Jim Coke graduated from Montreal’s McGill University in 1953 with a degree in electrical engineering, worked for a year and in the spring of 1954 embarked on a backpacking tour of western Europe with a friend. As Coke tells it, they spent the summer sleeping in fields and barns when they couldn’t find an appropriate bed and headed for home when they ran out of money. The young engineer returned to Montreal just in time to land a job on what was arguably the biggest Canadian construction project of the postwar era—the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway. “It was totally exciting,” recalls Coke, who spent 17 years in the operating and maintenance department of the St. Lawrence Seaway Authority before joining the Department of Public Works in Ottawa. “There have been huge projects since t...