One face stood out among the graduating engineering students seated together for a recent convocation ceremony at Queen’s University.

“I felt like an old man,” Bruce Jameson said. “I guess I was.”

The 93-year-old Corunna engineer retired in 1986 after working 39 years in research at Imperial Oil in Sarnia, a job he began in 1947 right after leaving university one credit short of earning his degree.

The Stratford native had worked the summer a year before as an intern at Imperial’s research department in Sarnia. That led to a full-time job offer once he finished his final year of school.

Company officials weren’t concerned with the missing credit – a German class — and Jameson settled into the job and his new life in the community where he had met Annabelle Marwick at a bible study the previous summer.

They married soon after he left Queen’s, built a home on Colborne Road and began a family that grew to six children. He never went back to get the German credit and his degree.

It wasn’t until about a year ago when Annabelle mentioned it in passing that their grandson, Dave Currie, learned Jameson hadn’t been able to graduate, some 70 years ago.

That got Currie wondering if Queen’s might agree to grant Jameson his diploma, all these years later, based on his nearly four decades of research work with Imperial Oil.

The pipefitter, who had working in Chemical Valley in common with his grandfather, reached out to Queen’s and while the initial response wasn’t encouraging, the school didn’t completely close the door on the idea.

Currie then went through his contacts at Imperial Oil and was in touch with Doug MacLaren, a section head in applied research in Sarnia. MacLaren looked into the records of Jameson’s work with the company and found he had two still-active Canadian patents.

MacLaren then cobbled together a five-page letter of Jameson’s research accomplishments, in which he credited Jameson with playing a role “in the development and implementation of several pivotal processes and techniques that transformed the petrochemical industry.”

Currie submitted the letter to Queen’s. He and his family were impressed with their grandfather’s accomplishments – and so was Jameson himself.

“I had forgotten about half of them,” Jameson said.

Eventually, Queen’s officials waived the German course requirement. Last Tuesday, more than 20 members of the family, including children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, joined him at the ceremony in Kingston. Jameson got a standing ovation after the crowd heard a brief summary of his story.

For Jameson, all the credit goes to Currie, the grandson he calls “a real go-getter.”

“If it had been left up to me, it would never have happened.”

pmorden@postmedia.com