A Sometime Fighter For The Disabled: Part One. by Dave Jaffe
People remembered Ronald Malevich for his low gravelly voice long after he'd left their lives. He would phone people up and talk to them for hours and hours. He'd tell them about his struggles on behalf of the handicapped and the issues he'd won. he'd stress his role and his intelligence. Some people were impressed. Yet others said after hanging up the phone,"I just wish this guy would leave me alone." Then some people told him that the next time he phoned them. Then he left their lives. Still, he kept on fighting for the disabled, until that is Chinese immigrants started to show up in Vancouver in the 1970's.
Ron Malevich grew up in Thunder Bay at Canada's western edge of Lake Superior. His parents were born in the Ukraine and came to Canada in the 1920's. They met in farming country and then married and moved to Thunder Bay. At this point it was two towns, one called Fort William and the other was known as Port Arthur.
Ron's father found a job in an industrial plant in Port Arthur where he and his wife also found a house to live in. His mother raised two boys and one girl. She spoke English but never achieved her husband's mastery of the language. She often cleaned houses to make money. Ron had his problems. He was the middle child but he had only some vision in one of his eyes. He graduated from high school. Yet at times he was hyperactive in the classroom and often argued with his teachers.
Unlike his father, mother and his siblings, Ron didn't likes to work too hard. "I left Port Arthur after I graduated from high school," he once said. "There was no work there." In fact there was lots of work to do in Port Arthur. Industrial plants back then dotted the city. To-day many of these plants are shuttered . Yet this wasn't true in the 1950's. In any case, in his late teens, Ron Malevich left Port Arthur and headed east. By now he was a short dark haired confirmed smoker who didn't like working in the factories of his native town.
In the late 1950's, he headed south-east to Toronto, a sober growing city that beckoned to many dissatisfied Canadian youngsters as well as many immigrants who were coming to Canada from Europe. In this city, which was now Canada's biggest metropolis, Ron survived but never made much money. He panhandled in the streets, worked in low paying dress factories and gambled some of his money at racetracks. He lived in low rent rooming houses,, meeting in these places, prostitutes, gamblers and other low paid workers like himself.
This was his life for a few years. "These people you were hanging out with were the underclass," a sociology student told him years later. "Karl Marx called them 'The lumpen proletariat'". All of this was true but Ron who knew little about Karl Marx back then. Still he benefited from coming to Toronto. He went to the Toronto office of the Canadian Institute for the Blind and got a better pair of glasses there. These glasses helped him read much more easily.
Soon he ended up in libraries reading left wing magazines like 'Canadian Forum' and 'Monthly Review'. Then he came across the works of the Chicago based organizer Saul Alinsky and read his books very carefully. Here was a man who knew how to change the world in a progressive direction. He became Ron's favourite author.
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