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Mariner Stephen Gillis was an avowed and proud non-conformist
Sep 29, 2020
Stephen Joseph Gillis: Brother. Mariner. Non-Conformist. Autodidact. Born March 14, 1954 in Boston, Mass.; died June 21, 2020, in Sydney, N.S., from cardiac arrest; aged 66.
Stephen was the second child of Isabel and James Joseph Gillis. Both born in Grand Mira, Cape Breton, Jimmy and Isabel moved to the “Boston States” after their marriage, and all six of their children were born there. Steve was an intensely intelligent and talkative child, and often asked his mother to take him to the window at bedtime so he could look at the moon. As a boy, he spent a lot of his time pedalling away from his siblings on his bike, or catching turtles in the Concord River, or baiting his littlest sister into all manner of misbehaving.
The family moved back to the old Mira farmhouse in Cape Breton in 1967 – no phone, no plumbing, no central heating and one single channel on the television set. An avid reader, Steve always pushed his younger siblings to read the books he had enjoyed. As children, they swam in the river, rambled the woods and tobogganed down the driveway. Their father repaired the planked hull of a large lapstrake rowboat and, with Steve at the helm, the siblings set off on countless summer excursions: three sets of long oars, the family dog sitting up on the prow, and (sometimes) even a homemade Viking-esque square sail.
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