Michael Magee(1929-2011)

Actor, comedian and horse racing commenter Michael Magee was born on October 11, 1929 in Toronto. His parents belonged to the Ontario Jockey Club. As a kid, Magee was not so enthusiastic about horse racing, but his father challenged him to learn about the subject before judging. In time, Magee became more and more enthusiastic about horses. He was sent to a series of private schools in Ontario, which was a rough time for him, and he sought refuge at the race tracks. In his adolescence, he worked as a money runner for the mutuels department at the original Woodbine track in eastside Toronto before taking a similar job at Exhibition Park in Vancouver. As a young man, he worked as a janitor, a surveyor, a hotel desk clerk, and on the line of canning factory. In 1956, he became a partner in Triangle Stable, which had only one racer named Brighton Queen, who was named for an English Channel paddle steamer. Magee joked that she was slower even than her namesake. That same year he debuted on radio station CKNW, featuring daily on the It Could Happen Show, which included a simulation of a fictitious horse race. Magee spent nearly fifty years on the radio talking about the Sport of Kings, including stints on CBC Radio, CKEY, CKO and The FAN, where, in 1994, he began co-hosting a Saturday program during the racing season called Racing With Magee. In 1968, he introduced his character Fred C. Dobbs, named after the mean and avaricious novice prospector in 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre', on Gerussi: Words and Music, a curmudgeonly character who mistrusted politicians and bureaucrats, big labour and big business. He appeared on Ottawa television as a parliamentary correspondent from Beamsville before making his national television debut with Don Harron on a 1969 New Year's Eve broadcast, That's the News??? Good Night!!! Magee married Mabel "Duddie" McDonald and in 1973 they started their own show called "The Real Magees", and owned and operated a meat market on Church Street in Toronto. However, their marriage didn't last and they separated. In 1980, Magee was cast as the cigar-chomping, maniacally greedy pink aardvark Cyril Sneer in the TV special, "The Christmas Raccoons", and went on to voice Cyril for the rest of the series, including three more specials and a TV show, "The Raccoons". Magee based Cyril's voice on a schoolmaster he disliked. Although Cyril and his sniggering dog Snag were Magee's only voice roles, he truly brought them to life, Cyril in particular. Magee caused a scandal while he was an after-dinner speaker at the Writers' Union of Canada when he made several sexist jokes, including referring to a fictional wife as "the old mattress", and insulted the women who walked out on him by claiming they had mustaches. In 1985 he met a woman named Sally Hamilton, and they stayed together for the rest of his life. Magee died on July 15 at the age of 81, after a struggle with colitis which led to heart failure.