Profile……

Don Tweedie – Portrait of an Achiever

“I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon,” Don told me. “I joined the Navy when I was a young lad in high school–it was the patriotic thing to do then because of World War II.” Don served aboard the USS Lexington in the South Pacific where he was a helmsman and was on a 40 MM gunnery crew. After his discharge in 1946, he spent four years in the reserves and made yearly cruises on destroyer escorts. “I once spent two weeks in a diesel-electric submarine. I don't ever want to do that again!”

During that same time, Don enrolled at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, and then went to work for Tektronix. “I spent five years there,” Don continues. “I was the seventh employee to join the company, so I was in at the very beginning.” That was the start of the groundbreaking work Tektronix eventually did in developing electronic test equipment. “Their major product at that time was a five inch oscilloscope—all vacuum tubes—this was before solid state electronics,” Don pointed out.

While Don was at Tektronix, he got married. “I married my childhood sweetheart,” he says proudly. “And now, 57 years later, she’s still my sweetheart!”

After Don left Tektronix, he and Maryann took to the road. “We moved down to Southern California and I went to work for the guided missile division of Convair in Pomona. Then I went to work at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Corona.” By this time Don had enough of the defense industry, “so I joined the microwave division of the National Bureau of Standards in Boulder, Colorado.” Don found Boulder entirely too cold in the winter, so he thought about moving to more moderate climes. “I found an IBM ad in the Denver paper and thought, I can do that! So we moved to San Jose and I ended up spending 25 years doing storage system development work there.”

Don finally retired and he and Maryann took to the road again. “We moved up to Cottage Grove, Oregon; then to Sacramento; back to Portland and Vancouver, Washington; and finally to Grass Valley six years ago.”

Don started volunteering in Sacramento, teaching junior high school in Elk Grove. “I remember we had Commodore 64 computers. Those were the days!” Don says with a chuckle. Don did volunteer work again in Vancouver, where he helped computerize a hospital’s record system. When he arrived in Grass Valley he quickly became a volunteer for RSVP’s Help Line. Less than a year later, the Learning Center started up and Don became one of the original coordinators.

I asked about Don’s family. “We had six kids,” Don said proudly, “four daughters and two sons.” Don told me that his oldest son recently died of cancer in Seattle. “Our other son lives in Wisconsin, one daughter is in Camas, Washington, one is in San Jose, and two are here in Grass Valley.” I asked about grandchildren and great grandchildren. After some counting, he calculated that there are a total of 10 grandchildren and three great grandchildren.

At the Learning Center, Don holds a number of important jobs. He is on both the curriculum and education committees, and also serves as a senior technical advisor. “I’ve been spending a lot of time writing manuals recently,” he says. “I wrote the one for Computer Fundamentals and the one for Introduction to Computers, which Bob Reeves is presently test-teaching. We should be releasing that one after the first of the year.”

Don takes his Learning Center responsibilities very seriously. His message for prospective students? “If you have a computer and don’t know how to use it, come to the Learning Center and we can set you up. We’ll get you on e-mail, get you surfing the Web, and teach you about text processing.”

Don Tweedie is the Learning Center’s Energizer Bunny. He just keeps going and going!