Village of Neudorf

Henry Taube was born at Neudorf on November 30, 1915. He was youngest of four brothers born to German farming immigrants who had come to Saskatchewan from the Ukraine in 1911. At the age of 13, Taube attended Luther College in Regina. After completing grade twelve, he remained at Luther College as a laboratory assistant thanks to his chemistry teacher, Paul Liefeld, and was able to take first-year university classes. His appreciation of Liefeld was expressed in 2004 in the form of a substantial donation to Luther College.

Henry Taube attended the UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN, successfully completing a BSc in chemistry in 1935 and an MSc in 1937. In 1940 he received a PhD from the University of California (Berkeley). Since positions at Canadian universities were scarce he remained at Berkeley as an instructor, becoming a US citizen in 1942. He also taught and conducted research at: Cornell University (1941-46); the University of Chicago (1946-62), where he was Chair of the Department of Chemistry from 1956 to 1959; and Stanford University (1962-86), where he was Chair of the Department of Chemistry from 1972 to 1974 and from 1978 to 1979. He became a Professor Emeritus in 1986. Taube married Mary Alice Wesche in 1952; they had two daughters and two sons.

Universally recognized as the founder of the modern study of inorganic mechanisms, Taube was the author of more than 300 scientific papers and articles on such subjects as the electronic mechanisms involved in the composition and reactivity of inorganic coordination compounds. He developed new techniques to study aspects of chemical reactivity. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science in 1977, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1983 for his work on the mechanism of an electron transfer reaction. He also received a Doctor of Laws degree in 1973 from the University of Saskatchewan.

Henry Taube died in his home in Palo Alto, California on November 16, 2005.

Percy Saltzman, who was the first person to appear on Canada's inaugural television broadcast in 1952 and was the country's first TV weatherman, has died at 91.

Saltzman died at his Toronto home on Monday. About six weeks ago, the iconic TV pioneer suffered a seemingly minor injury and his health began deteriorating rapidly, his family said.

 Saltzman's television broadcasting career spanned 30 years. Using no notes, no teleprompter, he did the weather from memory, ending the report with his trademark toss of the chalk.

"He was the first of the weathermen," said CTV anchor Lloyd Robertson, who worked with Saltzman.

"He made it all happen. In fact everyone today is a successor of Percy Saltzman. He was the the original."

The start of his career was also a milestone in Canadian broadcasting history. When CBC-TV launched English-language broadcasting in Canada on Sept. 8, 1952, Saltzman was the first person to appear.

He would spend the next 20 years at the CBC and several more at other Canadian networks.

During that time, he pioneered a number of techniques now firmly established in weather forecasting and reporting.

He was the first Canadian weatherman to use radar and satellite and the first to give road and forest fire reports. He was the weatherman who talked Toronto through Hurricane Hazel.

"He always explained everything so well and that's really what piqued my interest in meteorology," said CTV weatherman Dave Devall.

Three years ago, Saltzman recalled how it troubled him if the weather didn't match his predictions.

"My conscience hurt a lot and I lost a lot of sleep when I'd go home after an inadequate forecast," Saltzman said.

Percy Saltzman was born in Winnipeg, Man., in 1915. His parents, Solomon Saltzman and Lizzie Ross, born in Ukraine (1880), came to Canada in 1911. They married in 1914.

His folks then moved to Neudorf, Sask., where they operated a mom-and-pop general store selling groceries, hardware, skins, guns, tobacco, bolts of materials, tea. A lot of items were sold in bulk (Percy remembers the big barrels). Ten years later (1925), his family upped stakes, shook off the dust of the flatlands and moved to hilly Vancouver, B.C, where he attended the University of British Columbia. He later studied medicine at McGill University until 1935.

In 1943, he became a meteorologist and served in that role during the Second World War in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.

Four years later, he helped arrange weather programs for CBC Radio. Despite his move into broadcasting, he remained as a full-time employee of the official federal weather service for 25 years.

"He kept that job at the weather office the entire time he was on television with CBC because he didn't think TV was secure. He wasn't sure that TV would last," said his grandson, CBC reporter Aaron Saltzman.

Along with weather forecasting, Saltzman became a prominent TV interviewer and commentator. He worked on a number of CBC-TV's news and public affairs programs and participated in the 10-day coverage of the first moon walk.

Saltzman estimated he did 9,000 weather TV and radio broadcasts during his career and interviewed more than 1,000 people.

In 2002, he was invested in the Order of Canada and in 2004 he became a member of the Broadcast Hall of Fame. He was also the recipient of a Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal.

Dr. Doreen Kimura, behavioral neuroscientist, currently Visiting Professor in the Department of Psychology at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada, is the Kistler Prize winner for the year 2006. The Prize is given annually by the Foundation For the Future to recognize original work investigating the implications of genetics for human society.

Kimura was born in 1933 in Winnipeg, Manitoba and grew up and went to school in Neudorf, a small town near the Qu’Appelle Valley in southern Saskatchewan. Facilities for studying science were almost non-existent at the schools she attended, so Kimura was initially interested in writing, languages and algebra. Before finishing high school, she dropped out to teach in one-room rural schoolhouses, first in Saskatchewan and then northern Manitoba. She was 17. While in Manitoba she saw an ad in a teachers’ magazine for an admission scholarship to McGill University in Montreal. She applied for the scholarship just for the fun of it, and got it! Kimura earned a series of degrees from McGill University, Montreal: B.A. in psychology in 1956, M.A. in experimental psychology in 1957, and Ph.D. in physiological psychology in 1961. She was a professor for over 30 years at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, prior to accepting her current position at Simon Fraser University.

In her early work, Kimura studied the differences in the language and music processing capabilities of the left and right sides of the brain. Her early articles and papers on cerebral lateralization greatly influenced the field of human neuropsychology and are still some of the most widely cited in experimental psychology. In the 1970s and 1980s, her experiments in both neurological patients and healthy individuals demonstrated a critical link between speech and the production of other complex movements. Her books on this research include Speech and Language(Birkhauser Verlag, 1988) and Neuromotor Mechanisms in Human Communication(Oxford University Press, 1993).

The work for which Dr. Kimura was awarded the Kistler Prize is her research on sex differences in cognition. Despite the highly charged nature of the subject in the social-political environment, she catalogued numerous sex differences in cognition and developed proximate and evolutionary explanations for many of them. Her book Sex and Cognition (MIT Press, 1999) summarizes her research findings in this area. Sex and Cognition has been translated into French, Japanese, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish.

Among earlier awards and honors Dr. Kimura has received are the Canadian Psychology Association Award for Distinguished Contributions to Canadian Psychology as a Science (1985), the Canadian Association for Women in Science Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement (1986), and the Donald O. Hebb Distinguished Contribution Award by the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science (2005). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a recipient of honorary degrees from Queen’s University and Simon Fraser University.

In her speech accepting the Kistler Prize, Dr. Kimura noted that some individuals claim that studies such as hers should not be done. “My response to that is simply the principle that there should be no bar in a free society to asking any questions that can be answered by evidence,” said Kimura. “This is a fundamental tenet of science, and I think that it is a basic requirement for an open society.” In line with her continuing interest in maintaining academic freedom, she was founding president of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, which advocates the merit principle and academic freedom in Canadian universities.

“In the course of my research on both normal people and people with brain damage, differences often appeared between men and women in how problems were solved, which necessarily had to proceed from some difference in brain organization. … Some of the differences appear early in life, by three or four years of age, before formal schooling. Sex differences paralleling those in humans appear also in nonhumans.”

—From Dr. Kimura’s acceptance speech at the 2006 Kistler Prize Banquet