Life itself inspired her activism. Her mother and father were inept as parents, so she learned early on “to take care of myself and live in my imagination, and as soon as I could find books, I was reading them.” Words became magic for Callwood. She used them to persuade, denounce, and describe. They were the source of her livelihood, her prodigious influence in effecting social change, and her solace.
She also had two grandfathers “who were crazy about me,” so she didn’t mind her parents’ lack of attention, because she was loved and praised. “I grew up thinking people take care of one another and you have to do that to be a good person; you have to be available to help others. And I also grew up fearless, so that helped.”
Her self-confidence took perennial tumbles when it came to her vocation. “Fear of failure is huge with me in writing. I have never written something I thought was good enough,” she said in an interview five months before she died on April 14, 2007. Of all the books she wrote, she never attempted a memoir. “I’m not very introspective,” she explained. “I don’t think there are a lot of complications about me.” Besides, she was never sure she could write about her life without colouring her memories, and the reporter in her wouldn’t allow that.
JUNE ROSE CALLWOOD was born in Chatham, Ontario, on June 2, 1924, the elder daughter of Harold (“Byng”) and Gladys (née Lavoie) Callwood. Her mother’s family had settled in Quebec City in 1650 and could claim some native blood; her father’s ancestry was British. He was a plumber by trade and an entrepreneur by inclination. “My father was a rake who made life very hard for my mother. She eloped with him at sixteen to escape her convent school,” she told her friend, writer Sylvia Fraser, in a 2005 Toronto Life profile.
She spent her first two years in the town of Tilbury, the home of her grandfather, Harold Callwood, a magistrate. When she was two, her family moved to Belle River, a village near Windsor where her other grandfather, bootlegger Bill Lavoie, had built himself a massive stone house from the proceeds of running liquor across the Detroit River during Prohibition. Her father established the Superior Tinning and Retinning Company and set about, with his wife’s help, recycling rusty milk cans using a re-coating process he’d invented.
At six, June entered Belle River’s Catholic school and was immediately accelerated into Grade 3. An avid reader, she consumed books in the local library, acquiring general knowledge “so I wouldn’t feel so helpless.” By the time she was ten and her sister, Jane, was eight, her parents’ business had gone bust.
A bigger loss was in the offing. Her father skipped out on his family (and his financial liabilities) three years later and found work threshing wheat on prairie farms for a dollar a day. Callwood’s mother took in sewing, but she and her daughters were usually only half a step ahead of the bailiff, and there was one three-day stretch when they ate raw potatoes dug out of somebody else’s garden.
The war improved their situation. With many men overseas, her mother landed a job as a bank teller. Callwood attended Brantford Collegiate and gained friends and status as a cheerleader. Television producer Ross McLean was a classmate. He once described her as “a definite original,” saying: “Her beauty and her openness caught our fancy, for sure, but so did her unconventional ways.”
Athletically she was a freestyle, backstroke, and high-diving champion, but she was also honing her writing skills by working on the high school newspaper and entering (and winning) a short-story contest. A man named Judge Sweet gave her the prize and told her she should look him up if she ever needed a job — a circumstance that emerged sooner than either of them had anticipated. After her mother complained in the middle of a quarrel that she was tired of supporting her rebellious daughter, the furious teenager went to see Judge Sweet, who was on the board of directors of the Brantford Expositor. He gave her a letter of introduction to the publisher, who hired her as a proofreader at $7.50 a week.
In 1942 the Toronto Star offered her a job for $25 a week. “I was eighteen, but I looked about twelve, despite the high heels, and when the editors saw me, they had no respect for me,” she said later. She was supposed to answer the mail and write captions, but her editor fired her after only two weeks for writing a smartass letter to a sergeant who had complained that she’d misidentified an army tank.
She then applied to be a Spitfire pilot but was rejected by the Royal Canadian Air Force Women’s Division because they didn’t train women to fly. She was outraged. The Globe and Mail gave her a trial assignment covering an Ontario Medical Association convention at the Royal York Hotel, but her nerves got the better of her. Don Carlson, a reporter for the Toronto Star, took pity on her and wrote her piece after filing his own. On the strength of that OMA story, the Globe hired her as a general-assignment reporter. After that break from a male reporter, she could never endorse second-wave feminist rage at the oppressions of the patriarchal society.
She met Trent (“Bill”) Gardiner Frayne at the Globe; he was a journalist whose photograph and writing she had admired since her days at the Brantford Expositor. They were married on May 13, 1944. Callwood, who was nineteen, wore a grey flannel suit and white hat. She didn’t change her name because the Globe wanted to keep her on staff; two reporters named Frayne — one male, the other female — would look suspicious in an era when married women were expected to stay home.
Being married to Frayne meant “everything” to her. “My dad was a rascal, and I fell in love with [Frayne] because he was a rock. I wanted somebody I could be safe with, who I could count on and who wouldn’t walk out in the middle of the night like my dad did, never be promiscuous, never lie — just an honourable man,” she said in November 2006. “And he was handsome as hell,” she added with a grin. The added bonus was his sense of humour. “He’s hilarious. Dear with his children, and the freaky thing was that it never occurred to him that his wife shouldn’t work. It never crossed his mind.” She always referred to him as “my guy” and they called each other “Dreamy.”
The question of working was rendered moot when Callwood became pregnant three months after the wedding. “I wanted babies, I always wanted to be a mother and I assumed I was going to be a marvellous mother.” She quit work before her first child, Jill, was born on May 24, 1945. Motherhood, which Callwood embraced enthusiastically, also turned her into a freelance writer, as a home-based way of earning money.
She wrote her first magazine article (for Liberty, earning fifty dollars) about Violet Milstead, the instructor who was teaching her how to fly a single-engine Aeronca Super Chief. Callwood loved flying, but she gave it up after nearly snaring her plane in power lines. The prospect of being seriously hurt or killed was too alarming, given that she had one small child and was expecting another. Brant (“Barney”) was born on May 31, 1948.
By comparison, writing was harmless. She produced her first piece for Maclean’s magazine on the Leslie Bell Singers, an amateur women’s choir, in June 1947. Four years later, Callwood and Frayne cobbled together the down payment for a modest two-storey clapboard house on a large, maple-shaded lot surrounded by farmland in Toronto’s west end. By then they had a third child, Jesse (born May 15, 1951). Although the house was renovated and expanded over the years, it remained their home and workplace.
Callwood was a whirlwind of activity in the 1950s, writing regularly for Maclean’s to produce stories that varied from a profile of swimmer Marilyn Bell to the newfangled birth control pill, the death of the Avro Arrow, and even the meaning of the universe. She also began collaborating with Dr. Marion Hilliard — her own doctor — by ghostwriting a monthly column in Chatelaine when Doris Anderson was editor of the magazine.
“She was gay,” Callwood said, remembering how Hilliard wanted her to say in a column on lovemaking that “it doesn’t matter whether you are the same sex or not,” but “I was too scandalized to do it.” In 1957 Doubleday published A Woman Doctor Looks at Life and Love, a book that Callwood ghosted, based on the long-runni
ng magazine column. It became a bestseller, was eventually translated into forty languages, and launched Callwood on a prolific career as a ghostwriter for such celebrities as Barbara Walters, Otto Preminger, and Bob White, the Canadian labour leader.
And then everything crashed around her. Just when her three children were in school and she had a steady freelance income, she was whacked by depression. She sought help from a therapist and then turned the experience into a book, Love, Hate, Fear, Anger and the Other Lively Emotions, which was published in 1964 under her own name. She and her husband also had the surprise joy of conceiving their youngest, unexpected child, Casey, who was born September 12, 1961, when Callwood was thirty-seven.
The 1960s saw the emergence of Callwood the social activist. Like so many other things in her life, it happened because of a connection with one of her children. Teenaged Barney was living in Yorkville, then a hippie section of Toronto. Every so often he would bring home a destitute friend. “I was so shocked because I had seen us get out of Depression and scarcity and people not having enough,” she said, “and then, all of a sudden, I got hit with the kids from Yorkville, and they had bad teeth and many of them had grown up in foster homes and I thought, ‘What the hell is going on?’”
Eventually she founded Digger House (named after a group that had tried to establish self-supporting communes in England in the 1600s), a shelter for homeless kids. She paid the first month’s rent of $600, the equivalent of the fee for a magazine article. It was the first of several hostels she would help organize, always in response to a directly perceived need.
She also became a street protester, joining a demonstration against the Vietnam War in July 1968. When she tried to help another demonstrator, who was in police custody, she was herself arrested, hauled off to the Don Jail, and charged with obstructing the police. Pierre Berton testified at her trial. She was acquitted, but the experience had turned her into an activist, albeit one who was always dressed to the nines, complete with earrings, high-heeled shoes, and matching handbag.
Over the next two decades she helped found Nellie’s (1973), a shelter for abused women, and Jessie’s (1982), a home for teenagers and their babies. She also became deeply involved with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews, the Writers’ Union, the Writers’ Trust, and PEN Canada. Callwood brought her enthusiasm, energy, contacts, and persuasiveness to all of these activities. Sometimes, though, she became frustrated with the politically correct tenor of the times. A start-up manager par excellence, she was probably too impatient and energetic to be an effective maintenance manager involved in the running of an organization on a day-to-day basis.
When poet M. Nourbese Philip complained that a PEN congress had put too much emphasis on white writers, Ms. Callwood exploded with a crude expletive. “She was being obnoxious so I told her to fuck off,” she recalled. Years later, a black female staff member complained at a Nellie’s board meeting that the white staff members were racist; Callwood challenged her remark. Tempers flashed, and somebody called Callwood herself a racist. Shaken, she left the meeting and eventually the organization.
In the chaos, the provincial government contacted Callwood with a stern reminder that the Nellie’s operating grant would be cancelled if the enclosed forms weren’t filed immediately. “To my eternal credit, I decided I had to save Nellie’s so I phoned them and said they had to come and pick up this paperwork, but there was a moment there . . .” she said, five months before she died, her eyes glittering. The attenuated silence called to mind a comment she had made in the Globe in 2004: “It took me years to stop being angry, and I’m not over being hurt yet.”
Diagnosed with CUP (cancer, unknown primary) in September 2003, she had surgery but declined aggressive treatment. When journalist Sylvia Fraser asked Callwood, the author of Twelve Weeks in Spring — an inspirational memoir about the care circle she had formed for Margaret Frazer, a friend who was dying of cancer — whether she could foresee a time when she might like home palliative care, Callwood made a “rude” noise and said: “Would you want your friends feeding you and emptying your bedpan?”
By then Callwood had confronted the unthinkable: the death of one of her own children. Casey “was a dandy,” she said in that 2006 interview, with a quiver in her voice. “I used to say to him, if anything happens to you, I will never get over it.” And she didn’t. In April 1982, Casey, twenty, was riding his motorcycle back to Queen’s University in Kingston when he was killed by a drunk driver going the wrong way on Highway 401.
Out of Casey’s death and the palliative care experience with Frazer came the idea for establishing a residential hospice for people dying of AIDS. Callwood donated half the royalties from Twelve Weeks in Spring to help found Casey House hospice in 1988. It offers free services to more than one hundred clients and runs a thirteen-bed residential program in downtown Toronto.
For her eightieth birthday, in 2004, her family gave her a mahogany-coloured Mazda Miata, the latest in a string of small convertibles that she drove with the top down, especially on annual sojourns to Florida. Although the cancer was spreading, she seemed serene as she approached her inevitable death. She felt no fear and she admitted to very few regrets. “I’m a very healthy woman except for a lot of cancer tumours. They aren’t scaring me, although I wish I could breathe better because it is hard to go up stairs and I can’t walk very far.” She remained irredeemably cheerful, partly because every time she looked up her disease on the Internet, “I read my life expectancy and give myself a six-month extension.”
In her inimitable style she tried to organize her own departure, sending typewritten notes to friends and acquaintances — tidying up her desk, as it were — and then, on March 7, 2007, wearing a white shawl over a black trouser suit, she made a final public appearance at the Writers’ Trust annual awards ceremony to accept a lifetime contribution award. Knowing full well that death had already claimed the award’s two previous recipients, Pierre Berton and Bernard Ostry, she accepted a standing ovation with only a tinge of irony. And then she got down to business.
Never one to let a moment escape that could be turned to the advantage of others, Callwood reminded her admirers in a short speech that “If you see an injustice being committed, you aren’t an observer — you are a participant.” That didn’t mean you had to intervene, she explained, but you couldn’t pretend that you weren’t a part of what was happening in front of you. It was her ultimate chance to deliver her activist mantra and to sprinkle a little kindness on a well-intentioned audience. And then, breathing heavily because of cancer’s inexorable devastation, she left the building, the devoted Frayne at her side.
Two weeks later she entered the palliative care unit of Princess Margaret Hospital, where she said farewell to friends and family, nibbled on chocolate, sipped ice water and the occasional sherry, and exuded a calm acceptance of the manner in which her life was ebbing — a model, as always, for those around her. She was ready, but her strong heart wasn’t; it kept pumping until it finally stopped at four a.m. on the morning of April 14, 2007. She was eighty-two.
Arthur Erickson
Architect
June 14, 1924 – May 20, 2009
ARTHUR ERICKSON GREW up in the wet, lush climate of British Columbia, a land of grey skies, blue-green forests, towering mountains, crashing waves, ancient totem poles, and Haida longhouses. The scenery was rampant, the landscape was monumental, and both evoked a reverence and a wary respect for rigorous weather, and a desire to build shelters in harmony with their geography. Unlike so many architects, he absorbed the lessons of his environment and imagined buildings ensconced in their settings.
Erickson’s innovative body of work changed the face and the structure of architecture in a legion of buildings that included the landscape-hugging University of Lethbridge; Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto; the Canadian pavilion at Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan; the Canadian Embassy in Wash
ington; the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington; Napp Laboratories in Cambridge, England; the Kuwait Oil Sector Complex in Kuwait; and the Kunlun Apartment Hotel development in Beijing. But the largest and architecturally richest repository of Erickson’s work is in his native province, beginning with the Filberg house in Comox and including Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, and the Robson Square complex in downtown Vancouver.
Innately curious, openly gay, raised in a family that encouraged independent thinking, he also got outside his own environment by travelling the world at three pivotal points in his life. The army sent him to India and Malaya during the Second World War before he had decided on a career in architecture; he won a graduate travel grant in the early 1950s before he had sharpened his pencil and hung out his shingle as a practising professional; and he received another travel grant in the early 1960s about two years before he and Geoffrey Massey — to their surprise and most everybody else’s — won the design competition for Simon Fraser University.
On those two later, self-directed odysseys through the history of architecture in Europe and the Far East, Erickson learned the boldness of ideas, how style is inseparable from climate and place, the significance of light and cadence, and the paramount importance of site. Those trips were as influential as any seminar or encounter with architectural titan Frank Lloyd Wright in forming Erickson’s aesthetic. For him, as he wrote in The Architecture of Arthur Erickson, “the dialogue between building and setting” became the “essence.”
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