CALGARY — Prominent Calgary lawyer Robert Barron died May 15 in Calgary at age 91.
Barron, the second son of J.B. and Amelia Barron, was born in Calgary on Nov. 29, 1916. A lifelong Calgarian and a member of the city’s highly influential Barron family, he graduated with the Chief Justice’s Gold Medal in Law and other awards from the University of Alberta law school in 1938.
Walter Barron, Robert’s first cousin, who has been practising law since 1952, remembers him as “one of the most brilliant legal minds I had ever met.
“Whenever I called him, he would have an answer for me within minutes.”
Robert’s 64-year legal career was interrupted when he volunteered from 1941 to 1945 as a flight lieutenant for the Royal Canadian Air Force, where he trained flight navigators from the Commonwealth.
After World War II, Barron resumed his legal work, and a number of his cases are still studied in law schools. He would often take on pro bono work, even refusing payment from clients for whom it would be a financial hardship to pay.
It’s impossible to write about Barron’s life without noting that he was a key member of the Barron family.
Without the arrival to the city of the two Barron brothers, Jacob Bell (known as J.B.) and Abe, just prior to World War I, Calgary today would be a much different place.
Abe and his older brother J.B., the second practising Jewish lawyer in Calgary, founded the law firm Barron & Barron, which is still controlled by the family today. J.B. also went on to become a theatre owner and impresario, and he broke ground for the city’s first modern Orthodox synagogue, the Shaarey Tzedec. J.B. also built the city’s first high-rise, the Barron Building, which once anchored the oil industry in Calgary.
After resuming his legal career after the war, in 1956, Robert Barron’s life took on a new direction. Then 39, he was speaking at a Zionist convention in Calgary when he met a 20-year-old Junior Hadassah delegate named Cleoanne Heltay, from Edmonton.
The two fell instantly in love. They married within a month and six children followed.
Robert turned his attention to the raising of his children, a decision that also had great benefits for the rest of the Jewish community. For 14 years, he served as president of the Calgary Hebrew School, ensuring its survival and leaving a profound impact on Jewish education in Calgary.
During his involvement with the school, Robert, along with his father J.B. and close friend Charles Waterman, found land on what then the outskirts of Calgary and decided on a new location for the school.
Being a religious private school, it would not have survived with only the support of the city’s small Jewish community. It needed public funding, otherwise tuition fees would have been unaffordable, so Robert persuaded the Calgary Public School Board that the day school should receive public funds.
He was also a passionate volunteer for the Chevra Kadisha of Calgary, seeing death as a leveller and doing the organization’s legal work.
His daughter, Jacqueline Barron, who followed in her father’s legal footsteps and continues to run the family’s law firm, now called Ridout Barron, with her husband Peter Ridout, remembers her father as a very humble man.
“He never wanted his name on any plaque and would refuse any kind of recognition or award. He refused a [Jewish National Fund] Negev dinner in his honour.”
The Barron family continues to be influential in Calgary. Today, Gerry Barron, Walter’s son, is the current Jewish Community Council president, while son-in-law Ben Karmel is the principal of the Calgary Jewish Academy, as the Hebrew school is now known.
Robert Barron leaves behind his wife, Cleoanne, of 52 years, as well as six children – Deborah, Elaine, Daniel, Tamara, Yehoshua and Jacqueline – and seven grandchildren.