Phil Sparling

Teacher. musician, husband, father, grandfather, poet. Born June 8, 1922, in Goderich, Ont. Died Oct. 21 in London, Ont., of a pneumonia-related infection, aged 88.

Phil Sparling was the son of roving CN station master Roy Sparling and Iris Warnock. Self-taught on the saxophone, Phil left home in Clinton, Ont., at 16 to play in a bar in Windsor, Ont.

Phil wanted to be an air force mechanic during the war, but bad eyes and mechanical ineptitude put a stop to that. Seeing a "Musicians Wanted" sign, he eventually played sax with the RCAF Streamliners, a band so good it played on the same bill as Glenn Miller in London. This was one of nearly 1,000 troop entertainment gigs the band played in Britain and on the continent between 1943 and 1946. He would never return to England. "Why would I? The last time I was there someone tried to kill me."

Just before he went overseas, Phil married Margaret Elaine Nichols, whom he had met at a dance hall in Port Stanley, Ont. Their marriage lasted 68 years and 11 days.

Back home after the war, Phil completed high school on the veterans' education plan, graduated from the University of Western Ontario in 1951 and taught high-school French and Latin in Strathroy, Ont., where he wrote the town high school's song. With their two children - Jill and Andy - in tow, Phil and Elaine moved to London, Ont.

Ex-students remember attending "toga parties" - learning Latin in Roman garb was more fun. Phil directed the musical Finian's Rainbow at London Central Secondary School, and led the glee club. Students getting the right answer in French class were frequently rewarded with free rides on the teacher's rolling chair.

After the war, Phil's Friday and Saturday nights for the next 30 years were taken up playing saxophone and clarinet in bands. There was also a stint on oboe in the London Symphony Orchestra. For many years at the Western Fair in London, Phil was hired by touring performers to play the grandstand shows.

Phil was stubborn. In the 1970s, he pursued a master's degree with a thesis on the 16th-century French author François Rabelais. When he got to the thesis interview, he decided the board's request for changes was ill-informed, and he just wasn't going to change it. That was the last we heard of his plan for a postgraduate degree.

In July, Phil gave up smoking after 70 years. It was a surprise to all of us who grew up hearing that it was quitting that would kill him. He saved every penny he would have spent on cigarettes so he could split some Christmas cash among his kids and grandkids.

Near the end, breathing only through a tube and unable to talk, he was asked by a nurse if he was really ready to die. Phil's response, with a twinkle in his eye, was a slashing motion across his throat. We all had a good laugh at that. "What a way to go!" he had written earlier, flashing a jaunty wave.