Abridged Autobiography of Don Dodge

The smiling guy below is Don Dodge, nicknamed

Duke by my boyhood friends. I hail from Pittsburgh, PA.

I was born, raised, and educated in America’s greatest steel town; a city once labeled "…Hell with the Lid blown off…" by English fiction writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, way back in the 1880’s. I assure you all that Pittsburgh evolved from that early description into a great, mid-western city, renowned as a center for engineering and medical research. We still make steel, but not on the scale of the 1950’s, and our glory years, during World Wars I and II, and earlier. Anyway, I did not want to follow my dad into the steel making business. So, I opted to become an engineer, like my grand dad. I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1954 with a B.S. in Petroleum Engineering. After graduation, and training at Fort Devens, I served two years as a Morse Code intercept at the Army Security Agency’s 8610 post near Kyoto, Japan. Following my Army hitch, I joined a great Pittsburgh corporation, Westinghouse Electric, in their Naval Nuclear Power Program association with Admiral Hyman Rickover and the United States Navy. I spent 37 years in various engineering and management positions in Westinghouse’s Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, and Plant Apparatus Divisions in Pittsburgh. I enjoyed my last position as Engineering Manager, Valve Design and Development, before retiring from Westinghouse in 1994. Retirement and I did not mix. In 1997, I founded my own design business, Dodge Industries, Inc. I folded the company in 1999 to pursue other interests.

In 2001, I returned to the workplace as an Air Pollution Control Engineer with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP), Bureau of Air Quality, in Pittsburgh. I retired from the PADEP position on March 31,2007 to better pursue and enjoy my private life with my family and friends.