Esteemed Queen’s professor John Meisel chaired the CRTC

By his own admission, John Meisel was born with “the sunniest of temperaments.” Quite simply, he always looked on the bright side. He earned a laudatory reputation as a political scientist, a cultural maven, an avid nationalist and a patron of the arts, but many colleagues and friends remember him as much for his personality as his achievements. He was a gregarious, engaged extrovert, easily recognized as the lean, lanky figure enthusiastically conversing with students, speaking at a lectern, attending a concert, or peering through black-rimmed glasses with a beret crammed atop his cumulus of white chin-length curly locks, as he rode his bicycle through the streets of Kingston to his beloved Queen’s University campus.Born in Vienna on Oct. 23, 1923, to a German mother and Czech father, he arrived, at the age of 18, with his parents and older sister, Rose, in Canada in January, 1942. The Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor and the Americans had finally joined the Allies in fighting the Axis powers during the Second World War. Prof. Meisel’s hazardous and circuitous route to Fort Erie, Ont., is the stuff of an old-fashioned movie, a melodrama that moulded his life and that of his adopted country.