Tip your hat to a mentor

My mentor and good friend retired this past year. He was the one who pushed me to get my license and made sure I was involved in every aspect of the business. I had the honor of nominating him for the lifetime achievement award through our state's Professional Surveyors Association and low and behold he won and I presented the award to him at the annual conference. It was an excellent feeling to be able to show him how much I appreciate all that he did for me.

An unnamed surveyor who taught me both how to be a surveyor - that you perform whatever amount of research and fieldwork necessary to get the boundary determination right; and how not to run a business - because he never came close to being fully compensated for the amount of work he put into a job.

Great idea Nate! Some of my mentors are:

Don Cole, Jimmy Breen, Bobby Dawson, Pete Arney, Jay Caughman, Ken Beckwith, Paul (Skip) Erwin, Bill Woods, Jim Helton, Chris Billingsley, Bob Bannerman, Jim Key, Benny Moorman, and most of the posters from this forum, and the old forum.

The gentlemen I mentioned I have either worked for, with, or are good friends that have shared their experiences with me. I am sure I left out someone, and I apologize. I owe my career to these gentlemen, in that they helped mold me into the professional I am today, and I hope that one day people look at my work and career and know that I did my very best to represent this honorable profession to the best of my ability.

Jimmy

I'm hoping to pick a mentor a week, or a month, and to help tie this profession to those who have built it, often by mentoring.

I would have to say Wm. Kemp Morris who gave a young kid a job in the summer. Somehow I managed to come back and work for him even after college. It got in my blood. Penny Standridge and Charlie Gibson at Pinellas County. They were great to work for. Jeff Lucas who I really enjoyed working with.

Good post.

Here are some of my mentors.

Ron Ashe - He married a cousin of mine and his son is to this day still one of my best friends. He gave me a job when I was an engineering student and I worked summers for him for 7 years.

Donald Robinson and Moses Mitchell - These were two old field hands I worked with under Ron. I learned all sort of things traversing through the woods with those two.

Henry Williams - Surveyor/Engineer/Lawyer. Another surveyor from my hometown. I worked under him for 3 weeks one time and still drop into his office every few months to pick his brain.

Larry Click - Surveyor and Ag professor. My academic career would not have turned out like it did without him. A truly outstanding man.

Larry and Lucile Smith - Current employer. These two have forgotten more about surveying and running a business than I know. Definitely two outstanding people.

Tommy,

I have to agree with you about Henry Williams. I wish I lived closer to him. I only know him through TAPS. but when he talks, I listen. Anyone who is a Land Surveyor, engineer, and attorney, is a pretty smart person.

I have enjoyed the few times I have shared lunch with him at the conferences.

Jimmy

No mentor for me, the old guys absolutely refuse to share knowledge. Have to figure out everything on my own.

> AJ's crew ALWAYS took Paul Harvey breaks too. No matter what.
>
> Nate

After I read that last sentence, I was sure you were going to follow it up with "Good Day"

Mark

Sorry. I failed. I really failed. My bad. Throw me under the bus!

🙂

N

Nate,
I had the pleasure having A.J. as a party chief. I also was mentored by his dad, Alb. We all worked under Roy Black, RLS. I do remember making sure we were back to the truck to listen to the 'rest of the story'.

Here is a tip of the hat to A.J. Robinson, Ron Cole, C.T. "Pat" Patterson, and especially to Roy Black.

DDSM:-D

I have had three great mentors in my path.

First, Ken Wilkerson, PS in Michigan. Once he found out I was both, interested and intellectually able, he taught me baseline processing. Vectors, weighting, adjustments, outliers, orbits, etc. That naturally evolved into control network processing. (My favorite one was working on a 500 point control network in SoCal later in my career).

Second, Wayne Johnson, PLS in California. He pushed me. He knew I had a lot more potential than I let on. He also had the confidence in my abilities (even if I didn't) for me to run crew operations. I was 27 and running 8 crews. Boy, is that a different beast! You always know your abilities, but having to trust the abilities of others? hahaha.

Lastly, JVS. He pushed me to think of things beyond just surveying a parcel or mapping a roadway. It isn't simply a manhole, that manhole has attributes, pipes, walls, infiltration(?), adjusting rings. It ages, how do we account for that in our system? He pushed us hard to create a survey-grade GIS that an engineer would be able to utilize for design. Our collected data wasn't "archived" after construction began, but it was placed into the database for future use. It is updated when affected. All of this while also striving for as "real-time" as possible.

Hopefully I'm doing well enough they wouldn't mind reading this.

Makerofmaps

I would have to say Wm. Kemp Morris who gave a young kid a job in the summer. Somehow I managed to come back and work for him even after college. It got in my blood. Penny Standridge and Charlie Gibson at Pinellas County. They were great to work for. Jeff Lucas who I really enjoyed working with.

I guess you know Boyd Allen then...he was at Morris Surveying quite a while...a few others that I worked with worked there also...

I certainly hope that you forgot the sarcasm font...

I've had a couple of them.

The late Eric Soderquist, P.E. (whose granddad was a PLS) was the first one who really taught me the importance of uncompromising quality in the work I do. He was also the first one to mention to me the possibility about myself becoming licensed as a PLS.

Ben Baldauf, PLS, was another one who taught me to keep a larger picture in mind and to fight against developing tunnel vision when it comes to recovering physical and documentation evidence.

Still working on that PLS application but I'm almost done. Getting sick and tired of people pestering me 🙂

My mentors:
Champ Meyers with USGS who gave me my first exposure to topographic surveying in 1958.
Vern Lane with BLM who gave me my first opportunities with original surveying of townships in 1959-1960.
Boyd Owens who really taught me to study the Manual (1947) and to read court cases during 1966-1969.
But mostly to Jim Simpson with whom I worked on riparian boundaries from 1978 until his passing. He was a good friend who had a unique ability to get to the heart of a case and also to explain it. I still miss being able to pick up the phone and get his perspective.

There are many others who have helped along the way. I hope I may have helped a few.

I have been blessed with a career that I love and opportunities that are still hard for this old guy to believe. I am now mostly retired and live most of the time on a beach in Palau with my wife of 45 years.

Most of the mentors that have contributed the most to my situation today are long gone and without their influence and belief in me, I would still be in the hay fields or punching cows and wasting my time on fast cars and faster women, lol.
In truth, without them, the path to today would have been much longer and less enlightening.
Even though the fact that I did not work for or with with some of these people very long, in each time period, what I took from the experience led me further along the right path than I would have made by other means.
I am most grateful and thankful for having known everyone of them.

My mentors,
I guess this would be the order I would put them in, but all of them deserve the Number 1 spot
1. My father (Donald Burgess) and Uncle (Ray Burgess -deceased)
When I was a kid the "drug" me out to the field on the weekends to run lines with an old K&E transit and chain. From the time I was about 5 or six till I was about 13-14. I learned how to turn/calculate angles, simple trig offsets in the field, pull and throw a chain and cut line. I learned from the school of hard knocks and slaps on the back of the head (lol). I never forgot those days. In fact I was bound and determined when I was a teenager not to work in the civil and survey field. (At this point I was smarter than everyone and went to work for the other side of the family building houses and building developments)

2. Alex Theriot (deceased) & WJ Fontenot When I was in college and still doing development work, they hired me on. Got me moving back in this business. They taught me more about modern techniques and the business side of things. Really motivated me and pushed me to pursue my license. Years later after leaving the firm and before I received my license, I would run into one of them and they would ask me about me getting my license and about my family.

3. AW O'Quinn Sr., Great family friend and mentor. After leaving Mr. Theriot and Mr. Fontenot's company due to Mr. Theriot retiring. I start some side work with Mr. AW. The way it happened was happen stance. He was needing some help with a plat needing drafting in ACAD and I need some extra work due to some issues. It developed into a long lasting partnership until I received my license. He pushed me to learn more, be more responsible, not to be afraid of any project, and taught me it was alright to ask for help when I needed it.

I could write a book about these gentlemen, they were caring individuals that really took interest in me and saw something that I did not see in myself. I still see these guys and I hope I have made them proud, I know I am very thankful and proud of these guys everyday for the gentlemen they are and steering a "kid" into something he enjoys everyday.

You know who you are:

JLO
VJB
GRK

Et al