Douglas Carl Draper

Douglas Carl Draper passed away October 2, 2024 in Portland, Oregon. He was 85.

Doug was born on March 9, 1939 in St. Louis, Missouri to Grace and John Draper.

There he enjoyed playing baseball with his friends and being around his extended family. In 1951 the family moved to Monrovia, California where Doug and his sister, Joan, completed their schooling. He graduated from Monrovia-Duarte High School in 1956.

Doug couldn’t get enough of the sun, and he headed to the University of Arizona in Tucson where he completed his undergraduate studies. He followed in the footsteps of his grandfather by earning a degree in electrical engineering. While in school he worked serving food in a sorority house where he learned a lot about proper etiquette.

Doug’s first job out of college was at Aerojet in Azusa, California where he worked on torpedoes. Around this time, Doug’s love of travel and adventure took hold with a road trip to Baja California and other explorations. Part of his time at Aerojet he spent working at a torpedo workshop in Bremerton, Washington.

In the mid-sixties Doug was hired by a company in Dobbs Ferry, New York. The job involved a good amount of international travel throughout Europe and the Caribbean which he enjoyed.

The most significant part of the move to New York is that it led him to his future wife, Deanna who was there teaching French at a local high school. The two met at a Halloween party. Deanna, her close friend Peggy, their friend Pedro from Brazil, and Doug enjoyed many good times together in New York. Somewhere along the way, Doug and Deanna fell in love.

Doug left New York in 1967 to take a new job with General Motors in Santa Barbara, California. Deanna would visit on occasion and they would also meet up in Washington D.C. when Doug was working on field assignments at a Naval facility there.

In July of 1969 Doug and Deanna married in Tarrytown, New York. For their honeymoon, the newlyweds took a road trip across North America from Tarrytown to Santa Barbara through Montreal, Canada with many stops in between. One of the most notable was Mt. Rushmore where together, from their hotel, they watched the first human set foot on the moon.

In December of that year, the couple left sunny Santa Barbara for snow covered Pennsylvania where Doug began graduate school at Penn State University.

In 1971 they found themselves in Portland, Oregon after Doug accepted a job teaching electronics and engineering at Portland Community College. (Doug often recalled how he interviewed on a sunny summer day and was moved by the beauty of the area, unable to anticipate the Oregon raindrops that were to come.) The couple bought a house in Southwest Portland and in the next few years had two daughters, Polly and Laura.

In 1992, after nine years of post-graduate studies while maintaining his full time teaching job, Doug earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Oregon Graduate Institute.

Around this time Doug also began teaching additional courses at Portland State University. In 1997 Doug earned a Certificate of Merit for extraordinary work as Electronic Engineering Technology Department Chair at PCC.

Doug survived the long, wet Oregon winters by playing lots of tennis and traveling, including accepting a Fulbright to teach in India in 1990 followed by teaching exchanges in Suriname then Mexico.

His travels also included several tennis tournaments in Hawaii and many trips abroad with Deanna, his sister, Joan, and friends after retiring. The couple spent a lot of time in San Diego visiting with Polly and Kit and their grandchildren and even adventured to Spain a couple of times with Laura.

In addition to travel and tennis, Doug enjoyed long daily walks, meet-ups with friends for lengthy chats over a beer, listening to music, and working on his own personal electrical engineering projects.

Doug was a caring father, husband, uncle, grandfather, and friend. He instilled a sense of adventure in his daughters and modeled for them kindness, curiosity, generosity, and the value of physical activity. He read them endless bedtime stories and played “Old Daddy Tricks” with them when they were little. As Polly and Laura grew, he enjoyed hiking and adventuring with them, their friends and families.

Doug is survived by his two daughters, Polly and Laura, his son in law, Kit, three granddaughters, Ellie, Margot, and Ada, nieces, Jackie, Kathy, and Bobbi and their families.

He will be greatly missed.

A funeral service will be held at Mt. Calvary Catholic Cemetery on October 21st at 2:30 pm.