A Life Constructed. Delon Hampton

      CONTENTS

      FOREWORD

      PREFACE

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      ONE

      Points of Beginning

      TWO

      Footings and Foundations

      THREE

      Life Construction

       FOUR Building the Next Level

       FIVE Blueprint for a Career; Blueprint for a Life

       SIX Tangents and Turning Points

       SEVEN Building a Business

       EIGHT The Other Side of Life

       NINE Engineering Life

       TEN Engineering Equality

       ELEVEN Engineering Public Policy

       TWELVE Reflections on a Life Constructed

       APPENDIX A Bit of Douglas History

       INDEX

       FOREWORD

      THE LIFE story of Dr. Delon Hampton, my friend and confidante, is truly inspirational and uplifting! In this book the reader will find a road map to success.

      From his humble beginnings in Chicago, through the challenges of race and ethnicity in America, Dr. Hampton exemplifies the values of hard work and perseverance. He believes strongly that success is possible with self-determination, along with support from family, friends, and mentors.

      I got to know Dr. Hampton in the late 1960s when he was a professor of engineering at Howard University in Washington, DC, while at the time I was beginning my career in government service and business in the nation’s capital. We have remained close friends, and I was most impressed when he viii a life constructed began his own engineering firm in the early 1970s. Again with grit, focus, determination, and a keen mind for business, Dr. Hampton created one of the most successful engineering firms in America. A leader in both national and international engineering associations and societies, Dr. Hampton has broken through many barriers in his field. And through forty years of directing his own firm, Dr. Hampton has built opportunities for numerous associates and employees, as well as the many others he has mentored.

      A Life Constructed is a must-read for people of all generations. Dr. Delon Hampton’s life is not only an African-American success story but truly an American success story!

      Hon. Delano E. Lewis Sr.

      Former US Ambassador to South Africa

       PREFACE

      THERE AREN’T too many big cities in America where I can’t see one of the building blocks of the career and the life I have constructed as prime consultant or major sub-consultant.

      You have probably seen them as well.

      In Los Angeles, there are underground rail stations at Fifth and Hill Street, Civic Center, and Pershing Square and the double-barrel transit tunnel connecting them to Union Station. In Chicago, there are the new Comiskey Park, a section of that city’s deep tunnel and reservoir system (“Deep Tunnel”), and the rail line connecting the city to Chicago O’Hare International. In Atlanta, there is the MART A rail line that snakes its way through the hub of the South and the water treatment plants and the West Combined Sewer Overflow tunnel that keep the city humming. And in my company’s home of Washington, DC, there is the Capitol Visitors Center through which every visitor to the US Capitol passes, the ever-bustling Gallery Place Chinatown complex and adjacent Verizon Center I pass each time I go to my office two blocks away, the Pepco headquarters building, Nationals’ Baseball Stadium, the mixed use development, City Center, whose construction I am pleased to watch from my office window each work day, and Dulles International and Ronald Reagan Washington National airports I see each time I travel out of town.

      Whenever I see these projects and others that my firm helped create in my more than fifty years as a professional engineer, they still make me feel proud.

      But more than that, they make me feel very fortunate.

      Today, the company I founded in 1973 has been involved with thousands of projects around the country. I have climbed to the pinnacle of my profession, and it has taken me all around the world. I have taught and mentored thousands of others, in the classroom and in my business and in my chosen field.

      I am a very lucky man.

      For a black kid who skirted gang violence and other hazards in inner-city Chicago; who was raised by an eighth-grade-educated mother who wasn’t actually my mother; who overcame racial barriers during the time of Jim Crow and de jure segregation to earn a PhD, become a professor and then the CEO of a multi-million-dollar company I built from scratch with the help of others, I have much to feel lucky about.

      And yet, the life I have constructed has come at a cost. It is still lacking some essential pillars that would have made it better, stronger, more satisfying.

      An only-in-America story such as mine contains lessons for anyone seeking success. But it also holds the lessons of what the pursuit of such success can cost: friends and family members forgotten and lost, broken marriages, a childless life.

      A few days before these words were written, I took a trip back to the very footings of the foundation of my life. It carried me back to a little town in Northeast Texas, where I met a cousin I knew better from business functions than from family gatherings. He was kind enough to take me for the very first time to the grave of the mother I never knew, as well as to those of the aunts and uncles and cousins I knew only in passing, and through the town in which I was born.

      As I read the name on my birth mother’s gravestone