LDC’s Rees wins Winchell award
94 YEAR OLD Herbert Rees shares a laugh with Dave Holwell, Managing Director of the Lord Dufferin Centre after Mr Rees was awarded the Rick Winchell Resident of the Year, presented by the Ontario retirement Communities Association to the outstanding senior's home resident of the year. Photo/MIKE MALONEYIn recognition of his many contributions to society, an Orangeville resident has won an award as Ontario’s outstanding seniors’ home resident of 2010.
Herbert Rees, who became a resident of Orangeville’s Lord Dufferin Centre last December after the death of his wife of 70 years, has had a many-faceted career as an engineer, inventor, volunteer and philanthropist.
On April 26, he received the Rick Winchell Resident of the Year award, named after the first CEO of the Ontario Retirement Communities Association (ORCA). The award was given during a special recognition luncheon at the ORCA’s annual conference, held at the Metro Toronto Conference Centre.
The Winchell award recognizes the outstanding contribution residents of an ORCAmember retirement home have made during their lifetime and the contributions they have made to their community.
On Friday, May 14, at 3 p.m., the Lord Dufferin Centre will host a “This is your life, Herbert Rees Celebration” that will be open to residents and staff, family and friends of Mr. Rees and many of the organizations to which he has contributed time and support.
One of the recipients is Headwaters Health Care Centre, where the laboratory department was recently named after Herbert and his late wife Susan, long-time supporters of the hospital, who recently donated $1 million to the institution.
Mr. Rees was nominated for the award by Sara Cronkwright, marketing coordinator for Lord Dufferin Centre, who said that when she met him last December, “I immediately knew there was something special about this man.”
MUSIC MONDAY: Music Monday is an event public schools across Canada observe annually to celebrate the importance of music and arts education in our schools. This year, the celebration was at Orangeville Baptist Church as part of the Dufferin Youth Festival of the Arts. Here, Grade 2 students from Montgomery Village Public School sing Lean On Me as a part of their Music Monday concert. Photo/LINDSEY PAPPNoting at the time “the determination in his eyes and the passion in his voice,” she said he clearly was devastated at the loss of his wife, with whom he had gone following his retirement to Third World countries where he provided vital technological advice.
The nomination was made with the benefit of an interview and some brief biographical material Mr. Rees provided on his Macintosh computer.
In it, he mentioned that he was born in 1915 in Vienna, “into a typical Viennese middle class family — public school, high school, university, mechanical engineering.”
He also enjoyed sports — soccer, tennis, skiing, hiking, water sports — while finding time for such things as opera, the theatre, concerts and studying.
“The following may sound like boasting,” he wrote, “but with my positive outlook on life I prefer to talk about successes rather than about failures and tragic events.
“In high school I had Latin and French, and from my frequent vacation travels through Central and Eastern Europe I learned several other languages, which came in quite handy, but I never learned English.”
In the interview, he told Ms. Cronkwright that after Hitler’s armies invaded Austria in 1938, “two Gestapo goons” broke into his apartment while he was preparing for his final university exams, searching for his strongly antifascist brother Tom, who had already fled with his parents to Tangier in northern Morocco.
Failing to find the brother, they arrested Herbert and took him to an assembly point for 1,500 Viennese who were taken to the Dachau concentration camp and later to Buchenwald..
“There was nothing ever published about that,” he remarked. He won’t discuss what happened during the nearly nine harrowing months of imprisonment before Susan secured his release by flying to Berlin, beyond saying that when he left only 600 of the initial 1,500 were still alive.
One condition of the release was that Susan must leave Austria or, as a Czechoslovak national, face deportation.
“Around the middle of February 1939, I was given my belongings, the little money I had, a cap to cover my shaven head and a ticket from Weimar to Vienna,” Mr. Rees recalled. “I was too dazed, and probably mentally too scarred, to remember how I got from Buchenwald to Weimar, or the trip home. In Susan’s apartment I slept for the first time in a real bed, heaven after the bunk beds and straw mattresses I was used to.”
Nor could he recall how he and Susan got out of Vienna. But he went by train to Marseille and then by freighter to Tangier where he and Susan joined his family. “I don’t even remember what happened at the Austro-Italian border. There would have been some serious checking, but they let me go. I still had my old Austrian passport and needed no visa for Italy or France.” Susan had left Vienna earlier, taking a luxury liner from Trieste to Gibraltar where there was a ferry to Tangier.
Susan’s mother, meanwhile, went from Vienna to London, where she joined relatives in the Freud family (which included famed psychiatrist Sigmund).
“When I arrived [at Tangier] I was taciturn, morose, often rude and mistrusting everybody,” he said. “It took several years before Susan’s understanding and patience brought me back to my old, fun-loving self.”
Their first task was to find jobs. Susan quickly secured work as a local merchant’s French-speaking governess, but there was little relevant work for a budding engineer, and he wound up working in a garage as a car mechanic.
“All I knew about motors was theoretical – how they work and how to calculate and design them.”
However, he learned quickly and within a year was put in charge of the repair shop. At one point, when gasoline had become particularly scarce, he designed a system that could be attached to large internal combustion engines to make them run on readily available charcoal.
He and Susan were married on March 15, 1939, the day Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, and in January 1940 they had their first child, Jeanette.
During the war, his parents and Tom’s family both emigrated to the United States, but he and Susan stayed on in Tangier until 1944, when friends who had already made it to Canada managed to get them Canadian immigration papers.
“The problem was how to get across the ocean, which was full of Allied convoys and enemy submarines. Also, Susan was pregnant with Peter, and according to the doctor it would be twins, for sure, by September. (My father was a twin.)”
So they had to stay until after Peter (big but not twins) was born. They only had German passports issued by the Dutch embassy in Tangier. (Both Austria and Czechoslovakia no longer existed.)
On obtaining U.S. transit visas and proof that they were harmless citizens, they left Tangier by plane to Lisbon, where they boarded the Serpa
They took a southerly route to avoid the North Atlantic war zone and arrived in Philadelphia 16 days later, enduring a fourday storm that left him, but not Susan and the kids, seasick.
Going by train to Chicago, they spent 10 days there in his parents’ apartment before heading to Toronto, where Susan’s mother greeted them.
“The war industry was humming, and I had no trouble finding a job at Amalgamated Electric, even though I did not speak a word of English. I was listed as an ‘enemy alien’ and had to report weekly to the RCMP, but I advanced nicely and stayed there for 13 years, before joining Husky [Injection Molding Systems in Bolton] where I stayed until my retirement in 1979.”
He said Susan’s English was good enough for her to get a job as a Kresge sales clerk. She later worked in a day care centre before opening one of her own and ultimately doing autism research work, en route getting a doctorate in psychology.
After he retired, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) asked him to volunteer as a consultant in his specialty, plastics manufacturing. (During his employment at Husky he had secured 58 U.S. patents.)
“Many developing countries needed help in this industry, and both Susan and I were willing and able to accept assignments.”
Until Susan’s death the couple lived in Mono, with Susan spending much of her time working at Charlestown, the residential school for boys 10 to 18 near Caledon village.
The couple took several ocean cruises and in the late 1990s returned to Tangier.
He said nothing much had changed, “but it all looked as if it had been neglected since the colonial powers from our time there were driven out. The doctor at the English mission who delivered Peter was still there, over 90 but still active in surgery.”
In addition to his other endeavours, Mr. Rees has been a writer, having published his seventh textbook on mold and product design in 2005, when he was 89.
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