This day in history, 1947: ‘Zorlogse and unstoppable’ mayor Gerry McGeer dies in office

At about 10:15 am on August 10, 1947, Vancouver Mayor Gerry McGeer ended some work in his studies and recorded on a bank.

The next morning at 10 am his driver McGeer came to pick up to go to the town hall, but he was dead.

McGeer had a fatal heart attack in his sleep. He was 59.

McGeer had previously had some health problems – he was bedridden with appendicitis and peritonitis (inflammation of the abdomen) during the 1946 campaign for mayor.

“He underwent an emergency operation on December 2 and spent the rest of the campaign period in the hospital,” the province noted on 11 August.

“He fought against the same hard campaign that he always fought, despite his illness, fighting for voting in radio speeches from his hospital bed.”

He won in a landslide. The city was shocked about his sudden death eight months later – there had been speculation that he would make a run for Prime Minister as Mackenzie King resigned.

Gerald Gratton McGeer was born in Winnipeg on January 6, 1888, one of the 13 children. Two years later, the family moved to Vancouver, where his Irish father Jim McGeer became known for his eloquence and political tendency. He passed both qualities to his son.

Gerry McGeer was an impatient childhood: the province said that he was stopping high school at the age of 14 because he thought the education system found ‘medieval’. So his father got him like a job as an iron Moulder.

“He was a stubborn little syringe, but the hardest working little guy you have ever seen,” said one of his colleagues years later.

“The description was prophetically from McGeer the politician and reformer,” said the province. “Zorsteless and unstoppable, fond of his own eloquence, sometimes flashy and bombastic, but with a memory filled by facts and a cool, calculating brain that underlies all his fireworks.”

In his political career he was a fierce opponent of the left. But the province said in his Iron Moulder days that he became a trade union officer and “played a leading role in organizing various Vancouver attacks.”

He went to the Dalhousie Law School in Halifax and was admitted to the BC bar in 1915. A year later he successfully ran for the BC -Wegenting Power in Richmond as Liberal.

After a stint in the army in the First World War, he ran in 1920 for the federal liberals in Vancouver Center, but lost. He then flourished as a lawyer and was called the name of a king in 1921.

But politics was his true calling. He became a liberal MLA again in 1933 and entered the Burgerenena in 1934 and won a landslide victory at the longest serving mayor LD Taylor of Vancouver.

People had a fight about the fact that they had had a new town hall for decades, but McGeer finally got it done and opened the current Art Deco -Stadhuis in 1935. But his term as mayor was stormy: he read the Riot Act on Victory Square after unemployed men occupied the Hudson’s Bay store on April 23, 1935.

He then moved the proposed town hall from the center to the 12th and Cambie, which was heavily criticized.

He was chosen as a reformer and fired at the police chief and two magistrates in his first week. He declared the war against virtue and had the police confiscated 1,000 slot machines.

He was so omnipresent in Vancouver, newspaper heads often just called him ‘Gerry’.

He left both civil and provincial politics after he won Vancouver Burrard in the federal elections in 1935. But he became obsessed with currency formation and what the sun called “monetary theories of his own thinking” and was never named after a federal cabinet.

Yet he was known in Canada because of his speeches. A Wag once said that McGeer suffered from ‘inflammation of the vowels’.

“Evaliens, controversial, stubborn, full and sometimes flamboyant, he never recorded the imagination of an audience, who determined him time and time again, regulating majorities in the polls,” the sun said after his death.

He was re -elected as MP in 1940 and was appointed to the Senate in 1945. But he called it “a mausoleum” and again successfully ran for Vancouver Mayor in 1946.

His cousin Pat McGeer kept the family name alive in the provincial legislative power as an MLA and Minister of Liberale and Social Credit from 1962 to 1996.