By Diane Luckow

When there’s phone trouble on the Burnaby campus, Sharon Nelson is the go-to person to resolve the problem.

She’s been working in telephone operations for the past 20 years, and joined SFU as a charter employee 47 years ago.

On July 18, she’ll hang up her SFU phone for the last time as she heads into retirement.

Nelson was among SFU’s first employees, hired in September 1965 to register the first students. Billed as a continuing position, she and her colleagues were laid off 17 days later.

Nelson took it sitting down.

“I sat in the human resources office and said I’m not leaving until you find me a job.”

After two hours, the Dean of Women’s Studies, Lettie Wilson, asked if she could help.

“I sat there another hour and then she told me to go the math department. And that’s where I worked for quite a few years.”

Nelson misses those early days on campus, when everyone knew everyone else.

“For the first 10 years, it was like a family.”

In contrast, at her retirement party in June, she met about half of the attendees face-to-face for the first time.

“We had cultivated a relationship over the phone, so it was nice to put a face to the voice,” she says.

She fondly recalls the old campus camaraderie, and characters such as janitor Ted Sinott, known around campus as the “candy man” because he’d ask kids on campus to sing the popular Candy Man song and then give them treats.

“He was such a nice guy, everybody loved him.”

Her happiest on-the-job memories are of working in the counselling department for psychiatrist Ed Lipinski and his wife, Bea Lipinsky, director of counselling. But there was tragedy too. A part-time psychiatrist in the department was murdered by a patient from her private practice, and Lipinski was killed in a car crash in Europe several years later.

“That was devastating to me, I loved working there the most,” says Nelson, who hasn’t forgotten the European postcard from Lipinski that arrived about six months after he died.

When Nelson started working in telephone operations, she helped run the switchboard, writing down messages on pink slips and passing them along to staff and faculty. Today she handles a peculiar mix of clerical work and tech support, managing phone-trouble reports as well as phone change requests and moves.

She also finds herself retiring a year later than expected, at age 66, because “nobody on campus wanted my job—what does that say?” she laughs, noting that she is currently training a new staffer.

While Nelson may be retiring, she expects she’ll still be busy. She has custody of her 13-year-old grandson, and plans to do some volunteering.

“I’m going to miss the people here,” she says. “I’d just like to say “thank you SFU for the wonderful years”.