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W. Austin Ashmore, P.M.
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Austin was raised by his mother Lottie and, from age five, step-father Raymond Wigley. Lottie Wigley now resides in Coquille Oregon. He was raised as an only child, but when he was reintroduced to his father in 1959, he found he had a half sister Jenny and half brother Billie. He became close to his father before his death, and is still close to Jenny.
Austin and his first wife Jacqueline were married in 1967. They had two children. Shari Louise, and Scott Edward. Jackie died in January, 1977 of cancer.
For four and 1/2 years Austin kept the family going as a single dad until he and Joanne were married on August 29, 1981. Austin became an instant father to her two daughters, Mishelle and Marlene.
Joanne was raised in a very strong Masonic family. Her father, Howard Hosley, was also a Hiram Award recipient in Foothill Lodge and a member of this Royal Arch Lodge until his death. Joanne herself is a majority member of Bethel 195, Oakland, International Order of Jobs Daughters.
Austin was born in Arkansas, briefly lived in Oklahoma and New York before moving to Oregon in 1948. Moved to California in 1965
High School Accomplishments:
Hobbies:
Austin grew up in the small mill town of Coquille, OR, population 5,000 in 1959, about 4,000 now. A few summer stints in the plywood and lumber mills convinced him that he wanted a more intellectually stimulating and less physically taxing career. More money would be nice, too.
Austin dropped out of his freshman year in college after suffering a trampoline accident. After recovery, he joined the Army in 1960, and attended the Construction Drafting School at Ft. Belvoir, VA. Typical of the Army, he never worked as a draftsman in the rest of his enlistment. He served in Korea and Ft. Bragg, NC as an illustrator, photographer, and data processing specialist. He was discharged in August, of 1963 as a Specialist 5 E-5. He missed being a Vietnam era vet by one year - a fact that does not bother him at all.
He returned to college after the army, and majored in zoology at Oregon State University. Between his sophomore and junior years, having run out of money, and not wanting to work for a year in the plywood mills where he had worked summers, he came to San Francisco looking to ship out as a merchant seaman. A labor dispute dried up hiring, but Varian Associates in Palo Alto advertised a job as draftsman. Austin only had jeans and flannel shirts to wear since he expected to be a merchant seaman, but he borrowed some slacks, bought a white shirt and a clip-on tie and interviewed for the job. The interviewer asked what experience Austin had, and he said none but the Army school. The interviewer then asked for samples, and said he didn't have any - he had never worked as a draftsman. He then asked a few technical questions about machine shop practices that Austin took his best guesses at answering. They must have been good guesses, because he was asked to make a sample drawing (after all, he did not have any samples). He was seated at a drafting board with a drafting machine, and told to copy a drawing. This was the first time Austin had ever seen a drafting machine (school had just used T-square and triangles) and this one was locked up. He stalled until the chief drafter left to answer his phone - then he started pushing buttons and flipping leavers. By the time the chief draftsman returned, Austin had figured out how to use a drafting machine - and the rest is history.
He worked as a draftsman and designer at Varian, Singer Business Machines, and the Cyclotron Corporation and then started his own company, Mechanical Design Services. Over the last 18 years he has contracted through MDS or other companies, all over the East Bay and Silicon Valley. One of those jobs was at the Clorox Technical Center, where he met Joanne.
Austin's last job was working on his third assignment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he is the lead mechanical designer on the HIRIS program. HIRIS stands for Hyper-spectral Infrared Imaging Spectrometer. Security prevents description of the project. He just simply describes it as a device that would tell if Saddam's factory was really making baby food.