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Star of the Court
From basketball to the law, Coulter Osborne ’50 has always excelled
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COULTER OSBORNE’50HASHELD SOMEINFLUENTIAL POSITIONSOF AUTHORITY INHISLIFETIME, but he has never been interviewed for a job. He has been appointed to the bench, elevated to the province’s appeal court, overseen the lower court system as associate chief justice and evaluated the behaviour of politicians and public servants as the province’s integrity commissioner.
At Hillfield School in the 1940s, he excelled at cricket and won the headmaster’s reading prize. He played basketball at university on three intercollegiate championship teams and for Canada at the Melbourne Olympics. In recognition of these contributions and achievements, he has received honours, awards and accolades, but unless you asked, he’d never tell you about them.
“I’ve never heard him brag once,” says Harry Greening ’49, a contemporary of Coulter’s at Hillfield and his friend for 82 years. “No matter what he achieves, it never goes to his head.”
The achievements began more than 75 years ago, shortly after he entered the school as an eight-year-old. Not only did he pass with a solid academic record through eight consecutive grades, he also excelled at hockey, track, basketball, cricket and preparation for exams. “Classes at Hillfield were really small,” says Coulter. “There was an intimacy between students and teachers. We were required to participate in everything, including drama and public speaking. In the winter, I used to get up early in the morning and head to the outdoor, natural ice rink at school. I’d put my skates on and shoot the puck around till classes started.” For two winters, between 1946 and 1948, the temperature rarely fell below freezing. “The skating was bleak,” he says, “so I headed to the gym and played basketball.”
“Coulter could play all sports,” adds Harry. “He was a superb cricketer. On the basketball court, I’d just feed him the ball.”
As a teenager, Coulter displayed another talent. “I became known for being able to determine in advance the questions that would be asked on an exam,” he says. “That asset was portable. Even at university, people would call me out of the blue.” When he wasn’t answering phone calls at the University of Western Ontario (now Western University), he ran on the track team, played football and was a member of Western’s basketball team that won three consecutive intercollegiate championships. “A driving force,” said the selectors who inducted him into Western’s Hall of Fame.
Characteristically, he gives credit to his high-school coaches for his accomplishments on the court. “They advised me to stand out from the crowd,” he says. “One way to do that was to be able to jump. By the time I got to university, I was strong enough to dunk the ball.” That was no mean feat for a lanky sixfoot-two guard.
As a first-year student at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, Coulter continued to play senior basketball, winning a league championship and participating in a few post-season exhibition games in front of Canada’s Olympic scouts. That summer, he went to work at the American Can Company, near Victoria Avenue and Birge Street, where his father was assistant sales manager.
“One day I finished loading empty cans onto a freight car,” he says, “and when I went home I found this letter from the Canadian Olympic Association. It said, ‘Be in Vancouver the day after Labour Day.’ My father was befuddled. He said, ‘What happens to law school?’”
Coulter went to the dean of Osgoode Hall to ask for advice. “I said, ‘I’d like to go, but if I do, I won’t be at any classes in the first term.”
The dean looked down at the papers on his desk and said, “We don’t take attendance.”
Coulter and his teammates made the 16,000-kilometre trip to Melbourne in two days. “Unfortunately, we then played the Russians and the French,” he says, “and lost both games.” Those early losses relegated Canada to the B pool and ended Canada’s medal hopes.
Back in Canada, completing his law studies, he returned occasionally to Western, where he met a smart, personable senior named Barbara Mollison one afternoon after a football game.
“I didn’t know her at the time,” he says. “But I knew you,” says Barbara. After they were married, Coulter moved with Barbara to Kitchener in 1959 and practised for the next 20 years with such distinction that the Waterloo Bar Association now recognizes lawyers in the region with the Coulter A. Osborne Award for combining impeccable professional standards with civility and consideration for those with whom they work.
He also earned an appointment to the Supreme Court of Ontario, the province’s senior trial court. Within months, Coulter heard his first murder trial, involving eight members of a motorcycle gang accused of murdering a rival from another gang.
“There was still an athletic mien to Coulter Osborne,” writes Mick Lowe in Conspiracy of Brothers: A True Story of Bikers, Murder and the Law, “a slender, easy grace that women found attractive and that put men at their ease. Here was no fussy, three-piece-suit and pinstripes man. His style was preppy, a legacy perhaps of his years at Hamilton’s Hillfield School and St. Andrew’s College, outside Toronto.”
For four months, he filled his bench book with notations: his thoughts in the left column of the page, evidence in the right. When the trial ended, the jury convicted six of the eight accused persons of murder. The case remains controversial to this day, the subject not only of Lowe’s award-winning book but of a song by country star Steve Earle.
In 12 years on the bench, Coulter heard cases involving murder, manslaughter, drug trafficking, personal injury, bankruptcy, insolvency, wills and estates, divorce and the division of property in courtrooms around southern Ontario. “When he came through Hamilton,” says Harry Greening, “we’d go to Al’s Place in the train station for a corned beef on rye.”
Coulter’s days on the trial circuit ended in 1990, when he was appointed to the Court of Appeal for Ontario, hearing appeals of decisions by the lower courts, including a successful one by a woman in Guelph named Gwen Jacobs against her conviction for committing an indecent act by walking home topless on a hot summer day. “No one who was offended was forced to continue looking at her,” he wrote.
Coulter was on the golf course in 1999 when he received the call confirming his appointment as the province’s Associate Chief Justice. He did that job for two years, but even after he retired in 2001, the appointments kept coming: Ontario’s Integrity Commissioner; the province’s Lobbyist Registrar; the head of a review of public/private partnership proposals involving Toronto’s Union Station; examining the Ontario Securities Commission; special officer to the court in the restructuring of Stelco Inc.; head of an inquiry into the province’s civil justice system.
To this day, his phone keeps ringing as he accepts appointments as an arbitrator and fairness advisor on issues such as student transportation and the revitalization of Regent Park in Toronto’s downtown core. “I just have a hard time retiring,” he says. The accolades continue, as well: an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree, the Order of Ontario and, at HSC, the Athletic Hall of Fame Heritage Award in 2014, the Alumni Award of Distinction in 2013 and the Alumni Hall of Excellence in 2006.
More important, his three daughters have presented Barbara and Coulter with four grandchildren. And last August, Coulter and Barbara celebrated their 61st wedding anniversary.
After all this, Coulter Osborne still doesn’t talk about his achievements. Perhaps he might blow his own horn if he’d ever been interviewed for a job. But he’s still waiting.
