The house that Norm built

It's a sweltering weekday morning, but inside Sunnybrook's Kilgour (or K-) wing, Norman Bell looks dapper in a navy cardigan and ascot.

Seated in a wheelchair, the 89-year-old former stockbroker and World War II veteran could easily be taken for any other elderly resident on his floor. The difference is that it is largely due to him that they are all there.

When the hospital was transferred from the Department of Veterans Affairs to the province in 1966, then-premier John Robarts asked Mr. Bell to join its six-member board of trustees.

"We were supposed to see that the veterans were looked after once the hospital was open to the public," he says. As a board member, however, he was frustrated as funds set aside
in the transfer agreement for the construction of a new wing remained unspent.

The board at the time, he recalls, "decided that they would ask the DVA to let them have the money and they would build a wing for the hospital, but not for the veterans.

The government was never going to agree to that. It was ridiculous. So the money sat there for six years!" In 1972, when Mr. Bell was made Chairman of the Board, he says, " I thought to myself, what's the first thing I'm going to do? Get the money. That's why this building exists."

This year, that same building – Canada's largest veterans-care facility – became his home too.

As a young man, he still remembers going with friends from Upper Canada College to volunteer for military duty in 1940 and being told they had to finish their university degrees first. "It broke our hearts," he says.

"Then the war got worse and they said they needed us. They said, ‘we'll give you your last year and you go volunteer for the army.' Well, we were pleased as punch."

By 1943, he was fighting alongside British General Montgomery's 8th Army with the 48th Highlanders.