DAFOE o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2008-04-09 published
LOBSINGER,
Jean
Ella
(REVINGTON)
On Tuesday, April 8, 2008, Jean Ella
(REVINGTON)
LOBSINGER, age
96, went home to be with her Lord. Beloved wife of 64 years of
the late Doctor Leonard
LOBSINGER. A wonderful and loving mother
to Joe LOBSINGER and his wife
Anne,
Sarnia and Marie and her
husband Doctor William
DAFOE,
Edmonton. Dear grandmother of Stephanie,
Karoline, Kristen, Allan and Joanna. Great-grandmother of Madeline,
Annabelle, Cameron and Anders. Sister of Kathleen (Kay)
LANKIN,
Lucan.
Predeceased by granddaughter Heather
DAFOE, brothers Wesley
and Sheridan and by sisters Marie, Gayle and Eva. Mom was born
in Lucan, Ontario and graduated in 1933 in Nursing at the Sarnia
General Hospital. For over 50 years, she managed a loving home
and supervised Dad's Animal Hospital practice at their Davis
St. home. She was a life long member of Saint_Joseph's Catholic
Women's League and served as a volunteer for the Children's Aid
Society. A special thank you to Marilyn, Rhoda and all the special
angels who made it possible for Mom to stay in her own home.
Much appreciation to the staff at Trillium Villa Nursing and
especially Rhoda for their wonderful care in the last 2 years.
Visitation at the McKenzie and Blundy Funeral Home and Cremation
Centre, 431 Christina St. N., Sarnia, on Thursday from 2-4 and
7-9 p.m. where prayers will be offered at 3: 30 p.m. Mass of Christian
Burial will be celebrated by Fr. Matthew
BEDARD at Saint_Joseph's
Church on Friday at 11 a.m. Interment Our Lady of Mercy Cemetery.
As an expression of sympathy, Friends who wish may send memorial
donations to the Canadian Cancer Society, 714 Lite Street, Point
Edward, N7V 1A6. Mother had abounding faith in God. A prayer
that she said often was "Dear Lord, There Is Nothing That Will
Happen Today That You and I Can't Handle Together." We thank God
for giving us such a lovely mother. Messages of condolence and
memories may be left at www.mckenzieblundy.com A tree will be
planted in memory of Jean
LOBSINGER in the McKenzie and Blundy
Memorial Forest. Dedication service Sunday, September 21st, 2008
at 2: 00 p.m. at the Wawanosh Wetlands Conservation Area.
D... Names DA... Names DAF... Names Welcome Home
DAFOE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2008-03-22 published
Canadian ambassador to Moscow and envoy to United Nations was
a man of peace
He inherited his famous father's fascination with international
affairs and dedication to peace, disarmament and security issues
but purposely 'ducked the public spotlight'
By Sandra MARTIN,
Page
S11
As a diplomat, Geoffrey
PEARSON was one of our men in Paris during
the Algerian war of independence, in New Delhi when India invaded
what is now Bangladesh, and at the United Nations and in Moscow
during some of the chilliest days of the Cold War. But no matter
what he achieved in his own life, in more than 30 years in the
foreign service, he could never escape the shadow of his father's
fame as a diplomat, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Canada's 14th prime
minister.
"I don't like it, but there's nothing I can do about it," he
told an interviewer after he was appointed Canada's ambassador
to the Soviet Union in 1980. The headline in The Globe and Mail?
"Pearson's son gets Moscow post."
He was philosophical about the inevitable link, saying it was
better to be known as the
son of someone who's well known for
the things he did right than the things he did wrong. But he
did admit once that, "although I might have enjoyed politics,
I've ducked the public spotlight, have backed away from a political
career because I'm Mike Pearson's son."
A man who inherited his mother's wit and his father's fascination
with international affairs and dedication to peace, disarmament
and security issues, Mr.
PEARSON was also a dedicated family
man. When he was a child in the 1930s and 1940s, it was common
practice for diplomats and their wives to send their children
to boarding schools at home or abroad while they served their
country in foreign fields. It was the way things were, but it
was not the way he wanted to bring up his own five children.
They accompanied their parents around the world, and mostly attended
local schools.
"We were all marked by the foreign-service experience," said
his eldest daughter, Hilary
PEARSON. "
All five of us have been
influenced to think bigger, think broader, to look out. That's
what happens when you are a foreign-service kid. You are very
aware of the world."
Geoffrey PEARSON was born in Toronto on Christmas Day, 1927,
the elder child and only
son of Lester Bowles
PEARSON, then a
lecturer in modern history at the University of Toronto, and
his wife, Maryon Elspeth (née
MOODY) - at least that's the official
version. In fact, Doctor William (Billy)
DAFOE delivered the baby
at 11: 58 p.m. on December 24 and, being an obliging fellow, agreed
to register the time of birth as 12: 02 a.m. the following morning,
according to historian John English in Shadow of Heaven, the
first volume of his biography of Lester Pearson.
By the time, Geoffrey entered Trinity College School in Port
Hope, Ontario, at 14, he had attended, by his count, five schools,
including Ravenscourt in Winnipeg and Ashbury in Ottawa. At Trinity
College School, he was dubbed Joker because of his poker face.
"He yawned his way to the sixth form and left with a well-earned
scholarship to Varsity," reported the Trinity College School
yearbook for 1945, while also paying tribute to his sportsmanship,
his dry wit, and his responsibility as a house prefect.
Geoffrey had to sit out a year before university because he had
contracted tubercular pleurisy. He spent months in the sun in
Bermuda at a school friend's house and then in Arizona at a ranch
belonging to one of his father's American colleagues, where he
learned to ride horses and explore the desert.
He enrolled in Trinity College at the University of Toronto in
1946, studying history under Frank Underhill and Donald Creighton.
Along with his friend Mike
MacKENZIE, he spent the summer of
1948 as a cadet officer on a merchant-navy steamer, with responsibility
for collecting garbage, making tea for the officer who stood
the 4 a.m. watch and cleaning the ship's whistle, a task that
involved climbing a 10-metre ladder braced against the ship's
funnel. They stopped at major ports on the English Channel and,
while the ship was docked, they made quick excursions into England,
the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany (where they had an adventure
when an army friend tried to take them through Berlin on the
day the Russians imposed a blockade).
The following summer, he attended an international student seminar
in the Dutch city of Breda, where he edited the Breda News and
perhaps anticipated his future diplomatic career when he summed
up the experience by opining that, for five weeks, he and the
other students had "formed an international community… conscious
not so much of having fully comprehended the problem of liberty
and order as of having understood the bases on which an eventual
solution to it must be built."
Before returning to university for his final year, he and Lucy
Landon Carter
MacKENZIE, a Trinity student and the younger sister
of his friend Mike, became an item. He graduated in 1950 and
went to Oxford on a Massey scholarship. She graduated the following
year and moved to London to work as a tutor to the daughter of
Dana WILGRESS, then the Canadian high commissioner. Ms.
MacKENZIE
and Mr. PEARSON travelled back to Canada - at her parents' request
- where they were married in a private ceremony at her family
home in London, Ontario, on Boxing Day, 1951.
They both returned to Oxford, where, in 1952, he completed his
M.A. in philosophy, politics and economics. That summer, he wrote
the exams for the Department of External Affairs, one of two
dozen successful candidates in a field of more than 250 applicants.
A year later, he was posted to Paris as third secretary. After
four years in France - years in which Canada was a member of
the International Control Commission trying to oversee France's
withdrawal from Indochina, the Algerian war began, the Suez crisis
erupted and the first two of his five children were born - the
Pearsons returned to Ottawa.
By all accounts, 1957 was a busy year: their third child was
born; the Louis St. Laurent Liberals were defeated by John Diefenbaker's
Progressive Conservatives; his father won the Nobel Peace Prize
and was subsequently chosen leader of the Liberal Party. All
in all, Geoffrey
PEARSON "accepted with alacrity," as he writes
in Anecdotage, his privately printed memoirs, a secondment to
work in the political division of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Secretariat, an invitation that would take him away from Ottawa.
The secondment ended in June of 1961, by which time the Pearsons
had produced their fourth child and only son. Mr.
PEARSON was
offered the No. 2 job in the Canadian embassy in Mexico under
ambassador Arthur Irwin, a former editor of Maclean's, director
of the National Film Board and the husband of poet P.K. Page.
The posting - Mr.
PEARSON describes his duties in Anecdotage
as part academic, part consular and part diplomatic - lasted
until the summer of 1964. By the time they returned to Ottawa,
their fifth child had been born, they had learned to speak Spanish,
and Mr. PEARSON's father was prime minister.
For the next three years, he worked in Ottawa in the United Nations
Division of External Affairs. He went twice to New York as an
adviser to the Canadian delegation but was mainly engaged in
helping to shape our policies on peacekeeping. These were the
years when the Americans under Lyndon Johnson were becoming heavily
involved in the un-winnable Vietnam War.
After Lester
PEARSON retired from politics in 1968, Geoffrey
took a leave to arrange his father's papers and to work with
Norman Robertson and G.S. Murray on a historical study of Canadian
foreign policy. In the summer of 1969, the Pearsons were off
again, this time to New Delhi, where he served until 1972 as
deputy high commissioner. During his tenure, India invaded East
Pakistan - which led to the establishment of Bangladesh - and
conducted what it called a "peaceful" nuclear test. After his
posting ended, Mr.
PEARSON spent the 1972-73 academic year in
Vancouver as a visiting professor at the University of British
Columbia.
From 1973 to 1980, the Pearsons were back in Ottawa, where Geoffrey
was in charge of the policy analysis group at External Affairs,
then director-general of the United Nations Division of External
Affairs. He was also heavily involved in the posthumous completion
of his father's memoirs - Lester
PEARSON had died of cancer in
December of 1972 - and in the planning for the Lester B. Pearson
College of the Pacific, one of 12 United World Colleges around
the globe.
While at the United Nations bureau, he had a hand in drafting
the speech that Pierre Trudeau delivered in the General Assembly
on May 26, 1978, outlining a strategy to suffocate the arms race
by "depriving" it "of the oxygen on which it feeds" by, among
other things, prohibiting the production of fissionable material.
That call was eventually incorporated in the first resolution
passed by the General Assembly on that subject.
About this time, Mr.
PEARSON was shifted again, so he could work
directly under external affairs minister Donald Jamieson as adviser
on disarmament and arms control affairs. In an interview with
The
Globe,
Mr.
PEARSON said: "The Canadian people are not up
in arms (no pun intended), but there is more interest than there
was before," referring to the priority that Mr. Trudeau had placed
on increasing Canadian efforts to curb international arsenals
of nuclear and conventional arms.
In June of 1980 (less than a year after the Soviet Union had
invaded Afghanistan), Mr. Trudeau named him ambassador to Moscow,
an appointment that Mr.
PEARSON, then 53, described as a total
surprise. After postings in Paris, Mexico City and New Delhi,
he spoke Spanish and French, but he had never studied Russian.
Mr. PEARSON's commitment to peace and disarmament and his background
and expertise earned by working for North Atlantic Treaty Organization
and the United Nations were far more significant than language
skills to a prime minister interested in carving an international
legacy for himself as a peacemaker. As Mr.
PEARSON quipped at
the time: "There's no sense sending someone to Moscow who's an
expert on trade."
He was recalled to Ottawa in the fall of 1983 to serve as Mr. Trudeau's
special representative on arms control. After Mr. Trudeau resigned
as prime minister in 1984, Mr.
PEARSON launched an international
peace initiative that he hoped would defuse the Cold War between
Washington and Moscow. The plan included proposals for a summit
of the five nuclear powers, a renewed and strengthened non-proliferation
treaty, a ban on high-altitude, anti-satellite weapons and restrictions
on the mobility of intercontinental missile launchers.
While Mr. Trudeau liaised personally with the British and Commonwealth
countries, he asked Mr.
PEARSON to sell the proposal to Chinese
and Soviet leaders. The Moscow initiative was hampered by the
prolonged ill-health of Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, who was
hospitalized after suffering renal failure in February of 1983.
In February of 1984, Mr. Trudeau met Mr. Andropov's successor,
Konstantin Chernenko, for a brief and inconclusive discussion.
That year, the Soviets boycotted the Summer Games in Los Angeles,
at least partly in retaliation for the U.S.-led boycott of the
Moscow Games four years earlier.
Mr. PEARSON resigned from External Affairs in 1985, after more
than 30 years service, and accepted an appointment as inaugural
executive director of the Canadian Institute for International
Peace and Security, a think tank on disarmament and security
issues that was established with $1.5-million in start-up funds
from the federal government. He held the post for more than four
years.
Mr. PEARSON wrote a book about the early years of his father's
career, Seize the Day: Lester B. Pearson and Crisis Diplomacy,
which was published in 1993. John English, reviewing it for The
Globe, described the book as "clearly written" and "as much a
tract for our times as a history of postwar Canadian diplomacy."
According to Mr. English: "What [Geoffrey]
PEARSON admires in
his father's generation and times is the creativeness of Canadian
diplomacy and the fundamental commitment to the United Nations
as a symbol of moral leadership and a place for diplomatic opportunity.
That generation 'seized the day' in dangerous times, and the
world and Canada were better for it."
In 2000, Mr.
PEARSON was made an officer of the Order of Canada,
the country's highest civilian honour, a designation that had
been established in 1967 when his father was prime minister.
He spent his last years in Ottawa with his wife, working on Anecdotage
with the help of his daughter Hilary. At his 80th birthday party
last summer - he didn't like celebrating himself on Christmas
Day - he gave each member of his family a copy of his version
of his life.
Geoffrey
Arthur
Holland
PEARSON was born in Toronto on December 25,
1927. He died in his sleep at his Ottawa home on March 18, 2008.
He was 80. Mr.
PEARSON is survived by his wife, retired senator
Landon PEARSON, and by their children Hilary, Katharine, Anne,
Michael and Patricia. He also leaves his younger sister, Patricia
Hannah, and 12 grandchildren. A service to celebrate his life
will be held at St. Bartholomew's Church in Ottawa on April 12.
D... Names DA... Names DAF... Names Welcome Home
DAFOE - All Categories in OGSPI