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Alan H. Robinson Corvallis, OR QCWA # 31774 Chapter 108 |
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He was the eldest of four children of Walter Hadley Robinson and Mariana Webster Robinson.
Growing up, he enjoyed his summers camping in the Adirondacks, California, and Washington. He raced sailboats with this father on the Chesapeake Bay and Columbia river. He built cars and ran track in high school in Tunkhannock, PA, graduating in 1951.
Following his father and grandparents, Louis and Caroline Robinson, he graduated Swarthmore College in 1955. He flew A-4 jets in the U.S. Marines, serving from 1956 to 1960, attaining the rank of Captain. While in flight school at Pensacola, FL, he met and married Grace. He earned his PhD in Nuclear Engineering from Stanford University in 1965, with the goal of transitioning from coal burning, which he saw as destructive to his home countryside of Pennsylvania.
He was hired by the new Nuclear Engineering program at Oregon State University in 1966. He helped shape the Health Physics and Nuclear Engineering programs at OSU and chaired the department from 1987 to 1996.
Consulting for the government at the Hanford Site and other nuclear installations, he lobbied against the closing of the Trojan Nuclear Power in the early 1990s.
He retired from OSU in 1995.
He was a member of the Benton County Amateur Radio Emergency Service, and a volunteer crime analyst for the Corvallis police department.
He is survived by his wife, Kay Conrad Robinson, a resident of Conifer House; sons from marriage to the late Grace Robinson: Alan Robinson Jr. of San Diego, CA, and William N. Robinson (Julie Dolan) of Atlanta, GA, and grandson, Thomas Robinson of Atlanta; stepchildren, Shauna Smith of Portland and Jim Smith (Kelly Lomax) of Lake Oswego from his marriage to the late Gail Smith Robinson; brothers, Myles Robinson (Elinor) of Aberdeen, WA, Jared Robinson of Camano Island, WA; half-sister, Caroline Sanders (Lee) of Seattle, WA.