• From the Decades • From the Decades • From the Decades • From the Decades • From the Decades •
Life at Massey College
Thank you, donors! Donations made between July 1, 2009 and June 30, 2010. Nora Adamson Howard Adelman Toshiko Adilman Bruce Alexander Ian Alexander Derek Allen Jocelyn Allen Richard Always Cristina Amon Carl Amrhein R. Jamie Anderson Aubie Angel David Angell James Appleyard Sally Armstrong James Arthur Philip Arthur Katherine Ashenburg Roger Bagnall Andrew Baines Cornelia Baines Helen Balfour Ian Bandeen Carolyn Barnes Donald Baronowski Isabel Bassett R. Beardsley Belinda Beaton Avie Bennett Daryl Bennett Jalynn Bennett Robert Bennett Alan Bernstein Suresh Bhalla Andrew Binkley Robert Birgeneau Sonja Bird Gloria Bishop John Bishop Michael Bliss Robert Boeckner Henry Borden Alan Borovoy Marian Botsford Fraser Walter Bowen Alan Bowker Diana Bradshaw Donald Brean Robin Breon Peter Brigg Alan Broadbent Stephen Brooke Aaron Brotman Carol Brough
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The Master’s Report from page 3
Whenever a Junior Fellow makes a real contact with him, either in informal chat in the Common Room, or sitting beside him at High Table, an animated connection is made. Earlier this year, Master Hume and I went to visit Professor Boris Stoicheff at his palliative care hospice shortly before the great physicist died (his obituary appears on page 38). Both men deployed courage and black humour at what General de Gaulle once called “the shipwreck of old age,” but this particular rendezvous was one of the most moving I had ever encountered. I have thought about it often after I drove Pat back to his home, where he cares for and protects Patricia Hume, his loyal and loving wife. I think it is because of an innate understanding of the unpredictable trajectory of life that the Master Emeritus’ approach to old age is so moving. That charming offbeat sense of humour (which delighted so many at High Table and occasionally discomforted others) has turned out to be his battle shield against the vicissitudes and challenges of the unrelenting process we all must face. It’s also why the Junior Fellows enjoy his company and why I rejoice whenever he comes to College events, or just drops by for lunch. I need hardly say that the Masters of our College have been a remarkably diverse lot. When Stefan Dupré, one of the University of Toronto’s most distinguished political scientists, became Acting Master in 1993 to give Master Ann Saddlemyer a much-needed sabbatical to deal with health issues, he set about educating Corporation on the necessities of fundraising. Thanks to him, a somewhat hidebound but proudly independent graduate college learned to grow up without the benefit of U of T’s development office raising its funds. •
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Master Dupré also deployed good humour to get across some of his more difficult points and decisions to the community. Consequently, by the time Master Saddlemyer returned in good health to resume her mastership, he had managed to aid her immeasurably in getting the College to accept the reality of its special situation with greater equanimity and effectiveness. It was a simple enough equation and message that Master Dupré left the Corporation, the Senior Fellowship, and its Alumni to ponder: “Take fundraising seriously or wither on the vine.” Master Dupré comes fairly often to College events, although not as much as we would like. He also handles the vicissitudes of age with courage and grace, and his Christian faith has been a source of great comfort to him. With great integrity and honesty, he has this past year let people know that he is now coping with the onset of Alzheimer’s. Not that anyone would notice; his unfailing courtesy and tact seem as untouched as his curiosity about the young and his presiding affection for the Junior Fellowship. Once again, courage is the hallmark, and my respect for Master Dupré, which was always high, is now even higher. When the Master Emerita, Ann Saddlemyer, came to town last spring to help with the Canadian launch of the Dictionary of Irish Biography (to which she was a crucial contributor), I hosted a lunch for her that included Masters Hume and Dupré, as well as many of the Senior Fellows and Alumni who were associated with her seven years as Master. She is, as all who know her appreciate, a warm and welcoming figure in the College’s history. During her years, the whole notion of community became her watchword and presiding ethos, and much of the joyous and communal atmosphere at Massey today can be traced back to her influence, especially the quantum leap made by women at Massey. Continued on page 6 ALUMNI
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1971
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1973
JACK MacQUARRIE continues to
Lane Bishop, now retired from his
Ronald Stewart is Head of the
play in a variety of musical organizations and write a monthly column for a music magazine. He was made a member of the Chancellor’s Circle (U of T) this past year. He lives in Goodwood, Ontario, with his wife, Joan Andrews. h jmac@infinity.net
JOHN TSANG is a Clinical Professor, Division of Critical Care Medicine, Department of Medicine, UBC. He lives in Vancouver with his wife, Eileen, and has two daughters, Katherine and Laura. h jtsang@interchange.ubc.ca
position at Honeywell International, relocated this past June to Kars, New Brunswick, with his wife, Diane. h Lane@LBishop.net
MARTIN O’MALLEY is a writer
living in Toronto. He is preparing a memoir based on diaries, and enjoys time with his grandchildren, Rhiannon, Noah, and Jamison. h martin.omalley@live.com
TERRILL THEMAN is a surgeon at
St. Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and Clinical Associate Professor of Surgery, Temple University, in Philadelphia. h ttheman@hotmail.com
and learned your place in the world and what things in it can really serve you.
Department of Environment and Geography at the University of Manitoba. He is one of the scientists developing the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) on climate extremes, and has been funded to do a cross-Canada speaking tour on this issue. As well, to better understand mountain precipitation, he carried out measurements on the distribution of snow and rain on Whistler Mountain just before and just after the last Winter Olympics. He continues to publish extensively in his field. h ronald_stewart@umanitoba.ca
JANE GLASSCO
Don in slippers
(1939-2010)
by SIMON DEVEREAUX
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ast night I dreamt I was at Massey College again. The place was vastly bigger than I remember. My legs seemed to be sunk in molasses, and I realized with despair that I was going to be hopelessly late for High Table, since simply getting across the quad was taking me an hour. Even so, I first stopped by the Porter’s Lodge to check my mail, which was piled high with mysteriously neglected items. Why did “Devereaux” share a box with someone named “Oppenheim”? Such are the eccentricities of dreams, and Massey – like all the best human institutions – is at its best when allowing space for dreams and eccentricity. For me, an early sign of belonging to the place was a communal TV set surrounded by people who, like my younger self, could name the title of a Star Trek episode before the main credit sequence. Not the more recent crop of shows – STNG, STDSN, etc. – but the original Kirk-Spock crew (or, as we must now call them, STOS). Those were innocent days: before Shatner further embarrassed himself and his country by plugging the nether-region benefits of wholegrain cereals on bus-stop posters. Not to mention wife #3 turning up drowned in the swimming pool. But I digress. For me, as I hope for everyone I shared it with, Massey was a place of both retreat and community, and of affirmation. The greatest affirmation for me was to be elected Don of Hall during my final year. To be sure, some of my affectations were no longer welcome. Daffy Duck in place of the rosette on my gown had to go. But another eccentricity was wonderfully endorsed. Timothy Findley, the guest of honour at High Table the night I assumed office, was sitting on a quad bench, contentedly puffing on a cigarette, when a passing Senior Fellow insisted that I could not assume the dignities of my position while wearing slippers instead of shoes. Findley responded, his cigarette punctuating the statement: “Wear the slippers!” End of debate. Of course, the main job of any Don of Hall is the daily recitation of grace before and after dinner. Of the three Dons I saw in action, I alone had the dubious distinction of once going completely blank. (Thanks, Steve, wherever you are, for saving my hide that night!) I also remember one Senior Fellow, on the eve of returning to his native Ireland, telling me how much he enjoyed my “ironic delivery of the grace”. Whatever could he have meant? And, come to think of it, weren’t these also the years we stopped thanking a Christian God for our daily bread and replaced Him/Her with the Massey Foundation (domus Massiensus)? Inevitably though, as a historian, one of the things I remember most vividly about my Massey years is what remarkable events were transpiring beyond its halls – the fall of the Berlin Wall, the failed coup in Moscow, the First Gulf War (the one with the other Bush; the one that ended, or at least stopped). My own feeble attempt to share in the flow of events involved the novelist Josef Škvorecký, who attended a High Table on the same day that Alexander Dubček reappeared in public to set the
1990s Simon Devereaux seal on the end of Communism in Czechoslovakia. “This must be a proud day for you,” I said very earnestly. Škvorecký smiled mischievously. “Not really,” he said. “Dubček was always a boring speaker.” With such bricks should all the windows of historical cliché be broken. Sometimes history arrived at our door. I remember vividly the late John Kenneth Galbraith coming to speak, as well as to set his generational seal of approval on then-premier Bob Rae’s ill-fated effort to revive deficit spending in an era of fiscal restraint. In the end, the image of Massey that most often comes to my mind – the one that arises unbidden and without obvious association – is the one which surely all of us saw most often without even thinking about it. It is the enormous picture in the Common Room: Icarus plunging from the sky, while the chariot of Helios roars on un-noticing through the heavens. Which of the two might we budding scholars have been meant to emulate? The answer, of course, was neither. Our intended model was the third, markedly less ostentatious figure in the picture – Daedalus, in whom ambition is balanced by modesty, and accomplishment is devoid of a prideful defiance of human limitations. I hope that all of you are as content in the life to which Massey helped lead you as am I. Simon Devereaux was a Junior Fellow from 1989 to 1992 and Don of Hall 1991-92. He was four-and-halfyears at the University of Queensland in Australia, and is now Associate Professor of History at the University of Victoria. His colleague and partner Andrea McKenzie was much amused to read some years ago in the Massey Newsletter that she was her husband’s first child! They are, in fact, the proud parents of five cats and a 2005 Toyota Echo. h devereau@uvic.ca
Jane Glassco, who died on April 28, 2010 after a courageous battle with Lou Gehrig’s Disease, was a founding member of The Quadrangle Society. Like her father, the late Hon. Walter Gordon, who was a founding Senior Fellow of the College, she was a challenger and didn’t hesitate to state her mind. Once, during a question period following the formal presentation of a Walter Gordon Symposium on Public Policy, she told a participant that not only was she wrong, but that she, Jane, was prepared to stomach her distaste of what was argued and explain the depth of the participant’s ignorance in private in order to avoid further embarrassment. To the Master, who was a good friend, she simply said: “Better luck next year, old boy. This one was a bummer!” If she could be gruff, she also had an expansive and generous heart. A great benefactor, she loved the give and take at Massey encounters, and was a particularly wonderful friend and adviser to whichever Junior Fellow was assigned to her in the mentorship program, even after she was afflicted with the debilitating effects of the disease that took her life. “She was the soul of commitment,” said Andrew Ignatieff, a fellow Quadrangler and her dear friend right to the end. “I know of very few people who gave over so much of their lives to their family, friends, and causes.” Those causes were legion: she was co-founder of the famous Tarragon Theatre with her late husband, Bill Glassco. An edgy journalist and filmmaker, her work was always allied to causes or people she believed in. Her philanthropy was widely dispersed, but had a presiding focus on Aboriginal causes. The only flaw Andrew Ignatieff would ascribe to her was an intolerance toward the Canada geese that taunted her regularly at her beautiful farm an hour north of her Toronto home. Master Fraser commented: “Jane Glassco’s wit, questioning spirit, and supportive affection will be sorely missed by the College she always supported. I have lost a wonderful friend and ally of five decades. When the Quadrangle Society was first conceived, she caught the idea in a flash and stayed the course with us to her very end. On behalf of the College, I extended our profound sympathies to all her family.”
a mind driven by craving, pleasure or fear. To be happy, you must be reasonable, or you must be tamed.
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