DONOVAN, Gerry

The family of Gerry Donovan (Mary Catherine Geraldine (Maclean)) are sad to announce our mother’s passing on Sunday, April 21, 2024 at the wonderful age of 98. She was the daughter of Cape Breton Gaelic fluent Scots, Malcolm Joseph and Agnes (Macdonald) Maclean. She had the advantage of being an officially confirmed extrovert, officially confirmed by a personality test conducted in a UNB psychology class one evening many years ago. The family would often watch from the sidelines as she worked a room, simply for the pleasure of meeting the people, learning who they were and where they were from, which she never forgot. When she got off a plane, she always had acquired a new friend in her seatmate. She spent her formative years in Sydney and Boisdale where socializing was a way of life, storytelling and fun times. Care had to be taken to apply a grain of salt to the stories, as she made them sound so true. That extrovert personality was well suited to political campaigning which she did for the Progressive Conservatives for many years in Halifax especially for the late MP Robert Mccleave, and took up for the Progressive Conservative party in New Brunswick – within a week – of a move to Fredericton. She was absolutely dumbfounded when she discovered her voting age children were not automatically voting Progressive Conservative. Although she ultimately voted for all four parties, she remained a lifelong, true-blue Tory. The move to Fredericton was prompted by a decision of Gerry and “her Bob Donovan” on his retirement, now that there were only two of the eight children at home, to start a biweekly newspaper, the Brunswick Business Journal. This they ran successfully, with much hard work and late nights, for 10 years. Running that business-friendly newspaper opened many doors to meeting new people and making long lasting friends. And led to many new friends at the Fredericton Catholic Women’s League where she became president before her return to Nova Scotia, where her children were largely based. Through it all she played bridge, in the early years mostly family bridge, but, in later years duplicate bridge at the Antigonish Bridge Club and, for the last 20 years, at the Halifax Bridge World and Chester Bridge Club, participating in bridge tournaments in Bermuda and San Franscisco (with 5,000 people), where she proudly won a bottle of wine which remains unopened to this day. To round things off, as both a lover of story-telling but also writing stories, she published a children’s book “Hector Goes to the Circus” at the age of 90, illustrated by her daughter Nadine, about the Boisdale family pig. More recently, she helped with fundraising for Spencer House on Morris St., Halifax where she would bristle if a visitor failed to treat the seniors as equals. She amazed us at how, even in her nineties, she could get up in front of hundreds of people and address them on behalf of Spencer House, without notes, with aplomb and seemingly always hitting a chord with the audience that resonated. She is survived by her children Mary Ellen Donovan (Gordon Hebb, children - Alice, John, Andrew, Rebecca); Michael (Jacqueline, children – Malcolm, Marie) (Kathleen, Cecilia); Paul (Sophie Bieger, children Inga, Teresa, Rupert, Kurt); Maureen (Andrew Hamson, children - Paul, Charlotte, Michael); Ursula (children - Tatiana, Lara, Emma); Frances (Gary Scott, children – Madeleine); Nadine (Joseph Muzzi); Robert (Lynn Cuvelier, children - Olivia, Georgia (deceased)). Great-grandchildren: Westley and Rhys Hamson, Kyver Thomas. She was pre-deceased by her beloved husband, Robert Donovan, her sister Marguerite Macsween, Ironville, and her brother Michael Maclean, Phoenix, AZ. Donations can be made to Spencer House Seniors Centre in her name.