That voice is familiar but we can't seem to place the face. . . .
Over his more than 60 years at the CBC, the polymath Lister Sinclair, 85, has been known for many things: the writing of more than 400 plays, his stint as CBC vice-president, a term as head of programming, his boundless curiosity, his passions for Charles Darwin, the German mathematician Carl Freidrich Gauss and the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the mellifluous, cultured, honey-toned voice that from 1983 to 1998 hosted CBC Radio's Ideas, his strange but elegant bow ties, his mop of white hair, his beard.
Scratch the beard. Last Wednesday, while recovering from what was reported to be a pulmonary embolism at St. Michael's Hospital, the beard he'd worn for 70 years -- the beard he was already wearing when he first arrived at the CBC in 1944 -- was shaved off by nursing staff.
Some of those who visited Sinclair's book-littered bedside, including former CBC chairman Patrick Watson, queried this assault on the face of a national icon. But Sinclair said mildly, "I should have told them I wear a beard," and praised his nurses for their dedication during his two-week stay.
Unlike Samson, losing hair has not drained Sinclair's energies. This fall he plans to teach at the University of Toronto's continuing-studies department -- a course ranging from the Basques to Don Quixote.
As well, Sinclair and Ideas producer Sara Wolch are still finishing a script for a radio program based on the book Parkinson's Law -- a critique of organizations and their structures first published in 1957 by C. Northcote Parkinson. Sinclair has been intrigued by Parkinson's ideas for decades, but he's only now getting around to finishing his long-held plans to do a program on the man who said, "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. General recognition of this fact is shown by the proverbial phrase, 'It is the busiest person who has time to spare.' " --