Hmm...Col Man, I'll try to help you out a bit, but honestly, some of the questions I have no answers to. His first wife died in 1969, a year before I was born. By the time I arrived, he was with Toots. How they met, I don't know, but it was most likely at a social event of some sort in Regina. I also don't think he was practicing medicine by the time I was born, and I believe the building they bought for the practice is long gone. However, I do remember watching their home movies as a kid, one at the opening of the clinic, and all the doctors are smoking, drinking and whooping it up. I thought that was pretty funny. They were actually party animals in their day, and regularly kept going from dawn to dusk.
I'm not sure if they ever made it to Israel. Relatives on my mother's side did though.
Being a doctor and a good storyteller, he used to tell his kids, and the grandkids later, made-up fairy tales with characters like King Pellagra and Queen Halitosis. He also enjoyed taking phone calls from patients at dinnertime, and making sure everyone eating could hear him ask questions like "So, what colour was your phlegm again?"
He always encouraged seeking knowledge. If one of the kids had a question, rather than answer it, he always said "why don't we look it up?" The house was always full of books. There were a ton in the basement, and on one visit, when I was just a kid, he asked me to choose whatever I wanted and take them home. This was my first exposure to John Stuart Mill, Locke, Hobbes, and Shirley Jackson (she was one cool witch).
On that same visit, I was in a bug collecting phase. He helped me chloroform them and pin them to corkboards. Then we looked up the Latin names for all the species and labelled them. He introduced me to some rudimentary Latin, I introduced him to ELP, which he found interesting, but not entirely to his taste. That summer, I also trained a stray cat to do tricks, which amused him immensely.
I'll try to remember more, it has been a while.
..the memoirs breifly mention he had two wives but says nothing more... 