BLIZZARD: Joan Sutton Straus, Sun’s first lifestyle editor, dead at 89

Joan Sutton Straus, the Toronto Sun’s award-winning first lifestyle editor and a journalist who joined the paper the day it was born, has died. She was 89.

She was witty, flirty and a colourful icon of style at a time when Toronto was often a grey and staid city. She interviewed presidents and prime ministers. Her columns on love set the city gossiping.

Sutton Straus’s pithy columns on sex and relationships earned her a reputation as a love columnist, but in fact she was an insightful interviewer, who brought her own unique flair to sit-downs with the good and the great.

She interviewed former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, Ivana Trump and Egyptian first lady Jehan Sadat. She wrote about the Ronald Reagan campaign and interviewed his wife, Nancy, three times.

Born in Mimico, Sutton Straus worked her way into the world of journalism, starting at the now defunct Toronto Telegram.

Her annual sexy men’s list was a must read. In a pre-politically correct world, a columnist for another newspaper had made up her list of sexy men, all of them movie stars.

Straus always said she thought that was a bit of a cop-out.

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“If you’re going to do something like that, let’s be more courageous and pick 10 of our own,” she said.

True to form, she picked 10 local men – including then-Premier Bill Davis. While it was slated to run in the Life section, founding publisher Doug Creighton saw the column in the composing room and bumped it up to Page 1.

“One wife sent me flowers and said ‘thanks, I’ve had the best night in years,’” Sutton Straus told me.

Back in the day when phones had a hook, hers started to ring off it.

“People were angry because I’d put them on the list. They were angry because they thought it was ‘undignified,’ but if they didn’t get on the next year the were angry because they had been left off,” she said.

It became a hugely controversial and highly popular annual feature.

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“The Sun was a reality show before there were reality shows,” she told me.

“There was Paul Rimstead getting drunk. There was me pouring out love stuff and there was Peter Worthington riding an elephant. And that was part of the personality of the newspaper.” She lamented much of that was lost when the paper was sold to Maclean Hunter in 1982.

She may have been known as the love columnist, but she also understood the newspaper business. Sutton Straus also knew how to attract female readers to the fledgling paper. Young women picked up the paper to read her view on fashion, style and relationships. Their bosses sneaked it off their secretaries’ desks to read the sports section.

Sutton Straus was appointed the province’s Agent General to the U.S. in 1990 and was appointed to the Order of Ontario in 2021. She married her second husband, prominent American businessman Oscar Straus in 1982. They were close friends with Creighton and his wife Marilyn.

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