Our story

Several recent visitors have asked how Janet Wendy and I met, where we've been, what we've done over the years. I summed up a little of our story in a speech I made at our 50th wedding anniversary banquet, when this photo was taken. We think our story is a bit unusual and quite interesting, so here are the notes I made for what I said that evening:

On Sunday August 7 1955 I was off duty in the medical practice where I was the junior doctor and on my way to play golf, when I picked up two young women hitchhikers. They were on the wrong road for the place they wanted to go, so I should have dropped them ten minutes later at a corner where they could make their way to the road they needed. But before ten minutes had gone, I knew I wanted to see more of one of them, so I scrapped my plan to play golf. I was running late because I’d called at a hospital to see a mother and the new baby I’d delivered a few hours earlier and my usual partners would have started without me. It was a perfect spring day, sun shining, blossoms opening everywhere, birds singing. I offered to show them the dairy-farming and grape-growing country south of Adelaide. At the end of the day we exchanged addresses because the one who interested me, Jan (short for Janet) Wendelken, was heading home to New Zealand after several years in Britain. When she got there, we began writing to each other. Our letters became a courtship by correspondence. Jan, also known as Wendy, came back to Adelaide in June 1956. Our theoretical love affair became practical, hands-on, and much more fun. We got engaged on August 16 1956 and were married in the chapel of my old school, St Peter’s College, on February 14, Saint Valentine’s Day 1957, a searing hot 104 F but a cool change in late afternoon made the wedding reception very pleasant.

Our wedding anniversaries have been scattered about the world and many have been memorable: Our 7th was in Kingston Jamaica, when officers on the ship where I was the surgeon took us to a brothel; in Edinburgh we dined once at a very posh country inn with peacocks in the garden. Two venues for our celebrations no longer exist, a sandy beach resort in Sri Lanka that was swept away in the tsunami on Boxing Day 2004, and the restaurant on the top floor of the World Trade Center in New York that was wiped out on September 11, 2001; our 30th was at the best seafood restaurant in Sydney. On our 36th, a cold, wet day in Dunedin, New Zealand, we had an unforgettably awful meal. On our 40th anniversary, Wendy planned to surprise me with a hot air balloon ride over Ottawa but we never got off the ground because it began to rain as we were on our way to the field where the balloon was to be launched, and hot air balloons don’t fly in the rain. In the week before our 45th anniversary I performed in a colloquium at a think-tank on a cliff edge beside the Pacific Ocean north of San Francisco. I flew home anticipating an intimate dinner at a little French restaurant, to be greeted with the news that the day before, Wendy had slipped on the ice and broken her hip. Instead of our tête-à-tête dinner, I visited Wendy in the Ottawa General Hospital. On our 46th anniversary we had champagne at a resort in the Dominican Republic. I was in India working for the World Health Organization on one anniversary, but otherwise we’ve been together for all of them.

None of this was imaginable when we married. We expected to spend the rest of our lives in medical practice in Adelaide, where I greatly enjoyed my work as a family doctor, and, I think, was reasonably good at it. But less than two years after we married, when Rebecca was 11 months old and David was well on the way, I fell seriously ill with pneumonia. I (and my doctor) thought I was going to die, and during my slow recovery I began to think about our future in new ways.

I had an epiphany. Instead of dealing with sick people one at a time, it made more sense to find out why they got ill or injured in the first place, and try to stop it from happening. With Wendy’s backing, I gambled recklessly with our family’s future. I left the financial security of medical practice, and launched into a career in public health research, mainly in epidemiology. As Robert Frost put it, I took the road less traveled. It’s been a fascinating, exciting, fruitful road.

For 15 years we lived on the edge of poverty – research work doesn’t pay well – but we were very happy and life was full of interest. Looking back over it, I think we’ve had a richly rewarding life, we’ve had loads of fun and got around a lot. We’ve lived in Adelaide; Sydney; London; Sydney again where a mortgage company helped to buy our first home; Burlington, Vermont; Edinburgh, where another mortgage company bought most of our second home and our kids acquired lovely Scottish accents that sad to say, they’ve lost in Canada; we came to Ottawa in 1969, and bought our third home (with first and second mortgages); we had a sabbatical year in New York City in the late 1970s, and have lived in Ottawa ever since. In the 1980s my work often took me to Geneva or Stockholm, and after it was done we used rail passes to travel to many parts of Europe. Starting in 1987 I had meetings or work most years in or near Australia so we had a month or two away, half each in New Zealand and Australia. We’ve stayed put long enough to put down roots, get to know the cities we’ve lived in, and in each of them we’ve made good friends. As our family size and needs changed, we’ve moved six times so far in Ottawa. We hope our next move will be to the crematorium, but preferably not for a few years yet. I may have missed a few, but I can count 22 homes we’ve had in five countries; we’ve traveled half way across the world several times on passenger carrying freighters, and over large parts of it by air enough times to have lost count.

Between us, we have produced three children of whom we are immensely proud and whose progress through life we’ve watched with loving approval. Rebecca survived an armed robbery, has been executive director of a regional economic development program, the Canadian Cerebral Palsy Association, the Canadian Environment Industry Association, and now is a policy analyst in the government, a master gardener, and an accomplished public speaker. David appalled me by announcing when he was 13 that he intended to be a soldier, then demonstrated by his actions that what he really meant was that he wanted to be a peacekeeper and an expert in preventing violent armed conflict, which he has done with distinction in some of the world’s combat zones, and in high-level consultations with national, international and intergovernmental organizations. Now he teaches it at the Royal Military College of Canada. He works in another part of the same ‘prevention’ field as I do. Jonathan was born with very severe heart disease, surgically repaired when he was 7, and is carving out a career fixing and trouble-shooting computers, doing computer animations, designing exciting, innovative houses. Our three clever grandchildren all seem poised on the threshold of fascinating, worth-while careers.

Wendy has made possible everything good that has happened to us. Her talents include ability to dash off a vivid sketch and a commendable poem, paint pictures worth hanging on our walls, and to sew and mend clothes. She made what she’s wearing in many of the photos in our slide show, including her own wedding dress, and the gorgeous evening dress she’s wearing tonight, and the children’s clothes when they were young. She’s been a marvelous mother and a caring grandmother. She makes appetizing meals, manages my chaotic life, and devotes much of her time to less fortunate people, and to other good causes. Two of her most endearing qualities are her sense of fun and her spirit of adventure – the combination that plans hot air balloon rides for a pair of 70-year olds. And she has been my moral compass. I’ve dedicated my life and most of my books to her.

My love for her grows stronger every year. I think we’ve had a very happy union. For many years we kept quiet about the way we met – it was as unlikely as the improbability drive in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (and Wendy was hitchhiking on that August day in 1955). Now we boast about it. We’ve proved that time flies when you are having fun – it certainly doesn’t feel like fifty years! I know I’ve had a lot of fun and I’ve been happy, and I believe Wendy has been happy too. I’ve tried to react positively to her rare critical comments. I use mouth wash when she complains about my bad breath, apply scissors when she says my nose hairs are getting too obvious, don’t complain when she keeps me waiting, and try to stay calm when she criticizes my driving.

So please join me in a toast to the love of my life, Wendy.


(Dinner celebration was held in the banquet room at Beckta’s Restaurant, Ottawa, February 14, 2007)