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…
Category: Obit
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…
Obit: Meyer Joshua Nurenberger (1911-2001)
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Meyer Joshua Nurenberger, an internationally-known Jewish writer and publisher who founded the Canadian Jewish News, has died in Toronto at the age of 90. During a journalistic career that stretched from the 1930s into the 1990s, Mr. Nurenberger interviewed Albert Einstein, covered the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, and was editor of the Morgen Journal, a…
Obit: deputy police chief Jim Noble (1924-2003)
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Jim Noble, who rose from beat cop to deputy chief during a 37-year career on the Toronto police force, died recently in Toronto. He was 78 years old. Noble’s career was marked by an almost continuous advancement through the ranks. As a divisional detective, he worked on a gamut of crimes that included “housebreaking, frauds,…
A remembrance of J.D. Salinger (1919-2010)
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Not having published a thing in almost half a century apparently hasn’t diminished the fame of America’s most reclusive writer. J. D. Salinger died in January at the age of 91, prompting some hopeful observers to wonder whether he left a vault full of manuscripts to be published posthumously. Born in New York in 1919…
Obit: Justice Paul Lamek (2001)
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Remembered for his intellectual vigour and his great love of the law, Superior Court Justice Paul Lamek has died in Toronto at the age of 65. Lamek studied law at Oxford and began his distinguished career as a teacher of law at the University of Pennsylvania for two years and then at Toronto’s Osgoode Hall…
Obits: Kew Dock Yip (1906-2001) & Irving Himel (1915-2001)
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Kew Dock Yip, a familiar and distinguished figure in Toronto’s Chinatown for more than half a century, has died in Toronto at the age of 94. While serving as a reserve in the Queen’s Own Rifles in 1942, Mr. Yip entered Osgoode Hall Law School and in 1945 became the first lawyer of Asian descent…
Obit: pediatric neurosurgeon E. Bruce Hendrick (1924-2001)
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Dr. E. Bruce Hendrick, a renowned pediatric neurosurgeon who headed the neurosurgical division at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children for more than two decades, has died in Toronto after complications from abdominal surgery. He was 77. As Canada’s first full-time pediatric neurosurgeon, Dr. Hendrick operated on tens of thousands of children with head injuries, brain…
Obit: MPP Lorne Henderson (1920-2002)
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Lorne Henderson, who represented the former Lambton riding in the Ontario Legislature for 23 years and served in cabinet for seven of those years, was a grass-roots politician who knew an astonishing number of his constituents by their first names. Raised on a farm in Enniskillen Township in southwestern Ontario, he was first elected to…
Obit: sculptor E. B. Cox (1914-2003)
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From the Globe and Mail, 2003 E. B. Cox, a much-admired Toronto-area sculptor who prided himself on achieving artistic and commercial success without ever taking a penny in government grants, died last summer at the age of 89. E. B. was a young associate of some of the Group of Seven with whom he went…
