A graceful, impactful, sporting life ends at 84
If you played basketball in Toronto between 1956 and 2006, your game might have been refereed by Harry Gairey Jr. If you played football for the Scarborough Thunder’s atom division in the mid-1990s, you might have been coached by Gairey. And if you played rugby on the Harbord Collegiate senior team in the late 1940s, you might have been a teammate of Gairey’s.
But if you were the attendant at a skating rink in1945 who turned away 15-year-old Gairey because he was black, you probably didn’t realize your action would lead to a city ordinance against discrimination based on race, creed, colour, or religion.
The man for whom sports and fairness were big parts of life died on July 25 after a long illness. He was 84.
“He carried himself with grace,” said lifelong friend C. Arthur Downes. He was giving, respectful, and “never made you feel that he was judging you.” In November 1945, Gairey and friend Don Jubas decided to go skating at the Icelandia indoor rink, on Yonge St. north of St. Clair Ave. When Gairey told his family why he wasn’t admitted, Harry Gairey Sr. was not pleased.
Several nights later, 25 University of Toronto students picketed the rink, calling for an end to racial discrimination. Gairey Sr. took his fight to city council; the resulting antidiscrimination ordinance was passed in early 1947.
Harry Gairey Jr. was born in1930 in Toronto and grew up in the Dufferin and College area. He studied drafting and surveying at what was then the Ryerson Institute of Technology, and worked at the company that was to become SNC-Lavalin from 1966 until his retirement in 1999.
But it was another job that earned him praise from generations of colleagues: his half-century of work as a basketball referee.
“He had a far-reaching impact on everybody,” said Al Northcott, a referee who met Gairey about 30 years ago. “He never answered a harsh word with a harsh word himself.”
Northcott estimated that Gairey refereed between 2,000 and 3,000 basketball games during his career.
Whenever Gairey faced racist taunts as a youth, his good nature let things pass by, said his daughter, Brenda Gairey. “Harry Junior got along because I guess he didn’t know the seriousness of it,” Gairey Sr. wrote in his memoir, A Black Man’s Toronto, 1914-1980.
During his retirement, Gairey was “always willing to give his time for children and black history,” said Downes.
Gairey leaves behind his daughter, four grandchildren, and one greatgrandson. His wife, Sylvia, died last December.