ONE WOMAN’S GENEROSITY CHANGED CANADIAN BUSINESS
$500 bursary helped eventual Encana founder to fund studies
It was a simple thing. Donate $500 a year each to help two struggling students continue their studies and, in doing so, honour her late husband.
But one of Margaret Clarke’s first bursaries in 1965 had repercussions she could never have foreseen. Not only did it help one of the award recipients continue at university; it changed the face of Canada’s oil industry and corporate Calgary. For that student was Gwyn Morgan, one of Canada’s top business leaders.
After graduating with a mechanical engineering degree, he formed Encana, a leading North American energy producer now headquartered in The Bow building downtown.
When he retired as CEO in 2005, the company had a stock market capitalization of $60 billion.
But without that bursary in 1965, none of that might have occurred.
“I already had support from my family, but there were three sisters ahead of me. It was hard to ask for them (parents) to stretch a little further,” Morgan recalls. “But I couldn’t have not kept on, because if I missed that year, it was over. There was no going back. There was only going forward or out.”
The Robert B. Paugh Memorial Bursary came at just the right time for a kid from a Carstairs-area farm, who was trying to pay for room and board in the city along with classes and textbooks.
“At present I am finding secondyear engineering both interesting and challenging, but without some form of financial assistance, I am afraid that I could not continue,” Morgan wrote in a thank-you letter to his benefactor in February 1965.
“I hope to be a chemical engineer and you have brought me closer to my goal.”
Clarke kept that thank-you letter and all of the others she received over the past 51 years. Since initiating those first two bursaries — one for an undergraduate and one for a graduate student — Clarke, 82, has helped more than 100 students at the Schulich School of Engineering and her bursaries are now $1,000 each. She is the university’s longest-standing donor and has seen a wide variety of students from across the world benefit from her generosity.
“It started out mostly (as) farm boys who wanted to study engineering because Alberta was a rural economy at the time. They came off the farm and had no money and no school clothes. To me, that’s so touching. They were country boys coming in with such determination,” said Clarke.
“The letters show the evolution. Now, a large portion of them are international students and a lot are women.”
It was no easy thing for Clarke to fund the bursaries when she began in late 1964. She was newly widowed with three young children. But she wanted to do something in tribute to her late husband, Bobby. As he had been an engineer, she created bursaries for second-year engineering students at the University of Alberta’s Calgary campus, which became its own university on April 29, 1966. In later years, her son David graduated from engineering in 1980 and her grandson, Erik, was a 2010 Schulich graduate.
Morgan and Clarke met recently to mark the university’s 50th anniversary and Clarke joked that she should check Morgan’s school marks.
“My son, the engineer, David, has suggested that you bring your transcripts so I can see how well you did with my $500,” Clarke said.
In fact, Morgan did very well and is now paying it forward to the university that launched him on a career that culminated in being inducted as a member of the Order of Canada as well as being named Canada’s Outstanding CEO of the Year. Morgan and his wife have established their own “Be An Engineer” bursary. The Gwyn Morgan and Patricia Trottier Foundation will award its first $5,000 to a U of C student this fall.
They also fund bursaries at other colleges and schools — and are receiving their own thank-you letters — but the U of C one is “extra special.”
“Particularly, I suppose, because of my background and how things went for me,” Morgan said.
“I remember the bursary Margaret gave me at a very important time. It motivated us to do that … It’s full circle.”