38/Plumbing Engineer June 2019

to market. He willingly taught me a wide range of mar- keting skills, including developing a marketing plan, pre- paring marketing materials, client relations, interviewing techniques and more. Heartfelt Thanks After more than 40 years in the business, I find there are still opportunities to learn from great people. Of late that has come from the leadership of Coffman Engineers Inc. - most importantly, its founder Dave Coffman, CEO Dave Ruff and Bob Libby, head of the fire protec- tion engineering group. Many others have helped me along the way, includ- ing Chris Jelenewicz, Josh Elvove, Matt Chibarro, Jim Lathrop, Ray Grill, Jim Milke, Ed Danziger, Cathy Stashak, Bob Caputo, Tom Gray, D. Peter Lund, Kathleen Almand - and many more. I want to thank the editors of this magazine with whom I have worked these past 10 years: John Mesenbrink, Jim Schneider, Ashlei Williams, Sarah Cimarusti, Sharon Rehana and Kelly Faloon. I appreciate all their gentle reminders of upcoming deadlines, cutting me slack for my run-on sentences and over-abundance of commas, and giving me just enough freedom (or rope) to occa- sionally put some controversial thoughts in front of the readers. And thanks to you, the readers, for taking your valu- able time to read a column and for occasionally writing to let me know that someone actually read a column once in a while. I took on this column for many reasons. A strong craving for recognition, to prove that I could do it, but there were other reasons. To help others avoid the same engineering mistakes I made, to give the readers a sense of our history and tradition, as well as my take on fire protection engineering. Ben Notkin once asked me, when preparing to hire my replacement, what qualities I would recommend this FPE have. I told him that the most important quality for this person would be to have a passion for his or her work. It is a truly a blessing to have a job you really enjoy (except maybe for Monday mornings), one that occa- sionally gets your motor running and your heart pump- ing, and one in which you know that what you do is of service. I hope some of that passion came through in these columns. Gotta go now, there's a rerun of the "Rocky and Bullwinkle Show" on that I haven't seen. Aloha! l Samuel S. Dannaway, P.E., FSFPE , is a licensed fire protection engineer and mechanical engineer with bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Maryland Department of Fire Protection Engineering. He is a past president and fellow of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers. He is vice president of Fire Protection Technology at Coffman Engineers Inc., a mul- tidiscipline engineering firm with over 360 employees across eight offices. Sam can be reached at dannaway@ coffman.com. Association conference in 1980, Bud gave me some advice. He told me not to stay out in Hawaii too long because I would get lost, meaning lost to the profession. To me, this was a challenge. Since then, I have worked hard to make sure I did not "get lost in Hawaii." Before arriving in Hawaii, I spent the first nine months of my career as an engineer-in-training at the Chesapeake Division of the Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) at the Washington (D.C.) Navy Yard (once known, but now no longer exists, as CHESDIV). Here I had two great first bosses: Rick Rice and later Bob DiAngelo. Rick later became the head of the fire pro- tection engineering program at NAVFAC; Bob later became the chief fire protection engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers. Both set me on the right path to be a competent fire protection engineer and authority having jurisdiction (AHJ). Also at CHESDIV was Frank Caldwell, head of the design division and, coincidently, the father of another fire protection engineering peer, Carol Caldwell. Frank taught me one of those never-to-forget life lessons: No one is irreplaceable. In early 1979, Roger Parlee, the head of the NAVFAC FPE group in Pearl Harbor, came to Washington seek- ing young recruits to transfer out to Hawaii to help with the large amount of work developing in the Pacific. So, in April 1979, I transferred out to Pearl Harbor, a great opportunity to "travel the world" and get unstuck from Suitland. Roger was my immediate supervisor and he always took good care of me. While at PACDIV, I had the privilege of working under a very experienced FPE, Joe Condlin. Joe came to Hawaii a few years before I did, having worked in the old NAVFAC office at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, once called NORTHDIV. Before NAVFAC, he had been a field engineer with Factory Mutual in Philadelphia. I learned much about engineering from Joe but what I valued most was gaining some of his passion for the profession and the way he would approach solving fire protection problems. Joe was a classic AHJ. Anyone trying to BS him would end up getting nowhere. But if you approached him hon- estly about a real problem that needed a special solution and were able to get through the total stonewall he would put up during your first 15 minutes with him, he would begin to soften his attitude and truly try to work out an equitable solution to the most difficult of issues. I think those stonewall tactics were Joe's way of determining whether the person he was dealing with was someone he could trust. Not only a great mentor but a true friend. In 1985, I left the federal civil service, deciding to try my hand in the private sector. I worked out an arrange- ment with a local mechanical engineering consultant, becoming the in-house fire protection engineering con- sultant for Benjamin S. Notkin Inc., a Seattle based mechanical engineering firm that had recently opened an office in Honolulu. Ben Notkin offered to teach me the business in return for helping his staff develop fire protection engineering expertise. In addition to his skills as an engineer, Ben knew how

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