Gordon Dean Wiley

Gordon Dean Wiley was born in Long Beach, California, December 16, 1929, to Willard and Dorothy Wiley. He had one sister, Barbara. The family relocated to Bakersfield, California in 1938 where Gordon was raised. From age 13, he worked primarily during summertime in the oil fields as weed cutter, roustabout, and then roughnecking on drilling rigs.

He attended local schools, Kern County Union High and Bakersfield College. He met Marie Huckabay during his senior year. They were married in February 1951. Gordon went on to the University of California and graduated in January 1952 with a Bachelor of Science degree as a Petroleum Engineer.

He was accepted at Officer Candidate School in the Navy and served three and a half years as an engineer officer, then Executive Officer on board an amphibious rocket launching ship during the last part of the Korean War and patrolling the North China Sea protecting friendly islands.

Discharged in November 1955, he then spent six years with Honolulu Oil Company in Taft, California as drilling foreman. His three children were born in Taft: Steven, Douglas and Laura. From 1961 to 1970 he was a drilling engineer at the Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas, Nevada drilling holes for the underground testing of atomic bombs. Back to the oil fields, he worked as a drilling and completion engineer from offshore platforms in the Santa Barbara Channel to the Rocky Mountains for Sun Oil Company. He went to consulting in 1975 and continued the same work all over the Rockies out of Denver, Colorado.

The oilfields essentially shut down in 1984, and Gordon returned to live in Las Vegas and worked as an estimator for Addison Construction, a building contractor, and then retired at the end of 1993. Marie, his wife of 42 years, had died in May 1993.

He married Katherine “Kitty” Glover, a longtime friend since 1962, in February 1997, living in Las Vegas until 2003. They traveled in a motorhome and bought a lot in an RV park in Birch Bay, Washington and then a house in Casa Grande, Arizona, traveling back and forth for ten years. They left Casa Grande in 2014 to live full time in the motorhome, spending summers in Washington and winters in Arizona at Emerald Cove.

Kitty passed away in the spring of 2016. Gordon continued to travel between Arizona and Washington each year, living in his motorhome and working for two years as a summer camp host at Washington state parks. Gordon died on December 22, 2019, shortly after celebrating his 90th birthday.

Though Gordon has departed, his memory lives on in the hearts and minds of all who knew him. We will remember evenings of laughter over light beers and competitive card games, as Gordon joked with his trademark sharp wit and shared stories from a life lived well. From tales of his teenage adventures hitchhiking to Yosemite National Park, to his travels across the West well into old age, we are reminded to never stop exploring. Through remembrances of his distinguished military service and decades of dedicated and brilliant work, we reflect on the values of duty, loyalty and ingenuity he stood for each day of his life. And as his family remembers his two successful marriages, and carries the memories of our lives with Gordon as our father and grandfather, we will forever treasure the man whose values of love, humility and humor helped each of us become the people we are today.