Devoted to medicine and the arts

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This article was published 27/04/2024 (879 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was a few months into his overseas tour when a 20-year-old Canadian air force navigator named Douglas MacEwan left the theatre of war behind in order to experience theatre itself.

When he enlisted in 1943, MacEwan was posted to a flying patrol squadron under Coastal Command, responsible for patrolling the Bay of Biscay and the inner British coasts, scanning to detect any threats in Allied waters during the latter days of the Battle of the Atlantic.

“It was our job to catch (the U-boats) before they preyed on any of these vessels and prevented their supplies from reaching England,” he later recalled.

But in the summer of 1944, MacEwan — born in Ottawa and raised first in Butte, Mont., and later Montreal — was granted a brief reprieve from flotational threats, sent for a session of land-based flight training in Cambridge, about 100 kilometres north of London’s New Theatre. That summer, the Old Vic repertory company was putting on Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and Shakespeare’s Richard III, with the cast led by an actor named Laurence Olivier.

The Guardian’s review called Olivier’s Richard III a “career-best performance,” and MacEwan couldn’t have argued even if he had disagreed; those first professional stage performances he’d ever encountered featured perhaps the greatest actor in the history of modern English theatre, operating at the peak of his powers, the production made even more vital by the threats of war surrounding it.

MacEwan, a radiologist and philanthropist who died in Winnipeg this year at the age of 99, certainly never forgot the war, but neither could he ever escape the magnetic pull of the fine arts.

Seven decades later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, MacEwan raised nearly $130,000 for local arts groups with his daily, kilometre-long walk campaign. But his commitment to arts in this city started almost as soon as he arrived.

After his time overseas — where MacEwan had also seen performances by the Sadler’s Wells ballet company — he returned to Montreal, where he studied chemistry and later received a medical degree from McGill University in 1952. MacEwan worked first at the Montreal Children’s Hospital and then at Montreal General before being asked to become the head of radiology at the Winnipeg General Hospital, now known as Health Sciences Centre.

He and his wife Elizabeth, along with their four children, arrived in the city to the cold welcome of the blizzard of 1966.

“They told us it wouldn’t always be like this,” recalls MacEwan’s daughter Elspeth.

Despite the weather, the MacEwans’ arrival was well-timed for the patriarch, who was able to carve out a medical niche while also getting in on the ground floor of the local arts scene, rapidly expanding under the leadership of the Manitoba Centennial Corp., which would cut the ribbon on the concert hall in 1968.

MacEwan quickly became an annual subscriber to the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Manitoba Theatre Centre, Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and the Manitoba Opera, constantly searching for ways to get others to join him in the seats.

At the hospital, and as a professor at the University of Manitoba’s medical school, MacEwan had a reputation as a calm, down-to-earth professional, eager to share knowledge, says Linda Horodecki, who worked as MacEwan’s secretary from 1969 through 1973.

“Often there was a strata, with doctors on one level and all others below,” recalls Horodecki, 76. “With him, there was no separation at all. I was a colleague like any other colleague.”

In 1969, MacEwan noticed that his secretary frequently had her nose in textbooks, so he called the U of M’s medical library to give Horodecki permission to borrow books that were unavailable to the general public under his name; after her time in the secretarial pool, Horodecki earned a bachelor degree in arts and a master’s degree in library science.

Those books were one generous gesture. Another came when MacEwan slipped Horodecki a Christmastime bonus in the form of two tickets to the RWB performance of Nutcracker. “I had never seen a professional performance,” says Horodecki, who has held season tickets at Royal MTC, the ballet and the opera. “It opened a door, I suppose, to a new possibility.”

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MacEwan and his wife Elizabeth were fixtures in the seats of the city’s performance halls, and the couple often brought their children to camp at Stratford and Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario, where the adults took in as much of the Stratford and Shaw festivals as possible.

In the 1980s, MacEwan became the president of the Radiological Society of North America — one of only five Canadians to hold that title — but also joined the RWB’s board and fundraising council, rallying significant financial support from the medical community during the campaign to build the organization’s current building at 380 Graham Ave.

When Elizabeth died in 2007, she and her husband had just established the Douglas and Elizabeth MacEwan Scholarship Fund. The largest scholarship at the RWB school, it ranges from $20,000 to $35,000 per year, supporting 31 students in the last 17 years.

But regardless of how impactful MacEwan’s earlier philanthropic efforts were, none received as much attention as his last, great push: a 96-kilometre walkathon in the months leading up to his 96th birthday.

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When the pandemic struck, Dr. MacEwan’s children were nervous that their dad might feel too cooped up in the house he’d lived in since the family’s Winnipeg arrival in 1966. They asked him to send a daily email to let them know how he was doing.

The first few were short. “I’m alive,” or “I’m going out to the garden.” But by the summer of 2020, MacEwan had something else to write about.

A wealthy family friend had challenged him to walk 96 kilometres — one for each year he’d lived — as Nov. 11, his birthday, neared. If he walked alone, the benefactor would donate $500 per kilometre to help MacEwan raise money for the local arts organizations struggling through the pandemic.

If MacEwan walked with someone else, the donation would double.

Soon, a socially distanced walk with Dr. MacEwan — dressed for the weather with his signature urban walking poles — through his Tuxedo neighbourhood became a hot ticket. A neighbour of his daughters once asked whether she could join MacEwan on a daily trek, and the doctor had to check his schedule to make sure he didn’t double-book an appointment.

The arts organizations the walk supported — the RWB, RMTC, Manitoba Opera and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra — began sending representatives to MacEwan’s doorstep. “Actors, dancers, symphony players,” recalls Elspeth. “My dad had a very sociable time during the pandemic, even if it was six feet apart.”

“For a musician, he was a joy to talk to because he really understood what music and art is for and why it’s important,” says Julian Pellicano, the principal conductor for the RWB and associate conductor for the WSO.

“It was a ray of light in a very dark time for our organizations that someone would think about making an effort to help us survive,” says Manitoba Opera CEO and general director Larry Desrocher. “Ninety-six years old, doing what he could to make a contribution. It was very humbling.”

“At this point in time, half the world was making sourdough bread and watching Tiger King, and here he was, wanting to be with people,” remembers Camilla Holland, the executive director of RMTC. “(Walking with him) was a very warm and welcome moment.”

MacEwan’s dedication to the arts was obvious, says Holland, adding that he had an “extraordinary memory of the shows he had seen.”]

In his later years, when he had stopped driving, MacEwan would take the bus downtown for evening performances. “I’d sometimes say, ‘Dr. MacEwan, please let me drive you home,’” she recalls.

So it was no surprise that MacEwan refused to let a pandemic slow him down completely. “There was something in his energy that was transcendent,” recalls Stephane Leonard, the RWB School’s director, who walked with MacEwan as well. “He was surprising fast. I had a few knee surgeries after my dance career, and I had to work to keep up with him. Like I’ve said, he was on a mission.”

By the time his birthday came around, the mission was more than accomplished: more than $124,000 was raised to be split among the four organizations; for his efforts, MacEwan received the Arts Champion Award from the Winnipeg Arts Council.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com