To the Horban family
Our deepest sympathy.
Thinking of you at this most difficult time.
The Gregorish family
Roman was a fellow student and friend of mine at Jarvis Collegiate Institute in Toronto. He was always kind, considerate and well respected. Like all my buddies at J.C. I. Roman was a proud defender of our school and supported it fully. I noticed that his obituary in the Toronto Star requested donations be made to the Ukrainian refugee fund and this is very much in keeping with Roman’s loyalty to just causes and beliefs. One early indication of this was quite funny in its outcome and I do not tell this to denigrate Roman. One day a teacher came to us and said the school had a problem and that they were supposed to enter a swim team in a competition, but had failed to do so. Apparently there might be repercussions if a contingent did not attend the competition and the teacher asked us if we could get four people to swim. We said we’d try and soon had three but couldn’t find a fourth. We saw Roman and asked him if he would join us but with an abject look of horror he said no and that he couldn’t swim at all. We talked to the teacher and he said that all we had to do was show up and that finishing the race wasn’t necessary.
If we defaulted by swimming out of a lane that would be ok and the commitment would be met and the school would be off the hook. We told Roman that one of us would start the race and when we got back to the start he should dive in, veer right into the adjacent lane and the referee would disqualify us and that would be that. Roman dove in went right and started to sink. It was obvious he was drowning and one of our guys dove in and rescued him. This might be the only time that a swimmer almost drowned at a meet. The point was that our schools honour was defended and Roman took a big terrifying risk doing it. He was definitely a good guy and will be missed.