We are frequently involved in historical structures.  We often engineer with old methods, to the new code.  We also insist upon our staff having a facility with tools that many engineers would find antiquated, perhaps even outdated.  A Faber-Castell Novo Duplex 2/83N sits, pride of place, to this day on my desk.  It is still the fastest way to square a number, and puts a calculator to shame for many tasks.  For a novice engineer, learning the slide rule makes them a better person, as it makes them a stronger calculator (for centuries this was the person who calculated, not a device), and gives them a better ability to know the answer before they start.  I was taught that you needed to know the answer before you start by one of the finest engineers I ever met.  I found out today that he has passed, and I find myself deeply saddened, and grateful for the time I was able to spend learning from him.

I started work at Roney Engineering in Kingston Ontario in April of 2004.  My new boss, Chris Roney, P.Eng., had hired me because the Civil & Structural Engineering Lab Manager, Ken McMartin, P.Eng., said that while he didn't have any upcoming Masters of Engineering graduates to offer as new hires, I might do.  My grades sucked, but I was very passionate about Structural Engineering, often in my office at the University before the first bus would run, and before Ken arrived.  I think I impressed him, and clearly I did something good enough to have one fine engineer recommend me to another... But this isn't about either of those two great men.  It is about the father of the first, and a loss I was quite shocked to feel as deeply as I do.  My grades sucked because I had nearly completed an Electrical Engineering degree before I realized I loved the lectures but hated the work, and real world work would be more like the labs than the lectures.  No matter how I loved both the lectures and the home work once I switched, completing nearly eight years of university courses in five years was always going to have an impact on my grades.  But this post isn't about me...

I never saw Gerry use a slide rule, though I can guarantee you the man was a whiz with the slip stick.  No, instead I watched Gerry use a digital calculator so old and worn that the buttons had been rubbed clean of any number or other marking.  That man and his old calculator where simply amazing.  The fact that the buttons were polished smooth and entirely blank didn't seem to bother Gerry at all.  Gerry had an energy that was all electric, and was a conservative, through and through.  I don't always sleep well, and I often find myself early into the office.  I beat Gerry into the office precisely one time.  He seemed quite shocked, and perhaps a little bemused.  Later in the day his son Chris (of earlier hiring me fame in this post) warned me never to come in so early again, that it might hurt Gerry's pride to be beaten into the office by a younger man, and that this might in turn mean he would try to come in even earlier.  I thought the concern of son for father quite beautiful, and promised to keep from coming in first.  If I didn't see his van or car, I'd simply take a walk up to the nearby Tim Horton's, read a book a while, and then come back.

Gerry was a staunchly conservative man, and when I was too young to know any better, I would argue from a thoroughly left-leaning, University (non-technical) nonsense-filled, socialism-filled, brain.  He was the first person to ever point out the difference between national debt and deficit to me, and gave me a more thorough education in economics in five minutes of annoyed vitriol than had a university course, complete with copious and diligently copied notes and textbook had managed two years prior.

Watching Gerry work was amazing.  He would look over a set of drawings, and write down the correct beam and column sizes.  No calculations, at least none to be seen.  Often his calculations were twenty or thirty roughly sketched pencil lines on a small top edge bound spiral notebook.  You know the kind, sized and presumably designed, to fit into the breast pocket of a man's blazer.  The kind Gerry wore most of the days I knew him.

I was fortunate enough to be assigned to assist him on three or four occasions.  It was like being a toddler and watching an Olympian run.  Gerry looked over the sheets, took two or three minutes to write out the correct sizes of members on the drawings, and told me not to bother him with any questions and to iterate, revise, or review as necessary until my newfangled new code nonsense matched his sizes by no more difference than one increment of size in the steel beam charts.  He was inevitably right, and I never did find a size that was more different than one steel-chart-size-increment.  I'm not at all sure the man said "newfangled", but in my mind, and in my memories, he did.

If you're reading this today, know that it is because of my day yesterday, and a deep respect for an engineer lost.  The world is smaller today than it has been, and our technical excellence as a species is down one fine Structural Engineer.  Why did yesterday cause me to search out Gerry?  Why, because yesterday I watched an intern struggle with something I took for granted that every single engineering graduate could do.  Without question, without fail.  Then I found out that they pulled yet another of my absolute non-debatable, must-haves, from the curriculum.  Again.  It wasn't the first, and likely won't be the last.

My first ever moment like this was when I was the young engineer on the receiving end of a shocked and appalled Mr. Roney, P.Eng, Sr. moment:  I couldn't use the Hardy Cross Method.  Had never heard of it.  Didn't know it.  Couldn't do it.  And Gerry, well, Gerry was not impressed with young Master Maurice Quinn, No-Post-Nominals-Here.

But he was patient.  He was kind.  He taught me more in the precious hours I had in one-on-one with him than I could unpack in the nearly twenty years since.  And in 2020, he died.  He passed away leaving a legacy that could be envied by many, and should be the aspiration of most engineers.

He was never better than in the moments he sat at the big desk, back to the door, bent over the engineering paper and rubbing off another layer of plastic atoms from that old, rubbed-blank, calculator.  I asked him why he didn't buy a new one, and he said simply "They don't make this one anymore."  There was a message there, and I received it loud and clear.  I own more than twenty-four of my favourite calculator, having developed a knee-jerk reaction for purchasing "just one more, Hon" over the years, and boy I tell you:  This year I had a shock that came before learning of the fact that I'll never see Gerry again.  As I sit here, at my desk, at the end of the corridor, with young engineers coming to ask me questions every day, I could tell any one of them today: "They don't make this one anymore."

I left Roney Engineering after a group of Queen's University (presumably Engineering) students threw a beer bottle at me from a moving vehicle as I walked along the road wearing my Carleton Engineering jacket.  I was feeling deeply depressed, and stressed, and felt like a failure.  I went to see Chris and I told him I couldn't do it any longer.  I loved the job, I loved the work, I loved the people, but the City seemed to hate me; my little basement apartment with the illegally low ceilings was killing me a little more every day, and I didn't see how I could keep working there with what then appeared to be to be less than zero social life, and even fewer prospects.  I told Chris I would keep working as long as he needed to find a replacement, I told him I was sorry to have to leave, and that I had learnt a very great deal from him and was grateful.

That Friday, Chris handed me a letter which accepted my resignation. 

I have never regretted my time with Roney Engineering.  I have often regretted not sticking it out.  My career has been varied and interesting; from being the lead engineer on a stadium in Auckland to designing five storey climbing scaffolding arrays around sixty storey towers in Australia, from hotels in New Zealand and Vietnam to engineering the blast chamber used by Queen's University (ironic, right) and the Canadian Government...  Every one of them, while done by me, has had a helping hand from Gerry's wisdom.

Today I know what our next Technical Meeting will be about, having found that out yesterday, and I also know to be grateful for the opportunity to train these young engineers.  I hope, in time, to have inspired some of them as thoroughly as Gerry inspired me.

I never knew the Gerald Roney pictured above; I knew the older, wiser, man he was to become.  I realize now, with not a small amount of foreboding that I am close to the age of the man in that photo, and that my father is closer to the age of Gerry when I met him.

I'll likely find out another lost art of engineering soon enough, and spend fifteen or twenty precious minutes imparting yet another key lesson left untaught at University.  That's fate.  But the echo?  The echo finally starts to fade, with the passing of the man who's patient wisdom was passed onto me.

Sitting here, in my office, typing on a keyboard I love... A keyboard who's keys are slowly rubbing clean... I realize that I own only one.  Some things in an engineer's life might just be meant to be unique...  And I miss the man who owned only one calculator.  A calculator, with the keys rubbed clean.