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BANNISTER o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2008-06-16 published
BANNISTER, Stuart James
Tragically as the result of a car accident on Friday, June 13th, 2008, Stuart James BANNISTER, age 29 of Grand Bend. Sadly missed by his mother Mary Jeffrey and her husband Jim CHEVALIER, and his father Gordon BANNISTER and his wife Tran Tu THUY. Loved by his grandmother Irma BANNISTER. Missed by his brother Kurt BANNISTER and his partner Lauren ALEXANDER. Nephew to Ruth and Gord PHIPPS, Tom BANNISTER and Shirley OICKLE, Pat O'CONNELLY, Bill JEFFREY, Steve and Ann O'LEARY, Joan and Aldo ROTONDI. Cousin to Jody and Erik DERKZEN, Jill and Ian LEGG, Hillary and John O'DONNELL, Heather O'LEARY, Mia ROTONDI, John and Karen PHIPPS, Greg PHIPPS, Kelli IRWIN, Amy ROBERTS, Matthew ROBERTS, Kevin and Cathy LOISELLE and Kerri LOISELLE. Many good Friends including Patrick SCHLEGAL. Predeceased by his grandparents Ralph and Eileen JEFFREY and grandfather Lorne BANNISTER, also by his uncle Ralph BANNISTER. Stuart was the joy of his mother's life, an avid Gamer and Book Reader. He will be sadly missed by his Friends and family. A Celebration of Stuart's live will be held in the chapel of the D.J. Robb Funeral Home, (102 N. Victoria Street, Sarnia 519-336-6042) on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 from 11: 00 a.m. Cremation to follow. Friends and relatives may visit with the family at the funeral home on Wednesday evening from the hours of 6: 00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Donations in memory of Stuart's life can be made to N.O.R.M.L. or to Sick Kids Hospital or to the charity of your choice. (cheques only please). Messages of condolence may be sent to the family through djrobbfh@ebtech.net

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BANNISTER o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2008-06-29 published
McGEOCH, Thelma " Sammie"
Peacefully at Watford Quality Care on Friday, June 27th, 2008, Thelma "Sammie" McGEOCH of Melbourne in her 86th year. Predeceased by her husband James "Jim" McGEOCH (1998.) Dear mother of Cheryl (Elmer) BANNISTER of Simcoe, Heather Hart (Greg) GAVAN of Sarnia, Bonnie DELANGHE of London and Kim (Paul) MacDONALD of Dutton. Dear grandmother of Nicole (Jeff) PRICE, Rick AUSTIN, Brooke and Ben DELANGHE, Kaleigh, Josh and Shawna MacDONALD. Also remembered by Melanie (Tony) and Brian GAVAN and 4 great-grandchildren, Jacob, Matthew and Jessica PRICE and Rick AUSTIN Jr. Predeceased by brother Mel BARTLETT. Mrs. McGEOCH was a longtime member of Guthrie Presbyterian Church, Melbourne and a lifetime member of Womens Missionary Society. Friends may call at the Elliott-Madill Funeral Home, Mount Brydges on Sunday, June 29th from 6-9 p.m. Funeral service to follow on Monday from the funeral home commencing at 2 p.m. with Rev. Amanda BIRCHALL officiating. Interment Longwoods Cemetery, Melbourne. Donations to Guthrie Presbyterian Church, Melbourne would be appreciated as expressions of sympathy.

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BANNISTER o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2008-02-07 published
CLARK, Carol Anne (née MEREDITH)
Age 61, died peacefully with her family by her side in Bracebridge, Ontario on February 4th, 2008. Carol will be greatly missed by her husband Alan, her sons Simon ROSS of Durham, England (Sheena) and Michael ROSS of Montreal (Rachel;) by her brother David MEREDITH (Lynda,) sisters Sally BANNISTER (John) and Elin RACINE (Gaylen) and their children; and her wide circle of family and Friends. She was pre-deceased by her parents Jim and Elinor MEREDITH. A delightful spirit and wonderful soul; mathematician, cellist, writer, teacher; wife, mother, sister and friend to all who knew her; Carol was a marvellous cook and a fearless adventurer. A memorial service will be held at 2: 00 p.m. on Saturday, February 9 at the Lemonville United Church at 13523 McCowan Road in Stouffville, Ontario. Special thanks to the compassionate staff at South Muskoka Memorial Hospital. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to South Muskoka Memorial Hospital Foundation, 75 Ann Street, Bracebridge, Ontario P1L 2E4. Condolences and memories may be for warded through condolences@reynoldsfuneral.com.

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BANNISTER o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2008-03-13 published
WALKER, Mary▼ Pearl▼ " Mickey▼"
Peacefully at her home in Bala on Tuesday, March 11, 2008 in her 91st year. Beloved mother to Stephen KNIPFEL of Gravenhurst and Launi BANNISTER of Oakville. Beloved grandmother to Joseph Stephen KNIPFEL. Beloved▼ sister to George WALKER. Predeceased by her sisters Irene JACKSON, Maude▼ MOREY, and Hazel McNALLY, and by her brothers Ted, Tom and Reg WALKER.
At the request of Ms. Walker cremation has taken place. There will not be any funeral services held.
A Celebration of her life will be held in Bala, Ontario next summer.
In memory, donations to the Muskoka Interval House in Bracebridge, Ontario would be appreciated by the family.
Arrangements entrusted to the W.J. Cavill Funeral Home Ltd., Gravenhurst, Ontario (705) 687-3242.

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BANNISTER o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2008-03-31 published
With a wrist shot 'like a bullet,' she played hockey for 73 years
There's longevity in sport and then there was the veteran from Bala, Ontario, who competed for most of the 116 years that Canadian women have been playing organized hockey
By Ron CSILLAG, Special to The Globe and Mail, Page S11
It was on a frigid windswept lake in central Ontario's Muskoka region where Mickey WALKER's parents strapped a pair of bobskates to her tiny feet when she was three years old. As she grew, the girl played shinny with her father and four big brothers. She learned to stickhandle quickly. "If I didn't," she would recall, "I never would have had the puck."
At 12, Ms. WALKER joined her first hockey team with her brother's hand-me-down skates, an old stick (a new one cost 25 cents), and magazines wrapped around her shins for protection. She was 73 when the Ontario Women's Hockey Association recognized her as the oldest woman in Canada still playing, and 85 when she finally stopped skating in regular Monday night scrimmages at the arena in her native Bala, Ontario
She twice contested the Canadian women's championship in the 1930s, and pioneered the growth and development of hockey for girls and women. "She was so dedicated to women's hockey," remarked her friend of 25 years, Hazel McCALLION, the irrepressible mayor of Mississauga who's leading an effort to preserve Ms. WALKER's small mountain of hockey memorabilia. "She always encouraged young girls to get involved."
Ms. WALKER so loved the clean way women played that she spoke out against the violence in today's professional game every chance she could. "These young women play the game the way it should be played - without violence," she told The Muskokan newspaper in 1994. "I hate the violence of the National Hockey League! [Commentator] Don Cherry and the National Hockey League players who promote and play violent hockey should pay attention to those women.
"Great hockey players over the years, whether men or women, have never been violent. Only the goons who can't play the game and are out to injure the great players are violent. They should be barred from the game."
Little got her dander up like Mr. Cherry. "All he does is promote violence in the hockey telecasts and he makes videos out of them and sells them," she huffed in the Muskoka Sun in 1993. (Attempts to reach Mr. Cherry for comment were unsuccessful.)
Her disdain for violence and concern for women and children extended beyond hockey. Over several summers in Bala, she was known for sporting a sweatshirt emblazoned with the words: "My name is Mickey WALKER and I abhor mental, physical and sexual abuse against women and children. It has to be stopped!" She was also a fierce supporter of the death penalty.
She came into the world as Mary WALKER, the youngest of eight children born to Ada Berry WALKER and Captain John WALKER, who worked on Imperial Oil supply boats on the Great Lakes. The clan's Muskoka roots went back to the 1860s (Walker's Point bears the family name). The "Mickey" moniker stuck after young Mary endlessly sang a popular song she learned from the radio: "Mickey, pretty Mickey."
Her athletic skills came naturally. "We were a sports-oriented family," she recalled. "My mother was a beautiful skater and was still skating at 65. My father was a good hockey player well past the age of 50. So, hockey and sports just came naturally to me."
She also excelled at baseball and curling, and canoed well into her 80s.
Ms. WALKER began playing for the Bala girls' team in 1930. Practices were Friday at 4 p.m., and young Mickey so looked forward to them that she devised a way to get out of school early to get to the arena before anyone: She'd begin talking to someone in class until the teacher would holler, "Mary WALKER - out!"
That worked until the principal saw her scurrying along with her skates and stick before school was over. The next time the teacher spied his talkative pupil, she was kept for a half-hour after class.
"Well, that cured me," Ms. WALKER recalled in the 1995 history of women's hockey in Canada, Proud Past, Bright Future, by Brian McFarlane. "I never tried my little trick to get to the arena early ever again."
In 1934, Ms. WALKER's cousin returned to Bala after a stint in the semi-pro leagues in the United States, and joined the men's team in Bracebridge, Ontario, about 50 kilometres away. When he heard that the women's squad in nearby Bracebridge needed players, he told them about Ms. WALKER, who soon got an offer, accompanied by room and board.
When a teammate noticed that the toe of one of Ms. WALKER's skates was worn through, with her sock sticking out, she marched Mickey to her father's hardware store, where Ms. WALKER was handed a pair of $5 CCMs. They were the first new skates she'd ever owned.
She soon developed into her playing height and weight - 5 feet 8 inches, 130 pounds - and in her first year with Bracebridge, played for the national championship against the legendary Preston Rivulettes. The old Bracebridge arena was packed to the rafters. Ms. WALKER and her teammates had never played before such a large crowd and were so nervous, "it took us most of the first period to settle down," she told the Ice Times newspaper in 1991. The fearsome Preston girls, who reigned as champs for 10 years, were used to crowds and won the game 3-1 to retain their title.
Ms. WALKER and a group of Bala girls joined the team in Gravenhurst, about 15 kilometres down the road, for the following season, and again faced the Rivulettes for the national crown. The 1935 outdoor game was a disaster. For one thing, rain had dumped more than two centimetres of water onto the ice surface. "Have you ever tried to stickhandle on water?" Ms. WALKER later pondered. "The puck won't go anywhere."
For another, the champs had singled out Ms. WALKER as the only real threat on the opposing team. They identified her as the one whose wavy hair curled with perspiration (this was before helmets). Cries of "Get Curly!" could be heard from fans and the Preston bench.
Soon, the Rivulettes' big Marm Schmuck came barrelling down a wing straight at Ms. WALKER. " Step into her, Mickey! Step into her!" yelled her brother, Reg, from the stands. She complied, and both went down, but not before the Preston player's stick smashed Ms. WALKER across the nose and left her with two black eyes. "It wasn't an accident," she said, years later. A scar across the bridge of her nose was a lifelong souvenir.
As if that wasn't bad enough, an irate fan tried to swat Ms. WALKER with an umbrella every time she skated by. This time, her team lost 9-1, and the wild hit cemented her distaste for violence in hockey.
The Bracebridge and Gravenhurst teams folded and it was back to Bala until the Second World War broke out. At age 22, Ms. WALKER moved to Toronto to work at a small-arms plant that made Lee-Enfield rifles. Among 7,000 employees, she was soon picked among only a half dozen women to work in the "tool room," where she operated her own machine and earned the resentment of the men. "Girls in the tool room," she later mused. "Unheard of."
Two-and-a-half years later, she married a plant engineer and moved to Mississauga, where she played pickup games on the lake and in backyard rinks. Her daughter, Launi BANNISTER, a onetime figure skater, laughs heartily when asked whether she ever joined in. "Oh God, no! I didn't know what to do with a hockey stick!" Her mother was always chosen first and always shamed the guys with nimble skating and stick handling, and a deadly wrist shot that was "like a bullet."
But the story gets a little murky here. All her family will divulge is that Ms. WALKER endured back-to-back abusive marriages, both ending in divorce. She returned to Bala, alone, at 64.
She dived back into hockey, coaching a girls' team and captaining the Young Tymers, a squad of women over 35. She also started the Ice Girls, who met every Monday night at the arena for informal games. "There were no hockey programs for women or girls," she said about Bala. "So I started one. I'm trying to teach them that hockey is fun."
That's a lesson Ann KNIGHT learned. "She taught us how to stickhandle, how to steal the puck and how to love the game," said Ms. KNIGHT, who played alongside Ms. WALKER for a dozen years.
When Ms. WALKER turned 75, former Toronto Maple Leaf great Darryl Sittler was among dozens of people who sent her birthday greetings. She carried fan mail in her purse from Japan, Australia and the Netherlands.
In gratitude to her boosterism, the Ontario Women's Hockey Association in 1993 inaugurated the Mickey Walker Most Sportsmanlike Award. Ms. WALKER watched the Ontario Women's Hockey Association's ranks swell from a few thousand in 1975, the year it was founded, to about 40,000 players on 2,300 teams today, according to Fran RIDER, the association's executive director.
She loved the fact that women's hockey caught on globally, especially in 1990, the year of the first Women's World Championship, and 1998, when it was first played as an Olympic event. "You don't know how happy I am to see how far women's hockey has progressed," she enthused. "We've got just great players. They can do it all."
At the 1997 world championships in Kitchener, Ontario, she was interviewed by CBS television. The clip caught the eye of the late Charles Schultz, the creator of the Peanuts comic strip and an avid hockey fan who had staged the Snoopy Senior Annual World Hockey Tournament in California every year. He sent Ms. WALKER an invitation to play on his team (the 75- to 80-year-olds) but she was battling the flu and couldn't go.
But she was well enough to show up at the 2000 world championship in Mississauga decked out in full hockey paraphernalia, and with her face painted red and white.
Incredibly, Ms. WALKER chain-smoked, starting at 25, and quitting only two years ago after a bout of pneumonia.
She died four days before her namesake trophy was awarded to four-time world champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist Jennifer Botterill, who helped power the Mississauga Chiefs to the 2008 Esso women's national club championship in Charlottetown this month.
Mickey WALKER was born Mary Pearl WALKER in Bala, Ontario, on January 18, 1918. She died there on March 11, 2008 of natural causes. She was 90. She is survived by her daughter, Launi BANNISTER, son Stephen KNIPFEL and grand_son Joseph.

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BANNISTER o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.toronto_star 2008-03-13 published
WALKER, Mary▲ Pearl▲ " Mickey▲"
Peacefully at her home in Bala on Tuesday, March 11, 2008 in her 91st year. Beloved mother to Stephen KNIPFEL of Gravenhurst and Launi BANNISTER of Oakville. Beloved grandmother to Joseph Stephen KNIPFEL. Beloved▲ sister to George WALKER. Predeceased by her sisters Irene JACKSON, Maude▲ MOREY and Hazel McNALLY and by her brothers Ted, Tom and Reg WALKER. At the request of Ms. WALKER cremation has taken place. There will not be any funeral services held. A celebration of her life will be held in Bala, Ontario next summer. In memory donations to the Muskoka Interval House in Bracebridge, Ontario would be appreciated by the family. Arrangements entrusted to the W.J. Cavill Funeral Home Ltd., Gravenhurst, Ontario, (705) 687-3242.

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BANNOCK o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2008-01-07 published
IVEY, Beryl M. (née NURSE)
In the early hours of Christmas morning, in her 83rd year, Beryl IVEY died in her sleep of heart failure. She will be greatly missed by her husband Richard, her children Richard (Donna), Jennifer Ivey BANNOCK, Rosamond (John MacFARLANE) and Suzanne Ivey COOK (Dan,) her grandchildren Samantha, Alexandra and William IVEY, Olivia, Stephanie and Michael BANNOCK, and Dylan, Myles and Hayden COOK, and her brother Robert NURSE (Margaret.) Born in Chatham, Ontario, Beryl was predeceased by her parents Lt. Col. W. Ivan and Beatrice NURSE, and her sister Audrey WRIGHT. A private family service and burial took place on her 83rd birthday, December 28th.
A memorial service will be held on Friday, January 11, 2008 at 11: 00 a.m. at Saint Paul's Cathedral, 472 Richmond Street, London, Ontario. A reception will follow at The London Club, 177 Queens Avenue, London (across the street from Saint Paul's). In lieu of flowers, a charitable donation to Foundation Western (The University of Western Ontario, Westminster College, Suite 110, London, Ontario N6A 3K7) or London Community Foundation (Covent Garden Market, 130 King Street, London, Ontario N6A 1C5) would be greatly appreciated.
Condolences and memories may be forwarded through www.humphreymiles.com.

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BANNON o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2008-03-14 published
PALIN, James
At Seaforth Community Hospital on Monday, March 10, 2008, James PALIN, age 66, of Seaforth. Beloved husband of Marie (BANNON) PALIN. Dear father of Ray (Sandy) PALIN of Mississauga, Elaine (Larry) EAST of Seaforth and Cathy PALIN (Wayne GRAY/GREY) of Strathroy. Loving grandfather of seven grandchildren and one great-grand_son. Loved brother and brother-in-law of Robert (Barb) PALIN of Seaforth, Gary (Sandra) BANNON of Winthrop and Theresa (Bob) MacHAN of Blyth. Predeceased by his parents Harry and Nellie (GRUMMETT) PALIN and Marie's parents Leon and Jeanette BANNON. Family will receive Friends at the Whitney-Ribey Funeral Home, 87 Goderich Street West, Seaforth on Thursday from 2-4 and 7-9 p.m. Mass of the Christian Burial will be held on Friday, March 14 at 11: 00 a.m. at Saint_James Roman Catholic Church, Seaforth. Fr. Chris GILLESPIE will officiate. Interment Saint_James Cemetery. Memorial donations to Seaforth Community Hospital Foundation, Canadian Diabetes Association or Seaforth Fire Department appreciated. Condolences at www.whitneyribeyfuneralhome.com

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BANWELL o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2008-05-24 published
GROH, Judith Dorothy (née BANWELL)
Judy died at home with her family on Thursday, May 22. She is survived by her husband, Bob, sons Stephen (Emily STAUNTON) and Kevin (Jennifer BROOKS,) and grand_sons Ben and Oliver. She was the loving sister of Barbara STOKES, and Peter BANWELL (Barbara BANWELL.) Judy brought characteristic grace, determination, and courage to the challenges of a short illness. Her recent time with family and Friends warmed many hearts. Judy will be remembered in a reception of Friends at her home on Saturday, May 31 from 6 to 9 p.m. Her family wishes to thank Doctor Louise COULOMBE and a wonderful team of nurses and support providers for their thoughtful care. In lieu of flowers, please consider donations to Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children or Ottawa's Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario. Condolences and tributes may be made at www.tubmanfuneralhomes.com

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