Working the Dead Beat (41 page)

Lyle Creelman

Public Health Nurse

August 14, 1908 – February 27, 2007

H
ER NAME IS
barely known, but Lyle Creelman set the standard for public health nursing both here and abroad. She led the first nurses into Bergen-Belsen after British and Canadian troops liberated the diabolical Nazi concentration camp in April 1945. They found thousands of unburied corpses and more than fifty thousand prisoners, many of whom were dying of starvation and typhus.

After the war, Creelman co-wrote a hugely important report on public health nursing in this country that established teaching criteria for two decades, and in 1954 she became the first Canadian to serve as chief nursing officer of the World Health Organization. When she retired from
WHO
at age sixty, the journal of its International Council wrote in an editorial: “In these fourteen years, she has probably achieved more for nursing throughout the world than any other nurse of her time.”

Over her long career, Creelman developed and broadcast a vision of health care based on a philosophy of offering medical knowledge to health practitioners in developing countries, rather than imposing her views on their cultural practices. An intuitive and quietly ambitious woman with great intellectual and diplomatic skills, Creelman thrived in situations that combined travel, exchanging ideas, and deploying her medical training and expertise in new and innovative grassroots organizations.

LYLE MORRISON CREELMAN,
who was born on August 14, 1908, was known in her family as the “youngest of the youngest” because she had eleven older half-siblings, the children of her father, Samuel Prescott Creelman, and his first wife, Marianna (née McDonald). The Creelmans lived in Upper Stewiacke, a farming community near Truro, Nova Scotia, where her father was a well-driller. After he was widowed he married a distant cousin, Laura Creelman, with whom he had Lyle, his twelfth and final child. Her father, who was in his late fifties when she was born, moved his reconstituted family to Steveston, British Columbia, a fishing community located at the mouth of the Fraser River, probably during the First World War.

After graduating from high school in Richmond, B.C., she trained as a teacher, receiving her first-class certificate in 1931. Four years later she realized that her ambition demanded larger scope than teaching successive generations how to read, write, and do sums.

Her father had left her $200 in his will when he died in 1926. That money, plus her savings from teaching, enabled her to enter the nursing program at Vancouver General Hospital and the University of British Columbia, from which she graduated with a bachelor of applied science in nursing in 1936.

Older than the other students, she had a commanding, determined presence and, unlike many of them, she was independent-minded and keener on a career than marriage and children. In those days teaching and nursing were the preferred — and often the only respectable — options for intelligent young women. Combining them with marriage and motherhood was not only discouraged, it was usually forbidden by employers. It wasn't until after the Second World War that married nurses were allowed to practise in hospitals.

She worked as a public health nurse in Revelstoke for a year and then moved to Richmond as one of two public health nurses at the newly established Metropolitan Health Committee (later the Vancouver Health Department). In 1938 she won a Rockefeller Scholarship to study for a master's degree in nursing at Columbia University in New York City.

Equipped with all of the available academic and professional tools, she returned to Vancouver in 1939 just as war was declared. She was eager to serve overseas, but public health nurses and nursing instructors were designated “official home front personnel,” both to train nurses for the front and to care for Canadians in case the country became an active war zone.

By 1944, when an Allied victory seemed certain and Canada was clearly in no danger of an enemy invasion, she joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which had been formed the year before at a forty-four nation conference at the White House in Washington, D.C. Charged with providing economic and repatriation assistance to refugees in the aftermath of the presumed defeat of the Axis powers,
UNRRA
(which became the International Refugee Organization in 1948) reported to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (
SHAEF
) and was largely funded by the United States.

Creelman was sent first to England and a year later to Germany as chief nurse of the British Occupied Zone, which included the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. This was not a part of her life that Creelman liked to talk about, arguing that it was only one of many aspects of a long nursing career, but it must have been a devastating experience to be among the first medical personnel to see, smell, and care for the thousands of dying and dead victims of the Holocaust.

The Nazis created Bergen-Belsen in April 1943 as a sorting and transfer centre for labour and death camps. By 1945 it had become a concentration camp, incarcerating thousands of prisoners who were too weak for forced labour. Many prisoners, including the young Dutch diarist Anne Frank, who had been transferred there from Auschwitz, died from starvation and typhoid before the Allied troops arrived in April 1945.

Creelman's job, as director of the neophyte International Nursing Brigade, was to care for the physical, social, and mental health of her horribly damaged patients. Their deprivations were so overwhelming that her instinct was to do the hands-on nursing herself, but she quickly realized that the real job was to train everybody else. The nurses reporting to her came from more than twenty countries and didn't share a common
language
, training, or tradition, while the
INB
itself was too new to have a developed organizational infrastructure. So, after training her
INB
colleagues, she combined forces with them to offer ad hoc nursing courses to young women in the displaced-­persons camps so that they could provide medical care and also, perhaps, find a way to rehabilitate their own war-ravaged personalities and learn new skills.

All of her listening and diplomatic expertise was called upon in devising ways to care for her traumatized patients. Many kept “escaping” from hospital because they couldn't bear to be confined any longer; others who had been severely malnourished hid portions of their meals, convinced that each serving would be the last; and some, especially dissident Russian Jews, were unco-operative and disruptive because they were afraid of pogroms if they were sent home.

After two intense years, Creelman returned to Vancouver. She was almost immediately granted leave from her nursing job to serve as field director of an extensive study of public health services in Canada that was being conducted by the Canadian Public Health Association. She was co-author, with J. H. Baillie, of a highly acclaimed report that served as a guide to a more open and flexible direction for public health nursing in Canada. It was used for many years as a reference work for public health professionals.

Her final career, with the newly formed World Health Organization, came through a Canadian connection. Brock Chisholm, a Canadian doctor who was a highly decorated veteran of both world wars, inaugural deputy minister of health in Mackenzie King's government, and the first executive secretary of
WHO
, knew Creelman and her work both at home and abroad. A psychiatrist and a strong advocate of religious tolerance and holistic medicine, Chisholm had been one of sixteen international experts involved in drafting the World Health Organization's constitution in 1948. He invited Creelman to work with him the following year as a nursing consultant in maternal and child health.

Five years later, Creelman became
WHO
's chief nursing officer, replacing her British colleague Olive Baggallay. She held the position for the next fourteen years, spending nine months of the year in Geneva developing nursing standards, planning missions to developing countries, and preparing responses to outbreaks of cholera, malaria, and other epidemics. The other three months, she put theory into practice in developing countries. Even after she retired in 1968 she wasn't ready to quit; she accepted a
WHO
appointment to study maternal and child health services in Southeast Asia.

Afterwards she settled on Bowen Island, near Vancouver, where her apartment became a place of respite for friends, colleagues, family, and nurses she had mentored from across the country and around the world. In the late 1980s she moved into Hollyburn House, a seniors' residence in West Vancouver. Despite two strokes that impaired her ability to walk and speak, she maintained an elegant appearance and a lively social life until she died of pneumonia on February 27, 2007, at age ninety-eight.

Israel Halperin

Mathematician and Human Rights Activist

January 5, 1911 – March 8, 2007

M
OST MATHEMATICIANS FIND
their calling early, when their minds are uncluttered, their vision sharp, and their energy boundless. So it was with Israel Halperin, the son of Russian immigrants, who studied under the legendary Johann von Neumann at Princeton in the 1930s.

Halperin was being quietly celebrated among scholars for his work on operator algebras when treachery intervened during the Cold War and yanked him out of the ivory tower and into the mire of
realpolitik
. Unjustly accused as a spy by Canadian authorities, Halperin was suspended from his academic job and brought to trial.

Albert Einstein, his former professor at Princeton, was one of the scholars who came to his defence. Instead of making him bitter, the ordeal confirmed Halperin as a human rights activist. Until the end of his life he campaigned relentlessly for others, especially wrongly incarcerated Jewish dissidents, such as Anatoly Sharansky, in the former Soviet Union.

ISRAEL HALPERIN WAS
born in Montreal on January 5, 1911, but grew up in Scarborough, an eastern outlier of Toronto. After Malvern Collegiate, Halperin entered Victoria College at the University of Toronto, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1932, having won a mantelful of awards that included top marks in mathematics and physics. Two years later he had earned his master's degree and was at Princeton University, registered for his PhD.

Princeton was an academic mecca for refugees fleeing from Europe, especially mathematicians, who were drawn to the university's Institute of Advanced Study. Among them were physicist Albert Einstein and mathematician Johann (John) von Neumann, the father of computer science and inventor of robotics and game theory. Naively but boldly, Halperin asked Neumann if he would direct his doctoral thesis, not realizing that the man had such an exalted research position that he was not required to supervise graduate students. Nevertheless, Neumann, who was doing work on operator theories and continuous geometries, took him on, giving Halperin the distinction of being the great Neumann's only PhD student. After completing his doctorate, Halperin worked at Yale as a research fellow in 1936–37 and spent the next two years as the Benjamin Pierce Instructor at Harvard University.

He wanted to come back to Canada, so he accepted a position in the fall of 1939 as an assistant professor of mathematics at Queen's University in Kingston. He was twenty-eight and had already published several mathematical papers on operator algebras (a combination of algebra, geometry, and quantum mechanics), a field that he established here and kept alive for the next thirty years. It became a hot topic internationally in the 1960s in non-commutative geometry, mathematical physics, and numerical analysis.

Shortly after embarking on his research and teaching career at Queen's, he married Mary Esther Sawdey, the sister-in-law of a Harvard colleague, physicist Wendell Furry. The Halperins eventually had four children, Stephen (1941), Constance (1944), William (1945), and Mary Elizabeth (1948).

Along with his academic work, Halperin was active politically in those twitchy times. In the United States he and Furry were both actively involved with the American Association of Scientific Workers, a liberal and progressive organization founded during the Depression with the aim of involving scientists directly in debate about social and political issues. (Later Furry ran afoul of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist witch hunts of the 1950s and was indicted for contempt of Congress for refusing to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee.) At Queen's, Halperin was developing a reputation as an agitator. He wrote eloquently, publicly, and futilely in defence of geophysicist Samuel Levine, a classmate from his undergraduate days at the University of Toronto. Under the far-reaching powers of the War Measures Act, Levine had been arrested, jailed for six months for possessing subversive literature, and dismissed, in 1941, from his teaching job at U of T.

In 1942 Halperin took military leave from Queen's to enlist in the Royal Canadian Artillery and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. Mostly he worked at the Canadian Army Research and Development Establishment in Ottawa on artillery problems, explosives, and secret intelligence research into rockets and other issues. He attained the rank of major before being discharged at the end of the war and resuming his teaching career at Queen's, moving his family back to Kingston and building a house in the west end of the city.

That's when his life went haywire. Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, defected in September 1945, bringing with him a list of names of alleged spies and fellow-travellers. One of them, a left-leaning British immigrant and advertising copywriter named Gordon Lunan (about whom I wrote in Rogues, Rascals, and Romantics), fingered Halperin as a Soviet spy.

The two men had met in Ottawa late in the war. Lunan, a sympathizer of anti-fascist causes, a friend of union organizer and communist MP Fred Rose, and a lieutenant in the army, worked on
Canadian Affairs
, a newsletter that provided a summary of news and editorials for troops stationed here and abroad.

The Communist Party had been banned at the outbreak of the war but had re-formed as the Labour Progressive Party. Rose had run under its banner, won a by-election in 1943, and retained his seat in the working-class riding of Cartier in Montreal in the 1945 election. Through Rose's connections to Colonel Nikolai Zabotin, head of military intelligence at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Lunan was recruited as a low-level spy. He covertly supplied his handler, Colonel Vasili Rogov, with information gleaned from casual encounters with scientists and mathematicians.

One of Lunan's sources was Halperin, whose Soviet code name was “Bacon.” Lunan mentioned him in four reports to his Soviet spymaster, although never as a source of any secret information. On the contrary, Lunan wrote in frustration to his handler in July 1945: “this fellow is a mathematician, and not a chemist or physicist, which may account for his remoteness from the details of explosive research.”

Halperin was probably known to the
RCMP
because of his previous political activity and his work with organic chemist Raymond Boyer, president of the Canadian Association of Scientific Workers, an offshoot of the American organization. They swooped down on Halperin on February 15, 1946, raided his office, and whisked him away in a shocking abuse of civil liberties, especially as it was peacetime. The War Measures Act had expired at the end of the Second World War, but the Mackenzie King government had secretly extended one of its provisions — giving the prime minister and the justice minister the power to arrest and detain people suspected of passing secrets to the enemy — in a special order-in-council, PC 6444, in October 1945, a month after Gouzenko's defection.

At the time, Canadian, British, and American military officials were worried that key scientific discoveries were being shipped to the Soviets. Their main quarry was the British physicist Alan Nunn May, a genuine Soviet spy — like the notorious Kim Philby, he had been recruited at Cambridge — who was working at the Anglo-Canadian Laboratory in Montreal and at the atomic research plant in Chalk River, Ontario. Instead of apprehending May and turning him over to the British, the
RCMP
went after Canadians, most of them guilty of nothing more than sharing already published scientific information and harbouring sympathy for our former ally against the Nazis.

Halperin, like the other accused, was held incommunicado, without access to legal counsel or his family, by the
RCMP
at its Rockliffe Barracks in spartan accommodation — even the windows were nailed shut — pending an appearance before the Kellock-Taschereau Royal Commission. The commission, headed by two Supreme Court judges, Roy Kellock and Robert Taschereau, had been struck on February 5, 1946 (ten days before Halperin's detention), to investigate Gouzenko's allegations that a spy ring of Canadian communists was handing over state secrets to the Soviets.

Halperin's situation only became known to the public after he covertly sent a letter to John Bracken, the Progressive Conservative Party leader, which was read in the House of Commons on March 21, 1946. “For the past five weeks I have been held in solitary imprisonment, denied access to legal counsel and newspapers; in short, cut off from the outside world,” Halperin wrote. “I charge the minister of justice with using his authority in a way which sets a dangerous precedent, one which should alarm every Canadian citizen.” He then described himself as coming from a family “whose concern for our country was sufficient to put two sons in uniform. One of them is writing this letter; the other is at the bottom of the ocean.”

When Halperin was summoned to appear before the royal commission, he refused to make any statement without legal representation. His hearing was adjourned until March 27, 1946. Meanwhile, Halperin's wife, Mary, and his sister, lawyer Clara Halperin (later Muskat), presented a habeas corpus petition to Mr. Justice Walter Schroeder in his chambers at Osgoode Hall in Toronto, arguing that Halperin's detention was “irregular, illegal, defective, insufficient.”

On March 26, 1946, the judge granted the writ and Halperin was released, but he was required to appear in Ottawa Weekly Court four days later, where he was represented by A. H. Lieff, a Jewish lawyer who later became a renowned family court judge. When Halperin's hearing before the commission was reopened, he refused to answer what he described as a “cross examination.” A month later he was charged with conspiracy and violating the Official Secrets Act and was committed for trial in December 1946.

Halperin's trial came to a halt when the Crown called Lunan as a witness and he refused to testify, pending the outcome of his appeal against his own conviction on spy charges. When the court reconvened in March 1947, the charges were dismissed for lack of evidence when Lunan again refused to testify.

After thirteen harrowing months, Halperin was legally a free man, but he was still under suspicion in the groves of academe, where several of his colleagues wanted him fired. The person who came to Halperin's defence was Robert Wallace, principal of Queen's, who quickly moved to reinstate his salary, academic status (coincidentally, Halperin had been on unpaid research leave since October 1946), and sabbatical privileges. When a member of the university's board of trustees wrote to the principal declaring that “some Alumni” felt that “a Communist fellow-traveller” was not the “the type of individual who should be teaching in a Canadian university,” Wallace replied that “until a man is proved guilty, he has to be deemed as innocent.”

Nevertheless, Halperin's continued employment at Queen's was only happily resolved after a heated debate of the board of trustees in May 1948. Among the testimonials sent on Halperin's behalf was a letter from the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, signed by Albert Einstein and eleven others, describing him “not only as a mathematician of high standing but also as a man of greatest integrity” and finding it “impossible to believe” that he could be guilty “of any real breach of trust or honour.”

For the rest of his life Halperin refused to discuss his ordeal with family, colleagues, or historians working on academic freedom. He concentrated on his academic work and on helping others whose rights had been trampled by overweening authority. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1953 and given its Henry Marshall Tory Medal in 1967. He continued to teach at Queen's until 1966, when he was hired away by the University of Toronto. At least one of his Queen's students — George Elliott, now a distinguished mathematician — followed him down the road to Toronto.

During Halperin's long career — which extended far past mandatory retirement at sixty-five — he published more than a hundred papers and influenced waves of younger mathematicians, including Peter Rosenthal, who was attracted to the University of Toronto largely because of Halperin's work on Hilbert space (a kind of infinite dimensional space). Halperin also completed two substantial manuscripts that his mentor Neumann had left in an inchoate state when he died in 1957:
Continuous Geometry
(1960, 1980) and
Continuous Geometries with a Transition Probability
(1981).

In the late 1960s, Halperin founded an international newsletter to broadcast and monitor developments in operator algebras and established the first Canadian Annual Symposium on Operator Algebras and Their Applications in 1972. Many of the participants who gathered for these informal discussions were former students. Eight years later, those same mathematicians set up the Israel Halperin Prize in honour of his seventieth birthday; it is given every five years to a younger mathematician who has done significant research in the area of operator theory or algebras.

Halperin, who had always been a vocal defender of academic friends whose human and civil rights were being trampled, became a committed campaigner on behalf of a much wider community of scholars who were being repressed by their own governments. He was really a committee of one, acting on one case at a time and conducting his campaigns in a very dignified letter-writing mode. Typically he would write to Nobel laureates asking them to add their names to his campaign literature.

With French mathematician Henri Cartan, he formed a committee of scientists and scholars at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver in 1974 to lobby for the release of Leonid Plyushch, a Russian mathematician who had been incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital and subjected to insulin therapy. Plyushch was released in 1976, at least partly because of the ten-thousand-name petition that Halperin helped to accumulate.

He became secretary of the Canadian Committee of Scientists and Scholars and campaigned successfully for the release of José Luis Massera from prison and torture in Uruguay in 1984, and for Anatoly Sharansky's discharge from a Soviet labour camp in 1986 and permission to immigrate to Israel. The New York Academy of Sciences gave Halperin the Heinz R. Pagels Award in 1999 in recognition of his work in advancing the human rights of scientists around the world.