Donald Kepron

It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of Joan and Don Kepron. A memorial service will be held at the Centre Funéraire Côte-des-Neiges, 4525 Chem. de la Côte-des-Neiges, Montreal at 1:00 PM on Saturday, July 22nd with a reception to follow. All who knew Joan or Don are invited to join us for this celebration of their lives.

Joan Marie (Picard) Kepron was born in Toronto, September 14, 1930 to Pearl and Adolphus “AJ” Picard. She passed away February 8, 2020 at the age of 89 after suffering a stroke.

Joan’s father AJ was a widower, with six children from his previous marriage. Joan was the first child from AJ’s marriage to Pearl Palmer who ultimately had another three children, making a total of ten children in the family.

Joan attended a Seventh Day Adventist elementary school in Toronto and went on to Western Technical High School in a home economics-type track. Both of those experiences were reflected in the values and skills that she drew on later in life.

Joan decided to go into nursing, following in her mother’s footsteps, and graduated as an RN from Toronto’s East General Hospital. After working in the hospital for several years, she was hired as a DC-3 flight attendant by Trans Canada Airlines (TCA, later to become Air Canada), at a time when you had to be a nurse to serve in that role.

Joan and Don were married in Toronto, July 17, 1954 and moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan shortly thereafter for Don to pursue graduate studies in prosthodontics. They returned to Montreal in 1956, where Don set up his dental practice, which was initially in the family home in Pointe Claire. Over the first nine years of their marriage, they had five children, all boys.

In keeping with her nursing background, Joan was compassionate, supportive, optimistic, assertive, confident and forthright. She was athletic, enjoyed swimming and learned to ski after meeting Don. Skiing ultimately became an important part of the family’s activities and legacy, with all five of the boys becoming deeply involved in the sport.

She was energetic, adventurous and creative, with an enduring interest in learning new things. As the boys got older and she had more time available, she became involved with craft groups and generated a huge number of works of art, perhaps most notably with the Montreal Area Decorative Painters group. Every member of the family has many pieces of her work to remember her by.

Always involved with the school board’s Parent Teacher Association, in her later years Joan returned to school herself at Concordia University, obtained a BA in Family Life Counselling and worked at Lindsay Place High School in Pointe Claire, where she directed the Career Orientation and Community Centre for the Lester B. Pearson School Board for many years.

Don Kepron was born in Winnipeg, October 25, 1922, the youngest of five children of Ukrainian immigrants Anna (Bakun) and Paul Kepron. He passed away February 23, 2020, at the age of 97 two weeks after Joan, his wife of 66 years.

Don attended public school in Winnipeg and continued on to college at the University of Manitoba, serving as president of the student body in the Faculty of Science and graduating in 1947 with a B.Sc. in chemistry. He was athletically inclined. He was a body builder in his early years and was a member of an acrobatic group whose other members, Ray, Russel and Audrey Saunders, went on to become Hollywood stuntmen and women. He worked as a golf pro in the Winnipeg area and played college football. His football skills helped him gain admission to dental school at McGill University where he had a distinguished academic career, winning the Montreal Dental Club Prize his first year, the Montreal Dental Club and Mount Royal Dental Society Prizes in his second year and graduating in 1954 with the Gold Medal in Dentistry. He received a Kellogg Fellowship to pursue graduate studies in prosthodontics at the University of Michigan and graduated from there with an M.Sc. in 1956. His master’s thesis was entitled “Phoronomy of Jaw Movement”, relating to the three-dimensional tracing of jaw movement in space, and the study of jaw movement and its impact on dental occlusion (how teeth fit together) became specialties in his subsequent clinical practice and teaching career back in Montreal. He helped to define the specialty of Prosthodontics for the Canadian Dental Association and helped to have the CDA recognize Prosthodontics as a Section. He was an organizing member in the formation of the Canadian Association of Prosthodontics, the Association of Prosthodontics of Canada and the Quebec Association of Prosthodontics. He was a Charter Fellow of the Royal College of Dentists (Canada), a Fellow of the International College of Prosthodontics, the International College of Dentists and the Academy of Dentistry International.

Don was a charismatic and outgoing individual with a strong volition for the drive, determination and diligence required to fulfill one's potential. He didn't believe in short cuts, maintained a high degree of integrity in all he endeavored to achieve and was fearlessly optimistic in the projects he took on. He didn’t consider himself a politician, but he had faith in humanity and its capacity to triumph over adversity and resolve conflicts.

Like his father before him, Don was a craftsman and very skilled with his hands. He cared deeply about the quality of his work and strove to provide exemplary, data-driven treatment based on an understanding of each patient’s jaw movement and occlusal anatomy. And he was a teacher, an Associate Professor of Occlusion and Prosthodontics, and Director of the Division of Prosthodontics in the Department of Clinical Dentistry at McGill University. He taught a Treatment Planning Seminar for many years in which he sought to foster in his students the same data-driven approach to treatment and concern for quality, science and biomechanics that he had. He said one of the most satisfying moments of his professional career was having a former student thank him for the course in Treatment Planning.

Joan and Don were predeceased by their sons Kevin Murray in 1999 and Donald Paul in 2019. They are survived by their sons Michael (Ruth) of Standish, Maine, David (Lu) of Gaithersburg, Maryland and John of Mont Tremblant, Quebec and grandchildren Kristopher, Katie, Marla, Jared, Nicole, Nicholas and Benjamin.