Gary Dennis:
CLASS OF 1967
Earl Haig Secondary SchoolClass of 1967
Toronto, ON
University of Waterloo - Arts & ScienceClass of 1973
Waterloo, ON
Moira Secondary SchoolClass of 1967
Belleville, ON
Gary's Story
Find me on Facebook if you're interested in contacting me (Rob Bittle surfaced a few years back via Classmates) - I've never been willing to pay rent to Classmates. Went to University of Waterloo (Comp Sci, Poli Sci, Drama - always was a bit of a dilettante. Experimentally upgraded to full membership and contacted some cronies from Moira and Earl Haig but no dialogs resulted - downgraded.
Met my darling wife Susan in 1975 via the company we both worked at (I became a lifer, she quit to do the full-time Mom thing and took part-time jobs for a few years at a time.
My sweetheart of 39+ years passed away late spring 2015 after many months of illness. After a year or so the defensive numbness passed. I have not, and may never, "move on" to anybody else. 39+ years of something close to perfection is a hard act to follow.
Had a long and successful IT career during which I acquired minor eminence as the most senior tech support front end guy to a small stable of genius (and one super-genius) software developers at an important niche-player software house. Traveled to some interesting places, the most remote being Calgary, Dallas and San Jose where I spent about 10 days apiece. Shorter and more frequent trips to NYC, Boston, Hartford (watched whole Wagner Ring cycle of operas on PBS during the evenings in Hartford, Hartford is NOT a party town), etc. Was a founding partner in eventual employee-owned spinoff Soliton Associates that continued the software development/support end of business after Reuters bought I.P. Sharp for its extensive data bases and made many of THEIR shareholders quite comfortable financially. For the next 10 years salary was quite decent, dividends not so much though we did get a real nice one just once somewhere around the middle. In 2003 the twit CEO Reuters made us keep (not always terrible at CEO'ing though his marketing vice would have been way better and is still a good friend) as a condition of our deal to take over our intellectual property rights) basically flew the company into a wall by bringing in venture caps re a software package we'd been developing and they forced us to lay off all but a couple of our real employees and refocus the company on "their" package while our main software suite (SHARP APL) continued to provide the company's only real inco...Expand for more
me with development frozen on all products and a couple of surviving me-level support dudes in Toronto and Coventry UK. Around 2009 the package/tumor was sold, the venture cap pirates took all of the money from the sale and ran, and set us FREE again. The company continued to operate with reasonable success after the vampires left, finally shutting down in 2015. Survived the years when the vampires were taking all of our profits by reinventing myself as a tech support guy for client server packages at a huge soulless support outsource.
Thank God for Facebook - it's made it easy to stay in touch with most of my work pals, and even a couple of college friends have surfaced!
Two of our wonderful gorgeous granddaughters were scholarship kids at the universities of their choice - the oldest at North Park in Chicago (loved it, as we have for decades) the other at Houghton which is about an hour south of us down by the Pennsylvania border. The Houghton pre-med grad has now moved on, with a scholarship, to a PhD program in biochemistry at the University of South Carolina. The youngest is an artist of considerable ability but isn't making a living at it yet, still has day jobs. Those grandkids are courtesy of my step daughters, who were early school age when I met and informally adoped them ; my 30something daughter presented us with a killer cute grandson in May 2016 after marrying her successful photographer boyfriend of 5 years the previous July. One of our grandsons is hoping to go to our local community college.
Active in church (Presbyterian) - a considerable surprise to everybody who knew me at U of W and during the early parts of my career! Especially choir as I have a semi decent light baritone voice still - no formal training but I've been singing in choirs off and on since I was 7 and picked up a fair bit of technique - my pipes aren't stellar by any means but I can sing solos without completely embarrassing myself. After Susan passed I was encouraged to join the local folk singing society by an eminent acquaintance who helped as instrumentalist at the memorial service, and became a passable amateur soloist, though I can't imagine ever getting paid to sing or beat on my conga-like drum (a djembe, if anybody cares) . My other instrumental skills have long since rotted.
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