DEWAR, Stephen Winston – Stephen Winston Dewar, aged 76, peacefully, his family with him at his bedside. Brilliant, courageous, and so kind, with an exceptional talent for friendship, Stephen was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1943, the eldest son of Thorun (nee Johnson), a gifted teacher, and Winston Dewar, a well respected banker. His uncles included an MP, two high school teachers, a banker, a fine musician, a photographer, and a WWII test pilot. More distant relations included a renowned chemistry professor, an internationally known economist, one of Iceland’s leading actresses, and the Arctic explorer/ethnograher Vilhjalmur Stefansson, which may explain Stephen’s unshakable confidence that he could do whatever he set his mind to. After his younger brother Stewart died at 14, his family moved to Saskatoon where Stephen finished high school at Aden Bowman excelling in maths, sciences and football while playing guitar on weekends with a folk group featuring Joni Anderson, later known as Joni Mitchell. At University of Saskatchewan he played football, studied chemistry but switched to political science under Norman Ward. In graduate school at McGill he studied international relations and political philosophy by day while playing in clubs to pay his rent and hanging out with other night hawks like Leonard Cohen, and blues musicians like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. In two years in Montreal he made lifelong friends and discovered he didn’t want to write for academics but to inform and entertain the widest possible audiences.
He finagled an appointment with a leading figure at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, hitchhiked to Toronto, demanded a job as a public affairs radio producer and was hired at age 23 to produce a national show called Five Nights A Week At This Time, a daily fifteen minute documentary about anything he found interesting. With a group of other young producers ( nicknamed the Red Guard) he helped launch the Radio Revolution-the block information programs such as As It Happens still going strong fifty years later.
He decamped to CTV where he joined its flagship public affairs show, W-5, as an on-camera reporter/ director/producer. One of his early investigations concerned a paper mill dumping mercury into the English and Wabigoon Rivers near Dryden, inflicting Minimata disease on First Nations eating the fish. The Viet Nam war was raging: US draft dodgers were being illegally turned away at the Canadian border and Stephen caught it on camera, forcing a leading cabinet minister to apologize to the House. He covered the Quebec Crisis, live- edited video of the moon landing. He got so good at holding ministerial feet to the fire that then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau refused to let him do CTV’s Year End interview because ” Dewar always has some goddamn tricky question.”
That would have been career enough for most but he wanted to do longer features. He became a freelance director, writer, and producer, making hundreds of documentaries across the wide range of his interests– environmental, scientific, philosophical, political– for CTV, CBC , the National Film Board, and many independent production companies. His subjects included scientists contending for Nobels, Mohammad Ali, the folks pumping iron at Gold’s Gym (like Arnold Schwarzenegger) the wildlife of the Canadian Arctic. With his partner Charles Greene, and on his own, he also began writing dramas and comedies for television. Later, he started his own production company with financier A. Bram Appel to make a feature on Atlantis. With Charles and Lorne Greene, he co-created and produced Lorne Greene’s New Wilderness which, in the 1980s, demonstrated how humans have affected all planetary environments putting so many species under enormous pressure. These half hour stories were told from the animals’ points of view as informed by leading edge science –a new nature documentary form which conveyed complex ideas well enough to entertain everyone from six year olds to doctoral candidates. New Wilderness drew a large audience on CTV in Canada, was syndicated widely in the US and eventually seen in over 100 countries. Though he had no interest in prizes (” Watch out,” he’d say, “they’ll pat you on the head to death,”) the very first show won three daytime Emmys– for editing, cinematography, and music.
After writing and developing dramatic and comedy series, he switched careers. He became an inventor and an entrepreneur, patenting a new way to store information on optical discs written with parallel lasers. He sold that company and used his earnings to start another when he read that the bumps on the leading edges of Humpback whales’ flippers make them incredibly agile. With Dr. Frank Fish and Phil Watts he co-founded WhalePower Corporation. It combined his interests in science, the environment, whale behaviour, with technology. WhalePower’s first product, an HVLS fan, is sold around the world. The second patent he wrote describing the virtues of applying these bumps, known as tubercles, to the leading edges of rotary machines (pumps, compressor, fans, and turbines) was one of just three created anywhere outside Europe to be honoured by the European Patent Office Inventor Awards in 2018.
Stephen is survived by his wife of 50 years, Elaine Dewar, and his daughters Anna and Danielle, his sons in law Timothy Gully and Brandon Birch, his beloved granddaughters Lilah and Grace, his mother in law, Petty Landa, his brother and sister in laws, Murray and Leslie Landa, and Kahrellah Landa, his son- by- choice Brian Bobroff, plus a wide circle of other chosen family-his many loving friends. He is gone, but his ideas and stories will live on long after him.
At Benjamin’s Park Memorial Chapel, 2401 Steeles Avenue West, Toronto (3 lights west of Dufferin) for service on Wednesday, April 24, 2019 at 12:45 p.m. Interment in The Beit Olam section of Glenview Memorial Gardens. Family visits at 27 Tyrrel Avenue, Toronto. Memorial donations may be made to Doctors Without Borders 1-800-982-7903, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society 1-212-220-2302, or Bridgepoint Health Foundation 416-461- 8252 x2017.
Our most sincere sympathies to the family and friends of Stephen Dewar Saturday April 20 2019..
benjamins park memorial chapel
Death notice for the town of: Toronto, Province: Ontario