Dean Lane Whelan (74) was born on March 12, 1948, in Fort Collins, Colorado. He passed away peacefully in his sleep from heart complications in Seattle, WA on January 16, 2023.
Growing up in Fort Collins, Dean spent much of his childhood camping, fishing and skiing on the lakes of Northern Colorado. As a hard-working and energetic young boy, along with his brothers and sisters, Dean delivered the Coloradoan Newspaper for many years to the citizens of NW Fort Collins.
Dean was an exceptional student, always eager to learn above and beyond what was required. He first became interested in computers in High School in the mid-1960s working for a research scientist at CSU helping with a computer that filled an entire room with punched cards. He graduated from Poudre High School, Fort Collins, in 1966, as co-Valedictorian, where he participated in football, track, wrestling and played the trumpet in band and orchestra.
Having scored near perfect on the Math SATs, Dean was accepted to MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Boston on a full-scholarship where he was honored to work on the Boston Arm medical research team helping develop robotics for prosthetics. In 1972 as part of his work to obtain his Master’s in Electrical Engineering he built a computer that he later had to take apart because “the parts belonged to friends who needed them back.”
Between getting his Bachelor’s and Master’s after a year and a half of courting, he married Barbara Braden, the future mother of his children and wife for the next decade. After finishing school, he and Barb took an adventure trip of camping through the Sierra Nevada Trails in California and the West Coast Trail in Vancouver, BC. This, and his being offered a prestigious position at Boeing, convinced them to move to Seattle where they had their two Children, which Dean would later tell countless people were “the best thing I ever did with my life.”
One of Dean’s greatest accomplishments at Boeing was to have led a team of engineers to devise a system bringing the design of plane configurations from analog to digital, saving the company billions of dollars and countless hours in retrofitting planes in the 1980s.
Dean loved dancing, water-skiing, hiking and watching movies. He had a passion for patterns and trying to make sense of the world through a scientific lens. He also had a strong desire to help save the endangered species of planet earth. He spent much of his retirement where his first passions started with trying to better understand computers and how they can help in our daily lives.
Dean is survived by his Children, Tonya of Sedona, AZ and Seth (Cecily) of Seattle WA. His siblings Debbie Comegys of Severance, CO; Danette (Doyle) Gardner of Fort Collins, CO; and Dorita (Bob) Gray of Ferndale, WA, twelve nieces and nephews and countless great niblings.
Dean is preceded in death by his parents, Jonathan LeVon and Aili Johanna [Hautala] Whelan, his older brothers, Dennis and Donald, his brother-in-law, Bob Comegys, and a grandnephew, Dartanian.
There is no service planned at this time.