Notes re IPY 1932:
Prof. Balfour W Currie
had a
PhD and was a junior on staff at the U of
Saskatchewan.
He returned there and had his whole career at U of S. His
younger
brother was Don Currie who was an operational meteorologist who
forecasted
out of Edmonton.
EH Vestine and Stuart
McVeigh were
postgraduate
students,
probably Toronto; it is not known what happened to them.
JE Lilly, of Acadia
University was in charge of magnetic station Meanook, the nearest
permanent observatory to the north magnetic pole.
He later became Director and Dominion Geodesist
1957-1967.
Ratje Charles Jacobsen,
after 1933, was a pilot, flew and
supervised
RCAF upper air sounding flights at Fort Smith in 1934 when Canada and
US
jointly studied polar air masses. He was probably under contract
since he did not become a staff member until 1936 when he was one of
the
first to go to Newfoundland where he again flew "APOBS" with Hugh
Bindon,
looking after the instruments which were mostly read manually while in
the air. After a year or two, he returned to Head Office where he
became head of the Instruments Section when Middleton went to Optics in
NRC at Ottawa in 1946.
* John Plewman Rea
died in 1945. His mother Mary "Minnie" Rea was a nurse at Regina
College, which eventually became University of Saskatchewan, and John
was a student there. Minnie and John probably got to know Balfour Currie and Frank Davies there. John went to the
Arctic as a general assistant to the expedition. His diary tells how he
went ahead of the group to make sure all the supplies were in order.
His tasks including cooking meals taking care of fire wood and other
duties. Following the expedition he gave a number of talks to groups
regarding life in the Arctic. He married in 1934 and worked at
Malton Airport as a weatherman and perhaps as an early air controller
working in the little round room on the top of Malton Airport. He then
undertook an apprenticeship for his electrical engineering papers
working with Canada Electric during the war. He was stationed in
Newfoundland for a while. He graduated in 1943 and he and his wife
bought a house in Churchville, Ontario where he is buried.
Walter EW Jackson was a
magnetician and deputy director of the
Observatory
and Service.
John Patterson had become director of the Observatory and
Service in
1929.
Andrew Thomson
returned to Canada and joined the staff as the
atmospheric
physicist early in 1932. Later in 1936 when the reorganization
took
place Jackson was transferred to the Ottawa Observatory and Thomson
became
deputy director. Thomson began acting as assistant or deputy director
in
1936 but was not officially appointed until 1940.
Frank T Davies may have
come from Britain or New Zealand but
remained
in Canada and became a noted scientist in the early National Research
Council or another department in Ottawa.
photo reference: Canadian
Polar Year Expedition, 1932-33
Vol. 1,
Meteorology (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1940), 452 pages.
notes from Morley K Thomas,
January 2007
* note from John Gilbert,
September 2019
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