Young was a legend in city theatre
Norman Young died Friday from a heart attack. He was 94 years old, and lived every minute of those years.
Young was a staple of the local theatre community, a retired University of B.C. theatre professor who was once chairman for Vancouver Civic Theatres and a co-founder of the B.C. Entertainment Hall of Fame.
He was also a walking encyclopedia.
“Do you know how he did the New York Times crossword puzzle?” asked playwright John MacLachlan Gray. “He read the whole puzzle through, solved all the clues in his head, put one letter for each solution in the crossword puzzle, threw away the clues and then filled in the puzzle.
“He was complaining two weeks ago that when he was watching an old movie he couldn't remember who everyone on the screen credits was.”
His encyclopedic knowledge extended to his native Vancouver. He remembered all the people, buildings, bars and restaurants, and had a knack for being in the right place at the right time.
Matthew Norman Young was born on Oct. 12, 1926, in Vancouver.
“He was born at the family home, in front of the fireplace,” said Young's wife, Maida Price.
He grew up in Kitsilano, graduating from Kits High School in 1945. He was drafted the day the Second World War ended, so he missed the war. He joined the air force anyway, where he wound up causing a kerfuffle.
“You know how the services are, often a lot of the gear that comes in goes somewhere else,” said Price. “That was happening, and they wanted him to sign a letter saying that it wasn't, that everything was fine in this supply area. And he said, `No, that's not true, I can't sign that.' They said, `That's an order, sign it.' And he said, `No.' So they court-martialled him. Then somebody further up who knew bloody well what was going on stepped in and cancelled it. Reinstated him, and promoted him. A typical Norman story.”
After leaving the air force he went to UBC.
“Do you know how he ended up working in theatre?” asked Price. “It was his first or second day on campus at UBC and he saw a woman who he thought was attractive. Well, he followed her and she went to the theatre department. So he went along, just to see what went on in the theatre department. And that's where he ended up.
“He was so taken with the theatre in all its aspects — he was a theatre man all his life.”
He did some acting — he was cohost of a local CBC children's show in the mid-1950s. But he was most comfortable out of the spotlight.
“He said, `I like being in front, but I was always better as the guy at the back of the room,' ” said former UBC colleague Gerald Vanderwoude.
In 1961 he landed a job as a stage manager in London, England. But when he arrived there the theatre wasn't finished, so he came back to Vancouver, where he was offered a job at UBC. He was a professor there until his retirement in 1991.
In 1963, he and colleague Ian Pratt conned a construction crew into surreptitiously building the Dorothy Somerset Theatre at UBC, when they were supposed to be building a storage space.
“The construction crew was like, `You're really overbuilding here, why do you have to have this span?'” Vanderwoude said with a laugh. “Really, what they were trying to hide from them was they needed to have a stage width. They totally bamboozled everyone at UBC until it was too late. Then they said, `Oh, we'll just modify it into a theatre.'”
His resumé was staggering: at various times he was on the boards of, among others, the Vancouver Museum, the Vancouver Archives, and the Vancouver Children's Festival. He was also a former member of the Canada Council.
Still, many Vancouverites will remember Young for the fantastic tours he gave of the Orpheum Theatre with his friend, the late Hugh Pickett. He was a fantastic storyteller, a voracious reader and had a mischievous side.
“(A few years ago) he got annoyed by the proofreading in The (Vancouver) Sun,” said Gray. “He took to cutting out errors in the paper and every so often he'd put them in an envelope and mail them to Patricia Graham (The Sun's editor at the time). Unsigned.”
A typical Norman story.