My relationship with my Dad was complicated to say the least, but sometimes it feels refreshing to step back, outside of all the subjective details or personal regrets and grievances, and look at life in terms of the larger patterns that you can learn from; the forest, not the leaves.
Next to the dark stains of personal errors and mistakes – a filter which affected my vision for many years – I can also recognize bright paths of success to be celebrated. It’s healthy to shrug off some shadows once in a while, and enjoy a little objectively-cast sunlight.
Today is Father’s Day, and as I look back on my father’s life today, I think about his family line, his hometown, and some of the trends I’ve glimpsed running through his history. My father links back to his own father in notable ways.
Almost 102 years ago, my Dad, James Evan Love, was born in Prince Rupert, BC, to Albert Bruce Love and Margaret McCallum Owens. By 1928, the Love family home on Eighth Avenue East would total four boys and one girl.
Read more about the Love family home…
My Dad’s father Albert and his brothers came to Prince Rupert from Prince Edward Island around 1905. They were very industrious, making names for themselves in the early days of Prince Rupert’s electrical power and telephone systems. My Grandpa Albert Bruce worked for the Prince Rupert Telephone Company, as a lineman, high up on the poles splicing phone lines.
In my Dad’s career during the 1960s and 70s, he was also known to climb the antenna towers at his employer’s TV and radio transmitter sites. Maybe it was coincidence or an inherited need for adventurous freedom, I’ll never know, but I suspect that my Dad (and his Dad) would probably have just said that getting up there was a necessity; you went where the work was, where you were needed to be.
In the early years of Prince Rupert’s life as a growing port city, maybe in the early 1920s, I think it was my Dad’s Uncle Walter who was praised by the city’s council for keeping the power flowing to the city’s hospital during an emergency. This may have been the same uncle who took my Dad’s younger brother Eric under his wing at his company “Love Electric”. My Uncle Eric ended up having a long and successful career as an electrician, working all over BC.
After my Dad left the RCAF in the early fifties, he worked in RF, television, and radio engineering for more than twenty years all over western Canada. In 1975, he landed at TRIUMF, the atomic research facility at The University of British Columbia, where they’d built an “atom-smashing” cyclotron. Dad joined their RF group as a senior electronics technician.
At TRIUMF, the systems that my Dad helped to manage were attached to a cyclotron, whirling sub-atomic particles around at three quarters of the speed of light. One of the applications of TRIUMF’s subatomic research was that scientists would develop a particle beam that could one day treat cancer patients with focused radiation therapy.
Over the course of my Dad’s career, he’d watched vacuum tubes give way to semiconductors, and the dominance of terrestrial radio networks get replaced by microwave satellite broadcasts of colour television. By 1976, it was TRIUMF by name and triumph by nature, I suppose.
For my own part, I feel like I’ve followed in Dad’s footsteps in a few small ways, by doing my own work in television projects, or on software engineering teams, and most recently in web-based online learning and educational video production. The process of turning words into video sequences, seeing them delivered online to viewers across the globe – it fascinates me, our electronically distributed world. I suppose you might say it’s just more translations of electrical signals from one format to another, all in the service of some form of communication.
It’s fair to say that through what I’ve learned about my Dad and his brothers (and my Dad’s Dad and his brothers), there was definitely a familial trend towards electricity, electronics, power systems, and electrical communication.
Many of the Loves that I’ve learned about have seemed to enjoy getting their hands dirty moving atoms around one way or another. That’s kind of a cool legacy to feel connected to.
