Gerry Shannon could have been a professional hockey player like his father, but sought instead to play in a much bigger arena. Shannon went on to become a top career public servant who helped formulate Ottawa’s policies on international trade. At one time he held the No. 2 posting in the Canadian Embassy in Washington…
Category: Obit
Obit: Mordecai Richler (1931-2001); and IFOA Tribute (2000)
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Mordecai Richler, the acclaimed Canadian novelist who died July 3, 2001 at the age of 70, will be remembered for his various novels that brought the Jewish life of Montreal to vibrant and often hilarious life on the page. An irreverent satirist who honed his wit on diverse targets from the Jews to Quebec’s protective…
Obit: William George Poy (1907-2002)
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William George Poy, the father of Canada’s Governor General, died in Toronto on Sunday Feb. 3, 2002, at the age of 94. A onetime employee in the Canadian Trade Commission in Hong Kong, Mr. Poy and his young family came to Canada as war refugees after Hong Kong fell to the Japanese in 1942. Continuing…
Obit: Frank Marsh (2001)
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Frank Marsh was born in Lamaline, a remote coastal village in Newfoundland, and came to touch the lives of many people in Ontario, and even in distant India, by dint of his professional vision and dedication. A rural school-teacher who founded Newfoundland’s Eastern College and then became the province’s assistant deputy minister of education, Marsh…
Obit: nursing sister Dorothy Ann Macham (1910-2002)
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Dorothy Macham, a former army nurse who received an Associate Royal Red Cross medal from King George VI and headed Women’s College Hospital for three decades, died in Toronto in July, one week shy of her 92nd birthday. Ms. Macham had several years of operating room experience when she joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps…
Obit: Eddie Goodman, lawyer, political power broker (1918-2006)
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Eddie (Edwin) Goodman, a prominent lawyer, decorated war veteran, philanthropist and political power broker, died in Toronto from Alzheimer’s and heart disease on August 23, 2006. He was 87 years old. Head of a large law firm employing nearly 200 lawyers, Goodman was a lifelong Conservative who befriended Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and was a…
Obit: folksinger Wade Hemsworth (1916-2002)
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Wade Hemsworth, who was a career draftsman for the Canadian National Railway, once explained, “I build bridges with a slide rule and paper and pencil.” But after office hours, he crafted brilliant folk songs about life in the Canadian north that will likely prove as durable as any bridge he ever designed. Celebrated for the…
Obit: General Choi Hong Hi, grand master of taekwon-do
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General Choi Hong Hi, who founded the martial art of taekwon-do in Korea in 1955 and devoted his life to its promotion, has died in his birthplace of Pyongyang, North Korea. He was 83. Gen. Choi established the International Taekwon-do Federation in 1966 and oversaw its growth into more than 100 countries. He used to…
Obit: Mandel Sprachman (1925-2002)
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Mandel Sprachman, the Toronto architect who restored the city’s legendary Elgin-Winter Garden vaudeville house to its original splendour, has died at the age of 77. Like his father before him, Sprachman specialized in old movie palaces and theatres; he renovated and restored many such edifices in Toronto, Montreal and other Canadian cities. He was also…
Obit: comedian Frank Shuster (1916-2002)
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Frank Shuster, the straight man in the legendary comedy team of Wayne and Shuster, has died in Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital of pneumonia at the age of 85. He and his partner Johnny Wayne, who died in 1990, performed as a comic duo for 56 continuous years since first teaming up together for some comic…
