Person:Austin Dill (1)

Austin Glenn Dill, born November 27, 1922 at St. Anthony’s hospital in Oklahoma City, OK. Raised at 419 NW 20th in Oklahoma City until around 1928 or 1929, when they moved to San Antonio, TX. Then Glenn, Zelma, and Austin moved to Fort Worth, TX for a year, then Kansas City for a year, then returned to Oklahoma City when Austin was in the 8th grade, around 1935-36. During those years, he became an Eagle Scout. He graduated from Classen High School in 1940 and then went to Oklahoma University, and enrolled in Naval ROTC in 1940 and in Mechanical Engineering. He graduated and was commissioned into the Navy on the same day in February 1944, an accelerated graduation schedule to get college men into the war effort. In 1944, he went for submarine training, first in San Diego for 3 months, then for 3 months in New London, Connecticut. While there, at a party, he met Peggy Blocker, then a student at Connecticut College for Women, whom he would ultimately marry. Austin then went to the South Pacific to serve on the USS Aucilla, a Navy oil-tanker during WW2. He stayed on in Tokyo bay for 3 months after the war to finish up operations, then sailed back to the states in May 1946. By that time, he had also become a private pilot, certified on March 10, 1947, but there were no commercial piloting jobs after the war because of the large number of military pilots returning from the war. Austin worked for Standolind Oil Company for 3 months. He worked as an engineer (ultimately senior engineer) for Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, from 1946 to 1983, when he retired. He worked in the architectural department designing buildings for the phone company. Then he was involved in various phases of communication engineering including toll, local switching, PBX and Plant Extension throughout Oklahoma. During the Korean war, Austin and Peggy and their two children (Ken and Jim) returned to Navy duty in Orange, TX in 1949-50. Austin married Margaret Elise (Peggy) Blocker on November 2, 1946 in Maplewood, New Jersey, the home of her family at that time. Austin retired a Lieutenant Commander from the Navy in November, 1982. Austin had a stroke November 21, 2007, and died at home December 6, 2007. His funeral, originally scheduled for December 10, had to be postponed because of the worst icestorm in Oklahoma history. His funeral was held instead on December 12, 2007, attended by a Navy color guard and a 21-gun salute.

Austin's Obituary: Austin Glenn Dill died Thursday, December 6, 2007, at age 85. Born November 27, 1922 in Oklahoma City to Glenn Wolfinger and Zelma Ethel Vandergrift Dill. His grandfather, Judge David S. Dill, a pioneer who made the Land Run into Oklahoma Territory in 1893, is who Dill City, OK is named after. After spending his youth in San Antonio, Ft. Worth, and Kansas City, he returned to the 8th grade at Harding Jr. High and graduated from Classen High in 1940. He graduated from OU with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a commission as Ensign in the USN in February 1944. Austin served on the USS Aucilla (AO56) in the South Pacific, as well as serving for 3 months in Tokyo Bay, both during and after the signing of the surrender by Japan; he returned home in 1946. Later, as a member of the Navy Active Reserve, Austin was recalled to active duty in order to activate ships for the Korean War. He retired from Active Reserve as Lt. Commander in 1882. In September 1946, he went to work in the Engineering Department of Southwestern Bell Telephone Company and in October 1946, married Margaret 'Peggy' Elise Blocker. Son Kenneth A. was born in 1947 and James D. was born 1949. Both boys graduated as valedictorians from Putnam City High School, and earned Ph.D.'s from MIT and Harvard, respectively. Ken and Jim, both live with their wives and 5 children near San Francisco. 'Peggy' died of cancer in December 1979. Austin married Billie Ruth Young in January 1981 and they jointly retired from Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. in 1983. After many happy tours, cruises, and trips to see all of the children and grandchildren and a lot of partying and gardening, Billie died of multiple causes in June 2001. He continued his love of cruising and travel throughout the world and was lucky enough to find a traveling companion, Ms. Mathilde McAllister, an Austrian war bride, who also enjoyed the same until his death. His favorite saying was, 'you only have one life to live but if you're as fortunate as I was, once is enough'! In lieu of flowers, the family suggests memorials be sent to your favorite charity.

The eulogy given by Austin's son Ken at Austin's funeral:

My dad was a wonderful and decent man. I loved him very much. I will miss him very much. He was the best possible Dad forme.

I believe Dad defined himself by three aspects of his life. The first was his upbringing as an Oklahoma dust-bowl depression-era kid in the 1920’s and ‘30’s. His father had lost everything in the Great Depression of 1929. Afterwards, his family kicked around Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas doing chicken farming. But from those ashes rose my Dad, a man who was fiercely self-reliant, resourceful, hard-working, an Eagle Scout, and a man who became self-taught and masterful at finances. His deep concerns about money were never driven by an interest for material goods. They were driven by an abiding need for a safety net for his family, so we would not have to go through what he did.

The second life-defining event for Dad was his service in the Navy in World War 2. The defining values of the time were personal modesty and self-sacrifice. It was a time when he met my Mom and when he developed deep life-long friendships. He named me after one of his Navy buddies, Kenneth Sane. It was then, I believe, that people – his friends and loved ones – came to matter more to him than anything else.

Third, my Dad aimed to be the best father he could possibly be. He was a boy scout leader, a baseball coach, taught us how to fix bicycles, built projects with us, and took us swimming most summer weekends. He would set a picnic table on its side as a backstop, and would teach me to bat a baseball by throwing his amazingly fast underhanded pitches. He had been a pitcher in a fast-pitch softball league. He pitched to me almost every night for many summers. (Because of it, I later became a little league home run champion!)

I want to reflect on two aspects of Dad. First, he was a master of logic, reason, rationality, and applied smarts. He didn’t suffer other people’s stupidity well, including from my brother and me. His favorite remark was: “Use your head for something besides a hat rack!”. He gave us little placards that reminded us to Think or Plan Ahead. He wrote letters to companies to tell them when they were doing dumb things. He knew how everything worked. He could fix almost anything that was broken. My greatest thrill was on a Saturday morning when he would ask me to help him fix the washing machine, or other broken things.

Second, he was compassionate, always ready to help anyone, a listener, a doer, and generous to a fault. He always had time to help people. After Billie died, Dad paid to put one of her granddaughters through college. Once, after my brother and I left home, he and Mom spent a year raising a tough challenging kid who was the ward of the court, because someone knew Dad would have both the toughness and the willingness to do it, and that he was an excellent parent. He spent time in Junior Achievers, an organization in which adults help kids learn about business and the economics of life. When Southwestern Bell, the Oklahoma telephone company at which he worked, had strikes of the phone company operators, who were then always females, my father and other company men would man the switchboards in small towns in Oklahoma. Dad would always answer with a gruff and gravelly voiced: “Dill”. But he was so friendly with people, that the locals got to like him quite a bit. He would go out before sunrise to hunt crows on peanut farms in rural Oklahoma; the farmers so much appreciated his pest-control efforts that they would give him huge bags of peanuts. (He loved nuts.) Once he bought me a complicated electronics kit for Christmas – it was something that I had always wanted. He and I worked for days building it. But I was frustrated when, at the end, it didn’t work. The next morning, he told me that it was working now; he had spent the whole night fixing our mistakes.

Dad lived a good and full life. He would have wanted us all to know that he really enjoyed the life he was given. He would have wanted his passing to be a happy occasion, not a sad one. And, he would have wanted to thank you all very deeply for being here today and for the richness you added to his life.

1. ↑ United States. 1930 U.S. Census Population Schedule. (National Archives Microfilm Publication T626)
   Year: 1930; Census Place: San Antonio, Bexar, Texas; Roll: 2299; Page: 19A; Enumeration District: 229; Image: 500.0.