“Dedicated to serving his country.”
I was raised in a career military family along with my brother and sister. My father, Lt. Col. William “Bill” Curtis, served a 20-year decorated career in the Army that included a tour on Oahu from 1970 to 1973. During that tour we were stationed at 101A Jecelin Street on Schofield Barracks where I completed grades 4th through 6th at Hale Kula Elementary School.
After retiring from the Army, my father moved on to the next stage of his DoD service working as a civil servant for DISA’s Joint Planning and Execution Services (JPES) in the Pentagon. He was at work on September 11, 2001 when the Pentagon came under terrorist attack. He was fortunately out of harm’s way that day and went on to continue serving at the Pentagon until retiring in 2006 at the age of 70.
“The father that served before him.”
My grandfather before him, Chief Petty Officer Walter Howell Curtis Sr., served aboard the USS Dobbin when Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941. My grandfather was at home at 1638 Kalona-Iki Walk with my father and his three brothers when he got the call to duty amid the attack.
The USS Dobbin was a destroyer moored north east of Ford Island when the Japanese attacked. The USS Dobbin only sustained minor shrapnel damage during the attack and the crew spent the remainder of the day performing small craft rescues of the wounded and survivors. The USS Dobbin served in Hawaiian waters until May 1942 when she joined task forces in Australia that slowly made their way towards Japan as the war progressed towards the Japanese surrender.
“The son that learned from them both.”
Change was a constant in my early life as we moved and lived in 5 different locations before I started 7th grade. Learning to work through and manage change in my early life set the foundation for my future. I graduated high school in Bowie, Maryland in 1979 with a strong background in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). I started my college career as a freshman at the university of Maryland as an Architecture Major while also taking a curriculum of electrical engineering and computer science.
After my first year of college, I was offered a summer intern job with Bendix Field Engineering Corporation (BFEC) at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). I jumped at the opportunity. This was in 1980 at the beginning of the technology evolution driven by micro-processors and micro-chips in the move from large shared main frame computers to dedicated smaller computing platforms. Based on my STEM background, BFEC assigned me a computer programming task to complete by the end of my summer internship. I completed that programming task in my first week and that was the beginning to my 30-year career with BFEC and its successor companies. They kept me on as a temporary employee while I was attending college and made it financially rewarding for me to change my major twice from architecture to electrical engineering and finally to computer science. I successfully surfed that rapidly evolving technology wave over my entire career. I was very adept at infusing new technology, capabilities, and processes into existing and new projects to make them “cheaper, better, faster, smaller.”
My final role of managing the operations and maintenance of NASA’s Koke’e Park Geophysical Observatory (KPGO) lasted over 5 years as the work transitioned from Honeywell to ITT, to Exelis, and finally to the Harris Corporation. I chose to retire in Feb 2016 to make more time for ‘Ohana and enjoying life on Kaua’i with my dogs.