A WRITER’S DAD AND THE DOME

Rummaging through Nicola Robbie’s storage locker, I wished there was a “Take Your Dad to Work Day.”

The Robbies’ locker, brimming with mementos from the early SkyDome days, reminded me of my own family’s treasured items.

Nicola is the daughter of Rod Robbie, the late architect who helped design the SkyDome.

I am the daughter of Dave Battersby, a man who practically built the whole thing, or at least I thought so when I was a toddler.

My dad was the electrical foreman for the kitchen and dining room in the stadium hotel. That makes sense to me now, but try explaining that to a 3-year-old.

SkyDome officially opened in June 1989. That summer my family travelled back to Ireland, after leaving for Canada a year earlier.

It had been a difficult year, and my parents sold our North York house before we left, preparing for the possibility we might not return.

We did decide to stick it out though, and soon my dad was called in to help finish the SkyDome hotel, which had to be ready by November for the stadium to host the Grey Cup.

When he started, the job coincided with a production of the Verdi opera Aida, which meant he was walking into a domeful of wild animals.

The menagerie was just one unique characteristic at the work site. The kitchen, he recalled, mimicked the shape of the building, curving with one end out of sight of the other. The dining-room lights were imported from Italy — modern, new and chosen, by his account, “just to be fancy.”

His crew finished the job in time for the big game, the significance of which was lost on my dad. He didn’t know much about North American football, and a colleague had to explain the game as they watched.

Weeks earlier, it was my dad’s turn to explain when he brought in a hurley and sliotar, the wooden stick and leather ball used for hurling, a traditional Gaelic game similar to field hockey. He and a co-worker sneaked onto the field for a quick round.

“It was a construction site,” he said of the breach. “You could go anywhere, as long as you didn’t interfere with the elephants.”

He wasn’t doing it to make a mark for his homeland in his new country, he said when I asked him recently.

It just seemed like a fun thing to do, something he could say later he was pretty sure he was the first to do.

And, yeah, I still believe he was.