KLEIN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-05-02 published
Architect had a passion for museums
He won Governor-General's Award for a high-rise called 'a superior
project' and helped to put the Royal Ontario Museum on the map
By Allison
LAWLOR
Friday,
May 2, 2003 - Page R11
For
Toronto architect Henry
SEARS, working in museum-exhibit
planning and design proved to be the perfect fit. What better
place for a man interested in the world to delve into the fine
details of everything from fossils to Meissen china?
"He had an inquiring mind, "said Doreen
SEARS, his wife of 51
years. "[Museums] fed his natural curiosity in the most wonderful
way."
Mr. SEARS, who died on March 19 at the age of 73, began his museum
work in the mid-1970s at the Royal Ontario Museum when he was
hired to be part of a task force to plan future expansion of
the Toronto institution.
"Our job was to reimagine the Royal Ontario Museum, "said Louis
LEVINE, director of collections and exhibitions at the Museum
of Jewish Heritage in New York. At the time, Mr.
LEVINE was a
curator at the Royal Ontario Museum and part of the task force.
"He was the one who made us think. He wouldn't take fuzzy answers
from us, "Mr.
LEVINE said.
Mr. SEARS relished his job. Mr.
LEVINE recalled how his good
friend would show up at meetings unable to contain his enthusiasm.
With the excitement of a young child, he would describe to the
group, many of whom were academic archeologists, what he had
learned on his travels through the museum.
"He was hungry for information. He wanted to know how things
work, "said his son Joel
SEARS.
The task force produced an influential publication called Communicating
With the Museum Visitor in 1976, which became a textbook for
museum work, said Dan
RAHIMI, director of collections management
at the Royal Ontario Museum. The publication put the museum on
the world map as being a leader in museum theory, Mr.
RAHIMI
added.
In subsequent years, Mr.
SEARS continued to work with the Royal
Ontario Museum on various projects ranging from designing travelling
exhibits to gallery space. "He was so sensitive to the content.
He would always ask what is this gallery about? What stories
do they tell?" Mr.
RAHIMI said.
Aside from the Royal Ontario Museum, Mr.
SEARS worked with several
other museums across Canada, the United States and Europe. In
recent years, he and his firm Sears and Russell were working with
the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin in the planning for
a new permanent gallery. Mr.
SEARS also worked with the Nova
Scotia Museum, the Peabody Museum at Yale University and the
National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution,
among others.
"I don't think he ever had the sense that he would ever retire,"
said Jeff WEATHERSTON, an architect at Sears and Russell. "He
just loved the work here."
Henry SEARS was born in Toronto on October 30, 1929. After graduating
from Harbord Collegiate Institute in downtown Toronto, he went
on to study architecture at the University of Toronto, from which
he graduated in 1954. While at university he met a young woman
named Doreen on a blind date. The couple married on July 1, 1951,
and later had two sons.
After graduating from university, the young couple headed to
Europe where they spent six months travelling before heading
home. Back in Toronto, Mr.
SEARS went to work for a variety of
architectural firms before heading out on his own. In the late
1950s he and a partner Jeff
KLEIN started the firm Klein and
Sears. They worked on several housing projects in the city, including
the Alexandra Park Co-operative. Built in the 1960s, the large
public-housing project was one of the city's earliest such schemes.
A fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, Mr.
SEARS received a Governor-General's Award for residential design
in 1985. The award was for Cadillac Fairview Corp.'s Bay-Charles
Towers, a mixed-use project designed by Mr.
SEARS.
"A superior project, "the jury selecting the winners said at
the time. According to the jury, the Toronto project shows that
"the basic high-rise type provides opportunities for richness
of expression hitherto rarely explored."
In 1984, Mr.
SEARS created a new firm called Sears and Russell
that was dedicated solely to museum work. Over the years, he
acted as a mentor to several young architects who came to work
for him and others who worked with him in the museum field.
Outside of work, Mr.
SEARS loved to travel, and spent time at
the family's country place near Meaford, north of Toronto, and
on a sailboat on Lake Ontario. An avid sailor, Mr.
SEARS continued
to race even last year. "He was endlessly energetic and enthusiastic,"
Joel SEARS said.
Mr. SEARS, who died following a battle with cancer, leaves his
wife, Doreen, and sons Alan and Joel.
"He was an optimist to the last minute, "Mr.
LEVINE said. "He
added beauty to the world."
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KLEIN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-09-13 published
Singer was hit on Hit Parade
Canadian-born performer played violin with Jack Benny and posed
as wife of Sid Caesar
By James McCREADY
Special to The Globe and Mail Saturday, September
13, 2003 - Page F11
She was called "Canada's First Lady of Song." In the late 1940s,
singer Gisele
MacKENZIE was so popular on Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation radio that she was known just by her first name.
When she was 23, she headed off to Hollywood, where she became
one of the main singers on Your Hit Parade, a popular American
network television show in the 1950s. By the time television
started in Canada in 1952, she was already a star in the United
States, appearing on programs with Jack Benny and later with
Sid Caesar, the hottest comedian of his day.
Gisele MacKENZIE, who has died at the age of 76, was not always
known by that name. On the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
she was known simply as Gisele, though a 1950 Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation press release did call her by her proper name --
Gisele LAFLECHE. As soon as she moved to CBS in 1951, she adopted
the stage name Gisele
MacKENZIE.
The reason, she told a New York
reporter in 1955, was that the name Gisele
LAFLECHE "sounded
too much like a striptease artist's." The real explanation was
an American audience would have trouble with so French a name.
It was the television network that ordered the name change.
Marie
Marguerite
Louise Gisele
LAFLECHE was born on January 10,
1927, in Winnipeg. The name
MacKENZIE was from her paternal grandmother.
Her father, Georges, was a doctor, who played the violin, and
her mother, Marietta
MANSEAU, was a concert pianist and singer
as a young woman. Ms.
MacKENZIE started playing the violin seriously
when she was 7. She made her first public performance at the
Royal Alexandra Hotel in Winnipeg at the age of 12.
When she was 14, her family sent her to the Royal Conservatory
of Music in Toronto. She studied the violin and the piano, and
planned on being a concert violinist. Later in life, a story
circulated that she never took voice lessons, but Jim
GUTHRO,
who was at the conservatory at the same time, remembered a voice
teacher who took an interest in her. He also remembered that
she attended at the same time as Robert
GOULET and they would
sing together.
When she first came to Toronto, she stayed at Rosary Hall, a
residence for Catholic girls on Bloor Street at the top of Jarvis
Street. Tess
MALLOY, who was there at the same time, remembered
her. "She lived right across the hall from me. She and her girlfriend
used to drive us nuts practising the violin."
Ms. MALLOY didn't remember her singing at the residence, but
somewhere along the way someone discovered Ms.
MacKENZIE could
sing. It was close to the end of the war and she started to perform
for groups of servicemen. It was then that she was discovered
by musician Bob
SHUTTLEWORTH, a lieutenant who led a band for
the Royal Canadian Navy.
Right after the war, she started singing with Mr.
SHUTTLEWORTH's
band at the Glenmount Hotel on the Lake of Bays, north of Toronto.
Mr. SHUTTLEWORTH, who later became her manager and her husband,
took her to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which then
broadcast live popular music over the radio.
"Bob SHUTTLEWORTH called me at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
and said, 'Get a studio, a piano and a vocal mike. I have someone
I want you to hear,' recalled Jackie
RAE, then a music producer
at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, later leader of his
own band (and, incidentally, the uncle of former Ontario premier
Bob RAE.) "I remember her wonderful voice and how fresh she was.
We hired her straight away to do three programs a week."
The program was Meet Gisele, and it ran for 15 minutes on Monday,
Wednesday and Friday. The program started on October 8, 1946,
and lasted for four years. She was so popular the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation used her in other programs with names such as The
Girl Next Door or The Song Pluggers.
In 1951, Ms.
MacKENZIE was spotted by Bing
CROSBY's son, and
went to work in the United States for Bob
CROSBY's
Club 15, bumping
the Andrews Sisters from their regular slot. The pay was $20,000
(U.S.) a year, worth $150,000 in today's money. She was 23.
The money was something Canada could never match. Mr.
GUTHRO,
later head of Variety at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
guesses she was making $200 a week for her radio programs.
"Gisele Leaves for Hollywood. Canada's Loss," read a headline
in one Toronto paper. The article guessed at the pay package,
and it was right.
Ms. MacKENZIE was about to have her best decade ever in show
business. After a short stint on Club 15, she worked on the Mario
Lanza Show, before landing her full-time job at Your Hit Parade.
The idea behind the NBC program was to take the top seven songs
on the hit parade that week and have them done by the regular
singers in the Your Hit Parade troupe. The half-hour program
was a huge success in the United States and in late 1953 the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation picked it up for a while.
Ms. MacKENZIE was the only regular singer on the program to have
her own hit record, Hard to Get, in 1955.
Though none of her family shared her success, all were musical.
There were her parents, both of whom were serious amateur musicians
two of her sisters sang and played, and a brother played the
cello. Along with Gisele, two of them had what is called perfect
pitch.
"It's rare and she had it," Mr.
RAE said. "You would play four
notes on the piano and she could match them. Perfect pitch isn't
always a great thing, but in her case it was."
Ms. MacKENZIE's training as a classical violinist came in handy
on the Jack Benny program, on which she first appeared in 1955.
The droll comedian always made a thing of how he couldn't play
the violin. One vaudeville-type act they would do on his show
involved her patiently showing him what to do with a violin after
he made some awful screeching noise with his bow.
She was Jack Benny's protégé, and he helped land her own television
program in 1958. Called the Gisele
MacKENZIE
Show, it lasted
only six months.
But she remained famous. At one stage, she was the subject of
This is Your Life, which involved linking up with old Friends
and relatives. She was a regular on game shows that featured
minor celebrities, such as Hollywood Squares.
In 1963, she was cast as Sid Caesar's television wife and made
regular trips to New York City, where the program was done. Like
other television programs of that era, it was live, since videotape
was only just being introduced.
Ms. MacKENZIE also acted and sang in live musicals in the United
States, things such as Annie Get Your Gun and South Pacific.
Over the years, she also worked in Las Vegas, performing in night
clubs there. She returned to Canada for the occasional concert
and television special, including one on the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation in late 1960. It was about "her story book career"
and included the yarn, always told by her publicists, of how
she decided to take up singing after she lost her $3,000 violin.
By the end of the 1960s, the big work started to dry up and Canadian
newspapers were running the occasional "Where Are They Now" articles.
She was in a sprawling ranch house in suburban Encino, Calif.
She also owned property in Palmdale and Marin County, Calif.,
as well as a house on Lake Manitoba back home.
All that detail came up in a nasty divorce from Mr.
SHUTTLEWORTH
in 1968. Because he was also her manager, he kept 10 per cent
of her gross income for the next three years. She later married
a banker, Robert
KLEIN, but that also ended in divorce.
During the rest of her career, Ms.
MacKENZIE kept working in
regional theatre and made guest appearances on television series,
including MacGyver and Murder, She Wrote, as well as singing
stints on programs such as the Dean Martin Show. She also did
television commercials in the United States and Canada.
Ms. MacKENZIE had some odd hobbies. She collected and mixed exotic
perfumes and in the 1950s she took up target shooting, becoming
an expert shot. She and her first husband had a large collection
of pistols, rifles and shotguns. In her later years, like many
Hollywood stars, she was involved with Scientology.
Ms. MacKENZIE, who died in Burbank, Calif., on September 5, had
two children with Mr.
SHUTTLEWORTH, a son Mac and a daughter
Gigi (short for Gisele)
DOWNS.
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