Friends of June Callwood, a talented journalist and passionate social activist who died Saturday, recalled a person who did more than talk the talk about injustice.
“Many writers write about suffering, but June would take that one step further and she would do something about it,” writer Susan Swan said of her longtime friend.
Callwood, a companion of the Order of Canada, passed away peacefully early Saturday at the age of 82 after a long battle with cancer.
Some of the issues she cared about included women’s’ rights, gay rights, AIDS suffers and the under-privileged, especially children living in poverty.
Her death was confirmed by Casey House, the Toronto AIDS hospice she helped found in 1988. The hospice, a world’s first, is named after her son Casey Frayne. He died in a motorcycle crash in 1982 at the age of 20.
“Casey House is in mourning for the loss of our dear friend and champion. June Callwood, journalist and activist, wife and mother, dreamer and pragmatist, will be missed. She died peacefully in the care of her family and close friends, after a courageous and well-spent life,” stated a news release from Casey House.
The downtown facility has provided palliative and supportive care to more than 2,500 people.
She also founded hostels for homeless youth, battered women and a home for teenage mothers and their babies.
“I thank god for her, that there’s people like her in the community that care,” said Gwendolyne Martinez, a single mother and Jessie’s Centre volunteer.
“We knew each other, June and I, and she was an inspiration for me to keep fighting in life, fighting for life,” said Dwayne Ashwell, a resident of Casey House.
A tough upbringing
Callwood was born on June 2, 1924, in Chatham, Ont. However, she grew up mainly in the village of Belle River, the eldest of two daughters in an unstable family.
The poverty of the Great Depression years of the 1930s stayed with her forever.
“What I found about the hurt was that I felt shut out,” she said in an interview when she was 78. “That feeling has never left me. I have felt like an outsider all my life and still do.”
Her career as a writer began when she was just 16, working as a junior reporter at the Brantford Expositor and earning just $7.50 per week.
Two years later, in the midst of the Second World War, Callwood relocated to Toronto and managed to get a job as a reporter at The Globe and Mail, where she eventually met her husband Trent Frayne, a sports writer there.
The couple married when Callwood was 19, but she continued to use her maiden name at a time when The Globe didn’t hire married women, according to the biography provided by Casey House.
In the late 1940s, she picked up her pilot’s licence. She would take up gliding in the early 1990s.
Her activism started in the 1960s. In 1968, she got arrested at a Toronto protest over treatment of “hippies” in Yorkville.
“They put me in a cell smeared with shit, which was a mean thing to do,” Callwood recalled in an April 1993 story in Saturday Night magazine. “I thought I was ruined. In my generation, you didn’t get arrested unless unless you were an awful person. One year later, I was B’nai Brith Woman of the Year!”
Here are some of her other honours:
- Fifteen honorary doctorates,
- The Order of Ontario (1988),
- The Canadian News Hall of Fame (1984), and
- The Toronto Arts Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award (1990).
Her book titles include The Law is Not for Women (1976), Portrait of Canada (1981), Trial Without End (1995), the story of Charles Ssenyonga, who infected several women with AIDS, and The Man Who Lost Himself (2000). She co-wrote How to Talk With Practically Anybody About Practically Anything with U.S. TV personality Barbara Walters.
She once said Frayne was always supportive and never threatened by her successes.
“He’s never felt that if I grew, he would be smaller,” Callwood once said.
A trying period occurred for her in the early 1990s.
She had founded Nellie’s, a women’s hostel in 1974. But in late 1991, she found herself accused of being emotionally and verbally abusive to women of colour who worked there. Callwood quit the board in 1992.
In the 1993 Saturday Night article, she described the experience as the worst thing to happen to her since her son’s death.
Even in her last days, Callwood still spoke out for her causes.
“She was still giving me advice, about how to make sure this city is welcoming for everyone, particularly children,” said David Miller, Toronto’s mayor, after he visited her in hospital.
Swan saw Callwood at a recent event.
“I said, ‘I hope you know how much we all love you’, and I cried and she cried, but I did get to tell her how important she has been to all of us,” she said.
Callwood is survived by her husband, two daughters and son.
With a report from CTV’s Denelle Balfour and files from The Canadian Press