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Walter Curlook’s favourite film was the Danish drama Babette’s Feast. Perhaps this story, of a Parisian chef who takes refuge in an austere religious community, then spends all her money to prepare a sumptuous meal that awakens her hosts’ repressed senses, confirmed Mr. Curlook’s belief in generosity – sharing wealth to enlarge people’s horizons.
As a metallurgist, engineer and manager who spent his entire career as an executive at Inco when it was the world’s largest nickel miner, he understood how to create wealth as well as share it. Mr. Curlook, who died on Oct. 3 in Toronto of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 85, held 14 patents for improvements to nickel refining and played a role in the establishment of a science centre, a college and a research facility for particle physics in Sudbury that has no equal in Canada.
Brilliant and tenacious, he never stopped working. After he retired from Inco, he became an adjunct professor in materials science and engineering (unpaid) at the University of Toronto and donated $1-million to set up two laboratories there for the study of minerals.
“He was one of those people able to use a larger percentage of his brain than most of us,” his son Michael said. His daughter Christine Stinson recalled her father’s ability to be so absorbed in some problem that he would not hear his children speak: “He would sort of zone out and my mother would tell us, ‘Quiet – your father is thinking.’”
In the 1970s, Sudbury’s smelters belched thousands of tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere daily, killing vegetation and poisoning surrounding lakes. Mr. Curlook’s most important contribution might have been overseeing Inco’s $650-million pollution-abatement program that ended with the air clean, new trees planted and northern grasses growing over slag heaps.
He was born with a nickel-plated spoon in his mouth on March 14, 1929, in Coniston, Ont., near Sudbury, one of five children. His father, William Curlook, was a Ukrainian-born nickel miner, working in feudal conditions; his mother, Stephanie (née Acker), was a disciplined woman of German/Ukrainian extraction.
Money was short, so Walter obtained part-time work at Inco from the age of 15 until his graduation. At 17, on full scholarship, he left for the University of Toronto, where he earned a clutch of degrees in science and engineering.
In 1953, PhD in hand, he took up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Nuffield research lab of London’s Imperial College of Science and Technology, an institution that had specialized in Earth sciences since the mid-19th century.
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