Ottawa’s Shoebox Part 8: Grande dame gets a facelift (1980-1989)
by Tony Atherton, The Ottawa Citizen
Ottawa Citizen
August 6, 2005 Saturday
Final Edition
With Ottawa turning 150 this year, we got to wondering: If the city
was a proud, old dowager instead of a burgeoning metropolis, what
might she keep in her shoebox? What souvenirs of a century and a half
of colourful living?
With the help of local museums, public and private archives and
enthusiastic collectors, we have assembled nine such “shoeboxes”,
one collection for each significant era in Ottawa’s history, all
overflowing with the reminders of the people and events that shaped
the city. Today we upend the eighth shoebox — covering the period
from 1980 to 1989 — for your perusal. Watch for a final glimpse
inside Ottawa’s Shoebox next month.
If you left Ottawa in 1979 and didn’t return for a decade, you’d find
Canada’s good, grey capital looking a lot more glamorous.
During the 1980s, construction of the Rideau Centre and the Westin
Hotel changed the faces of both Rideau Street and Colonel By Drive.
The National Galley of Canada rose like a crystal palace on Sussex,
and the Museum of Civilization undulated seductively just across the
Interprovincial Bridge. All this activity helped to revitalize the
Byward market, which became chic as well as colourful.
While not all the changes were well received (the unsightly Rideau
Street bus mall would have to be dismantled), overall they gave the
environs of Parliament Hill a dramatic new look and flavour that
charmed Ottawans and visitors alike.
And the city had its share of prominent visitors during the ’80s,
figures who would become part of history. A gutsy kid with big
ambitions and 2,600 kilometres behind him made his ungainly way into
Ottawa in the summer of 1980. A fairy-tale princess whose story would
not have a happy ending charmed Ottawans during a visit in 1983. And
a Polish cleric with a beatific smile came to Ottawa via Rome in 1984.
And when the city wasn’t welcoming heroes, celebrities and saints,
it was manufacturing them, including a soft-spoken doctor who would
perform a miracle here 1986, and a petite skater who would struggle
through adversity to honour her country and captivate her hometown
in 1989.
There would be regrets — a newspaper lost, the shadow of terrorism
— but they would be outweighed by the sense that Ottawa was holding
her head a little more proudly.
1. Bert Raccoon plush toy, 1980s. (Collection of Kevin Gillis)
In the ’80s, goofy gregarious Bert Raccoon became the biggest Ottawa
celebrity since Dan Aykroyd, and helped launch a thriving animation
industry here.
In 1979, Kevin Gillis, a young musician and former CBC-TV kiddy-show
host (Yes You Can), approached Ottawa entertainment lawyer Sheldon
Wiseman with a script. He was looking for a some advice. What he got
was an executive producer.
Wiseman loved the story of The Christmas Raccoons, in which the
denizens of the Evergreen Forest help two children solve the mystery
of the forest’s disappearing trees. So did CBC and its viewers when
the half-hour special aired the next year. The show’s success led to
more specials and a primetime Raccoons series that drew as many as
two million viewers a week.
The Raccoons became an industry; with merchandising, sales of its
hip soundtrack, and worldwide distribution, the company that Mr,
Gillis and Mr. Wiseman founded, Lacewood Productions, was earning up
to $30 million a year.
Ottawa has a history in cartoon production dating back to the days
when Norman McLaren ran the NFB’s animation studio here, and including
the work of the former Crawley Films (Wizard of Oz TV series) and its
affiliate Atkinson Film Arts (Little Brown Burro). But the success
of The Raccoons was unparalleled.
These days there are a number of independent animation studios
operating in the city, including Dynomight (Untalkative Bunny), Funbag
(For Better or For Worse) and Mr. Wiseman’s Amberwood Entertainment
(Hoze Hounds, Zeroman).
2. Ottawa Journal final edition, August 1980 (Collection of Ottawa
City Archives)
For 95 years, Ottawans had had their pick of two daily newspapers,
the Citizen, launched as a weekly in 1845, and the Ottawa Journal,
which had arrived on doorsteps 40 years later.
Then, without warning on Aug. 27, 1980 (“Black Wednesday” in the
parlance of journalists who remember it), the rivalry was over. The
Journal closed its doors with barely a backward glance, cutting its
employees adrift before they knew what had hit them.
Not that the paper’s financial problems were much of a secret.
Questionable management and an inability, or unwillingness, to invest
in modernization of the paper had left the Journal with fewer readers
and advertisers.
When the paper was sold in 1979 to the Thomson chain, for whom Ottawa
journalists had little respect, it seemed like the beginning of the
end. And it was.
By then, the Journal was $4 million in debt, a hole too deep even
for cost-cutting Roy Thomson to climb out of.
While the demise of the Journal was not unlooked for, its timing
was a complete surprise, as were the circumstances surrounding the
closure. The same day that the Journal ceased publication in Ottawa,
leaving the market entirely to the then Southam-owned Citizen,
Southam’s Winnipeg Tribune closed its doors, leaving the prairie city
exclusively to the Thomson-owned Free Press.
The parallel closures raised cries of collusion, which sparked a
royal commission on the concentration of newspaper ownership.
3. Spring from the knee-joint of artificial leg, 1980 (Collection of
Diane Barrett)
Before microprocessors and rechargeable prostheses, artificial limbs
were a clever mechanical collection of pins and brackets and springs
like this, all subject to the wear and tear of daily use.
Wear and tear affected the limbs on some bodies more than others, of
course, and none more than the succession of artificial legs worn by a
young man from Port Coquitlam, B.C., in the spring and summer of 1980.
Ottawa’s Diane Barrett had been on a cross-country road trip with
family that summer when she stopped just east of Sault Ste. Marie in
mid-August to catch a glimpse of Terry Fox, who had been hop-skipping
his way across Eastern Canada, raising money for cancer research.
Fox was not quite a legend yet, but already a larger-than-life
celebrity, so it was a thrill for Barrett to find him stopped along
the highway, awaiting the delivery of another replacement leg. The
travellers politely kept their distance until the young runner called
them over and offered to explain how his leg worked. He then extracted
the spring, and proffered it as a souvenir.
When Fox’s run was ended by the recurrence of cancer three weeks
later, the unprepossessing piece of hardware became a treasured
family heirloom.
Earlier, Ottawa’s red-carpet treatment of Terry Fox, including Gov.
Gen. Ed Schreyer’s invitation to Canada Day festivities at Rideau Hall,
had helped make his quest into a national cause celebre. And on June
30, more than 16,000 Rough Rider fans at Lansdowne Park had given Fox
a standing ovation after he performed the ceremonial opening kickoff.
4. Turkish flag
In 1985, 16 years before U.S. officials started calling Canada a
haven for terrorists, the government of Turkey said roughly the same
thing about Canada’s capital city. Ottawa, the Turks declared, was
one of the most dangerous cities in the world — at least for Turkish
diplomats. And the assessment did not seem the least bit hysterical.
It was prompted by three disturbing incidents in the first half of
the decade. Turkish diplomat Kani Gungor was left paralysed after
being shot in the chest and the leg outside his Ottawa home in April
1982. In August the same year, Turkish military attache Col. Atilla
Altikat was shot to death in his car while waiting for a light to
change on Island Park Drive.
Both shootings were the work of Armenian extremists seeking redress
for the 1915 killing of some 600,000 Armenians by the Turkish military.
The attacks became bolder in 1985 when a group calling itself the
Armenian Revolutionary Arm, armed with automatic weapons and grenades,
stormed the Turkish Embassy, killing a security guard and holding
the embassy for four hours. Ambassador Coskun Kirca flung himself
from a second-storey window to escape the attack, and lay bleeding
and broken in the bushes outside the building during the siege.
The terrorists would eventually surrender, but the political fallout
would give rise to Canada’s elite counter-terrorism unit, Joint Task
Force Two.
5. Commemorative pin, 1982 (Collection of Larry Ellis)
A royal visit always produces trinkets such as this, but this souvenir
also marks a signal moment of history played out with pomp and ceremony
on Parliament Hill.
April 17, 1982, was overcast, blustery and pouring rain when Queen
Elizabeth II sat down with then justice minister Jean Chretien to sign
the paper that surrendered Britain’s rights to make Canadian laws,
and brought Canada’s constitution home.
Critics of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, one part of the
Constitution Act of 1982, might suggest the stormy weather was
prophetic. The charter, and its interpretation by a succession of
Supreme Court judges, has been at the centre of many controversies
in the generation since.
But on the day of the signing in Ottawa, the mood was celebratory
among the 30,000 who braved the elements and cheered the speeches of
the Queen and prime minister Pierre Trudeau.
6. Medallion die, 1983 (Collection of Royal Canadian Mint)
Somewhere in the vaults of the British royal family is a golden
medallion reminiscent of an age before scandal and tragedy, when people
still believed in fairy tales. The medallion, its lines carefully
etched by the master craftsmen of the Royal Canadian Mint, shows a
smiling Prince Charles with a beautiful Princess Diana beaming over
his shoulder.
The heavy die from which the medallion was struck remains with the
Mint, a memento of a visit that enchanted Ottawans in the early summer
of 1983, when the couple were presented with the gift. It was just two
years after their luminescent nuptials, and a year exactly since the
birth of the first son, William (he would turn one while his mother
was in Ottawa). The bloom was still on England’s rose.
The medallion was presented halfway through a hectic three-day visit
that also saw the royal couple attend a black-tie affair at Rideau Hall
and a barbecue at Kingsmere, cruise down the canal, and officiate at
ceremonies on Parliament Hill, at the new Ottawa Police headquarters,
and in the Terry Fox Canadian Youth Centre.
But it was during a walkabout on Metcalfe and Elgin streets that most
Ottawans had their chance to meet the woman they presumed would one
day be queen.
7. Souvenir program, papal visit, 1984 (Collection of Kevin Clarke)
Pope John Paul II was just six years into his long tenure as the head
of the Roman Catholic Church when he first came to Canada in 1984. By
then he had electrified the Solidarity movement in his homeland,
Poland, and had become a beloved symbol of both strength and goodwill
around the world.
His two-day visit to Ottawa, marked by the biggest and most expensive
security operation the city had ever seen, gave Ottawans plenty of
opportunity to see the pontiff. There were popemobile processions
through downtown Ottawa and Hull, a papal flotilla along the canal,
and an open-air mass on Lebreton Flats that attracted hundreds of
thousands.
One of the singers in the massed choir at the mass was Ottawa
Carleton Catholic School Board teacher Kevin Clarke, who has several
souvenirs of the event, but none more pleasing that the memory of
the smiling pope waving his arms as if conducting the chorus during
the celebration.
8. Jarvik Heart, 1986 (Courtesy of Ottawa Heart Institute)
A device like this, two plastic chambers joined by Velcro, beat in
the chest of a 41-year-old Orleans woman for a week in May 1986,
extending her life long enough to allow her to receive the heart of
a Montreal man that keeps her alive today.
The operation was a Canadian first, and gave the Ottawa Heart Institute
and its chief surgeon, Wilbert Keon, a national profile.
Noella Leclair had been in perfect health before the heart attack
that nearly killed her in late April 1986. It was her good fortune to
come to the heart institute just a few months after a team from the
unit had been trained in the use of the artificial heart in Salt Lake
City under the watchful eye of its inventor, Robert Jarvik. Before
Leclair’s operation, the heart had been used successfully six times
in the U.S. as a bridge for patients awaiting a transplant.
Ms. Leclair, now 61 and the oldest living bridge-to-transplant
recipient in the world, continues to work on fundraising campaigns
for the institute that saved her life
9. Birth announcement, 1987 (Courtesy of Lauren Forgie)
The first quintuplets born in Canada since the Dionnes in 1934, the
Forgies weren’t exactly newborns when they posed for the picture on
this card that their Orleans parents, Kim and Lauren, sent out to
family and friends.
The quints’ first group picture had to wait until the babies were
released from intensive care at Ottawa General Hospital; when they
were born Sept. 22, 1986, none weighed much more than two pounds and
all needed constant care.
Unlike the birth of the Dionne Quints, in a rough farmhouse with few
facilities, the birth of the Forgies was attended by a well-equipped
team of doctors and nurses hand-picked for the task. And Lauren Forgie
made sure her babies did not become the central figures in a media
circus like the Dionnes; she guarded their privacy rigorously.
The Forgies now live in Texas, where Lauren, an engineer and artist,
recently illustrated a children’s book.
10. Woman’s figure skate, 1988 (Collection of Gloucester Skating Club)
In February of 1988, this skate was part of a near-flawless performance
in a Calgary arena that turned a diminutive, dimpled Gloucester kewpie
doll into a beloved Olympic heroine.
Elizabeth Manley didn’t win the gold medal that night; it went,
again, to statuesque German skater Katarina Witt. But she did win
the hearts of Canadians with a comeback performance that astonished
Olympic watchers around the world.
Ms. Manley was not one of the favourites going into the Olympics. The
women’s figure skating competition was supposed to be a duel between
Ms. Witt and American Debbi Thomas. And, indeed, after the compulsory
figures and the short program, the odds were no better than even that
Ms Manley could squeak out a bronze medal. The skater was recuperating
from the flu and ear infections, and suffering pangs of self-doubt.
But on Feb. 27, none of that seemed to matter. Ms. Manley gathered
herself up and skated flat out for four minutes in a performance she
knew was superb from the moment the last chord of her accompaniment
was drowned out by the cheers of a partisan crown in the Saddledome.
She easily outclassed both her rivals that night, and cinched the
silver medal against long odds.
Ms. Manley got another standing ovation, and the keys to the city of
Ottawa, in a ceremony in Ottawa council chambers a few days later.
11. Chunk of rock, 1986 (Courtesy of the Museum of Civilization)
Souvenirs are what you make of them. One person’s rubble is another
person’s cherished memory.
This rock is left over from construction of the Museum of Civilization,
architect Douglas Cardinal’s daring, evocative celebration of the
natural world. It has been preserved by a museum staffer.
Opened in the summer of 1989, the $257-million building was one of
two cultural landmarks to embellish the National Capital region in
the 1980s. The other was Moshe Safdie’s breathtaking design for the
National Gallery of Canada. The gallery opened in the spring of 1988
with a spectacular black-tie gala attended by 10,000.