CHAPTER 9

They Shot, He Scored

Looking Back and Looking Ahead

Eternal optimism and idealism have characterized the NFB community from the time of its establishment under the direction of John Grierson, its first commissioner (1939–45), who first coined the term “documentary” in the 1920s.1 In 2004, sixty-five years after the founding of the Film Board, filmmaker Graham McInnes remained optimistic about the future of the NFB. In the closing sentence of his memoir, McInnes expresses his fervent hope that “for the vast press of eager young men and women who thronged about Grierson, who throbbed and surged through that old lumber mill on the Ottawa River until they practically burst it apart, who lived throughout those magic years a heightened life … the ideas they were shot so full of still live, still breathe, in other hands.”² A 2003 report titled Our Cultural Sovereignty: The Second Century of Canadian Broadcasting similarly points to the creative mission that Grierson established, and to his vision of the NFB as a lens through which Canadians and the world would “see Canada and see it whole: its people and its purpose.”³ The report’s author, member of Parliament Clifford Lincoln, assures the reader that the NFB’s mandate has remained essentially unchanged throughout its history.

In truth, the story of the fate of the NFB has been less encouraging than McInnes and Lincoln appear to suggest, as Zoë Druick, Gary Evans, and others have demonstrated so thoroughly.⁴ Though the Board continues to show flashes of brilliance, and has demonstrated considerable resilience in the face of dwindling budgetary and political support under successive governments, Canada’s once world-leading National Film Board has been in steady decline since roughly the time of Rathburn’s retirement in 1976. NFB staffers and filmmakers were appalled when, in 1982, the Applebaum-Hébert Report recommended that the Film Board withdraw from production entirely, and become an institute whose sole purpose would be “for advanced research and training in the art and science of film and video production.”5 Louis Applebaum was well aware of the irony that he, of all people, would assent so publicly to a recommendation proposing the diminution of the NFB in this way. Indeed, according to Applebaum’s biographer Walter Pitman, it was both personally and professionally awkward for him to be a prime signatory on a document recommending the cessation of film production at Canada’s most renowned film studio, the very organization that had played such a significant role in launching his own career as a composer.⁶ However Pitman points out that Applebaum took solace from the fact that the report underlines the importance of maintaining the Board’s role as a training institution. “Louis was aware of the extent to which the NFB had molded his talent, as well as those of many others who were now developing the art in Canada,” Pitman writes. “[He] was anxious that this [training] function should not be lost.”⁷ New York University film scholar George Stoney, Applebaum’s friend of more than forty years, was angered and perplexed when he read a summary account of the report in Variety. In December of 1982 he wrote to Applebaum: “For years I’ve known serious and profound changes were needed at the Board. But to cut it off from production is to kill what it does best!”⁸ Harry Rasky, arguably Canada’s most celebrated film documentarian at the time of the report, concurred. In a letter to the editor published in the Globe and Mail on 19 November 1982 he asked “whither (wither?) the NFB?”:

My friend and teacher, the late Marshall McLuhan, used to talk of what he called the Canadian disease of going through the garden and cutting off the heads of the largest tulips. He would be amused to read the Applebert Report, which suggests, in my view, killing the entire garden … [It] would in fact destroy the possibility of making the kind of films I do, which have won some 100 international prizes for Canada … It is naïve to consider that the private sector would take on such subjects as Next Year in Jerusalem, Tennessee Williams’ South, Travels through Life with Leacock, and Homage to Chagall. It is more ironic that the composer for all of these films was Lou Applebaum, co-author of the Report. My great documentary predecessors, Flaherty and Grierson, would be turning in their graves. We are in danger of having a country without tulips.9

Nerves frayed at the NFB by the impact of the Applebaum-Hébert Report were somewhat soothed when Francis Fox, the Trudeau government’s secretary of state and minister of communications, released a new “National Film and Video Policy” in 1984. This new policy document reaffirmed the role of the NFB, while at the same time seeking “to assure the economic development of a strong private Canadian film and video industry.”¹⁰ In the end, the NFB was not forced to withdraw from production, but the Applebaum-Hébert Report’s critique has had continuing resonance and consequences. As has so often been the case with Canadian innovation, perhaps the NFB’s success was simply taken for granted. In fact, at the very time the Applebaum-Hébert Report was clipping its wings in 1982, the Board’s international reputation was soaring to new heights, with four recent Oscar nominations, and an Oscar win for director Eugene Fedorenko’s Every Child (1979), an animated short film produced by the NFB in honour of UNESCO’s International Year of the Child.¹¹ At this pivotal moment in its history the Board was also being praised for the important impact it continued to have on Canadian education. In 1983, Gordon Martin, a leading authority on the use of film in curricula and the classroom, writes that “a significant number of NFB productions are either planned with the help of educators or are suitable for classroom and library because the content and approach taken coincide with the priorities set by institutions of learning.”¹² This crucial aspect of the NFB’s role and mandate, one that had been central to Grierson’s vision from the outset, was also vulnerable.

By the 1980s it was also unclear whether the creation of original music would continue to be a priority for the Board. Widespread support for the principle that quality documentary filmmaking required quality original music, music that was created specifically for the documentary film project in production, was an NFB priority during the early years. Grierson was uncompromising on this point, and he railed against the challenges of working with pre-existing libraries of stock music:

I have seen sequences wriggling like worms cut in half because the music changed at the wrong time. I have seen a continuity lengthen and drag and flop because the music reached its peak some seconds before the cutting was ready for it. The music was releasing the audience from attention just when the film was calling for it. It’s not the fault of the musician [or music editor]. His library of selections is against him from the start. He is asked to build his house, not with bricks, but with rocks, each piece of music having its own individual existence. How, except by the crudest chance, then, will a piece of music match the equally individual existence of a stretch of film?13

A few years before Grierson was called upon to lead the NFB in 1939, he had hired Benjamin Britten to compose an original score for Night Mail (1936), a classic early masterpiece of the British documentary film movement, and the first of five film scores Britten would compose in collaboration with poet W.H. Auden during the late 1930s.¹⁴ For Grierson, originally conceived music was quite simply a sine qua non of quality documentary film making.¹⁵ This continued to be the prevalent view at the NFB until the mid-1970s when Rathburn retired. Since that time original music has often been dispensed with in NFB productions, primarily in an effort to cut costs. By 1983, the once-important fundamental principle of prioritizing original music was explicitly challenged in a 122-page internal memo on the “Purchase of Distribution Rights for Music in English Production Films” that was distributed to all NFB studios by the director of English production. In one of its prefatory paragraphs, the memo issues the following cautionary notice to producers and directors:

The decision to use original composition must be made carefully, considering the resources in the budget and whether or not original music will improve the film significantly … It should always be remembered that original music is only required for films needing a very specific sound or sync musical treatment rather than blanket descriptive music. There is no need to spend money to do what stock music is supposed to do.¹⁶

A half-dozen articles emphasizing the importance of original music in film production were published in the journal Canadian Composer during the 1960s and ’70s – including an optimistic piece by Thompson Haliwell titled “National Film Board Stresses Original Scores”¹⁷ – but NFB staff composers knew that the writing was on the wall. The percentage of NFB film budgets spent on original musical content has steadily declined since the 1980s.18

NFB recording engineer Louis Hone gives a first-hand account of the situation, describing how dramatically things had changed since the departure of the NFB staff composers of Rathburn’s generation:

After I arrived at the NFB in 1979, we soon went from twenty-five regular musicians to five, then four, then three. Eventually one guy came in with his keyboard and did it all. These composers did not have the experience or the “chops” to compose a film score that Eldon had. They could write little tunes, but often the music was simplistic. I often thought “that’s not film music!” and imagined what the music would look like if it were written on manuscript paper for other musicians to perform. Sometimes I wanted to tell the composer: “If you had written that down and shown it to a real musician to be played, do you think they would play it or would they throw it back at you?” There’s a lot of that now, unfortunately.¹⁹

Were Rathburn’s years at the National Film Board of Canada (1947–76) truly its heyday? Or have we indulged in a misplaced and sentimental nostalgia for a bygone era that never truly was? About one thing there can be no doubt. The formation of full-time, expert on-site film-making teams such as the NFB’s legendary Unit B (1948–64) – filmmakers Colin Low, Tom Daly, Wolf Koenig, Roman Kroitor, Norman McLaren, Gerald Potterton, Stanley Jackson, Don Owen, and composers Eldon Rathburn and Maurice Blackburn – had unquestionable merits. Yet this approach has become largely a thing of the past.²⁰ Ironically, the very success of Unit B may have contributed to the breakdown of the NFB’s unit system, as Gary Evans and others have suggested.²¹ In place of the unit system the Board has increasingly moved toward a model whereby filmmakers, artists, composers, scriptwriters, and narrators are contracted on an ad hoc basis for individual film projects.²²

Eldon knew that in film work, the final product is ultimately greater than the sum of its parts. As much as he enjoyed his solitary work as a composer, he enjoyed the camaraderie and “parry and thrust” of working as a member of a creative team even more. “I’d like to be remembered as a person who enjoyed working with his fellow artists,” he told Louis Hone.²³ Rathburn is far from alone among composers in finding deep satisfaction and creative vitality in collaborative work. Yet a post-Beethoven conception of composer-as-solitary-genius has often been promulgated in popular culture.24 Aaron Copland described the problem succinctly: “It doesn’t matter how many times we tell the familiar story of Bach writing each week for the honest burghers of Leipzig, or of Mozart’s relations with the courtly musical patrons of his day; audiences still prefer to think of the musical creator as someone closeted with his idea, unsullied by the rough and tumble of the world around him.”²⁵

By all accounts Rathburn was at all times a self-effacing journeyman team player, in his work as a film composer in particular. “The cutting-room is anything but an ivory tower!” he noted in 1968.²⁶ Like jazz artists who provide background music for cocktail parties, ballet pianists, and countless other professional music occupations, film composers create so much of the magic in the room, but they are often unheralded. Eldon comments on this in his listening journal in 1987. Of the Hollywood film Of Mice and Men (1939), based on the classic American novel by John Steinbeck and scored by Aaron Copland, he wrote: “A strange one; Copland’s name is not even mentioned.”²⁷ In an otherwise excellent summary article on the genesis and presentation of Labyrinth, for example, Janine Marchessault makes only a perfunctory and passing reference to the film’s music, noting that it featured “a music score composed by NFB staff composer Eldon Rathburn.”²⁸ “Writing film music is no occupation for an egotist,” Eldon told film critic Gerald Pratley in a 1968 interview,²⁹ a view he reiterated in conversation with Louis Hone in 1993: “[Collaborating on a film project is] more about the film telling you what it needs than the individual people – it’s as if it’s a living thing … You don’t worry if someone does or doesn’t like someone. You’re concerned about and focused on the film. That’s the attitude you need. You need to get the ego out of the way.”³⁰ Yet in his hesitation to impose his will too strongly on those around him, Eldon may have been self-effacing to a fault. More than once his sister Joan asked Eldon why, for example, he did not approach Louis Applebaum about doing some compositional work for the Stratford Festival, where Applebaum served as the festival’s first director of music and provided incidental music for its theatrical productions until the end of his life. Eldon’s answer was always that he “did not want to ask about such things.”³¹

In chapter 2 we saw that the constraints under which the early NFB staff composers worked would be viewed as crippling by modern-day standards. How was it, then, that so many ground-breaking and innovative documentary and animated films were made in such modest studios, and under such constraining conditions? Paradoxically it seems that constraints and discomfiture can sometimes actually promote the blossoming of creativity. One of the most counterintuitive truisms in the psychology of creativity is the way in which it thrives under constraints, whether budgetary constraints, technical and resource constraints, formal constraints, or otherwise. Examples abound of artistic contexts within which the more challenging the problem, the more limited the resources available, the more tightly circumscribed the task at hand, and the more constraining the budget, the more innovative and authentically creative the resultant work of art. In a broadcast review of Morgan and Barden’s 2015 monograph A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations into Advantage,32 CBC media literacy and advertising industry guru Terry O’Reilly opined that creative work is often akin to “doing ballet in a phone booth … constraints fuel creativity … restrictions force you to abandon your conventional answers, and force you to find a different way.”³³ In this context, Rathburn must have smiled when he read Clifford Ford’s article on his work in the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada. “In common with other NFB composers of the era,” Ford writes, “Rathburn developed a light-textured and economical style.”³⁴ Indeed, as we saw in chapters 3 and 4, the ability to work with an economy of means was, of necessity, part of the daily reality and modus operandi for NFB staff composers.

Rather than decrying this situation, Rathburn learned to embrace it. “Documentary films often require a small group of musicians due to budget considerations,” he wrote in 1986. “This is often a blessing in disguise.”³⁵ Notwithstanding the fact that budgets permitted the hiring of only very small orchestras, NFB filmmakers urged their composers to strive to achieve a more grand and bombastic Hollywood-style sound. According to Rathburn, they were asked to make their small ensembles sound like larger orchestras, using all technical and orchestrational means at their disposal.³⁶ The only way this illusion could be achieved was by adopting a number of idiosyncratic orchestrational techniques – doubling the string bass in the bassoon and oboe parts, or doubling the weak violin section of four players in the upper wind parts, for example – that often resulted in the awkwardly wind-heavy and “scrawny high sound” that is so characteristic of the scores from the early Film Board era.³⁷ After striving to conform to these expectations during his initial years at the Board (in scores for the Canada Carries On newsreel series, for example), Eldon began to push back. Apart from his IMAX film projects of the 1980s and ’90s – for which larger orchestras were generally available – his film scores became increasingly more sparing and transparent over time.³⁸ This undoubtedly contributed to the great facility with which he wrote chamber-scale concert music, a skill that is amply evident in the large volume of chamber works he wrote for performance at the Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival during the last two decades of his life.

Figure 9.1 • Rathburn receiving a “Certificate of Commendation” from Saint John Mayor Joseph A. MacDougall (at left) and Gordon Spencer, Chairman of the Saint John Committee of the New Brunswick Symphony Orchestra (right), Saint John City Hall, 17 October 1967.

Rathburn’s list of awards and accolades is long. It includes the Canadian Performing Rights Society Award (1938), the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra Young Artist Award (1945), a Society of Film Makers Donald C. Mullholland Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Industry (1964), a Certificate of Commendation from the City of Saint John, New Brunswick (1967), a Canadian Film Award for Best Score (non-feature film, Fields of Space, 1970), Investiture into the Order of Canada (Canada’s highest honour, 1999), a City of Ottawa Arts and Heritage Award of Excellence (2000), and a Queen’s Jubilee Medal (2002). Figure 9.1 shows a Saint John Herald-Tribune photo of Rathburn receiving a Certificate of Commendation from Dr Joseph A. MacDougall, Mayor of Saint John, New Brunswick, on 17 October 1967, during Canada’s centennial year. The commendation, presented by the Mayor on behalf of a proud and grateful city, reads in part as follows:

Whereas Eldon Rathburn has won international acclaim as a musician and composer … [and] was chosen to compose the music for the Labyrinth Pavilion at Expo ’67 … Now be it resolved that every citizen of this city commends [him] and expresses pride in his achievements and contributions to the cultural and musical life of Canada.39

Thirty years later, on his eighty-first birthday, Ottawa Mayor Jacquelin Holzman proclaimed 21 April 1997 “Eldon Rathburn Day”: “Whereas Eldon Rathburn is one of the most distinguished creative artists ever to have lived in Ottawa … it is the desire of Mr. Rathburn’s fellow Ottawans to congratulate him and to demonstrate our pride in his artistic achievements.”⁴⁰

Tradition dictates that the most prestigious film festival prizes accrue primarily to directors and producers, and only secondarily to their artistic teams. However it is worth noting that Rathburn scored dozens of award-winning films that garnered international accolades including Academy Awards, British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Awards, Paris International Film Festival de la Géode (large format) prizes, and Bilbao, Venice, Berlin, and San Francisco International Film Festival Awards, for films including Hungry Minds (1948),⁴¹ The Romance of Transportation (1952),⁴² Corral (1954),⁴³ City of Gold (1957),⁴⁴ Universe (1961),⁴⁵ Nahanni (1962),⁴⁶ Christmas Cracker (1964),⁴⁷ Nobody Waved Goodbye (1965),⁴⁸ Death of a Legend (1971),⁴⁹ and Beavers (1988),⁵⁰ among others.

When it presented a retrospective screening of some of the films for which Rathburn had written his most notable scores, the Cinémathèque Canadienne added its endorsement to that of the Society of Film Makers, which had presented Rathburn with their annual Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Industry in 1964:

By selecting a composer for its award, the Society has drawn the attention of the film-going public to the importance of the role played by music in the motion picture … La Cinémathèque canadienne wishes to add its testimony to that of the Society of Film Makers and affirm the esteem in which it holds not only Mr. Rathburn, but all of the other distinguished composers who have written music for Canadian film.51

Had Rathburn not written a great deal more than film music, this might be a fitting tribute with which to close this book.

In the early 1990s, Louis Hone conceived and directed a touching and informative NFB documentary titled Eldon Rathburn: They Shoot … He Scores (1995), in collaboration with producer Judith Merritt, executive producer Don Haig, cinematographer Tony Ianzelo, and producer/cinematographer Wolf Koenig, all Eldon’s longtime friends and colleagues.⁵² Hone had always wondered why a documentary film had never been made about Eldon’s extraordinary life and work. Having known and worked with Eldon at the NFB, Hone had a profound admiration for his compositional talent and versatilility, and was unfailingly charmed by his droll, self-deprecating humour. “I always felt that one day Eldon would leave this earth and take with him his trade secrets, his precious knowledge and techniques, and his incredible life story,” he recalled in 2018. “I figured that if no one else was going to make this film, then I would.”⁵³

Hone found his opportunity to do some preliminary shooting for his documentary when he was hired by the NFB to collaborate with Eldon as recording engineer on the NFB IMAX film Momentum (1992). Working entirely on his own at the outset, he decided to shoot some pre-scoring sessions as well as the final recording sessions, for use in the documentary. Since he could not simultaneously record the music and handle the camera work, however, Hone was faced with a practical dilemma. Fortunately he was eventually able to persuade the NFB to collaborate with him. The NFB’s timely contribution to the project came as a great relief, as it both permitted the engagement of the rest of the production team and allowed Hone to use excerpts from Momentum and other NFB films on which Eldon had worked. He fondly recalled his interview sessions with Eldon for the documentary:

I sent Eldon the questions ahead of time so that he could sift through his memories. But I always kept a few surprise questions in the hope that I might catch him off guard and obtain a spontaneous reaction. He was very generous with his time, and he seemed to enjoy our sessions. His memory was sharp, and his answers were also generous. I already knew Eldon quite well at that point, but those precious days we spent together allowed me a privileged access not only to his music and his expertise, but also to his soul.⁵⁴

Figure 9.2 • Nuria, Lawrence, and Ronald Schoenberg with Eldon Rathburn, 28 July 2007, holding a photo taken by Rathburn of the Schoenberg children and their father in March 1945, at their family home in Los Angeles, California, sixty-two years earlier.

When Eldon spoke with his sister Joan about Hone’s film, with a self-effacing “shrug and half smile” he told her simply that “they’re making a film about me.” “He was thrilled and at the same time humbled by the experience,” Joan recalled in 2018, and “he did like the finished product; it meant a great deal to him that the film had been planned and executed by Louis and his colleagues at the NFB.”55

Eldon told Louis Hone that his fondest memory was “winning the [L.A. Philharmonic] award in 1945, finding out that Schoenberg was on the panel, and travelling to Los Angeles to meet him, hear my Symphonette, and receive the prize.”⁵⁶ In July of 2007, one year prior to his death at the age of ninety-two, Eldon had a memorable reunion in Ottawa with the composer’s surviving children: Nuria, Lawrence, and Ronald Schoenberg. Together they attended an international symposium hosted by Carleton University titled “I Feel the Air of Another Planet: Schoenberg’s Chamber Music, Schoenberg’s World,” and a series of concerts featuring Schoenberg’s music, presented by the Ottawa International Chamber Music Society. Figure 9.2 shows Eldon with Nuria, Lawrence, and Ronald Schoenberg, holding one of the photos he took of the Schoenberg children and their father in the front yard of their L.A. home in 1945, some sixty-two years earlier. It was clearly a magical moment for both the Schoenbergs and Rathburn, for whom the occasion seemed to transport him back to an earlier time of wide-eyed youthful vigour and optimism.

The question of Eldon’s religiosity is an interesting one. Although he was raised in the Anglican Church,⁵⁷ he rarely attended services during his adult years apart from the occasional Eucharist at St Margaret’s Anglican Church in Vanier, where his sister Joan was baptized at age twelve, five years after the family moved to Ottawa in 1947.⁵⁸ On religious matters, his world view and spiritual life appear to have been somewhat at odds with those of his wife Margot, who faithfully attended the Roman Catholic mass twice or more weekly throughout her life. Eldon once expressed interest in writing an article on the many instruments that appear in biblical scripture, but he never saw the project through to completion.⁵⁹ He incorporated traditional Anglican hymn tunes in countless films, including City of Gold (1957), Fields of Sacrifice (1964), and Who Has Seen the Wind (1977), to name only a few. In 1993 he spoke with Louis Hone about how he would often become deeply affected, to the point of tears, whenever he heard an old hymn tune such as “Rockingham” (“When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”).⁶⁰ He also spoke of how impressed he was by a film titled Listen to the Prairies (NFB, 1945), a picture he was required to view when he first arrived at the Board in 1947. In particular, he was moved by the way in which the film’s closing shots of wheat fields were accompanied by Johann Sebastian Bach’s tender Passion Chorale, “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” a Holy Week hymn that Eldon would have known from the Anglican hymnal.⁶¹ As with so many aspects of Rathburn’s inner life, the tunes and harmonization of traditional hymns seemed to evoke memories of his early days in Saint John, memories that were always bathed in the warmth of nostalgia. “Some people say that the good ol’ days weren’t that good,” he told Louis Hone in 1993. “I think they were!”⁶²

Is there an essential “Canadian-ness” in Rathburn’s work? Certainly he saw and experienced his country through a uniquely positioned nostalgic lens, and his passion for the railway, historical and folk instruments, Canadian stories, cultures, and places was surely unequalled by any other composer among his contemporaries. And just as Canada is a nation with a multilingual past and a multicultural future, Rathburn was truly a musical polyglot. He wrote in classical, jazz, folk, pop, Celtic, Québécois, country, and even “world music” styles according to the dictates and demands of the film project or concert work currently on his desktop. In his stubborn refusal to endorse the distinction that so many composers and listeners of his generation made between “high brow” and “low brow” music, and in the ways in which he freely borrowed from both, he was a postmodern composer avant la lettre. He led a remarkable life spanning nearly a century of rapid evolution in media, technology, transportation, and sociological and political unheaval, and he made an important contribution to the awakening of Canadians to the realities, issues, and potential of the nation. His “modernist and ethereal compositions are, in many ways, distinctly Canadian,” Tim Rogers writes. If folklorists of Marius Barbeau’s generation were alive today, he continues, they would recognize in Rathburn’s music that their “search for a Canadian music has been realized, at least in small measure.”⁶³

Figure 9.3 • Eldon Rathburn, age ninety-two, in his Saint Laurent Boulevard condominium, 2008. A proud moment is captured in a photograph displayed in the background (on the wall above Rathburn’s Steinway): a tuxedoed Eldon Rathburn is shown receiving the Order of Canada in 1999 from Romeo Leblanc, Canada’s twenty-fifth governor general. Photo by Lois Siegel.

In the background of a 2006 photo of the nonagenarian Eldon Rathburn in his Saint Laurent Boulevard condominium (figure 9.3), taken by Ottawa photographer Lois Siegel, one of his proudest moments is captured in another photograph that sits on top of his beloved Steinway grand piano. In the photo, a tuxedoed Eldon is shown receiving the Order of Canada in 1999 from Romeo Leblanc, his fellow New Brunswicker and Canada’s twenty-fifth governor general.

One of the most fitting tributes ever paid to Rathburn came on the occasion of his retirement from the NFB in 1976, from the legendary filmmaker Colin Low, who had collaborated with Eldon on so many of the Film Board’s most successful films:

This is a peculiar place where we work. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. You’ve probably never met a Cameraman who didn’t want to be a Director, or a Director who didn’t want to be the Director of Production or Executive Producer, or a Film Commissioner who didn’t want to be the Director of Production. Everybody seems to want to be someone else. Eldon is one of the few people who, as far as I can tell, just wanted to be himself. If we’re being frank here, I will have to admit that I really wanted to be Eldon Rathburn.⁶⁴

Eldon Rathburn died in Ottawa on 31 August 2008, at the age of ninety-two, following a brief hospitalization after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.⁶⁵ During the last years of her life, Margot supported the creation of the elegant “Eldon Rathburn Cinema” in Portobello Manor, her seniors’ residence in Orleans, Ontario. A touching plaque at the entrance to the theatre provides an overview of her husband’s extraordinary life and achievements. Three and a half years after Eldon’s death, Margot died in Ottawa on 18 March 2012, at the age of ninety-six. They are buried at each other’s side in Ottawa’s historic Notre Dame Cemetery,⁶⁶ not far from the tomb of Sir Wilfrid Laurier (1841–1919), Canada’s seventh prime minister.