====== McDonell, Angus Hoey ====== (13 May 1905-10 May 1992), author. (Angus H. McDonell, widely known as “Angus Hoey,” “Angus H.,” sp. Hoy and Hoye also found) Born in Montreal. Parents: John Duncan McDonell, a locomotive engineer, and his wife Elizabeth McMillan. The family seem effectively to have resettled in GC, on the family farm west of Alexandria, when Angus was a few years old, but John Duncan’s occupation necessarily continued to call him to work duties elsewhere till he retired, after 45 years’ service with the CPR, in the summer of 1938. (//Glengarry News// 5 Aug. 1938) He and his wife celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary in 1944. (//GN// 21 July 1944). Angus the son attended local schools. He had his first short article printed in the //Glengarry News// in 1922, thus beginning a remarkable history of 70 years as a writer for the paper. Because of difficulties with eyesight (colour-blindness) or hearing, he was unable to enter the family occupation of railroading. In 1923, he began to work for Northern Electric, and in 1925 he was transferred by the same company from Montreal to Quebec City. He spent 14 years, including most of the Depression, in Ottawa working as a barber, before moving over to the insurance business in 1945. In 1953 he entered the insurance adjuster business, where he continued for the rest of his business life. While in Ottawa, he was active in encouraging baseball and other sports there, and he organized a Glengarry Night in 1946 which led to the founding of the Glengarry Club of Ottawa. About the beginning of the 1960s, he and his wife left Ottawa and settled at the family farm, known as Highland Chief Farm, about three miles west of Alexandria in the 3rd Concession of Kenyon Township. After his return to GC, he was even more involved than before in the GC scene, but also continued work as an insurance adjuster in Cornwall. He noted (though he miscalculated the age by one year) in a letter of the Nov. before he died that he was “87 and nudging towards the shadows of 90.” Remaining active nevertheless, till near the end, he died at Highland Chief Farm, after a struggle of several years with cancer. The burial was at St. Finnan’s cemetery. After the death in 1962 of Major Angus A. Mcdonald (Grove) of Alexandria, Angus H. McDonell was named his successor as chairman of the Glengarry Highland Games. (//Glengarry News// 10 Jan. 1963) He remained chairman for a quarter century, till 1987 or 1988. He was the principal founder of the Glengarry Sports Hall of Fame at Maxville, which had its official opening 12 Sept. 1990. He was active in a wide range also of other GC-area activities, including the Alexandria Lions Club sportsmen’s dinner, which he chaired for many years. An immensely fluent and articulate writer, he had his own sports column in the //Glengarry News// from about the beginning of the 1960s, and somewhat later had a general-interest column usually on the editorial page, but these were in addition to a flood of well-informed articles from his pen over the years on sports and GC history. The many historical topics he wrote about included the Munro & McIntosh carriage plant, the //Glengarry News// of his youth, blacksmiths, the GC railways, cinemas, and the St. Andrew’s Day and Robert Burns celebrations. He published a number of excellent travelogues, including one relating how he traced by automobile the line of the old Canada Atlantic Railway (economically so important to GC) from Alexandria to Barry’s Bay. He published only a limited number of obituaries, but those were rich in detail, affectionate and eloquent, and carefully placed the deceased in the context of the history of the county. In 1979, he began to publish in the //Glengarry News// a series of long, well-developed biographical sketches of GC athletes, prepared on the occasions of their induction into the Glengarry Sports Hall of Fame. The series thus begun has since been continued by other authors, and he himself indeed has been given his own biography in its ranks. The series of biographies of farmers, compiled afterwards by other authors than Angus H. McDonell, for the Glengarry Agricultural Wall of Fame, may be considered an offshoot of McDonell’s sports biographies, as indeed the Agricultural Wall of Fame may be seen as a product, similarly, of his Sports Hall of Fame. The more important of Angus H. McDonell’s historical articles and all his Sports Hall articles are listed with full dates in the MacGillivray 1996 //Bibliography of Glengarry County//. He wrote in a vivid, forceful style that may be described as “sportswriters’ baroque.” He virtually never wrote for any publication except his beloved //Glengarry News//. In 1985 he had an agreement with a publisher to produce two vols., one on the history of GC Highland games and one on GC sports history (//GN// 31 July 1985), but the project seems to have died at an early stage. He has been more undervalued than any other historian of GC, possibly because he was so prolific and restricted himself to newspaper publication. It was among his strengths that he had a true historian’s understanding of the importance of communications systems and especially of railways in the history and operation of towns such as Alexandria. He had a fine understanding of the distinctive historical colouring of different parts of the county. He did not exaggerate the importance of anything he described. This was a remarkable and admirable feature of his lives of the athletes. Angus H. McDonell was never more fully a professional as a writer than when he dealt with this aspect of the biographies. He described their lives with zeal and panache, but in truth most of the athletes of his series were of merely local importance, few of them venturing onto the national stage. GC has been more successful in railway contracting and in literature (to name only two areas of achievement!) than in athletics! He loved his native county, with all its rich, complex traditions, and he grudged the loss of any part of the historical record of its pleasures and achievements. While he was unfailingly tolerant and courteous of other religions, the Roman Catholic church was very dear to him. An impressive-looking man who “photographed well,” one of the striking photographs shows him at the Glengarry Highland Games in 1975 with John Diefenbaker (//Vankleek Hill Review// 6 Aug. 1975); another, very fine, showing him at his typewriter, accompanied his front-page obituary in the //Glengarry News//. He was married twice, (1) in 1933 to Annie J. MacKinnon (d. 1956), and (2) in Feb. 1959 to Bertha (Bea) Mary Cecilia MacDonald (d. 31 Dec. 1993, aged 90), who was one of the “Sandy Ranald” sisters; the Sandy Ranald sisters, as Angus liked to remember, were known for their record of service as Bell Telephone operators, and she had been an operator in Alexandria and elsewhere for some 33 years. (See for this family, also, the biog. of J. J. Macdonald) Tragically, Angus’ only child, John Duncan McDonell, was killed in a car accident in 1959, aged only 21 or 22. (//GN// 28 May 1959) ---- //Glengarry News// 13 May-3 June 1992 (with portraits) * biog. sketch prepared for his (posthumous) induction into Glengarry Sports Hall of Fame, with line sketch by Douglas A. Fales, //GN// 9 Sept. 1992; for the induction, see also //GN// 2 & 16 Sept. 1992 * other biog. articles and notices about him, //GN// 27 May 1987 pp. 4, 16, 17, 24 (tributes, cartoon, portraits), 8 Jan. & 8 July 1992, & 27 June 2001 (letter of Douglas A. Fales); also, //Ottawa Citizen// 27 May 1987 * his Govt. of Quebec birth certificate Reg. No. 1190504848161 * obituary of father, //GN// 5 July 1956 * //Bibliography of Glengarry//: index (for his publications) * first marriage, //GN// 6 Oct. 1933 * obituary of second wife, //GN// 26 Jan. 1994 * Northern Electric, barber, insurance, //GN// 30 Nov. 1923, 20 March 1925 9 Nov. 1945, 1 Oct. 1953, 23 Aug. 1956 * personal knowledge * appraised in article on GC historians by Royce MacGillivray, //Glengarry Life// 1996 * returns from wedding trip to Florida, second marriage, //GN// 5 March 1959 * testimonial dinner, Ottawa, //GN// 2 Nov. 1961 * testimonial dinner, Maxville, //GN// 3 June 1987 * in group portrait from his High School days, //GN// 29 Aug. 2001 * Douglas A. Fales, “Remembering Angus Hoey,” //GN// 10 Jan. 2007 [<6>]