Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  The hardest lesson you have to learn as a journalist is to shut up and listen. Fortunately I had my wits about me when Sharp called me early one morning in response to my interview request. “You look at these people who set goals that are beyond our ability to imagine and it attracts you to them,” he said of the early days of the run, when motorists were laughing at Fox and he was drawing sneers instead of contributions. Sharp ran ads in newspapers and magazines saying that the Four Seasons would contribute two dollars a mile, amounting to $10,000 if Fox got as far as Vancouver. Then he invited 999 other companies to join him in order to make it a $10-million run and organized a huge reception for Fox when he reached Toronto.

  “He took cancer out of the closet. He always presented himself with his leg exposed,” said Sharp. “It is never the outspoken, out-front, macho characters who become heroes; it is the kids in the crowd who live and die by their principles and become extraordinary in circumstances that call upon people to live by what they believe in. He was a remarkable man, wise beyond his years.” Before he died, Fox knew he had raised more than $24 million for cancer research, one dollar for every person living in Canada at the time.

  After Fox had to stop running in Thunder Bay, slightly more than halfway through his run, Sharp contacted Betty Fox. He talked to her about holding an annual non-competitive fundraising run for cancer research in her son’s name and persuaded her to be the public face of the event. “I told her if she wanted the run to really have meaning, and to have longevity, she would have to become the spokesperson, be out there, travel, and try to keep Terry’s image alive, because people’s memories are short.”

  He knew he was demanding an enormous effort from her, but he also knew the run would give her a purpose. “The pain was always going to be there, but this was an opportunity that I sensed would be good for her for the rest of her life,” he said. Terry “gave her a cause that made her life better, having suffered that loss. You think you can’t do something from the grave, but he did.”

  Because of space and balance, I used almost nothing from that interview in the obituary I wrote about Betty Fox after she died of complications from diabetes and arthritis on June 17, 2011. I was trying to tell the story of her life, not her son’s or the reason for Sharp’s ongoing support and philanthropy. But it offered such a revealing and inspiring insight into the making of a hero and a legacy that we ran it as a separate story. That’s one of the enduring private rewards of writing obituaries: the chance to learn what moves people and spurs them to make superhuman acts of generosity.

  Some of the ten people I have written about in this chapter were famous, some were known only to friends, family, and colleagues, but all of them had an impact beyond the intriguing details of their private lives. Ralph Lung Kee Lee, for example, one of the oldest surviving head-tax payers, was long retired from his Chinese restaurant when he made a special trip to Ottawa in June 2006. He sat in the visitors’ gallery of the House of Commons and listened to Prime Minister Steven Harper apologize for the racist policy that had separated families and caused such hardship for the Chinese who came here to work on the railroad and to help build this country.

  Mabel Grosvenor, the last grandchild of Alexander Graham Bell, was one of the first women to graduate in medicine from Johns Hopkins University, but she was also a tiny witness to the first attempts at manned flight in this country, at her grandparents’ estate in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, in 1907. Sculptor Dora de Pédery Hunt, who became the first Canadian to mould the likeness of the Queen on the coins that jangle in our pockets, came here as a penniless refugee from Hungary and championed the ancient art of medal-making.

  Others had public profiles in sharp contrast with their humble beginnings. Who knew that Simon Reisman — the tough-talking, cigar-chomping market capitalist chosen by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to negotiate a free trade deal with the Americans in the mid-1980s — had flirted with communism as a student at McGill University?

  “Honest Ed” Mirvish made a fortune as a bargain-basement retailer by claiming to be the cheapest guy around. But he was a big-hearted benefactor of the arts and his community. Giving away free turkeys at Christmas was only one of his many generosities. Broadcaster Peter Jennings, the eloquent voice and cultured face of ABC News, was in fact a high school dropout who had educated himself by reading voraciously and roaming the world as an international correspondent.

  Dorothy Joudrie wanted nothing more than to be a housewife and a mother, but she became infamous as “Six-Shot Dot” when she emptied a gun into her husband, corporate titan Earl Joudrie, after he tried to terminate their tempestuous marriage. Ted Rogers, a relentless entrepreneur, was actually driven to build his communications empire to avenge and honour his father, who had died when he was a boy. The senior Rogers had been an inventor who developed a radio that could operate without batteries and had founded the Toronto radio station CFRB. He died suddenly in 1939, when he was thirty-eight and his only son was six. His devastated widow was pressured into selling the radio station. For the rest of his life, Ted Rogers, in a roller-coaster career that culminated in his being one of the richest men in Canada, was propelled by and thwarted in his drive to regain control of his father’s radio station.

  Jane Rule was an American writer who fled her country in the repressive McCarthy era and found a refuge in Canada, where she was instrumental in the development of two movements: the blossoming of cultural nationalism, and gay literature. Finally, Doris Anderson, the child of an unwed mother, was a pioneer feminist who bludgeoned male opposition in order to become the first female editor of Chatelaine and turned the magazine into a vocal vehicle for women’s rights.

  Everybody has a private life. What unites these people is the impact they made on the public agenda.

  Ralph Lung Kee Lee

  Chinese Head-Tax Survivor

  March 10, 1900 – March 15, 2007

  CANADIANS CONFRONTED AN ugly part of our collective past in June 2006, when Prime Minister Stephen Harper rose in the House of Commons to offer a formal apology to the remaining payers of the Chinese head tax and their families. His contrition and the symbolic $20,000 payment for “racist actions” had been such a long time coming that there were only six survivors, including Ralph Lung Kee Lee, who were well enough to sit in the visitors’ gallery that day to hear Harper speak.

  “We acknowledge the high cost of the head tax meant that many family members were left behind in China, never to be reunited, or that families lived apart and in some cases in extreme poverty for years,” he said. “We also recognize that our failure to truly acknowledge these historical injustices has prevented many in the community from seeing themselves as fully Canadian.”

  At 106, Lee was the eldest of the fewer than two dozen surviving payers of the infamous tax. His story mirrors the hardship and prejudice that so many Chinese endured when they came here as foreign workers. We tend to assume that the Chinese arrived with the building of the railroad, but they have actually been here since 1788. That’s when Captain John Meares sailed from China with a crew that included some fifty Cantonese and landed in Nootka Sound, in present-day British Columbia. He bought some land from a First Nations chief and, with the help of his Chinese carpenters, built a trading post and a ship — the Northwest America, the first European vessel launched in B.C. Some of the Chinese jumped ship and “intermingled” with aboriginal women, according to historian Anthony Chan, author of Gold Mountain: The Chinese in the New World.

  The second wave of Cantonese Chinese was prospectors. They moved north from California in 1858 during the gold rush in the Fraser River Valley. Because they were seeking gold and because B.C. was mountainous, they began referring to what is now Canada as Gum Shan, or Gold Mountain. There were soon about five thousand Chinese living in B.C., some of them taking over abandoned mines and forming their own companies, and others providing food and laundry services in mining towns.

  After C
onfederation there was a great push to link the West Coast to the rest of Canada by completing the Canadian Pacific Railway, and that meant that cheap Chinese labour was in demand. Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald put it bluntly: “The choice is only between Chinese labourers or no railway; there is no alternative.” More than fifteen thousand Chinese immigrants worked laying track and at other jobs to build the CPR. More than a thousand of them died during construction. When the railway was finally completed in 1885, the prime minister acknowledged their contribution in the House of Commons by saying, “Without the great effort of Chinese labourers, the CPR could not have been finished on schedule, and the resources of Western Canada could not also be explored.”

  The public mood about the Chinese turned sour after the railway was finished and manual and service jobs dried up. Many laid-off Chinese sojourners became destitute and faced social and racial discrimination. Unable to return to China, some moved east into the Prairies and Ontario. To curb immigration, the government passed the infamous Head Tax Act in 1885, which levied a fifty-dollar entrance fee on all Chinese immigrants coming into Canada. The tax increased to $100 in 1900 and was raised again, to $500 (the equivalent of about $10,000 today), in 1903. Newfoundland began charging a similar tax in 1906, which was repealed only after the province entered Confederation in 1949. About 81,000 Chinese immigrants paid a total of $23 million in head tax to enter Canada.

  And yet, despite the costs and the prejudice, Chinese people like Ralph Lung Kee Lee continued to come to Gold Mountain. He was born on March 10, 1900, in Toisan, Guangdong province, the middle of three children. Because he was “number two,” his parents decided to send him to Canada, hoping he would prosper and send money back home.

  He was only twelve when, with two younger cousins aged nine and five, he boarded a ship in Hong Kong for the long voyage to British Columbia. All three boys had identification tags hanging around their necks. An uncle met the ship in Vancouver, claimed the three tagged boys, and took them to Fort William (now Thunder Bay).

  Lee was indentured for five years, washing dishes (standing on an apple box to reach the sink), peeling potatoes, and doing whatever else was asked of him, until he had paid back the debt his uncle had incurred for his head tax. Then he began working maintenance on the railroad tracks — hard physical labour from morning to night.

  Lee finally got a break when a white engineer offered him a job working in the train kitchen, helping the cook prepare meals for passengers and crew. For the first time in his life he was making enough money to set some aside. When he was twenty-two, a decade after he had landed in Vancouver with a tag around his neck, he sailed back to China. His parents had found him a bride, Kem Lun Lee. They married in 1922 and had a son, Ming, a year later. By then Lee was running out of time: if he remained out of Canada for more than two years, he would forfeit his immigration status.

  Once again he made the long voyage, leaving his family behind in China. By now, though, he had marketable skills. He found a job in a restaurant in Windsor, Ontario, and began saving money to bring over his wife and child. Politics again intervened. The onerous head tax was repealed, but the Liberal government of William Lyon Mackenzie King replaced it with something even more draconian: the Exclusion Act of July 1, 1923.

  The law curtailed immigration from China and prohibited family reunification. Between 1923 and 1947, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed, fewer than fifty Chinese were allowed to enter Canada. As a result, many Chinese Canadians called Dominion Day (now Canada Day) “Humiliation Day” and refused to celebrate.

  By the mid-1930s Lee had saved his passage back to China. By then his son, Ming, was a teenager, older than Lee had been when his parents had sent him to Canada in 1912. Lee stayed for two years, the maximum time he was allowed to be out of the country without losing his status. His wife gave birth to a daughter, Faye, in 1937 and became pregnant with a second daughter, Linda, before Lee had to return to Canada.

  In China, Lee’s elderly parents found the money to send Ming to school in Hong Kong. There the boy fell ill, and with no family to organize medical care, he died in 1939, when he was seventeen. Lee, who had known his son for only two brief periods in his short life, never discovered where Ming was buried, a trauma that haunted him for the rest of his life.

  The Exclusion Act was lifted in 1947, two years after the Second World War ended. Lee applied in 1949 to have his wife and two daughters join him in Canada, but they weren’t granted permission until 1952 — three decades after Lee and his wife had married.

  His younger daughter, Linda, saw her father for the first time when he met their boat in Vancouver. She was an adolescent, about the same age as Lee had been when he arrived in Canada for the first time with his two younger cousins. The adjustment was hard — neither the children nor their mother spoke English — and they had to learn each other’s ways. They settled in a small town near Windsor, where Lee ran a restaurant and later operated a small import-export business in Chinese herbs and dry goods.

  In the late 1970s, his daughters grown and independent, Lee and his wife moved to Mississauga, a city to the west of Toronto. She died in 1981 at the age of seventy-nine, but he continued to live on his own until 1991, when he moved in with his daughter Linda. When she and her husband relocated to Vancouver in the mid-1990s, he moved into a nursing home close to one of his granddaughters. He continued to drive his car until he was ninety-five and, a robust walker, agreed to use a wheelchair only when he was past a hundred.

  All this while the political movement to lobby for compensation for those who had suffered under the head tax was gaining momentum in the Chinese community. Beginning in the mid-1980s, more than four thousand head-tax payers and their families, including Lee, registered with the Chinese Canadian National Council, seeking redress. Compensation was one thing — it was only money, after all — but a formal apology was one concession too far for many politicians, who feared it would set a precedent for other groups seeking public remediation of historical wrongs.

  The debate ramped up when Stephen Harper, leader of the Conservative Party, made redress and an apology part of his platform in the 2006 election campaign. Negotiations began in earnest after the Conservatives won the January election and formed a minority government. Six months later the stage was set for the Ottawa ceremony.

  A train dubbed the “Redress Express” left Vancouver, stopping en route to pick up several of the fewer than two dozen survivors, the roughly two hundred widowed spouses of head-tax payers, and other family members at stops along the way. Passengers settled into complimentary seats provided by Via Rail.

  Lee, accompanied by his daughter Linda and a grandson, climbed aboard at Union Station in Toronto. As the eldest of the surviving head-tax payers, he was asked to carry a ceremonial last spike. After Harper’s statement in the Commons, Lee asked the prime minister to hang the spike on the wall of the Railway Committee Room, the very room where the decision had been made to build the national railway more than 150 years earlier. No Chinese had been invited to the ceremony at Craigellachie in 1885, when railway baron Donald Smith had pounded in the last spike linking the eastern and western tracks of the transcontinental railroad.

  Lee had a very special celebration on his 107th birthday the following year, when his local MP presented him with his $20,000 redress cheque. Later his daughter Linda offered to use some of the money to take her father back to China to look for her brother’s grave, but he declined, saying he was too old to make the journey. Although nobody realized it at the time, he had suffered a small stroke, and he went into hospital the next day. He died on March 15, 2007, five days after turning 107.

  Mabel Grosvenor

  Pediatrician

  July 28, 1905 – October 30, 2006

  THE LAST SURVIVING granddaughter of Alexander Graham Bell and one of the first women to graduate from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Mabel Grosvenor began working as a p
ediatrician in Washington, D.C., in the 1930s, an era when the likely outcome of most childhood illnesses was death. More than sixty years later, when she was asked to name the greatest medical advance during her career, she promptly replied: “Antibiotics.” Although she lived most of her life in the United States, she began and ended her life at her grandparents’ estate in Baddeck, in the rugged highlands of Cape Breton overlooking Bras d’Or Lake in Nova Scotia.

  Why she decided to become a pediatrician is lost. She never married and had no children of her own, which may have been a factor. Then, too, she probably absorbed the idea of nurturing and caring for other people’s children from her own grandparents. Grosvenor’s grandmother, Mabel Hubbard Bell, after whom she was named, was deaf. She had lost her hearing as a child, as a complication of scarlet fever in the days before antiobiotics made it a serious but not deadly disease. Her grandfather, Alexander Graham Bell, began his working life as an elocution teacher specializing in deaf students. That’s how he met both his wife, Mabel, and Helen Keller, the blind, deaf, and mute child who, largely thanks to his interventions, graduated cum laude from Radcliffe. In 1913, when Grosvenor was eight, her grandparents, who were dedicated to children and teaching, hosted a huge reception for Maria Montessori, the Italian early childhood education advocate and pioneering female doctor, and founded an American branch of her movement in their Washington home. If her grandparents were not the models for her, she was a keeper of their legacy.