Hi Ken:
Below is my offered bio, a little over the suggested 400 words. Given your 4 rich guidelines, my relevant career events and stories are too much for a briefer approach. I’m not interested in a high-school yearbook style entry (eg: good at hockey, aced geometry, member science club). So, rather than further trimming, I’d withdraw it entirely from any publication.
McGill places I like to recall: the Mansfield tavern – cheap lunches- and consequent sleepy afternoon classes, and Ben’s Deli.
I’d liked to have further recounted some other items, including moments with favourite teachers and mentors: Prof. Theroux (Statics &Dynamics), Dr. Milsum (Control Systems Theory). Astute, fun people. Also Bob Gillies, mentor at CP. And some key career moves. The young engineer’s excitement with the perfect job at Honeywell morphed to disgust and disillusion on awareness of its corporate zeal for the Vietnam war. Then there followed my “dropping out”, alternative living, and travels.
Another great person in my work-life: Graham Hill, director of forestry systems, took huge risks, got the BC-wide ministry wired with computer and WP access before the IBM monopoly world was even on the scene, and paid a bureaucratic price for that. He ended up as multi term mayor of a Victoria suburb.
And then there was attempted retirement.
Note that in my previous email I suggested that a written entry was “the most simple for me at this time”; this also meant that
Zoom may not work for me. (spotty cable, plus other commitments). Send an invite if you like, I likely will not be around.
And after noting that some earlier emails were not answered due to me thinking they were yet more fundraiser appeals, the fund-appeal form you sent with a suggested minimum of $3k was good fun.
Best to all; appreciate your efforts. Joel
What to make of my McGill Engineering days? I had a big Lionel train set as a kid, and loved to disassemble motors, wire up accessories and automatic switches, design scenery and working sidings, and race trains. I also thought I’d follow a tradition started by grandfather, industry leader, and early McGill trustee with an EIC Medal award in his name, Julian C. Smith ( The Engineering Institute of Canada - Julian C. Smith Medal). That didn't happen.
While Electrical Engineering seemed to be the right place, it did not fill in the blanks around growing up, looking for purpose, assimilating new ideas, and politics of the times. In those days I supported Energy minister Renee Levesque’s program to nationalize hydro in PQ, including the takeover of the company above grandparent had been president of. Renee thanked me and said "keep on pushing". Later, I was not so happy with his unconventional approach to federalism.
Final year courses on Fortran programming and Operations Research led to ambitious modelling projects in a first job at CPRail, landed with Ken Porter's help. One involved combinatorics problems where we demonstrated CP could theoretically attain a 3-5% increase in single-track mountain mainline traffic using faster data and computer assisted scheduling. Then there was my brilliant simulation of the Roberts Bank coal system, analyzing risks due to supply chain fluctuations and accidents. At the demo a VP listened politely and then said, "I could do all that on a sheet of paper with a pencil in 5 min.!"
I quite admired him, strategist and Navy hero, and had mentioned to him earlier that I’d read in the McGill Daily about his grandad's part in the Prairie Clearances, as the Crown Prosecutor against Louis Riel. First Nations issues were already entwined with my life and career. Later, in Victoria, my wife and I helped support Nisga'a folks during their Treaty negotiations - public forums, places to stay, witness at some negotiation briefings. In good Canadian tradition, some of those Federal lawyers were real nasties. Our group helped nominate the main Nisga’a negotiator, a deep and civil person - Chief Joseph Gosnell - for his Order of Canada.
Professionally, I consulted in stats and modelling for BC government projects, offering progressive systems approaches. Plodding, vintage software management did not seem to attain even the basic smarts touched on in our engineering classes. I promoted Agile design & the fast-evolving SAS package. Both were annoying to systems bureaucrats of the day. I enjoyed teaching, mentoring, design and development, and dropping in on managers mulling multiyear projects, with full solution working prototypes I had put together in a few weeks.
I helped some innovative new foresters develop a computer-based forest planning system; we stealthily acquired car loads of drawers and boxes of un-used government card-based (remember punched cards??) forest inventory data and loaded an early database. When map digitizing came along, I developed a polygon overlay process (finding areas common to polygons from different map layers) 2 years before a more favoured consulting firm delivered. In that case I had to learn about under-appreciation.
Lots of water under bridges. Engineering training grounded me in a good kind of reality that I often used to help non-literate folks ( ie: those with no engineering background). Looking back, I am still not sure about the benefit of the quantum math course, but appreciated the Can-Do -Let's-Try attitude. A VW atop Place-Ville-Marie? Indeed!
And, as Dylan puts it somewhere "I've nothing but affection for those who sailed with me".