William A. McDill was a school teacher, author, editor and a UBC graduate (B.A. 1947; B.Sc., MechEng 1948) who served in the Corps of Royal Canadian Engineers during World War II. McDill was born August 10, 1913 to William Alexander and Jean Duff (McLagan) McDill in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Raised and educated in Winnipeg, McDill studied at the University of Manitoba and the Manitoba Provincial Normal School. He worked as a schoolmaster in the Technical Branch of the Winnipeg Public School System from 1933 until 1939, receiving a B. Ed from Colorado A&M College in 1938. He married Dorothy Sarah Wilkinson, a schoolteacher, in 1939. McDill was commissioned into the Royal Canadian Engineers Corps on Sept 22, 1939 and served in England and France during World War II between 1940 and 1945. After the War, McDill was a student in the Faculty of Applied Science at UBC, and received a B.A. in 1947 and a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering in 1948. He went on to receive an M. Ed (Industrial Education) from Colorado A&M College. McDill also served in the Canadian Army from 1948 to 1965 (undertaking additional training at the Royal Military College of Science in England from 1951-1953), attaining the rank of Major. With Col. A.J. Kerry, MacDill co-wrote The History of the Corps of Royal Canadian Engineers, a two-volume work published in 1962 and 1966. In 1965, he became the Assistant General Secretary at the Engineering Institute of Canada where he served as manager of technical services before retiring in 1975. McDill died in July of 1989.