Dale Marvin Age - 88 - Los Alamos Holm

Dale Marvin Holm\r\nJanuary 23, 1924 – November 19, 2012\r\n By his own words, Dale lived life without any serious regrets. \r\n Dale was born in Portland Oregon as the youngest child of John Elza and Marjorie Holm. When his father died unexpectedly in 1929 at the beginning of the Great Depression, his family struggled, trying to run small grocery stores and eventually going on "relief" with a monthly income of $37. His mother remarried in 1938. Dale completed the aviation program at Benson Polytechnic High School, taking with him many of the lessons that played an important role in his later life. \r\n An active Boy Scout, Dale reached the rank of Eagle Scout with two palms. With that experience his grandmother sent him to Boy Scout camp where he learned about horses and their care, all of which were very important to him. In 1941 while still in high school, he taught horseback riding at that same camp. When he returned years later with his own children to visit the camp, the deep meaning of that experience, and his joy in sharing that experience was evident.\r\n With good grades at Benson High School, and with the country headed toward war, Dale was excused from classes a few weeks before his January 1942 graduation to work in the war effort. After working for a few months, he joined the Navy in April 1942. Serving mostly in the amphibious forces, he was a member of an underwater demolition unit when the war ended. \r\n Immediately after being discharged in January 1946, he began attending a local college, and then transferred to Lewis and Clark College where his sister Jeanne was enrolled. His reasons for transferring were to try out for the Lewis and Clark ski team, and to meet more girls at school. Although he was getting benefits under the GI Bill, he also sold cooking utensils and worked at a boy’s detention home to supplement his GI Bill. With some of that supplemental income, Dale bought a surplus Navy panel truck and converted it to a camping vehicle that he used to make a tour of the west coast and western Canada with a friend. They worked at odd jobs through the trip when their money ran short.\r\n His future wife Molly was a skiing friend of his sister Jeanne, and he first met Molly at Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood in Oregon in the Ski Patrol first aid room where Dale lay with a broken leg. He became a member of the Lewis and Clark College ski team, and received an athletic letter during a year he took off from working. He also taught skiing on the weekends. At Lewis and Clark, Dale took the usual courses and majored in physics, but he also took psychology and art. Molly and Dale were married 3 years later on June 5, 1949, the same day Dale got his BS degree in physics.\r\n With very little money, Dale and Molly took a very inexpensive honeymoon to Mexico in the surplus Navy panel truck (the “honeymoon cottage”) that Dale had modified for "hippy type" camping and travel with two single bunks. As a special treat, they stayed for two nights in motels and spent perhaps $200 total including souvenirs.\r\n Dale decided to continue with graduate school at Oregon State College in Corvallis, and Molly became secretary in the Physics Department. Since Molly was more important in the Department than Dale, he was known as "mister Molly". After Dale finished the course work for his PhD, they moved to Los Alamos in 1952 to complete his doctoral thesis in the Physics Division as a research assistant.\r\n They used the same "honeymoon cottage" traveling to Los Alamos. Dale promised Molly, who was seven months pregnant, a motel room when they got to Santa Fe. But it was the night of Zozobra, and there were "no room in the inns” for them. So they had to spend the night in the valley in the truck. \r\n Once in town they stayed with Cleo and Mary Byers, friends from Oregon State College. Eventually the rules of the Laboratory "point system" changed and they qualified for a two bedroom Sundt with a robust cockroach population, near where the Mesa library stands today.\r\n Following graduation in 1957 and with a permanent job at the Lab, Dale became active in a group that wanted private housing. With that group of similarly motivated home builders, he spent 9 months demolishing an old tech area building and the "Ice House" from the ranch school to get materials for the house he designed and built. They moved into the house in September 1961, even though it was still unfinished and you could see through many of the walls. But as a courtesy to guests, they put a door on the bathroom for the first Thanksgiving dinner they had. After 4 man-years of Dale’s efforts and one man year of hired labor, the house was declared officially finished in 1971.\r\n After finishing his thesis in the Physics Division, Dale worked in the Reactor Division, with a nine month break in 1962 to participate in the last atmospheric testing as a crew member of an airborne diagnostic station. He was very proud that he was allowed to follow-his-nose in the reactor division and became a world leader in gamma scanning of reactor fuel elements, and trace elements analysis. He later transferred to the biophysics section of H-Division by offering to work for free to create some credentials with the severance pay from a K-Division reduction in force (RIF). The lab director decided to pay his salary for 9 months and Dale generated new money by demonstrating that they could make biological cells look like gamma-rays to the electronics and scan chromosomes that could be sorted into buckets. That demonstration made the H-Division genome project easier.\r\n Skiing was one of Dale’s loves, and he was involved in developing the runs at Sawyer's Hill and Pajarito Mountain. During that involvement, Dale taught Harold Agnew to ski and he must have taught him well, because Harold made Dale group leader of a new group "Agricultural Bioscience." Dale held that job for 8 years, and then transferred to the Intelligence Division. In the Intelligence Division for 8 years, he studied Soviet nuclear activities. He officially retired from the Lab in 1987 after a very fruitful career, but continued to consult four more years.\r\n Trained as a physicist, Dale was a generalist by inclination and became a master of many things. He was interested in everything and was an experimentalist to his core. He enjoyed challenges of all kinds. He had the courage to try and fail. He tried many things and failed at a few, although he never called it failure. He was very thrifty and hated to throw anything away. His workshop was very extensive and he could salvage and repair almost anything. He was an avid photographer with about 50,000 color slides of their travels and activities. He taught grafting to the Master Gardeners and his garden was on a Master Gardener's tour. He loved to work with his hands. He created his own business called HolmMade Art in 1969, where he did art of various forms and won some first prizes. The art included wood and metal sculpture, painting, and video documentaries for the National Council of State Garden Clubs, the Los Alamos National Lab, the Los Alamos Ski Club, the Historical Society, the Sheriffs Posse, weddings and PAC-8. With a good long term memory he became somewhat of a local historian, and he loved telling stories at any opportunity. Dale even had his own 15 minutes of fame in 1962, when the family was featured in a Look Magazine article about the southwest. \r\n Dale really enjoyed dancing with Molly. In the 1950s they were members of a dance group that met at the Lodge and had Cissy King (of the Lawrence Welk show) as one of the instructors. But Dale remembered almost nothing of what he was taught because they moved too fast. Years later, they started taking ballroom dancing lessons at Pajarito School, and when those teachers left town, they started taking lessons from Juan Manuel in Santa Fe. Dale found that by video recording his lessons, it provided a record that he could play at home to refresh his memory as many times as it took to learn the steps. In response to a request for a senior dance program to help others, Mary Swickard and Joe Monack offered to teach basic ballroom steps, but they wanted some help from Molly and Dale who they knew had been taking private lessons at the Strictly Dancing Studio in Santa Fe. After a few months Mary and Joe dropped out but Dale and Molly continued the class at the Community building. Because of his difficulty in learning to dance, he developed great empathy and patience with the students and could dance as either a man or woman. He enjoyed teaching and seeing the progress of his dance students. He was inducted to the Los Alamos Living Treasures in 2009 primarily because of teaching ballroom dancing. \r\n Few people knew that Dale was dyslectic, which required him to make many adaptations so he could survive in a world where reading is very important. He learned to read and even to read aloud which was a major achievement for him.\r\n After Dale retired, Molly decided she would retire from cooking and they struck a 50-50 deal: Dale would cook like he did on their honeymoon and make the mess, and Molly would clean up after him. \r\n Molly and Dale lived a happy and joyful life filled with many blessings and few problems and considered it a privilege to have spent much of their lives in Los Alamos. Dale was happy to say that Molly was his "Living Treasure" of more than 60 years. \r\n Dale is preceded in death by his brother John Holm, sister Jeanne Holm and grand-daughter Erin Bjorklund. Survivors include his beloved wife Molly; son Chris Holm with his wife Lesleigh; daughter Heidi Bjorklund with her husband Mark and their children Renee, Rachel and David, Renee’s husband Morgan Johnson and their son Peyton; and son Eric Holm with his wife Kalynne and their children Bryan and Jacob.\r\n A memorial service is planned for Saturday December 15 at Trinity on the Hill Episcopal Church in Los Alamos at 1 pm.

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