Fifty years happens.  You live it, things happen and all of a sudden it’s there.  So what did happen?  For the first 14 years following high school I spent most of my time in the academic world as a student (this should be near some sort of record).  The first 10 of these were at UW-Madison where I earned a BA in Mathematics and Masters degrees in Psychology and Geology.  It was during this time that I also met and married my wife, Lori.  For three summers while an undergraduate I also worked for the US Forest Service where I manned fire lookouts in Montana and Washington State.  It was then that I fell in love with the west.  

Following my protracted stay at Madison (a city that Lori and I are still in love with) I headed west where for the next four years I was a graduate student in Geology at UCLA.  Although I chose geology as a vocation because of my passion for the outdoors I found myself mostly in the laboratory working on rock deformation studies.  It was during our Los Angeles years (Lori was also a grad student at UCLA) that both of our children, Bob and Susan, were born.

After finishing my PhD work I moved to Seattle where I spent a year doing research at the University of Washington.  At the end of this time I had finally become burned out with the research side of the academic world (although I have never stopped loving teaching) and took a job as a geologist with a company that built equipment for underground tunnel construction.  This job fed into one of my other passions, that of traveling.  During my time working in industry I managed to travel throughout the world (all at the expense of others) to investigate the geology at various tunneling sites, including China, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Europe, Mexico, Canada and, of course, the United States. 

In 1993 the company was sold and the new owners felt it was too risky to be involved with advising potential clients on the geologic conditions at their tunneling sites.  It was then that I left industry and became a consultant in underground construction.  Since then I have consulted for a number of major tunneling projects on the East Coast and in Southern California.  I have spent enough time in cities such as New York and Boston that I could probably qualify as a travel guide.  I also spent five years consulting on a project on the South Island of New Zealand. 

The last 15 years have seen many changes in my life.  My father, Carl Dollinger, whom some of you will remember as director of bands at Central High School, passed away in 1992, and my mother, Harriet Dollinger, whom others will remember as their piano teacher, died in 1999 at the age of 98.  Up to her last year she was still playing the piano, mostly from memory.  I also had quadruple bypass surgery on nearly blocked arteries.  Fortunately, because of my persistent hiking in the Cascade Mountains I was in good physical shape and only had to spend two days in the hospital.  Two weeks later I was back on a plane heading to New Zealand for three weeks of legal meetings, with my doctor’s blessing.  The only problem was that I was put on the wrong plane and ended up in Tahiti (great place but bad timing). 

Over the last 30 plus years, I have kept a foot in the academic world by teaching a civil engineering course at the University of Washington, advising graduate students on their theses and running experiments at the Colorado School of Mines.  I have also pursued my lifelong interest in photography and for the last two years I have been president of one of the photography clubs in the Seattle area.  Finally, and perhaps most important, Lori and I are now grandparents to two granddaughters and one grandson, ages 2, 5 and 8.