In depth: The many lives of Al Osten, the namesake of Calgary’s newest playhouse

If you look around  Alberta, you will see their names everywhere.

The Osten-Victor Theatre at the Glenbow Museum, the Osten-Victor Tennis Centre, the Buddy Victor & Al Osten Dementia Research Fund, Pilgrims Hospice, the Art Gallery of Alberta, The Alzheimer Society in Edmonton, Theatre Calgary, the Alberta Tennis Centre, and the Osten-Victor Foundation. And now, after a $12-million donation to the Werklund Centre (Arts Commons), the 1,000-seat Osten-Victor Playhouse.

But who are Osten and Victor? The short answer is they were partners who built up a fortune, and now are trying to give it all away.

Saskatoon-born Al Osten met Brooklynite Buddy Victor in the United States when both were part of a doo-wop group called The Rover Boys. They scored a few hits, and somewhere along the way, fell in love. Their fortune came later, after buying the rights to Weight Watchers in Alberta just ahead of its explosion in popularity. When they sold, they reinvested wisely and have used that wealth to seed a legacy.

A longer answer follows:

When I met the surviving member of the pair, Al, at his apartment in west downtown Calgary on a drizzly morning in August, I was relieved to hear I was not the only one lying in bed the night before anticipating the interview.

Osten said to me: “Last night I was in bed saying, what am I going to talk about this time?  I said, ‘Maybe I should tell them about the many lives of Al Olsen and how he’s lived his life all the way through,” he laughs.

I ask about the piano in his apartment. Al smiles and admits he’s never played a note, but the Broadway songbook still sits on the stand, as though waiting for someone to sit down. It is only later I realize that is Buddy’s instrument. 

The more I get to know him, the harder it is to think of him apart from Buddy. Victor and Osten. Osten and Victor. Buddy died last year after living with Alzheimer’s, and even without ever meeting him, his absence is palpable.

I also come to realize that their long list of donations are breadcrumbs. Each one a clue to the many ways the world touched Al and Buddy, and the countless ways they gave back.

But there was a life before Buddy.

Osten calls himself a “surprise baby.” The seventh in his family, born in Saskatoon in 1931 at the height of the Depression, he jokes, “They needed me like a hole in the head.”

Even his mother’s friends hadn’t known she was pregnant — “She was hefty,” as Al puts it — so his arrival was a shock.

When he was just two and a half months old, the family moved to Edmonton, where he grew up chasing stages. As a boy, he went to every show he could, Jewish community halls, Catholic gatherings, wherever and anywhere with a song.

One of his first paid jobs was a small act of rebellion. His family worked in cleaning, but he refused to follow suit and instead took a job in a poultry plant. His job was to hang the live birds on an assembly line, before they were shuttled to be killed, and then shuttled to be plucked. The women doing the plucking spoke Ukrainian so Al picked up a few words along the way.

He laughs about coming home covered in lice, and says that despite everything, “It was a good life.” The poultry career ended the day he tried to hang a turkey — “It beat me to death with its wings,” he recalls with laughter, “So that was the end of the chicken thing.” He still eats chicken, by the way.

Fast-forward a few more lives: brassiere packer, Henry Singer sales associate, insurance salesman. Some of these jobs fill whole chapters, others going by with a snap of his fingers.

Al Osten went to Toronto to find show business and found it. Or rather, the right person at the right time found him.

“It’s weird, weird. But there’s always been people involved that have moved me a little bit further on each time,” Osten said.

He was invited to join a quartet of male singers, a manufactured boy band before the term existed. The group became The Rover Boys, a name given to them not by choice but by a club promoter in Buffalo.

“On the way we heard there was a group coming in called the Rover Boys. We said, ‘Where’d they get the name?’ They made it up, and we became the Rover Boys from then on.”

The performance was a three act variety show: a comedian, a dance team, and The Rover Boys. They performed three shows a night, at nine, midnight, and three in the morning. The last set was for the artists who had just finished their own gigs and needed to decompress.

“It was a good life. I was young, so it was great,” Al remembers.

It was the group’s lead singer quitting suddenly that brought Buddy Victor into Al’s life. After hearing The Rover Boys perform, Buddy decided he wanted in.

“Buddy had to get in the car the next day and learn the songs, because we were opening in Detroit. He became our lead singer, learning the songs in the car on the way there,” Al recalled.

Buddy was talented and decisive. “He really was a quick learner. And he also was a real boss. All of a sudden, he took over the whole group. Whatever he said, we did. It worked out really well.”

The Rover Boys went on to chart a few hits, including “Graduation Day,” later covered by The Beach Boys  before the group wound down.

By then, Al and Buddy’s relationship was firmly established. When Al returned to Edmonton to work with celebrated musician and later senator Tommy Banks at The Embers Club, he hooked Buddy up with a chance to perform. Buddy caught the attention of CBC, and landed his own program, “The Buddy Victor Show.” Osten says that is one of the chapters that came and went, with a snap of his fingers, “like that.”

The romance that had started on the road deepened along the way, “Bud and I had fallen in love a long time before that,” Al says. Remarkably, both their families embraced the partnership. Buddy’s Italian mother doted on Al, “the Jewish boy in their home,” while Al’s siblings welcomed Buddy as one of their own. For gay men in the 1950s, that kind of acceptance was rare and good fortune.

“We’ve had lots of things that became very fortunate for us,” admits Osten.

It was both good fortune and wise choices that helped the pair pivot from a life of performance to a life of helping fund performance.

In the 1960s, a phone call from Brooklyn changed everything. Buddy’s mother urged them to look into a new program called Weight Watchers. So they went to New York to check it out.

Al remembers, “I met the lady who started it, Jean Nidetch, and she said, ‘Well, if you’re interested, we can give you Alberta for Canada.”

The cost was $10,000, they scraped the funds together with the help of relatives and bought in.  The Bank of Canada inflation calculator indicates it would be closer to $90,000 today. Being able to collect the funds was a testament to how successful they may be as salesmen of the concept.

“It was really a success. For 20 years we were in Weight Watchers. Who knew?” Osten said.

He cherishes the memories of that life.  

The business grew quickly. Their very first meeting drew 72 people. “Bud was the talker, I was the weigher,” Al laughs. “We opened the doors at 7 o’clock. By almost 11:30 he was still talking, all the men were outside marching back and forth waiting for their wives.”

Meetings fostered a sense of community. Osten says the friendships went beyond the weigh ins; he remembers proposals, and wild stories about some members jokingly policing who was allowed on the elevator. “It was a good experience, and I loved the business.”

Weight Watchers became an international sensation, and eventually the mothership came calling to buy back the rights of their franchise. Even though Buddy and Al resisted several times, eventually the number was too good to ignore.

“We said, ‘This is ridiculous, we’d better take it — that’s when we got out of the business,” Al says.

If readers are searching for a secret nugget of wisdom from Al Osten on how to get rich, perhaps it’s this: don’t blow it. Instead of burning through their earnings on houses or cars, he and Buddy handed their money to trusted investors. “We didn’t go hog wild. We found three people we sent the money to. We shouldn’t blow it, they should grow it — which they did.” That prudence turned one smart gamble into a lifetime of giving. It was the golden choice that defined how many lives they would be able to touch in the decades that followed.

That’s not to say they never invested in things they loved. They helped produce shows like Little Shop of Horrors, Back to the Future, and Hairspray. “Some of them were successful and some of them were real failures too.” He felt one in particular was a bit of a risk, “What’s that one with the barber that kills people? Sweeney Todd? Yes. That was an interesting thing because in that show all the actors were also the musicians. Every one of them played an instrument — there was no orchestra. It was pretty successful on Broadway.”

Meanwhile, Buddy was making a habit of charitably buying up hospital and hospice beds privately. But their first big public donation came when the Edmonton Art Museum (now the Art Gallery of Alberta) asked for support. At first, Al and Buddy insisted on anonymity. “We said, we don’t want everybody coming to our beck and call because we had given them some money. Finally they said, ‘Look, you have no families. You might as well start yourself a legacy.’ Put your name on it.” When the building opened, Buddy looked up at the third floor where their name was etched and quipped, “It’s so small.” 

Al says the experience taught them two lessons. First, that giving feels good. “If you give to charity, the glow you get within yourself that you’ve done something good… people say, you did a great thing for the city.” And second, that generosity has a way of circling back. “For some reason, after we gave that first million, within a month or so we looked at our account and it was back up there again. We keep giving things away, and it keeps coming back at us. Someone asked how long we’ll do this and I said, ‘Until we’re broke.’

Over time, they set pillars for their philanthropy: children, hospice care, and the arts. Those choices weren’t just about filling gaps — they were about sparking something larger. “It makes other people interested. Maybe I should be doing something like that as well. I know that’s happened to some of my friends who never gave charity before. All of a sudden, they’re involved in it too now. So it does pass on.”

Al will turn 95 this December, though he just marked his 94th birthday with a rollicking hoe-down at the King Eddy Hotel this past summer. He jokes that it took him years to learn his lesson about Alberta weather, which is why he now celebrates half-birthdays. Between his donations, theatre dates and visits with friends, you might also spot him at “the office,” which is his tongue-in-cheek name for a particular row of slots at a local casino.

As for what he’d love to see christen the new 1,000 seat Osten-Victor Playhouse at the Werklund Centre? Al doesn’t hesitate to offer what Buddy would like, “He loved our biggest hit show that we backed, which was Hairspray. He said, if it ever comes back again, I want to be involved in it again because it was his favorite show.”

And there are plans in the works for more Osten-Victor, or Victor-Osten signs, depending on what city you are in. With Victor coming first in Edmonton donations, and Osten first in Calgary — a sort of inside joke between the pair.

“He was a great singer, by the way. If you never heard him, you would really enjoy it. In fact, I will play a song for you if you want to hear him sing.”

Al calls for a CD player. A track begins with a radio announcer’s rich voice, from the lilt and gravitas I can tell this is a recording from long ago. I suspect this may be the only copy. “From Edmonton! The Magnificent Westerns! With the orchestra and chorus of Tommy Banks — with songs by Diane Nelson and Buddy Victor. Music from the movies – The Magnificent Westerns!” Then the opening notes of The Magnificent Seven fill the room. We listen all the way through, until the next song when Buddy’s voice finally arrives. Raintree County. I have never heard this song before sung by anyone else. Perhaps a fitting way to first experience Buddy Victor.

As the melody soars, Al looks over and catches my eye. He smiles proudly. While Buddy may now be gone, Al ensures his name, and his song will never be forgotten.  

“He deserves to be honoured… I always put Bud’s name with me too.”