Col. Dennis William Gilstad MC, USAF (Ret.)

Col. Dennis William Gilstad, USAF, MC (Ret.) was born outside Blackduck, Minnesota on Saturday 12 August 1939, to Mary H (Reed-Hill) Gilstad and Harold A Gilstad. He met his future wife Barbara Claytor in seventh grade in East Troy, Wisconsin and they kept in touch through his school years in Robbinsdale, Minnesota (class of ’57), and freshman year at the University of Minnesota. While a college freshman he received a nomination to the US Military Academy at West Point, New York from Hubert Humphrey, and he left Minnesota and reported to “Woo Poo” in the summer of 1958. He and Barbara were married in the West Point Chapel on Thursday 7 June 1962, the day following his graduation. He accepted a commission in the Air Force and proceeded to graduate school in electrical engineering, earning his masters degree at Texas A&M at College Station, Texas in 1964 where daughter Elizabeth was born. The family moved to San Bernardino, California, where he served in the Air Force’s Minuteman Missile Program at Norton Air Force Base – earning the coveted “Pocket Rocket” missile badge - and son John was born. The family then moved to West Lafayette, Indiana, where he completed his PhD in electrical engineering at Purdue University in 1970 under Professor King-Sun Fu, with a dissertation entitled “A Two-Dimensional Adaptive Model of a Human Operator in a Time Varying Control System.” Research and teaching followed in the electrical engineering department and the Seiler Laboratory at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In 1973 he made his first major career switch, securing release from the Air Force to attend medical school at the recently established Long School of Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, where he earned his MD in 1977. He then rejoined the Air Force in the Medical Corps and completed Anesthesia residency at Wilford Hall Medical Center under Dr Francis Joseph Dannemiller, earning board certification from the American Board of Anesthesiology in 1982. Following several years of Air Force anesthesia practice, aerospace research at Brooke School of Aerospace Medicine, and teaching at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda Maryland, he transitioned to the Air Force Reserve and worked as Director, Department of Bioengineering at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. In 1989 he made his second major career switch, enrolling in the University of Texas School of Law in Austin. He earned his JD in 1991 at aged 51, and went to work as an intellectual property attorney with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Feld, and later with Arnold White & Durkee. In his sixties, he transitioned to solo practice and invention, developing a portfolio of patents held jointly with Barbara that apply the control of high frequency vibration to practical problems of durability and efficiency of oil and gas well machinery. He died 5 June 2020 in San Antonio, aged 80. He was preceded in death by his parents and by his eldest brother, Harold A. Gilstad, Jr. In addition to his wife Barbara, he is survived by their children CAPT Elizabeth A. McGuigan, MC, USN (Ret.) and CAPT John R-H. Gilstad, MC, USN, (Colleen); his brothers Col. Claire J. Gilstad, USAF (Ret.) (Bonnie) and R. Scott Gilstad (Beverly); and grandchildren Dennis W. Gilstad, Shannon L. McGuigan, Kieran C. McGuigan, Mary C. Gilstad, and 1Lt Anlon P. McGuigan, USMC.

A memorial service will be held at Arlington.