Stan Stanyar was a boxer and rower at Glebe Collegiate Institute in Ottawa, Ontario in the 1920s and also played for the Ottawa Senators of the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union, a precursor to the Ottawa Rough Riders of the Canadian Football League, from 1926 through 1929. He attended McGill University in Montreal, Quebec for some time, but eventually moved to Hamilton, Ontario and joined the Leander Boat Club. It was with this club that he was selected to represent Canada at the 1932 Summer Olympics, where he won a bronze medal in the coxed eights alongside Don Boal, Earl Eastwood, Harry Fry, Joe Harris, Cedric Liddell, Les MacDonald, Al Taylor, and Bill Thoburn, finishing only 0.4 seconds ahead of the British crew in the final. He was also a member of the Leander crew that won Canada’s Henley Royal Regatta that year. He returned to Ottawa in the fall of 1933 and rejoined the Senators, now known as the Rough Riders, for a short period. He retired from athletic life in the late 1930s and bought land in 1938 to build a country resort in what is now Val-des-Monts, Quebec. His plans, however, were interrupted by World War II, during which he served in the Royal Canadian Army. The Stanyar House Bed & Breakfast in Val-des-Monts, run by his son, was named in honor of Stan and his wife Violet.
Canada