Roger worked summers as a carpenter’s helper during high school and college-a great job because it led him to become a civil engineer. He graduated from OSC without a job offer as very few companies were interviewing because returning GIs graduating between 1950 and 1954 filled most available civil engineering positions. When interviewers learned that Roger was still subject to the draft, the interview quickly ended.
In late 1955, Roger was in Boise working a temporary assignment for Earl Reynolds on pipelines at the sugar beet plant in Nyssa, Oregon. He was ready to settle into the Boise office as a permanent employee, so he rented an apartment and started working on a highway project in eastern Idaho when his draft notice caught up with him. After basic training, he spent the next 20 months as a surveyor at Fort Riley, Kansas, and made it all the way up to the rank of private first class. During this time, he kept in touch with Fred Merryfield, who helped him enroll at the University of Minnesota in the fall of 1957 and receive an “early” discharge to attend college.
Following graduate school, Jim Howland offered him a job that took him back to Corvallis, where he began a career of 50+ years working on hundreds of interesting projects with hundreds of great people. After rejecting the first few opportunities to transfer out of Corvallis, the firm stopped asking him to move. He has continued to live in Corvallis, but always traveling for days, weeks, and months at a time for project work.
Roger participated in the studies, design, and construction of two major award-winning projects in 2006: the Iron Mountain Mine Slickrock Creek Reservoir (Redding, California) and Standley Lake Dam Improvements (Standley, Colorado), both receiving the ASCE Engineering Excellence Awards Grand Award. Roger also participated in the design of several lake and river intakes, including the Lake Mead Intakes 2 and 3, Las Vegas, Nevada (1996-2008); the Round Butte Outlet modification near Madras, Oregon (2005-2010); and the Eagle Mountain outlet, Dallas, Texas (2005).