At age 76, engineering entrepreneur Joseph Pataki has returned to the firm he helped found in the late 1980s.
When Joseph Pataki, BEng 74, talks about the arc of his life, the 76-year-old engineer and entrepreneur keeps coming back to two things: his late wife, Gabriella, and his alma mater.
Talking about Gabriella, who died at age 74 in October 2021, is still difficult for Pataki. But it is thanks in large measure to her that the graduate of Sir George Williams University — one of Concordia’s founding institutions — has pledged $75,000 to create an endowment in support of the Joseph and Gabriella Pataki Scholarship for International Female Students in Engineering.
He has also included a $125,000 bequest in his will to continue his support for the endowment — a legacy that he and Gabriella will leave at the university.
Although they didn’t meet at Sir George, he and Gabriella dated while he was a student there, attending night courses in the late 1960s. By 1971, when Pataki enrolled full-time to obtain his degree in mechanical engineering, they were married and had a daughter, Erika.
His late wife — who was born Gabriella Muranyi in Hungary and emigrated with her parents in the late 1950s following the Hungarian Revolution — “was very much part of me and supplemented my vision,” Pataki says. She supported him, working full-time at Bell Canada while Pataki, who had worked as a draughtsman at Canadair (now Bombardier Aerospace) while doing his part-time studies.
“She played a very big part in our success.”
'Concordia has had a big influence on me'
The experience of the women in his life — his wife, his daughter and now his granddaughter — led Pataki, who served as a founding member of Concordia’s Engineering and Computer Science Advisory Board, to support engineering education for women at Concordia’s Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science through the Campaign for Concordia: Next-Gen Now.
Directing that philanthropy specifically towards international students arises from his own roots as the son of Hungarian immigrants and his pride in Concordia’s growing international reputation.
“Concordia has had a big influence on me,” Pataki says. “The chance to go to school and work at the same time — and also develop a technical career — was very important to me. As a mature student, it helped me to develop my independent thinking and risk-taking. I think it forms your character; it has a big influence on how you approach your professional career.”
Working at Canadair helped Pataki advance his studies, because the aviation company supported his tuition for the two or three courses a year he took at night. By day, he was helping design an articulated military-cargo transport vehicle intended for use by a United States Army then mired in the Vietnam War, before turning his attention to an airplane that became famous around the world: the CL-215 water bomber, used in fighting forest fires.
After graduation, Pataki landed a job with Lachine-based Dominion Engineering, where he stayed until 1978 when — like many anglophones following the election of the Parti Québécois — he moved down the 401 to Toronto to take a position with Ferrco Engineering Ltd., until the economy soured and the company’s future became cloudy.
Then, it was time to take a risk. In 1984, Pataki and three colleagues founded Quad Engineering, a design-engineering firm that developed custom machinery, especially for the metal-production industry. From its humble beginnings with the four partners, it grew to employ roughly 100 employees at its peak and still occupies prime space at Yonge Street and Sheppard Avenue in the North York suburb of Toronto.
“We will soon be celebrating our 40-year anniversary,” he says.
An international reputation
Pataki returned to that office in recent months, following Gabriella’s passing — his way of dealing with his profound grief and loneliness at her loss. Another way is including her name in the bequest to support international female engineering students at Concordia.
As someone who graduated at the same time Concordia was founded with the merger of Sir George Williams University and Loyola College, Pataki has been able to observe his alma mater during the course of its first 50 years. He says he’s been impressed, and surprised at how far and fast it has grown as an institution, particularly in its reputation around the world.
“I have been amazed at how the faculties and graduate-studies programs have grown,” he says. “But Concordia has still maintained that it is an urban university, a downtown university.”
And for the next 50 years? “I would like to see that Concordia gets more and more international recognition,” he says. “It would be nice to see Co-op programs strengthened, because they are very successful in technical fields.”
Clearly, there’s a symmetry to Pataki’s vision of Concordia’s future and the investment he’s made to help achieve it.