Doon Valley Journal

Jesse Davidson, son of John and Sherene Davidson, lost his battle against Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy on Nov. 6, 2009, at the age of 29. Through Jesse’s Journey and the Foundation for Gene and Cell Therapy, he became a community icon. The following is a profile I wrote of Sherene Davidson for The London Free Press. It was titled “Silent Partner” and appeared on Aug. 2, 1998.

Silent Partner: Sherene Davidson holding the fort

Sherene Davidson would prefer that you weren’t reading about her in today’s newspaper.

For years, she has hugged the shadows as those closest to her were in the public spotlight.

She has been, by choice, a silent partner, supporting their work from the sidelines, much as a stage manager helps a drama unfold without ever being seen by the audience.

It’s only during weeks like this, when husband John Davidson passes through London on his coast-to-coast odyssey to raise money for research into genetic diseases such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy, that she’ll step into the limelight for a moment. After all, the cause represented by Jesse’s Journey — A Father’s Tribute, she says, is so much more important than herself, her husband’s passion for it so intense and the opportunity to create awareness so ripe that the moment must be seized. As soon as the fanfare subsides, though, she’ll happily retreat to the wings.

It would be a mistake, however, to cast Sherene Davidson in the role of a stay-at-home mother, hostage to the ambitions and status of her family.

The second child of Doris and Mowbray Sifton, she shuttles most weekdays between Sifton Properties’ offices at 195 Dufferin Ave. and the 200 Queens Ave. headquarters of Jesse’s Journey.

Her professional life consists of four major components:

- She keeps the books and handles the correspondence for Awata (an Inuit word meaning “family circle”), the holding company which owns the vast range of Sifton interests, principal among them Sifton Properties;

- She is secretary-treasurer of the million-dollar Sifton Family Foundation, which supports myriad community projects, especially those serving the youth and social sectors;

- She is unofficial historian for Sifton Properties, which marks its 75th anniversary this year;

- She is treasurer for the Foundation for Gene and Cell Therapy. John is its chief fund-raiser.

And when she gets home from work, she runs a household that includes two teenage sons — Jesse, who joined his dad on Jesse’s Journey in 1995 and plans to wrap up his high school credits at Saunders secondary school this year, and Tim, who will begin Grade 10 at Saunders next month. An older son, Tyler, is an electrician at Alberta’s Banff Centre for the Arts.

Sherene’s character — equal parts stoic, efficient businessperson, family loyalist and supportive wife and mother — has been shaped both by the cautiously ambitious family into which she was born and the family she is raising.

The Sifton family — Doris and Mowbray, as well as children Glen, Sherene, Carol, Paul and Richard — have seen the family business grow into one of London’s biggest landlords.

As they have achieved remarkable success in building large chunks of the city, such as Westmount and Oakridge, the family has participated in the community, lived in their own subdivisions and steered their business with an eye to steady, long-term growth.

Public relations consultant Chris Dennett, author of an upcoming book on the Sifton dynasty, says the family has been “very successful in maintaining the family unit of ownership while not squabbling over the assets. (Yet) the Siftons do not believe there is anything remarkable in what they’ve been able to achieve.”

Sources close to the family say Sherene’s understated confidence, her ability to coolly think problems through, her long-term approach to challenges and unshakable loyalty to family are Sifton clan trademarks.

From the age of 10, Sherene’s lived in Oakridge Park, which was being built by her father’s company. She attended Oakridge secondary school through Grade 11 and learned to play the flute in the school band. She spent her last year of high school, though, boarding weekdays at St. Joseph’s Academy, run by the Sisters of Mount St. Joseph.

Sherene’s post-secondary studies were at Hillsdale College, in Hillsdale, Mich., where she sorted through career options.

Though she’d been involved in the family business through summer jobs at the Berkshire Club and some general office work, she struck out on her own after leaving Hillsdale, working as a pharmacist’s assistant at a London drugstore.

“My father was a little bit old-fashioned and saw the future (of the family business) more in his sons rather than his daughters,” she says. “Though if I’d wanted to, I probably could have become more involved.”

By August 1971, she’d met a young CFPL-AM broadcaster named John Davidson.

“We had a mutual friend . . . who decided that the two of us would hit it off,” she recalls. “That was the downside . . . If she hadn’t told us that, we probably would have instantly got on very well.”

Nonetheless, Sherene and John were married the following January. Within five months, they were off to Vancouver where John had found work with the CBC. Sherene, meanwhile, tried her hand at retailing with the Hudson’s Bay Co.

The move provided John with plenty of new professional challenges. But his hectic schedule of radio and TV coverage did little for relations with his new bride and extended family.

“The choice became career or family and we chose family. And we couldn’t think of a better place to raise our family than in London.”

In October 1973, they returned to the Forest City, where John returned to work at CFPL-AM.

Sherene took business administration at Westervelt College and worked in a local accounting office for a while. But with the birth of Tyler in 1977, she turned her attention to family matters full-time.

“We really felt that that was an important part of the kids’ time — that for one of us to be home was pretty valuable. And I really enjoyed that . . .

“I know a lot of young mothers (today) whose lives are a lot busier, trying to balance careers and family responsibilities.”

Second son Jesse was born in 1980, followed by Tim in 1983.

At CFPL-AM, John helped produce and report for Bill Brady’s morning talk show. After several part-time stints in TV, he jumped to CFPL-TV full time in 1981, becoming a well-known local sports reporter.

Then, in 1986, they learned that six-year-old Jesse had Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

“We were all devastated by the news,” says Sherene’s sister, Carol Robertson.

“Sherene . . . found out (when) John was away, up in Temagami or somewhere, for the weekend. She found out on the Friday and he had already left. There was really no way of getting in touch with him, so she had to cope with it.”

She was impressed by her sister’s strength and resilience in the face of crisis.

“Sherene is much stronger than I am. Not physically, but mentally, emotionally,” Carol says.

“I think it took John a long time to come to grips with (it). Sherene was able to grasp it and make decisions about it much quicker than John.

“They tried to keep things as normal as possible for Jesse so that, for him, (the disability) was a gradual thing.”

Both extended families rallied around the Davidsons to help them cope with this new, hard reality. It would change everything in their lives, from daily routines to the house they lived in.

“We have five children,” says Doris Sifton. “And of the five children, if God had to give someone a child with muscular dystrophy, he chose the right parents.”

“John, at first, didn’t want to go to the Thames Valley treatment centre. Jesse went, I think, about once a month. Then John went and would see maybe a family with two boys that had muscular dystrophy. And the next thing you knew, John was down on the floor playing with the children there.

“(John and Sherene) both just accepted the fact that it happened to them and I’m not so sure that any of my other children could have accepted it that well.”

With the news about Jesse in hand and with Tim already four years old, Sherene decided in 1987 to end her 10-year hiatus from work outside the home.

“I’d always liked working with numbers and I saw an ad in the paper for H&R Block,” beginning what would be a two-year stint preparing income tax returns.

In 1989, when Mowbray Sifton and the rest of the family decided they “wanted to do something (for the community) in a more organized fashion” by creating a family foundation, Sherene took charge of day-to-day operations.

Meanwhile, the search for help for Jesse went on.

“John and I had looked around to find out what kinds of treatments there were for muscular dystrophy. Basically, there weren’t any,” Sherene says.

“So we knew that the only way there was going to be any solution was for there to be a lot more research, which, of course, costs a lot of money.

“John was doing a lot of walking, just to get some exercise. He began to think, ‘I can do this — it’s quite easy.’ And he began thinking about ways to raise some money and he came up with the idea of walking across the province.

“Originally he was going to walk by himself. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that Jesse should go too, because it would attract more attention to muscular dystrophy — what it is, what it’s caused by, genetics, the whole field he wanted people to focus on.

“If Jesse was along — a young kid — most people would be more prone to pay attention . . . so Jesse went along on the first trip,” she says.

She and John discussed the trip for about a month before broaching the idea to Jesse on his birthday on April 10, 1994.

Jesse responded with a characteristically frank, “Are you crazy?”

“It took a while,” Sherene recalls. “Jesse likes to take an idea and think about it.”

Gradually, though, he warmed to the idea of making people aware of the need for research into inherited diseases such as Duchenne’s, which was slowly sapping him of strength and mobility.

The original Jesse’s Journey was announced in February 1995. That summer, John and Jesse crossed Ontario from west to east in pursuit of $1 million in donations for research. They would make that, and more, eventually raising $1.2 million.

The journey’s unprecedented success, however, created an unprecedented workload for Sherene as treasurer of Jesse’s Journey and its parent, the Foundation for Gene and Cell Therapy.

The work required to issue tax receipts alone was staggering.

“Because I’m the treasurer of the group, I was responsible to see that all of those receipts were done,” Sherene recalls.

And they got done — all 6,000 or so of them — by Sherene, some volunteers, even her mother.

The journey’s other effect also caught the Davidsons a little unprepared as the foundation was deluged with funding applications from researchers.

“Jesse’s Journey certainly increased our assets enormously, but it also put a great deal of pressure on the board to make decisions — and fairly quickly — about where that money was going to go.

“And that was very difficult, because most of us were not scientists and did not know a great deal about how peer review and that kind of thing worked.”

Adding to the board’s burden were Revenue Canada regulations governing most of the money raised by the journey. They stipulated that at least 80 per cent of the funds collected be disbursed within a year.

“To read through all that information and decide whether this was something that made sense, whether this might work and to know whether the scientist (applying) was top-ranked or mediocre . . . it was very difficult and put a lot more pressure on the board,” Sherene says.

By any measure, however, the trip was an unqualified success. Father and son had cemented an unbreakable bond; the financial goal was reached; public awareness was raised significantly; and kudos poured in from the premier, the prime minister, even the Queen.

But the journey was far from over for the Davidson family, Sherene says.

“Even when they got back, there seemed to be a very long period of going to dinners and all kinds of things like that. Jesse couldn’t go to them all. But some elderly lady would come along and push $5 into his hand — that kind of thing . . . So there were those kinds of disruptions to our lives.

“We’re been very lucky in that Jesse hasn’t allowed it to go to his head,” Sherene says.

“So far,” Jesse interjects from his nearby computer work station.

John returned to work at CFPL-TV, which had granted him a leave of absence for the journey. Tyler and Tim got their father back. Jesse returned to school. Sherene and the rest of the board set about distributing the trip’s proceeds.

Inwardly, though, John wondered whether his contribution to the cause would last.

“Although Jesse did an outstanding job, I thought I could have done better in terms of what we raised. We dedicated what we had to research and then I thought maybe I should have designed something that would feed research forever. And then this (current trip) began to take shape in my mind,” John says.

“I got to (age) 50 and I just decided it’s not all about money. Assuming I’d work until 65 or so, I just said to people that, for the next 15 years, I want to do what I want to do. This thing just kept growing and growing.

“When you’re a family in our situation, you look everywhere. You ask yourself how you can help.”

He quit TV to work for the Foundation for Gene and Cell Therapy full-time.

Sherene admits that, initially, she was no more thrilled with John’s desire to embark on a cross-Canada fund-raiser than she was about the original journey. But she resolved to support him.

“I’m very tolerant. I know this is something he really wants to do. It wouldn’t be something I would pick to do. And so I’m going to do whatever I can to help him realize that ambition,” she says.

Carol adds that her sister was concerned about the journeys’ impact on John’s health. She had had similar misgivings about Jesse’s ability to cope and John’s ability to push him across Ontario on the first trip.

“This time, too, she didn’t want John doing this because he was concerned about his health,” her sister says. “Putting your body through something like this — you don’t know what the end result is going to be.

“She was thinking through not just 1998, but 10 years down the road, am I still going to have this man there, and (his) support.”

There was also the question of caring for Jesse while John was on the road, with memories of the exhausting pace and overwhelming workload of the first trip still fresh.

“I remember saying to my mom many times, ’she looks awful,’ — she looked so tired. She didn’t even have Jesse there and she was just really worn out. It was like she was on the journey, walking,” Carol says of the ‘95 trip.

“So when John said that he was going to do this, Sherene said she was going to have someone look after Jesse on a full-time basis and someone else was going to do the receipts.”

University student Jennifer Maslovski, of Burlington, was hired to help Jesse get around. He makes trips to the office and bank regularly to deposit money collected on the trip.

And at journey headquarters, Maureen Golovchenko and a staff of volunteers look after logistics and receipts.

As a result, “Sherene is much more relaxed,” Carol says.

The family agreed early on that asking Jesse to take part in a second trip would be “unrealistic,” Carol says.

So Jesse is eagerly awaiting his dad’s return, hoping John will be back in time to see him enrol in a hotel-restaurant management course at Fanshawe College.

Administratively, the foundation is better prepared for this trip, Sherene says. Donations will go to an endowment fund and the Medical Research Council of Canada will help review applications.

Personally, Sherene says, she is managing just fine, thank you. While John’s absence for nine months is a challenge (she joked with him that she could have a baby while he’s away), she has adjusted and keeps the household running like clockwork.

“The difficult part on the marriage might be after he comes back, because now that I’ve been on my own for so long, I’m used to doing it my way,” she says.

“Keeping the house and the kids, that’s not been too hard. But there were other tasks that he did around the house that don’t get done,” either on time or at all.

“I’m a fairly independent person and I’m fairly self-contained,” she concludes.

She’s also an indispensable part of both his life and his cause, John says.

“She’s a great partner both ways. She’s a rock-solid person that you can count on. Enormously understanding. We’ve always had a tremendous amount of trust in one another.”

Son Tyler, monitoring his parents’ efforts from Alberta, agrees his mother is “a workhorse — calm, capable and collected.”

He says this second trip is really more difficult for his younger brothers. Watching the current journey from the sidelines was pretty tough at first for Jesse, Tyler says.

Asked why he’s on the road again and not home with his family — especially Jesse — John is straightforward, his earnest voice softening even further:

“You know and I know what the odds are here . . . Jess is a pretty mature young man now. He knows where things stand.

“I think to stay home and watch movies with him isn’t going to make a hoot of difference. So somebody’s got to do this thing — that’s why it’s being done.

“(Each day) some other family finds out that their lives have just flipped upside-down and, in terms of being in a race with time, if we can’t win for ourselves, let’s win for somebody else.

“And Jesse’s a big part of that. He’s the type of kid that, if he could do this, he’d probably be out here himself.

“I have no medical skills to bring to the table. So I’m doing the only thing I can do, and that’s generate an awareness and try to generate the dollars that are necessary.”

In addition to pride in her daughter’s efforts, Doris Sifton is both concerned and pleased with the way young Tim has coped.

“Timmy is the one that has probably had the hardest time because, even as a baby, there really wasn’t enough time to spend with him because of Jesse. But he’s turning into a very fine young man and is being very helpful to Sherene and Jesse. And he’s grown up an awful lot since John left,” she says.

John, too, is aware of Tim’s sacrifices.

“I can’t say enough about Tim . . . . He’s been asked to understand way too much for his years. . . . I owe (Tim) so much — how do you ever balance the books?

“These kids — in a roundabout way they teach you a lot more than you teach them,” he adds.

The $10-million goal, which still looks like a distant daydream as the walk moves on to John’s home turf this week, is still within reach, Sherene says.

“It doesn’t end with the end of the walk — in fact, that’s when you really pick up and see another 20 per cent or so,” she says.

And that, friends say, is Sherene Davidson all over. Her quiet unflappability in the face of the most daunting challenge has made her the unsung heroine of the Jesse’s Journey projects.

Yet in the midst of all the attention those projects have generated, she remains an intensely private person. Even after hours of interviews with her family, friends and coworkers, it’s easy to come away with the sense that the lock on her innermost self remains closed, the elusive key unfound.

Leslie Brown, of Toronto, a former neighbour who has known Sherene for more than 20 years, says that, with the exception a small, tight circle that know her innermost thoughts, “she won’t tell you.”

What Londoners will see and should appreciate, Brown says, is a woman with “a great and very quiet sense of public duty.”