Bill Wolley-Dod
Bill Wolley-Dod passed away at the
age of 74 years at the Dr. Vernon Fanning Centre in Calgary on August
29, 2002
after a long battle with diabetes which he had endured for years.
He obtained his commission as an Alberta Land Surveyor in
1952.
He also held commissions as a Saskatchewan Land Surveyor and Canada
Lands Surveyor.
Bill served as President of the Alberta
Land Surveyors' Association in
1958
and was awarded Honorary Life Membership in
1989.
He received the Association's Professional Recognition Award in
1981.
Bill was actively involved in the surveying profession
provincially, nationally, and internationally. He represented
Canada at a number of professional gatherings throughout the
United States, Accra and Ghana.
Bill was a principal of the firm of Wolley-Dod & MacCrimmon
Surveys Ltd., Land Surveyors and Professional Engineers, until
his retirement in
1988.
He became a life member of the Association of Professional
Engineers, Geologists, and Geophysicists of Alberta in
1991.
Bill served as Master of Glenbow Masonic Lodge No. 184, A.F. and
A.M. G.R.A. in
1995
and
1996 and remained active in the Lodge
following his year in office. His many interests included an
active role in numismatics and he served on the executives of
the local and national associations.
As a surveyor, I will remember him as such:
-
a man who gave freely of his time
to students wishing to join the profession as is evidenced
by the months that he spent on certification boards for
entry to the ranks of the Alberta Society of Surveying and
Mapping Technologies, an organization closely affiliated
with our own;
-
a man who was a student of
astronomy, and who assisted many, including myself, in
understanding the complexities of the celestial sphere;
-
a man who could get to the crux of
a survey problem and come up with a solution;
-
a man who believed that the records of his surveys were an
integral part of the overall fabric which governed property
boundaries and, as such, were open to inspection and or
assistance, if requested, to any fellow surveyor who
approached him; and
-
a man whose name appears on more
plans of survey in what was the South Alberta Land
Registration District than anyone I know of (with the
obvious exception of Allan Spence)!
We will remember his renditions of
Grandma's lye soap, his dexterity with a ukelele and the piano.
One of his "performances" was made to an empty house. He and I
were looking for survey monuments on the boundaries of a school
section in the Brooks area. The school house had been left
unlocked and had, in one corner of its single room, an upright
piano! I would suggest that Tommy Dorsey's Boogie- Woogie was
played for the first time in that particular setting.
Bill and I "started" with Bob
McCutcheon at about the same time - he joined the firm in
1951,
and I first met him when I returned to Bob's Calgary operation
from the Chinchaga River Country in the spring of that year.
President McWilliam's message of
condolence in the September issue of ALS News said it
best. "Never did I see the man even contemplate compromising his
ethics in favour of the easy solution." I would say Amen to
that.
Bill was born in Calgary on July 14th,
1928,
a date which he liked to refer to as Bastille Day, perhaps in
reminiscence of his days at the University of British Columbia.
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