August 24 1928-May 12, 2020


Alexander “Sandor” Fekete, was born in 1928 to Sandor Fekete and Paula Weiner of Kiskunfelegyhaza, Hungary, where he spent his childhood and youth. His mother died when Alex was 10, but his father’s subsequent remarriage to Ida Csernus produced a half-brother Leslie. He survived the upheavals of the Second World War while completing Gymnasium, where he was a founding member of the local boy scout troop. It was also in Kiskunfelegyhaza that he met his first love and future wife, Susanna Epstein. He went on to study economics at the University in Budapest from 1946 to 1950, and after graduation he and Susanna were married. During the next 4 years he worked for two Hungarian foreign trade companies, and their first son Stephan was born in 1952. In 1954 he accepted an appointment as commercial attaché in Damascus, Syria for Hungary’s Department of Foreign Trade, where he was charged with developing markets for a range of Hungarian agricultural machinery and engineering capabilities.
After the Hungarian revolution in 1956, Alex arranged for the family to defect to the British. Traveling in the middle of the night from Damascus to Beirut, they were flown to London with 6-year-old Stephan and newborn Paul, where they stayed briefly before immigrating to Canada in early 1958. First settling in Montreal, Alex worked in a variety of jobs. During this time, he obtained an MBA from McGill University while also advancing his career with Pepsi-Cola Canada where he later became Director of Market Research. In 1968, he was transferred to Pepsi’s headquarters in New York City where he worked until 1972. Subsequently employed briefly by the Royal Bank of Canada, he soon accepted a position with Royal Crown Cola in Columbus, Georgia. Alex left the beverage industry in 1980 to return to government service, this time with the Canadian government, serving in a variety of capacities at the Department of Regional Economic Expansion (DREE) in Moncton, and in Ottawa, the Departments of Industry, Sciences and Technology (DIST) and Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), from which he retired in 1997.
Alex was an accomplished gardener who turned his backyard into a showplace of flowers, vegetables and fruit trees. He had a formidable intellect and spoke several languages. He read extensively and was very knowledgeable about history, especially the tumultuous era through which he had lived before, during, and after WWII. However, his first priority was always his family, to whom he was always a devoted husband, father, father-in-law and grandfather.
He is survived by his lifelong partner Susanna Fekete (nee Epstein), to whom he was married for 69 years, as well as sons Stephan Fekete (Peggy Ruthven) in Kelowna, BC and Paul Fekete (Carol Grigsby) in Washington, DC, and grandson Alexander Armistead Fekete, also in Washington DC. A brother, Leslie Fekete, lives in Brossard, Quebec.

Charitable contributions may be made to the Ottawa Food Bank or the Ottawa Hospital in his memory.