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I am an electrical engineer and a
Registered Professional Engineer (Retired) in the State of Texas. After getting out of the U.S. Navy,
I went back to South Dakota School of Mines and Technology on the GI Bill, and graduated
in 1980 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering (BS/EE). After graduation, I moved to Texas to work
for Texas Instruments (TI) in their defense division, and was still working for them when
TI sold us to Raytheon in 1997. After a little over two years with Raytheon, they
chose to close our Lewisville, TX plant, where I'd worked almost exclusively since 1980, and moved all the programs to their
Tucson, AZ plant. Because Tucson was not an option that I was interested in, I chose to leave Raytheon/TI after 19-1/2 years
combined, and went to work as a test staff engineer for SpectraPoint Wireless LLC in Richardson, TX. Unfortunately,
SpectraPoint went out of business when I'd only been there about eight months. From there I went to
Motorola as a senior test engineer in their cellular base station factory in Fort Worth,
Texas, but was laid off on 1 November 2002 along with 39,400 other unfortunate Motorola employees, more than any other company
in the entire US in 2001!! After 11-1/2 months out of work, I went to work for
Lockheed Martin Aeronautics in Fort Worth, TX as a systems engineer on the
Joint Strike Fighter (F-35 Lightning II) where I stayed until 1 January 2012 when I retired. My wife and I had often discussed eventually moving back to South Dakota, so we sold our house in Fort Worth, bought a house in Rapid City, and moved in March 2012. |
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