He would boast about North York getting land from the federal government, selling it twice and still owning it. Mayor Mel didn’t invent the word chutzpah, it just seems that way. “Maybe one, Paul Godfrey (who became Metro Chairman and head of Post Media) because he doesn’t ask for anything.” They always want favours and I can’t grant them,” he said, then corrected himself. “Who are your friends?” I asked Mel shortly after. When Marilyn ran for North York council in the mid-1980s, her campaign team was just family and a few aides knocking on doors.
People loved him, were drawn to him - a populist in the positive, classical sense of the word, before the Trumps of the world polluted the idea with indecent identity politics.Īnd yet he had so few friends, no band of courtiers or hangers-on. He couldn’t walk down the street without drawing a huge following. He was a master salesman with the gift of gab, but lacking the social graces and finesse to foster deep or lasting personal relationships with colleagues and staff that spanned 35 years of civic life. Mel could be brilliant and befuddling at the same time. But there’s been none like Mel - even counting the one-term misadventures of madcap Rob Ford, the absolute zaniest, mind-boggling magistrate of them all. Scarborough had the folksy Gus Harris and Mississauga countered with Hurricane Hazel McCallion. Downtowners have been led by the Tiny Perfect Mayor David Crombie, the iconoclastic John Sewell, and female light bearers Barbara Hall and June Rowlands. So, just like that, Mel’s gone - and with him, the golden era of reporting on municipal politics in the Toronto region.Īllan Lamport must have been special as Toronto’s mayor who pushed for Sunday sports, and produced so many malapropisms (“If someone’s gonna stab me in the back, I wanna be there”) he’s often seen as a local answer to New York Yankee great Yogi Berra. “His love for my mom was so strong he couldn’t bear the thought of living one day without her.” 1,” said Dale, the big shot corporate lawyer, by way of an audio recording, as he is under COVID-19 quarantine. The mayor who could turn it on and off on cue, likely died of a broken heart - never recovering from Marilyn’s death, their eldest son, Dale, told funeral mourners. Few expected his death - suddenly in his sleep at the Sunrise Retirement Home where he has domiciled since Marilyn died last New Year’s Day. Nobody saw this brash and bombastic Mel coming when he arrived in sleepy North York in 1969 and stayed to deliver what his detractors dismissed and pooh-poohed - a real suburban downtown with two subway lines on the edge of the 401, Canada’s busiest highway. Toronto’s royalty was headed by the flamboyant, cigar-smoking, millionaire huckster and his dilettante wife who staged two jaw-dropping bar mitzvah for their sons at a time when Toronto eschewed show-offs. “Nooooboooody” does it quite like Bad Boy Mel. president routinely transgressed all bounds of decency before politicians paraded as rock stars and their children commanded attention like the monarchy before 24-hour cable television news and social media - there was Mel: King of North York, Mel.
#How long to beat intrusion 2 crack#
“They tried to revive him on the way to the hospital but he was already gone.” Mel was 88.īefore a Toronto mayor smoked crack and achieved global infamy, and the U.S. “He passed in his sleep,” said Blayne, the younger son who resurrected the Bad Boy furniture chain Mel started. Melvin Douglas Lastman got his wish last Saturday night. “I’m not afraid of dying,” he’d told me three years earlier. And after about 40 minutes his aide wheeled him back into the home. He remembered more than I figured he would. It was a chilly day under the courtyard gazebo. There was no “performance” that day, just the reality of the once most powerful man in Toronto, now resigned to the end of a great run.
And I kept thinking about the first time I had met him, taken aback at how small he was and how less than imposing he appeared - right up to the moment before he ascended a podium to flip the mental switch, hit the “perform” button and wow the audience. But his mind still pulled up events and memories from back in the day. We were a long way from the centre of the town he presided over as mayor for 31 wildly entertaining years, spiced with political gaffes and conspicuous consumption: the Rolls-Royce and hair transplant and in-your-face stogies, the charity balls and parties and his wife’s shopping spree, and a string of excesses and headline grabbers that kept Toronto’s high society agog.
A little over a year ago I visited with Mel Lastman at his retirement residence on the north side of Steeles Avenue West.
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