HABIB said.
Besides, she'd been thinking of selling the place. "It was just
too much running a club at night, especially by myself."
Months later, Mr.
O'BRIEN became restless, and
in March, 2003,
he and some partners unveiled Bambu By The Lake, an even larger
club/restaurant on Toronto's waterfront. "I really loved the
old BamBoo," he explained in an interview, "but this really makes
me forget it quick. We took the best of the old parts of the
old BamBoo and incorporated them."
His involvement in the new venture lasted six months. According
to Ms. HABIB, he lost everything, save for his Toronto Islands
house, which he'd mortgaged to the hilt.
His final contribution to the city was an attempt to beautify
the islands' grim concrete ferry terminal. He re-learned to use
a computer well enough to Photoshop his colour-splashed ideas
into the landscape, and called it Terminal Art.
Mr. O'BRIEN suffered a second massive stroke earlier this month.
His last words were, "What's the big deal?"
Richard Kevin
O'BRIEN was born in Montreal on July 28, 1948,
and died in Toronto on October 14, 2007, of neurological complications.
He was 59. He is survived by his mother, Catherine
O'BRIEN, and
sisters Colleen and Marylou. He also leaves his godson, Alexander
HABIB. He was predeceased by his father, Joe
O'BRIEN and his
brother Gregory.
C... Names CS... Names CSI... Names Welcome Home
CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-11-19 published
Criminologist identified boredom as the policeman's greatest
enemy
University of Toronto expert on crime and punishment took police
officers to task for pushing too much paper, for doing little
more than maintaining the status quo and for picking on 'pukers'
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S10
Is being a police officer boring? Consider the startling research
on policing in Canada carried out in the 1980s by University
of Toronto criminologist Richard
ERICSON.
He found that the average number of reported crimes per police
officer in Canada was 30 in 1962, rising to 45 in 1977 - or about
one a week. He reported that officers on average spent about
half their time on the job doing paperwork, and reporting to
superiors about what they did with the other half.
He repeated what has virtually become an adage about police work
- that the worst part of being a police officer is boredom. The
police themselves, in his study, rated fewer than 7 per cent
of incidents they dealt with as "exciting."
In a subsequent book, he examined what policing really is about
in Canada and concluded that it is "concerned with the reproduction
of order." In other words, maintaining the status quo.
To illustrate (and here he probably won few police Friends),
he reported that a common diversion among officers was to pick
on "pukers" - young males of lower socioeconomic background -
and minorities of any sort. Patrol officers, Prof.
ERICSON said,
seemed to go out of their way to stop such people, run their
names through the national database and look for ways of laying
charges.
"The police sell themselves as crime fighters," Prof.
ERICSON
said in a 1984 interview, "but do not spend much time on this
activity, per se." The bulk of the patrol officer's time was
spent "doing nothing other than consuming the petrochemical energy
required to run an automobile and the psychic energy required
to deal with the boredom of it all."
Public Misinformed
Partly, he blamed a "relatively misinformed public" for buying
into the belief that cops are around-the-clock crime busters.
"The general feeling is that crime is under the control of the
government as long as you keep giving tax dollars," he said.
The public's acceptance of this "creates a view among citizens
that they should be deferential to the police."
A year-long study done by his department of an Ontario police
force seemed to support that claim. It found "an amazing compliance"
by more than 400 citizens, who dutifully turned over files to
officers, remained in their presence even though not under arrest,
and rarely objected.
Complaining can be risky. In 1981-1982, he found that about one
third of all those who filed charges against Metro Toronto Police
officers were taken to court by the municipality's lawyers for
malicious prosecution. Only two were spared civil damages.
The time had come, he believed, for police officers to be treated
just as human beings, with citizens "criticizing them, questioning
them and resisting them."
A world-renowned criminologist who challenged assumptions, ruffled
feathers and put U of T's Centre of Criminology on the map, Prof.
ERICSON
was described by colleague David Garland of New York University
as "a serial specialist with the broadest of visions, a continually
curious scholar who became expert in one field after another."
Indeed a polymath, he became authoritative in several fields
relating to crime and society: Young offenders, detective work,
policing, defendants in the criminal process, crime reporting
in the media, risk, insurance and the regulation of financial
institutions, and surveillance. Lauded by scholars around the
world as creative, innovative, critical and highly rigorous -
and by students as a warm, wise and nurturing teacher - Prof.
ERICSON
authored, co-authored or edited 17 books on crime and punishment,
the first two when he was 27.
"He was a sociologist who took criminology as his chosen specialty
but who had an expansive view of what criminology should be and
whose work transformed the scope of that discipline," eulogized
Prof. Garland, who is considered the English-speaking world's
top criminal theorist. "He paid attention to complexity and to
detail. His research projects were large, ambitious undertakings
intended to address big theoretical questions."
Prof. ERICSON was educated at the Universities of Guelph and
Toronto, and received his doctorate from the University of Cambridge.
Most of his career was spent at U of T's Centre of Criminology,
where he became director in 1992. For a decade, he was the first
principal of Green College and professor of law and sociology
at the University of British Columbia, and then won an appointment
as professor of criminology at Oxford University, where he was
a fellow of All Souls College, among other foreign postings.
He returned to University of Toronto in 2004.
His work may have been big and theoretical, but it had real-world
relevance. He was known for offering a shocking new vision of
police work in which data gathered by law enforcement using surveillance
and other technologies is not only not protected, but brokered
to other institutions.
Links To Insurance
The police, he noted, have become information dealers to insurance
companies and health-and-welfare organizations whose operations
are based on knowledge of risk. These institutions, in turn,
influence the ways in which police officers think and act.
"It's fairly obvious, as any homeowner who's had a break-in knows,"
explained Mariana
VALVERDE, acting director for the Centre for
Criminology. "The only reason you call the police is to get a
report that you can then submit to the insurance [company]. You
don't actually expect the police to really find your lost CD
player."
It wasn't that Prof.
ERICSON had broken new ground. "It's just
that nobody studied how it works, and the tremendous importance
the police have by way of generating information for all sorts
of agencies," Prof.
VALVERDE said. "He put the work of police
forces in broader context."
Prof. ERICSON also conducted the first major sociological study
of the insurance industry, examining how it controls our institutions
and daily lives in ways that are largely invisible, and how it
functions as a kind of government beyond the state.
One alarming conclusion was that there's a lot less certainty
than people may think in the insurance business - the very industry
that is charged with transforming uncertainty into manageable
risk.
Post 9/11 security measures, he argued, include disturbing new
forms of "counter law" or "law against law," which criminalize
not only those who actually cause harm, but also those merely
suspected of being harmful.
Words such as vandalism are always being applied to youngsters
breaking windows but almost never to "large corporations polluting
the atmosphere… which in the aggregate is far greater."
Critical Of Media
And there's the matter of how the media report crime. After six
months of studying how three Toronto newspapers - including The
Globe and Mail - covered some high-profile sexual assaults in
1982, he found the news outlets rarely questioned the prevailing
belief that it was up to women to curb their activities if they
wanted to avoid sexual attack.
The articles presented a central image that sexual assault "was
best controlled by having women take precautions that restricted
their freedom," the study said.
"By locating the problem with the victim and by not questioning
the cultural and social structures in general, and gender relations
in particular, the news accounts functioned to acknowledge the
existing order of values and social relations which perpetuate
the subordinate place of women. The newspapers arguably perpetuated
the views that it is something women do that contributes to attacks."
He rejected the old saw that journalists are mere observers.
"I don't see the media as being in any way outside the process
they are reporting on. The reporters, in the way they use sources,
are active players. They don't reflect reality, they help to
constitute the reality."
It seems incongruous that someone who tackled such bold subjects
was described as not especially outgoing, often to the point
of shyness. And despite being critical of police, his own son
became an Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer. "It was a very
proud moment in Richard's life when Matthew was sworn in," Prof.
VALVERDE
noted. "So it's not as though he disrespected police, or didn't
have an understanding of [their] day-to-day realities. I think
his sympathies were always with the rank and file."
Don't tell that to the Peel Regional Police force on Toronto's
western flank.
Perhaps the biggest stink Prof.
ERICSON raised was in one of
his books, Making Crime: A Study Of Detective Work, in which
he accused the police he was observing of routinely forging,
or "left-handing" the signatures of justices of the peace on
search warrants.
Force Not Named
The force he observed was unnamed in the book (though he dropped
one juicy hint by mentioning 19th-century British prime minister
Robert Peel in the first sentence). Peel Regional Police revealed
it was them, and went on the offensive.
"It wasn't a big deal because at that time, even when real signatures
were placed on warrants, the warrant approval process accomplished
little," recalled colleague Anthony Doob. "That was Richard's
point: Real signatures, fake signatures… it didn't matter."
It did to police in Peel, who called the book "a crock of garbage"
and said the force "seriously questions Prof.
ERICSON's bias
in policing." They also found evidence they said totally contradicted
his allegations.
As Prof. Doob recalled, one Wednesday afternoon in August, 1980,
two senior police officers visited the centre "and delivered
what we saw as a serious threat to get additional details about
activities described in the book. After Richard refused to answer
most of the questions that were put to him, we made the decision
that in order to protect the identity of the police officers
he had observed, his data had to be placed somewhere secure."
That somewhere was in the attic of Prof. Doob's ex-wife's grandmother's
cottage in rural New Hampshire. And Prof.
ERICSON, despite the
intimidation, stood his ground. "I'm not revealing sources,"
he said, "and if I did, I might as well pack in my books."
Richard Victor
ERICSON was born in Montreal on September 20,
1948. He died in Toronto on October 2, 2007, after succumbing
to multiple health problems. He was 59. He leaves Diana, his
wife of 38 years, and their son Matt. He also leaves his brother
John, and sisters Elizabeth and Kristine.
A memorial will take place at University of British Columbia's
Green College on Friday, November 23, at 2: 30 p.m.
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CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-11-26 published
Rev. Alex RAPSON, 99: Clergyman
Chaplain who endured the horrors of war is still remembered in
Holland
To tend to the wounded and bury the dead, he never left anyone
behind even if it meant entering a minefield. To escape a barrage,
he once had to dive into the grave of his dead Commanding Officer
By Ron CSILLAG,
Page
S10
April, 1945, the district of Voorst, in the east-central Dutch
province of Gelderland. The storied 48th Highlanders of Canada
had arrived from Italy, where the regiment lost at least 250 men
killed in action, plus another 1,000 wounded. Even so, the fruit
trees were in bloom and the Nazi enemy a month away from surrendering.
An end to the war was in sight, but the task ahead was no less
daunting.
Handed the job of liberating 12 towns and villages in that part
of the Netherlands, the Highlanders' first battalion massed on
the free side of the Ijssel River. After engineers built a beachhead,
they called for tank and artillery support.
Captain Alexander
RAPSON, a United Church minister and one of
two chaplains attached to the unit, was used to artillery fire
and not bothered by it. "But holy doodle, the concussion of those
shells passing so closely over us was great enough to lift the
ground sheet covering me to keep out the drizzle and then let
it fall back on my face," he wrote just a year ago in the Highlanders'
newsletter, The Falcon. "There was no sleep while the shelling
lasted."
In that thunderous barrage, a sergeant and the padre - then 36,
older than most of the officers - set out by jeep for a regimental
aid post. They turned downriver, drove through a marked-off minefield
and arrived at the designated Dutch farm near the edge of the
bridgehead.
"The shells arrived while I was trying to console a stretcher
bearer who had brought in our first casualty with both feet missing,"
Mr. RAPSON recalled. "I had to leave him since one of those shells
had blown one of his companions to pieces. The shell had landed
dead centre in his ammunition pouches and hand grenades, all
of which exploded, literally blowing him to bits, leaving his
head and shoulders bare-naked like a Caesar's bust." Two companies
had to march by the remains before they were buried on the spot
since a battle gravesite had not yet been established.
"Tough stuff, eh?" Mr.
RAPSON queried. "I'd forgive you, if,
like the stretcher bearer, you said, 'That is as far as I can
go.' "
It was a bad day that turned worse. While Mr.
RAPSON tended to
the dead and comforted the dying, the sergeant brought in the
regiment's commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Donald
MacKENZIE.
He had taken a chunk of shrapnel right in the heart. The padre
dug a shallow, makeshift grave, then heard a shell whistling
in his direction. With nowhere to run, he dived into the grave,
on top of the body. It probably saved his life.
The last two hours of daylight were spent searching in vain for
the body of a missing Highlander, as Mr.
RAPSON was responsible
for burying all dead. He did not remember where he slept that
night, but awoke to find a local telling him that the soldier's
body was in his garage. Mr.
RAPSON, his driver and an assistant
were now eight hours behind their unit.
That was April 12, 1945 - a single day in battle.
Would he have done it all over again? "You bet your life we would!"
he exclaimed at last year's Remembrance Day ceremony at Queen's
Park in Toronto, where the Highlanders lay a wreath each November 11.
"We would because we love this land and would give our lives
to keep it free."
Scores more casualties, including burying 16 more dead, awaited
the chaplain in those five horrible early spring days. He never
left anyone behind, in either the Dutch and Italian campaigns,
even if it meant going into a minefield to retrieve a fallen
soldier (which he did once by walking in the tracks of a blown-up
jeep). In battle, he toted an ever-present leather case that
contained communion wafers, a goblet and a Union Jack to drape
on an altar. He kept meticulous records of every soldier killed
or wounded - when, where, and the nature of the wound.
"He was always in the front lines, through the smoke and shelling
of combat, to be with his soldiers," said Geordie Beal, honorary
lieutenant-colonel of the Highlanders, and whose father served
with Mr. RAPSON. "He was a tower of strength and comfort for
our men in combat; positive, caring, upbeat… a true 48th Highlander."
His father, Alexander, a Methodist minister, died unexpectedly
in Saskatchewan before Alex
RAPSON was born. His mother was homesteading
in northeastern Alberta and didn't learn of her husband's death
for two weeks. Young Alex was raised in rural Ontario and studied
engineering at Queen's University for a year before switching
to the University of Western Ontario, where he graduated with
an arts degree in 1933. He paid his tuition by working on Imperial
Oil tankers in the summers.
Mr. RAPSON married in 1935 and graduated in divinity from Emmanuel
College, the United Church of Canada seminary at the University
of Toronto, the following year. After serving in several pastorates
in Ontario, he enlisted in the army in 1943 and was posted first
to the Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury Regiment, an artillery unit
serving in British Columbia. In the summer of 1944, he was sent
to Britain, and that fall he joined the 48th Highlanders and,
according to the Orillia Packet and Times newspaper, replaced a
padre who had been driven insane by the horrors of the battlefield.
After the war, he returned to the ministry and worked in and
around Sarnia, Ontario For a time, he left the pulpit for a few
years to work as editor of Dow Chemical's in-house magazine,
The Maple Leaf. He wanted to combine the two callings by becoming
an industrial chaplain in the chemical business around Sarnia.
The idea didn't pan out, and for a while he served as a municipal
councillor in Sarnia before returning to the church.
In 1971, he retired - but only from employment.
An inveterate tinkerer since his days as an engineering student,
he built a wine press and made the interior for a camping van
(complete with curtains he sewed himself) when he was 86 years
old. At 87, he bought a computer and learned to use it. There
was a new garage roof at 89, then a sugar shack he built in panels
and erected in the forest at his son's farm when he was 91.
And just last year, he was a "drummer" for a crew at the Orillia
dragon boat races.
He liked the occasional cigar and nip of rum. "Grandpa would
enjoy saying, 'I'm going to live to 100, or die in the attempt,'
eulogized his grandchildren, Steve and Kate
RAPSON.
Two of
his great-granddaughters planned to take him to school for show-and-tell,
where he was all set to teach the children to sing Roll Out the
Barrel.
He also loved teaching kids how to shoot peas with a spoon, "something
I thought was hilarious as a kid," said Kate
RAPSON, "then dreaded
when he showed my kids."
As it turned out, he died three weeks shy of his 100th birthday.
On his bedside table was a framed and signed photograph of a
traditional Dutch windmill draped in the Canadian flag - a gift
from the mayor of the district of Voorst presented last spring
to some Canadians who were touring battlefields. The visitors
were stunned to hear the mayor praise the Highlanders, and "Padre
RAPSON of Orillia" specifically.
"It was pure serendipity," said Richard Johnston, who was among
the tourists. "The mayor didn't know we were from Orillia. When
he found out we were, and that we knew Rev.
RAPSON, we were treated
like royalty."
For years, Mr.
RAPSON had spoken little about his war experiences
and probably struggled with it. "I live, like hosts of others,
with these memories!" he wrote last autumn. "Has the time come
when oldies like me should speak out to say that the price of
freedom is high and always will be, but is worth the price?"
He reasoned: "If we go down to the Legion to 'histe' a few, please
do not be too hard on us. Just keep in mind that we know some
things we do not talk about."
Alexander RAPSON was born in Kerwood, Ontario, on November 25,
1907, and died in Orillia, Ontario, on November 4, 2007, of complications
after a stroke. He was 99. He leaves his son, David, daughter
Louise, four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. He was
predeceased by his wife, Grace, and two sisters, Jean and Philena.
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CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-12-10 published
Priest from Japan ministered to displaced Japanese Canadians
He arrived in Canada for a three-year posting and stayed 26 years.
'He was kind of a reverse missionary. He would write his Sunday
sermons in between periods of Hockey Night in Canada'
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S10
Toronto -- Upon their arrival in Canada in 1953, Paul Ken
IMAI,
his wife and two children constituted five per cent of all immigrants
from Japan that year. In the decade after the Second World War,
just 409 Japanese émigrés were permitted to come to this country.
Racial hysteria kept all but a trickle of Japanese out of Canada
until 1967, when the government introduced the point system,
which judges potential newcomers primarily on their labour market
skills and adaptability to Canada, rather than racial or ethnic
backgrounds.
A particularly dark chapter in Canadian history began in late
1941. Just weeks after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and its
invasion the following day of Hong Kong, which led to the death
or capture of 2,000 Canadian troops, Canada invoked the War Measures
Act and declared Japanese Canadians to be enemy aliens.
In British Columbia, where most of them lived, it meant that
22,000 persons of Japanese origin, including Canadian citizens,
were uprooted. The evacuees were relocated to B.C.'s Interior,
scattered about or placed in internment or work camps. They lost
everything. Their homes, fishing boats, businesses and personal
items were taken or destroyed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Their land was set aside for returning veterans.
Four months after the war ended, Ottawa made Japanese Canadians
an offer: Be dispersed or return to Japan. About 4,000 people
went back to Japan (voluntarily, the government insisted). About
9,000 settled in Ontario.
That's where Rev.
IMAI, an American-trained Anglican priest,
found a community still recovering, trying to make a life in
the country that had treated them so miserably. Not many of them
were Christian, fewer still were Anglican, but those who were
encountered a gentle, compassionate man who would be a calming
influence in their lives.
"They were uprooted. They wanted to go home but were not allowed,"
remembered Grace, his soft-spoken wife of 60 years. It was a
community still in shock. Her husband "visited people and listened
to them. That was a very good thing for them, to talk about it,"
she went on. "But maybe he couldn't do as much as he wanted."
Though small in number, Mr.
IMAI helped solidify Japanese Anglicans
in Toronto, Hamilton, London, St. Catharines and Montreal. As
a parish priest, he conducted hundreds of baptisms and weddings,
and held Bible classes in Japanese. It was supposed to be a three-year
posting; it lasted for 26 years.
A much-loved pastor, priest and teacher who combined Japanese
serenity with Christian saintliness, Mr.
IMAI represented a distinct
minority. In Japan, where European missionaries were not as successful
as elsewhere in the Orient, fewer than one per cent of the population
is Christian. Japanese tend to borrow freely and without conflict
from Buddhism and Shinto, the indigenous religion of Japan, sometimes
with Christian holidays and traditions thrown in. Mr.
IMAI studied
and was conversant in Shin (Japanese) Buddhism, Zen and Shinto,
but never considered those as alternatives to his beloved church.
He was born of samurai ancestry in Manchuria, then under Japanese
control. His father was a wealthy railroad magnate and devout
Anglican who wrapped his new son in white and offered him to
God's service. He named him Ken, which means "offering" in Japanese.
Mr. IMAI attended Saint Paul's University in Tokyo and studied
at the General Theological Seminary in New York from 1938 to
1940. He was ordained to the priesthood at Christ Church Cathedral
in the city of Sendai.
His family concedes the only gaps in his biography occur during
the war years. He never spoke about them. He felt that as a Christian,
he could not support war, and delivered an anti-war sermon from
the pulpit in the city of Akita around 1941, only to notice a
man in the back row of the sanctuary leave right after it was
over. It turned out that the stranger was a member of Japan's
secret police, and Mr.
IMAI was drafted into the Japanese army
right away.
He served in the dangerous position of scout, and saw front-line
action in the Philippines and New Guinea, where he was captured
by U.S. troops. Japanese soldiers had standing orders to kill
themselves with a poison pill upon capture, but Mr.
IMAI and
a group of others didn't have their suicide pills, so they asked
to be shot in the chest. The Americans declined.
Imprisoned in New Guinea, Mr.
IMAI was soon shipped to a prisoner
of war camp in near the town of Cowra in Australia. Located about
300 kilometres west of Sydney, N.S.W., the facility was home
to some 4,000 Axis inmates. A guard from New York befriended
the young priest and even presented him with a cake on his birthday.
Hunger was the PoW's constant companion, and they wondered what
the crocodiles in nearby streams tasted like.
The Cowra camp became famous when on August 5, 1944, more than
500 Japanese PoWs escaped, or died in the attempt. At the sound
a bugle, hundreds of PoWs charged the wire yelling "Banzai."
The authorities had earlier been tipped off about a planned breakout
and purposely rearmed the guards by replacing their rifles with
machine guns. The gunners mowed down scores of prisoners before
being overwhelmed by sheer numbers, and two were killed. In all,
about 350 PoWs got away but by all accounts few of them expected
to get very far. Some killed themselves, had it done for them
by a comrade or were shot avoiding recapture. Within 10 days,
all 230 survivors had been rounded up. For his part, Mr.
IMAI
did not make it back to Japan until 1946.
He took a job as chaplain at a girls' school in Tokyo. Six years
later, he was called by the Missionary Society of the Church
of England to minister to Japanese-Anglicans in the Toronto area,
then the second-largest such community outside Japan (the first
was in Los Angeles). At the same time, he was awarded a scholarship
to take a master's degree in theology at the University of Toronto's
Trinity College.
"He was kind of a reverse missionary," his son, Shin, said. "He
loved this country. He would write his Sunday sermons in between
periods of Hockey Night in Canada." It was a peripatetic congregation
in those days, more recently settling at St. Andrew Japanese
Congregation, located in St. David's Anglican Church on Donlands
Avenue.
"There was a lot of emphasis on education," recalled Shin
IMAI.
"They really pounded that into us. My parents always said, and
this is fairly common among immigrants, that you have to be -
no insult to anybody - better than white people in order to be
treated the same as white people."
Mr. IMAI maintained a resolute silence about his war experiences.
But there were times at night, his son says, when his father
awoke screaming.
He was appointed an honorary canon of Saint_James Cathedral in
Toronto. Two years later, he and others translated Anglicanism's
central text, the Book of Common Prayer, into Japanese. In her
will, Shizuko
MORITSUGU, the woman who handwrote the edition's
kanji script, specified that a copy be placed in her coffin.
Mr. IMAI retired as parish priest in 1978. For the next five
years, he served as a chaplain at a Japanese school in England,
then as dean of King Alfred's College in Winchester, Wessex.
Back in Toronto, he taught Japanese Bible classes for 11 years,
before Parkinson's disease sidelined him in 1997. As far as his
family knows, he voiced no opinion on the same-sex controversy
now tearing apart the global Anglican communion.
Rev. John WILTON, the
IMAIs' own priest, said he encountered
"holy ground" whenever he visited Mr.
IMAI.
Mr.
WILTON summons
a scene that is sad yet dignified. Deaf, wracked by Parkinson's,
and with most of his English gone, Mr.
IMAI could do little else
in his final days but make the sign of the cross.
Paul Ken IMAI was born in Manchuria on November 10, 1911, and
died in Toronto on November 27, 2007. He was 96. He leaves his
wife Grace
YACHIRO, children Shin, Margaret and Rei, and seven
grandchildren.
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CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-12-21 published
Famous for his Canadian Football League 'sleeper play,' he became
Ottawa's local hero
In November, 1960, he executed an unusual and dangerous manoeuvre
that put the Rough Riders on the road to the Grey Cup. He turned
down two National Football League teams and later entered politics
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special▲▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S6
November 20, 1960, Toronto's Exhibition Stadium. The Canadian
Football League's Eastern Conference final was being played,
with the Argonauts pitted against the Ottawa Rough Riders. It
was a two-game affair, with the point total to decide the outcome.
Ottawa had won the first game, 33-21, but in the second, they
were trailing 20-14 in the fourth quarter. One more Toronto touchdown
would send the Argos to the Grey Cup.
Then came a manoeuvre so outrageous, it was actually banned:
the famous "sleeper play," in which Ottawa quarterback Ron Lancaster
spotted tight end Bob
SIMPSON during a player exchange that no
one else noticed, least of all the Toronto defence.
Only Mr. Lancaster, who went on to become a Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation sports announcer and Canadian Football League head
coach, can call it: "It was kind of crazy," he recalled in a
telephone interview from Hamilton. "We were in our own end. Toronto
was winning. If they score again, they're gonna beat us, so we
need to move the football.
"We ran a play, and getting up off the field, heading back to
the huddle, I ain't got nothing to do. So I'm just kind of looking
around, and Bobby's walking to the sidelines. He just sort of
walked. He wasn't drawing attention to himself. It was a spontaneous
thing. He just kind of had his head down, his hands on his hips,
just kind of walking to the sidelines - and he stopped. Didn't
do anything elaborate. Just kind of blended in.
"And I look at him and he gives me this sign. He just stands
there. So I hurry up and tell 'em to snap the ball. I throw it
to him and he runs [from] somewhere around our 25 down to their
25. Next play, we run it down to the 1, put it in the end zone
and scored, beat 'em 21-20, won the East and went to the Grey
Cup and won it."
It was a jaw-dropping play for the fans, the most famous sleeper
play ever executed in the Canadian Football League - and also
the last. The league outlawed it immediately. But it was typical
of the kind of guy Mr.
SIMPSON was: brash, bold, cheeky, fun.
A swift runner with huge, glue-like hands and impressive playing
numbers, he "was as great an all-around athlete as you're going
to find," Mr. Lancaster said. But he was always remembered for
that play.
"Over the years, there must have been a quarter of a million
fans who came up to me and said they were in Lansdowne Park [in
Ottawa] and saw the sleeper play," Mr.
SIMPSON once told his
friend Pat
MacADAM, a sports columnist for the Ottawa Sun. "I
didn't have the heart to tell them the game was played in Toronto."
A native of Windsor, Ontario, Mr.
SIMPSON was a year old when
his father walked out on his mother. At Patterson Collegiate
and later Assumption College, now federated with the University
of Windsor, he excelled at basketball, football and track, running
the 100-yard dash in 10 seconds flat. He played on two provincial
championship basketball teams in high school before joining the
famed Tillsonburg Livingstons.
He was tearing up the field for the Windsor Rockets of the Ontario
Rugby Football Union when the Rough Riders snapped him up in
1950. But he was granted leave to play for Canada's basketball
team at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. He played five games but
Canada was eliminated.
In his 12-year Canadian Football League career, he caught 274 passes,
including a single-season career-high 47 in 1956, for a total
of 6,034 yards. He scored 65 touchdowns - 12 of them defensive.
The record stood until Terry Evanshan broke it in 1975. He set
another record for most yards receiving in a game (258) in a
1956 contest against Toronto.
He was an Eastern division all-star eight times at four different
positions - end, flying wing, running back and defensive back
- and was a three-time nominee for the Schenley Award given to
the league's most outstanding Canadian. He was runner-up in 1956,
the year he was also nominated as the Canadian Football League's
most outstanding player.
Mr. SIMPSON was inducted into the Canadian Football League Hall
of Fame in 1976, the Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame in 1998 and the
Windsor-Essex Sports Hall of Fame the same year.
With his skills on both sides of the line and his leadership
as co-captain (with Kaye Vaughan), Ottawa won Grey Cups in 1951 and
"He had these great big hands," remembered George Brancato, who
played with Mr.
SIMPSON in Ottawa and against him in Montreal.
"He could catch the ball. He had a real soft touch. He knew the
game so well. And he loved life. He enjoyed himself all the time."
He also famously turned down two offers from National Football
League teams in the United States. The first came from the New
York
Giants, who noticed Mr.
SIMPSON after they became the first
National Football League team to play outside the U.S. on August
12, 1950, when they met Ottawa in a preseason exhibition game
at Lansdowne Park. New York won 27-6 and wined and dined Mr.
SIMPSON
- unheard of for a Canadian player at the time.
The story, according to Mr.
MacADAM, is that he listened to his
mother, who said to him: "Do you want to be a little fish in
a big pond?" and turned down the Giants. Besides, the money wasn't
nearly as good as he was making in the Canadian Football League.
At his peak, Mr.
SIMPSON probably earned $10,000 a year.
Around the same time, he turned down an offer from the Baltimore
Colts.
Ottawa sportswriter Earl
McRAE waxed, "Imagine: Johnny
Unitas passing to Bob
SIMPSON."
Mr. SIMPSON's career ended in 1962 after a car accident with
a tractor that dislocated his already bashed-up hip. After retirement,
he was elected to Ottawa City Council, representing Wellington
Ward for two terms. "It was right after the Grey Cup in 1960 and
he was the hero," retired sportswriter Gerry Redmond told The
Windsor Star. "He could have been elected prime minister."
He went on to a variety of occupations. He owned a cleaning company
for a time, coached a local high-school football team and worked
in the Rough Riders head office as a public relations man. He
bought the Locanda restaurant on Laurier Avenue from Paul Anka's
family. "It was a great watering hole and restaurant but Bobby
overestimated Ottawa nightlife," Mr. MacAdam wrote in the Ottawa
Sun. He also "tore up one too many of his Friends' bar tabs."
He opened a night spot, Club 70, his Ottawa jersey number, but
it stayed empty.
Still, he never lost his outsized zest for life. "Any time Bobby
SIMPSON was around, you heard him," Mr. Lancaster said. "He was
just naturally loud. He was really a fun person to be around.
If you were around him, I guarantee you're going to have a good
time."
Mr. MacADAM had similar memories: "You could hear him coming
a block away. Make that two blocks. You knew you were not going
to receive a handshake. His standard greeting was a slap across
the back that threatened to separate your shoulder blades. A crushing
bear hug was an automatic. Bobby
SIMPSON didn't just fill a room
he lit it up with his infectious good humour."
He and a group of rambunctious beer-drinking buddies were institutions
at the Belle Claire Hotel's bar and, when it closed, the Churchill
Arms on Carling Avenue.
"Good-natured insults flew fast and furious and Bobby was the
butt of a few memorable ones," Mr.
MacADAM wrote. "But he had
a good sense of humour and gave as good as he received."
As with many former athletes his weight ballooned, to 270 pounds.
When a doctor advised that he drop to 180, Mr. Brancato exclaimed:
"His bones weigh 180 pounds!"
One day, Mr.
SIMPSON walked into the Arms, grinning like a Cheshire
cat.
As Mr. MacADAM related, "he told us the greatest honour he had
ever received" was bestowed on him at the annual Easter Seals
"Timmy" event for disabled children at Maple Leaf Gardens. Traditionally,
"Timmy" was carried from the back of the hall to a platform by
wrestler (Whipper) Billy Watson. But Mr. Watson was recovering
from surgery and the honour fell to Mr.
SIMPSON.
"I never felt so proud or so humble," Mr.
SIMPSON said.
For 14 years, he worked as a clerk at various liquor stores in
Ottawa. In 2000, Ottawa sports fans celebrated an event billed
as "No. 70 turns 70."
Did he miss playing? "Every day," said his wife, Mary. "He would
have paid them to play. I don't think he ever found anything
really to replace that. He just loved it."
That his glory days were long past never seemed to get him down,
though. In fact, there was a Dixieland band at his funeral, playing
You Gotta Be a Football Hero.
Robert Lee
SIMPSON was born April 20, 1930, in Windsor, Ontario
He died of cancer on November 27, 2007, in Ottawa. He was 77.
He leaves his wife, Mary, daughters Lynn and Mary Leigh, sons
Rob, Gary and Mark, and seven grandchildren.
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CSILLAG o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-12-27 published
Backbone of Saint Michael's Choir School groomed 'young gentlemen'
For more than 60 years, 'the guardian of the school's character'
served in many capacities but mostly she taught the students
liturgical music and religion, as well as their ABCs
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special▲ to The Globe and Mail, Page S7
Toronto -- Kathleen (Kay)
MANN could have easily become a Roman
Catholic nun, but chose instead to teach. The decision proved
almost moot; she viewed her job as a religious calling. Besides,
teaching was no mere whim - she did it for an astonishing 65 years
at the same school.
"My work is equivalent to that of an apostolate," she reflected
in 1987. "It gives me great joy. I love my work and my faith."
Ms. MANN combined those as can few who do not take religious
vows. She was a fixture at Toronto's famed Saint Michael's Choir
School as a firm but much-loved teacher, administrator and conductor,
and maintained a spotless attendance record since the school's
founding in 1937 - missing only one day, when she fractured her
elbow playing softball, her other passion.
Over six decades, thousands of boys learned liturgical music
and religion, as well as their ABCs, from Ms.
MANN, who served
the school in virtually every capacity and taught every one of
its administrative and choir directors.
"I was her boss for 24 years, but she was always my teacher,"
remembered Harry
HODSON, a pupil of Ms.
MANN's in the early 1950s
who went on to become the school's principal and director. "She
was a guardian of the school's character."
Proper and punctilious, with a straight back and earnest smile,
Ms. MANN
(Miss
MANN to her students) was a gentle and inspiring
instructor, and kept her boys on the straight and narrow. "She
was not a softie by any means," Mr.
HODSON said. "She wanted
the very best from her boys but was probably one of the fairest
people you'll ever come across. She wanted to raise young gentlemen
and, along the way, turn them into singers."
Several of her choirboys went on to find fame in singing, among
them Michael Burgess, operatic tenor Michael Schade, jazz crooner
Matt Dusk, members of the Crew-Cuts and Four Lads, and Kevin
Hearn of Barenaked Ladies.
"She didn't joke around a lot. She was pretty serious and dedicated
and made us work hard," recalled Mr. Hearn, a student from Grades
3 to 11. "When I look at my self-discipline skills, she's certainly
the person who had a major influence on helping them develop.
She was a beautiful person."
Mr. Hearn, who still does the vocal exercises he learned from
Ms. MANN, went to visit his old teacher a few years ago. "She
asked how I was doing and what I was doing. I said I was in a
band. She asked what it was called. When I told her, she just
sort of shook her head, looked at me and said," - and here he
lowers his voice for effect - " 'Oh, Kevin …' "
Mr.
Dusk, with three jazz CDs under his belt, remembers Ms.
MANN
as "a kind of second mother to us. She taught us that singing
is praying twice, that music can be fun but spiritual."
For years, she was equally dedicated to softball, and even turned
down a professional contract. "I thought my teaching was more
important," she told the Toronto Star in 1987. "Playing ball
would have only lasted a few years."
Born into a working-class family in Toronto, Ms.
MANN displayed
her mettle and sense of fair play early, once challenging a neighbourhood
tough to "Take off your glasses and fight."
She learned to play baseball in the schoolyard at age 12, recalled
her sister, Doris
McGRATH. "In those days, there wasn't much
to do but go to the school playground."
She entered a local girls' league, developed a wicked pitching
arm and hot bat, and never looked back. Newspaper reports of
the day described her as "a sterling pitcher… speed-ball hurler&hellip
one of the best."
She played for 23 years, starting at age 13 with the Nationals,
going on to the Toronto Ladies, followed by corporate teams such
as Peoples Credit Jewellers, Simpsons and Clayton's. She guest
pitched for several world tournaments in Detroit and was offered
a contract to play in the women's big leagues in Chicago. She
declined.
The softball-and-music combination led to decades of "perfect-pitch"
puns.
Meantime, Toronto's Cathedral Schola Cantorum, founded in 1926 to
train boys for Saint Michael's Cathedral's choir, added elementary
grades in 1937 and was rechristened Saint Michael's Choir School.
A 19-year-old Ms.
MANN began as an assistant to founder Monsignor
John Edward
RONAN.
She is remembered as the last of the school's
co-founders.
Armed with a teaching certificate from the Toronto Normal School,
she started instructing traditional academic subjects, as well
as Gregorian chant, sight singing, choral music and voice. The
life of a chorister was hard, Mr.
HODSON recalled. It started
in Grade 3, went to Grade 13, "and for nine of those, from Grade 5
on, you were singing every Sunday of the school year at the cathedral."
Although stern, Ms.
MANN had a way of easing tension. She would
hold up small cards facing the choir that said, "No smoking,"
or "chicken lips." Darren Dais, a former student and now a Dominican
priest, recalled that she installed two rear-view mirrors on
her piano, which faced away from the class, to keep an eye on
trouble-makers. The jingle of the huge ring of keys she carried
alerted the more rambunctious singers to settle down before her
arrival.
Her interest in Gregorian chant led to additional studies in
New York, the Catholic University of America in Washington, and
Boys Town in Nebraska. She also held a Bachelor of Sacred Music
degree from the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in Rome,
through an affiliation with the choir school.
She was awarded two papal medals, the Bene Merenti in 1964, and
the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice ("For Church and Pope") in 1987,
on the school's 50th anniversary. She was inducted into the Order
of Ontario in 1997.
Ms. MANN was at the school seven days a week, usually arriving
straight from 7: 30 a.m. mass at the cathedral next door. Weekends
were spent on paperwork. For a time, she pinch-hit as the secretary
at night. She taught at the summer school until the mid-1960s.
And she taught singing to nurses at Saint Michael's Hospital and
the Catholic Youth Organization's glee club.
Despite plenty of opportunities, she never married. Her students
were "her boys" and she unabashedly mothered them. "Children
nowadays need somebody to be firm, consistent and loving," she
told the Star.
From 1967 until her first "retirement" in 1984, Ms.
MANN was
the school's vice-principal. In 1984, the school persuaded the
archdiocese of Toronto to retain her as an "adviser in sacred
music," a position she held for almost 15 years. And from 1985
on, she conducted the elementary and junior boys' choirs. She
was 85 when she finally stopped working.
After slipping into a deep sleep on her final day of life, she
waved her hands in the air for a few minutes. At first puzzled,
her family realized that she was conducting. Then she crossed
herself, folded her hands on her chest, and died.
At her packed funeral service, several men approached the family
to say, "Kay is the reason I'm a gentleman."
Kathleen Mary
MANN was born in Toronto on August 31, 1919. She
died of cancer in Toronto on December 8, 2007. She was 88. She
was predeceased by her brothers Leo and Raymond
KILLORAN.
She
leaves her sister, Doris
McGRATH.
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CSIMA o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-08-24 published
CSIMA,
Adele
Passed suddenly on August 13, 2007, while visiting family in
Europe. Retired Professor, University of Toronto, continued active
supporter of University Women's Club and several Hungarian community
organizations in Toronto. Loving mother of Peter
FISCHHOFF,
Cathy
PATRICK,
Les and Jeffrey
CSIMA, devoted grandmother of Michael,
Jennifer, David, Daniel, Jonathan
FISCHHOFF, James and Robert
PATRICK, Trevor, Lisa, Doug, Tom
CSIMA, Linda, Erik, Amanda,
Darryl CSIMA. An informal reception is planned for family and
Friends to meet at Holiday Inn, 590 Argus Road, Oakville, Saturday,
August 25, 3: 30 p.m. to 6 p.m. Donations to Canadian Diabetes
Association are welcome.
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