Kennedy assassination expert grew up in North Toronto

[attach]7312[/attach]On Nov. 22 1963, students at Bedford Park Public School took an early break from classes to listen to Toronto mayor Donald Summerville’s state funeral as it was broadcast over the public address system. Summerville had died suddenly two days earlier, suffering a heart attack while playing in a charity hockey game.

Eleven-year-old Al Navis listened attentively to the proceedings with his classmates in Miss Evelyn Reynolds’ Grade 7 class. Suddenly the proceedings were interrupted when principal J.H.C. Vanderburgh cut in over the PA system to deliver the stunning news: U.S. President John F. Kennedy had been shot.

“School is dismissed,” the voice said tersely. “Go straight home.”

Navis biked to his home in Wanless Park. Breathless, he broke the news to his mother. She set her iron down and turned on the TV just in time to see Walter Cronkite confirm the death of a sitting president.

For Navis, who grew up to become a radio personality of note and a rare- and first-edition bookseller, that announcement proved to be a watershed moment, igniting a lifelong preoccupation with one of the most indelible moments in the collective American conscious.

Navis died on Oct. 13 following a battle with cancer. He was considered Canada’s leading expert on the Kennedy assassination — a breathing encyclopedia of facts, players and timelines. He delved into the world of conspiracy theories, travelled to Dallas to conduct tours at Dealey Plaza, the site of the assassination, and held lectures on the topic that turned into all-nighters.

Navis’ voice on the airwaves were markedly absent on the recent 50th anniversary. With stints at Q107.1, CFRB 1010 and The Fan 590 making him well known in Toronto, Navis was at home on any radio airwaves, and come Nov. 22 each year he would spend the day doing interviews on radio shows around the world.

Navis’ appetite for historical intrigue expanded beyond the Kennedy assassination, namely, into a 7,500 square-foot basement of a Thornhill strip plaza — affectionately nicknamed “The Bunker” — that was home to his first-edition and rare books.

The 100,000-piece inventory made up Almark and Co., an online bookselling business Navis operated for two decades, beginning two years before most people had even heard of the web, much less the bookselling giants who would emerge there.

In book circles his reputation for finding the rarest, most obscure tomes preceded him, says fellow bookseller Peter Sellers.

“If we had customers looking for things we didn’t have, I would be on the phone with Al. Nine times out of 10, he’d say, ‘Yeah, I’ve got it.’

“Al became this semi-mythical, mysterious book guy that we would call who, pretty much all the time, would be able to fill the order.”

A longtime member of the Canadian Booksellers Association, Navis’ realm of expertise branched out to crime and mystery, a genre that encompassed a tight-knit but geographically widespread community of authors.

In 1992 he took on a massive undertaking when he chaired BoucherCon, a Canadian mystery-book convention. He repeated the endeavour in 2004.

“Some of the biggest names in mystery were good drinking buddies,” says longtime friend and business partner Mark Novak.

And some of the biggest names in Hollywood — Whoopi Goldberg, Mel Blanc and John Larroquette — were regular book customers. Novak says he has fond memories of going for sushi dinners with Navis and George Takei, another Navis patron.

“He had all kinds of knowledge about not only book collecting, but he knew an incredible amount of authors personally,” said book dealer and longtime friend Jeff Coopman. “The number of celebrity customers that you just shook your head at.”

Navis was also a sports fan. He melded his deep love of sports with books as host of “Between the Lines,” an early-1990s interview radio show on The Fan 590, where he became known as the “Book Doctor”.

Novak says Navis had the ability to engage every guest, from the major sports star to the U.S. senator.

“There are people who play games at interviewing and they don’t really care what the answer is … but Al wasn’t like that,” Novak said. “He would ask very incisive questions that were what the interviewee wanted to talk about — what was most important to them in their life — and he was really good at that.”

During the overnight shifts, Navis befriended three up-and-coming radio jockeys who would go on to illustrious careers in Toronto media: Jeff Marek, George Stroumboulopoulos and Bob Mackowycz.

Navis welcomed the trio into the graveyard shift fold, and quickly became a trusted friend.

“It’s what you look for when you’re young and breaking into a world that you don’t feel like you have any business being in, in the first place,” Stroumboulopoulos says.

Marek says Navis took good conversation and elevated it to a fine art, all the while teaching him the value of wine and a good cigar.

“We closed so many restaurants. His frame of reference was just so wide. There wasn’t a topic that Al would look at you and just sit there, dog-faced.”

Says Stromboulopoulos: “Al liked a good laugh, but Al wanted a smart laugh. I liked that about him because it taught us really early that we should expect more from ourselves.”

Though Navis was considered a pioneer in online bookselling, the industry changed drastically during the span of his career. The advent of iTunes and Amazon, as well as the mass market appeal of electronic readers allowed publishers to effectively cut out the middle-man book dealer, going straight to the source, and taking a greater share of the profits.

Business declined and in 2009 Navis shut down Almark and went back to the Handy Book Exchange, a legendary Avenue Road bookstore that had been run for years by his mother, Olive, until her death in 2006.

Handy Book remains one of the last independent bookstores in North Toronto. There are currently no plans to shut it down, brother Gord Navis told the Town Crier.

Despite his having moved his books out of The Bunker years ago, Sellers says his best memories of Navis still trace back to that treasured library.

“I have this great fond picture of Al just sitting there, surrounded by books, talking on the phone with customers from all over the world and just seeing a guy who was doing exactly what he was intended to do,” he said.