“BARRY,” FRED STEINER SAID, looking around Sherman’s office, “define exactly what your business is.” To call the place cluttered would be an understatement. Bankers boxes and stacks of papers crowded every surface. Steiner could see that some of the papers were covered with the scrawl of scientific calculations.
“Well,” Sherman said, “it’s very simple. I’m a counterfeiter. I take other people’s pills and I make them cheaper.”
Steiner laughed, running his fingers through the thick, wiry hair he proudly called his “Brillo pad.” He was not yet sure what to make of Sherman. When they first met, the previous year, he’d thought, Well, he seems okay. Bright guy. But he would never be one of my best friends. He was wrong.
The road that led Steiner into business with Sherman, and to one of his closest friendships, started with the death of Steiner’s first wife. Born to parents who fled Austria in 1938 and settled in Detroit, Steiner married at an early age. He and his wife had two children. In her early twenties, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and died a few years later. By December 1970, Steiner was feeling lost. He had two children under seven years old, a boy and a girl, and was struggling to find his niche in a variety of restaurant ventures. He had a teacher’s certificate and was a substitute teacher at several Detroit schools, which helped pay the bills.
During the winter holidays, Steiner took his children to Florida for a break, where they checked in at the Newport Beach Hotel. He was a thirty-year-old man who’d had modest financial success but was still looking for his big break. One afternoon by the pool, his four-year-old daughter had to go to the bathroom. He felt she was too old to take her into the men’s room, and he certainly could not go into the women’s. He spotted two attractive young women—“nice, cute girls”—and asked if they could help him out. The women were Honey Reich and Bryna Fishman, on one of their getaways. They helped Steiner’s daughter, after which the three adults spent a pleasant afternoon lounging around the pool. Reich mentioned that her boyfriend, Barry—she called him Chuck, because his middle name was Charles—was flying down later in the week, the four had several dinners together, and got to know each other.
“I looked at Barry and thought, interesting guy, nice guy,” Steiner recalls. “But he wasn’t my type. You could see he was more of an academic. I was more of a streetwise guy. School was never my thing.”
Back in Detroit, Steiner was at a family get-together with his children and his late wife’s family, and one of his in-laws was looking at photos from the Florida trip. “Who is this?” she asked, seeing Bryna Fishman’s face appear throughout the album. “Just a girl I met down in Florida” was the reply.
Fred and Bryna were married seven months later, on July 4, 1971. Barry and Honey had been married two days before, at a Toronto courthouse, but they waited for Bryna and Fred’s wedding before leaving on their honeymoon. The two couples remained best friends until the Shermans’ deaths. The Steiners lived for a brief time in Detroit, but they returned to Toronto within two years and have lived there ever since.
Toronto in the early 1970s was an eye-opener for Steiner. It was quite different from Detroit, where riots and gun violence were commonplace. He was teased when he told his new Toronto neighbours that he locked his doors at night. But Steiner was amazed by the welcome he and Bryna were given, particularly by Barry Sherman. One day, he visited Sherman at Empire and told him he was planning to buy a business but had no idea what it would be. He was looking for a sounding board. Other people had promised to invest with Steiner but one after another dropped off.
“Fred, if you find a business that’s the right one, then do it. I’ll be partners with you,” Sherman said. Steiner had no footprint in Canada, no credit history north of the US border, nothing more than a stated desire to succeed. As Sherman would do for many people over the next fifty years who showed similar enthusiasm, he provided financial backing. The business relationship with Steiner would prove the most stable Sherman ever had outside of his own company, Apotex. The deal that Steiner eventually made was to purchase a small firm that delivered coffee, water, and soft drinks to offices in downtown buildings. Joel Ulster joined the partnership at Sherman’s suggestion, with each of the three men investing $25,000. It was the early 1970s, and the concept of contracting with an outside company to provide a beverage service to an office suite was becoming big business in the United States, but it was relatively unknown in Canada. The company the trio purchased had 175 accounts. By 2017, when Sherman died, Imperial Coffee had 15,000 contracts across Ontario, supplying product and providing and servicing thousands of high-end coffee machines. All three men were still partners, though Sherman had sold the majority of his shares to Steiner’s son Mark at a generously low price. Mark Steiner eventually became president of his father’s company.
Most people think of Barry Sherman only as the man who made a fortune as a “counterfeiter,” to use his word. Some might also see him as a generic pill guy who dabbled in other businesses, quite often unsuccessfully. But what emerges from interviews with dozens of people who knew Sherman well, or who faced off against him in business, is that Sherman was much more than a “pill guy.” He was a risk-taking entrepreneur whose most successful enterprise just happened to be generic drugs. It could easily have been something else. He tried and failed, and tried and succeeded, at many other ventures. His support for Fred Steiner, at a time when other potential investors backed away, is early evidence of his savvy and appetite for risk.
Sherman was only able to give a financial leg up to Fred Steiner in 1973 after an uneven start in the generic drug business that would eventually be his greatest accomplishment. When Sherman and Ulster took over at Empire Laboratories in 1967, Sherman alternated between over-the-moon excitement and fear of the worst. Bankruptcy would mean losing not only the money the two men had put in, but also the greater amount invested by their own parents.
Empire Laboratories, purchased from the trustees representing Sherman’s late Uncle Lou’s estate, was failing when Sherman and Ulster took control, according to Sherman’s memoir. The orphaned Winter cousins would eventually disagree and dig up information they said suggested the company was doing much better than Sherman claimed. But according to Sherman, when he and his partner took over, no new products had been introduced for several years, the building it was housed in was run down and lacked modern manufacturing machinery, and the man at the helm, courtesy of the trustees, was, as Ulster put it, “a disaster.” To purchase Empire and its generic business, the two young men incorporated a company called Sherman and Ulster Ltd. They paid the Winter estate $450,000, pooling the money they had with loans from Ulster’s father and Sherman’s mother. Sherman was president; Ulster was vice-president.
Empire’s operations were spread out over a five-storey building on Lansdowne Avenue near Dundas Street, an industrial part of Toronto at the time. The president put in charge by the estate trustees, chemistry professor George Wright, was not a strong businessman. Sherman fired him the day they assumed control. The partners decided that Sherman would handle production, quality control, and product development. Ulster would handle sales, accounting, administration, and any human resources issues among the employees.
Manufacturing generic drugs was a fledgling industry at the time, and a confusing set of government rules controlled their existence. Morris Goodman, a Montreal businessman who was one of the pioneers of the generic industry, explains that one of the main problems he and others in his business faced was that “doctors did not believe in generics.” Physicians were wined and dined by the brand name pharmaceutical companies, and their salesmen pushed their brand products at doctors’ offices frequently. Not surprisingly, doctors usually wanted to prescribe the brand name version. Goodman says that if a doctor did prescribe a generic version and the patient didn’t do well, “the doctor blamed the drug.” In an ideal world, the generic version would be identical to the brand name product. Using the simplest example, a generic ASA tablet should be the same as an Aspirin. The problem was, at least in the early days, it often was not the same. Government regulators spent a considerable amount of time trying to catch generic companies producing inferior product. Ulster, recalling those early days, says there was always speculation, never substantiated, that brand pharmaceutical companies paid off the government inspectors to perform extra policing of the generic firms that were trying to get a piece of a very lucrative pie.
Similar issues were encountered by the man who would become Sherman’s biggest rival, Leslie Dan. Dan had founded the generic firm Novopharm in 1965. A Hungarian Jew, he had come to Canada in 1947 and enrolled in the University of Toronto School of Pharmacy. He was fourteen years older than Sherman and was more established in the pharmaceutical world when Sherman and Ulster emerged on the scene. Their bitter rivalry would be the stuff of acrimonious court battles and occasional headlines in future years. Dan’s son, Aubrey, would eventually become an admirer of Sherman, and together they would work on a plan to legally sell marijuana as a pharmaceutical.
Barry Sherman entered the tumult of the pharmaceutical world in 1967 as the twenty-five-year-old owner of a medium-sized generic company and its head of product development. Biochemists and molecular chemists are typically the type of scientists involved in pharmaceuticals. Sherman was neither. His background was in math and physics, and aerospace. “At that time,” Sherman recalled in his unpublished memoir, “I knew little about pharmaceutical manufacturing, and virtually nothing about how to formulate a tablet or capsule.”
Sherman and Ulster shared a long table that acted as a desk at the Empire office on Lansdowne. When they looked at recent company reports, it was clear there was a problem with quality, not just with the quality of prescription pills but also with the company’s relatively simple line of vitamin C tablets, known by the generic name ascorbic acid. James Church, the sales manager, told Sherman that the tablets were soft and broke up in the bottle. Customers were returning them, and revenues from the product, not surprisingly, had taken a big hit. What pharmacy wanted to carry a product that was unstable? What customer, hoping to stave off a cold, wanted to open a bottle and find a jumble of broken pills? Sherman describes in his memoir how he went up to the third floor of the Lansdowne building and spoke to the production manager. The man told him there was nothing wrong with the tablets. He formulated them himself, he said to Sherman, and “every product formulated by him was the best that could be made.” Sherman then walked downstairs to the second floor and questioned the packaging supervisor, who told him that, yes, there was a problem.
Within a couple of days, the production manager was shown the door and Sherman promoted Chris Retchford, a young Australian man a few years his junior, who had studied pharmacy for two years back home and then emigrated to Canada. Sherman gave him the title of acting production manager and promised the job would be permanent if he did well. The task ahead, to understand how to manufacture high-quality products, would be critical in Sherman’s career. By 2017, Apotex, the company he started after Empire, would be manufacturing twenty-five billion doses (pills and other formulations of drugs) a year. At Empire in 1967, Sherman needed to learn how to make one pill and make it right.
His first task was to understand the components of pharmaceuticals. All pills, whether prescription or non-prescription, are composed of the active pharmaceutical ingredient, or API, and “excipients,” or inactive ingredients. These are also called binders and fillers. The actual amount of drug, or API, is small. The additives make the pill into a form that can be swallowed and also, depending on the type of medicine, help deliver the active ingredient to the body in a way that allows it to be absorbed properly to have the best effect. Shortly before his death in 2017, Sherman was devising the best way to deliver the various active ingredients of marijuana to the body in pill form.
Working alongside his new acting production manager, Sherman set up a series of trials to see what worked and did not work with the ascorbic acid tablets that were disintegrating in the bottles. The former production manager had left a list of all the inactive ingredients: lactose, microcrystalline cellulose, starch, sodium carboxymethylcellulose, magnesium stearate, talc, and colloidal silicon dioxide. Sherman wrote in his memoir that neither he nor Retchford had any idea of the purpose of each ingredient. They ran a series of trials, compressing all the ingredients with a tablet “punch” but leaving one ingredient out each time. They discovered that only two inactive ingredients were needed: microcrystalline cellulose, which makes the tablets hard but also allows them to break up in the stomach within thirty minutes, and magnesium stearate, which is a lubricant that prevents the tablet mixture from sticking to the tablet punch. Problem solved.
Sherman wrote, “It appears that [the production manager’s] approach had been to include a little bit of everything, without doing experiments to determine what was needed and what was not. From that day forward, I personally made all decisions relating to product formulation, based on review of one or more series of comparative experiments.”
During this time at Empire, both Sherman and Ulster kept long hours out of necessity. But Sherman also laboured deep into the evening because, and this is confirmed by literally everyone who knew him well, he loved working. In years to come, people would see him on sunny winter days at the Alpine Ski Club, near the Ontario town of Collingwood, sitting inside at a table, his laptop out, typing, his ski boots unbuckled to rest his feet after an obligatory few runs down the slopes with Honey. That scene was replicated many times. When Sherman began dating Honey Reich three years into his time at Empire, she would often drop by the office and they would have a quick meal, usually chicken and fries from Swiss Chalet, then Sherman would go back to his formulations.
If one of the main lessons Sherman learned in those first few years was how to make a pill better (and cheaper, due to fewer ingredients), the new tool he developed involved the law and the courts. In the days immediately after his death, media stories remarked on his “litigious nature,” with one well-known lawyer pronouncing Sherman “the most active litigant in any industry in Canada.” By his own account, Sherman’s first use of the courts to his advantage was in 1971, when a federal official wrote to tell Sherman and Ulster that Empire was being struck from the country-wide list of approved pharmaceutical companies. Inclusion on that list was a prerequisite for selling drugs in Ontario and also for supplying customers, including hospitals.
“We immediately panicked,” Sherman recalled in his memoir. The bureaucrat who had written the letter was the chairman of a federal board that oversaw the listing of pharmaceutical companies. It was after hours, and Sherman was unable to reach the bureaucrat at his office in Ottawa. He called directory assistance and asked for a home number, dialled, and the board chairman answered. Sherman identified himself, and while there is no account of the call from the bureaucrat’s perspective, Sherman recounts it in his memoir. Ulster’s recollection also matches what Sherman wrote. The man was not happy to be disturbed at the dinner hour, but Sherman kept him on the telephone. What the federal board had done, Sherman said, was unlawful, because it had not disclosed the allegations to Empire and provided the company with a chance to respond. He also took issue with the fact that, in Sherman’s opinion, these were historical complaints from a time before he and Ulster had taken over.
“It appeared that [the bureaucrat] and his board had never heard of the principles of natural justice with which, according to common law, all judicial and quasi-judicial bodies must comply,” Sherman wrote. He warned the bureaucrat that if the decision was not reversed and Empire products reinstated on the list, Sherman would hold the bureaucrat personally responsible. Personal threats were a waste of time, the bureaucrat said, and he hung up on Sherman.
Sherman got in touch with a lawyer he knew, Willard “Bud” Estey, who years later would be named a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. Estey, with Sherman’s urging, went to court and began an application to have a judge quash the federal board’s decision. Estey also wrote to the Ontario government and asked it to hold off delisting Empire products, pending the court challenge, which the government agreed to do. Shortly before the court hearing, the federal government backed down and relisted Empire products for sale in Canada.
“This was the first time in my career that I found it necessary to initiate legal action. It was to be the first of many,” Sherman recalled.
It was at about this time that Sherman asked his friend and business partner Fred Steiner to come on a tour of a house he was building in Toronto on Beaverhall Drive. Sherman had a contract with the house builder that stipulated certain parts of the construction had to follow a timeline. The plumbing was one of the items, and the toilet in the main bathroom had not been installed as promised.
“I want you to be a witness,” Sherman said. He sued the contractor, successfully, as he would with other properties he built. If Sherman believed he was the aggrieved party, and he had a contract, he would take the matter before a judge. The Old Colony Road property, where he would eventually die, was built for relatively little money. Due to his lawsuit for non-compliance with a contract, Sherman would recoup most of the cost of the construction.
The home in Thornhill, north of Toronto, where Joel and Cindy Ulster had settled down was lively. The Ulsters had four children, and were not yet thirty years old. There was a secret in the home that would eventually burst free, but for now it was the picture of domestic, though often chaotic, bliss. Thornhill was a new neighbourhood in the early 1970s, a place with cookie-cutter houses (Mark Ulster, one of Joel and Cindy’s boys, says, “Every fifth house was the same”) and perfect lawns. Mark recalls how his parents always had friends over, “just hanging around.” The adults would get together, and the kids—Mark and his siblings and whoever else was there—would put on a play or some other performance. Everybody seemed to get along. At one point, Joel and Cindy fell in love with the Toronto production of Hair and attended it several times. They befriended the cast, and one night they invited them all to the Thornhill house for a cast party. Later, two actors in the play, who were married with children, moved in for several months. Mark says his “crazy hippie” parents and their friends did not quite fit into the area, which Mark took as a sort of badge of honour. Today a successful documentary writer and producer, Mark recalls with fondness how nice it was to have his parents’ friends around, and the most popular of them was Uncle Barry, a busy man who still found time for his friend’s kids, and a man who would later give Mark a helping hand.
“Barry was just always around,” says Mark. “He was very positive. I had always thought that Barry would be a great father, because he was very devoted and would really get down to your level and show interest in you, which was nice.” Caroline, Mark’s wife, who knew Sherman in later years, recalls his warmth. Photos taken of weekend get-togethers at the Ulster home show Barry and Honey mugging for the camera.
But for all the appearance of a typical suburban family, the Ulsters really were different. The secret in the house was that Joel Ulster was gay and had fallen in love with a man named Michael Hertzman, a Toronto clothing store owner. One day in 1973, Ulster took a walk with Sherman on the streets around their Empire factory and told him his plan to leave Cindy. He had already confided in his friend that he was gay. Ulster recalls that walk, no sidewalks in those days, dodging broken pavement on the side of the road, trucks rumbling past. “He was very supportive,” Ulster says. The next day, Joel told Cindy that he could no longer live with her, that he preferred men. Cindy at first believed that her husband was just going through a phase. “It was a huge scandal, because my dad was gay and it was the early 1970s. It was a pretty crazy situation,” Mark Ulster says, remembering how it was viewed by others. After all, only a few years earlier, homosexual acts were against the law in Canada. That changed when Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau passed legislation decriminalizing gay sex, famously saying, “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.”
Ben Ulster, who had backed son Joel and Barry Sherman financially, was not at all supportive of his son’s decision to leave his family. But Joel had made up his mind. The question was, Where was he going to live? He telephoned Michael Hertzman and told him he had done it, he had told Cindy. Michael asked, “Do you have a place to stay?” Joel did not, and Michael said Joel could stay with him. Following Cindy’s wishes—they eventually divorced—he kept the fact that he was gay from their children until they were in their early teens. Mark’s brother Jeff recalls his naïveté from those early years: he thought his father merely had a roommate.
Jeff Ulster also recalls how at first their mother would not let Michael into the house after the couple separated. But Cindy was not a housekeeper (she proudly had a poster in her front hall that said “Fuck Housework”), and so eventually Joel and Michael would be occasionally permitted to visit, when they would do an “intervention” and throw out accumulated trash from the ongoing parties the house still hosted. Cindy eventually met and fell in love with another man and remarried. She died of cancer in 2013.
Throughout the years, until the Shermans’ deaths, Barry and Honey remained close with Joel and Michael. Among the adventures they shared was a train trip on the Polar Bear Express, in Northern Ontario. Photos from the early 1970s kept by Michael and Joel in a well-organized album show the two couples standing in front of a stone monument outside Cochrane, Ontario, the train’s southern terminus, Honey in red bell bottoms, Barry in dress slacks. In another photograph, a grinning Honey has curved her body into a pantomime of the polar bear depicted on the side of the train.
Today, Joel and Michael are married and living in New York City. On the walls of their apartment are testimonials to a family life being lived well: dozens of smiling photos of Joel and Michael taken all over the world with the four children from Joel’s first marriage and the two children he and Michael adopted in New York. Over the years, Sherman provided financial assistance and mentorship to all the Ulster children. All six are now adults and successful in a wide range of careers.
In the midst of Ulster’s personal crisis, Sherman and his partner continued to steer the company to greater heights. Empire was now profitable. New products and better versions of old products contributed to an increase in sales from $800,000 in 1967 to $2 million several years later. Empire was being noticed as a contender in the generic business, and not just by Canadians. Not long before Ulster was preparing to deliver his news to Cindy, a California-based company sent a representative to visit Empire. International Chemical and Nuclear Corporation (ICN) was in expansion mode and wanted to see if Empire would be a good fit. It had recently purchased Morris Goodman’s Montreal company, Winley-Morris. Goodman was now president of the renamed company, ICN Canada, and ICN wanted to expand by purchasing other firms. Sherman and Ulster were not sure if they were interested. They had spent several years turning around Empire, and they saw the opportunity for future growth if they continued on their own. On the other hand, the five-storey building on Lansdowne was tired. To renovate would be expensive. Improvements to the chipped, uneven floors alone would be an expensive task. The ideal atmosphere for making pharmaceuticals was completely sterile so that the various ingredients were not contaminated. The Lansdowne location might simply need too much of a capital investment. Sherman also believed that the operations in the building, a factory with constantly moving product spread out over five floors, was inefficient. When they received an offer of about $2 million from ICN, they set to work on the final points of the negotiation, and Sherman took a close look at the documentation provided by the US firm.
“I wanted to be free to go back into the same business,” Sherman wrote in his memoir. Ulster recalls how Sherman devised a plan. ICN was stipulating that the shareholders in Empire would not be able to compete in the generic business for two years. What ICN did not know (apparently they never checked) was that neither Sherman nor Ulster, technically, were shareholders in their company. Instead, they each had a personal holding company that owned shares in Sherman and Ulster Ltd., which in turn owned shares in Empire. Sherman withheld the schedule that listed the shareholders in Empire until “the last minute” in the hope that ICN would not figure it out.
“This worked out exactly as I hoped,” Sherman recalled. When the dust settled, taxes and debts paid, he and Ulster had each netted about $300,000. Ulster exited the new business, but Sherman stayed on to work as an executive for ICN, until something happened that would occur only once in his life. The ICN Canada president, Morris Goodman, sent Sherman to California for some meetings. The plan was to discuss the future growth of the combined organization. Goodman never heard the details from his American bosses, but it did not go well. Sherman apparently told ICN how to do their work better. “Sherman opened his big mouth,” Goodman says. “I got a call saying, ‘Fire the son of a bitch.’ I don’t know what he said.”
A few weeks later, Goodman drove to Toronto to meet with Sherman, who, by his own account, knew what was coming.
“I became the only person who ever fired Barry Sherman,” says Goodman. “When I fired him, I said, ‘You know, I don’t like firing people.’ Barry said, ‘Don’t worry, Morris. I was going to quit anyway.’ ”
Goodman is now eighty-six and still involved in his own business, Pharmascience. His son David is the chief executive officer, and Pharmascience is the largest pharmaceutical employer in the province of Quebec.
After he was fired, Sherman packed up his office and went home. Thanks to his sleight of hand on the ICN deal, he was free to start his own firm. He incorporated Sherman Technologies in 1973, which initially provided equipment for other pharmaceutical businesses, then morphed into a generic firm. Sherman invited Ulster to join him in the new venture, but Ulster declined, saying he was ready for a change. At Empire, the two men had shared an office with two desks and a long table between them. Each day, Joel would open his drawer and find a note from Sherman with suggestions as to what he should do that day, what was prudent not to do that day, or just general observations on the best way to handle Ulster’s side of the business.
“He was a very strong presence to say the least,” Ulster says. “He didn’t know how to stand back and let you do it. He would tell you how to do it.”
That rankled Ulster. He understood his friend was well-meaning, but he realized from those daily notes and the extreme effort that Sherman put into business, to the exclusion of all other pursuits, that in the long term they were not suited for a partnership. Ulster also found Sherman to be too much of a risk-taker, and that did not sit well with his more financially conservative attitude.
“We had different objectives,” Ulster says. “I wanted to make money, be successful, and then have a life where I could do what I wanted to do, which was a lot of other things. I realized that I loved him, but it wasn’t for me.”
Best friends, they would continue as partners in some enterprises, but not Sherman’s new foray into the pharmaceutical world. Ulster and Sherman were still teamed up with Fred Steiner in his coffee service business. Ulster and his future husband, Michael, who had a successful Toronto menswear store, worked in concert with Sherman in reinvesting some of their funds in second mortgages on commercial and residential properties. Those businesses would do well, and that, plus the cautious investment of his nest egg from the Empire sale, has funded a very comfortable but not lavish life for Ulster.
Ulster’s final official contribution was to help Sherman name his new company. They tossed around some ideas the way they had bandied about monikers in school that combined parts of their names. The suffix tex was one they had always liked. The original word for a drugstore was apothecary, and so it was born: Apo-tex, which eventually became simply Apotex.
The new business he started in 1974 was on a street off Weston Road called Ormont Drive, in an industrial area in the northwest of Toronto. Sherman built a small factory, taking advice from professionals on the best type of materials for the floors and walls, and ensuring they were sealed so that a sterile environment would be easier to maintain than at the old Lansdowne building.
Fred Steiner was in the beginning stage of his own business, and Sherman took him aside and made him a proposition. “Why are you looking to lease space? I will never be able to use five thousand square feet. Move in with me,” Sherman said, adding it would be rent free.
Over the next few years, the two men became close friends. As he did with Ulster’s children, Sherman took a strong interest in Steiner’s son and daughter from his first marriage, and eventually the daughter Fred and Bryna had together. Sherman wanted children of his own one day, but Honey had a series of miscarriages that delayed those plans. Bryna Steiner said she and Honey became pregnant at the same time, when the Steiners were living in Detroit before moving to Toronto permanently. Once a week, they would gab on the phone. Bryna’s pregnancy went as planned, but Honey miscarried. After that, Honey did not tell her friend when she was pregnant. Bryna could always tell when Honey was pregnant over the next few years, though, because she would quit smoking and stop playing tennis, fearful of another miscarriage. In 1975, Honey and Barry welcomed their daughter Lauren into the world. She would remain an only child for close to a decade.
At the office, Steiner and Sherman discussed their businesses and politics, but never sports. Topics like sports would produce an explosion. Any mention of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Toronto’s professional hockey team, would lead Sherman to opine at length on how ridiculous it was for someone to have an allegiance to a sports club. “That is the stupidest thing I ever heard,” he’d tell Steiner. “They are not Toronto Maple Leafs. Why do you root for them? What makes you root for one team over another? They are not from Toronto; they are a bunch of people from here, here, and here.” So vexed would Sherman get that he would dissect all parts of the allegiance, right down to the name of the team. “And why the ‘Maple Leafs’?” Sherman would shout. “It makes no sense.”
Discussions about politics resulted in more civil communication. Sherman taught the new Canadian resident (Steiner eventually became a dual citizen) the difference between the parliamentary system and the political structure in the United States. Sherman was a lifelong supporter of the Liberal Party of Canada, and he and Honey would from time to time host fundraisers at their home for local politicians and aspiring national leaders. He felt that the Liberals’ stated belief in a wide social safety net was most aligned to his own beliefs, though he hated paying taxes to support that net.
One day, Steiner overheard a conversation that years later he would recognize as the beginning of Sherman’s philanthropy. Steiner had dropped by Sherman’s office, and they were “shooting the shit” when the telephone rang. Sherman motioned to Steiner to stay; it would be a brief conversation. As Steiner divined from listening in, it was a Toronto rabbi calling, and he had a problem. There was a Hebrew school that had a bus for disabled children. The bus had broken down. Sherman nodded, listening. The rabbi was talking a lot, pleading his case, and Steiner could hear the man’s voice, though Sherman had the receiver pressed close to his ear. “Hmm…yes…hmm, uh-huh…yes. How much is it? Okay, I’ll give it to you. But on one condition. Do not tell anybody where you got it.”