Thomas Reginald Joseph Irvine
By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - 0 Comments
Ostracized as a child because of his weight, he fought hard to bring it under control, exercising no matter how bad the weather
Illustration by Ian Phillips
Thomas Reginald Joseph Irvine was born on Sept. 29, 1971, to Reg and Judy Irvine in the German city of Lahr. “I was in the infantry, a ground-pounder,” says Reg, who served in the Canadian Forces for almost four decades. His wife, Judy, was a homemaker, caring for Thomas and his brother Jeffrey, who was older by four years. “I told her when I married her, ‘You will never work. You will be a mother to my boys,’ ” Reg says. “She raised them with love.” While Reg was stationed in Germany, he and Judy would travel when they could to see more of Europe. “We went to Venice, to Amsterdam, to Italy, and to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower,” Reg says. “It was an education.” Thomas and Jeffrey were too young to remember these trips when they got older, but the family took photos “so we could show them, years later,” Reg says. “They couldn’t believe they’d been there.”
In 1976, Reg was stationed to Petawawa, Ont., and moved back to Canada with his family, “and that’s where the problems began.” At just five years old, Thomas’s weight was ballooning out of control. He was teased mercilessly everywhere he went: “in school, in restaurants, at the Ottawa Exhibition, at the War Museum,” Reg says. “I was never [home] that much. My wife spent hours talking to his teachers, and took him out of school. It was the worst a child could go through. You don’t know what it’s like, when somebody’s humiliated so bad—he’d come home crying, upset with the whole world. It was a scar on his mind, to be treated like that.”
In 1982, Reg was posted to the military base in Gagetown, N.B., and the family moved again. Even in their new home, Thomas was cruelly mocked and ostracized for his size. His weight had reached nearly 400 lb. “One day, when he was 11 or 12, I sat down with him, man to man,” Reg recalls. “I said, ‘We’re going to beat it.’ I said, ‘I’m in the army, and my job is physical training.’ So I took him down to the bottom of the hill. It’s a [steep] incline, and six miles from home. And I said, ‘I’ll see you at home, you know where it is.’ And when he arrived, two or three hours later, he was soaking wet from top to bottom. Of course, we were worried. And I said, ‘He ain’t gonna quit.’ And he never quit, he never did.”
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Daniel Joseph Botkin
By Gabriela Perdomo - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments
A volunteer firefighter, he’d learned the value of hard work at a log-home firm, where he returned last month to fight a fire
Illustration by Julia Minamatag
DANIEL JOSEPH BOTKIN was born Feb. 17, 1986, in Salmon Arm, B.C. His birth was the first adventure for a man who would go on to seek many more. His mother Sandra, a homemaker, and father Doug, a worker at a nearby sawmill, lived across the Shuswap River from Salmon Arm. There was no bridge to their home, so they left their car in town and used a raft and cable to cross the river. But the winter day Daniel was born was unusually cold and the water level was low, with ice jamming up the pulley. Daniel was born a mere half-hour after they finally made it to hospital.
The family soon moved to Enderby, B.C., a small community nestled in the mountains where both his parents had grown up. Following his parents’ divorce, Daniel, then three, and his younger brother Christopher went to live with their mom; Daniel quickly assumed the role of “the man of the house,” according to Sandra. “He felt he had to be protective of me,” she says. “And that never went away.”
Daniel was a sweet boy, with lots of friends. In Grade 5, his teacher at M.V. Beatty Elementary created fridge magnets with a title defining each student. Daniel’s read: “How to charm everyone and everything.” His mother had to help him deal with the many girls who took an interest in him. “He didn’t want to hurt their feelings, so he wouldn’t take the girls’ calls,” she says.
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Monte Walter Menard
By Emma Teitel - Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments
His farming childhood bred a love of the outdoors that led him to commercial fishing—no matter how harsh the conditions
Illustration by Team Macho
Monte Walter Menard was born on March 1, 1963, in the western Manitoba town of Swan River, to Grace, a community worker, and Walter, a farmer and regional manager of the Manitoba Metis Federation. The fifth child and first boy in the Menard clan (younger brother Dale would come along seven years later), Monte spent his formative years hiking through the family’s mountainside ranch in Slater, Man., and tending to the animals with his father. “We had cattle, chickens, turkeys,” says Walter. “Almost like an ‘Old MacDonald’ farm.”
Monte loved to wander off on his own and explore the wilderness with his dog, a mutt named Sheba. “He just walked and walked,” says Walter. “He wanted to return to the pioneer existence.” But Monte’s journeys weren’t limited to land; one winter, Walter was forced to brave icy waters when Monte, still a small child, decided to ride his bicycle into a nearby river. “He just wouldn’t let go of his bike when it was rolling into the water,” says Walter. “That kid was never fearful of water.”
When Monte was nine, his family moved to another ranch about 100 km east of Slater, to start what is known as a “PMU operation”: collecting and selling pregnant mares’ urine to pharmaceutical companies for use in a menopause drug. “At that time, we probably had 150 horses,” says Walter. The business thrived, and Monte thrived with it, helping with the horses and hay bales “day and night,” and proving he was an exceptional farmhand. “I recognized even at that age that he was very good at this kind of thing,” says Walter. “He had a country attitude.”
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Margaret Pidlaski
By Kristy Hutter - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 1:20 PM - 0 Comments
A teacher of English as a second language, she loved travelling, in part to see the homelands of the people attending her classes
Illustration by Team Macho
Margaret Pidlaski was born on June 22, 1954, in St. Boniface, Man. Her mother Hilda, a nurse, met her future husband, Bill, when he returned from the Second World War with tuberculosis and was admitted to the hospital where she worked. Margaret was the youngest of their three children, an easygoing child who avoided sibling rivalry. Indeed, she never fought with Patti, her sister two years her senior, and they did everything together.
Patti helped initiate Margaret’s love for film, music, and theatre. Her favourite was Bye Bye Birdie—the two once sat through it three times in a row in the theatre before realizing that their parents may have been worried. A Monkees concert at age 11 sparked a passion for live music, which led to lining up for tickets to see the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Who and others. “She was the essence of the baby boomer generation and everything that was a part of it,” says Patti.
As a young University of Manitoba student, Margaret spent two summers doing odd jobs at Jackson’s Fishing Lodge on Lac du Bonnet, so far north she had to fly in. She subsequently dropped out of school, and soon embarked on a European backpacking adventure with her friend, Gail. Both in their early twenties, they hopped on a steam tanker in Montreal and worked in its kitchen until they docked in Rotterdam. Margaret would spend 25 months abroad, working, among other things, as a cook for the Canadian military in Germany, and enjoying her adventures—including a trip to Paris, after hearing a rumour that Bob Dylan would be giving a concert there (Dylan didn’t show).
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Peter Devoe
By Gustavo Vieira - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments
After a horrific car accident, he found a new lease on life in his wheelchair. But it was diving that really made him feel free.
Iillustration by Marian Bantjes
Peter Devoe was born on July 28, 1955, in Prince Albert, Sask., the oldest boy of six children. He had a Catholic upbringing, singing in the church choir, and he loved the outdoors, fishing and hunting with friends in his spare time. When Peter reached high school in the early ’70s, like most young men of the day, he grew a moustache and long hair that he would keep for good. At their school’s welding workshop, Peter and his friend, Grayden Tyskerud, learned to fix just about anything, a skill that would come in handy later.
In the summer of 1978, Peter was living in Cranbrook, B.C., working at a sawmill, when a car crash radically changed his life. Travelling with friends on the road leading from Yahk toward Cranbrook, their car hit a rock wall and crumpled. Peter suffered a spinal cord injury, lost two fingers and one of his friends. After the crash, Peter’s mother gave him a medallion of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travellers, which he wore around his neck.
Being in a wheelchair did not make Peter feel sorry for himself. To the contrary, he never moped, and wouldn’t let others do it either. In the lobby of GF Strong, B.C.’s largest rehab centre, Peter would meet other patients and say, “Okay, everybody, let’s get into a taxi and go for a ride.” They would get an ice cream or a couple of drinks—ordinary things that nevertheless may have seemed undoable to some. “When you have an injury like most of us had, to have somebody take the lead and get you back out doing something was major,” says fellow patient Robin Devoe. Peter was to blame for introducing Robin to his brother Joe, who ended up moving to B.C. because of her. They have been happily married ever since.
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Allyn Robert Parker
By Cathy Gulli - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments
A generous man who liked to cook for friends and family, he had a dream of bicycling down Maui’s Haleakala mountain
Illustration by Jack Dylanw
Allyn Robert Parker was born on March 11, 1946, in Vancouver. His father George was a plasterer nicknamed “Shorty” for never growing taller than five feet after getting rheumatic fever at 11. His mother Hazel was a homemaker who also bore three older children, Don, Davina and Georgina, and enjoyed reading: she chose her youngest son’s name from a romance novel about a Welsh forester.
Allyn was never bookish. He preferred adventure: commandeering his bicycle 45 km from home to Fort Langley, B.C., or target shooting. His travels provided fodder for his budding obsession with photography. He had his own darkroom, worked on the high school yearbook and played the bongos. The one subject he excelled at was technical drawing.
That skill landed him a job with the Vancouver park board, despite not having graduated from high school because he was short an English credit. For two years, Allyn helped survey and plot parts of Stanley Park, which he referred to as “his.” Around then he met Sandra, an aunt’s foster child, and they married in 1967. Eventually the couple moved to Port Alberni, B.C., where Allyn worked as a municipal draftsman. He and Sandy were married 12 years and had three children, Vikki, Dawn and Allyn Dean, before splitting up.
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Norman Nathan Parker
By Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 8:50 AM - 0 Comments
He loved the sea, women and beer. Though he never learned to swim, he gave up drinking when his son came to live with him.
Illustration by Team Macho
Norman Nathan Parker was born on Jan. 12, 1966, the third of four children, and grew up in Back Bay, N.B., a village on the Bay of Fundy, where his parents Glendon and Melva worked at the Connors Bros. sardine cannery. Jutting out into the sea, with a white, red-trimmed lighthouse standing sentry nearby, Back Bay is a place of flinty, taciturn people, folks who, despite hardship, have managed to live off the briny riches of the mercurial bay—calm one minute, fog and treachery the next.
Norman’s disposition was sunnier than most, a charming boy with green-brown eyes and sand-brown hair who shared a bunk bed with his little brother and never learned to read or write. At 15, too young by law for full-time employment but by temperament too restless for school, his parents secured special dispensation from a judge to let him work. This he did with gusto, at Harvey Hooper’s lobster pound, and later on the sealing line at the cannery. Soon he struck out on his own—“he couldn’t work under anyone,” a relative says—buying an 18-foot skiff for clamming and periwinkling at low tide. About that time he took up with Rose, a woman older than he and already pregnant. Ashley became his daughter, too, whatever her ancestry, though he was soft. “You’re the adult,” Rose would say. “Punish her!” And he’d try. More often he’d mouth the words to Roy Orbison—Oh, Pretty Woman—“grab my hands and dance,” says Ashley, “he’d get me twisting.” At night he’d wait for teenage Ashley to get home; it broke his heart she got pregnant at 14.
He was full of contradictions—a fisherman who couldn’t swim, a family man who drank too much Bud and caroused (“he loved his women and the women loved him,” says Ashley). When, after 16 years, he and Rose split, Norman quit booze. Yet he’d go back to it now and again, and meet new women. “He was a charming guy, I can’t remember the women he been with,” says Melva. When his friends hit rough patches with girlfriends, they went to Norm’s to drink and throw darts. “House for battered men, they called it,” says Melva. With Melinda, a much younger woman, Norman had Nathan, a red-headed boy. Though things with Melinda grew rocky, Nathan got his father’s full attention—they fished and four-wheeled on nearby Frye Island, where there was good hunting, too (years back, Norm shot himself a 14-pointer, and searched for the trophy for days after the wounded buck fled into the bush). When Nathan came to live with him full-time, Norman quit drinking for good.
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Gerald ‘Jerry’ Wayne Friesen
By Jane Switzer - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments
He started running at an early age. ‘Wind, snow or sleet—nothing would stop him,’ his mother Joan recalls.
Illustration by Ian Phillips
Gerald ‘jerry’ Wayne Friesen was born at West Lincoln Memorial Hospital in Grimsby, Ont., on July 15, 1960. His older brother, Randy, had a hand in naming his newborn sibling, known for the rest of his life as Jerry. “There used to be a show called Uncle Jerry’s Club,” says Randy. “I liked the show, and the story was that I said we should call him Jerry.” Raised on a farm on the Niagara Escarpment between Grimsby and Beamsville, Jerry spent his childhood happily surrounded by horses, cows and pigs. “We spent a lot of time outdoors,” says Randy. “We had ponies and later on, when we got older, we had motorcycles and snowmobiles.”
His parents, Joan and Ben, also grew grapes, pears and apples on their 23-acre fruit farm. According to Joan, Jerry’s strong work ethic dates to a young age. “He started on the farm with me when he was two weeks old,” she says. “I carried him in my arms to pick fruit, and I carried him out in the trailer with a playpen. When he was 12, he started working on his uncle’s dairy farm next door.” Jerry also inherited his parents’ green thumb. In 1974, his produce won the grand champion title at the Beamsville fair, an accomplishment that made the front page of the Toronto Star.
As a teenager, Jerry took up long-distance running—mostly out of necessity. “He started running because he could run down the mountain without us having to drive him someplace,” says Joan. “Wind, snow, or sleet—nothing would stop him.” A lifelong athlete, Jerry also dabbled in football and track and field. He took up boxing at age 19 under the tutelage of coach Jim Neill. He wasn’t naturally athletic, Randy says, but made up for it with determination. Jerry won a provincial championship title within a year, and went on to compete nationally, narrowly missing a chance to compete at the Commonwealth Games in 1982.
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Arthur ‘Art’ Armond Mainil
By Susan Mohammad - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments
A western farmer, he became a strong opponent of the Canadian wheat board. ‘He wanted free choice,’ his daughter says.
llustration by Juliana Neufeld
Arthur “Art” Armond Mainil was born on Oct. 13, 1933, in Lampman, Sask. He was the oldest of three children for Hector and Emma, a farming couple who settled on the same 960-acre grain and cattle farm that Art’s grandfather homesteaded near the town. Even though he was only a year older than his brother Jerry (his sister Valerie was born six years after him), Art was expected to lead by example in helping to manage the property. At age seven, Art could be seen driving a tractor through fields with his father on a binder behind him.
“Farming was in his blood,” says Jerry, who describes his brother as “strong-headed” even as a child. Along with stubbornness and a solid work ethic, Art developed a lifelong love of horses early on. He had a pinto named Snookie that he rigged up to a cart or sled in order to take his siblings to their one-room school four kilometres from where they lived, after their previous school burned down.
In order for the children to continue to attend school, Art’s family moved to the town of Yellow Grass when he was nine, and then to the town of Weyburn three years later, where they settled (Art’s father made the 45-minute commute to the farm each day). Art was a top student who also played baseball, and was a fast-running centre on his high school football team at Weyburn Collegiate. Four years after graduating from high school, Art decided farming wasn’t for him, and set out to get a higher education. He spent 2½ years pursuing an engineering degree in Denver, Colo., before dropping out and trying his hand as a logger in the bush of northern B.C. After another 2½ years, he returned home to work the land. When Art’s father retired in 1961, he took over the farm, and took great pride in renovating it.
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Mathieu Lefevre
By Emma Teitel - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments
An artist, he ‘had ideas no one else had.’ One of his most famous works was called my bike disguised as contemporary art.
Illustration by Team Macho; Lee Brunet
Mathieu Lefevre was born in Edmonton on Friday, March 13, 1981, to French immigrants Alain and Erika Lefevre. Aside from the superstitious date, recalls Erika, a university instructor, “it was a typical March day.” Mathieu, however, would be far from typical himself. “He was a boy of many interests,” says Erika, “or what I like to call a free-range, organic child.” The second of four children, Mathieu spent his early years exploring the outdoors on his family’s sprawling acreage near the Alberta hamlet of New Sarepta, “tinkering with things,” says Erika, “pounding nails, playing soccer [his father, an accountant, was his long-time coach] and drawing animals.” By the time he was seven, he had completed one of many art projects to come: a series of animal sketches that his parents framed and displayed in the house. “I hung them all up,” says Erika, “so I could tell people I only had original art hanging in my house.”
At primary school, Mathieu was a polymath, excelling not only in visual arts but in literature as well. A lover of ancient myth, by age nine he’d written several storybooks about Greek and Arthurian legends, one of which he called “A Quest for Eternal Life.” “It was about the Holy Grail,” says Erika. “He always loved history.” He loved pranks, too: April Fool’s Day was a big deal at the Lefevre residence, where every year Mathieu (whose schoolteacher called him “Asterix” after the cunning French cartoon character) would booby-trap the whole house with water balloons and cover all the doorknobs with Vaseline. During the summer he and his brothers, Joel and David, would catch frogs in the woods and make them race each other. “He called it the ‘Frog Olympics,’ ” says Erika.
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Kyle James Knox
By Cynthia Reynolds - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments
As a snocross racer, he liked to take chances. But in his job as a crane operator, he was safety conscious—after saving a man’s life.
Illustration by Julia Minamata
Kyle James Knox was born in Stouffville, Ont., on Nov. 12, 1986, to Kent and Sherry Knox, the first of three children. His father owned Knox Insulation and Roofing, a family business that Kyle’s grandfather began in 1974. His mother ran the household, raising the three children, including Kendall, born in 1988, and Hanna, born in 1990.
As a toddler, Kyle would get his mother to tie his old rocking-horse patterned baby blanket around his shoulders as a cape. Wearing a Batman T-shirt, he would then zigzag around the house, calling himself Kyle “Batman” Knox. Outside, he liked to create make-believe construction sites in a green turtle-shaped sandbox, warning his sisters not to mess up his sand piles. They didn’t. They preferred to follow, rather than antagonize, their brother. “Everything he did was fun, so we wanted to do it, too,” says Kendall, who chose hockey over ballet when she was four, in order to be with her brother.
Growing up on Musselman’s Lake, the kids spent much of their time in the water with neighbourhood friends and cousins. In the summer they swam and fished; in the winter they skated and played hockey. Kyle also spent time tinkering in the shed, where he had his own workbench and tools. He would often join his father on jobs, soaking up his hands-on expertise. When he was 12, his parents bought him his first BMX bike—before he rode it, he took it completely apart. “He wanted to ‘soup it up,’ he said, so it would ride better,” Kendall recalls. “He was always trying to make things faster and stronger.” It was around this time that the kids got into motorized sports.
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Andrew Thomas Wade
By Alex Ballingall - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments
He loved Vancouver, and jogging along the seawall with his mother. But his real passion became airline safety.
Illustration by Team Macho
Andrew Wade was born in Denver, Colo., on May 26, 1985, at “high noon” on a crisp, sunny day in the Rocky Mountains, as his father, Don, recalls. His sister, Laura, 10 years his senior, clearly remembers how Andrew was full of energy and enthusiasm as a kid. “He was kind of a ham,” she says, describing how her little brother would sing and put on “little performances” for family and friends. “He could probably be considered a handful at times,” she laughs.
Andrew’s characteristic drive to “do everything” emerged early and continued through his childhood. Don and his wife, Julie, a long-time flight attendant, remember watching Andrew tirelessly play on their front lawn with the family’s yellow Lab, named Molson for his fur’s likeness to the Canadian beer. Once Andrew was in school, his parents had to keep their active son busy during the summer. They enrolled him in several rock-climbing, basketball, soccer and lacrosse camps. “He certainly enjoyed all of those,” says Don.
As a teenager, Andrew started making movies. One of them was a 30-minute snowboard video featuring him and his friends carving through powder and going off jumps. “I was blown away by what he did,” says Don, who believes these projects partially inspired Andrew to move north of the border to Vancouver, where he enrolled in film studies at the University of British Columbia in 2003. Julie had been to Canada several times as a flight attendant, and she had fallen in love with Vancouver. Andrew fell for Vancouver, too. “It wasn’t too hard to decide to go up there, even as a Yank going in there with all the Canucks,” says Don. During Andrew’s time in Vancouver, his mother was able to visit him on a regular basis. They would jog the seawall in Stanley Park and go out for dinner. “I treasure those times,” she says.
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Danny Gail Dimm
By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments
A logger and outdoorsman, he named his son timber—then fought a gruelling custody battle to finally get him back
Illustration by Ted McGrath
Danny Gail Dimm was born in Duncan, B.C., on Feb. 25, 1958. His father, Fred, and his mother, Eunice, both had two children from previous relationships, but Danny was their first child together. (Mike, his younger brother, came next.) “He was always a daydreamer,” recalls his sister, Jewel Juriansz. “And he adored animals. As a three-year-old, I fully expected he would grow up to be a vet.”
Danny inherited his father’s love for the outdoors. Fred was a woodsman and a pilot and a pipeline worker, and would often walk through the front door with souvenirs from the bush—from rattlesnakes to hornets’ nests. Eunice, a stay-at-home mom, was the family anchor. “Danny got a lot of his industry from her,” Jewel says. “He could work circles around most people, and he put his whole heart and soul into everything he did. He would run; he wouldn’t walk.”
After high school, Danny toyed with the idea of racing cars for a living; he even moved to Mont Tremblant, Que., the mecca of Canada’s Formula 1 scene. But by his early 20s, he was back out west, working as a tree faller in the town of Lillooet. “He was just a really quirky guy,” says Peter Ford, a close friend and fellow faller. “For somebody who was crawling around in the mountains all the time, he had a very, very broad knowledge base about a lot of different things. Even out in the woods, he would always have books by his side.”
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Obdulio Mateo Manalon Mineque
By Cynthia Reynolds - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments
He was a dedicated swimming coach—one of his charges is now an Olympic hopeful—even though he couldn’t swim himself
Illustration By Team Macho
Obdulio Mateo Manalon Mineque was born in Quezon City, Philippines, on Sept. 21, 1950, to Obdulio Sr. and Lourdes; he was the third of six children. His father, a lawyer, worked as the postmaster general and his mother was a school principal.
When he was little, his mother called him “Chico,” Spanish for “small boy.” The nickname stuck. Growing up, Chico was heavily into sports. He liked martial arts, but excelled at baseball; as a teenager, he made the Philippine junior national team. He was good with his hands and taught himself to play piano and guitar, which he taught to his younger sister Wyn.
While studying architecture at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila during the civil unrest of the late ’60s and early ’70s, Chico became increasingly involved in student activism, joining the protests and revolts against the Ferdinand Marcos military regime. In 1974, he was detained and tortured. After his release, his family urged him to flee. With a bag full of dirty clothes, Chico landed in Toronto where his older brother Placido lived. He never believed he would stay—despite the predictions of a fortune teller who had once told him he would move to a foreign land and marry there.
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George Edgar Ronald Hewitt
By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 at 5:20 PM - 2 Comments
Flying was his job and his hobby. He had a hangar attached to his house, and he planned to fly vintage planes in airshows.
Illustration by Team Macho
George Edgar Ronald Hewitt was born on Dec. 4, 1950, to George and Rose Hewitt in Winnipeg, Man. George worked for Trans-Canada Air Lines (TCA), Air Canada’s predecessor, upholstering the insides of airplanes. Rose stayed home with their kids: George, Linda, Sharon, Wayne and June. George was always fascinated by planes. “My brother and I used to build model aircraft, fly them, break them and rebuild them,” Wayne says. George and his youngest sister, June, would play “pilot and stewardess,” Rose says. The Hewitts would go on trips to Florida or Mexico, and “even as a baby, I was on a flight somewhere,” says Wayne.
When George was about 13, he joined the Air Cadets, and at 16, won a scholarship to get his private pilot’s licence. After that, “he’d grab me and say, ‘Let’s go flying,’ and off we’d go,” Wayne says. In a rented Cessna, the brothers would fly around the city, “up the river and back.” In high school, George joined the reserves and got his jet licence, too. When Winnipeg hosted the Pan American Games in 1967, George—who was a member of his Air Cadet squadron’s honour guard—proudly raised the flag for Canadian swimmer Elaine Tanner, who won two gold and three silver medals.
George had set his sights on becoming a pilot. After high school, he went to Red River College in Winnipeg to take a business administration course, and “as soon as he finished that, Air Canada hired him,” Wayne says. “He was very, very excited—and I was excited, because he left his Opel GT [sports car] in the driveway.” George moved to Montreal, where he he met and married his first wife, Barbara; they had two children. As a commercial pilot, he started out flying domestically, but quickly advanced, and was soon flying overseas, too. “He had friends all over the world from flying,” Wayne says, and loved travelling to Australia or the Far East. George, who had an adventurous and competitive streak, also took up sailing, and participated in several regattas.
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Ryan Snutch
By Alex Ballingall - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments
He was selfless, always helping others. As a child he never pressured his parents for toys, even when all his friends had Nintendo.
Illustration by Ian Phillips
Ryan Snutch was born in Ottawa on Dec. 22, 1984, six weeks sooner than expected. In the early hours of the morning, Ryan’s mother Kitty went into labour and was whisked off to the hospital by her husband, Don, leaving their house full of family and friends. After all, it was three days before Christmas.
Born at that moment of happy togetherness, Ryan carried this sentiment to others in the early years of his life. As a baby, when it was time for bed, he couldn’t fall asleep without holding onto one of his parent’s fingers. “You had to sit there with your hand through the crib,” recalls Don. When his little sister Kayla was learning to speak, Ryan would “translate” on her behalf, telling Kitty and Don that he could understand her because he still knew “baby talk.”
A few years later, when Ryan was in Grade 3, Don showed up at Ryan’s school for a volunteer appreciation day. He was approached by a woman who vigorously shook his hand and thanked him “for raising such a good boy.” Apparently, the woman’s son, who was in kindergarten, was dejectedly playing by himself one day. Defying all playground conventions of cool, Ryan veered away from his own friends to go join him. It was something that regularly happened as Ryan grew older: his parents learned much about Ryan’s good nature from the stories people would tell of his caring generosity. “People constantly come up to us and compliment us on our son,” says Don.
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Giovanna Quarin
By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments
She came to Canada from Italy’s Friuli region, and her heritage, including bocce ball, remained an integral part of her life
Illustration by Juliana Neufeld
Giovanna Quarin was born on Oct. 2, 1933, in Biauzzo, a village in Italy’s Friuli region, in the northeastern end of the country. Her father, Giovanni Ottogalli, died from appendicitis while mother Ida was pregnant with Giovanna; Ida was left to raise their daughter and son, Mario. (She later remarried and had another three boys.) By 13, Giovanna had left school to work full-time in the fields, and in a tobacco factory with her mother. “This was during the war,” says Rita Zoratti, Giovanna’s daughter. “They were quite poor,” but the family made do, raising rabbits to eat. In the night, Giovanna would sneak outside with a sickle in her hand and “steal grass” from a nearby landowner’s property to feed the animals, Rita says.
Giovanna dreamed of leaving her village, and at age 16, she left Biauzzo to work as a maid to a wealthy family in Florence. After four years she returned home, and struck up a correspondence with Luigi Quarin, a Friulan who’d moved to Canada (they were re-introduced through a mutual acquaintance). Luigi, who lived in Hamilton, Ont., “didn’t speak a lot of English,” Rita says, “and he wanted to marry an Italian girl.” In December 1954, Giovanna boarded a ship for Canada. She arrived on New Year’s Eve, and the couple was married on Jan. 29. The reception was held at Hamilton’s Venetian Club, where they were members.
Giovanna and Luigi moved into a house in the north of the city with Luigi’s parents and brother. “It was a very Italian community,” Rita says. “There was an Italian grocery store, an Italian doctor, and everybody on the street was Italian.” Luigi worked as a roofer, and Giovanna got a job at a candy factory until their kids were born. The first, Ed Quarin, came in 1955; Rita and Linda Viola followed. At home, the family spoke the Friulan language native to their region of Italy. “Our friends all spoke Friulano, and we sang in Friulano when we got together,” Ed says. Hamilton’s Friulan community was so big that they eventually splintered off from the Venetian Club to start their own, Ed says. The Famèe Furlane of Hamilton (the name translates to “Friulan family”) was founded in 1969; Giovanna was frequently at the club cooking food for events, helping with committees, or visiting friends.
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Harold Norman Lynge
By Richard Warnica - Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments
A farmboy turned neurosurgeon, he fell in love with a craggy plot of land on the Juan de Fuca strait, and returned every year
Illustration by Julia Minamata
Harold Norman Lynge was born on a wheat farm in the fertile Regina Plains on March 29, 1922, the son of Amelia and Kristian, Lutheran immigrants from Jutland, Denmark. Kristian came to the New World in 1914. He worked in Chicago but returned home twice to woo his bride. Eventually, Amelia agreed to join him. She booked passage to Montreal in 1919. Later that year the two settled on a rented section of land just off the old Soo Highway between Drinkwater and Moose Jaw. Harold arrived three years later. His only sister Marie was born the next year. He had no brothers.
Harold grew up in a farmhouse without running water or electricity. There was never much money, Marie says, but always plenty of food. Amelia canned anything: potatoes, carrots, turnips, even chickens. But at harvest, it was her pies that drew crowds from neighbouring farms. Marie says she had a happy childhood. “But I’m not sure my brother felt the same way. He was a very intense person. He worried about mother and dad and the hardships they were facing.”
During the school year, Harold and Marie travelled by horseback more than six kilometres through the snow to a one-room schoolhouse. Harold rode the faster animal, a great brown beauty named Stuffy. Marie’s mare, Jessie, was older and slower. “When Harold was ill, I was thrilled because I could race his horse,” she says. The early exposure stuck with Harold. He was a dedicated horseman for most of his life. He “could ride anything on four legs,” says his wife, Amy.
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James Forrest Kienholz
By Michael Friscolanti - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments
He was meticulous, unmaterialistic and frugal, waiting until his 65th birthday to get the seniors’ rate on a fishing licence
Illustration by Team Macho
James Forrest Kienholz was born in Nelson, B.C., on Sept. 12, 1946, the first of five siblings (Melvin arrived next, then Lorraine, David and Beverley). James’s father, Forrest, was a Greyhound bus driver; his mother, Malendar (neé Davidson), was the anchor of the family home. “I had a house full of kids all the time,” she says. “I always baked bread and buns on Monday mornings, and all five kids wanted to bring a friend home for cinnamon buns. I let them each to bring one, so that meant 10 kids every Monday morning.”
As a child, Jim was a natural athlete. He spent the summers playing baseball and soccer and anything else that kept him outdoors. When the kids went fishing on Kootenay Lake, Jim always took the time to bait his little sister’s hook. “We would collect grasshoppers from my grandmother’s backyard and use them for bait,” Lorraine remembers. The family had a cat named Mittens. Jim’s pet rabbit was Sniffles.
When he was 13, a family of refugees from the former Yugoslavia moved in across the street. Dan Skopac barely spoke a word of English, but Jim and his brothers welcomed him to Canada, sharing their Batman comic books and teaching him the language (good words and bad). “Jim was three years older, and I just thought he was such a cool guy,” says Skopac, who remained lifelong friends with the Kienholz boys. “He had his comb-back hair with the Brylcreem and he looked like James Dean and Edd ‘Kookie’ Byrnes and Fabian all rolled into one.”
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Suntharam Yogarajah
By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 11:55 AM - 0 Comments
He survived war and violence in Sri Lanka, then rebuilt his family in Montreal
Illustration by Marian Bantjes
Suntharam Yogarajah was born in Kamparmalai, a town on the northernmost tip of Sri Lanka, on Nov. 26, 1947, to Suntharam Yogarajah, a farmer, and Vairi Muthan, a housewife. The sixth of 12 children, Suntharam’s first job was selling his father’s banana, eggplant and carrot crops in the local market. At 22, he met 18-year-old Sivapackiam Arumugam at her high school in the nearby town of Parutharai. The two were so taken with each other that they decided to marry—one of the few couples in Kamparmalai to enter into a “love marriage” rather than one arranged for them. Their first child, a girl named Vansanthy, was born in 1970. Five more children, two sons and three daughters, followed.
Tensions grew between Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers in the late ’70s. Suntharam was used to seeing men abducted off the street, never to be seen again. In 1981, two years after their daughter Tharsini was born, he answered a knock at the door to find several Sri Lankan soldiers. He convinced them to leave him be by motioning to the baby in his arms. The soldiers moved on to his neighbours’ houses, rounding up other young men and bringing them to a vacant building. The soldiers then executed them, worried they would have otherwise joined the Tigers—the rebel group that went on to fight a 26-year war with the Sri Lankan government—if they hadn’t already.
As the eldest male in the house, Suntharam felt he was in grave danger, and soon fled to Singapore for three years. He moved to Canada in 1985, part of the first wave of Tamil refugees to come to these shores. He landed in Montreal alone on Aug. 11—he always remembered the date—and settled in an apartment in the city’s Snowdon district. His first job was distributing flyers door to door; he later worked as a printer and, finally, as a supervisor for the company that produced the flyers. In 1994 he had his entire family brought to Canada to live in the same apartment block.
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Christopher Michael Sheppard
By Stephanie Findlay - Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments
He grew up by the often perilous waters of Newfoundland, and once saved a cousin from drowning
Illustration by Jack Dylan
Christopher Michael Sheppard was born on a wet, snowy, windy morning in Bay L’Argent, Nfld., on Feb. 6, 1978, to Rupert Sheppard and Patricia “Pat” Baker, the middle of four children. (Two years later, the couple would lose their second daughter Ruby to health complications.) Pat, whose father was a deep-sea fisherman, was a homemaker. Rupert, who grew up with 14 brothers and sisters, worked, among other jobs, with CP Rail in Ontario and the Canadian Coast Guard in Newfoundland.
Toddler Chris had a shock of shaggy, dark brown hair, like his dad, and emerald green eyes, like his mom. His grin was infectious. “Chris was a bit of a rambunctious fellow,” says Rupert, “but if he couldn’t make you smile throughout the day, then girl, you had a glass jaw.” Older sister Ann-Marie, Chris, and younger brother Jamie made an inseparable trio. “They had their little toughs every now and again,” says Pat, “but one protected the other.”
The Sheppards’ early stomping grounds were in Harbour Mille, an 18th-century fishing village on Newfoundland’s southeast shore. Days after school ended, the family would pile into their bright yellow wooden boat for the 20-minute ride across Fortune Bay to the cove where their small log cabin stood. “Me and my brother would be curled in the bow of the boat with a blanket over our heads and there’d be 14-foot waves,” says Jamie. “It was lots of fun. Giggles left, right and centre.”
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Ramesh Chandra Sharma
By Alex Ballingall - Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 2 Comments
A fun-loving cab driver who enjoyed Bollywood music and card games, his main desire was to make his children happy
Illustration by Julia Minamata
Ramesh Chandra Sharma was born in New Delhi on July 5, 1954, the second of 10 children raised in a Hindu family in the Yusuf Sarai neighbourhood, which in those days was a poor area of India’s capital.
Growing up, Ramesh, who always took great care in making sure his clothes were perfectly ironed, had a reputation for being the best-looking kid on his street. Neighbours called him “the movie star.” And he caught the eye of Charan Kabba, a girl who lived across the street. “He was very handsome,” she remembers. Over time, the pair fell in love. “He was very nice and he had good manners,” says Charan. “I loved him too much.”
It wasn’t easy for them to be together. Ramesh came from a Hindu family, while Charan’s family was Sikh. Charan’s parents didn’t approve. In 1980, Charan followed her sister to Canada. Ramesh, who had graduated from Punjabi University with a bachelor of arts degree, stayed behind and worked at the Japanese embassy before moving to Oman, where he found work as a security guard. During their separation, Ramesh wrote Charan more than 100 letters. Each one began the same way. “Dear darling sardarni,” he would write, referring to Charan using the religious title for a Sikh woman. In 1982, when back in India for a visit, the two eloped and were married in an unofficial ceremony. Ramesh was eventually able to join Charan in Victoria, where they had an official wedding in 1986.
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Bradley Jeffrey Prytula
By Alex Ballingall - Wednesday, August 10, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments
A thrill-seeker, he’d grown up with a new job; his parents bought him a dirt bike to recognize his new-found maturity
Illustration by Team Macho
Bradly Prytula was born in Winnipeg on July 7, 1994, the second of two boys born to Daryl and Audry. The Prytulas live near Anola, a rural community just east of Winnipeg, where Daryl runs a welding shop named for his sons—Brody and Bradly’s Auto Body and Welding—and Audry is a caretaker with the Sunrise School Division. Their house, as Audry puts it, is “out in the middle of nowhere.” That’s the way Bradly loved it.
When he was a little boy, “you couldn’t tell him what to do,” says Daryl. “You’d tell him to turn right and he’d turn left.” Daryl would often pull Bradly and his older brother Brody on GT Sno Racers—sleds with steering wheels—behind his snowmobile. Bradly was always “the cocky one,” Daryl remembers, often playfully bumping into his big brother as they slid across the snow.
The family often visited Star Lake, Man., where Bradly’s grandfather has a cabin. It was there that Bradly started developing his reputation as a daredevil. “He was like Evel Knievel,” says Daryl. Bradly loved waterskiing, wakeboarding, tubing and, especially, dirt biking. “Nobody could ride a bike better than him,” says Daryl. “Bradly had a knack for it.” One winter, Daryl and Audry lit a big bonfire on the shore of the lake while their two sons roared across the thick prairie ice on the family’s two new snowmobiles. “He was active and happy. And he loved being outside,” says Audry.
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Sheilah Lorraine Wheeler Sweatman
By Alex Ballingall - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 5:15 PM - 0 Comments
She was the ‘glue’ that held her family together, and wanted to help everyone. That led her to become a search-and-rescue volunteer.
Illustration by Ian Phillips
Sheilah Sweatman was born in Winnipeg on Feb. 8, 1982, the third child of Wynn and Teddi Sweatman. Ever since Sheilah was a little girl, the Sweatman family has been frequenting their cottage at Lake of the Woods, a large body of water dotted with thousands of islands that straddles the Minnesota, Manitoba and Ontario borders. It was Sheilah’s favourite place. “I believe her heart lies at Lake of the Woods,” says her older sister Megan.
When Sheilah was three, Wynn remembers her hammering nails into the deck at their cottage. “All the other kids could walk around a work site,” he says, chuckling proudly. “Not Sheilah. Even at a young age, she was a participant.”
Sheilah’s “ fiery demeanour” first surfaced when she was a little girl. At the cottage, she was always dragging massive branches and logs out of the woods to help her cousins build “the biggest and best forts,” recalls Megan, and she was “always the first one in the water.” It was Sheilah who helped teach people to swim. She was also the go-to guide in the forest and the resident expert on catching fish. “She was our guide, in more ways than one,” says Megan. “She thought of everybody else before herself. Sheilah’s heart was never full.”
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Jason Richard Chenier: 1975 – 2011
By Jen Cutts - Thursday, July 21, 2011 at 1:45 PM - 0 Comments
Born into a mining family, it wasn’t long before he followed in his father’s footsteps. Safety was one of his main concerns.
Illustration by Marc Ngui
Jason Richard Chenier was born in Rouyn-Noranda, Que., on Aug. 17, 1975, to Richard, a miner, and Barbara. With “poker-straight” blond hair and big blue eyes, he was an outgoing kid, says his uncle, George Staszak. While younger sister Jennifer was the artistic one (once winning the family a trip to Ottawa with a drawing she entered in a Maclean’s contest, says George), Jason was the sporty one; often, the entire family would travel to cheer him on at out-of-town hockey games. When summer came, it was baseball, or fishing with George. If Jason didn’t like what Barbara was serving for dinner, says George, he’d “run two streets over to Granny’s house, and get fed whatever he liked there.”
In high school, Jason took summer jobs at the mine where Richard worked. He also inherited his dad’s habit of teasing people he liked, says Tracy Racine, who didn’t mind the attention. Though she was just 13 and three years behind Jason in the small English high school they attended, she couldn’t help developing a crush on the “loud” boy who was friends with her older brother, and prayed that she would one day marry him. But too soon, Jason left Quebec for Sudbury, Ont., to live with his grandmother (who’d moved) and attend Grade 13.
In 1994, Jay, as his friends had begun calling him, enrolled in Cambrian College’s mining engineering technician program. He shared an apartment with Rob Des Rivieres, who had the pleasure of being subjected to Jay’s practical jokes. One night, after drinking more than he’d planned at a keg party, Rob decided to sleep it off in his car. He awoke to find Jay had stuffed it to the roof with things from the neighbours’ yards: “Firewood, recycle boxes, garden gnomes. It was never just a low-end prank with Jay.” After they’d been in school for two years, nickel prices were surging and local mine Inco was paying for students to take the “common core” course that would certify them to work underground, says Bill Bennett, who also got to know Jay at Cambrian. Though Bill and others moved right from the course to jobs at Inco, Jay stuck with school and finished the last year of his program. By the time he graduated, the nickel market had turned down, and Jay wasn’t able to get on with Inco. He returned to Rouyn-Noranda, and worked a few short-term contracts at different mines in the area.
