Ron Sadow, 1931-2005

The letter in the previous post ends, "take care, Dad."

Perhaps this is where my fondness for writing columns come from, since my father was a frequent writer of letters to the editor. At his visitation this afternoon several people remarked upon that. In honor of my father, I am making an exception to what I wrote about my private life in this blog's very first post (last item). Now his memory lives, among other places, in cyberspace:

Ronald Sadow was born in Astoria, New York. A graduate of Flushing (NY) High School, he entered the University of New Hampshire in 1949, where he obtained a B.S. in Civil Engineering in 1953. During his time at UNH he lettered in several sports and played on UNH’s Yankee Conference football team in 1950. He also completed Reserve Officer Training Corps study and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force upon graduation. After advanced training at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, OH, he was stationed as an assistant installations officer at Hamilton Air Force Base in San Francisco, CA where he met his future wife Helen and whom he married in 1955. After discharge from the Air Force he attended the University of Tennessee and completed a M.S. concentrating in the area of environmental engineering in 1957. Employed by Dow Chemical for several years in the Norfolk, VA area, a subsequent transfer brought him to the Texas Gulf coast where he worked in areas of increasing responsibility for Monsanto Corp., Turner, Collie, and Braden Engineers, and Walsh Engineering. In 1981 he accepted a senior-level position at Ford, Bacon, and Davis in Monroe, LA where he remained for the next dozen years, and spent one year working for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, NM before retiring from full-time work in 1996. He continued working part-time until his death.

Sadow was a professional engineer for almost 50 years and held numerous offices in, wrote a number of articles about, and won awards in the profession. Licensed in dozens of states, he was an authority on treatment of sewage, wastewater, and runoff. In 1968 he won the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Water Pollution Control Federation’s Wilhelm Rudolfs Award for the best publication in the area, and subsequently he served on the executive board of the organization, as well as on its Texas board, culminating in holding the office of president of the Texas organization in 1971.

Take care, Dad.