Walter Olson

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Biography

Walter was born in 1917 in Royal Oak, Michigan. He was always known as Teddy or Ted. He spent most of his childhood in Baltimore, Maryland, though his family moved to Willmette, Illinois where he attended New Trier High School and Shaker Heights, Ohio, where he graduated from Shaker Heights High. He is a member of the Shaker High Hall of Fame.

He went to college at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. While there he married Marie Shultz, a classmate, and had a son, John Thomas. They divorced. He went on to study chemical engineering at Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, where he got his PhD.

After a brief stint with a local chemical company, he signed on with NACA in Cleveland in 1942, which later became NASA. There he met and married Ruth Barker, and they had a son in 1955, David Olson. After a 40-year career at NASA in which he was an aircraft and rocket chemist and the Director of Public Affairs and Technology Utilization, he became Director of the Build Up Greater Cleveland program.

An avid outdoorsman, who particularly loved sailing, he skied into his 70s and climbed a 14,000-foot peak in his 70s. He passed away in 1997 of Alzheimer's disease. ^[1]

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Sources

1. ↑ First-hand information as remembered by David Olson, Sunday, January 11, 2015. Replace this citation if there is another source.

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