Sally (Sarah) Paterson.The Globe and Mail
Sally Paterson: Mother. Caregiver. Scientist. Scholar. Born Oct. 17, 1927, in Toronto; died March 21, 2018; in Collingwood, Ont.; of cancer; aged 90.
Sally was born as Sarah Strathy Broughall in North Rosedale, Toronto. When her father went overseas in the Second World War, Sally helped her mother raise two younger siblings. Sally, older by five years, served as anchor, which was a role she assumed in most of her life.
We met at a physics lecture at the University of Toronto. She was an independent-minded person and while we held different views on some things we shared the important ones. In 1949, we became engaged in a canoe on the Bow River. At least, sort of engaged. I think I asked her something like, “If I were to ask you to marry me next summer, after we graduate, what would you say?” She didn’t think much of the proposal but eventually confessed that she would marry me any time, anywhere, even if she spent the next few years in a tent. (As a geophysicist, I might be in the bush a lot of the time.)
Within three years of her graduation with an honours BA, we had two children. Sally stayed home to run the family as I worked on my PhD and by the time I had settled down with a regular job we had four children, Catherine, John, Michael and Norman. There was no way Sally could accompany me in a tent.
Not surprisingly, the brilliantly intellectual and inquisitive woman I married looked for new challenges. In 1977, at the age of 50 when all the other students were in their teens, she enrolled at Shaw’s Typing Academy on Yonge Street. Aided by her academic qualifications, she landed a secretarial position in the Chemical Engineering Department at U of T. She was soon not only typing (slowly) but correcting spelling and grammar, and finding mistakes in the professors’ arguments and conclusions. Sally next took courses in computer science and biology. Despite having graduated before even pocket calculators were invented, she was soon writing code in Fortran and programming chemical algorithms. By 1980, she was co-authoring papers with Prof. Donald Mackay, and initiating studies of her own. In 1985, she was advising the provincial government on toxic chemical limits in the environment.
After we “retired” to our farm on Georgian Bay in Ontario, Sally continued to work with Prof. Mackay on a textbook. She loved the farm and put endless hours into a vegetable garden and too many perennial beds, aided by our seven grandchildren and their friends. She enjoyed travelling to far-off places and always insisted on learning the local languages, particularly Spanish, which she used on winter visits to our second home in Costa Rica. Competitive bridge tournaments, family visits and reading kept her busy up to the last few weeks of her life.
Her bag was packed for another trip to Costa Rica when she was diagnosed with untreatable cancer. Her life could not have been fuller.
Norman Paterson is Sally’s husband.
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