Garry Monckton
Haro Park Centre
Vancouver
Residents 154
Infected residents 87 (as of April 22) Deaths 12
Infected staff 29
Staff deaths 0
The joke followed Garry Monckton everywhere: He was the guy who’d ruined Bobby Orr’s knee.
“Everybody was always like, ‘It must have been Monckton’s fault,” said his daughter, Samantha Monckton. “We heard that goddamned joke our whole lives.”
Garry was hit by a motorcycle when he was a boy growing up in Graz, Austria, and, already suffering macular degeneration, the accident blinded him. He moved to England to New College Worcester, a trade school for the blind, to study physiotherapy.
After graduating, he heard you could make three times the money in Canada than in London and hopped a boat in 1965 with his wife Maggie, whom he’d met at a New Year’s party the year before.
“She’d arrived with one guy and left with dad,” Samantha said.
After arriving in Oshawa, Ont., one of his physiotherapy clients was the Ontario Hockey League’s Oshawa Generals and a teenager named Bobby Orr, whose stellar career was cut short by knee trouble.
Samantha and her older brother Neil were always busy with chores growing up, but despite his sight impairment their dad would build a barn, fix a lawn mower, train horses. He moved to Vancouver after Maggie died on Boxing Day 2013.
There was always music playing in the Monckton home. Garry played organ, piano and mouth harp. They’d go to the O’keefe Centre in Toronto to enjoy The Sound of Music, South Pacific, Brigadoon, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
Because Samantha couldn’t see her dad in person the last 19 days of his life, she’d play familiar tunes to him on the trumpet outside of the Haro Park care home in Vancouver’s West End, where he spent his last days.
The other thing Garry liked was his cigarettes.
“That never killed him!” Samantha said. “What? COVID? I thought it would be smokes, for sure. I lost that bet.
“But I didn’t think we were going to lose him at all.”