PLSO The Oregon Surveyor July/August 2021

Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon | www.plso.org 9 Member Spotlight SPOTLIGHT Member By Vanessa Salvia Daniel Hoekstra Statewide Land Surveying Dan Hoekstra’s tournament bridge team in a national event where they placed third. D an Hoekstra became a land sur- veyor before he even realized that he was going to become a land surveyor. “I still remember the first time I got introduced to triangles, sines, and cosines, and the Pythagorean theo- rem,” Hoekstra recalls. “I thought, this is pretty cool stuff. The rest of it was kind of a series of accidents.” At that point, he was 15 years old, in high school trigonometry and still liv- ing in Holland, where he grew up. After high school, he joined the Marine Corps. They give Marines tests to determine their skills and assign their basic du- ties. “I was assigned to the artillery, and then the second night somebody walked through the barracks saying, ‘Does any- body know trigonometry?’” That landed him in fire direction control, which includes determining coordinates of enemy positions. After he left the service and was looking for a summer job, Hoekstra says he re- ally had no idea that there was a civilian application for his coordinating skills, but once he mentioned that he had some surveying experience from the military, that helped him get a job with the Bu- reau of Public Roads. “So for a few years, I was surveying to support my schooling, but then in 1970 I started working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and that’s where I built the first part of my career,” Hoekstra says. In 1979, Hoekstra started his own com- pany, which lasted for only one year, then went to work for David Evans and Associates, also in Portland, where he was introduced to GPS by Jim Griffis, which Hoekstra says enriched his ca- reer. “I became the GPS field survey manager and I really fell in love with GPS,” Hoekstra says. “Itwas aneye-opening,mind- expanding manner of surveying.” He worked there for 15 years, then went back to work for the Corps of Engineers for another 10 years, then retired from there 10 years ago and became associ- ated with Statewide Land Surveying. He got his license while working at Ginther Engineering. In 1981, Hoekstra went to work for George Cathey, who died a few years ago. Hoekstra encouraged Cathey to take his job at the Corps of Engineers when he retired in 2009, and Hoekstra says Cathey enjoyed it more than he thought he would. Hoekstra also did a short stint at Cooper, party chiefing at the Eastside light rail project. Hoekstra says surveying is the kind of profession that you either grow to love or you decide it’s not for you. “It’s not the sort of thing that you just sort of like,” he says. “And I loved it. As I got more expe- rienced and gained more understanding of what surveyors do, it just got more in- teresting as time went on.” Hoekstra moved to this country in 1958 from Holland, with about a year of high school left. His mother, Eline, was Jew- ish, and during World War II his family had to go into hiding. In 1956, an upris- ing in Hungary reinvigorated Hoekstra’s parents to continue to try to get a Visa to come to the United States. “After the war, they were hoping to be able to do that, but America was not all that keen on taking a lot of immigrants at that time, so it took quite a while,” he says. continues T