Grateful Engineer Gives Back in Two Ways

John and JoAnn Bolender

John and JoAnn Bolender

John Bolender can look out the picture window of the home where he has lived outside of Seattle for the past 55 years and see snowcapped Mount Rainier, the engineering marvel of the new Tacoma Narrows bridge (a previous version of which fell apart in a wind storm) and the huge container ships arriving in Puget Sound—some from Korea each carrying as many as 6,700 new cars.

From his window he can’t quite see The Boeing Company, where he worked as a design engineer for 38 years after earning his degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1951, nor can he see CenturyLink Field, where UW’s Russell Wilson “scampers around in the backfield and does his magic” as quarterback of the Super Bowl Champion Seattle Seahawks. It’s a good life John Bolender has lived since Boeing recruited him right off the UW campus, and that’s why he has established three charitable gift annuities with the University of Wisconsin Foundation and recently made a significant gift from the combined IRA belonging to him and his late wife, JoAnn, also a UW graduate with a degree in home economics education.

“JoAnn and I were talking in early 2013 about making a gift to the university,” Bolender recalls. “Up to that time we had done things I considered fairly small; it was the best we could do while putting four kids through college. Then she was gone very suddenly and two IRAs were combined. I took the required minimum distribution and was able to give that to the Foundation. I was taught that when I have a little more than I need I should be doing something to help others.” That “something” was to support the alma mater to which he says he owes his career.

“I grew up in a family that was not very prosperous. It was touch-and-go for me to go to college,” Bolender says. “I looked at the catalog and decided the thing I was most interested in was engineering. Then my high school principal found a scholarship from a generous Chicago lawyer. It gave me $235 per semester—which covered all my books and tuition. Can you imagine that today? I thought I would design manure spreaders for John Deere, but the Boeing offer included a draft deferment. So I cast my fate with them, though I had never been west of Dubuque.”

Then John Bolender referred to four letters he has received from UW students so far this year. “They are thanking me for easing their financial problems,” he says. “I understand that, currently helping some of my grandchildren through college.”

Bolender made the IRA gift unrestricted, “going to whatever the university decides is the best employment.” The charitable gift annuities are for the specific colleges that he and JoAnn attended.

“She never quite got to be a teacher because we began having children,” says Bolender, listing his daughter and three sons, all successful professionals. “But the family benefitted from what she learned.”

Bolender says he is grateful to UW for “providing the rigor of the engineering profession.” It served him well at Boeing, where design engineers go to a new project every two years. He worked on military planes, commercial planes, missiles, satellites and the international space station, and he was the lead engineer of the 747 freighter system that can load 110 tons of cargo in 30 minutes.

“Our children have JDs and master’s degrees, but that bachelor of science was enough for me,” he says. “I enjoyed great satisfaction being a design engineer.”

Now retired for 25 years, John Bolender cruises around in his 1966 Corvair, hangs out with his kids and grandkids and rattles around the home he and JoAnn built in 1959 after a short tour as a Naval Aviator. He is even considering an additional gift in support of the University of Wisconsin Foundation as an alternative to trying to split its value among
the children: that home with the spectacular view.

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