Dad died on August 15th, 2019. He and I had lived together for a number of years: perhaps that’s why we liked Frasier so much.
After Dad's dad died when he was 11, he and his sisters and mom moved from their little house, which they could no longer afford, to one room in a boarding house without a door that locked. Then his mom sent him off to live with an aunt in Los Angeles, but after a bit, he decided, on his own, to make his way back to Winnipeg by himself. So, he was told no more school and put out to work on some horrible jobs, dangerous jobs, until he was 17 and could join the Canadian military. That's when he found out he might be smart, he said: they gave tests to everyone to see where they would fit in best, and he scored so well, they took him aside and told him they were not letting him go to Korea, as he wanted to do, as front line infantry, but that he had to train as a plane mechanic. Then, his sister, Gerry, sent him a used book of logarithms that she had come across and figured it was something he might like, and it so captivated him, he ended up studying for his high school diploma at night, just so he could learn more about logarithms, and then after he got it in very short time, he got a drunken promise from his lovely step-dad, Red (they were at a pub together when he was home on leave) to provide room and board if he managed to ever get into university. Dad said the idea seemed so remote, the promise seemed a safe thing to offer. So, however long after that, he showed up at their door, saying, here I am! Red didn't even remember the conversation, but was too embarrassed to admit it, and so convinced Dad's mom that it was a long-standing promise that had to be kept, and that's how my dad ended up in college.
One other story: in the air force, he read the bible. He hadn’t encountered it until then and he got so taken up with it, he’d report every day on what happened to his messmates, like it was a soap opera.
One day, he and a few others were sent to Naples to bring back a plane. They had to make several refueling stops, I don’t know where, but to pass the time, he and another guy got to talking about the bible, and it turned out this other guy was planning on becoming a minister once out of the air force. Maybe he was surprised when he found out Dad’s enthusiasm for the bible wasn’t of a religious nature. Dad said they debated god’s existence every night on the trip out to Naples. Dad said he enjoyed it greatly and looked at it as just a fun diversion, but the night they reached Naples, the proto-minister looked glum and didn’t want to debate anymore, because he said Dad was right, there was no god. And that therefore, he could no longer become a minister. Dad was horrified; this also meant the guy’s fiance would probably not want to marry him. So, to rectify the situation, on the trip back, Dad said, I’ve been giving it some thought, and you had a point with such and such. Then, every evening, he pretended to have some other epiphany that must mean god existed, so that by the time they were back home, the guy was back to being a believer, his career and marriage once again secure.
Anyway, Dad ended up with a PhD in math and eventually wound up a professor of Computer Science. Before that, though, in the ‘60s, he advised NASA on sending up rockets straight , in the ‘70s, he was the science advisor to the premier of Manitoba — he sponsored an electric car race (perhaps the first of its kind?) to show the promise of the technology — and later in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, he developed an image compression technology that was used in video games and bar codes. In the ‘70s, he also started a business to offer music downloads through phone lines for 5 cents a song, but he was decades ahead of his time and the business went bust. That, and the voting out of his political party, resulted in our moving to Illinois, where he started the CS department with a friend at NIU.
Dad wrote his autobiography, so I will leave something for him to say in his own words. :)
