McKAY, DONALD DOUGLAS 1920 – 2019 Born in the spring of 1920, in that part of Kildonan now absorbed into North Winnipeg, he grew up where his family settled in 1815. His parents are Isobel (MacDonald) McKay, a musician and painter and Douglas William McKay, a typographer and CCF politician. The third of four children – William, Jean, Donald and James – he spends his free summertime on the Red River and never learns to swim. Instead, he sails the boat he and his brother Bill put together out of a skiff bought from a family that makes a summer home on the riverbanks. He learns to drive on his uncle’s farm by the time he is eleven. He will love driving, fast and accurately, into his nineties.
In Kildonan, the school inspector takes an interest in this boy who reads everything, he joins with his father, the typographer, to convince Donald to stay in school to the twelfth grade. Saint John’s Technical School ends at the Eleventh, so he finishes with a year at United College, where his brother will teach after the war. Enlisting in the Navy as a seaman early in 1940, he musters out in 1946, a sub-lieutenant, qualified in signals and gunnery. Until the Canadian Navy has ships, he is a coast watcher, a thin young man in a roll-neck sweater with a navy colt and enormous binoculars. In the Battle of the Atlantic, he serves escorting convoys to Northern Ireland and the western edges of Scotland and into the Barents Sea to the northern tip of the USSR. Among his decorations is a medal for serving the Soviets in the Great Patriotic War. On the west coast, waiting for shipyards to refit his ship for the invasion of Japan, he is seconded to the US Navy to train crews in sub-hunting. Disgusted by the racism on American ships, he returns to Vancouver after three weeks.
In 1946, Donald McKay goes home to Winnipeg and to the woman his sister Jean first introduces him to: Thelma Mary Draper, the intense, blue-eyed daughter of Cockney immigrants. In June of 1947, in a ceremony presided over by his older brother, she and Donald marry, forging a partnership that will last until her death, the consequence of Alzheimer’s disease, sixty-six years later. He devotes every day of those last years to her company.
In Winnipeg after the war, he chooses a life in the insurance industry, first as an inspector, then a claims adjustor, then an underwriter, then – in Toronto and Cambridge, Ontario – as general manager and company president in several different firms: Federated Mutual, Prudential Assurance, Canadian Surety, The Gore Mutual and finally, the Facility Association. He regards his fields –– property and automotive insurance and bonding –– as a social glue, stabilizing communities against misfortune. He likes the Surety companies best, where policy holders enjoy benefits as shareholders and he is proudest of the work he does, as chair of both the Underwriters’ Association and the Underwriters’ Laboratories, making the case for seatbelt regulation and automotive safety across Canada.
He retires at seventy-three, to pass his time with Thelma. In all their time, Donald and Thelma work together to make a home, raise a family, travel and cultivate their own special interests. While he steals a few simple pleasures for himself – a weekend golf game and lunch with a friend, reading in economics and history, especially in naval history – he devotes most of his time to his family, his home, his church and his wife. After he retires, he walks with her for miles every day, using exercise to hold back the confusion that is overtaking her. Order appealed to him. Along with honesty, modesty and forbearance, it was a part of his code of civilization, a civilization he worked to help create, protect and pass on. When his eyes failed him and he could no longer read, he told stories. This is a shaving from those stories.
March 18, 2019, after a short illness, Donald Douglas McKay joined his wife, Thelma, his brothers William and James, his beloved sister Jean and his parents Douglas and Isobel McKay. He leaves his proud family: his children – Donald Douglas McKay Junior, Nancy Jane Perkins née McKay (wife of Victor Perkins), and Ross George McKay (husband of Nora McKay, née Salman); his seven grandchildren – Gregory (husband of Jen Laschinger), Alexander and Claire Perkins (children of Nancy and Victor Perkins), Heather, Rachel and Rebecca McKay (daughters of Ross and Nora McKay), Robin Simpson-McKay (daughter of Donald Jr. and Sandra Lee Simpson and partner of Rebecca Gaudreau); and his great-granddaughter, Lucy (child of Gregory and Jen). We will remember Donald McKay and mark his passing in the place where he lived happily for the last two years of his long life.
11:00 a.m., Saturday, April 20th, The Sunnybrook Veterans Chapel, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Bayview Campus, 2075 Bayview Avenue, Toronto, ON.