R. Malcolm Ohl

I never wanted to be a general contractor. A baby boomer growing up in a construction family — a dad driven by a Pennsylvania Dutch ethnicity, memories of the depression, and gratitude to the GI Bill for his electrical engineering degree — it was all about learning the benefits of hard work, from the bottom up: pure drudgery to a kid. What he didn’t teach, and I didn’t figure out until much later, was that it was actually fun: a puzzle much better than the on-line ones, working out how to get a place built. The fun of progressing your job each day, of patiently molding your client’s ideas into reality, and of standing on the roof you’ve just framed up. Only in his later years, when dad always asked to work on my projects, did I know that he too felt the fun.

USNR Aviation Electronics Technician 1967-1973
BS Civil Engineering, Stanford University 1973
General Contractor’s License, 1974
Professional Engineer’s License, 1977