William Robert “Bob” Dengler, BSc’65, DSc’88, showed flashes of his entrepreneurial spirit early in life, finding a way to make a bit of money and satisfy his love of cars along the way.
At the time, the Dengler family lived on the property of the Donalda Gold Mine near Noranda, Que., where the miners parked their cars beside the family home before heading off to their shifts.
“He started out early in business, when he was about eight or nine,” Mr. Dengler’s brother, Pete Dengler, recalls.
“Bob would clean the miners’ cars and detail them to make a little money – his fascination with cars also started at a very young age.”
A few years later, Mr. Dengler’s father fed his son’s passion with a joint project to rebuild a car engine, which also piqued his interest in engineering and fuelled dreams about owning the most advanced car of the day, a Ferrari. Later, when his father went away on an extended work assignment, 15-year-old Bob became the family’s main driver, and his need for speed emerged.
“He had a little Morris Minor with a very small engine. It just didn’t have enough horsepower for Bob, so he modified the engine and installed a ‘hot,’ very efficient exhaust system along with a homemade muffler,” Pete Dengler says.
“A few years later, the family acquired a 1949 MG TC of which Bob blew its engine. An excellent reason for Bob to shoehorn a huge V8 Olds-mobile Rocket 98 engine into that tiny car. Wow, what a feat.”
Next, he painstakingly restored a Triumph TR2 that became his Queen’s car when he started university in Kingston. There he met fellow car aficionado Jack Hughes, which led to the founding of the Queen’s Tricolour Sports Car Club. While he still dreamed of owning a Ferrari, school and making money to pay tuition took precedence.
Upon graduation, the newly minted mining engineer joined J.S. Redpath Mining as partner and vice-president. Mine safety became a driving force of Mr. Dengler’s career after a life-changing moment in 1968 when he suffered a serious injury in an underground mining accident at the Creighton Mine in Sudbury, Ont.
“He was pinched between two 12-ton buckets, which fractured his pelvis,” son Steven Dengler says. “He realized that an individual can be doing everything right and mistakes can still happen. So, one of the things that my dad did when he started his own mining company, Dynatec Mining Limited, with William [Bill] Shaver in 1980, was to put an absolute corporate focus on safety. He always said: ‘The right number of accidents is zero.’”
A few years before starting Dyn-atec, Mr. Dengler found his dream car: an ultra-rare 1953 Ferrari 375 Mille Miglia Coupé Prototype powered by a V12 Formula One engine and driven to victory in the 1953 12 Hours of Pescara by F1 driver Umberto Maglioli and future F1 world champion Mike Hawthorn.
Mr. Dengler and his wife, Pat, drove the car in an exhibition event that retraced the route of the legendary 1,000-mile Italian road race from which the Mille Miglia got its name.
“It was so exciting and going through the little villages the people knew that car, and as soon as they saw it, they started cheering,” Pat Dengler remembers.
“He had sold the car, and the gentleman who bought it really couldn’t drive it, so Bob and I went over to drive with him, but we ended up driving most of the race.”
Mr. Dengler also entered races at tracks around Ontario, including one at Mosport (now Canadian Tire Motorsport Park near Bowmanville, Ont.), where he not only tested his mettle against retired F1 driver Stirling Moss in a vintage event but also beat the 16-time Grand Prix winner to pole position in qualifying.
Just as on the racetrack, Mr. Dengler also pushed himself in business, often to the limit. Pete Dengler recalls that his brother once told him that he often lay awake at night in cold sweats worrying about the fate of a deal that could determine Dynatec’s success or failure.
In the end, the business succeeded wildly and grew into an international powerhouse while also becoming a safety leader in the industry. Along the way, Bob never passed up an opportunity to discuss mining safety, whether in formal lectures and informal chats with colleagues or in advice to the Robert M. Buchan Department of Mining at Queen’s. In 1988, Queen’s recognized his contributions to mining safety with an honorary doctorate.
Mr. Dengler retired in 2005 but refused to slow down, getting his helicopter pilot’s licence and then embarking on a trip around the world with son Steven in 2017, as part of the Canada 150 celebrations.
“We were the first Canadian team to circumnavigate the world by helicopter. What’s more, we set the Guinness World Record for the first father and son circumnavigation of the world by aircraft – not just by helicopter,” Steven Dengler said of the trip that raised an estimated $800,000 for charity. “Since that record was a world first, it will always stand, and my father and I will always share that little piece of history.
“The most spectacular vistas were in the Canadian Arctic, which is a place that my father had been working his entire life. I’d heard stories about the Arctic from him my whole life. And then I got to see it with him, father and son, together.”
Once-in-a-lifetime, record-breaking trips notwithstanding, Mr. Dengler also found time to kick back and relax in retirement.
“He just had a wonderful zest for life and loved travelling,” Pat Dengler says.
“We went to Bora Bora years ago and it was one of his favourite trips: We went with a couple of books and decided we were going to take five days and do nothing. And in February, we went over again, and that was his last trip.”
In the fall of 2025, Steven’s son Beric became a third-generation Queen’s engineering student, following in his mother, Bruna (Sc’95), and grandfather’s footsteps. Unfortunately, Mr. Dengler passed away before Beric decided on Queen’s.
“My father would get a huge thrill out of Beric being at Queen’s,” Steven Dengler says.
“He was incredibly proud throughout his entire life to be a Queen’s engineer – and now his grandson will be a third-generation Queen’s engineer, continuing the tradition.”
Born in the Northern Ontario mining town of Kirkland Lake in 1940, Bob Dengler died on May 15, 2025. He was 84.
