Gerald Owen, writer and editor at The Globe and Mail, has died at age 70.Peter Power/The Globe and Mail
Gerald Owen, who has died at age 70, capped a long career as a writer and editor as a member of the editorial board of The Globe and Mail. He had been managing editor and, briefly, editor of The Idler magazine of Toronto, managing editor of Books in Canada, and an editor and writer at The National Post before working at The Globe from 2007 to 2017. His prodigious learning, precise command of language, and deep, resonant voice made him a striking presence in journalism.
Gerald Ivon Strachan Owen was born in Toronto on Sept. 2, 1953, the second of two sons of Ivon Owen and Patricia Heighington Owen. He grew up in a learned and literary home. His parents were among the founders of The Tamarack Review, the leading literary magazine in Canada in the 1960s. As a teenager he helped with the review’s mailings and met some of the rising figures in CanLit.
Ivon Owen worked at the Oxford University Press in Toronto, where he became chief editor. Gerald’s grandfathers were E.T. Owen, professor of Greek at Trinity College in the University of Toronto, and Wilfrid Heighington, a lawyer, politician and writer.
Gerald went to the University of Toronto Schools, popularly known as “the brains’ school,” and stood out as a “big brain.” He mastered Latin and ancient Greek, and later Hebrew.
In 1970, his brother, Kenneth, five years older, who had been an outstanding student at the University of Toronto and was studying in England on a Commonwealth Scholarship, disappeared. No trace of him was ever found. Not long after, his parents divorced.
Under these clouds, Gerald spent a year in Europe, including some months in Greece visiting ancient sites, and then in 1972 went to Trinity College where he studied political science. He entered the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in 1976. He was one of a small group of classmates who formed a reading group to study ancient philosophy. Some had been students of the American philosopher Allan Bloom when he was at the University of Toronto. Gerald’s command of ancient Greek made him a key member of the group, which continues to this day.
Though he had uncles at the two largest law firms in Toronto, he articled in a small firm and, when called to the bar in 1981, joined another lawyer in a store front office in the east end of Toronto. They employed a blind secretary who used a braille typewriter. He did a lot of “family law,” a term he found amusingly euphemistic because of the frequency of distressing divorce and custody battles involved.
The practice did not go well. His associate proved unreliable. Mr. Owen said he lost $100,000 in his practice. As it went down he became a contributing editor of Impulse, an arts and culture magazine founded by the artist Eldon Garnet. In 1985 he began writing for The Idler.
In 1986 he closed his practice and joined The Idler as managing editor. He became its editor in 1991, the year it won Magazine of the Year at the National Magazine Awards. He left The Idler at the beginning of 1992 when there was a falling-out between some at The Idler and its founder David Warren, who had left to work at The Kingston Whig Standard and then returned. In 1992 he received the 125th Anniversary of the Confederation of Canada Medal.
Mr. Owen freelanced and wrote for The Lawyers Weekly and business publications before, in 1995, becoming managing editor of Books in Canada under promising new owners. In February 1998 he became editor, but in September he had not been paid for four months and quit just in time to be hired by The National Post, which was about to be launched. It was his first job with a large, well-funded company.
He did not write regularly for The Post, working mainly as an editor, including flagging copy that might be libellous. He could write about anything from day-to-day politics, to business, or the law, but only he could write in The Post about Hans-Georg Gadamer, the German philosopher, who spent some time in Canada in the 1970s, or the time the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas joined with his philosophical antagonist the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in a statement on the Iraq war.
The Post’s founding editor, Ken Whyte, writes: “He had an incredible fund of knowledge – if a question came up that no one around the table could answer, the last resort was always ‘ask Gerald.’ You never had to worry about any copy he handled, and as a result, he tended to get many of the more difficult editing assignments. He was consummately professional, quiet and steady, although if you ever got him to look up from his screen and talk about a story or an issue, he was wonderfully engaging and funny.”
When Mr. Owen left The Post, Robert Fulford wrote in a farewell note that “he always fought a noble (even if at times losing) battle against tired language, exemplified by the ever-proliferating jargon words such as iconic, literally, and convergence.”
Moving to The Globe and Mail in 2007, Mr. Owen wrote mainly anonymously as a member of the editorial board writing editorials. He continued editing and as Reader Response Editor handled issues raised by readers about articles.
On the side, Mr. Owen regularly did scholarly work. He helped edit works of the philosopher George Grant and in 1993 presented a paper on him to a meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association. He contributed a chapter to a book on the Supreme Court of Canada’s use of The Charter, on the Crown’s duty of disclosure in criminal prosecutions.
In the late 1990s, Mr. Owen and his wife, Katherine Anderson, originally from Halifax, moved to the house that had been in his family since his grandfather built it in 1910. They were tireless and generous hosts holding gatherings large and small. Sometimes they were what the late John Bentley Mays called “parties with a purpose,” when an issue was discussed or a cause promoted.
Always a great walker, Mr. Owen would regularly walk the three miles to or from The Globe offices and his home.
Mr. Owen had a curious charisma. Though he could be quiet and reserved, when engaged he could become very animated. He was gregarious and keen to know people, making and keeping up with friends of all sorts throughout his life. He kept in touch with his wide extended family, whose exact relation to him he knew if they did not. From his days at The Idler, where he was revered by the interns, he attracted young admirers.
Though deeply knowledgable about religion and theology he had never been a churchgoer until about 20 years ago he became a Roman Catholic and a faithful communicant at St. Vincent de Paul Church in Toronto.
Several years ago Mr. Owen began to show signs of early onset dementia. His wife kept him as engaged as possible through a grim, relentless decline. He died on Nov. 27 in the home where the Owen family had lived for 113 years.
He leaves his wife, Ms. Anderson.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this obituary said Gerald Owen’s house was purchased by his grandfather in 1911, so it was owned by the family for 112 years. But in fact the house was built by his grandfather a year earlier, in 1910, so it has been in the family for 113 years. This version has been corrected.