This led to my answering ads by the railways and by the Manitoba Power Commission. Canadian Pacific took some time to make up their mind and never made an offer, while C.N.came up with an offer to work in their signal department after I had started working for the Power Commission. I was tempted to take up C.N.'s offer because (as we shall see) I always loved railways; however, at the time I decided that as the Power Commission came first I would stick with them. They, after an exchange of letters and an interview had offered me a job as a Junior Engineer at $160 per month. Their base pay was $150 per month, but they gave an extra $10 to acknowledge my three years of naval electrical service! This was a bit of a comedown from the $190 per month that I was being paid as an Electrical Lieut. in the Navy, but under the circustances I was very glad to get the MPC job and walked with the highest hopes into their office in the Canada Building in Winnipeg on Feb. 1, 1946.
I was assigned to work under Tom Woodhall who held the position of "Electrical Engineer" and who had been gold medalist in his class of 1930. He had subsequently won his Master's degree and had a most prodigious memory. I found out through working with him he had memorized the electrical distribution layout of nearly every small town in Manitoba served by the MPC. He was a kindly man to work for and helped me in many ways. In personal appearance as he grew older and grayer he strongly resembled Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame. Years later I had the honor of giving the eulogy at his funeral service which I was pleased to do, as I had come to know his wife Anne and their children quite well. Other working associates already at MPC included former engineering classmates such as Lew Dahl, Bob Jeske, Don Midwinter and Gib Pink. The large part of the work at this stage included planning and design for the postwar farm electification project, which over the 7 years I was there brought the benefits of electric power to 50,000 Manitoba farms! Most of the work I had to do consisted of designs for main transmission lines and rural transformer substations.
One of the greatest contributions which MPC made to the art of power distribution was to find the most economical designs to cover the sparse territory; farms on the average were about one mile apart! Designs that the MPC developed to do this included going to a higher voltage of 6900 volts single-phase (compared with the generally used 2400 volts) with a steel hot wire and ground return for the line going to the individual farm. This permitted longer spans (350 ft.), less sag and shorter poles. A cheaper design of single bushing rural transformer built by Supreme Electric and later by Pioneer Electric also saved money. The result of all these innovations, together with using local Manitoba jackpine poles from the Sandilands Forest Reserve enabled us to deliver the power to a typical farm for only $900! Typical pole top and other designs were assembled right in the drafting room by Cliff Steadman and Earl Mills, who were Superintendents respectively of East and West construction crews. Another engineer, Paul Shane, put them on paper. His drawings and bills of material were works of art and made great field books for all the crews.
The construction was of course good for the economy and manifested itself in many ways. The most interesting development I thought was the formation of the Pioneer Electric Company, organized to build 3 kva rural pole top transformers in a plant in St.Boniface. This startup was a classic example of capitalism at work. The company was formed by three young men who were at the time working for English Electric Co. in St. Catherines but who had the idea that they could build a rural transformer which could be competitive and operate in the west. Dick Noonan, a graduate of U.of Man. was the head, Adrian Tallman, a graduate of the U.of Alberta was the Chief Engineer and Don Mathieson was Production foreman, a position he had held in St. Catherine's. They each put up $10,000 from their savings and with this they purchased a steel sheathed building from the war assets and bought a coil winding machine. With their shop set up they produced a prototype of their transformer for testing and got Jack Tomlinson, who was MPC Chief Engineer to o.k. it. The MPC Board and Chairman Herbert Cottingham then o.k'd an initial order for 500 transformers. With this in hand our intrepid entrpreneurs went to the Royal Bank of Canada and obtained a loan for $25,000 to buy material. The loan was guaranteed through the bank's being given a lien on the initial year's production. This worked like a charm and was of much interest to me because I confess to having been somewhat of a socialist while I was at university! MPC had a long association with Pioneer and the company grew to have a thermal switch plant in Brandon (initially started by a former MPC manager Wally Coburn), and additional transformer plants in Saskatchewan and Alberta to service the demand for rural electrification in those provinces. Eventually they bought out Supreme Power supplies in Mimico, Ont. and after getting additonal skills from England they started production of switchgear and large high voltage transformers in a plant erected in Fort Garry which is still in operation to-day (1998). They were eventually bought out by Federal Electric in the U.S. with Dick Noonan becoming a Vice-President of the merged company, now called Federal Pioneer Electric! Tallman, who was not in favor of selling thecompany retired to a life of mainly travel while Mathieson eventually started a new small transformer company of his own.
Starting out as an Assistant Engineer under Tommy Woodhall, I first had the job of calculating the unit resistance and reactance values of our transmission lines with the idea of building our own miniaturized System Analizer. In retrospect, it was not a job I particularly relished, but when I discovered and Tommy ratified the fact that the existing figures used for the Winnipeg-Brandon line were incorrect it gave my reputation an early boost. While we never achieved the initial aim of building our own System Analyzer we learned a good deal about the process and use of this modern analog pre-computer tool. Our progress was scooped by the knowledge that the General Electric Co. had already developed and built one that had the flexibility to do studies on any power system because it consisted of adjustable resistors and reactors which could be set to the desired values and connected in the same way as our real system. This knowledge resulted in our making a two-week visit to G.E.'s headquarters in Schenectady, New York where together with the well-known Canadian consulting firm, H.G. Acres we were able to set up our whole Manitoba system in miniature. We could then run tests on normal power flows, show the effects of various lines or generators tripping out, determine the effects on voltage through predicted load growth, etc.. One particular thing we studied was the possibility of establishing a modern steam-electric station at Brandon. I enjoyed this whole study very much together with working with the consultants and the General Electric people. Among other things they gave us a tour of the plant where steam turbines were produced. It was the greatest demonstration of America's technical and manufacturing might that I have ever seen! From the gallery at one end of the main building we could see it stretching at least a quarter of a mile with huge turbines in all stages of construction. With the haze created by the cooling fluid for the many machine tools we could not really see the far end of this gigantic plant!
Other jobs I got to do were things like checking substation drawings before they were sent to the construction dept., determining capacity additions needed for lines and substations for farm electrification growth. This also required making estimates of material and labour for substation jobs and field visits to the sites to see the work being carried out.
At this stage I was still single and working hard, including a good bit of overtime. I stayed for the first few months in a boarding house on Assiniboine Ave.. It was run by a couple of elderly spinsters who had come in from the country some years before. They were good enough ladies but had got to the point where they liked their liquor; perhaps it was their only form of pleasure and relaxation. I recall one day when they served bacon and eggs for supper and one of them had to steady herself near the table by holding onto the backs of our chairs. There was a jovial enough group of young men like myself staying in the house. One whose first name was Roger liked the game of bridge, so for the first time in my life I got to play this devilish game. What I have never liked about bridge was that it was difficult to play agressively unless you had good cards. Even my present wife, Frances will avow that she never has played with anyone who got poorer cards than I! In any case, when an opening came up to return to Dear Miss Bishop's care and feeding (much remembered from university days) I was happy to do so. The house she now ran was on Sherburn St., close to Portage Ave., so although it was not as near my work place as 54 Maryland had been it was good to get back to her cheerful care.
About 1947 I was made Assistant Operating Engineer. This entailed watching over all of the daily operations of the utility. We had a room full of the latest kw and voltage charts from various key points on the system. Analysing these showed us the many effects of storms (mainly wind and ice) which really played havoc with our transmission lines. It also helped us review the effects of load growth and voltage drops showing where we needed more capacity. At one point it showed Brandon voltage was getting too low at peak times; so it was decided to install a machine known as a synchronous condenser. This machine, by changing the reactive component of the power could cause a voltage rise at peak times (and a voltage drop at light load times). A 2500 kva machine was ordered from the Engish Electric Co. of St.Catherine's Ontario and Jack Tomlinson sent me to act as an expeditor at the plant so I could oversee completion of the machine and its control board.
We got the machine going in Brandon and it seemed to do the job. However, one night, after it had been in operation for a few days, I noticed some sparking in the air gap between the rotating armature and the stator. A shutdown proved the proper air clearance was there but further investigation revealed that some of the armature poles were loose and the combination of centrifugal force and magnetic attraction was causing the pole faces to contact the stator. In the haste of getting the machine delivered quickly the manufacturer had not done a proper job of wedging the poles at their base. They flew out repairmen in a hurry to fix it and in the rest of my time with the MPC the machine worked very well. There was a lesson in life for me in this episode; on the weekend the poles were poorly wedged at the factory I was on a tour of parts of Southern Ontario in a car loaned to me by English Electric. I'm not sure my presence would have prevented the problem but it might have, so I felt a bit guilty!
However, as load growth continued apace under farm electrification the peak load voltage drop got to the point where the synchronous condenser could no longer compensate for it. This called for more major remedies, namely the construction of a 110,000 volt main transmission line from Winnipeg to Brandon to give a large boost to the capacity of our existing 66,000 volt line, with the syncronous condenser still able to continue its job of regulating voltage on this larger capacity system. MPC also established a new main substation later which was called Dorsey sub after one of our Electical Egineering professors at U.of M. who had advocated use of direct current high voltage transmission. This was however not adopted until after I had left the Power Commission when it was used for the long distance 300-500 kv lines from the Churchill River power plants in Northern Manitoba.
Incidentally, the trip to St. Catherine's was my first regular airline trip. Under the rush circumstances of the job it was decided the time saving over train made the added cost worthwhile. Millions of such decisions in the latter half of the century have consigned inter-city rail passenger service to a much smaller level than it once enjoyed, particularly in North America. On this first trip on an Air Canada North Star I was fascinated by the sight of jewel strung city street lights and their halos and a bit frightened at the very red hot exhaust pipes of the Rolls-Royce engines just outside my window!
Another interesting trip, made about 1950, was a car trip to attend the annual A.I.E.E.(American Institute of Electrical Engineers) meeting in Minneapolis. Two items were of special importance. The first was that a great eal of excitement occurred in sessions dealing with the matter of solid state "gates" and diodes. I not could not see at the time what all the fuss was about, not realizing that the excitement was that those more knowlegable than I knew that this would be of immense importance in the development of the new computer age, because the solid state "on-off" binary switches were much more energy efficient, compact and reliable than the vacuum tube devices used up to that time! Little did I realize that my own career and those of my sons would be geat;y involved with modern computers! The second important insight was that of seeing the first televison set operating in a store window in downtown Minneapolis. Broadcast TV had not yet come to Western Canada and was only just getting started in the U.S.. It had of course already been going on in Briatain for some time.
So much for progress in work at the MPC. It's now time to bring my personal life up to the same point and we can return to the world of work later. When I returned from the war I resumed acquaintance with some of the girls I had known as co-eds at University. These mainly included Betty Emery, Pat Harris and Nina Walley, Cap Walley's daughter. In those days it was normal for young men and women to date more than one person until they could make up their minds about a "steady". At university most did not go steady and the few who did were called "gruesome two-somes". So we went to various dances, concerts and other events, enjoying the variety of taking various ones as dates as the fancy struck us. However, this all changed for me in 1947 when I met Anne Walker. My first contact with her was at a Manitoba Power Commission dance which she had attended as the date of Don Midwinter, one of my university classmates and a fellow worker at MPC. She was a tall blonde girl (see photo), with a delightful laugh and a nice way of speaking, which together with the fact that she was a lovely dancer made quite an impression on me. I got her phone number from knowing what street she lived on and some help from a co-operative telephone operator. I then took her out on other dates so was sharing her with Midwinter. This competitive situation was resolved when Don accepted a job with the Transport Dept. in Ottawa, more or less leaving the field clear to me! Based on this I made the most of her company.
We enjoyed quite a few dates including dances, movies, walks, bicycle rides and a day ski trip to Miami in southern Manitoba; this latter being reached by a ski train special operated by the CPR. Anne graduated from Home Economics in 1945 and from the Education faculty in 1947. I had the honor and the pleasure of escorting her to the graduation dinner and dance (See photo). During that winter she took up her teaching career as Home Economics teacher in Dauphin, where she started up the high school Home Economics course. Before I met her she had spent time as a relieving teacher in rural Manitoba one room shools such as Ripon and one year teaching Home Economics at Summerland, B.C..
When 1948 arrived we were all set to enjoy the summer, but Anne's mother Ella felt that I might not be the best for a son-in-law so it was arranged for Anne to go to Houston, Texas, where a summer job was set up in the interior decorating business of the Dutchers, who were family friends who sometimes vacationed for part of the summer at Laclu. Anyway, the separation lasted only two weeks. Anne decided to come home which she said was because of the hot humid climate; I like to think it was because she wanted to be with me. So we enjoyed a great deal of each other's company for the balance of the summer. No further opposition was raised by the family and in fact we were invited to spend a week at Laclu with Ella's older sister, Auntie Beth Aitken. She was a retired public health nurse who had never married. She had served in frontline nursing hospitals in France during World War I and had worked in Hamilton, Ont. for many years after the war. Anne was born in 1922 and her brother George about two years later and as Ella was having difficulty in coping Beth moved to Winnipeg and used her spare time to help Ella raise the children, whom she loved. She thought Anne and I were o.k. and she helped promote our love by acting as chaperone at LacLu. This included such things as letting us enjoy the swings in the backyard of the cottage while she played romantic Haiwaiian music on the gramaphone in the house!
So we had a most enjoyable summer and when Anne returned to Dauphin the winter we were able to keep in touch by letter and telephone with my having an opportunity to visit her once or twice when travelling on MPC business in the Dauphin area. As the Christmas season approached she was the one who decided to push for the next step and wrote to say we should move on or break up. They say the woman is often the one who takes the lead! Based on this I was forced to give the matter some serious thought and came to the conclusion that she was a fine girl, a brave and capable girl, that I loved her and that we should indeed consider getting married.
Anyway, when she came home for Christmas, the bus was delayed by the weather and I waited 'till she arrived at 3 a.m.. That helped convince her that my intentions were still of the best so I proposed and gave her the traditional engagement ring for Christmas. She accepted the proposal of marriage that went with it and we were both very happy about it! I had also asked the permission of her father which was traditional in those far off days. Father George said o.k. opining that "Anne has a mind of yer ownand will do as she wants in any case".
And so we were married at St. James United Church in Dauphin, July 2,1949, after her school term had closed. Anne's Father and Mother and my Father and Mother were all in attendance. The service was conducted by the Reverend Muttit. It was a lovely ceremony, including the traditional vows I remember most, 'to love and to cherish, to have and to hold, through richer or poorer, forsaking all others until death do us part', ending with, "those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder". The church was decorated with flowers from Anne's students and fellow teachers with a particular spray of white lilies mounted by the organ which Anne had pickedfrom her landlady's garden earlier that morning!
The service was followed by picture taking, coutesy Auntie Beth and George ?, who was our MPC Supervisor for the Dauphin area. The reception and lunch were held at a local hotel where toasts were exchanged; after which we went to the airport to catch the plane to Winnipeg, (See photo). We then caught the CPR train to Kenora and after a supper at a local restaurant took a taxi to Laclu. There we had rented one of Webb's cabins on secluded Rice Bay for our honeymoon. One thing I recall especially on our trip was the brilliant display of lightning we experienced during the taxi ride from Kenora. For two weeks we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, swimming, boating, taking pictures and doing all the othe wonderful things one does on a honeymoon. We walked all the trails and visited the waterfall and other spots which Anne had grown to love, and took in the dances at Webb's dancehall.
Returning to Winnipeg we moved into a new one-bedroom apartment, Suite 8N in the Marion Apartments in St. Boniface. The rent was $70 a month which was about we could afford on my salary of $195 per month. We moved in with a mattress on the floor for a bed, kitchen table and chairs, pots, pans, dishes and other sundries we had received as wedding gifts. These included a lovely wool carpet from Anne's father and mother which we laid on the living room floor.
As we got settled into our new life I of course went back to work and Anne took up relief teaching in Winnipeg schools in the fall of 1949. However life moves on in its ever flowing stream, and it was not long before we discovered she was pregnant (I wonder how that could have happened?) and that all being well we would be experiencing a happy event about June 1950. However, before this could take place we had to live through the emergency of the great Winnipeg flood of the Red and Assiniboine rivers which caused us to flee from our new home for most of May. As the waters rose, resulting from heavy thawing followed by terrific rainfalls, the city found it necessary to throw up protective dykes on which most citizens like myself had to work in our spare time. Most of the dykes failed, except for ours, but the authorities thought we should leave for our safety. Even though our apartment was on the second floor it was decided to move all the first floor residents' furnishings to the second floor and when this was completed we all fled as the apartment building would be completely isolated by the flood waters even if the dyke did not break. We were fortunate as we were able to stay with Anne's parents on Campbell St. in River Heights. However, to get there we had to go a roundabout route to cross the Red at the Lockport high dam some miles north of the city. To get there we had to drive across the tributary Seine River which had already overflowed its bridge deck. Flood fighters had managed to keep the traffic moving by putting large planks on top of cement blocks to correspond to the wheel spacing of the cars. I can tell you it was some nerve-wracking thrill to drive across those 12 inch planks with an 18 inch deep millrace of water flowing through just below the planks!
On the work side at MPC things were no less exciting as the flood had created a lake about 50 miles long and 20 miles wide south of the city. Most of our pole lines were o.k. as they were up in the air but at Morris the local substation feeding the town was flooded and it was necessary to get our portable substation installed on higher ground. We had to use a boat to disconnect the old sub and while this was being done we noticed a telephone man's motor had failed and his boat was drifting toward the highway bridge where the river was still about 4 feet below the deck beams. He drifted under before we could get there but he grabbed the beams above his head and let the boat go. We were able to rescue him from his precarious perch, but we never did find out what happened to his motor boat! It could have ended up in a farmer's field or in a backyard in St. Vital!
The other MPC challenge in which I took part was the need to keep our main substation operational in Ft. Garry where we took our main power supply from the Winnipeg Electric Company. While we had built a dyke around the substation it did not protect the basement from getting flood waters backing up through the storm drains. This threatened the large capacity batteries for circuit breaker operation as these batteries were located in said basement. We first tried plugging the drains in the basement with bags of linseed, which swells up when wet thus blocking the drain. Just as we thought this was working we were surprised to see gushers of water shooting up through the toilets, so it was decided we would have to move the batteries upstairs. Carrying a large number of these lead-acid batteries up those stairs was a really tough task and I was glad when we got it completed. While Anne and I were high and dry at Campbell street for the duration, about a hundred thousand citizens who fled the low lying areas before the dykes broke returned to very sad looking messes as flood waters had reached up to 4 or 5 feet above ground floor level. Typical was the case of my boss, Tom Woodhall, who lived on Baltimore Road in Fort Rouge. The whole ground floor was covered in silt and muck and sensitive furniture such as his living room chesterfield and piano were destroyed. One of the toughest jobs was to replace the hardwood flooring with which I helped for a couple of Saturdays.Parts of it had to be chiselled out to get rid of it. Anne and I were indeed fortunate that we lived in a second floor apartment in the only area where the dyke never failed! As a result of the flood the city and the province dug a huge floodway around the east side of Winnipeg which proved its worth in 1997 when a similar flood struck.
Not long after the flood had subsided and we had moved back to our apartment, Anne's time for birth approached. While we were on a weekend visit to her parents, she came downstairs in the evening to announce that her waters had broken. So it was time and after a very hard night for her, Robin was born at 7 a.m., July 21, 1950. When I first saw him in the nurse's arms he was quite a red little fellow with a very pointed head! Anne was so proud of him and her struggle to bring him forth; she kept saying that he was 21 inches long and weighed 9 lbs. 11 ozs.!
Some months after he was born we decided we would look for a house. After a good deal of searching, checking prices, tax costs, bus stops, etc.we picked a nice stucco storey and a half starter home with unfinished space upstairs for expansion. It was about 5 years old and had low taxes because the service taxes from older homes on the far side had already paid for thestreet paving, water mains, etc.. It was located in Ft. Rouge at 224 Clare Ave.. We did some landscaping and put up a ranch style fence around the back yard. The gates and wooden lawn chairs we built by attending a wood-working course at Kelvin Technical High School. There was no garage but I wired in a heater plug for the car on the back lane so the car would start on Winnipeg's renowned winter mornings. The cost of the house was just $9750 with a Central Mortgage and Housing 25 yr. mortgage at 4 1/2 %.
In the summer of 1951 we vacationed at Laclu and at Rivers, so both sets of grandparents could get a visit with their new grandson. In August we attended my brother Bill's wedding to June Rabe at the Rabe farm home near Alexander, Man..Bill and June had both just graduated from university that year and as Bill was also an electrical engineer he got a job with the Saskatchewan Power Commission in Saskatoon. Auntie Beth kept in close touch with us and in fine weather loved to wheel the baby in the nearby park. Mum and dad Walker often invited us to their home for dinner followed by going to the sneak preview movie at the local theatre. In the winter I curled at the Strathcona Club on Furby Street.
In the following year (1952) we again holidayed in Rivers and at Laclu. My parents also came to Laclu for a few days and Anne took painting at the Winnipeg School of Art, which her mother had attended earlier; art proved to be Anne's enduring hobby and we shall be touching on it from time to time in this chronicle.
In the fall of 1952 Anne and I were richly blessed once more with the arrival of our second child; a lovely, perfect little girl we named Anna Maria. The second name was that of her grandmother Maria Harrison and the Anna was after her mother Anne, but changed to Anna as that rhymed with Maria. She was born Nov. 9 at Winnipeg's Grace Hospital, just off Portage Ave., and weighed over eight pounds. (See photo).We were both very happy to have a girl for our family! Tasks took up more time but Anne's efficiency saw that I got all time needed for my job! Robin did have quite a shock when mother arrived at the front door bearing this new bundle in her arms which cried. He instinctively realized that his sole position of importance was to be eroded by the presence of this new being in his life. After looking at he ran away and hid! However, by the time she was two he accepted her as a playmate and enjoyed boing on outings with her, whether accompanied by us or by Auntie Beth.