When I got my PhD in 1948 I had thought I would go out into the real world for a few years before entering Academia but as usual inertia stretched those few years into seventeen. I had always kept in contact with a Statistician friend in Toronto who in 1965 was head of the Mathematics department at the University of Toronto. I approached him for an appointment in the fall and the timing was right. I started that term as a full Professor with tenure along with a cross-appointment at the Business School (now the Rotman School of Management). I had a PhD, the academic passport, and had published enough during my stay in industry to qualify me for such an advanced appointment, and I also had several years of business experience. (See Curriculum Vitae.)
I spent the next 23 years teaching, trying to do research and publishing papers and succeeded as well as might be expected of one who has been out of the stream for the previous 17 years. My first sabbatical was spent visiting a professor at (O.I.S.E.) the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto. Sabbaticals also gave us a chance to travel and I spent one visiting at the University of Florida in Tallahassee. A former friend from my North Carolina days headed the Statistics Department there. Another sabbatical was spent in England visiting Andrew Ehrenberg a professor of marketing research at the London Business School located in Regents Park, a prime location. Those five months in London were an educational experience in itself. It had changed a lot since the blackout days of the war that I remembered; it had become Americanized, which was good in some ways but bad in others. We had been there in 1969 and then the change was not so noticeable. More about London later.
After five months in London we returned to Toronto briefly to reorganize ourselves before leaving for L.A. by car to spend five
months as a visiting professor at U.C.L.A. Our house in Toronto was rented for the duration to a doctor and his family from Sweden who was on sabbatical visiting colleagues at the Toronto hospitals.
While teaching at the University of Toronto I enjoyed the contact with students and colleagues and although lecturing wasn’t my forte I found the interaction with faculty and graduate students interesting and stimulating. At committee meetings, since I was a senior professor my opinion counted but I was not too eloquent at the kind of verbal skills and rhetoric needed to influence people, so I did much of my influencing by lobbying in smaller groups in the Faculty lounge. I recall many a pre-meeting discussion at coffee breaks with Barry Coutts, John Crispo, Warren Main, and Jack Siegel, to name just a few of my affable friends and willing listeners. The School was small and intimate in those days.
I continued working until I was 70 and
then came
active retirement. At the University of Toronto retirement at 65
was
mandatory at that time and my pension kicked in but I continued to do
consulting and some part time teaching at the U of T for the next 5
years.