Biography

Charles Herbert Best, just a few weeks after receiving an Honours Baccalaureate in Physiology and Chemistry, jumped at the chance for a summer's work with Dr. Frederick Banting. It was a classic case of being at the right place at the right time. Less than three months later, Best's name was known throughout the medical world, and he had not even begun his medical studies. During the research at the University of Toronto, Banting did the surgical work and Best followed with the chemical assays, and with Collip the purification of the chemical extracts. Sharing Banting's Nobel Prize, Best went on to complete doctorates in both medicine and physiology. As a professor of physiology at Toronto, he joined with Banting as a Director of the Banting and Best Institute, where he succeeded in isolating heparin, an effective ant-coagulant. After the Second World War, the Charles Best Institute, scene of further outstanding research, was established in his honour.

Speech to:

The Academy of Medicine

Toronto, The Vaughan Estate

April 24, 1996

Henry Bruce Macleod Best, M.es A., PhD.

Mr. Chairman, participants in this evening’s celebration of the 75^th Anniversary of the Discovery of Insulin, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Dr. Ken Ferguson, you and Mary were good friends and colleagues of Charles and Margaret Best, and you, Ken, have been a willing and wise adviser to me.

Dr. Laurie Chute and Dr. Helen Chute.  You, Laurie, were a favourite pupil of Charles Best, and you both were very good friends to my parents, and are to Janna and me.

On one occasion, when he was in hospital, Dad said to mother and me, “If there is any kind of memorial service when I am gone, I want Laurie to speak”, and so you did in a gentle and eloquent way.

On another occasion, my father said to me, out of the blue, “At my funeral, I want you to sing “Abide with me”, and “Unto the hills around”, I replied that I couldn’t do that.  In fact, we did sing those old hymns – the sort of music David loved- but I didn’t sing a solo”.

Cecil Yip – Charles Best was proud of your scientific accomplishments.  He would have been pleased that you were appointed Chairman of the Banting and Best Department of Medical Research (the last of his “boys” to be so) and to see you as an Associate Dean of the Faculty of Medicine.

Dr. Carol Schwartz – I am pleased to meet you and have listened to your presentation with great interest.

I am honoured to be surrounded by people who have all made a contribution to the art and practice of Medicine in Canada.  I want to state my own claim in this regard right at the beginning of my remarks.  My contribution to the medical profession, and particularly to Meds 5T8, was made in 1955 when I left the medical course in 1^st Meds.

My father was very disappointed and hurt, but he never took it out on me.  Ray Farquharson was wise and understanding as always.

Dean MacFarlane summoned me to his office and shouted at me for forty minutes.  He said he didn’t care what I wanted to do.  He ordered me to continue in medicine.  I am sorry for this, and other reasons, that Marguerite MacFarlane burned Mac’s diaries; but I can imagine what troubles she thought they would cause.

When I came back from University Laval in the Spring of 1957 and handed my father the parchment for ma Maitrise en Arts in History, Magna Cum Laude, he smiled and said “Well, maybe you will amount t something after all”.

His approval meant a great deal to me.  I can say for myself, and also for his seven grand children (two of whom are here tonight, my nephew Charley and his wife Ann Marle and my son Bruce) that I knew Charles Best first as a person and only second as a “personage”.

I am here tonight because I am a professional historian engaged in writing a biography of my father, Charles Herbert Best.  I am fortunate to have the 80 volumes of diaries that my mother kept from 1914 to 1984.  Also thousands of letters, and many scrap books and photo albums.

Margaret Mahon writes in her diary the day after that on February 29^th, 1919, she went to a dance at a house in Rosedale.  Dance programmes were in vogue.  My mother said, “Then I had the 10^th, the supper Dance, with Charlie Best, and strange to relate we discussed that Charlie used to live in Maine, right across from St, Andrews” (where Margaret Mahon was born).  Margaret was supposed to be taken home by someone else, but she rearranged her schedule so that “Mr. Best” would take her home.  Clark and Warwick Noble and their dates shared the cab.

During the summer of 1921 while Margaret Mahon was in Muskoka and in Coniston visiting friends and relatives, Charles Best, by now her fiancé, wrote to her frequently.

In her last years my mother used to tease me that she would destroy the love letters that she and my father exchanged.  Happily she did not.  Along with the endearments were some comments about the work in the lab in the Medical Building.

On August 8^th, 1921, Charles Best wrote, “I went back to the lab at eleven p.m. and we worked all through the night and today until two.  We got fine results”.

On August 10^th, “We have mailed our report to Dr. Macleod.  He will have food for thought for a little while at least….We are doing identical operations on the dogs.  We are going to give one the extract and the other none and study the condition of each – how long each lives etc.  It will be quite a crucial test for our “isletin”.  I am glad you asked to hear about the dogs, dear.  I know you are not interested in them apart form my work.  It will be a great help, Margaret mine, when we are married to have you interested in the things I am doing.  You could read any articles I might write about, cases I may have and help me make them understandable for people”.

On August 15^th, “It is about midnight of the fifth consecutive night up and I am getting the disease called insomnia.  I cannot sleep even when I have the chance”.

And in another letter of the same period, “It has meant more than I can tell you to have one person just “out for me” in the lovely way you are”.  Their mutual devotion and interest lasted throughout the fifty three years of their long and happy marriage.

Margaret Best’s diaries covered a lot of family happenings, but were also accounts of important events in their lives, of the people they met, their travels, of the weekends at Strawberry Hill Farm at Georgetown (where some of you may have served as conscript labour), at Londonnery Farm in Nassagaweya Township and of their beloved Schooner Cove Farm in Maine.   Margaret Best referred to her archives as “a wonderful record of a family”.  She considered herself “Charley’s Boswell”.

The book I am writing will be different from that of anyone with another background.  I hope that you will enjoy reading it as much as I am enjoying writing it.

What were Charle’s Bests’s opinions about the events surrounding the Discovery and the early development of Insulin?  Both Fred Banting and Charles Best believed that there was a demarcation line between the discovery and the early development.  They were the discoverers; others, such as J.J.R. Macleod, J.B. Collip, Clarke Noble, Walter Campbell and Almon Fletcher made very important contributions, but at another level.

In my father’s view, as in Fred Banting’s, the Nobel Prize should have gone to Banting and Best, rather than to Banting and Macleod.  Charles Best rarely talked of this, but there is no question that, later in his life it did bother him.

There have been many people who felt that they should have received credit for the Discovery of Insulin.   Aside from those in Toronto, there was Earnest Scott in the U.S.A., and Nicolas Paulesco in Rumania.

At the 1991 Meetings of the International Diabetes Federation in Washington, D.C., I had a talk with Professor Rolf Lutt of Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute.  Afterwards, Dr. Luft wrote to me, naturally not wishing to fault the Nobel Committee:

            “I can only say that, with reservations, I think it might have been fair to give the Prize

            to Banting, Best and Paulesco”.

Writing in the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, published in 1950 by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Goran Liljestrand of the Nobel Institute said, “No doubt it would have been right to include Best among the prize winners, but it was not formally possible as he had not been nominated by anybody – a circumstance that probably gave the Committee a wrong impression of the important of Best’s share in the discovery”.

Banting and Macleod were each nominated separately by Americans, and then jointly by Professor August Krogh, a Danish Nobel laureate.  The process by which individuals are nominated for the Nobel Prize is complicated.  In the case of the Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1923 the system failed.

It is important to realize fully just how high the stakes were in 1921, 1922 and 1923.  Whether the players were senior, such as Professor Macleod, very young, such as Charles Best and Clark Noble, or in between, such as Bert Collip or Fred Banting, the pressures were tremendous.  Knots of supporters of one or another player formed and pushed the claims of their particular favourite and sometimes denigrated the role of others.

There is no question that C.H. Best felt an outsider.  Though a Canadian citizen, he was born in the U.S.A.  This is seen in his correspondence on the matter of an annuity from the Dominion government, eventually given to Banting alone.  An affidavit signed on February 22^nd, 1924, by his father, Dr. Herbert Huestis Best establishes Charles Best’s right to claim Canadian citizenship.

“This certifies that, I Herbert Huestis Best, M.D. of Pembroke, Maine, U.S.A. was born in Brooklyn Street, Cornwallis, King’s Country, Nova Scotia, Canada on January 17^th, 1871.  My ancestors for six generations were residents of Nova Scotia.

That I am now and always have been a Canadian – a British subject not having been natruzlied as an American citizen”.

Your President and I have enjoyed discussing a Resolution of this Academy passed by Council, March 23^rd, 1923, part of which I will read to you:

Academy of Medicine of Toronto – Resolution THAT in view of the importance of the discovery and isolation of a substance purporting to be the internal secretion of the pancreas controlling carbohydrate metabolism, and consequently of great value in the science of Physiology and Biochemistry, and possibly, in practical medicine by reason of its presumed ability to control Diabetes Mellitus, the Council of the Academy of Medicine, after careful investigation, believes that conclusive evidence has been furnished of:

FIRST the isolation of such a substance from the pancreas of various animals and termed “insulin” by Dr. F.G. Banting and Dr. C.H. Best in summer of 1921 at the University of Toronto.

The use of such words such as “purporting”, “possibly”, “presumed”, show the political nature of the event.  Dr. Fowler has sent me copies of the drafts for this Resolution.  They show to an even greater degree the tentativeness of the wording.  Amusingly, the citation Mr. Best became Dr. Best, which he was not until 1925.  Possibly this was reflection of the belief that no non-MD or Ph.D. could really have been a co-discoverer of insulin.

More recently there was sharp disagreement about the changing of the wording on the plaque outside the Medical Sciences Building at the University of Toronto commemorating the work done in the old Medical Building in 1921.  On the original historical marker Banting and Best were the co-discoverers of Insulin.  About six years ago, this was changed to Banting, Best, Collip and Macleod.  I believe that the names of Clark Noble, Walter Campbell and Almon Fletcher should be commemorated along with those of Macleod and Collip, but in a different way from Banting and Best.  I agree with the judgement “Glory Enough for All” and think that this can be implemented in a fair and non-combative manner.

Talking of “Glory Enough for All”, I have been asked hundreds of times for my reaction to the TV presentation.  The public will take everything they see on such a programme as gospel even though some scenes and characterizations are fictional.  Surely the real story is dramatic enough without invention.  I regret that those responsible for the production replied when I contacted them about interviewing my mother, “But she is dead’”.  On being informed that Margaret Mahon Best was very much alive, the Director said, “But it’s not that kind of film”, and refused to let Leah Pinsent (who played Margaret Best in the film) or others talk to the one person still alive who had been closest to the main characters in the drama.  Miss Pinsent was very annoyed when she learned years later that she had been denied this opportunity.

What were Charles Best’s relations with some of the players in the insulin story?  The stakes were extraordinarily high.  Emotions were volatile.  Few, if any, of us have ever been under this sort of pressure.  Stories about a “cure” for diabetes were circling the globe.  Appeals were arriving daily in Toronto from the parents of diabetic children, pleading for a chance for their child to live.

A few of you have been involved in medical research that has saved lives.  Most clinicians have had similar experiences.  One differences in the attitudes of patients treated with insulin compared to those treated with penicillin or heparin (or other important discoveries) is not that the latter are any less appreciative, but that diabetics are reminded every day of their gift of life.

So, what were Charles Best’s relations with others involve din the insulin saga?

John James Rickard Macleod.  Charles Best always referred to him with deference as his Professor.  Macleod had taught him the Physiology that he used in the insulin work.  Best believed that Macleod was influenced

by his European experience of the way discoveries were recognized, and that the heady fumes rising from the insulin work had affected his judgment.  Not perhaps that he had pushed his own cause unduly, but that he had failed to present the case for Best.  Charles Best saw Professor Macleod during trips overseas after the older man’s return home to Aberdeen in1928.

James Bertram Collip was later a distinguished researcher and administrator at the Universities of Alberta, Toronto, McGill and Western Ontario as well as the National Research Council.  Charles Best was uncomfortable talking in public about the Discovery of Insulin when Collip was present, Best could never forget the incident in January 1922 that led to blows between Banting and Collip.  In a letter given to me recently by my first cousin, Dr. Joan Bain, who many of you will know (It is wonderful to have relations of whom you are also very fond and I am delighted that her son, Dr. James Bain, is here tonight) Charles Best wrote to his father on May 10, 1922:

“There has been a lot of trouble, quarrels etc., but we are getting on”.  He then describes Collip’s departure and continues, “I am now in charge of making the dope”.

He goes onto give the financial arrangements as worked out by Dr. Fitzgerald that enabled him to continue in medicine at the same time as he was in charge of insulin production, and in 1924, to get married.  In May, 1922 Charles Best was 23.

In recalling the events of 1921 – 1922, at the request of Sir Henry Dale, Charles Best wrote on February 22^nd, 1954:  “I have to confess that even after all these years, the revival of the memory that Professor Macleod and later Collip, instead of being grateful for the privilege of helping to develop a great advance, used their superior experience and skill, with considerable success, in the attempt to appropriate some of the credit for a discovery which was not truly theirs, still makes me warm with resentment.  I must state, also that I have only to think of the understanding and fairness of scientific colleagues in many countries who have read our reports carefully, to replace resentment with a much better feeling”.

The relations between Best and Collip were cordial, but they were never close friends.

Before I talk of the relations between Charley Best and Fred Banting, I want to mention Clark Noble.   He and my father were best friends; they studied together and worked on the building of the Georgetown Golf Course.  They played semi-pro baseball for Georgetown, Noble as first base, Best as catcher.  My mother and father became engaged on July 12, 1920 at the Noble’s farm at Norval.  Clark joined in a motor trip to my Dad’s parents’ home in West Pembroke, Main in1922.  I also have a graduation photo from Arts 1921 of three friends, Clark Noble, Charles Best and Henry Marsh (later a Bishop in the Anglican Church).  Mrs. Marsh told me that they did the three-in-one graduation picture to save money.  I am pleased that Dr. Ted Noble and his wife are here tonight.

In a record that Margaret Best kept of the first years of her eldest son, Charles Alexander, born July 7, 1931, she notes:  “A gift arrived of a “tinker toy” from Teddy Noble”, and she remarked, “Teddy being a few days older himself”.

This close friendship did not last.  There was never any open breach that I am aware of; but Clark Noble certainly felt, as is shown in later Noble family correspondence, that he had been denied his share of the kudos surrounding the Discovery of Insulin.  There was resentment that Charles and Margaret Best had not attended the Nobles’ wedding on June 16^th, 1926.  The fact is that the Bests had been in England for almost a year, since July 17^th, 1925, and would not return to Canada until Christmas 1926.  Later generations of the Noble family would not have known this.

Frederick Grant Banting - In 1921-1922, both Banting and Best felt that they were outsiders.  Later they worked to defend themselves against those whom they believed were trying to horn in on the recognition for their achievements.  The well-known reaction of Fred Banting to the announcement that Macleod, not Best, was to share the Nobel Prize is shown by the telegram sent to Dr. Elliott P. Joslin in Boston, where my father was giving a speech.  It read as follows:

At any meeting or dinner, please read the following stop I ascribe to Best equal share in the Discovery stop hurt that he is not so acknowledged by Nobel trustees stop will share with him stop.

Perhaps even more telling is the inscription on an autographed photograph, which Banting gave to Best, of the Curtis Williamson portrait now hanging in the Banting Institute:

Later Fred Banting developed different research interests from Charles Best.  Best had success in the purification of heparin, a field in which some of the world leaders are colleagues of yours, particularly, Dr. Bill Bigelow and Dr. Ron Baird, and Dr. Helen Chute, and Dr. Louis Jaques in Saskatoon.  The work on heparin kept Best in the public eye, as did the work on choline.  Charles Best with collaborators Don Solandt, Ed Sellers, John Scott and Jim Campbell, all in the Royal Canadian Navy, worked on wartime projects such as Blood Plasma, night lighting, remedies for sea-sickness, and the design and equipping of survival rafts.

Charles Best’s ambition possibly irritated Banting.  Best was ambitious, for himself, for his family, for his colleagues, for his students, for the University of Toronto, for Canada.  He often said that one should aim only for excellence.

Banting continued to be lionized.  He was Knighted in 1934, the Banting Institute was opened in 1930 and he received Honorary Degrees and other awards and recognition.

Sir Frederick Banting died in a plane crash on his way to England on February 20^th, 1941.  It is probable that Charles Best received more honours thereafter than he would have if Sir Frederick had lived.

Charles Best’s first of 30 Honorary Degrees was presented at the 50^th Anniversary Convocation of the University of Chicago on September 29^th, 1941, when he gave an address on “choline”.  He would have been delighted that our daughter, Mairi Mahon Ramsay Best, is now doing her doctorate in Palaeontology at the University of Chicago.

Generally older scientists were given recognition before Best.

Professor Macleod became a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1923, Bert Collip in 1933, Fred Banting in 1935, and Charles Best in 1938.  Bert Collip received the CBE in 1943.  Charles Best was awarded the CBE in 1944.

A story Charles Best enjoyed telling was of the ceremony where the awarding of the CBE took place.  He was standing talking to Prime Minister King.  He did not like King personally, but like many people, Best voted Liberal federally and Conservative provincially, that is until 1957, when my brother Sandy, at age 25, was elected M.P. for Halton County.  The whole family then became Tories.

At any rate, after the CBE Investiture Jean-Francois Pouillot, M.P. for Temiscouata, came and congratulated Best.  With King still standing there, Pouillot added, “I am so pleased to see that Her Majesty the Queen has decorated someone who really deserves recognition”.

King had earlier been awarded the C.M.B.  Charles Best was truly left speechless.

Charles Best was also awarded the Companion of the Order of Canada (1967) and the Companion of Honour (1971).

The award that was most often mentioned in our home was the Membership in the Papal Academy of Sciences.   The parchment accompanying the gold medallion informed the world that henceforth Charles Herbert Best should be addressed as “Your Excellency”.  I used the title occasionally when coming down to breakfast.  My father’s reply was a quick, “How much?”  He liked to tell audiences where he knew there were a number of Catholics that the Holy Father was getting good advice on matters such as birth control from the nephew of an Anglican Bishop and the son-in-law of a Presbyterian Minister.

Both Banting and Best received tempting offers to leave Canada for the USA or for Britain.  In 1933 Charles Best was offered the Chair of Physiology in Edinburgh to succeed Sir Edward Sharpey-Schafer.  In 1949 the post of Secretary of the Medical Research Council of Great Britain was offered to him.  I remember my father at dinner one night saying, “Well, Boys, how would you live to live in London”?  We thought it was a great idea.

The offer of the Chair of Physiology at Cambridge in 1951 to succeed Lord Adrian led to a short exchange of cables.

But by the late forties nothing would have pried Charles Best away from the University of Toronto.  He had been promised his own building bearing his name where he could combine the two Departments he headed, Physiology and the Banting Best Department of Medical Research.  The building was finally opened in 1953.

Did Charles Best enjoy all these honours?  Yes he certainly did, and so did the whole family.  But something of the small village of West Pembroke remained always in my father, part of an undoubtedly complicated mixture.

I have mentioned West Pembroke in the State of Maine, where my grandfather practised medicine for 48 years.  West Pembroke was only 30 miles from the border of Calais, Maine and St. Stephen, New Brunswick.  Dr. Herbert Heustis Best used the Chipman Memorial Hospital in Ste. Stephen, except when he ran his own hospital in Eastport, Maine.  The latter didn’t work out too well financially, and, in any case, my grandmother insisted that they move out of the “city” of Eastport because Charley at 7 years old was fast becoming a “juvenile delinquent”.   The last straw was when the only fire engine, which was parked outside the house of the Fire Chief, when he went home to lunch, rolled down the hill, crossed Water Street, ran the length of Wadsworth’s Wharf and sank to the bottom of the harbour.  One Charley Best was near the top of the list of suspected culprits.

Charles Best never relaxed and enjoyed himself anywhere as much as he did at our farm, four miles form the village of West Pembroke, where his father’s horses were kept.  Dad was brought up with horses.  From the age of 7 he could, with the help of a step ladder, unharness one team when his father came home from a call and prepare the fresh horses for the next call.   The first of the horses bred in West Pembroke was a standard-bred trotting mare from the farm of Dad’s grandfather, John Burbidge Best, at Grafton, King’s Country, in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia.  Charles Best went overseas in the First War in 1918 as a Sergeant, aged 19, on the basis of his abilities as a horseman.  In Toronto for years he rode with Garfield Weston, a classmate from his one year at Harbord Collegiate, and later at the Connaught Labs Farm with Neil McKinnon, father of Dr. Barbara Hazlett, who I am delighted to see here tonight.  (I will never forget the affectionate care that Barbara gave my mother and my aunt in their last years).

Later he and I had two retired Toronto Police horses.  Charles Best in later years was safer on horse back than he was on his own two feet.

The Maritime connection was exceedingly important to Charles and Margaret Best.  Margaret Best told of going to a tea in Rosedale as a bride.  A lady from one of the Old Toronto Families explained to her that to count in Toronto, one had to be both Loyalist and Anglican.  Mother replied that her family had come to Nova Scotia before the Loyalists and that she was proud to be the daughter of a Presbyterian Minister.

None the less, they both had several dear friends in Toronto – Don and Mary Fraser (young Don I count as a valued friend), David and Bertha Scott, Ray and Ena Farquharson, Alex and Mary MacDonald, Reg and Margaret Haist (I am delighted that Margaret is here tonight), Keller and Kay Mackay, Ruth and Vin Price, George and Catherine Scroggie – some medical and some not, but often of Maritime background.

A word about the influence of my mother.  It was undoubtedly very great.  She had a degree in Botany, a field of study which my brother allowed.  She guarded Dad as he did her.  She travelled with him everywhere, except during World War II, when she was very unhappy at his overseas travel and was afraid that the same fate might await him as had Sir Frederick Banting.  Omond Solandt, whom Charles Best considered, along with Laurie Chute and a very few others, as his prize pupils, emphasized what a formidable impression Charley and Margaret Best made as a couple.

I understand that some members of the medical profession are known to play golf.  Charley Best loved golf, and like most things he set his mind to do, he was good at it.  He played at Georgetown (on the course that he and Clark Noble had helped make), at St. Andrews, New Brunswick, and for many years at York Downs with Don Fraser, David Scott and Alex MacDonald.   Most of all he enjoyed his driving range at Schooner Cove Farm in Maine.  At high tide (there is a 40 foot vertical rise and fall of tide) he would drive 50 or more balls into the cove form the top of the hill beside the barn, enjoying the “plop”.  At low tide I would go out on the mud flats to collect the balls of the next round.

Both Fred Banting and my father painted.  Banting travelled with A.Y. Jackson on the lower St. Lawrence and to the Arctic.  Jackson influenced his style.

Charles Best started painting in the mid thirties at our farm in Maine and did most of his work there.   Several artists tried to show him how to paint, but he ignored their advice.  He put the same concentration and determination that he showed in all aspects of his life into painting.   He loved painting which he found totally absorbing and most relaxing.

In later years Charles and Margaret Best often reminisced about 1925-1926 and 1928, when they lived in London.  Those were exciting and happy years for the young couple.  The best thing that Charles Best ever did professionally (aside from accepting the offer to work with Fred Banting) was to go to London to work with Sir Henry Dale.  When visiting Toronto in 1922, Dale told my father that as soon as he finished his Medical Degree, he must get out of the hot-house political atmosphere of Toronto, and Dale invited him to come to the National Institute for Medical Research in London.  Those years were very productive from a scientific point of view and most enjoyable for them both.   My mother’s life-long interest in art and antiques stemmed from that period when she visited galleries and museums in London.   Succeeding generations are enjoying her good taste in the antiques she bought there, and later in Toronto works of the Group of Seven, Emily Carr and many others.

Sir Henry Dale was a very distinguished scientist:  Nobel Laureate, President of the Royal Society, member of the Order of Merit.  One honour does not seem to appear in the biographical dictionaries:   he was my god-father.  Dale was undoubtedly Charles Best’s greatest mentor.  Others were Dr. Elliott P. Joslin, probably in his time the best known diabetes specialist on this continent, and Dr. J.G. Fitzgerald, the first head of the Connaught Labs, and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine.  I am pleased that James Fitzgerald is writing a biography of his grandfather.

Charles Best had an inexhaustible supply of energy and enthusiasm for life.  This was slowed down for a while by a series of heart attacks in 1953 from which he made an excellent recovery.  In 1964 he suffered a sudden and severe depression.  Omond Solandt said to me the last time I visited him, “He really made a very good recovery, but he never quite regained his spark”.  However, Charles Best enjoyed taking part in the celebrations surrounding the 50^th Anniversary of the Discovery of Insulin.  Margaret and Charles Best did a lot of travelling in 1971 and 1972, when they were invited to Brazil, to England and to many countries in Europe, and to Israel.

On September 3^rd, 1974, Margaret and Charles Best celebrated their 50^th Wedding Anniversary.

Finally, on Easter Sunday, 1978, Charles Best suffered an aneurysm of the aorta the day after my brother, Sandy, died of a massive heart attack at 46.  Five days later Charles Herbert Best was dead at 79.  For Margaret Best, this was a terrible double blow.

My thanks to your for your invitation and your kind attention.  As I mentioned earlier, I am currently writing a biography of my father, so if any of you know of papers of any sort, or of oral records that could be of interest to me, please get in touch with me through the History Department of Laurentian University in Sudbury.