This biographical note was published in the newsletter of the York Geography Alumni in October 2004

Roy bio

ROY WOLFE 1917-2014

Roy Wolfe, Professor of Geography at York University (1967-83), died November 15 2014, four days short of his 97th birthday, at the Kensington Gardens retirement home, on Brunswick Avenue, Toronto. Roy and his wife, Rosemary, moved there in 2004; sadly, Rosemary died later that year.
Roy was born Israel Wolbromski, at Staszow, Poland in 1917. In 1922 the family immigrated to Canada, where he acquired his English name. He grew up in the Kensington Market area of Toronto, where, symmetrically, he also spent his last years. Of Jewish parentage, in adulthood he avowed secularism, even anti-Zionism. In 1940 he took a Bachelor’s degree in Biology on a scholarship at McMaster University, with which he taught school for two years at Fort Frances, NW Ontario. During WWII he served in the Medical Corps of the Canadian Army, after which for two years (1945-47) he headed the Visual Education Service of the Veterans’ Rehabilitation Institute within Ryerson Polytechnic Institute (now University). In these last two years he studied for the Master’s degree in Biology at the University of Toronto, for which his thesis concerned the variation of finger prints across different Canadian ethnic populations.

Roy and Rosemary met at the University of Toronto, where Rosemary, from Mount Vernon, New York, was studying English at Victoria College. She was a sister of Nobel Prize-winner Arthur Schawlow, latterly of that university, then of Bell Labs. They wed in 1949. Roy moved to the Ontario Department of Highways in 1952, where he rose through positions as Statistician, Planner, Geographic Advisor, and Research Geographer. Along the way, having absorbed Geography as a discipline akin to his own research, in 1956 he obtained the PhD in Geography at Toronto, for which his dissertation concerned summer cottages in Ontario (i.e., all of Ontario!), their location, ownership, use, and owners’ travel patterns, with an examplary focus on Wasaga Beach (where his family had a cottage) and surrounding lakeshores of Simcoe County. “Wasaga Beach: The Divorce from the Geographic Environment, ‘ appeared in the second volume of The Canadian Geographer , (1952). Roy’s employment and study meshed in his involvement in planning Ontario’s “Roads to Resources”. It was from this last position that he was recruited in 1967 into the 8-strong faculty of the Geography Department at York University (as Associate Professor, to satisfy Senate regulations) and, rightfully, named Full Professor a year later.

Before we became colleagues at York, while a graduate student at McGill, I had warmed to Roy Wolfe, whose review of a Geography of Canada showed how forceful a character he could be, by very negatively referring to a similar work co-authored by one of the McGill Geography faculty! At York, I quickly recognized the new recruit, who had moved into a double office in Winters College, from where he mock-ranted and mock-raved, making firm collegial friends with everyone who took him as he wished to be taken – not too seriously! The double office accommodated his complete deafness (since 1947), for which he needed to be within sight of a secretary. Poor girl, you might think, but we all were very lucky that Roy was served by a succession of women who saw the human being just underneath the bluster.

Suffered in his late 20’s, the cause of Roy’s deafness was not diagnosed, but he specified that a post-mortem should attempt to explain it. Certainly, it was no impediment to his teaching. He quickly became a favourite of students, not least because he paid close attention to interpreting their questions and comments during and after class. His lip-reading skill was extraordinary; he could even tell what accent you spoke in, while humour was never far behind the encyclopedic front. He was at his most enthusiastic as a teacher when he was with students in the field, as on Field Camp in his old Simcoe County haunt (or with honey-garlic chicken wings at lunch in his office). As his office neighbour from 1969-83, I became accustomed to the uproar next-door, accompanying either an evening graduate class, or discussion of an essay with an undergraduate. He was an absolute fiend for improving students’ writing, in the tried and true Strunk and White tradition; he even wrote his own version as a seven-page hand-out. The impact of his teaching fired up a colleague in the Social Science Division, who in 1981 compiled Roy’s successful nomination for the annual teaching award of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA). His classes were extemporary; I never saw him anywhere, at any time, writing lecture notes, and I was quite familiar with his home domestic scene, as he invited me often to an evening of billiards on the ¾-size table in the basement of the Wolfe-pack’s den in Rosedale.

The Geography of Recreation and Transportation was the ‘hub’ of Roy’s teaching, research, and numerous high-profile consulting jobs, completed through R.I.Wolfe Associates, and his affiliation with Kates, Peat, Marwick. He was a member of the IGU Commissions on Trans-portation, and on Tourism and Recreation. He lectured as visitor at the State University of Washington, Pullman, WA., Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, NS, York’s Atkinson College, and at Toronto. He and Rose were invited by convenor Aristotle Doxiadis to the “Delos Symposium”, a Brains Trust on human settlements, of which he proudly displayed a group photo, prominently featuring Arnold Toynbee.

Before and after he joined York, Roy published numerous in-house reports which helped frame transportation policy in the heady days of provincial growth under the Frost, Robarts, and Davis governments; see, for instance, “Recreational Travel: The New Mig-ration, “The Canadian Geographer , Vol. 10, No. 1 (1966), pp. 1-14. Within that batch appeared “Transportation and Politics” (Van Nostrand, Reinhold, 1964). Then, John Warkentin asked Roy to write a chapter on Canada’s economic development for his “Canada: a Geographical Interpretation” (Methuen, 1968), the CAG’s contribution to Canada’s centenary. That chapter slid off Wolfe’s pen like an invitation to a sumptuous, celebratory dinner – so orderly, so pointed, so full, so succinct, and so dynamically illustrated; University of Toronto cartographer, Geoff Matthews, worked wonders with Roy’s profusion of diagrams. Did his deafness contribute to his graphicacy?

So easy was it to be captivated by the energy, humour and originality of Roy Wolfe’s ideas and his more visible works, that it stretches credulity to realize that between 1950 and 1980 he published nearly 40 journal articles and chapters in other books. It’s not at all easy to figure just where he found the time. Then, on retirement he settled into the recliner with his New Yorker magazines, with his several editions of Macs corresponding with all and sundry, with closed-captioned “information” TV, and more and more naps as the years passed.

Roy leaves two siblings – Eleanor (Murray Enkin), and Raymond (Ursula), two sons – Bob (Jackie Duffin) and Rick (Kris Anderson), and two daughters – Judy (Marc Glassman) and Mitzi (Eyal Zohar), six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
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Ian Brookes, York Geography Department, 1965-95.