TORONTO -- On the surface, Charles Fremes looked every inch the driven public-relations man: educated, witty, urbane, able to come up with a solution to a problem in a hurry. He rose from assistant to a federal cabinet minister to civil servant, a brewery executive, then president of a large PR agency.
But his friends and family knew him as a man who could mimic the play-by-play of Danny Gallivan, the long-time CBC announcer for Montreal Canadiens games, and follow that with an imitation of the bilingual announcer at the old Montreal Forum. He picked up those tricks, and his love for the Canadiens, when he was at McGill and, later, working for Molson.
For the past 12 years, Mr. Fremes was president of Edelman Canada, the arm of the big New York-based PR agency. When he took it over, Edelman was little more than a sports agency, with Imperial Tobacco as its main client. He transformed the Canadian branch into a full-service firm with offices in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
"Charles helped to shape modern public relations in Canada. His work at Molson, where he served as VP of corporate affairs, on prevention of drunk driving and then in support of HIV-AIDS research was the first of its kind in the country," said CEO Richard Edelman, whose father founded the agency.
During his decade at the firm, Mr. Fremes dealt with high-profile situations ranging from the product launch for Sirius satellite radio to the Ontario government's SARS crisis. Some of Edelman Canada's other clients included the CBC, the law firm Torys, and Hudson's Bay Co.
His co-workers say Mr. Fremes's gifts included his penchant for remaining calm during a crisis and his ability to look at a problem in several different ways.
"He was brilliant that way. He saw issues from different angles," said Freda Colbourne, who worked with him at both Molson and Edelman. "He was always so witty and easy to work with. When we were in the middle of a crisis, he'd say, 'Relax, it's just public relations.' "
Charles Fremes was born in Toronto, where he grew up in the north Toronto neighbourhood of Willowdale. His father, Arthur, was a pediatrician - as a boy, Charles would sometimes follow him on his rounds of house calls. He attended Earl Haig Secondary School and was an Ontario Scholar, one of the top students in his class.
As a young man, he was an ace golfer. His brother John recalled that when he was 16 or 17, he shot a hole-in-one at the Bayview Country Club.
"Whatever he took on, he became passionate about, whether it was golf or languages," John said from his home in Los Angeles. "When he learned French, he wanted to speak it perfectly. Later, as an adult, he took up Italian and made sure he spoke proper Italian."
Mr. Fremes had almost a childlike curiosity about anything and everything - he read books, magazines and newspapers, in part to keep on top of what was happening in the world, but also because he wanted to know.
After high school, he went to McGill, where he studied political science and French. With that background, he worked in Ottawa from 1974 to 1977 as an assistant to Liberal Hugh Faulkner, who held the portfolio of secretary of state, among others. During this time, Mr. Fremes made lifelong friends in the press gallery and the civil service.
"We used to play baseball in a league called Hacks and Flacks," said the CBC's Peter Mansbridge, who was a reporter at the time. Many of the Ottawa group remained close. "A lot of people relied on Charles for personal advice. He was good at solving those kinds of problems, too."
In 1978, Mr. Fremes took a year off to get a master's degree in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard. He returned to Ottawa and worked as director of communications in the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources (now Natural Resources Canada). Later in life, many people would find it hard to believe that Mr. Fremes started life as a civil servant.
His first foray into private business was working for Foster Advertising, where he was vice-president of public affairs from 1980 to 1984. He then worked another four years for the PR arm of Decima Research, before landing a job as senior vice-president at Molson Breweries. The job was based in Toronto, but his fluent French helped.
An important contribution at Molson was to convince the company to sponsor an AIDS awareness strategy.
"Molson was the first brewery to reach out with an AIDS campaign. Big companies were nervous about that sort of thing back then but Charles got them to do it. Among other things, it was a way to reach out to the gay community," Ms. Colbourne said. He also came up with innovative campaigns to talk about the risks of drinking and driving, including ads that used a pregnant woman and father-and-son auto racers Mario and Michael Andretti.
After seven years at Molson, he moved to Edelman, where his job was to build the Canadian arm into a full-service operation - and he succeeded. When he died, Edelman Canada had more than 100 employees. He recently scored a coup by buying an agency in Vancouver, expanding Edelman's reach to the West Coast.
To relax, Mr. Fremes enjoyed gardening - it became such a passion that he even wore a garden trowel as a lapel pin. As an adult, with two degrees, he went back to Ryerson University to study landscape architecture at night.
"He loved nothing more than designing a garden and then getting out there and getting his hands dirty for eight hours digging and planting," said his wife, Judith McDermid. "We planted 3,000 bulbs last fall and were waiting for them to come up."
He died after a heart attack in his garden.
"If it can happen to him, a man in his prime of life, a man who took obsessive care of his health, it can happen to you and me," friend Bob Ramsay said in a eulogy at Mr. Fremes's memorial service.
CHARLES FREMES
Charles Fremes was born in Toronto on May 26, 1949. He died of a heart attack in Toronto on May 7, 2007. He was 57. He is survived by wife Judith McDermid, daughter Danielle, father Arthur and his wife Yaffa, sister Margaret and brothers John, Dan and Ron.
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