Jeffrey Fawsett:  

My Life and Career After Florida Military School After graduating from Florida Military School in May 1960, I met and fell in love with my future wife, Annette Hill, in Orlando where we both had grown up. That summer was another one of hard physical work in a fertilizer plant. My father made sure every summer included 40-plus hours a week of hard manual labor to show me what life would be like if I failed to obtain a college education. During most summers, it was 50 hours a week in citrus groves doing hard time. In September of '60, I bid good bye to my future wife, and with a footlocker and my 16-ga. Winchester Model 12 shotgun, I left for Raleigh N.C. to attend North Carolina State College. It was and still is a highly respected engineering school, much like Georgia Tech and a little like FMS. The company of girls on campus was little to almost none at all. In all of my classes, I had one female engineering student in differential calculus, an attractive blond. She enjoyed the student ratio of 1 female student to about 2,500 male students majoring in either textiles or engineering. My major was aerospace engineering. I was a natural for ROTC with my military school skills gained from my years at FMS. In December 1962, a near state wide freeze damaged my father's citrus grove so that out-of-state tuition was no longer possible. My brother had just graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and had enrolled in law school at the University of Florida in Gainesville. So I went to work for a surveying firm in Vero Beach, Florida. Having a lot of the basic engineering courses under my belt, I was a natural to split my work time between office work and field work. The firm was involved in surveying land sections for the design and construction of new citrus groves. Citrus groves north of Orlando and Tampa had been complete eradicated by the freeze of December '62, and the lower east coast of Florida was exploding with new groves and replanting of the older, freeze damaged groves. Before long, field work in the blistering heat of the south Florida summer was just an unpleasant memory. I moved from, initially, just drafting plans for an engineer in a partnership firm to designing citrus groves, drainage systems, pump stations, perimeter levees and irrigation systems. I became so interested in agricultural engineering that the rigors of fluid dynamics, air frame & space craft design, differential equations, Fourier analysis and Laplace transforms all seemed to take a back seat to what I was now doing. If I had landed a job with NASA, I would have never had the opportunity to work for the aerospace designers. The mundane kind of work a junior class engineering student would be assigned might be, at best, working on test stands for the big rocket boosters under development at the time. So, with the funds I had saved and help from my family, I entered the University of Florida and took up where I left off at N.C. State. However, I lost 40 credit hours of sophomore and junior course work unique to aerospace engineering. Agricultural engineering at Florida had more credit hours of course work than any engineering major. That's because my major required a lot of work in agricultural soils, horticulture, livestock, farm structures, harvester design and other course work not required of parallel engineering majors as collateral course work. But, much to my horror, I still would have to defeat differential equations or it would whip me. However, I graduated, which shows which prevailed in that struggle. Air Force ROTC might have redirected me to a flying career in the air force, but God had another plan for me. I had married Annette in my fifth year of University work with another year still needed to graduate. That's where the penalty of 40 lost credit hours came into play. Annette was so much my superior at university studies that she started at FSU a year after I started at N.C. State and graduated two years sooner with a double major and a minor. And she wasn't a bit enthusiastic about me flying in Vietnam. However, I was bound and determined to do my 5 years as an F-4 Phantom fighter pilot. I graduated and went to Jax Naval Air Station for a pre-commissioning physical. I was one of the many 2nd Lieutenant candidates to endure the upper and lower GI tract exam. Well, that finished my air force career before it ever started. I had scar tissue from duodenal ulcers brought on by my parents divorce while at FMS. I could fly a desk for 4 years, but I had no fondness for that alternative. The ROTC commanding officer at Florida talked my draft board in Orlando into a 1-Y reclassification, so being drafted was less likely. As a result, I started my engineering career 5 years earlier than a flying career would have allowed. In fact, I might have either extended my service into an air force career, or I might have been shot down over North Vietnam. Annette was much relieved while I was simply devastated that I would see many of my friends serve their country, and I would get a much unwanted draft deferral that others fled to Canada to gain. Instead, I interviewed with Gee & Jenson Consulting Engineers, Inc. in West Palm Beach, my first career choice, because the firm did so much design work for Walt Disney World. Eventually, Gee & Jenson became tagged, 'The Mouse's Engineer'. With my course work at Florida and my drainage design work in south Florida before transferring to Gainesville, I was a snap to take right off on my career. Ninety percent of Disney World was swamp land and reclamation was the name of the game. However, the firms Comptroller that interviewed me said Gee & Jenson was no longer doing drainage engineering. I asked to interview with the firms chief engineer or any of several principals, but this non-engineer just lacked the courage to tell me without a masters degree or a professional engineering license, the firm wouldn't hire me. I thought he looked a bit 'light in the loafers', so when I knew employment was not going to happen, I asked him why in the Hell he agreed to interview me and cause me to make a nine hour round trip from Gainesville. I would later regret my candor. My second choice was a position with USDA-SCS that gave me post graduate training and the opportunity to take command of a watershed construction project so remote that supervision by any superior career employee was not a possibility. In that position with a crew of engineering technicians, I oversaw the construction of a major concrete water control structure with radial gates and two miles of channel excavation from Lake Harris extending up to and beyond the structure on the Palatlakaha River. In my administrative duties, I met monthly with the principal engineer from the engineering firm that designed the watershed project for USDA-SCS. It was none other than Col. Ted Jenson, one of the founders of Gee & Jenson Engineers. By the third design review meeting, Col. Jenson offered me employment with his firm. Cripes, I felt an obligation to SCS which had provided me 6 months of intensive post graduate training in Texas, Nebraska and other locations, and my project was under construction with no other engineer to replace me. However, Ted never gave up, and when the first phase of the Palatlakaha project was completed, he hired me to design the rest of the phases in their West Palm Beach office. However, all was not as I would have wished. I soon met Col. Herb Gee. I worked exclusively for these two founders, and in the process, Ted and Mary Jenson became very fond of Annette and myself. We entertained socially together which caused a lot of jealousy among the firms middle management. My desire to be elevated to the Board of Directors was never a remote possibility, since middle management was so envious of my working exclusively for the two founders. To make matters worse, when I began working on watershed projects for Col. Gee, we became fishing partners. This caused such a stir that Herb and I decided that for peace to prevail with the middle managers who would soon take over when Herb and Ted retired, we should take a break from joint fishing activities. After Herb and Ted both retired, middle management knew I would soon leave the firm and take some of my clients with me. So, the new directors doubled my salary in less than two years. Working relations were still strained, and the Comptroller that interviewed me in 1966 never forgot my crack about causing me to drive nine hours when he surely knew he wouldn't hire a new graduate engineer with only a bachelors degree. So, in 1981, I decided that '12 years to life' was enough with Gee & Jenson, and I returned to Gainesville and earned a Master of Engineering degree. I took one client with me that would not accept a substitute engineer. It was a litigation case that lasted almost two years and paid much of my tuition and living expenses. After graduating from Florida again, I was faced with a decision to circulate my resume and seek employment with a smaller firm where a position on its Board of Directors might be possible. However, my largest client account at Gee & Jenson had been following my progress in the background, and when I graduated, they fired Gee & Jenson and approached me about taking over its 22,000 acre development. That's known in the engineering profession as an anchor client which any new engineering firm must have to keep the 'bear away from the door.' I soon became a stable, although small, independent firm, accepting only the work that I found to my liking. Eighteen years as a big fish in a small pond followed, and I had many challenging client assignments. I was blessed by the opportunity to have things fall in place during my career. I retired in 2002, and I will...Expand for more