Dorothy Roggeveen

Dorothy Roggeveen was born in 1929 in Detroit, Michigan. In 1948, at age 19, she joined the Women's Army Corps and worked in their dental lab. In 1951, she went to work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and learned the administrative side of construction contracting. This is where she met her husband, Adrian Roggeveen of the Netherlands, who was an engineer specializing in bridge building. They married and moved to Okinawa, Japan and for the next 18 years worked on construction projects in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. In 1960, Adrian sat down at their dining room table in Okinawa and designed the iconic clamshells to protect the radar at the Nike Missile Sites around the world. These clamshell structures were based on the oriental fans Dorothy had collected. When Adrian retired in 1969, they moved to Arizona. Adrian died in 1974 and in 1975 Dorothy moved to Alaska to work on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Dorothy passed away in Anchorage, Alaska on May 9, 2015.