It wasn’t exactly as he had planned, but Ken Shetlar won’t complain.
Shetlar, 62, has been phased into “semi-retirement” by management of Shafer, Kline & Warren, the Lenexa-based civil engineering firm that has a regional office in Iola.
Shetlar, a civil engineer for 40 years, will now work on an “as-needed” basis.
“I worked 17 hours last week,” he said. When the snowstorm arrived Tuesday morning, he felt comfortable staying at home keeping the wood fire stoked.
In his rule book, Shetlar had planned to work until 65 — two-and-a-half more years. But when he sold his stock in the company at the end of 2010, SKW took that as a way to ease Shetlar from his position of office manager. Shetlar said he sold the stock on the advice that capital gains taxes were due to increase. That has since been delayed, when President Obama signed the tax relief package in early December.
Now he’s paid by the hour. “It’s been since before college I’ve had an hourly wage,” he said.
ELEVATIONS, blueprints, specs: It’s all in Shetlar’s blood.
As a sophomore at Iola High School, Shetlar began working for the architectural firm Brink & Dunwoody, where his father, Charles, worked as an architect. It’s there that the young Shetlar became intrigued with the intricacies of the large 2-foot by 3-foot drawings that showed a plat’s elevations and waterways.
During the summers he worked on road survey crews. Highway 54 from LaHarpe to Moran was one such job.
Shetlar graduated from IHS in 1966. From there he attended what was then Iola Junior College, graduating in 1968, continuing at Kansas State University where he graduated in 1970 with a degree in civil engineering.
That was also the same year he and his wife, the former Ann Dunlap, were married. Ken and Ann met at Brink & Dunwoody where Ann worked afternoons as a secretary while she, too, attended the junior college and later moved on to K-State.
“I had to work a year to save up for university,” she said.
Ann, also 62, grew up on a farm southeast of LaHarpe in modest circumstances. Their home lacked plumbing all the years they lived there up through her days as a student at the junior college.
“I remember telling of my childhood days in a sociology class at K-State,” Ann said. “A girl looked at me, wide-eyed, and said she couldn’t believe someone in her generation lived in such primitive conditions.”
Ann remembers how there would always be a bucket of water from which to drink, the cold of the outhouse on a winter’s night, and the pot-bellied stove they fed coal to warm the house.
It wasn’t until she was a teenager that they got their first telephone. And that was a 13-party line. “Eight-four-F-eight,” was their “code,” she said, which translated to one long ring followed by three short ones to signal the call was for the Dunlap house.
Ann attended Bethel School for elementary school. She was the only person in her grade. From there she attended Zillah, just east of Humboldt. “That was big time,” she said, referring to having classmates. She attended high school in Elsmore.
“We were a ‘metropolitan’ family,” she said. “We lived outside of LaHarpe; banked in Humboldt; shopped in Iola; went to school in Elsmore; and had our telephone service from LaHarpe.”
AFTER K-STATE, the two settled in Iola, where Ken took on with his dad. By then G.A. Dunwoody had retired, but John Brink held on.
“He was quite a force,” Shetlar recalled of the big Native American who also farmed outside of Le Roy. His daily attire included his Stetson and cowboy boots. “If he liked you, he let you know. Same if he didn’t.”
“He was also a big Democrat,” which had something to do with his appointment as state architect during the term of Gov. George Docking, 1957-1961.
Shetlar recalled the telling of Brink’s first day on the job in Topeka.
“He walked into Docking’s office, sat down and propped his feet up on the governor’s desk. On the bottom of his boots, hung manure,” Shetlar said. “Then he fired everyone on staff, and appointed his own crew.”
Brink was the principal architect of the Eisenhower Museum in Abilene and GSP residence hall on the campus of the University of Kansas. Locally, he designed Allen County Hospital and the Bowlus Fine Arts Center.
Brink retired in 1974. By then Clem Griffith had come on board as a civil engineer and it was later renamed Shetlar Griffith Shetlar, PA. Griffith, 93, and Charles Shetlar, 83, both continue to live in Iola.
In 1995, Ken and Charles Shetlar sold the firm to Shafer, Kline & Warren. Griffith had since retired. Charles Shetlar used the transaction as a time to step down as well.
Highway and street projects, water and sewer systems, have been Ken Shetlar’s main responsibilities. He worked on the construction of Highway 169 from Iola to Humboldt in 1974. That project took two years.
He also was instrumental in the construction of Critzer Dam west of Mound City.
Recent street work in Iola that he has overseen includes the widening of Cottonwood Street, Miller Road and Kentucky Avenue.
Besides designing roads, dams and water structures, Shetlar has a critical role in securing their funding.
“The most important part, is getting the money,” he said.
Shetlar works hand in hand with city administrators, county and city commissions and rural water districts in seeking the best matches between their projects and funding sources. Typical sources come through grants and revolving loans through state agencies such as the Kansas Department of Transportation, Kansas Department of Health and Environment and Community Development Block Grants.
Ann relishes the fact that Ken will now be home most evenings. The bulk of his presentations to city and county officials occurred at their evening meetings all across southeast Kansas.
THE RECESSION has had a big impact on the engineering profession, Shetlar said. A few years back Shafer, Kline & Warren had as many as 200 employees. Today it has closer to 160. The Iola office is down from 18 employees to nine.
Shetlar said some of the layoffs had to do with the company’s ventures into private development of shopping centers and housing developments.
“That market is gone now,” he said.
With the regional economy slowly gaining steam, he said public projects are on the rise.
The company has seven offices other than in Iola. Two are in the Kansas City area. The others are in Macon, Columbia and Chillicothe, Mo., Tulsa and Houston.
Danny Coltrane will assume some of Shetlar’s previous clients, Shetlar said, though he will remain based in Tulsa.
A reception recognizing Shetlar’s service to SKW will from 2 to 4 p.m. Feb. 9 at the Iola Senior Center, 204 N. Jefferson.
