June Acorn died of pneumonia on April 25, 2025. She was 94 years old.
She was predeceased by her husband Glen Acorn and her life-long friends Sheila Abercrombie, Anne Stewart and Anne Armstrong. She is deeply mourned by her son John Acorn and his wife Dr. Dena Stockburger, her daughter Annalise Acorn, Annalise’s husband Timothy Endicott and June’s lifelong friend Avery Fleming and many other friends and family.
June was born in 1930 in Alberta to Melba and Van Carlson and she grew up on 132nd Street in the Glenora neighbourhood of Edmonton. From early childhood onward she was blessed to be a member of a gang of superb Glenora girls – all fiercely intelligent, movie-star gorgeous, high-spirited and stylish; all of whom reveled in adventure, fun, discovery, art, ideas and mischief. Their smart, engaging and often brutally honest conversation about life went on uninterrupted for their entire lives. The last surviving two – June and Avery – had a long and lively talk on the phone a week before June died.
In 1940 at age 10 June played the leading role of “Miss Canada” and master of ceremonies at the opening ceremony of Glenora School on 136th Street and 102 Avenue. She claimed that she got the part because she was the only one who could remember all the lines.
After graduating from Edmonton’s Westglen High School June worked both for her grandfather H.V. Shaw’s insurance company and for the Edmonton interior design firm Curlew’s owned by designer Marion Cooper who was a powerful influence on June’s artistic sensibility. June studied art at the Banff School of Fine Art and was also strongly influenced by artist Harry Wohlfarth, one of her teachers there.
She married Glen Acorn in 1957 and became a stay at home mom in 1958 when John was born. By the time both John and Annalise were in school she returned to painting, selling her work in several galleries and mall shows in Edmonton. Her friend Howard Peckett invited her to set up a studio by the pool in his hotel, the Mayfield Inn. She painted many of her finest works poolside much to the delight of the hotel guests. But she was never happier than when, of a summer morning at Gull Lake, she would get up at the crack of dawn, put the top down on her white Pontiac Parisienne and go exploring rural Alberta in search of dilapidated old barns and houses to paint. She invariably charmed the farmers (and dogs) she’d encounter. She’d return with freshly baked butterhorns from the Bentley Bakery just as the rest of the family was rolling out of bed.
In the mid seventies she decided to leave art behind for a while and become a real estate agent. She threw herself into the business with great enthusiasm and enjoyed it immensely. She loved people and she loved houses. She was a shrewd businesswoman and a tough and wonderfully effective negotiator. She loved to haggle. But when she had had enough of driving clients all over the city and climbing stairs, she retired from real estate and turned her attention to the stock market. One of her classic lines was, “You want to hold it long-term? I’m a day trader. Long-term is lunchtime.”
June was an ardent admirer and a searing critic in equal measure. Her values were derived from her admiration of people, her grandfather H.V. Shaw’s entrepreneurial spirit as founder of the Edmonton Cigar Factory, her grandfather Gustav Carlson’s scholarship and engagement with big ideas and her grandmother Carlson’s deeply spiritual commitment to love and compassion. Her cousin Donald Carlson and her cousin David Martin were also great inspirations to her – people whose ways of being in the world she sought to emulate. She had tremendous admiration for her son John as a scientist, television personality and singer songwriter. She started a cottage industry manufacturing, selling and distributing DVDs of John’s television show Acorn the Nature Nut. She sold the DVDs worldwide and kept an enormous map of the world in her study, sticking a bright red pinpoint in every place to which she had mailed a Nature Nut DVD.
She had an extraordinary gift for friendship and she always wanted both to say exactly what she thought and to hear exactly what you thought. She had a constant craving for human mutuality and down to earth discussion. She loved people who could return a volley and had little time for those who couldn’t.
In the 1980’s and 90’s, June and Glen travelled extensively throughout Europe, Asia and Egypt with many trips to Hawaii , Costa Rica and the Caribbean. She celebrated her 75th birthday with the family onboard a transatlantic crossing on the Queen Mary II.
She was, as anyone who knew her will know, a style icon.
One of the most extraordinary things about June was that, unlike many elderly people, her life did not get smaller as she got older. It got bigger and bigger. At age 85 she took up the cause of saving the old Royal Alberta Museum Building in her beloved Glenora. It was a burning passion for her for the last 10 years of her life. In 2016 she started a petition on change.org- https://www.change.org/…/alberta-infrastructure-save… -to save the building and to date it has received 20,284 signatures. It has been one of the most strongly supported petitions in Alberta history.
In the last decade of her long life, she began to develop a public voice, confidently talking to reporters, doing television and radio interviews and becoming a true social media influencer. She worked tirelessly making contacts in the heritage community and in government to try to save the building. She was present and acknowledged in the Alberta Legislature in November 2024 when the petition was tabled.
In her final days it was still one of her favourite pastimes to drive to the old Royal Alberta Museum building, peer past the “No Trespassing” signs and through the frost fence to try to see what was going on, speculating about whether she could climb that fence and thinking about whether she might chain herself to the building if they tried to bring in the wrecking ball.
In her last year she stepped into a new space of great freedom and wonder. She got the itch to travel and it stayed with her until the day she died. In August of 2024 she returned to her cottage at Gull Lake with her daughter and tremendously enjoyed reuniting with a place steeped in the heritage of her family and the grand old ladies Edna and Mary Moore who had owned and occupied it before her. She celebrated her 94th birthday there.
In October of 2024, she and Annalise went on a month-long road trip across Alberta visiting David Martin and family in Calgary, luxuriating in a suite in the Banff Springs, then drawing Mount Rundle from a room at the RimRock hotel – travelling the Icefields Parkway – reverently taking in the somber devastation of fire-torn Jasper and then travelling South to Alix and Drumheller visiting the Royal Tyrrell Museum and the Badlands. She gave rapt attention to the beauty of the world in every moment. She studied the landscape with an artist’s eye and she just kept wanting to see more.
She renewed her passport in late 2024 and a few days before she died she was looking up airfares to Hawaii and rooms at the Royal Hawaiian and was hoping also to make it to Oxford to visit Annalise and Timothy. She saw that the ice on her backyard pool had melted and she wanted to get it open and running as soon as possible so she could go for a dip. After decades of waiting and hoping, she struck oil in late 2024. A private memorial was held in the Wedgewood Room at the Hotel MacDonald in Edmonton on May 20, 2025.
In lieu of flowers or donation please send a snail mail letter to either Premier Danielle Smith or Minister of Infrastructure Martin Long to urge the government to repurpose the Royal Alberta Museum in Glenora.
She was a woman, take her for all in all.
I shall not look upon her like again.