Click here to view his service.
Don will be interred at Ft. Logan National Cemetery on December 15 at 1:15 pm.
Donald Eugene Lloyd was born in McPherson, KS on April 10,1932, to Ivan and Annabelle Lloyd. He grew up in Wichita, KS, graduating from Wichita High School East in 1950. He attended Kansas University under a Navy ROTC scholarship, graduating in 1954 with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, and a Navy commission as an Ensign.
He chose to fulfill his Navy commitment as a pilot, and applied for flight training upon graduation, completing flight training in 1955. He then received orders to the Training Command, as a primary flight instructor in basic training at Pensacola, where he remained until he left the Navy in 1958. Don was employed at Beech Aircraft Corp. in Wichita upon leaving the Navy, and then at The Martin Company in Littleton in 1959, where he worked as a group engineer in ground support equipment for the Titan I, II, and III missile systems. He moved to Ball Brothers Research Corp. in Boulder in 1967, (subsequently Ball Aerospace Systems), where he was employed as a project manager for 27 years until his retirement in 1994. He managed programs producing the Viking Orbiter camera system, the Cosmic Background Explorer Dewar, and the coronagraph replacement electronics for the Solar Maximum Repair Mission.
Though he had known Patricia Olds all their lives, they became romantically serious several months before Don graduated from Kansas University. They eloped in June 1954, right after Don’s graduation, and were married at the Methodist Church in Dalhart, TX, and honeymooned in Manitou Springs.
Shortly after their return Don had to depart for Pensacola, FL, to his first Navy duty assignment. Pat then returned to Tulsa to finish her nurses training. Pat and Don’s first 13 long months of marriage were then spent apart, with Pat continuing in St. John’s School of Nursing in Tulsa and Don at NAS Pensacola, but they kept a close relationship through daily letters and over the highways on holidays and even long weekends (a 17-hour trip one way by car, which Don drove non-stop)! Their adopted song was “Little Things Mean a Lot”, which exemplified their mutual love and guiding principles through their following 62 happy years of marriage.
Pat was finally able to join Don in 1955, when she graduated from nursing school, which occurred within a week of when Don received his Navy pilot’s wings, and was reassigned to Pensacola Naval Air Station as a flight instructor. Their first daughter, Kathleen, was born at the NAS Pensacola Naval Hospital a year later in 1956, and their second daughter, Christine, was born in 1959 at Porter Hospital in Denver, after they had left the Navy and moved to Littleton. Pat and Don moved to Boulder in 1967, joining St. Paul’s UMC the following year.
After joining St. Paul’s UMC in 1968, Don served several years as chairman of the Trustees and then the Administrative Council, before becoming chairman of the Finance Committee, which he continued for the next 20 years.
Don is survived by two daughters, Kathleen Lloyd of Boulder and Christine [Edgar] Schwartz of Parker, CO, granddaughter Tiara [Mike] Pearce and great granddaughter Cali of Aurora, CO, grandson Wyatt (Vicki) Schwartz, great grandsons Adam and Michael Schwartz, and great granddaughter Evelyn of Greeley, CO.
No comments:
Post a Comment