Bateman stands up for female engineers
Don Bateman, 82, went back to school last week.
Bateman is chief engineer and corporate fellow with Honeywell Aerospace in Redmond, Wash. He works at making flying safer; has for almost 60 years. A native of Saskatoon, he is an inductee in the National Inventors Hall of Fame Museum in Alexandria, Va., filing enough patents to fill the cargo hold of a wide-body Boeing. Last Tuesday afternoon he was at TCU Place for the University of Saskatchewan’s spring convocation, receiving an honorary doctorate of science.
During his speech to the audience, Bateman looked at the rows of engineering grads seated in the main theatre. He made a point of saying how many engineers in the Class of 2014 are women. That wasn’t the case when he graduated from the U of S College of Engineering in 1956, he said. He told a related story. Bateman talked of a female engineer who applied to work with his company. He met her. He was impressed. He recommended she be hired. She was.
Male co-workers questioned his thinking. “A woman engineer?” they scoffed.
She is smart and curious and committed, he told them. She can do things we haven’t thought of, he said.
They noticed. After working with her for a year they told Bateman they were wrong about her.
“Don’t apologize to me,” Bateman said. “Apologize to her.”
Dennis Swaney, 75, ran through the streets of Saskatoon last month.
Swaney is a retired pharmacist from Rapid City, a city in the Black Hills of South Dakota near Mount Rushmore. He started running when he was 40. He has run in Houston and Indianapolis, New York and San Francisco. He has run in the Boston Marathon six times.
Swaney trains on a treadmill. He said if he ran on pavement every day the hard-pack would jackhammer his legs.
He came to Saskatoon this spring for the Saskatchewan half-marathon.
“This is the last province in Canada where I’ve run,” he said. “I want to do them all.”
Swaney arrived in Saskatoon on a Friday. On Saturday he walked from his hotel near Midtown Plaza to Prairieland Park near Lorne Avenue to pick up a race package that included a T-shirt and his bib number, No. 1455. He walked back downtown. On the patio of a riverside restaurant he ate tandoori chicken pizza and had a glass of craft beer. Sunday morning he ran. He wore black shorts and a khaki green shirt. His runners were a darker grey than his moustache. He wore the same red ball cap he has worn in other races.
He ran 21 kilometres in less than 2½ hours.
Everywhere Swaney travels he likes to read about local history, especially about local people.
“You should see a guy I know in Rapid City,” Swaney said of a man in his 90s in South Dakota.
The man plays pool. His cue has more character than a whitewall Packard sedan.
“Can he play!” Swaney said. “With every shot he is setting up his next shot. You better not miss yours. Playing him you won’t get another one.”
Snack food for Mohammadali Khan is dates and almonds. He’d add fruit, too, if he could find the kind he ate as a kid.
Khan lives in Saskatoon. Schooled as an engineer, his work included converting saline water into fresh water in the United Arab Emirates. He worked in England. He worked in Japan. His home is India. Khan grew up with 10 brothers and sisters in the city of Jaora, a land of cotton, maize and poppy. Mango trees blossomed in February and March. Khan’s taste buds danced in June.
“We picked one type of mango when the fruit was hard and green,” Khan said. “We’d spread out a bushel of hay, put mangoes on the hay, then add more hay on top to cover the mangoes. In about a week they’d ripen.
“Pressing and sucking on a mango brought out the juice.
“The other type was a smaller tree, but the mangoes were bigger and sweeter.”
He ate jujube fruit, also known as beri. Grape-sized, they are as crisp as an apple. Jujube honey is sweeter than a baby’s smile.
Khan sat in the shade of pomegranate trees.
“I can taste those mangoes still,” he said. “Oh and what a smell. Put a fresh mango in a store here and the smell of one mango would fill the whole store.”