Eulogy
Louis Mason Sebert
Ottawa Citizen, August 6, 2002, C14
Suddenly, on August 1, 2002 at the age of 85.
Will be remembered by beloved wife Eileen; loving children Louis (Anne), Anne (Mark), Susan (Guy), Carol (Gregor); grandchildren Cody, Simon, Carmen and Dmitri; sister Mary and brothers Jim (Barbara) and John (Adele).
After graduating from the University of Toronto in Engineering, Col. Sebert served in WW II in England and Italy. Afterwards, he transferred to the Canadian Army Survey Establishment where he was instrumental in surveying the Canadian Arctic. Retiring for the Army in 1965, he joined the Surveys and Mapping Branch of the federal Department of Energy, Mines and Resources until his retirement in 1981.
A prominent figure in the Canadian mapping community, Lou Sebert co-founded the Canadian Cartographic Association and throughout his career was actively involved with the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and the Canadian Institute of Geomatics. A prolific writer, Lou Sebert published extensively on the subject of Canadian cartography. Among other works, he co-wrote "The Maps of Canada" (1981) and co-edited "Mapping a Northern Land" (1999).
In 1995 Lou received the Camsell Award for outstanding service to the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and in 2001 he received the Award of Distinction for exceptional professional contributions to the practice of cartography from the Canadian Cartographic Association. Still active as a consultant in his field at the time of his passing, Lou Sebert will be deeply missed by his family, friends and colleagues.
A mass in celebration of Lou's rich life will be held Thursday, August 8 at 2 p.m. at St. Basil's Church, 940 Rex Avenue, Ottawa. A reception at the church will follow. In lieu of flowers, a donation to the Canadian Diabetic Association would be appreciated by the family.
(For those unable to attend the mass and reception, condolences may be sent to his wife Eileen at the following address: E. Sebert, 1119 Agincourt Road, Ottawa ON K2C 2H8.)
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(Ed Dahl, 8 August 2002)
Lou’s family wanted one of Lou’s friends to say a few words about him and I have happily agreed to do that. It’s always harder to speak to a group of a hundred people rather than -- as we did for an hour or two in the Sebert living room yesterday – to simply tell stories about Lou, recall events, have some good laughs and wipe away a tear or two, and just bask in that feeling of good fortune of having known him.
And each of us knew him or of him in a unique way. Few of us could even pretend to know the full story about all that he was involved in during his lifetime. The part I knew was connected with his professional career in various ways.
You have probably read the obituary of Lou in the Ottawa Citizen, carefully assembled by Susan and the family. As you can imagine, the main problem for them was not “What can we think up to say about him?” but “How do we cut this down to size?” The man led a full life, as most of you already know.
What you all know by now is that Lou’s professional life revolved around the many aspects of the surveying and mapping of Canada – actually DOING it himself, that is, surveying in the bush, then drawing maps in the office back home, seeing them through production, into print and into the users’ hands. Maps are such basic, important elements of Canadian history, cornerstones of our experience and our identity. They include everything right from the impressionistic sketches drawn by our earliest explorers to technologically complex geospatial works produced today, and our understanding of ourselves is so much enriched as we come to understand them. Lou worked right at the heart of this.
But he didn’t just MAKE maps, he also reflected on their importance and their role in our lives and wrote about all this as an historian. Without Lou’s writings over the past half-century, covering mainly the late part of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth, we would know very little about those millions of sheets of paper called the “one to fifty thousands,” the “quarter millions,” the “three-mile sectional maps,” the “Yukon one-mile cadastral maps,” and a myriad other series.
He wrote prolifically, and he did it with flare and a sense of humour, always appealing to a broad audience. His publishers, editors, reviewers and readers were unanimous on the high quality of his work, and honours and awards were showered on him over the decades.
In our professional lives, we hope to do our part well, to make a significant contribution, to make a difference, to leave our mark. Not all of us manage to achieve this as well as we would like to. But someone had it right in an e-mail message in the past days when they referred to him as one of the giants in his field.
As important as it is to make one’s mark, it is more important who we are in the process while we were doing this – how we treat others and interact with them – the contributions made on the human level, the mark we leave on other people. To get at that, each of us can talk only on a fairly personal level, since our experiences are then unique to ourselves.
So let me turn from the professional to the more personal. Lou and I had a great arrangement. He subscribed to The New York Review of Books.” I’d take him out for lunch and in return would get his next batch. Every now and then, he’d talk of letting his subscription end -- there was just too much to read -- but then he’d get that excitement in his voice as he told me about several really great pieces that had just appeared, and he’d renew once more. He didn’t stagnate in his retirement, but read widely, loved new ideas, loved to discuss world events, and kept a very open mind and a fresh approach to everything. Of course, I just took for granted that we’d still be doing this a decade from now.
I think it was Lou’s interest in literature that was indicative of the kind of person he was, the interests he had. I should also mention here that he must have been one of the world’s longest-standing subscribers to The New Yorker magazine, having started in 1937 and missed only the years when he was serving in World War II.
I mentioned Lou’s sense of humour. He took it seriously. Every so often, I’d get a call saying “Ed, I just don’t get the cartoon on page such-and-such in his week’s New Yorker.” And then I’d give my take on it, or we’d both just scratch our heads and start talking about the ones we DID get and had enjoyed. His voice always broke in an unusual way when he was laughing, and it’s one of the friendly sounds I’ll associate with Lou forever, I suppose.
As I mentioned earlier, Lou reached a broad audience with his writings and lectures. Once you know Lou’s reading tastes, you are less surprised by the style of the history he wrote. Here’s a little piece Lou wrote for The Canadian Surveyor in 1986 titled “94L Revisited”.
It begins:
The first map that a topographical surveyor works on becomes something rather special in his own personal memory bank. It is stored there with other bittersweet memories such as the first teacher, the first car, the first love. In my case my first map was 94L, Kechika, in the 1 : 250,000 Series. The year was 1949.
LATER in the piece, this about “packhorse transport”:
… There is something quite satisfying in watching a good party pack up…. The whole load comes together at the same time as the loud grunt from the horse indicating that he (or she) thinks that the load is tight enough.
And, towards the end, we find this – pure Lou!:
…We finished the season on schedule. All triangles were sufficiently closed, though one or two needed an invocation of rather large amounts of spherical excess to bring them within the 10-second limit….
Such literary gems deserve to be collected into a published volume.
When I heard the sad news of Lou’s death, I arranged to have this announced on the various discussion lists on the internet, thereby getting the news out to about a thousand individuals in the Canadian and international map communities.
The responses were spontaneous and heartfelt, full of warmth, sadness, a great sense of loss, yet almost always with that cheerful bit thrown in expressing pleasure at having known, or even just met, Lou.
Samples…
I also had long telephone chats with Bernard Gutsell (now in Guelph) and Gerald McGrath (a former professor at Queen’s University in Kingston), two individuals many of you will know. Both deeply regretted that they would not be able to attend this service today. Gerald spoke eloquently of Lou as one of the two mentors he had had since he had arrived in Canada in the 1960s.
I mentioned earlier the matter of one’s wish in life to make one’s mark. Lou did this as a professional cartographer and in the related scientific community. But he also rose above that as a humanist with a broad interest in and understanding of life, a very complete human being. While we will continue to admire him for his professional contributions, we will deeply miss Lou the human being, but we’ll remember him with much warmth and affection.
