Looking back on my time at McGill, I can say that I spent it either in class, at the Library, or in the Currie swimming pool! I was a competitive swimmer, so I spent a lot of time training alongside Dick Pound and our swim coach Ross Firth.
I had the good fortune of attending courses given by some of the most brilliant minds: I remember taking invertebrate zoology with Dr. Norman Berrill, advanced vertebrate zoology with Dr. Joan Marsden, ecology with Dr. Maxwell Dunbar, political science with Keith Callard, as well as literature with Hugh Maclennan and modern poetry with Professor Curtis Cecil.
You can Google them now, but you couldn’t do that in the 1950s and 60s! These were brilliant people and world-class professors, but one didn’t know it when one was a student at that time. It’s only later that you realize that you’ve been taught by some of the most brilliant minds in their field.
After graduation and a summer in Europe, I applied at Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan as a Junior Buyer. They didn’t hire anyone that didn’t have a university degree, and the McGill name meant something – even there. At the time, Americans considered McGill the Oxford of Canada. So that gave me my entry into my first job.
Returning to Montreal after two years in New York, I became involved in a lot of McGill volunteer work: serving on several University boards, helping with fundraising upon moving to Toronto, and chairing two of the Toronto Leacock Lunches. Upon retiring to Nova Scotia I discovered there were a lot of McGill graduates in my area. With support from the then-Head of the McGill Alumni Association, Honora Shaughnessy, I began hosting an annual dinner at the Lunenburg Yacht Club in Nova Scotia – which won the Alumni Event of the Year in 2008.