Doug VanDine, CGS past president (2015-2016), has recently completed writing a biography of Robert Legget for whom the CGS’s most prestigious award, the R.F. Legget Medal, is named. The 280-page book is titled, “The Many Sides of Robert F. Legget,” and is available for free downloading as a pdf (13 KB) from the Canadian Geotechnical Virtual Archives on the CGS website.
In 1983, Robert Legget, who is considered one of the Fathers of Canadian Geotechnique, wrote a draft personal memoir as part of the CGS’s Canadian Geotechnical Heritage Project. His memoir summarized his career (1925-1969) and the early development of the geotechnical profession in Canada; however, it was never published. Doug used Legget’s memoir as a starting point to write the biography. It covers Legget’s entire life (1904-1994) and career, and includes an edited and annotated version of Legget’s 1983 memoir. The book includes approximately 175 photographs, some of them taken by Legget and published for the first time in the book. Many of the annotations provide little-known facts about the history of Canada and Canadian geotechnique.