William George Dean

            Many geographers across Canada will be saddened to learn that Professor Emeritus William (Bill) Dean died on 29 December, 2009. Bill will be best known to University of Toronto geography students, where he taught for over 30 years, and to the numerous participants in the two major atlas projects he led to outstanding success, the Economic Atlas of Ontario (1969) and the Historical Atlas of Canada (3 vols., 1987, 1990, 1993 and the Concise Historical Atlas of Canada, 1998). He was also editor (1960 to 1967) of the Canadian Geographer during its formative years. Bill belonged to the generation of university students whose late teen years and early twenties were spent in the armed forces during World War II. In Bill’s case it was in the artillery in the Royal Canadian Army in Great Britain, where he was a gunnery instructor. After the war he enrolled in the Honours geography programme at the University of Toronto (B.A. Hons., 1949), and then quickly went on to his M.A. (UofT 1950), followed by a Ph.D. (McGill, 1959). In his doctoral work he carried out an aerial reconnaissance of the physiography and vegetation of the Albany River watershed in northern Ontario, and later in his career he specialized in Pleistocene geomorphology and the geography of Arctic Canada. He started his professional career working as a research geographer for the British Columbia Department of Lands (19­­52 to 1953) but he wanted to be a university teacher and in 1953 became the founding professor of geography at United College (now University of Winnipeg). In 1956 Bill was invited to teach at his alma mater, where he remained until retirement in 1987.  Bill was a generous supporter of the department at UofT, where he endowed an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and an award for undergraduate field studies.  A celebration of Bill's life will be held at the Faculty Club, University of Toronto, in late Spring 2010.  If you would like to attend, please contact Andrew Malcolm at mainoffice@geog.utoronto.ca.

            Bill had great curiosity and broad geographical interests, and he enjoyed collaborative work. These characteristics found their outlet in the two big atlas projects that he initiated and organized. These were conceptualized in an era when two editions of the national atlas were produced, and provincial atlases were developed in British Columbia and Manitoba, and then in Saskatchewan and Alberta. Bill recruited Geoffrey Matthews to the University of Toronto to establish its cartography laboratory and to work with him on his first major atlas. He was the editor and Geoff Matthews the cartographer/designer of the Economic Atlas of Ontario. Bill enjoyed working with colleagues in creating many of the maps in this atlas. In the subsequent massive Historical of Canada project Bill led the team that found the essential start-up grants, recruited volume editors, chaired the executive committee, and administered the enterprise over a period of 14 years, with about 150 academics and researchers involved. He liked to be hands-on, and here he authored some of the maps pertaining to military matters. Both atlas publications have been given numerous awards. These include the Gold Medal and recognition as the “Most Beautiful Book in the World” from the Leipzig International book Fair for the Economic Atlas of Ontario, and Bill along with Geoff Matthews and each of the volume editors of the Historical Atlas of Canada received the Gold Medal of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.  He was given the rare distinction of an honorary LL.D from his own institution in 1997 and was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award by the University of Toronto Association of Geography Alumni in 2000.

            Bill was an avid curler and sailor. In retirement he spent much time sailing and cruising in the Great Lakes, U.S. internal and coastal waterways, the Caribbean and on occasion in the Mediterranean. He was predeceased by his first wife Betty and later moved from Ontario to Nova Scotia with his second wife, Wendy, who survives him along with the two children of his first marriage.

By John Warkentin.