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“Winter nights are long, summer days are gone
Portage and Main fifty below.

Looking back at a prairie town
People ask me why I went away
To fly with the best, sometimes you have to leave the nest
But the prairies made me what I am today.”

- Randy Bachman – “Prairie Town”

The Wordless Wednesday experiment was fun. I still don’t really understand it, but seems a good way to see other sites and have other people look at yours. I don’t know where I stumbled upon it, but seems like most of the participants were stay-at-home Moms and Christian bloggers, not that there’s anything wrong with that, just not my usual audience I wouldn’t have thought.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to use the photo from yesterday for ages. It was one of my favorite family photos. It’s of my grandparents Victor and Myrtle Savino and my Aunt Sandi and I believe my Uncle Victor as well. I think my Mom wasn’t born yet. I may need to be corrected on this – Mom? The picture was probably taken in the late 40’s somewhere up in Ontario. We rediscovered this photo a few years ago when my Granddad got very ill. It was an emotional time anyway and when this picture turned up I was really struck by it. I’m not sure why, it’s a pretty standard family picture – the young Savinos out on a picnic. But I never knew my family this way. We’re not a particularly close family. My parents moved to Florida when I was ten and the rest of my Mom’s family stayed up in Canada. We saw my aunt and uncle at most once or twice a year at my grandparents lake house in Timmins. My grandparents we saw more often, but never like this. Never as a young family without all the baggage that you pick up going through life. My grandfather is probably about my age in this picture.

My Uncle Vic, who I believe is the baby in this photo, died about a month ago now. As I mentioned, I didn’t know him very well. So it was a very nice coincidence that a writer for the Winnipeg Free Press chose to do a feature on his life. It’s amazing what you can learn from an outsider’s point of view. This article is quite long, but I think interesting enough. I’ve edited it slightly to try and condense it a bit.

_______________________________________

From the Winnipeg Free Press – Saturday, July 7th, 2007

The tragedy of Vic Savino
He was young, idealistic and brilliant — and then he found cocaine

Lindor Reynolds

VIC Savino’s mom only looks fragile. She’s a tiny woman, small-boned and so slight it seems a hard breeze could carry her away. Her hair is carefully arranged, her outfit just so. She belongs to that generation of women who keep a stiff upper lip and never let strangers know their troubles.

But trouble has landed hard on Myrtle Savino’s doorstep. The 86-year-old woman has lost her only son, Victor. On a warm day in late June, Myrtle Savino bears both the emotional and literal weight of the box that holds her cremated son’s ashes. She insists on carrying Vic’s remains as she makes her way back to her room at the Holiday Inn, brushing off offers of help from her solicitous daughters. It’s the last act the mother can perform for the son. She’s made of strong stuff, this widow from Timmins. You can see it in the set of her jaw and her rigid posture, in her neat dress and her uncompromising nature. Truth be told, she lost her son years earlier. She and her daughters admit that much. Myrtle has come to Winnipeg only to see this thing through, listen to the kind words, see her grandsons and get on a plane back to [tag]Ontario[/tag]. What grief she feels remains hidden. Her anger, however, thrums near the surface.

Myrtle Savino lost Vic, aged 60, after he lingered in hospital, his end officially coming after a battle with bowel disease. He was already ravaged by years of alcohol and drug abuse. But she lost him, really, when she buried her husband four years earlier, when Vic came to the funeral and the magnitude of his drug use was apparent.

“He was obviously out of it. It was clear he was out of it.”

She may have begun to lose him some 20 years earlier, when her son entered into a common-law relationship with an aboriginal woman. She clearly didn’t approve of the ill-fated marriage.

“I think that’s part of his rebel nature,” she says tersely. “He became a champion for the cause.”

Her anger is there in the set of her jaw, her clipped words and her obvious reluctance to eulogize her son.

* * *

Vic Savino Jr. was born to Myrtle and Victor in Timmins on Jan. 20, 1947. His dad was a Manulife employee. His mom tended to the family. They were average folks, worked hard, made comfortable lives for themselves and had reasonable expectations. Vic’s sisters, Sandi and Judy, grew up just fine. Sandi, now Sandi Robertson, is 62 and still lives in Timmins. Judy Vedova, the younger sister, lives in Ormond Beach, Fla. They are sincerely nice women who seem bewildered by the life and death of their only brother. There’s a reluctance to speak much about Vic. They’re afraid of speaking ill of the dead.

“We knew Vic was in trouble,” Sandi Robertson says on the day of the memorial service. “We just didn’t know how bad it was.”

Vic was the professional in the family, the lawyer who got his education, articled with the best, set up his own practice and became known for his commitment to aboriginal legal issues. He raised his boys alone, a caring dad who worked long hours but still found the time to coach his son’s hockey team, take the kids to the lake and muck about on a small farm he owned near Steinbach. His son Joseph, now 21, remembers the good years.

“I was really close with him,” says the handsome young man. “He was a really good hockey coach. Hockey was our father-son time.”

Joseph remembers trips he and his dad would take, jaunts to Cuba and weekends at their cottage in [tag]Kenora[/tag]. His dad was a Shania Twain fan, thrilled to be at her 1999 concert in their shared hometown.

“The concert was Timmins’ Canada Day celebration and fireworks show,” Vic recounted in an online article. “Literally, half the town was there. She donated all of the net proceeds of the concert to four local charities, one of which is the Mattagami First Nation. And this is the woman, you may remember, who, at age 21, interrupted her study of music at the University of Toronto to go home to care for her younger siblings when her parents were tragically killed in a car accident.”

Kindness was a quality Vic prized. His eldest son says his dad’s open heart led him to be taken advantage of, that people recognized he’d give anyone a hand up.

In the early years, after his common-law relationship ended and he became a single father, in the years when he was building a practice, he developed a reputation as a caring but very private man. Vic raised the boys (younger son Victor is now 17) on a friendly block on McMillan Avenue and, when his practice took off, bought a home in Tuxedo. Ironically, that marked the beginning of the bad years.

“I’ve been exposed to a lot more than most people my age,” says Joseph Savino. “Most of it was good.”

The good ended when Vic began drinking and experimenting with drugs. He started with marijuana and ended with hard drugs, reputedly crack. He lost the house in Tuxedo, was arrested for drug possession and eventually disbarred. He was charged with assault on at least one of his common-law partners. It seemed the downward spiral couldn’t happen quickly enough.

“He lost his way,” says Joseph. “I think it started as a mid-life crisis and he lost his way.”

Vic’s sister Judy is blunt in her assessment.

“They went from having everything you wanted in life to having nothing,” she says, her lips a thin white line. “At the end he didn’t even have a roof over his head.”

* * *

Roland Penner, Manitoba’s former attorney-general, first encountered Vic Savino in 1972. Penner had been commissioned by the federal government’s Health and Welfare Department to evaluate university-based legal aid clinics. One of them was Halifax’s Dalhousie Clinic. Savino was working on his master’s degree at Dalhousie University with his thesis and practicum based on the clinic.

“And so we met,” Penner explains in an e-mail interview. “I interviewed him at some length and we hit it off both personally and ideologically.”

Before Penner left Halifax, he asked Savino to consider moving to Manitoba and either working with him at Legal Aid Manitoba or joining the law firm of Zuken Penner and Larsen. Vic agreed to move and articled with Penner’s firm for a year. He was called to the bar and asked to stay on with the firm as an associate. Soon after, he became a partner.

“Vic was a hard-working, indeed driven-to-a-fault, professional who, although soft-spoken, was all-too often uncompromising when, as is frequently the case, compromise is the only solution,” Penner says. “Early on he developed a particular interest in aboriginal law and eventually that became the centre of his professional life as it did with respect to his personal life.”

In 1979, Savino, who was an active member of the Fort Rouge NDP, wanted to earn the nomination in a byelection made necessary when Lloyd Axworthy decided to run federally. He asked for Penner’s support. Penner wasn’t then an NDP member, so Savino signed him up. In the end, Penner became the candidate — and MLA and attorney-general — with Savino as his official agent in the election.

“Vic was a very intelligent, hard working, committed professional who, in the end was destroyed by personal demons,” said Penner. “Although I admired his dedication to the poor and disenfranchised, towards the end of our professional relationship I found him very difficult to work with.”

* * *

When Vic Savino and his boys lived on McMillan, they became close with their neighbours. The Penner family (no relation to Roland) were nice working-class people whose kids played together and shared the dangerous and foolish adventures boys tend to find like moths find flames. Kathy Penner, her son Randall and daughter Elizabeth Klassen gather early one evening to remember Vic and to express their worries for the sons he has left behind.Joey and Randall did everything together from learning to ride bikes to almost burning down a trailer at the Savino cottage. Randall, now 22, wants the best of Vic Savino remembered. In a carefully written note, he characterizes his friend’s late dad as “a very professional character who kept his family and work life separated.

“Although his life was cut short by unfortunate circumstances, we will all remember him with fondness for his convictions, accomplishments, the wonderful lives he brought into this world, the way he lived, not the way he died.”

Kathy Penner, a gregarious woman who is clearly concerned about the future of the Savino boys, remembers Vic Savino as a father who gave his kids everything they wanted. There’s a hint of disapproval in her recital, the suggestion that the boys might have been better off if they’d had more attention and less stuff.

“Victor lived big,” says this open-hearted woman. “He had the latest model of cars, he did the drinking….”

Her voice trails off.

“I just worry so much about those boys.”

“By the end Vic was living on the streets,” says Randall Penner. “I was driving down Maryland one day and I saw him picking up cigarette butts.”

There’s a ghastly silence.

“When the house got taken from them they lost a lot of personal stuff,” Randall says. Joe, he says, is still angry.

* * *

Justice Murray Sinclair met Vic Savino when they were young lawyers. In 1982, Sinclair joined Savino’s firm. They would work together for about 18 months until the ambitious Sinclair left for a larger firm where he could gain more litigation experience.

“We were members of the left-leaning lawyers group,” laughs Sinclair. “We were just a bunch of lawyers who had a social conscience.”

He remembers the younger Savino as a smart, standup guy,

“Vic was a very solid guy. He was energetic as hell and very, very bright,” says Sinclair. “He had a big picture of himself and his career and where he wanted to be.”

Savino wanted to develop a boutique legal practice. He saw aboriginal law as his ticket to a successful practice.

“I think Vic saw that the aboriginal community was in the very early stages of its growth,” says Sinclair. “In the early ’80s this was a tremendous growth area.”

Savino’s liberal ideas, big heart and recognition that this specialty could put him on the legal map spurred him on. He took on pro bono cases, examined land claim issues and began to work in the area of aboriginal treaty rights. His interest in aboriginal affairs actually began in the ’70s, says Sinclair, when he taught what was then called native law at the University of Saskatchewan. The six-week summer course helped aboriginal students make a smoother transition to law school. Sinclair says Savino sometimes thumbed his nose at what he saw as the archaic conventions of the legal community.

“He had a resistance to authority,” Sinclair says dryly.

The two men kept in touch after Sinclair became a judge. They’d have lunch every couple of months, usually at Savino’s instigation.

“He would always have a cause he wanted to talk about,”

Eventually, the phone calls stopped. Sinclair didn’t think much of it until he started to hear rumours that Savino had lost his house, might have moved to the West Coast, was heavily into drugs. He had no idea where his former associate was. There’s true sadness in Sinclair’s voice when he talks about Savino.

“I suspect Vic saw injustice everywhere and it just finally got to him,” he says. “I think he just wasn’t meeting his own expectations.”

* * *

The downward trajectory of Vic Savino’s life is marked in headlines. In the early ’80s, the Law Society of Manitoba fined him $600 for professional misconduct relating to advertising. In 1985, he was convicted of assaulting a former common-law wife. In 1994, the town of Kenora sued him for comments he made about Kenora police in connection with the death of an aboriginal man in custody. He was forced to apologize. In 2003, he was charged with possession of crack cocaine and marijuana when Kenora police, acting on a tip, pulled over a pickup truck. In 2005, Savino was disbarred. The Law Society of Manitoba’s discipline case digest listed seven counts of professional misconduct, one of conduct unbecoming and a breach of the society’s code for his criminal conviction. On April 26, 2005, Vic Savino’s legal career was officially over.

* * *

Many of Savino’s former colleagues refuse to discuss him or their relationship with him. Graham Campbell is an exception, although he’s still cautious about what he says. Campbell, who knew Savino for 20 years, is not a lawyer. He’s a business broker and Savino invested with him. The men had lunch a couple of times a month. Although he says he knew next to nothing about his late friend’s personal life, he was asked to deliver the eulogy.

“The situation was, when he passed away, that I called his mother. She was virtually lost. She didn’t know anyone here. I sort of took over to help her.”

Campbell remembers Savino as a “very, very quick study.”

“He was a voracious reader. Say I went to him with a prospectus. Where many clients would not read the details, he would. I respected his brain. He was a very, very bright guy.”

Savino just lost his way, says Campbell, echoing so many others who knew him.

“It really was a situation where he kind of lost touch with people for awhile. The feeling I had was he really kind of treasured his two sons but he was having so many personal problems. I think he did the best he could.”

“There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us
Helpless, helpless, helpless….

Neil Young – “Helpless”

Image credits:

Winnipeg skyline

Timmins sign

Mattagami River