A rchive Date
[ 20-08-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[A toast to you, dear Morty
By GARY DUNFORD - Toronto Sun
August 20, 2000
Dr. Morton Shulman made friends and money far more easily than he made enemies. But as Morty once confessed - with his wonderful cackle - he was never happier than when he was making trouble. He loved to make waves. As coroner, then politician. As doctor and TV talk show inquisitor. As millionaire. As demon bridge player - once winning $900 - at a dime a point.
"I had a doctor just yesterday say to me: 'I hate you!'" Morty snickered, guesting on my old radio show several years ago. "You've wasted hours of my time! Every time I do an operation, I have to count the instruments, re-count the instruments and every time I count, I think of you." Come home from hospital with only your organs inside you? Thanks, Morty.
Early success in the stock markets allowed Shulman the luxury of chasing his ambitions, interests and instincts. He wasn't working for wages, though he maintained a life-long family medical practice in Toronto's west end. He had Eff You money, the kind most can only dream of. Total independence.
Morty's reign as crusading coroner in the 1960s seems an unlikely launch pad for a life that touched so many. But his press-savvy investigations of hospital deaths and unusual fatalities made headlines, embarrassed the powerful and challenged how things were done. When the provincial Tories named Shulman chief coroner, it was only to shut him up.
"They appointed me chief coroner so I wouldn't run as MPP," he claimed. "I was going to get the Tory nomination in Parkdale and I was in favour of Medicare at that time. They weren't ready for it and didn't want it. In effect, they said: 'We don't want this guy at Queen's Park: let's make him chief coroner where he'll be harmless.'" Wrong. And after the Tories fired him, he resurfaced as an NDP MPP, the government's most prickly persecutor.
Years before the word "Ombudsman" existed, brown envelopes of incriminating material would move mysteriously towards Shulman - the maverick, the outsider. His success staging verbal fist fights for CITY-TV, only increased the tide of tips that reached his beach. He knew the raw power of things other people don't want you to know.
Morty used some insider info to crowbar change, righting wrongs on the spot. Other tidbits found their way to articles or newspaper columns, often by news sorts he'd played like fine fiddles during his coroner days. But - in a way never chronicled on Wojeck, the TV series he inspired - many troubles that reached Morty's desk, he quietly righted himself. He was a public and private linchpin for good. To fix so much for the better, yet not say a word about it, must have been a real burden for a guy who so loved gossip, issues and politics.
Parkinson's plagued his later years and led Morty to push for new treatments, new drugs, the wider publicity and support that can fund a cure. It gave him an odd, upside-down insight into the medical system.
"It's terrible being a patient, but wonderful being a doctor," he laughed, when we taped the radio show. "I sit in my office as a doctor and patients are deferential, they take off their clothes, they ask for help, I feel powerful. When I go to my doctor, he tells me to take off my clothes and I feel ineffectual, insecure, nervous. I hate it."
Listening to a tape of our long-ago conversation, I'd forgotten Morty had brought three of his favourite records to the studio to play. This morning, they seem an all-too-appropriate epilogue ...
- I'm Five by Barbra Streisand ... "I love playing it for my five-year-old granddaughter" Shulman said. "She smiles, I laugh and we all feel giggly. It makes me feel like a kid again."
- Terrible Operation Blues by Bill Broonzy ... The lyric: Get up on this table. Pull off that gown. Raise up that right leg, put that left one down. Pull off them stockings, that silk underwear. The doctor's got to touch you, mama, Lord knows where.
- Ravel's Bolero, the Montreal Symphony recording under Charles Dutoit ... "It makes me think of making love and beautiful women," Morty chuckled.
I doubt there's a Merlot fine enough to toast Dr. S - as he was always identified on my pink Sun call slips, that later gave way to voicemail. Some media guys loved him for more than his tips. Bless him.
© 2000 Gary Dunford Reach Dunf at (416) 947-2246 or by e-mail at pagesix@aol.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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