7671

 

7671 David Scott Lay

Review 1969

 

In March 1969 I met Jane on a blind date. We hit it off well and dated all through final exams.

June 1969 TelMaintO at CFS Dana. I was bored and Jane was still in Kingston, so I asked the career manager to get me out of there. The response was unexpected; “where do you want to go?”.

June 1970 Course Director of the Anti-jamming Operators course in North Bay.

Summer 1971. Started post-grad at U of T. Married Jane in the Downsview chapel. 8081 John Westrop was our Best Man. He took a T-bird down from Cold Lake and wowed the girls at the rehearsal party by turning up in his flight suit.

Summer 1973. Finished my M.A.Sc.

Derek was born in August.

Posted to NDHQ and worked on a project to replace the CADIN/Pinetree radars. This did not come to fruition but influenced the development of the North Warning System (NWS).

May 1976 Keith is born.

August 1976 off to Sioux Lookout on promotion to Major. Jane had the joys of living in a poorly insulated twelve foot by sixty house trailer with a three-month old and a three year old. Fortunately for her, our tour was cut short when an organizational change caused my job to disappear at the end of 1978.

Back to NDHQ, as Project Manager of the Canadian component of the NATO Integrated Communications System. I needed the Carp Cable Plant Replacement project to support this, and took over management if it too.

February 1981. Holly is born, and I was selected for Staff College.

5874 Captain (N) John Croft, my director, persuaded me to instead go to Gander as CO of 226 Radar Squadron. Some senior officers of the C&E Branch were not happy about this and in 1982 I was again selected for Staff College. John Croft said don’t worry; you’re not going.

Back to NDHQ as a LCol. I set up the logistic support for the North Warning System (NWS). The agreement was that Canada would build the new sites and the USA would provide the electronics. Canada would also take over maintenance and supply, which the USAF had been doing for the DEW line.

1987. Promoted to Colonel and posted to Project Manager of the Intelligence and Security Complex. We were trying to build a highly secure distributed computing system, and the state of the art was not there. The project was eventually (after my departure) cancelled. It was painful.

December 1988. 4983 MGen Peter Woods, Chief of Engineering and Maintenance, called me early on a Friday morning. Would I be interested in a posting to Europe? He had a problem to solve and he knew I would not mind being rescued from a floundering project. So...

February 1989. Chairman of the Allied Communications and Computer Security Agency (ACCSA), International Military Staff, Brussels.

The huge benefit of the posting to Brussels was the travel opportunities for the children. This was pre-Euro so we kept envelopes of cash for the countries that someone might be visiting on short notice.

During this period Derek was accepted for ROTP at Royal Roads, with a strong endorsement from our NATO MilRep, 4377 LGen Rick Evraire.

August 1993. Deputy Chief of Staff for Telecommunications and Information Systems, Air Command HQ Winnipeg. Difficult times; peace dividend expectations, buyouts for junior officers. We lost a lot of good people.

Keith started the Civil engineering program at U of M in 1994. Derek graduated from RMC in Mechanical engineering in 1995.

June 1996.  Chief, Systems Certification Division, US Space Command, Colorado Springs. This was a dual-hatted US Spacecom/NORAD position with responsibility for certifying the software of the Integrated Tactical Warning and Attack Assessment system. I had a bi-national tri-service (plus civilians) staff.

September 1998. Holly started in engineering at Queen’s. We bought a house in Kingston, but I went back to Ottawa to fill blanks in the senior staff, holding two different NDHQ director positions.

May 1999. I retired from the CF and took a job at the Queen’s University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; staff engineer and adjunct instructor. The provincial government had launched the “Access to Opportunity” program to increase enrolment in high-tech disciplines, and I was handed a big bag of money to buy equipment for expanded undergraduate labs. The procurement process being vastly more simple than I was accustomed to in the Federal Government, we were able to do this in time to start courses in September.

I became involved in the Integrated Learning initiative, which comprised curriculum changes and new facilities to improve the quality of engineering education. The new facilities part of this became the Integrated Learning Centre (ILC). I contributed to the design and was appointed Operations Manager. 

The ILC was hugely popular with the students, less so with some faculty members who thought it a boondoggle that took money that should have gone to them. For ten years I fought a rearguard action against efforts to shut down or divert ILC resources.

In 2011 Holly earned her PhD in Engineering Physics.

In May 2014 I bade farewell to Queen’s. On my last day there I had an interview at the end of the day, at the Bombardier plant in Millhaven. I started work there the following Monday.

Engineering Project Manager for reducing the costs of manufacturing of the roof, frame and cabling of the monorail. We had some success in this, but the division president who had started the project got cold feet about the implementation. As the project was winding down I turned my attention to a couple of R&D projects, but then that budget was cut and in February 2016 I became unemployed for the first time since I was sixteen years old.

In October 2017 I was given another contract at Bombardier, in project management of the Riyadh Metro. I managed the customer queries and tracked the contract data.

 The trains were manufactured in Mexico and I took a couple of trips down there to investigate corrosion problems, and to witness a special test.

Eventually the contract money ran out, and in August 2021 I left the company, which by this time had become Alstom.

I have not been up to much recently, but the children definitely have.

Holly has been very active in the medical acoustic imaging community, and in 2022 was appointed a vice-president of Acoustic in Seattle.

Keith meanwhile was going in the other direction. In 2001 he got a job in Orange County, California, and eventually became a highly-paid expert on California’s environmental regulations. He married a California girl and they have a child. In recent years his wife was becoming alarmed at the increasing level of violence and political nonsense and decided they should move to Canada, which they did last year, buying a house down the street from Derek and his family. Keith continues to work in his California job, remotely.

Derek was promoted to Colonel last year.

Eventful times. I have passed the torch.

On the occasion of Keith's wedding in Orange County, California, in 2004; Derek, Keith, Jane, Me, and Holly.