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Today's Featured Biography

 
Les Kempers

Following SC High School, I attended Iowa State University for undergraduate study in Civil Engineering, followed by graduate study for a Masters in Structural Engineering at University of Colorado in Boulder. In between colleges, four of us from SCHS traveled around most of free Europe for a couple months, Darwin Wissink, Scott Beernink, Doug Moret and myself; a trip we will never forget. While at University of Colorado graduate school, I shared an office with an amazing Turkish girl from North Africa and we eventually started dating and married about a year later.

As Boulder, Colorado is such a beautiful place, we decided to stay and make it our home. Since we were both Structural Engineers pursuing careers, we did not have our only son Adam until 10 years later. I worked for a large prestress/precast design, manufacture and erection company in Denver, starting as a design engineer and then moved to a number of different positions in the same company as the years passed. Fatima worked for a few different design firms, mostly at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and KKBNA, both in Denver. So we lived in Boulder for 26 years and loved it, great life, went to a great church, and I got to be involved in some of the original ‘Promise Keepers’ events that started in Boulder with Coach McCartney. Darwin Wissink and Dave Johnson moved to Boulder sometime in the early 80’s and we got to see them periodically. Dave worked for our company for a while and then moved to one of our other plants in Phoenix; Darwin built custom homes for a number of years and now has his own great business doing home inspections, and is known around town for his integrity and honesty. (Darwin didn’t pay me to write this, but you do owe me now, Darwin)

In 1999, our president asked me to go to Hawaii for 6 months to analyze the market to see if we should keep the (then failing) plant open that we had started two years earlier. We said yes and …… wait; that was 12 years ago; what happened to 6 months? Well, our plant is doing well, Fatima works for a Engineering firm in Hawaii and has designed a couple 40 story high rises; Adam has finished High School at Punahou (same school Obama attended-I’m sure that may stir mixed emotions) and is now attending Iowa State University and plans to follow that with Law School, (somewhere besides Iowa, he says it’s too cold there, having grown up in Hawaii); he wants to specialize in Construction Law; imagine that. Living and working in Hawaii is a lot different than vacationing Hawaii, but we’re not complaining; we enjoy walks on Kailua Beach, golfing, swimming and some kayaking, and we both enjoy our work.

That’s my 40 years in 3 paragraphs; kinda; aloha.

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