On Tuesday we heard from long time member, Ken Sutley, who gave us a refresher since his last classification talk, given shortly after he joined our club in 1994. Ken’s classification is Chartered Accountant, Consulting.
Ken was born and raised in Edmonton, as the youngest of three children. His family was quite musical and they all played instruments or sang together as a family. Ken also loved to spend time with his father fixing up old cars. He attended Delton Elementary, HA Gray Junior High and Queen Elizabeth High School in Edmonton. He then went on to get a B. Comm. from the U. of A. in Edmonton. Ken loved bowling and belonged to the bowling club at the U. of A. He articled at Deloitte and wrote the very challenging four day exam to become a Chartered Accountant in 1976. During this time Ken also married and had two children. Ken worked as an accountant for a while but then decided that he would like to be able to teach accounting. He worked for a while at the U of A as a sessional instructor and then looked into going back to school to earn a PhD. He had a choice of several different pathways and Universities. He chose the University of Chicago, as they had a highly respected academic reputation and also because his sister lived just outside of Chicago. In retrospect, he said that this may not have been the wisest choice for him and his family.
In 1982 he and his wife took their two small children and moved to Chicago. Ken had obtained a five year student stipend (in Canadian dollars) that would support them while there, so they went on student visas. This meant that neither he nor his wife were allowed to earn income in the US. Unfortunately, the value of the Canadian dollar dropped every year and it soon turned into some very tough years financially. In addition to this, Chicago was a very tough, violent place to live. As he soon found out, the working culture at the University of Chicago, was also not the best, with most professors being very unsupportive, and more often than not, outright nasty to most of their students. His only moments of sanity came when his family visited with his sister, or when he sang with a local choir that she had encouraged him to join.
He received his PhD in 1984 and moved back to Edmonton with his family, just in time for the Klein government cutbacks to nearly everything. He spent five years in a tenure track position at the U of A, but left in 1992 to start his own accounting practice. Ken joined Rotary in 1994 and has held many different positions within our local club and district and still continues to do so. In 2001, Ken and his wife divorced and Ken returned to teaching on contract at the U. of A. His father soon became ill and he spent the next six years caring for his father and then his mother.
In 2006, Ken joined Grant MacEwan, to help them build their accounting program. He taught there until his retirement in 2016. He has never looked back since. Ken now enjoys being able to do the things he loves. He has returned to singing and playing bridge. He belongs to the Cosmopolitan Choral Society and has recently earned a bridge Life Master milestone. He also enjoys travelling and spending time with his two children who are now both married with children of their own. We would like thank Ken for this insight into his life, and also for the many contributions of talent and time that he has made to our club over the years.
