As a journalist, Edith Iglauer came close to remarkable people such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Pierre Trudeau. But it was Iglauer鈥檚 eye for detail that allowed her to uncover remarkable things done by ordinary people.
鈥淪he was very interested in the lives of ordinary people who work in places like the World Trade Center and the everyday lives of notable people,鈥� said Lara Wilson, director of special collections at the University of Victoria.
Iglauer died on Feb. 13 at the age of 101聽in Sechelt. Now her archives and journals have been donated to the University of Victoria.
They chronicle a career that spanned the Second World War, writing for prestigious magazines such as Harper鈥檚 and the New Yorker magazine and authouring several books, including Fishing with John (1988), nominated for the Governor General鈥檚 Award for Non-Fiction.
Iglauer鈥檚 records, notes, papers and audio recordings will be preserved at UVic, where they will be held in the Special Collections and University Archives, the university announced last week.
Wilson said Iglauer鈥檚 papers will provide insights for researchers interested in major events in the 20th century, from the Second World War through to the construction of the World Trade Center, completed in 1973.
They will also provide good insight into the development of sa国际传媒鈥檚 Arctic in the 1960s and 1970s, as the Inuit people began to exert their ambitions for citizenship, and industry began to penetrate.
All Iglauer鈥檚 papers, 69 boxes of them, are well arranged and were professionally organized with the help of an assistant.
鈥淪he was a very well-organized person because of the nature of her work and how she did her work,鈥� said Wilson.
鈥淎ll the notes from her interviews and her manuscripts and the recordings were well put together,鈥� she said. 鈥淪ome of those topics she would return to over the years.鈥�
Wilson said the papers also offer insight into how journalism and research were done before the digital age.
Born in Cleveland and educated at the Columbia University School of Journalism, Iglauer began working in Cleveland and later Washington, D.C. During the Second World War, she attended weekly press conferences by Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House.
In 1945, Iglauer was sent to Yugoslavia, still very much a war zone, and witnessed the destructive horror of the Second World War for the Cleveland News. After returning to the U.S., she moved to New York, where she joined the New Yorker as a staff writer.
She covered the opening of an exhibition of Inuit art in New York in the 1950s, a kind of premi猫re event for the esthetics of sa国际传媒鈥檚 northern peoples.
In 1961, on assignment with the New Yorker, Iglauer travelled to Northern Quebec on a dogsled to research the formation of Inuit co-operative ventures, seen as a step toward modernization for the Northern Indigenous Peoples.
It was her first time in sa国际传媒, and later formed the basis of her 1979 book Inuit Journey.
In 1969, she completed a New Yorker profile of Pierre Trudeau, then one year into his first term as prime minister and a figure of excitement and interest in sa国际传媒 and abroad.
Iglauer recounted in a 1988 interview that Trudeau was one of the most unco-operative subjects every profiled by the magazine.
Not only was she unable to use a tape recorder, she had to take notes under the table and out of sight.
In 1973, Iglauer first came to sa国际传媒 on assignment to write about fishing and met John Daly, a fisherman/unionist with a taste for the works of William Shakespeare and classical music. In 1974, the two married. He was Iglauer鈥檚 second husband.
She moved into Daly鈥檚 waterfront house in Garden Bay on the Sunshine Coast and would spend most of her remaining life there, although in the initial years she returned frequently to New York City.
Iglauer鈥檚 interest in Northern sa国际传媒 never lagged and in 1974, she published Denison鈥檚 Ice Road, the tale of John Denison, the Canadian road engineer behind the construction of ice roads to haul freight in and out of Arctic outposts and mines.
In 1978, Daly died of a heart attack. Iglauer, however, stayed and continued to work in sa国际传媒, publishing Seven Stones, A Portrait of Arthur Erickson, Architect in 1981.
She never lost her interest in fishing and never forgot the man who had convinced her to move to sa国际传媒 In 1988, she published the memoir Fishing With John. It became a Canadian bestseller and in 2000 was made into a TV movie, Navigating the Heart, with Jaclyn Smith and Tim Matheson.
Wilson said UVic is lucky to have the papers of a person such as Iglauer.
Considering the breadth of her experience, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Pierre Trudeau to Inuit peoples, her papers would have been a good fit for the archives of the U.S. Library of Congress or the collections of Library and Archives sa国际传媒.
Jay Hamburger, 71, one of two sons from Iglauer鈥檚 first marriage, said he never stops being surprised by his mother鈥檚 courage.
鈥淪he had a lot of daring,鈥� said Hamburger in a telephone interview from Vancouver, where he lives and works as a theatre director.
鈥淎nd she always had really good intuition,鈥� he said.
