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If you’ve ever dialed 911 for help in Ottawa, you can thank Geri Migicovsky that someone answers the phone. Migicovsky, who died May 27 in Toronto, was instrumental in the Action 9-1-1 committee that lobbied to bring the emergency service to the capital.
Wife, mother, actress and community activist, Migicovsky left her mark on the city in the years she spent here. Born in Winnipeg in 1921, Migicovsky grew up in Toronto, but moved to Ottawa with her husband, Bert, after the Second World War. She leaves a son, John (Carol Strom) and a daughter, Janet (Mark Finklestein), five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
The Citizen’s Kelly Egan wrote a column about Migicovsky in 2006 when she was leaving Ottawa for Toronto.
A simple thanks for all your help: This city owes a lot to Geri Migicovsky for all she’s done for us
Originally published on Oct. 1, 2006
After 56 years under one roof, now beyond her 85th birthday, Geri Migicovsky is packing up her house, a small, grey-brick affair striking for a great, checkered window overlooking the street.
A house becomes you after this long; surely, it cannot be otherwise. The Migicovskys, after all, had it built in a design of their own choosing; only they have ever lived here since the 1950s.
Inevitably, then — box by box, room by room, one picture frame after another — she is packing up not only cherished possessions, but a life.
On a table on the edge of the living room, she has assembled file folders with the paper evidence that are the journey’s footprints.
What a fine, exquisite run it has been.
A career in the early days of radio. A career in the early days of television. Encounters with Lorne Greene, studio work with Peter Jennings, gigs with Wayne and Shuster, chats with Pierre Berton, a stint as a hand-model for the T. Eaton Co. A founding member of the lobby movement that gave us 911 emergency service, then paramedics. A longtime fundraiser for the Civic hospital. Advocacy for worthy causes too numerous to mention. A wife, a mother, a grandmother, a widow.
Mrs. Migicovsky is moving to Thornhill, Ont., later this month to be nearer her two children.
She is not slipping happily down the 401. This kind of life is not easily uprooted.
“You know, I’m really quite depressed about it.”
She was born Geraldine Shnier in Winnipeg in 1921. Her father, Jacob, was a Russian Jew who became a merchant in Canada. In the 1920s, he moved his wife Ethel and two children to Toronto, where he took up a soft-drink business.
On the way to prosperity, he was felled by illness while still in his 30s, leaving a widow with a young family in the middle of the Depression.
Young Geraldine shared an interest in the dramatic arts with her mother. She took elocution lessons, including private instruction from a certain Lorne Greene. She remembers a big man with a booming voice in a tiny apartment on Bathurst Street.
With her father gone, she was learning to be a feminist before the concept was even invented.
In 1939, at age 18, she scored a major coup. She won a starring role in Canada’s first national radio soap opera, The Lives and Loves of Dr. Susan.
It was a live drama, aired daily. She played the role of the title character, a 35-year-old doctor with a set of twins and a sketchy husband.
In a folder in her home on Patricia Avenue, in the Scott-Island Park area, there is one of her original contracts with the J. Walter Thompson Company Ltd. Ten bucks a day, or $50 a week. Not bad money in April, 1940.
(Interestingly, her stage name then was Geraldine Carroll, ethnic names being frowned upon in the socially conservative times.)
She met her future husband, Bert Migicovsky, through a mutual friend. Shortly after they married in 1943, he went off to war. They did not see each other again, or even speak, for almost three years.
Mr. Migicovsky, a PhD biochemist, went on to a long, distinguished career with the Department of Agriculture.
Geri, meanwhile, was not destined to be an apron-bound housewife, though, curiously she kept a notebook about important dinner parties in the house.
She worked for CJOH for 17 years. In the 1970s, Mrs. Migicovsky was a fixture on daily television, beaming into homes two and three times a day. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, she would work with Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet; and The Amazing Kreskin.
In the 1980s, her husband’s health began to fail and, in 1986, he died.
She says now that the 911 campaign helped her find her way through the fog of grief.
Mrs. Migicovsky heard a CBC Radio interview one morning about the lack of 911 and paramedic service in the city.
One phone call led to another. Before long, she found herself as co-chair of Action 911 with Mark Maloney, later to be a city councillor and brother of Justin, a leading emergency physician and kingpin of the movement.
It took four years of spade work and political arm-twisting, but the system finally fired up in 1988 with a call from a man who cut his arm with a chainsaw. She is modest about her role in the campaign but, undoubtedly, it is part of her legacy.
I have known Geri slightly for some years now. She is an age-resistant wonder, always stylishly dressed and graceful as can be.
She is asked for a final remark to wrap up her life in Ottawa. We never got the phrasing right, fiddling with weak words like “opportunity” and “fulfilling.”
Why not be plain? The city has grown up in the last 50 years; Geraldine Migicovsky was never far from the noisy parade of progress. She made us better; as a city, she leaves us indebted.
Contact Kelly Egan at 726-5896 or by email, kegan@ottawacitizen.com
查看原文...
Wife, mother, actress and community activist, Migicovsky left her mark on the city in the years she spent here. Born in Winnipeg in 1921, Migicovsky grew up in Toronto, but moved to Ottawa with her husband, Bert, after the Second World War. She leaves a son, John (Carol Strom) and a daughter, Janet (Mark Finklestein), five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
The Citizen’s Kelly Egan wrote a column about Migicovsky in 2006 when she was leaving Ottawa for Toronto.
A simple thanks for all your help: This city owes a lot to Geri Migicovsky for all she’s done for us
Originally published on Oct. 1, 2006
After 56 years under one roof, now beyond her 85th birthday, Geri Migicovsky is packing up her house, a small, grey-brick affair striking for a great, checkered window overlooking the street.
A house becomes you after this long; surely, it cannot be otherwise. The Migicovskys, after all, had it built in a design of their own choosing; only they have ever lived here since the 1950s.
Inevitably, then — box by box, room by room, one picture frame after another — she is packing up not only cherished possessions, but a life.
On a table on the edge of the living room, she has assembled file folders with the paper evidence that are the journey’s footprints.
What a fine, exquisite run it has been.
A career in the early days of radio. A career in the early days of television. Encounters with Lorne Greene, studio work with Peter Jennings, gigs with Wayne and Shuster, chats with Pierre Berton, a stint as a hand-model for the T. Eaton Co. A founding member of the lobby movement that gave us 911 emergency service, then paramedics. A longtime fundraiser for the Civic hospital. Advocacy for worthy causes too numerous to mention. A wife, a mother, a grandmother, a widow.
Mrs. Migicovsky is moving to Thornhill, Ont., later this month to be nearer her two children.
She is not slipping happily down the 401. This kind of life is not easily uprooted.
“You know, I’m really quite depressed about it.”
She was born Geraldine Shnier in Winnipeg in 1921. Her father, Jacob, was a Russian Jew who became a merchant in Canada. In the 1920s, he moved his wife Ethel and two children to Toronto, where he took up a soft-drink business.
On the way to prosperity, he was felled by illness while still in his 30s, leaving a widow with a young family in the middle of the Depression.
Young Geraldine shared an interest in the dramatic arts with her mother. She took elocution lessons, including private instruction from a certain Lorne Greene. She remembers a big man with a booming voice in a tiny apartment on Bathurst Street.
With her father gone, she was learning to be a feminist before the concept was even invented.
In 1939, at age 18, she scored a major coup. She won a starring role in Canada’s first national radio soap opera, The Lives and Loves of Dr. Susan.
It was a live drama, aired daily. She played the role of the title character, a 35-year-old doctor with a set of twins and a sketchy husband.
In a folder in her home on Patricia Avenue, in the Scott-Island Park area, there is one of her original contracts with the J. Walter Thompson Company Ltd. Ten bucks a day, or $50 a week. Not bad money in April, 1940.
(Interestingly, her stage name then was Geraldine Carroll, ethnic names being frowned upon in the socially conservative times.)
She met her future husband, Bert Migicovsky, through a mutual friend. Shortly after they married in 1943, he went off to war. They did not see each other again, or even speak, for almost three years.
Mr. Migicovsky, a PhD biochemist, went on to a long, distinguished career with the Department of Agriculture.
Geri, meanwhile, was not destined to be an apron-bound housewife, though, curiously she kept a notebook about important dinner parties in the house.
She worked for CJOH for 17 years. In the 1970s, Mrs. Migicovsky was a fixture on daily television, beaming into homes two and three times a day. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, she would work with Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet; and The Amazing Kreskin.
In the 1980s, her husband’s health began to fail and, in 1986, he died.
She says now that the 911 campaign helped her find her way through the fog of grief.
Mrs. Migicovsky heard a CBC Radio interview one morning about the lack of 911 and paramedic service in the city.
One phone call led to another. Before long, she found herself as co-chair of Action 911 with Mark Maloney, later to be a city councillor and brother of Justin, a leading emergency physician and kingpin of the movement.
It took four years of spade work and political arm-twisting, but the system finally fired up in 1988 with a call from a man who cut his arm with a chainsaw. She is modest about her role in the campaign but, undoubtedly, it is part of her legacy.
I have known Geri slightly for some years now. She is an age-resistant wonder, always stylishly dressed and graceful as can be.
She is asked for a final remark to wrap up her life in Ottawa. We never got the phrasing right, fiddling with weak words like “opportunity” and “fulfilling.”
Why not be plain? The city has grown up in the last 50 years; Geraldine Migicovsky was never far from the noisy parade of progress. She made us better; as a city, she leaves us indebted.
Contact Kelly Egan at 726-5896 or by email, kegan@ottawacitizen.com
查看原文...
