Steve Bloomer 1920-2005

Stephen S. Bloomer was born in New York State in 1920. He knew very early that he’d be an artist: all he wanted to do in school was draw. By his late teens he was studying illustration full time at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art; but as America entered the war in 1941 he left after his third year of schooling to join the U.S. Army Air Corps.

In 1942 Steve married fellow art student Margie Russell. Through violin lessons and singing with his family Steve had had an early introduction to music, but when Margie introduced him to her family he was introduced to a whole new kind of music: American folk music. He started playing guitar and learning to sing the songs of greats like Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, and John Jacob Niles. Now in the army, when the opportunity arose to put on a show, he was able to not only paint the sets, but also be part of the entertainment.

At the end of 1945 he returned to finish his final year at college in Philadelphia, but was instead wooed away by the position of Art Director at Webster Publishing Company in St. Louis, Missouri, where he illustrated and oversaw the design of textbooks and remedial readers.

It was around 1952 in St. Louis where Steve started yet another career. As television was entering its heyday Steve became “The Finder” on public television station KETC. His show gave him a chance to combine his abiding fascination about how the world worked with his natural talents for drawing, singing, songwriting and performing.

After a few years he was drawn back into the world of commercial art, when, in 1956, he moved his family to Montreal to take a position at Stanfield Advertising Agency. Before long, however, he was immersed in television once again; and for many years shared his love of nature with the Canadian public every week as the host of CBC’s “This Living World”. Here he shared a small jungle-like set with wild animals of all sorts — sometimes a baby alligator, sometimes a cheetah. With a boa constrictor casually draped across his shoulders, or cuddling a chimpanzee, he would discuss the habits and attributes of animals, and give his viewers a glimpse of how the natural world has a place in our world.

It wasn’t long before Steve was known in the community as the man to bring some animals and a guitar to entertain schools or groups of Boy Scouts or Girl Guides. He also developed a reputation as the local expert where you could take a sick bird or a motherless raccoon. The Bloomers’ own menagerie of three cats, a dog, an iguana, and various turtles and fish, had to coexist with guests such as raccoons (not the ideal bedfellow for a turtle or a fish), a chimpanzee who was a regular visitor, and even, on one occasion, a baby bear. Steve took full advantage of this particular billet to remind his neighbours that he did indeed have an interesting job. He made sure to be out walking the bear on a leash across the park while the morning commuters marched past. To his surprise, only one man turned his head. Without even breaking stride, he looked over at Steve and remarked “That all you got to do, Bloomer: walk a bear?”

1967 was the year of Expo ’67 — the Montreal World’s Fair. Here Steve branched out yet again, doing public relations for the Youth Pavilion. Not only did they book performers like Gordon Lightfoot, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and international folklore singers and dancers, but Steve was thrilled to have the opportunity to bring his own personal favorites — blues legends such as Odetta; Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee; and Josh White — to Montreal to share with the people who came from all around the world.

There was simply no precedent for this kind of venue, so Steve’s job required not only some skillful coordination but also some creative troubleshooting. If a flight came in late he became an emergency taxi service to ensure the show went off as planned. It was in that capacity that he got to find out just how many large, Senegalese Lion Dancers he could fit into his Volkswagen bus, along with a full complement of spears and sabar (traditional drums made of tree-trunks). Answer: all of them.

In 1968 and 1969, Steve worked at the Commercial Art Centre (CAC), which led to an educational television experiment called “Tevec” (Television educative du Québec), a distance education program aimed at rural Quebec. Here Steve had to mobilize all his communication skills to put across material that produced not just interest, but results – his audience had to pass their exams! And how were the results? An expected 15,000 registrants ballooned to 35,000, and gave Tevec a Neilson rating of 38.5% of the whole population where the average for educational television elsewhere was 0.03%.

The rewards of meeting that challenge made Steve realize how vital his abilities could be, and may have given him the spark for what became his ultimate passion: teaching at John Abbott College (CEGEP). Present at its inception in 1970, he first taught “The Art of Listening” and “Colour & Light”. Because the CEGEP was brand new there was no established curriculum. Here again, Steve’s “seat-of-the-pants” experience served him well. In “The Art of Listening” he investigated sound with scientific equipment such as oscilloscopes, but also improvised instruments like French horns out of funnels and lengths of garden hose. (Now, finally, he had a use for the tortoise shell that had been lying around the house. Covered with a drum skin and attached to a section of hockey stick, it was transformed into Steve’s own invention: the oddly elegant, two-stringed “Blue Ninny”.) At John Abbott, Steve realized his opportunity to pass on the inspiration he had gotten from some of his teachers much earlier in his life, and he discovered his wonderful gift as a teacher there. He continued teaching Drawing and Painting until he retired in1988.

As a life-long environmentalist, it was only natural that Steve would champion the project to turn the parcel of land East and North of the Pointe Claire Plaza into the conservation area called Terracotta Natural Park. He, along with the other founders, succeeded in convincing the City of Pointe Claire to purchase the land for this purpose. It remains to this day a natural preserve where people can go to escape the asphalt, and appreciate the green.

Along with everything else, from 1965 until 1990 Steve freelanced for the National Film Board, creating beautiful watercolours to illustrate filmstrips for libraries and schools. Some of these (for example, “Raven’s Feather Dance” which he wrote, illustrated and narrated) were turned into videos and can still be found in public libraries and viewed at the National Film Board’s Mediatheque.

In his retirement Steve continued to enjoy life — reading, painting and playing music with friends and family.

Steve Bloomer died on November 13, 2005 after a short illness, surrounded by his loving family.

A memorial service was held on Sunday, December 4, 2005 at 1:00pm at Beaconsfield United Church, 202 Woodside Road, Beaconsfield. The duration of the service was one hour, followed by a reception.