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Duncan B. Gillmore(By Fred Cheng on the occasion of the presentation of the Professional Recognition Award, 2005)
Each year, the Alberta Land Surveyors' Association offers three awards designed to honour Alberta Land Surveyors who have brought distinction to the individuals themselves to the surveying profession or to society in general through extraordinary service or achievement.
This year, I have the honour to nominate and present this prestigious professional recognition award to one of our very own. I am here to honour an excellent field surveyor, a past president and an honorary life member of the Association to receive this year's award.
This individual was born in Upper Chelsea, Lunenberg County, Nova Scotia in 1931. He completed his high school education in Bridgewater and went on to receive his land surveying training from the Nova Scotia Land Surveying Institute in Lawrencetown and graduated in 1950. Upon graduation, he travelled to Alberta and began his employment with Phillips, Hamilton Land Surveyors. This company is now known as Hamilton & Olsen Surveys Ltd.
He began his articleship with Mr. Buck Olsen, another honorary life member, and obtained his Alberta Land Surveyors' Association commission in 1956. He then went on to obtain his Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Dominion land surveying commissions. His employment with Hamilton & Olsen included a variety of experiences. He gained a reputation as an excellent field person and an excellent project manager. He worked on many interesting projects including the trans-mountain pipeline in the early fifties. His other expertise includes the survey of mineral claims in the Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. In 1960, he left Hamilton & Olsen and took up employment with the federal government in Ottawa where he was responsible for the surveying of several indian reservations in northern Manitoba.
In 1962, he returned to the private industry in Edmonton where he established his own professional practice which he owns and operates today. In Alberta, he gained a reputation as Mr. Township because of his extensive township survey experience. He has successfully undertaken and completed numerous other official survey projects such as resurveys, settlements and inspections in northern Alberta.
Over the years, he has served the Alberta Land Surveyors' Association in various capacities including the following:
Other committee he served on included ASSMT, LIS, RPR and the Oil & Gas Ad Hoc Committee. Last, but not least, he is a past president of this Association. In addition, he has moderated numerous educational seminars for the Association and has been a master of ceremonies for numerous ALSA events.
He is reknowned for his pragmatic approach in handling difficult issues and is notorious for his great sense of humour. Over the years, many of us have come to enjoy his added humour and shared wisdom at our regional meetings and annual general meetings. Throughout the course of his professional career he has mentored and trained a number of people of which six of them have successfully achieved their Alberta Land Surveyor commissions.
They are: Bob Riley, Lyall Pratt, Don Wilson, Andrew Lee, Duncan Gillmore Jr. and myself. I am proud to admit that he has been my role model for the past twenty-odd years.
His opinion on land surveying matters is well respected and sought after by a variety of individuals from the newly commissioned to experienced land surveyors, and from counties and municipalities to different levels of government. He is currently one of the lead authors for a chapter of the ALSA survey law text. At the moment, his writing hand has been suffering from arthritis but I am confident that once he is finished writing that chapter, the end product will be a labour of love.
He is married to Pearl and they have four grown children with families—John, Alex, Duncan Jr. and Marcie Joe. They have ten grandchildren—five boys and five girls. As I understand, all of the children are in the audience today except for Marcie Joe who is a special education teacher and was not able to be here today.
Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in recognizing Mr. Duncan Burhoe Gillmore, better known as Dunc Sr. for his almost fifty years of signal and dedicated service to the Association, the public and the land surveying profession in western Canada.
Mr. Gillmore addressed the luncheon as follows:
I'd like to thank the Alberta Land Surveyors' Association for giving me this prestigious award and I would like to say it has been an interesting forty-nine years since I received my commission.
I would like to thank all the Directors of Surveys starting way back with Carl Lester and Wally Youngs down to the present for helping me whenever I had trouble with surveys and sort of bailing me out. I'd like to thank Buck Olsen, who I articled to and I would also like to thank my wife and family for putting up with a workaholic all these years. I would also like to thank Systematic Practice Review for keeping me on my toes these last years.
Thank you again.
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