Indiana's Oldest Employee - a Land Surveyor

"Pretty disgustin' to drive forty or fifty miles and forget the battery..."

Amen, brother. 😉

99 years old, licensed in 1973, a late bloomer like me!

With all of the recent RIP posts, it's great to see this story. I hope I'm still retracing lines at 99!

This guy was at an ISPLS (Initial Point Chapter) meeting last year. I happened to be there. A great and interesting man. He had a lot of funny stories to tell and seemed as excited about getting out to survey as he probably was in 1973.

Here is a video that ISPLS made about 20 years ago interviewing several "old timers":

[MEDIA=youtube]8MOXVay8Idw[/MEDIA]

Ahhh...Nelson Prall. I wish they would have included Charlie Condra. He is a local legend around my parts.

Apparently the video is only 5 years old, boy was I way off.

Any way here is the entire thing, see if you find any of your favorites:

Dropbox - Full Movie.wmv

Awesome. Hope I can still get around like that in 65 years and still be as sharp. Amazing man.

Wow. I musta missed this the 1st time through. Good stuff.

Such a cool story. I hope to still be alive at 99, let alone surveying in the field.

When did Indiana first license surveyors? It might well have been that late.

I was just going to post this! Glad that it makes him happy. I was ready to call it good. Must be Indiana?

It is always encouraging to see "old timers" like this still kicking around and enjoying life.

I do recall that I had a summer job surveying for a utility company when I was still in college. One week the party chief told us we'd have a fourth crew member tagging along. It was an Irish fellow with the name of Peter Brady (which is pretty Irish). He was in his late 60's and his story was that he was 1 month away from retiring after 30+ years of service with the company and so they were letting him do basically whatever he wanted for this last 4 weeks there.

Since he was a surveyor, he said he wanted to go back out into the field. And so he did.

This guy, who at the time was over 40 years my senior, was waltzing across the fields and climbing over wire fences faster that I could. He sure didn't seem like he was ready to retire.

That guy sounds like me, but I not ready to retire yet.

Ed

I like his gun. Looked to be an S6.
I bet he runs his field collimnations on it a couple times a month - can't get young guys to do that.

I hope to be still surveying at 99.