Edgar Cowan and his wife, Nuala FitzGerald, who was an actor, with their dog, Alec.James Lewcun/The Globe and Mail
At the 1977 annual meeting of the Canadian Conference of the Arts in Ottawa, magazine publisher Ed Cowan challenged the country’s arts community to take off its white gloves, ween itself from government handouts and get down to the dirty work required to sustain itself. He used unseemly words such as entrepreneur, promote, hustle and exploitation – practices he not only preached but lived by.
Indeed, Mr. Cowan and his Toronto-based company New Leaf Publications had resuscitated a moribund Saturday Night magazine in 1975 with the aid of a $100,000 gift from Imperial Oil and $250,000 from private investors. After decades of stumbling financially, the historic general interest periodical, now with a groovy Seventies font, actually turned a profit in 1977 – at which point Mr. Cowan sold it.
He then moved onto something else, as was his wont. He was one of the co-founders of CITY-TV, a vibrant Toronto station with modern programming notions, which launched in 1972 on the nosebleed UHF channel 79.
In 1983, he was the man behind C Channel, a daring venture in the early days of pay television that offered lively, wall-to-wall cultural and arts programming that came with no commercials and no zany sitcoms. Brazenly highbrow, it was, The Globe and Mail’s Peter Harris wrote, “Culture with a capital C,” and, to Mr. Cowan’s mind, “everything television could and should be.”
It went under after only 17 weeks, failing because of inadequate financing and general viewer indifference but not for a lack of trying.
Mr. Cowan, a versatile entrepreneur, a committed player in the Canadian arts and culture industry and an invested Torontonian, died on Feb. 9, at Kensington Gardens, a long-term care facility where he had lived for the previous three years. Afflicted with the degenerative disease progressive supranuclear palsy, he was 86.
“Even in his last years, he was doing what he had always done, which was to deal with the affairs of the day, whether those affairs were music or politics or social issues or neighbourhood development,” former Toronto mayor David Crombie told The Globe. “Ed touched a lot of things and helped reshape the city that we have today, and he did it with enormous vigour.”
Mr. Cowan was an ad man in the 1960s with MacLaren Advertising. He co-founded the five-city Carleton, Cowan Public Relations firm and was a communications consultant for the Liberal Party. In 1961, he helped organize the first Mariposa Folk Festival, in Orillia, Ont., a bucolic town north of Toronto. It was watershed event for the country’s folk music community.
With a head full of ideas and a face full of beard, he was the kind of confident guy who drove a red convertible. And in the days before e-mails, he had connections.
“He knew how to reach people,” said folk music icon Sylvia Tyson, one half of the duo Ian & Sylvia.
It was Mr. Cowan who in the spring of 1961 introduced the nascent twosome to Pete Seeger, the consensus dean of folk music who was in Toronto to give a concert at historic Massey Hall. Mr. Cowan, organizing publicity for the performance, arranged a midday break between Mr. Seeger’s promotional appearances for him to meet the duo and hear their sound. Impressed, Mr. Seeger would invite them up on stage that night for a couple of songs.
In John Einarson’s book Four Strong Winds, Mr. Cowan described the spotlight appearance at Massey Hall as an “historic occasion” and a “seminal event” in the duo’s career. He might have been overselling the moment. “I don’t know about seminal,” Ms. Tyson said. “But it certainly brought us to broader attention.”
Mr. Cowan brought Ian & Sylvia to New York to audition for folk music impresario Albert Grossman. Though he said he was very busy with Peter, Paul and Mary at the time, he nevertheless signed the duo to a management contract and landed them a deal with Vanguard Records.
Mr. Cowan was part of his own duo: His long marriage to the elegant Irish-Canadian stage and screen actor Nuala FitzGerald Cowan was perhaps the best of his endless endeavours. They enjoyed life with a sociable bent and cinematic flair, entertaining at a home in Toronto with an in-ground pool or retreating to a cottage in southern Ireland.
They graced society pages and raised a family that included their son (the late Noah Cowan, former co-director of the Toronto International Film Festival) and two children from Ms. FitzGerald’s previous marriage, Brian and Timothy FitzGerald.
“Ed and Nuala kibitzed back and forth so easily and beautifully and teased each other,” said Dianne Rinehart, a journalist and close friend. “Ed was proud of Nuala’s career as an actress and bragged that she had the bigger career, at a time when men did not generally do that. Theirs was a comfortable, creative love.”
Mr. Cowan and Ms. FitzGerald attend an Irish pub at Christmas.Supplied
And fun – they hosted outrageous get-togethers stocked with media people, politicians and the theatre crowd that are the stuff of Toronto high-life lore. “Their kids joked that those were the parties, not theirs as teenage boys, that the neighbours had to be worried about,” Ms. Rinehart said.
Of course, Mr. Cowan had a serious side as well. In 2015, he penned an opinion piece for The Globe that advocated for arts and culture industries as an economic driver in Canada. “While we are just 15 years into the digital millennium,” he wrote, “it is crystal clear that creative and innovative uses of technology are essential to our future sustainable economic success.”
Mr. Cowan was an energizer who made things happen. As his late friend Paul Break described him, “he was the man who could squeeze air and get water.”
Edgar Arthur Cowan was born May 29, 1937, in Toronto, to Maurice Cowan and Anne Cowan (née Finsten). His father was in the clothing business.
He studied business administration at Ryerson Institute of Technology (now Toronto Metropolitan University), where he first scratched his showbiz itch with an involvement in the school’s official comedy troupe, RiOT.
After graduation, he spent a few years at the dawn of the 1960s at the Toronto Telegram as a writer and promotions specialist. Around that time, Mr. Cowan and other members of the tight-knit folk community visited the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island and came back inspired enough to create a similarly styled event with a focus on Canadian artists.
The resulting Mariposa Folk Festival was founded by Orillia residents Ruth Jones, her husband Dr. Casey Jones, and local broadcaster Pete McGarvey. Mr. Cowan co-ordinated the marketing and media communication. Among the performers were the Travellers, Bonnie Dobson and Ian & Sylvia. With its sun-splashed launch in the summer of 1961, the country’s coffeehouse scenesters were galvanized.
“A kind of gathering of the tribes, it drew folk fans and aficionados from across the country who discovered to their delight that they were, indeed, not alone in their appreciation for this music,” Mr. Einarson wrote in Four Strong Winds. Mr. Cowan himself recalled a weekend marked by an “open-air holiday atmosphere” and “pure musical joy.”
The festival’s emcee was Ted Schaefer. He shared an apartment with Mr. Cowan that was a lively hub for the Toronto folkniks. “It was pretty much party central,” Ms. Tyson said.
Not long after the inaugural Mariposa, Mr. Cowan and business partner Jack Wall opened the Fifth Peg folk club on Toronto’s Church Street. Active through 1963, the establishment billed itself in newspaper advertisements as “Canada’s most sophisticated coffeehouse,” offering 15 varieties of coffee and an upscale (steak and shrimp) menu.
Performers included touring folk and blues stars such as John Lee Hooker, Leon Bibb and the duo of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Among the local upstarts was Gordon Lightfoot. Bill Cosby, Dave Broadfoot and David Steinberg told jokes.
From the folk music scene, Mr. Cowan transitioned into the PR field and, eventually, media. He was among a founding group of cable TV pioneer Phyllis Switzer, lawyer and future senator Jerry Grafstein and television host Moses Znaimer that created CITY-TV.
“Ed was our connection to the advertising community, the one who gave credibility to our application by confirming that there really was advertiser demand and market room for another television entrant in Toronto at that time,” Mr. Znaimer said.
In the late 1980s, Mr. Cowan and his wife, a Shaw Festival actress, owned and operated the Bank House, a bed-and-breakfast operation in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
As Mr. Cowan grew older, he became known as Grampa Zed to his family. Drawing on his experience as a camp counsellor in his early teens, he organized three-legged races and old-fashioned competitions involving eggs and spoons for his grandchildren and their pals. In 2013, he landed the lead role in one of his grandchildren’s school film projects that screened at a York University film festival.
His co-star in life, his wife, died with medical assistance on July 31, 2023.
Mr. Cowan leaves his stepsons, Tim FitzGerald and Brian FitzGerald; and five grandchildren.
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