Rogers matriarch Loretta Rogers wielded a quiet power

By Alexandra Posadzki

On the cusp of Rogers Communication Inc.’s expansion in the late 1960s, it was Loretta Rogers who personally paid for the first 600,000 metres of cable to be laid, setting the company on course to becoming a $30-billion telecom, sports and media behemoth.

A woman of few words and great insight, the Rogers family matriarch was co-founder of the company and its longest-serving director. Unlike her husband, Ms. Rogers wasn’t one to yell over others during board meetings. Instead, she wielded her considerable influence more subtly, providing Ted Rogers, the hard-driving CEO, with wise counsel until his death in 2008.

Ms. Rogers died peacefully in her bed on June 11 at age 83, after a brief battle with gallbladder cancer. She was surrounded by her daughters and closest friends, who took turns holding her hands.

In addition to the pivotal role she played at the company, Ms. Rogers was also an accomplished painter, a loving mother and grandmother and a generous philanthropist who supported nature conservation, health care and women’s empowerment. Friends and family describe her as an elegant, soft-spoken woman with a great sense of humour who loved to spend time on the water and treated everyone as her equal.

“You would never know that she was a woman of such wealth,” said Judith McMurray, Ms. Rogers’s best friend, who accompanied her on countless adventures aboard the yacht Loretta Anne. Everyone loved Ms. Rogers, Ms. McMurray said, including her staff, whom she treated as extended family. “She was not high-and-mighty.”

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Published by the Globe and Mail.