BOMBARDIER o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2008-01-05 published
KANDER,
Gerhard
While vacationing in Jamaica, Gerhard
KANDER passed away at 7 a.m.
on January 1, 2008. He celebrated New Year's Eve with his wife
Dr. Claire
BOMBARDIER, her sister Hélène
BOMBARDIER and niece
Myriam RICHER, at midnight they wished each other Happy New Year
and he never woke up in the morning. Gerhard was born in Germany
on August 27, 1921 an only child; he became a professional violin
soloist at age 13. In 1939 he escaped to England but his parents
never made it. The 'camp boys' (other Jewish refugees) became
his family. In Canada, he had the good fortune of being adopted
by a wonderful and generous Toronto family: Mr. Kaspar
FRASER
(founder of Fraser and Beatty law firm, now Fraser, Milner, Casgrain)
and his wife
Lois
McPHEDRAN. He eventually became an investment
advisor (recently with CIBC World Markets) but continued
to play the violin every day of his life. Visitation will be
held at their home on Saturday, January 5th, Sunday, January 6th
and Monday, January 7th between the hours of 4-7 p.m.: 18 Strathearn
Boulevard in Forest Hill (Spadina Road and St. Clair Avenue West
area). A memorial service will be arranged at a later date. In
lieu of flowers, donations can be made in Mr.
KANDER's memory
to either of the following charities: The Arthritis Society (www.arthritis.ca)
or The Arthritis and Autoimmunity Research Centre Foundation www.beatarthritis.ca
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BOMMEL o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2008-06-24 published
VAN
BOMMEL,
John
In loving memory of a dear husband and father, John
VAN
BOMMEL,
who passed away 1 year ago today, June 24th, 2007. It has been
a year since you have been gone There's not a single day that
goes by That you are not deeply loved and missed. Forever in our
hearts, Rose, Ryan and Michael.
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BOMS o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2008-04-05 published
McLUHAN,
Corinne (born
LEWIS)
(April 11, 1912-April 4, 2008)
Died peacefully of natural causes at her home in Wychwood Park
surrounded by her family. She was the beloved and loving wife
and confidante of the late Marshall
McLUHAN (1980;) dear sister
of the late Carolyn Lewis
WEINMAN (1996;) devoted and loving
mother of Eric (Sabina
ELLIS), Mary, Teri, Stephanie (Niels
ORTVED),
Elizabeth (Don
MYERS,) and Michael (Danuta
VALLEAU;) proud grandmother
of Jennifer Colton
THEUT,
Emily McLuhan
BOMS, Anna and Andrew
McLUHAN,
Claire and Madeleine McLuhan
MYERS, Arthur,
Mark,▼ and
Gwendolyn McLUHAN; and great-grandmother of Olivia, Charlotte,
and Gillian.
Corinne was known for her beauty, grace, intelligence, wit, and
Southern charm. She embraced life fully and enjoyed many rich
experiences and wonderful Friendships along the way. Born in
Fort Worth, Texas, Corinne proudly remained an American all her
life. She graduated from Texas Christian University and went
on to do graduate work in theatre at the leading drama school
of the day, Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, California. It was
there that she met her future husband, Marshall
McLUHAN, a graduate
student at Cambridge University in England, who had travelled
to Pasadena to visit his mother, a drama coach at the Playhouse.
The family wishes to extend its heartfelt thanks to Doctor Wendy
BROWN, for her years of unflagging and tender care, and to special
caregivers Sally, Bona, Tasie, Amy, and particularly Cynthia,
who has stayed at Corinne's side day and night for the last four
years.
There will be a funeral mass at Holy Rosary Church, 354 St. Clair
Avenue West on Monday April 7 at 1: 30 p.m.
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BOMS o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2008-04-19 published
She was Marshall
McLUHAN's great love ardent defender, supporter
and critic
An aspiring actress from a privileged Texas family, she was swept
off her feet by a young Canadian academic who would lay the cornerstone
of modern media theory. She later edited his first big book
By Lisa FITTERMAN,
Special to The Globe and Mail, Page S11
When she was young, Corinne Lewis
McLUHAN won a Mary Pickford
look-alike contest, but woe betide any person who assumed that
there wasn't much more to her than masses of dark hair, a wide
smile and a disarming southern drawl. For Mrs.
McLUHAN, actress,
English teacher and wife to the unbending, irascible and brilliant
Marshall, looks were just the medium in which she packaged a
sharp intellect, a steely will and enough spirit to elope with
a man who did not impress her upon first introduction.
"He was six-feet, two-inches, thin, with a little moustache,"
she once told a television interviewer. "He was very self-contained
and very British, all with this peculiar Canadian accent. I thought
he was the strangest duck I'd ever met!"
No one in her family, at least, ever envisioned her, a southern
belle from Fort Worth, Texas, falling in mad love with a skinny,
awkward academic from Edmonton with a penchant for poetry. After
all, she was a direct descendant of one of Fort Worth's founders,
while her great-grandfather had been the state's first carriage
manufacturer and her own father, Charles Wallace
LEWIS, provided
a more-than-comfortable living for his family as the chief financial
officer of the local Swift and Company packing plant. From her
father, young Corinne learned to how to shoot and hunt, while
her mother, the feisty Corinne Keller
LEWIS, raised her and older
sister, Carolyn, in the tradition of the Daughters of the American
Revolution, complete with its motto of "God, Home and Country."
In this rarefied world, scholastic excellence was lauded, as
was churchgoing and the pursuit of hobbies such as theatre. In
high school, young Corinne was always a top student but she was
also a key member of the drama club called the Vagabond Players,
both directing and performing in plays such as Seven Keys to
Baldpate, a whodunit by George M. Cohan for which the tagline
was "Mystery writer and blonde… too scared to kiss… in mansion
of fear!" In The Constant Wife, an extramarital farce by W. Somerset
Maugham, she played Martha Culver, a prickly, cynical spinster
who doesn't trust men one bit.
After graduating from high school in 1930, she was offered scholarships
to several universities elsewhere in Texas, but her parents pressed
her to remain in Fort Worth, where she attended Texas Christian
University, completing a degree in general arts and pursuing
her interest in drama. She also won poetry-recitation contests
and honed her talent for public speaking.
Throughout, she had any number of gentleman callers, but she
wasn't at all interested in living what she knew for the rest
of her life. Rather, she decided to pursue her dramatic studies
further, ending up in Pasadena, California, which had a well-regarded
theatre school. There, a meeting with a teacher would change
her life forever: Elsie
McLUHAN,
Marshall's▲ mother and a force
in her own right, had arrived to run a class after directing
at a theatre in Detroit. At once, she decided the younger woman
was the perfect match for her intellectual son, who was coming
to visit her.
"She told me he was very handsome," Mrs.
McLUHAN recalled in
a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio documentary. "She invited
me over a lot and generally promoted our togetherness."
As part of their courtship, he would pick her up in Pasadena
and drive to the countryside, where they'd lie on the grass and
read poetry to each other. They hadn't been going together for
very long when Marshall, who was working on his master's degree
at Cambridge University, had to go back. He proposed marriage.
She responded by suggesting that they write to each other for
a while first. "But no, he wanted me to go with him or forget
about it," she would say in another documentary about her husband.
"I wasn't used to this kind of treatment. What made this man
tick?"
In the end, she said yes. On August 4, 1939, they tied the knot
she telegraphed her family the news only after the deed was done.
"Mother knew they'd never accept him," said Stephanie
McLUHAN,
the fourth of the couple's six children. "Her family never particularly
accepted him. Texas and Canada are still pretty different."
The newlyweds honeymooned in prewar Venice, sailing through the
canals with gondoliers singing at the tops of their voices -
until they descended one morning from their hotel room to learn
that war appeared imminent. Their next stop was Paris, but they
soon felt compelled to leave there, too; as Mrs.
McLUHAN quickly
packed, her husband ventured out to get provisions.
"He came with a bottle of Benedictine and a basket of pastries,"
she recalled in the same documentary. "We took the last train
out of Paris and a boat across the Channel, which was crammed
to the gills. We were the only ones with any food or drink on
hand. We arrived in London the night before the war was declared,
and then went down to Cambridge where we stayed for the year."
He got his master's in January, 1940, and though he would begin
his doctoral dissertation soon after, the outbreak of war led
the university to grant him permission to complete it in North
America; it would be granted three years later without him having
to travel back to make a defence. The couple sailed for the United
States, stopping in St. Louis for a year because he had to work
at a local university.
In 1944, they moved to Windsor, Ontario, where Doctor
McLUHAN taught
at Assumption College. Two years later, he joined the faculty
at Saint Michael's College in Toronto. In the 1950s, he began to
give the Communication and Culture seminars that would lead to
the establishment, in 1963, of the Centre for Culture and Technology
the university did so because, by then, Doctor
McLUHAN was so famous
he was receiving tempting offers from other institutions.
Mrs. McLUHAN was her husband's most ardent defender, fan, critic,
editor and love. A staunch patriotism, an even stauncher faith
in God (like Doctor
McLUHAN, she was a convert to Catholicism) and
an impish sense of fun would help guide her throughout her life,
through the raising of six children and through the leaner years
before her husband gained renown. She never renounced her U.S.
citizenship and prayed regularly, while author B.W. Powe, who
first met her in 1978 at a Christmas party at the
McLUHAN home
in Toronto's tony Wychwood Park, recalls that she was in the
kitchen, spiking the punch with lots of alcohol.
"She poured and sang," Mr. Powe wrote in an e-mail. "You must
picture her: tall, elegant, with a Texan drawl and that bright,
broad smile, much laughter in her face. There she was, singing
and pouring in the alcohol so that we, Marshall's grads, would
no doubt happily reel out into the good Christmas night."
The McLUHANs were devoted parents, although Stephanie
McLUHAN
speculates that her mother's experience as a stage director must
have helped, for it was she who did most of the day-to-day raising
of her and her siblings, of listening, disciplining, bandaging
and counselling. Her husband may have popularized terms and phrases
such as "global village" and "the medium is the message" but
he was stymied by the sheer noise of children, sometimes even
retreating to a table in the backyard when weather permitted
so he could work in peace and quiet.
"They expected us to excel," said Stephanie, who now runs the
Canada Institute program for the Washington, D.C.-based Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars. "Mom was a voracious
reader and a real confidante to my father. She edited his first
major book, The Gutenberg Galaxy. Dad was a stellar verbal person
but when he sat down to write, he needed help.
"They had a real partnership in addition to marriage," she continued.
"Dad just adored her."
In 1979, Doctor
McLUHAN suffered a stroke that robbed him of his
ability to speak, read and write. While it broke his wife's heart
that they couldn't continue the intellectual discussions they'd
been having ever since they first met, they continued with their
regular walks around Wychwood Park. She would guide him and he'd
stay fast by her side - just like it had always been.
Corinne Lewis
McLUHAN was born April 11, 1912, in Fort Worth,
Texas She died April 4, 2008, of natural causes at her home in
Toronto. She was 95. She leaves her children: Eric, Mary, Teri,
Stephanie, Elizabeth and Michael. She also leaves grandchildren
Jennifer Colton
THUET,
Emily McLuhan
BOMS, Anna and Andrew
McLUHAN,
Claire and Madeleine McLuhan
MYERS and Arthur, Mark and Gwendolyn
McLUHAN, and her great-grandchildren, Olivia, Charlotte and Gillian.
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