By DAVE KOSONIC

“Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome once again to Saturday Night at the Movies. My name is Elwy Yost.”

That is the welcoming way Canadian television personality Yost began his weekly movie program for 25 years from 1974 to 1999 just after multi-colored stars glistened on viewers TV screens.

Yost had a long connection with Etobicoke and few people knew that he was  a full-time English teacher at Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute.

“Well it is that time ladies and gentlemen to turn your lights down very low and put your feet up.” Yost added while introducing a show about alcoholism as presented in the cinema.

“It is harrowing but it is magnificently made and I am very proud of this film,” were words he used while reviewing the Academy Award winning movie The Lost Weekend produced by Billy Wilder and starring Ray Milland with screenplay by Charles Brack.

Yost always appeared very relaxed while he sat back in a comfy chair and turned on his retro film projector and then said with a smile: “If you are ready I am now so let’s roll our projector.”

Yost was well-known for hosting CBC television’s weekday Passport to Adventure series from 1965 to 1967, TVOntario’s weekday Magic Shadows from 1974 to the mid-1980s and Saturday Night at the Movies.

He also authored four books about movies.

The broadcaster  was born in Weston in 1925 and passed away in West Vancouver 2011 of natural causes at the age of 86.  He was married to Lila Ragnild for 60 years and has two sons, Christopher and Graham, who is a producer and screenwriter in Los Angeles. Yost was also a film maker and he produced two movies titled Ida Makes a Movie and Moulin Rouge.

Yost joined the Canadian Infantry in 1944 and was honorably discharged in 1945. Other brief employment included construction work at the CNE, working in circulation department at the Toronto Star and a job in the aircraft industry in Malton. Yost earned a degree in sociology from the University of Toronto in 1948. He worked on and off as a panelist on television shows until the late 1960s when he became the permanent host of the CBC radio show It’s Debatable and his career then blossomed.

After Yost’s death in 2011 an editorial in the Toronto Star entertainment section reflected back upon his life. ‘The bald man with the moustache, wire-rim glasses and odd name was an unlikely candidate for stardom…at the peak 250,000 viewers appreciated his appetite for gorging on movies and taking trips to Hollywood to talk with the people who made them.’

Adrian Morrow in the Globe and Mail added, “His father would give him a dime every week to see a film and then have him recount the plot.’

On a personal note I was a student at Burnhamthorpe Collegiate when Yost taught there. I was not in his classes but he always voiced a friendly hello when he passed any student in the hallways.