Allan E Paull
[Rotman School of Management < http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca>]
39 Fenn Avenue, Toronto ON,
M2L1M7, 416-445-6050
Email: paull@rotman.utoronto.ca
I’m starting this on my 86th birthday
and my thoughts are wandering back to past years and to uncertain future ones.
My memories of the past are not as vivid or as reliable as those of my wife
Freda’s, but we’ve been married only 50‑some years so I can’t expect her
to remember my childhood days. I would turn to my sister Ruth to share
memories of my early days but she died more than ten years ago, so I’m
dependent on my own long-term memory, and that is not the best. I’ll
record here some of my thoughts while I can still recall them, and they will be
centred mostly on my personal life in a somewhat impersonal way. There
will be few if any anecdotes; this is intended to be a personal history without
implying judgement of others.
My paternal grandfather, Leib (or Levi)
Pelenovsky, emigrated from Russia with his wife and children in 1890 to farm
with other Jewish immigrants on a settlement near Wapella, Saskatchewan.
My father was born in Montreal shortly after they disembarked from the
ship. I do not know when or by whom the name was changed to Paull.
Most likely it was my grandfather when he later moved the family to
Regina. My mother came from Russia with her parents via London at the age
of twelve to settle in Winnipeg.
I was born and brought up in Regina and I called
Regina home for the first 21 years of my life, including the last four which I
spent in Winnipeg getting a B.A. at the University of Manitoba. My majors
were Mathematics (Actuarial Science) and Economics. For reasons that will later
become clear, I branched off in the direction of Statistics. After graduating I
accepted a job at the Grain Research Laboratory of the Board of Grain
Commissioners in Winnipeg. I stayed in Winnipeg until the army draft was
breathing down my neck in 1941 and along with a friend I joined the RCAF as a
radar technicians with the rank of AC2 (Air
Craftsman 2nd Class).
The next 5 years I spent at numerous air force facilities in Canada and the
U.K., usually for no more than three months at any one spot, and ended up as a
Flight Lieutenant at the end of the war. Those years are documented in a
later chapter.
After the war I used my veteran benefits to get
a Ph.D. in mathematical and experimental statistics at the University of North
Carolina. In my subsequent career path I can recall two incidents when I
declined job offers in which the money was very appealing but I never lived to
regret it. I planned on spending 5 years in the real world before returning to
Academe but those 5 years stretched out a bit.
In July of 1950 I took a job with Abitibi Power
& Paper Company in Toronto and worked there until 1961. During those
years Freda and I got married, bought a house, had two kids, and had a $10,000
mortgage on an $18,000 house at 104 Sultana Ave. I soon learned to become
a good handyman, building a workbench and finishing off the recreation room in
the basement. Men in those days participated rather passively in the care and
nurturing of children, and Freda did that job herself without any help from a
mother or mother-in-law; and the two kids turned out to be two wonderful
children who had enough sense to choose for themselves two wonderful
mates.
Some time afterwards my folks, who must have
been saving their lunch money, helped my sister Ruth and her husband
financially in the purchase of a house, and somewhat later sent us a gift of
$10,000. I think they wanted me to have it before my sister got her hands
on it. Ruth was always a better spender than all the rest of us. But on
the other hand she deserved a larger share of the “inheritance” because even
though Mom was well able to look after herself after our father died, Ruth was
destined to become the main caregiver in her old age, and Ruth continued to
fill that role until mother’s final days. Mom was 96 when she died.
In 1961 I began to experience my mid-life crisis. I made a move to Kimberley-Clark in Neenah Wisconsin and those years too are described later. After four years we returned to Toronto and I began an academic career as a professor at the University of Toronto in the Mathematics department with a cross appointment at the Business School. I had stayed in industry longer than the intended 5 years. Although lecturing was not my strong point I enjoyed the contacts with the graduate students and I continued to work until I was 70; then came active retirement.
The word “unauthorized” in the title is partly tongue-in-cheek but also, at this stage of writing, I’m not too sure how much of my soul I’m willing to bare. I have always found any authorized biography I have read in the past to be much too self-serving.
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Although I started this on my 86th birthday time goes quickly when you’re old and now my 88th is approaching as I put this opus to bed. The above synopsis is for people who don’t read more than one page; for others who do there are ten more chapters of interesting narrative ahead.