Awardees with 20-40 years of service >
Awardees with 10 years of service >
Staff members who have made an enduring career commitment to the University are honored each year through a series of celebrations. The Service Award Program, which recognizes those who have achieved career milestones, involved three events this year to honor nearly 1,700 staff members with 10 years or more of service. The final ceremony, honoring staffers with 30 or more years of service, was held Dec. 3 at the Michigan League. The Record annually profiles staff members who have dedicated 45 or more years to the University, lists those with 40, 30, and 20 years of service and publishes online a list of employees with 10 years of service. The list of honorees was provided by University Human Resources. For a complete list of all awardees go to www.hr.umich.edu/serviceawards.htm.
45 Years of Service
Donald Boettner, senior software engineer, Information Technology Central Services
Boettner says he was drawn to computers at an early age. In the winter semester of 1960, he took a computer class. He didn’t realize at the time that it was a graduate-level course and, of the hundred or so people taking it, he was the only sophomore. But he did well and was offered a job with the Computing Center at the end of the semester.
He was a temporary student employee operator and the only staff member on Monday nights. He began when computer code was punched on cards. He ran them through a special reader, printed output and operated the mainframe computer. Boettner became a regular employee after graduation. He has worked for the same unit during his entire time at U-M, but the unit changed its name “as required by fashion and politics” from the Computing Center, to Information Technology Division (ITD), ITD Research Systems and, finally, Information Technology Central Services.
Recently, his office was moved to its 13th location since he started working at U-M. His new space is in the basement of the School of Education building, two floors directly below where he attended sixth grade. He tells people that after “50 some years at the U, my net progress has been 20 feet straight down!”
Outside of work, he collects mystery/detective fiction, is a photographer and “hacks” at playing the classical organ. Boettner owns two organs, and if he practices a piece long enough, he says he can play it badly but “usually I don’t get that far.”
Charles Engle, senior systems research programmer, Information Technology Central
Services
As a graduate student in the early 1960s, Engle took a computer programming course, which led to a job at the Computing Center. He received a degree in 1966 and was offered a regular appointment the following spring. He has worked for that unit ever since, through a series of name changes.
Engle worked on the Michigan Terminal System (MTS), along with Donald Boettner, another 45-year honoree. In connection with MTS, he worked on a project that conducted the statewide vote tabulation for the news media during three election years in the early 1970s. Through the Computing Center, he served in various positions with the Amdahl Users Group. After MTS was decommissioned in the mid-1990s, he continued to help in providing computing services for the academic and research communities of the University.
He met his wife 40 years ago at the University. They have two daughters and one grandson. Their younger daughter received a graduate degree in 2004 from the School of Information.
His advice for new graduates starting their careers is to work somewhere where they are doing what they like. “In the long run, that will probably be more important than how much money you can earn,” he says.
L. V. Allen, medical technologist, U-M Hospitals, Special Chemistry
Allen declined to be interviewed for this article.
