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.

Originally published in the Globe and Mail.

Roy I. Wolfe, Professor of Geography Emeritus, York University, died on November 15, 2014, surrounded by his family. He was born Israel Wolbromski in Staszow, Poland, on November 19, 1917, and came to Canada via Germany in 1922.
He was predeceased by his parents Wolf and Ethel (née Starkman), by Rosemary (née Schawlow) his devoted wife of 55 years, and by his daughter Cynthia.
Brother of Raymond (Ursula) and Eleanor (Murray Enkin). Proud and loving father of Robert David (Jacalyn Duffin), Richard (Kristine Anderson), Judy (Marc Glassman) and Mitzi (Eyal Zohar); grandfather of Joshua (Jennifer Macleod), Jessica (Daniel Goldbloom), Rachael, Daniel, Emily and Zachary; and great-grandfather of Tycho and Maxwell.
Roy Wolfe’s education was interrupted by the Depression and the Second World War. He received a BA in Biology from McMaster University, in 1940, and a MA in biology, in 1947, from the University of Toronto after serving overseas with the army medical corps. During the war the RCMP blocked his promotion from the ranks to officer because he had belonged to a communist organization in the 1930’s.
He listened to Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven and Mahler in his head all his life, and he was singing Gilbert and Sullivan songs until the end, despite having been profoundly deaf since June 29, 1947. Known as Izzy to his family, he spoke Yiddish, English, French and German, and could lip read in all of them, sometimes even distinguishing regional accents in English. He recalled Shakespeare sonnets and parodies of romantic poems from memory with equal delight, and calculated logarithms in his head for recreation. He was an astute film critic, partly because he depended on stories being told visually. He liked people who smiled, especially pretty girls, and anyone who was willing to engage in a good argument, about anything. He was proud of his invitations from C.A. Doxiadis to the Delos Symposiums in the 1960’s, where he could argue with such twentieth-century intellectual giants as Margaret Mead, Buckminster Fuller and Arnold Toynbee.
In 1956, while working as a planner in the Department of Highways of Ontario (DHO), Roy completed his University of Toronto PhD in geography on summer cottages in the province. His numerous scholarly publications on vacation travel founded the new sub-field of recreation geography; he also made significant contributions to the literature on transportation and planning. He left the DHO in 1967 to accept an appointment at York University, a belated return to his professional beginnings as a high school science teacher, in Fort Frances, in the early 1940’s. At York he lectured to large classes and ran graduate seminars where a student would take notes for him so that he could follow the discussion. He loved teaching, and although he could be formidably demanding (often covering term papers with blunt comments in red ink), his students loved him- he won an OCUFA teaching award in 1981, cited as ‘the only prof who listens.’ During his career, he also held numerous visiting appointments including at the University of Washington, St Mary’s University, and Scarborough College of the U of T. After leaving DHO he was also active as a planning consultant, participating in nearly two dozen tourism-related projects for governments in Canada, the United States and the UK. He had two pieces of advice for planners, which exemplified his approach to life and to politics as well as his work: first, leave people alone; second, you can’t leave people alone. Roy Wolfe retired from York in 1983 but remained an active member of the Rosedale and Bayview Village tennis clubs.
He had been an early user of mainframe computers for data analysis at the DHO, but he was always a skeptic of the telephone, especially long distance calls. Nevertheless, at 78, he got a Mac. The internet revolutionized his life by increasing his contact with his family and friends, offering an infinite outlet for his insatiable curiosity, and introducing him to Slate and the Onion.
He was fiercely independent, indeed he did many things fiercely, but was cracking jokes until the end, always reminding us that it is better to be lucky than smart. He was both.
His family is eternally grateful for the warm care of the outstanding staff at Kensington Gardens, where he had lived for ten years, and for the love and kindness of his personal caregivers.
Donations may be made to Kensington Gardens (https://www.kensingtonhealth.org/Donate-now.aspx), or to the R.I. Wolfe Scholarship fund at York University.
Memorial to be held Saturday, December 13 in Toronto. Contact the family for details.