OBEIRNE
OBERDORF
OBERHOLZER
OBERLE
O'BEIRNE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-07-28 published
O'BEIRNE,
Hugh
James
Born in Ireland, died July 26, 2007 in his seventy-fourth year
at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, after a courageous
battle with cancer.
son of the late Alphonsus
O'BEIRNE and Brigid
McDONNELL.
Brother to Betty, Brigid
HURLEY (Victor,) and Richard
O'BEIRNE
(Mary.)
Predeceased by his sisters Frances and Gertie.
Lovingly missed by his wife
Henriette
BOISVERT and his children
Patricia (Elvidio), Allan, Michael (Jennifer), and Carole (Michael).
Proud grandfather of Jessica, Maggie, Stefan and Félix. Hugh
graduated as a civil engineer in Dublin and worked all over the
world. We will always remember his love of nature, literature
and a good yarn. The family wishes to thank Doctor Gerry Batist,
Dr. Bernard Lapointe, Doctor David Melnychuk, and the staff and
volunteers of the Segal Cancer Centre and the 4 Main Palliative
Care unit of the Jewish General Hospital for their care and compassion.
Visitation will be held at Maison Darche, 7679 Taschereau, Brossard,
Quebec, Thursday, August 2 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. and Friday,
August 3, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Service to follow. In lieu of
flowers, a donation to the Hope and Cope program of the Jewish
General Hospital would be appreciated, 514-340-8255. 'Until we
meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.'
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OBERDORF o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-09-29 published
'Country gentleman' doubled as the gravel-voiced Nose of Algonquin
Disarmingly direct, he kept a close eye on his resort's decorum
and his campers' secrets
By Charles
OBERDORF,
Special▼ to The Globe and Mail, Page S12
For 30 years, most people met Eugene
KATES as the proprietor
of Arowhon Pines, the luxury resort in Ontario's Algonquin Park.
Although sometimes disarmingly direct, he had the manners and
style of what an earlier generation called a "country gentleman."
In charge but at ease, he made a very reassuring host.
Mr. KATES's gentlemanly side often came as a revelation to the
two generations of summer campers, more than 5,000 children and
adolescents, who knew him in the 30 years before 1975 as the
fearsome, gravel-voiced autocrat who owned and ran Camp Arowhon,
two lakes away from "the Pines."
Seth GODIN, a former Arowhon camper and counsellor who is now
a widely read marketing guru, wrote recently that, "In an age
of 'the customer is king,' Eugene was an anachronism. He never
said things to make people happy, didn't sugarcoat his point
of view and didn't compromise. He stood up to the government,
to rangers, to staff and even to his customers, the parents.
He wasn't afraid to tell you what he thought, and it didn't take
long to guess what he expected."
Behind his back, campers called him The Nose. That hurt, but
as his daughter Joanne, now Arowhon's camp director (and in winter,
this newspaper's restaurant critic), tried to tell him, it was
really a backhanded compliment. Although he rarely dealt with
campers individually - that was the counsellors' job - he always
seemed to know everything that went on, including each child's
most embarrassing secrets. The full phrase was "The Nose knows."
And so he did. When two counsellors-in-training got caught smoking
marijuana, Mr.
KATES immediately began arranging to send them
home. Not an easy decision; one of the two was very popular and
also a close relative. Within hours, one senior counsellor had
begun organizing a resistance: "If those two have to go home,
we should all quit."
Mr. KATES called a staff meeting for 11 p.m. His decision was
final, he said, adding that he had heard talk about quitting.
"I'm going into my office now," he said. "If any of you want
to leave, meet me there and we'll do the paperwork." No one took
him up on it.
However, he was less hard-hearted than his young charges thought.
His second wife, Helen, remembers a pale yellow bathrobe in which
he would patrol the grounds when he thought some campers were
staying up too late. Helen, new and conscientious, took a walk
herself one night, caught a boy in one of the girls' cabins and
marched the miscreants to the director's cabin. Later, he told
her gently that the idea wasn't really to catch anyone. It was
enough that campers saw the yellow bathrobe and got scared back
to where they belonged.
Eugene KATES was born in Toronto, the elder child and only son
of Max KATES, a dentist, and his wife, Lillian. He grew up on
Edgar Avenue in Rosedale, attended St. Andrew's College, Elm
House School and Upper Canada College until his final school
year, 1932-33, when he transferred to the University of Toronto
Schools. At the university itself, he studied math, physics and
chemistry. He then went for a short time to Rochester, New York
to learn film editing, hoping to work in the industry.
But the Depression was cutting deeply into his father's income,
and to eke things out, Lillian
KATES determined to open a children's
camp in Algonquin Park. She took over the lease on a bankrupt
family campground, renamed it Arowhon (from Samuel Butler's utopian
novel Erewhon - and "arrow"), and in 1934, signed up her first
60 campers, recruiting them through the sisterhoods of Reform
synagogues within one day's drive of Toronto. Mr.
KATES, then
20, dealt with logistics.
"The cabins had no lights, no running water," he later recalled.
"There was a smelly central toilet system and a kitchen with
a couple of old wood-burning stoves. To keep food cold, we had
to cut ice from the lake in wintertime, carry it to the icehouse
and pack it in sawdust. I was as much trouble as I was a value,
but I installed a small 32-volt generator, which allowed a 25-watt
bulb in each of the camper cabins. Almost every time there was
a play, we would overload the generator and there'd be a mad
rush up the hill to restart it while the camp waited in the dark."
In 1940, he and friend Tommy Walker joined the armed forces.
He trained at Camp Borden and in 1941 was commissioned a second
lieutenant with the 10th Armoured Regiment. By mid-1942, in England,
he had been seconded to the Royal Air Force, interpreting aerial
photographs and, it seems, spending many evenings at London's
Savoy Hotel.
He always spoke fondly of his time in England, but hardly at
all about later tours in Europe and North Africa, except to imply
that what he witnessed there turned him forever against the idea
of war. His last long conversation with his daughter was about
the folly, as he saw it, of Canada's involvement in Afghanistan.
At war's end, he had a job offer in the British film industry
but decided to help out for one season at the camp. The war years
had left it with a staff more interested in having fun than in
their charges, and his mother was giving it only partial attention,
having also built and opened Arowhon Pines, for visiting parents.
"That season was so unsuccessful and so unhappy" he wrote, "that
I had to come back to prove that I could beat it. I certainly
had no experience as an educator, but I had trained men in the
army and had become used to having my directions unquestioned.
That first postwar year at camp hooked me on the life."
He abhorred the thought of running a babysitting service, though.
He cleared a baseball diamond and an archery range, built stables
and a riding ring, expanded the docks for canoeing, sailing and
swimming. They could choose what skills to master, but they were
expected to set goals, state them and meet them. "His philosophy,"
his daughter says, "was that the drive toward excellence and
the pursuit of learning forged lifelong character - for both
the child attaining the skill and the staff member teaching it."
He was also passionate about the wilderness, even though, as
his son, Robert, an expert outdoorsman, points out, he never
hiked in the bush, never paddled a canoe and hardly ever sailed.
"But he loved Algonquin Park, loved being in business in Algonquin
Park."
From the start, Camp Arowhon had been co-ed - one of the first
such camps in North America. After the war, Mr.
KATES set about
diversifying it in other ways, reaching outside the Jewish community
to replicate the rich mix of cultures he had experienced in the
army. Soon enough, Arowhon was mixing not only Jews and gentiles,
Americans and Canadians, but also campers from Europe, the Caribbean
and Latin America.
His off-season life in Toronto went less well for a while. In
1949, he had married Ruth
GROSS,
Joanne and Robert's mother,
but the pair divorced in 1962. In 1968, he married Helen
DAY,
an English-born businesswoman. In 1971, the two took over Arowhon
Pines, the resort hotel, which had been fading under Mr.
KATES's
mother's management.
The hotel's lease then had only six years to run, and government
policy called for an end to all private leaseholds in the park.
Mr. KATES brought his full-bore energy and single-mindedness
to bear on Queen's Park. "A park the size of Algonquin can't
be the exclusive preserve of canoeists and backpackers," he argued.
"Three hotels in a 3,000-square-mile park exclude no one."
The minister he addressed was impressed, and even more that the
Pines had stayed solvent for 30 years with no liquor licence
(guests bring their own) and operating only 18 weeks a year.
Its lease was renewed, and the government was soon promoting
it in its tourism brochures.
The KATESes set about upgrading on all fronts. As Mr.
KATES put
it with typical directness in a 1976 interview, "We're in the
business of selling three things: a bedroom, a dining room and
a setting. The setting is superb, but it's beyond our control,
so we have to do our best with the other two." In 1987, Arowhon
Pines was invited to join Relais and Châteaux, the very selective
luxury hotel association.
By that time, it was already attracting guests from Europe. It
has since seen them arrive from as far as Peru, Vietnam and Senegal.
Mr. KATES delighted over the foreign guests, but when his staff
was abuzz over serving Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, William
Hurt, Frances McDormand or Martin Short, he would ask, "Who?"
And, while he fretted over decorum in the stately dining room,
whenever hydro crews worked on lines to the camp or the hotel,
they got invited to lunch, sweaty work clothes and all.
Until late in his 70s, he went skiing for three weeks each year
in the Alps. In his 80s, he and Helen were beating couples 30 years
his junior at doubles tennis. About five years ago, though, he
was diagnosed with emphysema. Still, one afternoon in April,
sitting in his Toronto garden with the management team, talking
about reopening, he offhandedly said, "I don't know if 92 is
the right time to retire."
He spent his final weeks in his cabin at the camp, amid the shouts
and laughter of children. He died on the final day of camp, but
not until after the last bus had left.
The Nose knew.
Eugene KATES was born in Toronto on October 14, 1914. He died
at his cabin in Algonquin Park on August 21, 2007. He was 92.
He is survived by wife Helen, children Joanne and Robert, and
four grandchildren.
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OBERDORF o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-11-03 published
He escaped the Nazis to become Canada's 'most brilliant photographer'
Initially trained as an engraver in Vienna, he pursued a passion
for photography that led him to produce trademark black-and-white
images. The results took him to the heights of his profession
By Charles
OBERDORF,
Special▲ to The Globe and Mail, Page S11
Toronto -- Peter Newman once described Walter
CURTIN as Canada's
greatest photographer. A Viennese Jew who fled Nazism, he became
one of the country's most successful photojournalists of the
Fifties and Sixties.
His best-known image is probably also the best-known photograph
of its subject, Glenn Gould. In it, the pianist, wearing a heavy
overcoat and a driver's cap, sits in profile, hunched over the
keyboard of a shopworn Canadian Broadcasting Corporation studio
piano, his mouth slightly ajar, as if singing along with his
playing.
Mr. Gould himself seems to have preferred a different Walter
CURTIN shot.
Over the years, thanks to several
CURTIN assignments, the two
had become Friends. ("Walter," Mr. Gould once said, "you're as
crazy as I am.") The Friendship had an opposites-attract element:
the charming, gregarious and dapper Viennese and the unkempt,
argumentative and reclusive Canadian.
During one conversation - possibly one of Mr. Gould's famous
late-night phone calls - the pianist described a nightmare he'd
recently had in which he was a passenger in a 747 jet. A flight
attendant came to him and whispered that the pilot had just died
and that only Mr. Gould could land the plane. He woke up in terror.
In his darkroom, Mr.
CURTIN dug out the negatives from an assignment
he'd done that included a shot of a pilot at the controls of
a big jet. He printed an enlargement, then one of Mr. Gould with
his head at a matching angle. Carefully, he substituted the pianist's
face for the pilot's, framed the result and sent it to Gould.
He heard nothing, but later learned that for years there had
been a shot of Mr. Gould in a pilot's uniform, with someone else's
hairy hands, hanging in the pianist's bedroom.
Walter CURTIN was born Walter
SPIEGEL in the imperial Vienna
of Gustav Mahler and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Arthur Schnitzler and
Gustav
Klimt. In that well-fed city, the
SPIEGELs were food importers
and wholesalers. The business ran into trouble, however, when
Walter was about 15.
A few years later, in 1933, his father died, leaving him head
of the family. In November, 1938, eight months after Hitler's
Germany annexed Austria, the concierge in their apartment building
saved the family during the brutal Kristallnacht pogrom by sowing
such seeds of deceit and confusion that the Nazi mob who came
for them went away empty-handed. The strategy gained precious
time, and Mr.
CURTIN and his brother, Otto, soon fled to Britain.
Their mother would die in Poland along with thousands of other
Viennese Jews.
In England, Mr.
CURTIN worked at odd jobs, tried to enlist on
the day war was declared in September, 1939, but was rejected
as an "alien." After the fall of France, both brothers, along
with 2,000 other German-speaking aliens of military age, were
shipped to an internment camp in Australia. When British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill changed the policy to allow "friendly
aliens" to enlist, Mr.
CURTIN joined the British military and
was advised to change his name in case of capture.
The brothers served first in the 93rd Pioneer Corps, and then
Mr. CURTIN joined the Royal Engineers "after passing a test that
required putting together two bits of old-fashioned toilet chain.
That's how I became an Army engineer," he once wrote. He served
until 1946, mainly with the Royal Air Force.
Once out of the military, he decided to pursue a career in photography.
It was an interest that had followed him through the years. In
Vienna, he had studied photoengraving and worked briefly for
a portrait photographer; in London, before he was deported, he
had learned colour printing; on the ship to Australia, he and
some had formed a keen if under-equipped photography club.
Returning to London, he talked his way into an apprenticeship
at a busy commercial photo studio. He was soon behind a camera
making copy photographs of paintings. In 1948, he set up shop
on his own in Kensington, where such clients as Time-Life Books
wanted his well-crafted photos of paintings and art objects.
Along the way, Mr.
CURTIN became acquainted with a talented young
British painter 10 years his junior whom he met through an old
military friend. As it happened, his friend was married to a
painter who had decided to play matchmaker. Invited to dinner,
Mr. CURTIN showed up in all innocence to be introduced to a beautiful
young woman named Isabel
KANN.
She was Catholic and he was Jewish,
but no matter. As these things go, a relationship quickly developed
and they fell in love. They married in 1949.
On visits to Paris, he made Friends with the founders of the
Magnum photo agency - including Robert and Cornell Capa, Dimitri
Kessel and Henri Cartier-Bresson - who were setting new standards
in photojournalism made possible by the inconspicuous mobility
of the 35 mm camera and the versatility of high-speed film.
In 1952, hard economic times in Britain, together with the needs
of a young family, led the
CURTINs to emigrate to Canada.
Settling in Toronto, Mr. Walter decided to follow the lead of
his Magnum Friends and began shooting people and events rather
than paintings and sculpture. Within months he had sold a cover
to Liberty magazine. It was a portrait of the hockey giant, King
Clancy. Not long after that, the National Film Board in 1953
commissioned him to document the first season of the Stratford
Festival.
It soon became apparent, though, that photojournalism would not
support a growing family that by 1963 would number six children.
So, according to his colleague, John Reeves, "Walter did this
amazing thing. He unleashed that Viennnese charm of his on the
ad agencies and somehow convinced them that his kind of shooting
was just what they needed. All of a sudden, these black-and-white,
available-light images started showing up in magazine ads and
at the art directors' shows."
It was during this period that he worked with the journalist
Peter C. Newman, who was then a senior editor and columnist at
Maclean's. In a hand-written dedication, Mr. Newman wrote: "To
Walter CURTIN, the most brilliant photographer in Canada. With
admiration and best wishes. Peter Newman, May, 1961." It was
a respect that was to remain unchanged through the years.
By then, Mr.
CURTIN had moved the family back across the Atlantic
to again try his luck in London. There, he replicated his Toronto
ad-agency breakthrough, most memorably in a series of ads for
Wills cigars. Each one featured a large informal close-up portrait
of a man, clearly not a model, usually working-class - one was
a street sweeper - each in his working garb and almost off-handedly
holding a cigar. Freed of their ad copy, the series still stands
up as a vivid collection of genre portraits.
Eight years later, the
CURTINs returned to Toronto, where he
would soon begin an obsessive personal project to document the
major figures in Canada's classical music scene. In concert or
rehearsal, in their homes or sometimes his own, he shot them
all, from an aging Wilfred Pelletier in 1971 to a just-unpacked-from-Finland
Jukka-Pekka Saraste in 1994. His Canadian Brass look slimly resplendent
in the bell-bottomed, peacock tailoring of the early 1970s. Lotfi
Mansouri of the Canadian Opera Company gesticulates, soprano
Teresa Stratas clasps her hands to her mouth in embarrassment,
the Huggett family clutter the floor with their many wind and
string instruments. In 1994, some 80 of these images (from tens
of thousands of negatives) finally became a book, Curtin Call,
published by Exile Editions.
One reason Mr.
CURTIN could indulge in this labour of love was
that just as he was reaching retirement age in the mid-1970s,
his wife, Isabel, took up painting again and was soon a success
in major galleries with calm canvases that always included a
vase of flowers, a colourful swatch of fabric and a sun-shot
view through a window. Increasingly, in paintings made in winter,
the window looked out on a corner of Cannes or Albuquerque.
The six
CURTIN children also flourished. All of them have worked
in the arts, but as one son, John, said, "We keep out of each
other's way." One daughter paints, another sculpts, another writes
poetry, another designs stage sets. John
CURTIN makes award-winning
documentary films. Joe, a designer and builder of concert violins
and violas, recently received a $100,000 "genius" fellowship
from the MacArthur Foundation for advancing the science of his
field.
At the age of 80, Walter
CURTIN, an agnostic Jew, converted to
Roman Catholicism - primarily, his Friends speculated, to be
buried with Isabel. Characteristically, he took Israel as his
baptismal name. Until his early 90s, he seemed to live as energetically
as ever, though, travelling whenever possible, especially to
Europe, at home running errands for Isabel, entertaining Friends
and eating heartily in the Viennese style, always with a glass
of port before dinner, music after. He loved walking the dog,
Bertie, and sitting in Isabel's overflowing garden of lilies.
In the last year or two, though, he loved more and more to sleep,
claiming it was preparing him for "the eternal snooze."
Walter CURTIN was born Walter
SPIEGEL, on August 16, 1911, in
Vienna. He died of age-related causes in Toronto on October 21,
2007. He was 96. He leaves his wife, Isabel
KANN, and two sons
and four daughters. He also leaves four grand_sons.
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OBERHOLZER o@ca.on.grey_county.owen_sound.the_sun_times 2007-10-19 published
McFARLAND,
Ruby
Alice (née
FRENCH)
Formerly of Mississauga passed away peacefully at the Southampton
Care Centre of Wednesday, October 17, 2007 in her 92nd year.
Beloved wife of Ralph Wesley
McFARLAND for 65 years. Dear mother
of James McFARLAND and his wife
Janie of Port Elgin. Loving Grandmother
of Patricia Ann
OBERHOLZER of London, Janie Lynn and her husband
Brent RICHARDSON of Burgoyne and Jennifer Marie
McFARLAND and
her fiancé Luke
PARADIS of Kincardine. Loved Great-grandmother
of Fawn OBERHOLZER and Mikki
OBERHOLZER.
Sister-in-law of Irene
FRENCH of Palmerston. Fondly remembered by several nieces and
nephews. Predeceased by two sisters Edith
VEITEL and Emily
MITCHELL,
two brothers Bert
FRENCH and Beverly
FRENCH, sister-in-law Anna
FRENCH and brother-in-law Lloyd
VEITEL.
The family will receive
Friends on Sunday, October 21, 2007 from 2-4 p.m. at the Heritage
Funeral
Home,
Palmerston where Rev. Janet
SINCLAIR will conduct
the Funeral Service in the Funeral Home Chapel on Monday, October 22,
2007 at 2: 00 p.m. Interment Palmerston Cemetery. As expressions
of sympathy donations to charity of your choice would be appreciated
by the family.
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OBERLE o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2007-01-12 published
MARCHAND,
Jordan
Marchand
Was always smiling, learning, dreaming and hoping. During his
four year battle with cancer, Jordan proudly completed his computer
engineering degree from the University of Waterloo and worked
for Conversys Inc. Although Jordan never realized his dreams
of buying a Mercedes and working in California, he continued
living his life quietly, but with zest and spunk. Jordan, 25,
died holding his mother's hand in his Star Wars decorated room
at London Health Sciences Centre, Tuesday, January 9, 2007. Jordan
was the cherished
son of Robert and Mary Ann
MARCHAND, the beloved
brother of Nathan and Sheldon
MARCHAND and Ingrid (Paul)
McDERMOTT
and special grand_son of Flora
DUQUETTE.
Predeceased by grandparents
Arthur and Leona
OBERLE and Oscar
DUQUETTE.
Jordan will also
be missed by Comet, his Chihuahua. Friends will be received by
the family form 7 to 9 p.m. Friday at the A. Millard George Funeral
Home, 60 Ridout Street South, London, and
at Holy Family Catholic
Church, 777 Valetta Street, London, on Saturday, January 13,
2007 from 10: 00 to 11:00 a.m. where the funeral mass will be
held at 11: 00 a.m. Jordan's family thanks London Health Sciences
Centre oncology, cancer, and palliative care staff and physicians
for the outstanding care Jordan received. Donations may be made
as flowers, or as the gift of life (blood donations) or to the
charity of your choice. Online condolences accepted at www.amgeorgefh.on.ca
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