MACKENZIE, NORMAN ALEXANDER (1889-1944)

MACKENZIE, NORMAN ALEXANDER, native son; military officer and adventurer; b. Chatham, 13 Jun 1889, s/o James Daniel Bain Fraser Mackenzie and Annie Miller McKay; m. 1939, Amanda M. Babineau, music teacher, sister of Joseph Louis de Gonzague Babineau; d. Saint John, 10 May 1940.

Norman A. ("Bud") Mackenzie was educated at the Chatham Grammar School, Upper Canada College, and the University of New Brunswick (BScE 1913). In 1911, he represented the 73rd Battalion of militia at the coronation of King George V. In World War I, he received a commission with the Royal Engineers (Imperial Force). He was in almost continuous service at the front and was awarded the Military Cross.

After the war, Mackenzie worked with the Bell Telephone Co. in Toronto. In 1928, he went to the Arctic with the MacAlpine Expedition, which made a perilous overland trek to Cambridge Bay when their aircraft became stranded on Queen Maude Gulf. For the last three years of his life, he was employed with the federal Public Works Department in Saint John. When he died there, at age fifty, his only named survivor was his wife, Amanda M, Babineau, to whom he had been married little more than a year.