MARINE CORPS LOGISTICS BASE BARSTOW, Calif. -- In past civilizations, there is one person that can most likely be found in all of the history books. They are known as the sage, the wise one, and is revered by the populace as a guide and teacher who gives counsel to all who seek it. Fortunately, in modern day communities, sages can be found as well using their many years of experience with life to help their peers solve problems.
Maintenance Center Barstow has an employee who has been around for sometime, about 76 years, and his name is Dale Dunn.
Dunn grew up in Los Angeles, and has been living in Southern California for the majority of his life.
When he was still in high school, he took vocational classes specializing in electronics, starting a trend he would follow for years to come.
In 1948, he joined the Army Signal Corps as an automatic telephone exchange technician, and spent his military days troubleshooting problems that arose, said Dunn. It soon became apparent to him that instrumentation and sequencing with electronics would be his passion.
After his term in the Army was done, it was time for Dunn to feed his passion for electronics.
Dunn started studying at Stanford University to become an electrical engineer. Unfortunately, after his third year, he ran out of money for school and had to focus his funds on taking care of his family.
A job designing electronics systems for machines presented itself to Dunn, and he took it, which allowed him to start his days of working on electronics, he said.
Throughout his life, Dunn has worked on some notable projects around the world.
One of the projects Dunn has worked on was instrumentation that was to be used by submarines in the U.S. Navy while conducting torpedo missile firing missions, he said.
Back in the early days of the submarine, sailors were tasked with using dials and meters to calculate the distance between the ship and the target, Dunn said. As technology improved aboard the vessels, a need for a device that could convert the data from dial readings into digital data that the sailors could use.
For this, Dunn invented the Non-linear Amplifier (U.S. Patent No. 3,089,968), which was patented in May 1963 and used until technology made the gadget obsolete, he said.
"It was great being on the edge of technology," said Dunn.
The most notable projects that Dunn has worked on were the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury space programs, he said.
He was a part of the crew that was responsible for the instrumentation and sequencing for the parachutes that were in the nose cones of the rockets, and it was their mission to make sure that the parachutes opened properly and when they were supposed to while the crew of the space craft was traveling back down to Earth.
Finally in 1987 Dunn got a job working at MCB. "I knew of Barstow and I never thought I would be here, but I ended up moving here anyway," Dunn said.
Through all he has done in his life, Dunn is an individual who has a wealth of knowledge that is very beneficial to the maintenance center, said Gary M. Kralik, supervisory industrial engineer for MCB.
Dunn says that if it were not for his love of learning new things, he would not have been able to be a part of so many different projects in his life. It is due to his desire to try something new, whenever he gets the chance to, that he finally made it to the maintenance center to work.
From working in the Army as an automatic telephone exchange technician to working for the Marine Corps at MCB, Dunn has gathered a wealth of knowledge he uses to influence anybody he might come into contact with.