“A day for a celebration”: That’s what Bill Brock calls the day in 1958 when he graduated from the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC), one of the founding colleges of the University of Guelph.

He was among the first in his family to attend high school, let alone university. His parents – and their parents’ siblings and spouses – had all left school after eighth grade. “Going to university was a bit of a dream, as my family did not have the resources to help fund my education, and there were no student loan programs,” says Brock.

Brock’s experience and insight have been invaluable for the University and for its members.

He put himself through OAC with various jobs during summers and the school year. “It changed my life,” he says. “Besides learning in the classroom, I learned how to progressively build my self-confidence – a very important factor given that I was younger than most of my classmates.”
After finishing the fourth year of his agricultural engineering option, Brock completed his accredited mechanical engineering degree at the University of Toronto. Having begun work with a major oil company, he soon realized that he needed a business education to keep up with his peers. He earned an MBA from Western University.

After joining the Toronto-Dominion Bank, Brock spent the next 37 years at home and abroad, including 13 years in London, Hong Kong and Singapore. He spent the last 20 years of his career with the executive team at the bank’s Canadian head office.

After returning to Canada in the mid-1980s, he decided to make one major volunteer commitment – to the University of Guelph. For nearly 25 years, he volunteered in various roles, including serving as a member and ultimately chair of the Board of Governors.

During his five-year term as chair, U of G and other institutions confronted a major challenge. “The world changed for all universities in Ontario,” he says. “The Ontario government slashed its funding in the early nineties, and it became clear that this would not change and that universities would now have to fundraise on a major scale.”

Besides relying on student fees and government transfers, the University needed to secure revenue through fundraising campaigns and other means. Two campaigns in the late 1980s and the early 2000s raised more than $100 million in total for the University. Brock served as vice-chair and lead volunteer for the first campaign and was the largest volunteer fundraiser for the second.
For the latter campaign, Bill and his wife, Anne, donated funds to establish an endowment for the Brock Doctoral Scholarships, one of the top awards of its kind in Canada. A recent donation from the couple brings the total endowment to $2.5 million and will allow future scholarships to increase to $150,000 from the current $120,000.

Two campaigns in the late 1980s and the early 2000s raised more than $100 million in total for the University.

U of G president Franco Vaccarino says providing one of the largest awards for a PhD student in Canada – particularly with the recent endowment increase – means that “the University of Guelph can offer a scholarship that attracts the best who can become the foundation of tomorrow’s faculty.”
More than 10 PhD students have received the awards. Jesse Stewart, a professor in Carleton University’s music department since 2008, was the inaugural recipient at U of G. He says the award opened the door to his academic career.

Before receiving the award, he had taken a “soul-crushing” job to make ends meet. Says Stewart, “I had a brand-new baby at home and had been trying to make a living by playing music, which was spotty at best.”

Hoping to return to university, he applied for the Brock scholarship. Receiving the funding was “like winning the lottery. I couldn’t believe it. Everything I’ve done since, including getting the professorship at Carleton, is because of the Brock scholarship.”

Calling the Brocks “tremendously generous and wonderfully kind people,” Stewart says they are “a wonderful example of giving back and working to benefit others as they’ve benefited.”
Brock also spearheaded the creation of the Heritage Trust in the early 1990s to develop surplus real estate owned by the University on and off campus and leased to third parties. He chaired the trust for about 10 years. The Heritage Trust has generated more than $133 million and now provides about $10 million a year to the University.

Acting on behalf of the University, Brock negotiated the purchase of the Cutten Club, the golf club adjacent to campus. Now called Cutten Fields, the club was leased to its members for 40 years; after that term ends, U of G will determine the future for this large tract of land.

“I recognized some 35 years ago that my successful struggle to go to university had resulted in an outstanding career,” says Brock. “I will be forever indebted to the University of Guelph for the change and opportunity it brought to my life.”

The U of G president says Brock’s experience and insight have been invaluable for the University and for its members.

“We are deeply indebted to Bill and the deep connection he has to the University,” says Vaccarino. “His support and leadership have been integral to the success of this institution and its national and international reputation for excellence.”

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“I started at OAC in ’39, the year the war broke out,” says Orr, a ’43 OAC alumnus who, as far as he knows, is the last surviving member of his graduating class.

“We didn’t know what to expect or what would happen.”

As the world became embroiled in a war that spread rapidly around the globe, post-secondary life in Guelph carried on normally, he says. There were nourishing meals served in Creelman Hall and all the milk you could drink. There were plenty of activities on campus to get involved in, and Orr led an active student life both on and off campus grounds.

But as his second year at OAC ended, the campus – consisting of the agricultural college, the Macdonald Institute and the Ontario Veterinary College – was repurposed for war.

“We had two years in residence and then the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) moved in and we had to move out and find an apartment off campus for the last two years,” says Orr.

The air force requisitioned a large portion of the campus, turning it into the RCAF Station Guelph, part of the Second World War British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. Among the station’s schools were one to train airmen and airwomen as chefs and a larger one to train wireless operators.

It was a temporary wartime measure, but a historic one. Orr recalls how the campus was dramatically transformed from a pastoral college environment to one teeming with military trainees.

The central hub of the campus was fenced off and tight security was imposed. The grounds and buildings became crowded, but classes continued.

Orr was required to take military training in his final two years of study. “We were in uniform about three or four days a week.”

Throughout his time at OAC, Orr was affected by the war deeply and personally.

“Every year we lost fellas who had joined up in the war,” he says, reflecting on his memories of that troubling time while sitting in a comfy chair in his small apartment in a Guelph retirement residence.

“I lost some good pals who were killed before it was over.”

There was a tradition each fall during the war years, Orr recounts, of students volunteering to go west to help with the harvest. The need for farm labour on the prairies was great during the war, with so many young men off fighting and so many having died.

“A few days after we returned for the fall semester in ’42, 49 of us Aggies went west for two weeks,” he says. “We took the train across the country. When the trains stopped, if we saw a store nearby we would all rush over to get a few things for the trip. It was a lot of fun.”

The work on the prairie farms was hard and the hours long.

“You got up bright and early in the morning, had a breakfast and then you had to go out and harness your team, hook it up to the wagon and out you went into the fields with your fork,” he says. “You forked the sheaves of wheat onto the wagon and when you had a load you went to the threshing machine and forked them into the thresher.”

Orr studied crop science at OAC but was encouraged by a beloved professor to take a one-year poultry specialist program after he graduated and completed his military service. At that time, the science of poultry nutrition, health and management was in the early stages of development.

Orr grew up around chickens on the family farm in southwestern Ontario. Feeding his mother’s flock of hundreds of hens was one of his many boyhood chores.

“My mother always had laying hens,” says Orr. “I think she got up to three or four hundred or more.”

The hens and their eggs, he says, helped put him through university.

With that special connection, it was not a great leap for him to study poultry.

After graduating from OAC, and serving in the military in Saint John, New Brunswick, and Goose Bay, Labrador, Orr returned to OAC to complete poultry program, then earned a master’s degree in poultry products in Pennsylvania. He would again return to Guelph as an OAC professor.

The poultry field would preoccupy him for the next roughly 45 years, years of investigating the processing of poulty, research ways to improve the yield of poultry meat and methods of ensuring egg quality.

The humble chicken and egg have long been dietary staples, but nothing like the industry of today, says Orr. “The changes in technology today sort of boggle my mind. Things we did by hand in the past are now all done by machine.”

While he is happy to have contributed to and witnessed the changing industry, Orr says, the years he spent teaching were his most rewarding.

“I really enjoyed the students,” he says, adding that seeing them mature, listening to them and helping them along in their development, and then watching them graduate, were the most rewarding aspects of his professional life.

In the following video, Hank Orr talks further about his time at OAC:

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It was a great privilege to return in July 2017 to a place that I treasure in my memories: Vineland, Ont. This was the experimental farm on the Niagara Peninsula where I and two other girls from OAC spent the summer of 1942 with different horticultural jobs.

We anticipated an introduction to various experimental procedures, possibly leading to new varieties of corn or some other harvest. One strategy was to cover the plant to avoid ad hoc pollination and then to introduce pollen from a desirable plant. Tasting the new product was also a part of our job.

While such experimental procedures were welcomed, the bulk of our work included scrubbing old plant pots for future re-use – something I suspect is now done by a machine. We improved on this monotonous job by singing and storytelling. I have also many memories of travelling in the back of a pickup truck from orchard to orchard to attend to various jobs. The best one was to test new peach crosses directly off the new tree.

While today’s Vineland Research and Innovation Centre is strictly a working place, without residences (human or horsey), this was not the case in my time. Faculty lived in homes across the street, while the greenhouse and stable staff had houses on the station.

That first year, there was only a male dormitory. When it came time to decide how to house four single women, including one from a Toronto lab, the station created Spinster’s Hall in a large empty house. Although the original furnishings were sparse, female residents of the station were quick to add from their surplus. Their most memorable contribution was a picture of Queen Victoria – perhaps to keep us honest!

Three daily meals were provided to all students (at cost) by a cook in her small assigned house. Lake Ontario and a wharf were only five minutes away and there was also a tennis court, ready for a nightly workout. What more could you want? I was happy to join the tennis. As far as I recall, there were enough of us, between faculty and students, for a personal game rating, and even to field a team to compete Saturday afternoons in St. Catharines.

Once a group of us were rounded up to visit a dance at the nearby Vineland community, although specific details escape me.

Graduate students from the University of Toronto and some professors in plant pathology came down from Toronto to use the station’s equipment. The expert staff included provincial entomologists Peter, who was hard of hearing, and Bill, who had a speech impediment. One day they were working in the field when a man came by and asked for directions. Bill could not articulate an answer and Peter did not hear the question, so the man walked on – a story now more meaningful to me in light of my personal hearing degradation.

In 1942 the war was still on, and we would often see training planes from the nearby St. Catharines air base overhead. One small plane splash landed in the lake close to shore. It was good luck that the pilot survived.

The station housed a great barn filled with women called Farmarettes. Since the fit men were off to war, farmers lacked field hands. City girls moved to the farms to perform many simple but essential jobs. I befriended a couple of the Farmarettes. What a surprise when, a few years later, I met one of them as my future sister-in-law!

I was the only girl from the summer of 1942, to spend a second year and then a third year at Vineland. By then, there was no more Spinster Hall, and I roomed with a worker’s family.

With another OAC girl, I inspected the nurseries of the Niagara Peninsula for the entomologist of the Ontario government. [Not sure about the point here on: Yes, our appointment was a witness to the changing times: replacing one man with two girls – a single woman working alone in a field was not an option to be considered! With gasoline scarce during the war, our mode of transportation was a bicycle. That this gender replacement had other effects that were soon apparent: girls became upset with minor happenings in the kitchen, during their lunch, i.e. the changing of crying babies, etc. We also objected to sharing a single bed, while paying separate rent. It did not take us long to find another place. We moved out on the next week end.]

Do you have a memory to share from your time at U of G? Email a high-resolution photo to porticomagazine@uoguelph.ca and it could appear in Time Capsule.

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