From
The Toronto Star. She also wrote the 2013 book,
What I know: Lessons from my 30 years of quadriplegia.
Barbara Turnbull, who died May 10 at age 50,
is remembered for her "strength, her bravery, the depth of her
independence, her writing talent and her vibrant personality.”
Retired Toronto Star editor Nick van Rijn
admits that when he first saw reporter Barb Turnbull in the newsroom, he
thought: “What is she doing here?”
Years earlier, a teenage Turnbull had been
shot in the neck during a robbery, severing her spinal cord and
rendering her a high-level quadriplegic.
“She wasted no time showing me what she was doing here,” van Rijn recalled Sunday.
Despite “my accident,” as Turnbull called the
1983 shooting during a robbery in the convenience store where she
worked, she graduated with honours from Arizona State University’s
journalism school as class valedictorian in 1990. She was subsequently
hired by the Star, where she became a champion of disability rights and
organ donation over her incredible career at the newspaper.
Former Star managing editor Mary Deanne Shears
hired her in the early ’90s. “Little did I know then of her strength,
her bravery, the depth of her independence, her writing talent and her
vibrant personality. But the Star newsroom came to know all of that, and
many of its journalists became her friend, as did I. She was smart and
feisty and kind and determined to make every day and every assignment
count. I shall miss her so much.”
Former Ontario Attorney General Roy McMurtry befriended Turnbull shortly after the shooting.
“I admired Barb so much. She was without a doubt the most courageous person I had ever known,” he said.
Newsroom colleague and close friend Joe Hall
said he was shocked by how quickly Turnbull made people see her as she
wanted to be seen.
“The miracle of Barb was you lost the chair. A
whirring, lumbering, 300-pound contraption — the legacy of a cowardly
crime and catastrophic injury. Yet if you knew her, it disappeared.
Gone, in the glow of a sublime spirit.”
“Barb was exceptional in the way she conducted
her life,” said another former colleague, Leslie Scrivener. “She used
positive language, the language of the able-bodied, so that she was not
set apart. Because of that we didn't set her apart. She walked to work.
She had lunch with you. The relationship was collegial, not dependent.”
Torstar board chair and former publisher John Honderich said Turnbull’s work was exemplary.
“She was a great journalist. She wrote some
tremendous stories. This is someone whose name had transcended virtually
everything, and so people knew the story of Barbara Turnbull.
“And yet she was insistent, always determined
to be just considered, she was a journalist doing her job, she wanted to
do great stories, she wanted to do stories that mattered. She cared
about the paper. In those respects she would be like any other reporter.
“But she wasn’t. She wasn’t every other reporter and that’s what made it so special.”
