Warren E. Jamison

"His speech reflects much in a few words."

# of children:

4

# of grandchildren:

7

# of great grandchildren:

My Journey:

Shortly after graduating from RHS, I obtained a job as a draftsman at The Jersey Central Railroad. I commuted from the Westfield station to their terminal in Jersey City until 1955, when I quit to study mechanical engineering. After spending a year at Texas A&M, I transferred to Drexel Inst. of Tech. (now Drexel Univ.) in Philadelphia, where I could earn my way through on the cooperative engineering program. Co-op assignments at various Chrysler plants in Detroit cemented my long-standing interests in automotive engineering. That is, until the space age came along and I quickly switched my focus and ambitions. I worked on co-op assignments for Chrysler at their missile plant in Michigan and at the Missile and Space Division of General Electric in Philadelphia. I graduated from Drexel in 1961 with a BS in Mechanical Engineering, a pregnant wife and a job in bearing research in Connecticut. In the next 4 years, I migrated to Chicago, where I managed a lab doing research on the effects of the space environment on engineering materials. To further my research interests and capabilities, I enrolled at the University of Cincinnati and obtained an MS (1967) and a PhD (1969) in Materials Science. Following this, my wife and I and our three children spent a year in Norway, where I had a post-doc research fellowship at the University of Oslo. Returning to the US in 1970, I worked at a research facility for a ball bearing manufacturer in Pennsylvania for three years. Desiring to do more fundamental research, I took a faculty position at the University of Virginia in 1973, and moved to Clemson University in 1975 and Colorado School of Mines in 1977. By then, my research interests had switched from lubrication of space vehicles to lubrication problems on Railroad locomotives. This latter topic occupied my professional career until my retirement in 2000. I left the university environment in 1979 for financial reasons when my children came of college age, and struck out on my own. I co-founded a company in Denver to develop and market a lubrication product that I had invented during my academic research. The company was eventually sold off to a major steel company in 1984 and I became a consultant to the industry. After a few more miscellaneous jobs and a few more teaching stints a various universities, I again founded a company to build and market a lubrication device for railroad locomotives. This company I sold in 2000 and I then retired. My second wife and I live in a Seattle suburb and enjoy a second home on an island close by in the San Juans. My wife is a registered nurse and works in benefit coordination for a major health care provider. Our children and grand children are scattered in Colorado, Alaska and France.