![]() What could be worse, you tell me, what could be worse than that?’ ![]() Article content ‘It is impossible to describe the loss of a child. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. (Mitchell Chuvalo, the eldest son, is a teacher at University of Toronto Schools. Steven Chuvalo survived prison, but not the streets. Two days after Georgie was found dead from an overdose, his mother lay down on his bed and swallowed a bottle of prescription pills. His older brothers, Georgie Lee and Steven, were also pulled under by heroin. He shot himself in the family home near the Weston Golf and Country Club in 1985. Some “a–hole” offered him heroin at a party. ![]() He would get in an accident, tear up his knee, have surgery and take pills for the pain. Near the bank is the car lot where Jesse, sweet Jesse, their youngest, bought his motorcycle. Lynne Sheppard was smart and funny and tough, a real “Junction girl.” They had four kids - all boys - by the time she was 20. I would yelp and howl like a natural-born sissy but my sister, Zora, a year younger, she never made a sound. If I’d done something bad he’d hit me on the fingertips with a pussy willow branch, then hit me on the buttocks and put me on cinders - coals that had cooled off - and I would have to pray for forgiveness. I had more trouble with him at home than with the kids. But these were poor kids, and a lot of them had lost their fathers in the war. “The kids would call me a f-ing Jew boy because my mother would make me a steak sandwich on rye bread with a pickle. “It was a little rough, because my folks were from Bosnia-Herzegovina and it was mostly Anglo around here,” George Chuvalo says. Croatian was the first language in the Chuvalo home. Kata plucked chicken feathers at a poultry factory. Stipan stripped hides in a nearby slaughterhouse. His parents, Stipan and Kata, were immigrants from Bosnia-Herzegovina. It’s where he fell in love with his first - and second - wife and experienced both the greatest joys and cruelest tragedies imaginable. It is here, on Hook Avenue, on the streets and empty lots of The Junction, in the neighbourhood where he grew up and fell in love with boxing. I just felt bad for Rob.”īesides, the key to understanding George Chuvalo can’t be found at city hall. “All kinds of crazy things happen in life,” Mr. Ten days later on Hook Avenue he shrugs off the whole affair, saying being upstaged on what was supposed to be his special day at city hall doesn’t sting half as a bad as a straight right jab to the kisser from Ali. He said all he knew about Rob Ford, a west-end guy just like him, whose older brother, Randy, was childhood pals with some of Chuvalo’s sons, was that he came from a good family and was a good person. Chuvalo, once he actually heard the questions - he is basically deaf - smiled them away, said he couldn’t comment. ![]() Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt. ![]()
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