Date: Wed, 3 Feb 2021 16:03:58 -0500
From: Emil or Nedra 

OK, here is mine. Looking forward to tonight ? Emil


After OHS, I went to McGill where I took mainly math and physics courses but at
the end of my third year, felt that this was not really what I wanted to do. As
a kid, I had very nearly electrocuted myself wiring a lamp and so felt I needed
to become an electrical engineer. I reached an agreement with the engineering
department that allowed me to transfer into the last two years of the honours EE
program. So after a total of six years, I left McGill with a BSc in physics and
BEng in EE. I felt that was a pretty good deal because in those days, the normal
engineering program was a five year ordeal.


After a wonderful summer of hitch-hiking through Europe, I started in the
graduate EE program at Univ. of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Not sure why I
went there except that it had a pretty good reputation in automatic control
theory and they offered me more money than other places which at the time was
pretty important to me. I did research in a lab which resulted in my first
patent and a job offer with the company that funded the work after I completed
my degree.


Going to U of I was the best decision I ever made because it was there that I
met Nedra, my soul mate and true ?basherte?. Next month, it will be 50 years since
we met at a party on campus and that marked the real beginning of my life. After
getting a master?s I decided I had enough of academia and went to work at Warner
Electric near Rockford, Illinois. I was designing motion control devices and
eventually was in charge of the photo-electric control dept. I worked there for
2 years while Nedra was completing her PhD in psychology. We would alternate the
trip between Rockford and Champaign so we managed to see each other every
weekend. We also managed a trip to Boston, her home town, which is where we got
married.


After Nedra received her degree we moved to Ottawa and have lived here ever
since. When we arrived, I started a job at Computing Devices (then Control Data
and now General Dynamics). She worked as a clinical psychologist at the Ottawa
Civic Hospital. I have worked as an engineer in R&D my whole career ending up at
BNR and Nortel for my last 25 years. It was a very exciting time for
telecommunications and Nortel was a world leader in the field. It also afforded
me some opportunity to travel in support of product introduction to plants in
Dallas and Belfast. I retired one year before the demise of Nortel and was very
upset when it happened. We were a great Canadian company and as evidence our
patents (mine included) sold for a staggering $4.5 billion. This helped boost
our depleted pension fund.


We have two wonderful children, Elisabeth and Daniel. We are very proud of their
accomplishments and would enjoy being friends with them and their spouses if
they were not already our kids. Before writing this one-pager I googled myself
to see if there was anything ?out there? I needed to deny. I was happy to find that
the only thing that shows up about me is in reference to Nedra. This is because
she has dedicated some of her papers and book to her wonderful husband Emil.
This is something I will definitely not deny. We spend a lot of time in and
around Boston, especially at our family cottage on the coast of NH, just north
of Boston.