Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
A most generous man
The most common feeling expressed last week when word began to spread that Tony Holt had died of a heart attack in his new home of Cobourg, was shock. Tony seemed just about the last possible candidate for a heart attack that we knew; the enduring image that most of us carried of him was the one that Roger Varley mentions in his story on page 7, a hale and hearty man of boundless energy, enthusiastically walking everywhere in town as he kept up with his very busy calendar.
When we read the funeral notice, that Anthony Holt had passed away “in his 79th year”, we were surprised again. We knew that he had been retired from teaching high school for quite a long time, but he never struck us as someone who was approaching the milestone of 80. He was always very youthful, and he certainly continued to relate with young people very effectively, as his many successful private piano students will attest. Despite being almost 80, he was far too young to leave us so soon.
And that’s why the shock of Tony’s death was soon supplanted by sadness. He had so much left to give. In only a short time, he had become as involved in his new community as he had in ours. He was singing, accompanying, helping give out scholarships - all of the activities described by the minister presiding over Tony’s funeral service in Cobourg last Saturday sounded very, very familiar to the large number from Uxbridge in her audience.
And there was something else that sounded so familiar to us, as various friends and family members got up to speak about Tony: his generosity. Rarely do we encounter someone who gives so freely of his time, his energy, his talent, expecting absolutely nothing in return. The testimonials that flew by e-mail and on Facebook after news of his death came from the heart. A teacher told how he had helped rekindle her love of playing the piano. A budding opera singer said no one had encouraged her career more enthusiastically than Tony, with time and patient guidance as well as words. Another former student, now with a promising career in music, was dismayed when she heard the news on Facebook: “My beloved teacher, where would I be without him?”
Tony touched the lives of dozens of us privately, but for Uxbridge as a community, his most important legacy is the Uxbridge Music Scholarship Trust, which he founded in the late 90s with fellow teacher/musician Lesley Joosten and singer/minister Paul Kett. The Trust has fostered the musical development of dozens of Uxbridge area youth, not just through education funding, but through performing opportunities - concerts that raised funds while giving promising musicians precious time before appreciative audiences.
Of course, the impresario performed himself at many of these concerts, and that didn’t stop when he moved to Cobourg. Only a few weeks ago, he returned with many of his new musical friends from Cobourg to headline a concert in benefit of his old favourite charity, the Scholarship Trust, and those who saw him then all said the same thing - he was in top form, no hint whatsoever that he was about to leave us.
I’m not a musician, so I didn’t know Tony as well as many others in Uxbridge, but as a singer, actor and director, my path was bound to cross his from time to time. I was privileged to perform with him many times, and he never said no when I asked him to accompany an audition or rehearsal.
My two most treasured memories of Tony, however, have little to do with music, and everything to do with his boundless generosity. In the fall of 2004, Lisa and I had just moved in to our wee bungalow on Reach Street. Not long after the move, a knock came on the front door. It was Tony with a gift. Many years before, he had taken a photo of our section of Reach, and now, realizing we’d come to occupy it, he took another one and put them side by side in a frame.
“I thought you might find this interesting,” he said as he handed it to us. It still hangs on our wall. Who else would think of such a gift? It was matched about a year later, shortly after I started this paper, when he just walked in the office door one day and handed me some sheet music.
“I wrote this little song about the Cosmos,” he said. I was speechless. Finally I said he should play it for me some day, and he said he’d be delighted. Of course “some day” never came, we were both busy fellows and we never found the time. But it’s still in a file at the office, so maybe it will come to life yet. In the meantime, Tony’s Cosmos song, and his photos of our house, will always remind me that I was lucky enough to share a community with someone as big-hearted as Tony Holt.
