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A short biography of
April 27, 1924 - January 5,
2018
By Richard Sanders |
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The profound childhood experiences
described by Roy in these powerful memories deeply affected him throughout his life.
Roy always worked
very hard, he was frugal, prudent and practical, and he showed great talent for creative ingenuity and
pragmatic inventiveness. He also had great empathy for others, especially those less
fortunate than himself, and he passionately believed in the need for people to
work together, to cooperate and to share their common resources for the betterment of
all.
Soon after her arrival, they decided to speed up
their plans and were married on July 27, 1946. When it came to the part of the
wedding ceremony when the United Church Minister asked Sylvia
to vow that she would always "honour and obey" Roy, she said yes she would
honour him, but no, she would not "obey" him. The proceedings
stopped while they discussed this unusual situation (brought on by a
woman named for suffragette
Sylvia Pankhurst).
Because Roy was happy to go along with Sylvia's feminism, the wedding proceeded. This
was an auspicious beginning to a long and eventful partnership
which lasted until Sylvia's death 61 years later.
In early 1953, Roy, Sylvia and their first daughter, Heather, moved to Britain where he began studies at the University of London's Imperial College of Science. (Read Heather's personal description of those years.) While maintaining his work position at NRC, Roy completed his Ph.D. in the university's Department of Technical Optics (Colour). After receiving his doctorate in late 1955, Roy returned to work at NRC and remained there until his retirement in 1979.
During Roy's travel to work conferences, he was sometimes able to combine work with pleasure. For instance, whenever Sylvia accompanied him on these trips, they made sure to include not only the usual sightseeing tours, but more extended and unusual holiday travels as well. Roy and Sylvia's curiosity about other cultures, history, nature and genealogy, and their desire to promote peace and understanding between East and West, North and South, fed their life-long enthusiasm for exploring the world. Roy and Sylvia passed on this "travel bug" to their children. Besides car-camping trips across Canada (one to BC and another to Nova Scotia), there were other family trips to explore the eastern US. In the 1970s, Wendy travelled with them to BC and Florida, while Richard joined them on a journey through Guatemala and into Honduras. That trip involved Roy driving a jeep 1500 kms through jungles and mountains to see the ruins of ancient Mayan cities.
Despite the extreme, political and military paranoia
that characterised the Cold War, Roy was open to mixing business and pleasure
with scientists on both sides of the "Iron Curtain." The warmth of these
friendships, east and west, can be seen in letters he received from colleagues
in the US and the USSR. These work friends included Luke Thorington and Dr. Vera
Kartachevskaia.
Struggles
for Peace For decades, they were active in the NDP, although this often meant trying to move the party to the left and to embrace stronger ant-war policies. Through the Waffle movement in the early 1970s, Sylvia especially tried to move the party towards socialist perspectives, and Roy was on board. As part of his involvement in these struggles, Roy used a wide variety of tools, and was not afraid to get his hands dirty! He operated Gestetners to run off copies and silk-screen contraptions to produce coloured signs. Being a relentless letter writer he quickly adapted from old typewriters to newfangled DOS home computers in the very early 1980s.
During the 1980s, Roy was also involved in
supporting several other peace groups, including the Ottawa chapter of Veterans
Against Nuclear War, and national organisation based in Toronto called Science
for Peace. Along with other friends and activists in Ottawa's peace
community whom he had known for decades be was involved in starting a group
called Educating for Peace and he worked on various projects and activities with
the city's Peace Resource Centre. When their son Richard, who shared their deep commitment to the peace movement, took up this struggle fulltime in 1984, they supported his efforts and, throughout the late 1980s, joined him in organising civil disobedience campaigns for the Alliance for Nonviolent Action (ANVA). They were all arrested at a few ANVA actions opposing Canadian complicity in NATO's low-level test flights, the Star-Wars weapons program, and the international arms trade. On one occasion, all three were arrested together when joining 50 others from across Ontario and Quebec for a "sit in" in front of Canada's War Department in downtown Ottawa. (See image at right, and read a funny story about it on the "Peace" page.)
As life-long do-it-yourselfers, Roy
and Sylvia worked as a design-build team on three major projects. Besides
designing and helping build their passive solar home in 1960, they also
planned and constructed two cottages. For more than 50 years they found great respite
Another project began in 1971 when they saved a 150-year old farm house that was doomed to be turned into docks. They had the building disassembled, log by log, and then moved by horse and sleigh three kilometres across Pemichangan's winter ice to a new home on Baie Noire. It was reassembled there in the spring. (See image below.) Learn more about this second cottage from the memories of John Hefler, Kay Hefler, Hilary Horan and Barbara Lunney.
Roy and Sylvia loved swimming, sailing, fishing, climbing the hills around the lake, exploring its many hidden bays by boat, hearing the loons, viewing and experiencing wildlife closeup, and retelling true stories like the time a big black bear knocked open their door and invited itself in for a taste of Sylvia's tasty stew. Sylvia and Roy, alone at their cottage home, were enjoying a pleasant afternoon nap when the bear arrived for a late lunch. Hearing the crashing of their door being knocked open and the pressure cooker hitting the floor, Sylvia went into the kitchen and was surprised to find a bear. The bear, surprised to hear Sylvia making her own loud noises, finally turned and lumbered off outside. Roy then came lumbering in to say: "What's all the commotion about?"
It was also a useful strategy in many games and
sports. Roy also had a
highly-competitive streak and struggled to win at whatever games he played. This
was well known to everyone with whom he played chess, cribbage, rummy and
bridge, the latter of which he played into his 80s. But it was certain physical
sports which he loved the most.
Over many decades, table tennis was the game he played with the greatest skill, vigour and speed. Having learned it as a youth in The County, he later brought the game to work where he played regularly at lunch with NRC colleagues. Besides playing in Ottawa tournaments, where he won 2nd prize in 1973, Roy enjoyed the sport regularly at home. (See Sylvia, Roy and Richard watching a game in the basement.) Later in life, he took up tennis and had great fun playing the sport with friends and family, into his late 70s. During his 90s, some of his most enjoyable moments at the Garry Armstrong care facility, came when batting a beach ball back and forth with Heather, Wendy, Richard, his wife Susan and Roy's grandchildren Arthur and Erica.
At the age of 89, Roy put his mind to trying to solve
one of the greatest puzzles in the universe! This was a grand enigma which had
long intrigued him: the origins of the cosmos! Using his mastery of
theories that explain optics, stellar
Throughout his own bright journey through life, Roy
always thrived on learning. While always trying to expand his knowledge
and understanding of how the physical universe works, he also enjoyed exploring
the natural world and finding his unique place within it. He strove to
apply his thorough grasp of the theories of physics to master many practical
techniques, technologies and tools which he used in his daily life, both at work
and at play. His tool kit was huge and he made his mark on the world using
everything from household hammers to spectroradiometers, and from tennis
racquets to protest signs. Roy and Sylvia were both generous with their
knowledge and skills. They taught us much about many things and they will
continue to do so.
Roy and Sylvia Sanders were
married for 61 years. They are seen here, in about 1960,
Have something to add? Richard Sanders <overcoat@rogers.com> |
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Corey Leroy "Roy" Sanders was born
in Hillier Ontario and, as a toddler, moved to another small farm in Prince
Edward County, just outside Bloomfield, where they sold their vegetables.
Growing up in this small, tight-knit community in The County, Roy acquired a
wide
array of practical skills which he
applied throughout his long and eventful life. Tragedy struck Roy's already poor
farming family when his young father died of Parkinson's disease in 1939. This event,
just a few days after Roy's 15th birthday, intensified his family's hardships
during the Great Depression. (Read Roy's powerful and shocking memories of this
period in his life: "
spent two years maintaining RADAR equipment aboard Liberator
bomber aircraft. These aircraft, with 354 Squadron of South East
Asia Command (SEAC), did reconnaissance patrols over the Bay of Bengal watching
for Japanese ships and submarines going to and from occupied Burma. Roy was initially posted to Cuttack, in Orissa,
where he was known as "Sandy." In
late 1944 and early 1945, he and fellow
ground crew technicians were deployed to
Minneriya in Ceylon. One of his stories
from India was that he built a radio which he and the crew used to listen to an
announcement that the US had exploded an atomic bomb on Japan.
On his way home to Canada after the war, Roy stopped
in Britain where he met his warbride-to-be,
(Read
the 
Roy represented Canada
within scientific organisations
such as 
Thanks
to his career in physics, Roy and Sylvia had the opportunity to glimpse into the
lives and cultures of people in both western and eastern Europe. Their
journeys to the east included visits to Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the USSR in
the 1960s and 1970s. During one such work-related trip, in 1971, Roy was
accompanied by Sylvia and their younger children, Wendy and Richard, to
Budapest. Then, while Roy went off to work meetings in France, they flew
to Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia and traveled overland to meet up with him in
Barcelona. 
Luke,
who was the leading engineer at Duro-Test Corp. (America's largest light
manufacturer), brought his son John to the Sanders' cottage in the early
1970s. (See photo of Roy and Luke, at break during a European conference,
above left.) Mme. V.E. Kartachevskaia was a leading Soviet physicist who, for
decades, headed the Photometry Lab at the Mendeleev Institute of Métrology.
When Roy and Sylvia visited Leningrad in the 1960s for a physics conference,
Mme. V.E. Kartachevskaia took them around to see many sites in her city and they
kept in touch for decades. In 1985, when Roy, Sylvia and Richard went on
an "
After
his retirement, Roy was able to focus more attention on peace and
disarmament issues and fully joined Sylvia in her tireless efforts. In the late 1970s
and early 1980s, the couple were central to many peace movement activities in
Ottawa. This included working through the National Capital branch of Operation
Dismantle and helping to create and sustain the Gloucester Peace Group. (See Roy
and Sylvia in image at left.)
When
Richard started the
on Lac Pemichangan north of Ottawa and spent decades working to
improve their piece of off-the-grid paradise. The adventure began with
the building of a log cottage on Shouldice Bay in 1957. (See photo, left.)
Besides providing a respite from the city, and the stresses of work there --
both in the field of physics and peace activism -- cottage life also allowed them
opportunities to enjoy sharing time with family and friends. For Roy it
was also an opportunity to return to his country roots and to express his
pioneer creativity. Cottage life was a time when he could use all manner
of tools from antique wooden planes, pulleys, hand augers, axes and adzes to
modern gadgets like chain saws and solar panels. (Read Richard's "
The
glory days of their cottage life came to an abrupt end years later when Sylvia,
following a hip replacement in 2002, suffered a heart attack and stroke.
Although she never lost her great humour, wit and caring personality, Sylvia was
paralysed on one side and bedridden. For the next five years, Roy was her
primary care giver, helping see to her daily needs at their cottage-like home.
Throughout those very trying and difficult years, friends and family rallied
round, and Roy and Sylvia endured. They even continued to host some lively
musical parties. When Sylvia died in 2007 it was the end of an era,
especially for Roy. Coping alone at home eventually became too much and he
moved into a City of Ottawa seniors residence.
Even
Later in Life: Still Growing and
Playing
These
involved using rackets to hit small spherical objects over nets. His
strategy in these games involved movements that were at times slow and highly
calculated, to strikes of lightning speed that could surprise and hopefully
intimidate his fiercest opponents.
Another
late-life passtime, at the Garry Armstrong care facility, was to begin
painting in his late 80s. In this endeavour, he focused his eye on
rendering colourful images of flowers. (See left.) This reflected one of Roy's
great, life-long passions which had begun during his childhood in The County.
Roy never lost touch with his farming origins.
He always enjoyed growing and then harvesting the products of his labour.
He even tried his hand at cottage gardening but the thick forest cover proved an
unbeatable adversary, except for the shore-side blackcurrants. At his suburban
home, lawn-fixated neighbours were chagrined by the Sanders' front yard which was
overgrown with a thrivingly productive jungle of raspberries and other edibles.
In his late 80s, Roy devoted much time to nurturing indoor flowers. Roy
also used some of his time to complete complex jigsaw puzzles. (See image at
right. Note his window garden in the background.)
