EDE o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2008-03-04 published
STONE,
John
E.
It is with great sadness we announce the passing of John E.
STONE,
on Friday, February 29, 2008 in his 78th year. John is survived
by his beloved wife
Kathryn
(Kay
SMITH,) his adoring children
Robert (Jay-Dee,) Brian (Kelly,) Susan (Glenn
LEBLANC,) and Warren
(Laurie) and cherished grandchildren Jeromy, Michael (Tanya),
Bob (Kate), Sheena (Bobby
EDE), Sam
SHARPE, Tony (Melissa), April
(Matthew HUNTER), Brian Jr., Ashley
LEBLANC, Kalynn
LEBLANC,
Joel and Jesse and his treasured 10 great-grandchildren. John
was predeceased by his parents, Robert and Mary (née
CRAWFORD)
and his sister Pearl and brother-in-law Levi
BUDDEN.
John will
be sadly missed by his surviving in-laws and by his many nieces
and nephews. A heartfelt thank-you to the staff and volunteers
at the McCormick Home for their wonderful care and ongoing support.
Visitation will be held at Forest Lawn Memorial Chapel, 1997 Dundas
Street East (at Wavell) on Monday, March 3, 2008 from 2-4 and
7-9 p.m. Funeral Service will be held in the chapel on Tuesday,
March 4, 2008 at 1 p.m. In lieu of flowers donations to the McCormick
Home Foundation would be appreciated.
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EDE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2008-02-16 published
He used his brush as a weapon to empower the powerless
Once a sincere and ardent Communist, he spent more than 60 years
depicting strikes, refugee camps, political rallies, native reserves
and the lives of ordinary working people
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special to The Globe and Mail, Page S12
Toronto -- Bill
STAPLETON was more than just another artist with
a social conscience. His documentary art prodded, pushed, shamed,
confounded and made people think (and sometimes squirm). He knew
that not many people wanted to hang socially relevant art like
his over their living-room sofas. It was just as well.
No bucolic landscapes, postcard portraits or pictures of fruit
for him, but fulminations against inequality, oppression, poverty
and the misery of society's dispossessed. These were powerful
reminders of humanity's shortcomings, but also depictions of
the inner strength and dignity of people accustomed to hardship.
In the words of his biographer, Mr.
STAPLETON held "strong, unabashedly
partisan empathy" with the compositions the artist called "Human-scapes."
Largely unsung, though he was once dubbed "the People's Artist,"
Mr. STAPLETON was a committed socialist, activist and a sensitive,
persuasive man "who celebrated the dignity and independence of
the human spirit without irony but not without humour," wrote
C.H. (Marty) Gervais in People In Struggle: The Life and Art
of Bill Stapleton (Penumbra Press; 1992).
Working in a variety of media - pen-and-ink, charcoal, watercolour,
ink wash, oils and acrylics - Mr.
STAPLETON spent more than 60 years
depicting strikes and picket lines where workers squared off
against police and company goons, refugee camps where he heard
tales of torture, women's rallies and the lives of ordinary working
people, and native reservations where he faithfully recorded
disgusting poverty.
"Sketching is honest and immediate," he'd say. "You can't go
back and pretty it up."
His artistic activism wasn't limited to Canada. He journeyed
to Mexico and Central America to document injustice and despair
with nothing more than brushstrokes.
"People have been neglected," Mr.
STAPLETON explained on his
90th birthday, "and that's why I've concentrated on them. Social
art doesn't play enough of a role in art." He saw his role as
almost journalistic, a visual Upton Sinclair whose solidarity
with his subjects only hardened. Mr.
STAPLETON was committed
to using his craft "as a tool and weapon for the benefit of the
powerless and the denunciation of the powerful," Mr. Gervais
found.
Collections of Mr.
STAPLETON's work are housed in the National
Archives of Canada and, ironically for a man who worked so hard
toward peace, in the Canadian War Museum. In 2006, he donated
more than 1,500 canvases and sketches to the Cabbagetown/Regent
Park Community Museum in Toronto.
Born and raised in middle-class comfort in conservative small-town
Ontario, his father was a salesman. A 1933 strike at a local
food plant that was violently suppressed left a deep mark on
him. "The father of a friend of his was beaten in that strike,"
said his daughter, Lynn
TAILOR/TAYLOR. "
That left a very raw impression.
It had a lot to do with influencing his politics later in life."
He planned to become an engineer and, to that end, accepted a
job surveying the Trans-Canada Highway in White River, Ontario,
north of Lake Superior. The Depression was on and he was grateful
for the work. His older brother, Bruce, an illustrator well known
for his war-bonds and Red Cross posters, sent him some paints,
and Mr. STAPLETON sketched the scenery and his fellow workers
- 12 to a tarpaper bunkhouse. With little else to do after long,
gruelling days, he honed his talents, sending pieces to his brother,
who returned them with notations suggesting improvements.
He toiled in the north for 18 months and, with $800 in savings,
headed to New York City where he studied art at the U.S. National
Academy of Design, and where the apolitical 21-year-old first
encountered radical politics. His roommates in a teeming tenement
near Central Park were leftists, and the Big Apple was a magnet
for Marxists. Finding and sketching hobos and street urchins
a stone's throw from the gleaming towers of Wall Street helped
seal his political views.
But New York was as competitive as people had warned. After two
years, he failed to find work as an illustrator and came home.
In Toronto, he worked as a printing salesman, which allowed him
to take evening classes at the Ontario College of Art.
In 1941, Mr.
STAPLETON was emboldened to join the Communist Party
of Canada after Ottawa banned it. This was no act of petulance
but a sincere belief that the party could better achieve the
dreams of social justice than other leftist groups. (He would
quit the party in the early 1950s, dismayed by Stalin's treatment
of artists in the Soviet Union.)
Later in 1941, when the Soviet Union entered the Second World
War, he signed up for service in the Royal Canadian Air Force
and became a pilot. It was around this time he first achieved
recognition. A work of his titled Canadian Airman was included
in a travelling Canadian military exhibit.
Shipped to several bases in England, he ended up with the 418th Royal
Canadian Air Force Squadron in North Yorkshire and trained on
Wellington and Lancaster bombers. But the war ended before he
could fly any missions.
Meantime, he'd sketched.
"It got so I was annoyed if we had to fly because it cut into
my art time," he would recall to his biographer. "I usually rode
a bicycle, with a small canvas bag I could sling over my shoulder,
and I'd pedal off to sketch. Fortunately for me, when the fog
set in - and this was quite often, English weather being what
it is - we'd be grounded for two or three days. It was a great
opportunity, and not having to make art to make money was like
being subsidized."
At war's end, he chose to stay in London to study at the famed
Slade School of Art. Though his own war art portfolio grew, an
appointment as an official war artist eluded him, and he returned
to Canada in time to document two seminal strikes, one by Stelco
workers in Hamilton in 1946, and the other by the Canadian Seaman's
Union in 1949 on the waterfronts of Welland, Toronto and Montreal.
That same year, he married Margaret (Mickey)
RYLANCE.
He'd met
her at an art show, and later explained that he fell for her
despite the fact she believed in God.
With a family to support, he started his own advertising agency
and bought a cottage and a split-level house in Toronto. The
middle-class life was maybe not what communists aspired to, but
"with a wife and three daughters and a couple of mortgages, I
had to have a job - so I went into the advertising business.
It was a living." There was a line he once heard about working
in advertising and loved to quote: "I never told my mother I
was in advertising. She thought I played piano in a brothel."
In 1974, he visited Russia on a cultural exchange. Describing
it as the trip that had the greatest impact on him, Mr.
STAPLETON
reconciled conflicted feelings. "They led the world in science
and were the first to the moon. Freedom of the sexes, women were
ship captains and factory heads. Socialism led the world then,
but was betrayed from within and without. I still believe in
revolution."
He divorced his wife after 23 years of marriage - there were
no hard feelings and the two stayed Friends - and moved to Toronto's
Cabbagetown neighbourhood ("it was here I joined the human race")
where he began depicting ordinary people doing ordinary things.
For about a decade, he was resident artist at three Toronto landmarks:
The Hotel Winchester, the Paramount Tavern, and the Trojan Horse
Coffee House. He'd sit for hours, sketching and painting exiled
Chilean musicians, leftist activists, and the regulars.
"I liked pubs like the Paramount," he recalled. "It attracted
a mostly black clientele. The guys were cocky, exuberant and
graceful; they just had this way of moving and expressing themselves.
And their music - wow! The mixed clientele provided a real slice
of life - fights, shootings, stabbings and four police vans on
a Saturday night."
As for his style, it had a relaxed structure but his lines were
"direct and bold, drawn with rock-steady hand and a sharp eye,"
noted Carol
MOORE-
EDE,
Mr.
STAPLETON's friend and curator. "He
painted in startlingly vibrant colours and bold strokes, as forthright
in his technique as he was in his social convictions."
One reviewer lauded his oeuvre as being in the tradition of Edgar
Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
His pace quickened in his sixties and seventies. He journeyed
to Nicaragua in 1982 to sketch the suffering and despair caused
by the country's political upheaval. In 1984, he went to Mexico
to document the scores of Guatemalan refugees flooding the border
in a struggle for safety and food. The following year, he was
part of a delegation that travelled to Spain to seek recognition
for the 1,239 Canadians of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion (the
"Mac-Paps") who fought the fascists in the Spanish Civil War.
And in 1989, he joined the Innu of Sheshatshit, Labrador, to
protest low-level test flights of North Atlantic Treaty Organization
fighter jets and bombers over traditional native hunting grounds.
An exhibit was mounted in Toronto.
He belonged to Veterans Against Nuclear Arms, and in the early
1980s, helped mobilize artists in a national disarmament movement,
Arts for Peace, chaired by novelist Margaret Laurence and numbering
the likes of Pierre Berton, Norman Jewison, Margaret Atwood and
Karen Kain.
In his later years, he volunteered for ArtHeart, a community-based
effort that provides free access to studio space, instruction,
and art supplies. He'd give away quick sketches to children.
Just last December, he received the Ontario Federation of Labour's
first Lifetime Cultural Achievement Award. His age prevented
his attendance but he received a standing ovation nonetheless.
Asked by his biographer whether, at 75, he still had "the fire"
in him, Mr.
STAPLETON reflected, "Sure, I still get passionate
about causes, about inequity and inequality, about what's wrong
with our society, with the environment and with the economic
system… Look, you have to have anger, passion, indignation, love,
tenderness - the whole gamut of human emotion - if you're going
to be a real artist. Injustice is always with us, and one of
the jobs of responsible artists is to respond to it. Art becomes
an essential voice in all the chaos of our times: A tool for
bearing witness, and a weapon for effecting change."
He never made a living at art, he admitted, "but I lived through
it."
William Johnson
STAPLETON was born in Stratford, Ontario on January 24,
1916. He died in Bracebridge, Ontario on February 5, 2008. He
was 92. He is survived by daughters Lynn
TAILOR/TAYLOR,
Judith
STAPLETON
and Sharon
SHERMAN. He also leaves his former wife, Mickey, and
five grandchildren.
An exhibition of Mr.
STAPLETON's selected works, is on display
at Riverdale Farm, 201 Winchester Street, Toronto, Saturdays from
11 a.m. to 3 p.m. until March 23.
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EDEN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2008-04-10 published
FLINTOFT,
George
Robert "
Bob"
Of Saint Thomas, passed away on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008, at
the Saint Thomas-Elgin General Hospital, in his 76th year. Dearly
loved husband of Lenore
(WEST)
FLINTOFT and loved father of Kimberley
and his wife
Wendy
FLINTOFT of Aylmer, Kathy and her husband
Brian WILLIAMS of Aylmer and step-father of Christine
CLUNAS
of Saint Thomas. Loved grandfather of Jon, Mike, Curtis, Jennifer,
Amanda and Racheal. Dear brother of Jean and her husband Morley
BROWN of Saint Thomas, Ruby and her husband Bill
EDEN of Sweaburg
and the late Dorothy
JAGOE.
Sadly missed by 5 great-grandchildren
and a number of nieces and nephews. Bob was born in Saint Thomas
on July 3rd, 1932, the
son of the late George Albert and Alma
Grace (MUNROE)
FLINTOFT. He was retired from Laidlaw Transport
and also had driven for Hepburn Transport. Bob had received an
award for over 3,000,000 miles of safe driving. He was a member
of the T Meadow Hunt club, an avid outdoorsman and trap shooter.
Resting at Williams Funeral Home, 45 Elgin Street, Saint Thomas where
funeral service will be held Friday at 11: 00 a.m. Interment to
follow in Union Cemetery. Visitation Thursday from 2-4 and 7-9 p.m.
Remembrances may be made to the charity of choice.
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EDEN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2008-06-14 published
DACOSTA,
Frank "
Non"
Peacefully with his family by his side on Tuesday, June 10th,
2008, Frank "Non"
DACOSTA of London at the age of 67. Adored
husband of Valerie. Admired and cherished dad of Dominique (Larry
ROUSSEAU), Danielle (Dwayne
EDEN), Jilaine and Mark
LOMAS, Rebecca
(Steve MORUP,)
Nieve and Will
LOMAS, and Tassie and Dorian. Loving
Poppy of Rowan and Max, Justin and Alex, Hannah, Gavin and Meg,
Ariel, Ronin and William, Emily and Isaac. Dear brother of Arlene
and Ken FINKEL,
Fred and Rosie
DACOSTA, Gus and Jacquie
DACOSTA
and their families. Visitation will be held at the Westview Funeral
Chapel, 709 Wonderland Road North, on Sunday from 2: 00-4:00 p.m.
The Funeral Mass will be celebrated at Holy Family Parish, 777 Valetta
Street, on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 10: 00 a.m. Cremation to
follow.
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EDER o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2008-03-29 published
EDER,
Anna
At London Health Sciences Centre on Friday, March 28, 2008, Anna
EDER of London in her 84th year. Lovingly remembered by her children
Bohdan, Genny and her husband Terry
ROSS, and Peter and his wife
Jane. Adored Baba of Bradley, Katherine, Natalie and Annikka.
Predeceased by her husband Alex (1987). Visitors will be received
in the O'Neil Funeral Home, 350 William Street on Sunday, March 30,
from 2: 00-4:00 and 7:00-9:00 p.m. The Divine Liturgy will be
celebrated in Chris the King Ukrainian Catholic Church (707 Nelson
St.) on Monday, March 31, at 10: 00 a.m. with Father Zenowy
DIDUKH
officiating. Interment Saint Peter's Cemetery. Panachyda Service
Sunday at 7: 00 p.m. If desired, memorial donations may be made
to the Palliative Care Unit of London Health Sciences Centre.
Anna was a little lady but she had the biggest heart of gold
- and will be dearly missed.
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EDER o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2008-04-30 published
EDER,
Hans (1927-2008)
It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Hans
EDER on Monday, April 28 2008. He is survived by his wife of
53 years Christa
EDER, his son Markus
EDER and wife
Roxanne,
in Australia. daughter Penny
EDER-
MARTYN and husband Bruce
MARTYN,
of Whistler, British Columbia. Grandchildren; Angela, Kalee,
Talon, and Cody, and pets Dougy and Kejung.
Hans was born in Bad Gastein, Austria on March 26, 1927. Hans
at 12 years old started ski jumping and was invited to join the
Olympic team, he then went on to train and was the first man
to jump over 130m.
He won medals and trophies in the Olympics of 1948 St. Moritz
and 1952 Olso, he was a ski jumper, ski racer and XC skier.
Hans immigrated to Canada in November 1952. He then went on to
build and establish many ski jumping venues in Ontario helping
to create Ski racing and ski jumping. In 1961 Hans and Christa
purchased, and operated Snow Valley Ski Resort in Barrie, Ontario,
for 28 years.
In retirement he enjoyed golfing at the Barrie Golf and Country
Club, as well as in Florida at the Citrus Hills Country Club.
In 2000 he moved to Qualicum Beach, British Columbia, and enjoyed
golfing and life at the Eagle Crest Golf Club. Hans passed away
at the Eagle Park Nursing home in Qualicum Beach with his wife
and daughter at his side.
The family would like to thank the staff for their exceptional
care shown to Hans during his stay.
In lieu of flowers please send donations to Ski Jumping Canada,
Box 418, 305-4625 Varsity N.W., Calgary, Alberta T3A 0Z9. For
the development of young Olympic athletes. Or to Eagle Park nursing
home garden fund at Qualicum Beach British Columbia, 777 Jones
Street, Qualicum Beach, British Columbia.
By request a celebration of life will be held at 466 Gallery
Close, Qualicum Beach, on May 3, 2008, 2-5 p.m.
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EDEY o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2008-05-29 published
HUDSON,
Richard
Thomas
At the Bobier Villa, Dutton on Tuesday, May 27, 2008 Richard
Thomas HUDSON born June 29, 1918 at Bryanston. Survived by a
sister Norma
SABOURIN of London and several nieces and nephews.
Predeceased by his parents Clifford and Bessie
(EDEY)
HUDSON,
sister Edith
McPHERSON, brothers Clinton, Beverly, Kenneth and
a niece Kathy
GREENE.
Richard served his country from 1942 to
1946, for years he operated the general store at Iona Station
and served as postmaster. The funeral service will be held from
the Bobier Villa on Friday, May 30 at 2 p.m. with visitation
1 hour prior. Interment in Siloam Cemetery. Donations to the
Bobier Villa would be appreciated. Arn Funeral Home Dutton entrusted
with arrangements.
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