He spent his sabbatical year (1974-75) in Amsterdam at the FOM Institute working with J. The next move was five years later - back to Canada in 1967 to accept a position with the Department of Metallurgy and Materials Science at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) where he immensely enjoyed teaching classes and working with his research students from various parts of the world, as well as enjoying the social life at the university. The work was satisfying and the opportunity to be immersed in the European environment was an education much appreciated by both Roger and his wife. Four years later, Roger accepted the invitation in 1962 from Euratom to work at its atomic energy laboratory near Lago Maggiore in northern Italy. and moved on to Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) at Chalk River where his two sons, Steven and Bruce, were born. (Later, while at McGill University, a well-known orchestra conductor asked why he wasn't playing the oboe professionally, to which Roger replied that while he loved music, he expected to earn more money with science!)Īfter earning his Master's degree and getting married, he and Shirley (a teacher and pianist with whom he played almost daily piano and oboe duets for most of his life) moved from Saskatoon to Montreal and McGill University for him to work on his Ph.D. His first research papers, (for his Master's Degree at the University of Saskatchewan), were for studies of cement, his first "material"!Īll during his youth (and for his entire life), Roger had a passion for music, taking piano lessons and playing saxophone, at first with the Navy Cadet Band, and then in the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra, which bought an oboe for him and paid for him to go to Winnipeg (Manitoba) for special lessons. During those High School years, he created and enjoyed working in his own attic laboratory (often with a friend), getting chemicals and encouragement from his father (who by this time was teaching chemistry in a high school). With regard to school, he seems to have been a gifted student from the beginning and eventually his parents were able to have him go to High School in the city of Saskatoon where he excelled in academic and extracurricular activities - everything but "physical education" where he objected to the philosophy of the teacher who declared that if a male didn't "stink" he wasn't a good phys-ed student! Roger preferred his Latin and also studied Greek and German on his own. His father was a young teacher struggling to survive when teachers were a "dime a dozen" and schools were usually "one-room"! Roger showed his experimental leaning early by climbing to the top of the schoolhouse at 2 1/2 years and then needing a rescue! Roger was born in 1933 - at the lowest point of the "Great Depression" in Saskatchewan, the hardest-hit province in Canada when there was no rain to speak of, nor were there jobs.
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