Details:
Wells Fargo Advisors, along with co-sponsors the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Lifelong Learning Institute of Washington University in St. Louis, hosted the Second-Half Champions Awards on October 19, 2009 to honor the achievements of four citizens who are spending the second half of their life in ways not traditionally associated with retirement. The recipients were honored for their significant contributions to society or the achievement of ambitious personal goals after the age of 50. Second-Half Champions begin new ambitious endeavors and make positive changes in their lives, communities and in the lives of others.
One of the four honorees was Dr. Dale Besterfield, an alumnus of the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis.
At 79 years old, Dale Besterfield has lived a life full of professional and personal accomplishments, including raising three terrific children, retiring as a distinguished professor or engineering at Southern Illinois University, authoring three books (one of which has been translated into Chinese and Spanish), working with Engineers Without Borders, and being a fellow of the American Society for Quality and earning their Grant Medal. You would think that in light of that resumé, Dale would have looked forward to a little downtime following his retirement from academia at age 61—quite the contrary.
Dale spent the first three years of his retirement traveling and doing consulting work, though he was restless and wanted to do more. In 1994, at a trivia night at Central Presbyterian Church, Dale not only met his future wife, Gloria, but he also learned about some of the mission trips that Central Presbyterian was sponsoring. Dale took his first mission trip to Haiti in 1995, and it was then that he fell in love with helping others. Since then he and Gloria have joined mission groups to build houses with bunk beds in Guatemala and participate in mission activity in Honduras, Peru, Russia, India, England and Belgium.
Dale believes his successful career blessed him with the funds to finance his mission trips and the skills and innovation to create better living conditions for the poor. For the past three years, Dale has been designing, building and delivering wood-burning cook stoves for families and schools in Guatemala and Uganda. Typical stoves in these nations require a lot of wood and result in unhealthy, sooty living conditions. During each of his trips to deliver a stove, Dale teaches a member of the local community to construct more stoves with the funds he leaves behind.
Closer to home, this Second-Half Champion continues his mission activity through his church by volunteering with Presbyterian Disaster Relief in Louisiana and Mississippi and participated in the rehab of a day-care center in East St. Louis. He currently is organizing volunteers to work with the city of East St. Louis to help them in their clean-up efforts. And behind him every step of the way is Gloria, the pretty blond he met in church, who is incredibly proud of the way Dale serves others with all the energy of a very young, very selfless man.
This article originally appeared in Second-Half Champions Awards program.
Abstract:
Dale Besterfield traveled to Honduras, Peru, Russia, India, England, Russia and Guatemala for mission trips.
DateAdded: 12/30/2009