Daniel Edward Groteke
December 17th, 1932 - July 13th, 2024
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Daniel's Obituary
Daniel ‘Dan’ Edward Groteke, 91, entrepreneur and inventor, artist and adventurer, family man and pilot, passed away July 13, 2024 at Pine Ridge Rehabilitation Center in Stevensville, MI, following a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
Dan was born Dec. 17, 1932 in Los Angeles, California, where his father, Edward was trying his luck as a gold prospector and his mother, Regina, had set up a canteen for the miners. Three years later the family, which also included an older sister, Barbara Ann, returned to their home in St. Louis, Missouri. Dan remembered little of those very early years, but it wasn’t too long before he developed his lifelong interest in metal. He began by collecting scrap lead which he melted down and poured into toy soldier molds, then hung the finished soldiers from his bedroom ceiling. When his collection became too large, he discovered he could make money from his hobby by selling them through the local drug store.
During those early years, Dan also tried many other jobs: he had a paper route, hawked soda at the Cardinal’s baseball games, mowed lawns, swept out a drug store, worked as a soda jerk, was a golf caddie; when asked he needed both hands and his toes to keep track of all of them. Most of his earnings helped pay for his education. In 1950 he graduated from the all-male St. Louis University High School, where he had written for the school paper. Dan then enrolled in the University of Missouri, Rolla, School of Engineering. While working for his degree, he also honed his writing skills by again working for the school paper, first as a sports columnist but taking on bigger assignments until, as a senior, he became its editor in chief. He joined the TKE (Tau Kappa Epsilon) fraternity, working there as a dishwasher to help pay for his room and board. He supplemented his earnings one summer by working in a copper mine and another summer flew to Alaska, taking a job with a construction crew digging a tunnel to bring water out of the mountains to a power plant. He was laid off because a west coast longshoreman's strike in California halted the shipment of all construction materials to Alaska. Unable to find another job and running out of money, Dan made his way home by hitchhiking all the way down the Alaskan highway, living on bananas on the way.
After graduating in 1954 with a BS in Metallurgy, Dan took a job as a trainee metallurgist with Allis Chalmers in Milwaukee, WI, later transferring to Norwood, OH, but within a year he was drafted into the US Army. After finishing his basic training, he was assigned to an Ordinance Company at the Frankfort Arsenal in Philadelphia, PA, where he was able to use his metallurgical training to good advantage. His two-year enlistment complete, Dan immediately returned to civilian life. He worked for several companies, and in various capacities, perhaps the most notable being Chief Metallurgist at American Standard (bathroom tubs and fixtures) and Quality Assurance Manager at Reliable Castings (valves for, among other uses, the Nuclear power industry). Dan’s name is associated with several patents developed during this period; the most recognizable may be for the non-skid bathtub.
In 1981 Dan decided to try working for himself as a consultant and he had an idea for filtering molten aluminum as it was being poured to create better quality castings; his first companies, Q. C. Designs and Metcast, were born. In 1987 he left Metcast in the able hands of his daughter Terri, and took a position as quality controller at a brass foundry in Pennsylvania but returned to working with aluminum a year later as Quality Assurance Manager at Alreco Industries in Benton Harbor, MI. “Retiring” five years after that, he revived Q. C. Designs in order to resume consulting. His earnings allowed him to design and build two machines to help evaluate the quality of aluminum before it was poured into a mold. Their sales in turn funded experimentation with a method for in-shop recovery of good aluminum from the dross (think flotsam washing up on a beach or the foam on a beer mug) which inevitably floated to the top in an aluminum melting furnace. Dan had a total of 12 patents for his inventions in the metal casting industry when he truly retired in 2022 and his son, Mark took over Q. C. Designs.
While still in school, Dan had joined the American Society of Metals and the American Foundry Society; it was the latter in which he became most active, serving several divisions and committees, often as chairman. He was the guest speaker at many local monthly chapter meetings as well as a regular presenter of papers at AFS annual congresses, and also contributed regularly to various industry publications. In 1984 he was invited to join a group of 22 other experts on a “People to People Metallurgical and Mining Delegation to the People’s Republic of China”. In 12 days they visited 4 major industrial sites where they toured research institutes, mines, and large manufacturing installations in exchange for presenting status reports to Chinese leaders on industry developments and trends in the US. But it was Dan’s role as AFS chair of a research group formed to identify and solve gating system (the method of pouring hot metal into a mold) problems which earned him the 1994 annual award for Scientific Merit from both the Society as well as its Aluminum Division. Dan was a member of the AFS for seventy years.
Despite an obvious dedication to his profession, Dan did have other interests. As a caddie he learned to play golf and played on many leagues over the years.. In 1959, while working in Lake City, MN, Dan met Rita Wilkes, an English radiology technician working at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. They journeyed back to her home in England to marry but then returned to Lake City and soon started a family. Teresa was born in 1960, and Mark in 1961. Meanwhile Dan had accepted a job with American Standard, and they moved to Louisville, KY, where his other two children were born, Regina in 1963 and Michael in 1966. Among other tasks, Dan was experimenting with bronze alloys, altering the ratio of tin to copper to change the color (of interest if designing a new bathroom fixture). One weekend the family was touring Louisville’s summer art show and Dan got an idea. Back in his lab, he started by collecting his multi colored bronze scraps but he soon discovered he could create more interesting shapes by dribbling or splashing hot metal onto flat sheets of sand, (rather like creating ink blots). These he affixed to a velvet background, framed the whole, and voila, an alloyed wall sculpture. The next several years, until taking a new position in Cincinnati, Dan and his family could be found in a booth at the fair, selling his creations.
In Cincinnati, Dan used his spare time to renovate their home with the help of his children and in turn, took them to the local country club and taught them to play golf. In fact, he was very proud of becoming a member of the “hole in one” club while in Cincinnati. Eventually, he renewed another childhood interest: airplanes and flying. With earnings from all those early odd jobs, he had paid for cross-town streetcar rides to the local airport, where he hung out, watching, sometimes helping to clean up a plane, very occasionally persuading someone to give him a ride. In 1979 he earned a private pilot’s license and later obtained his instrument rating. In partnership with two other men, he bought his first plane, a Piper Arrow. Over the years his logbooks document over 3300 hours of flight time, flying in club, his own and in rented planes of at least 10 different types, sometimes at night or in bad weather, both for business and for pleasure.
Dan and Rita separated in 1984 and later divorced. In 1986, at a Unitarian church camp out, Dan met Patricia ‘Pat’ Taplick; they married five years later in the back yard of the home they were renovating together in St. Joseph, MI. They continued to work and play together for almost 33 more years. In the early years their “playing” usually involved an airplane. Dan had joined the “Tail Dragger Flyers”, a local flying club and they used the club plane for several years, but in 1997 they purchased their own, a Piper Lance. It was big enough to hold luggage for a 3 day, or a 3-month trip, plus two sets of golf clubs. Staying east of the Rockies, they flew north into Canada, South to Texas and Florida, and to many states between, sometimes for the fun of it, but as often to visit members of their far flung families. They also made “island hopping” fights to many isles in the Caribbean, having met and joined a loosely organized group called the West Indies Fliers—pilots and their wives who gathered each January to escape the states’ winter weather.
In the days before GPS, a pilot relied on being able to triangulate between special beacons, but the islands of the Caribbean often line up in a straight line thus giving Dan a lot of practice in using all manner of navigation aids in order to safely reach his next stop. He gained enough confidence to sign on for more challenging trips. In 1999, after qualifying for an African pilot’s license, he and Pat flew alone on a circular route out of Johannesburg, Republic of South Africa, to safari game camps in Botswana, Zimbabwe and back to Johannesburg with stop overs at Victoria Falls and a farm/B & B in the foothills of the Drachenburg Mountains in the RSA. In 2004 they made a similar trip, this time in Australia with 3 other WIFer couples. They met in Sydney and boarded a train for the 3 day cross country ride to Perth, where they met three other pilot couples and a guide. After the pilots qualified for their Australian licenses, they took off on a 14 day route which circumnavigated half of the continent: north along the coast as far as Broome, then east, remaining inland until reaching the east coast, then south to their final destination of Brisbane. Dan continued to fly but less frequently until he began to feel he was no longer making good flight decisions; he hung up his wings in 2007.
Dan is survived by his wife Pat, three children, 10 grandchildren—Melissa (Mike) Brand, Andrew (Chelsie) Mitchell and Brooke (Jake) Davenport, and Michael, Alison, Abigail, Adison, Mitchell, Abriana, and Matthew Groteke-- and 8 great grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his son Michael, his parents, and his sister Barbara Ann.
In lieu of flowers donations can be made in Dan’s honor to the Alzheimer’s Association or the Foundry Educational Foundation, Scholarship fund c/o Brian Lewis, 1695 N. Penny Lane, Schaumburg, IL 60173. A celebration of life service will be held Saturday, August 31, at 2 P.M., at the First Unitarian Church, 801 E. Washington St., South Bend, IN. Those wishing to leave an online condolence may do so at www.starks-menchinger.com. Arrangements have been entrusted to Starks & Menchinger Chapel & Cremation Services, 269-556-9450.
Dan was born Dec. 17, 1932 in Los Angeles, California, where his father, Edward was trying his luck as a gold prospector and his mother, Regina, had set up a canteen for the miners. Three years later the family, which also included an older sister, Barbara Ann, returned to their home in St. Louis, Missouri. Dan remembered little of those very early years, but it wasn’t too long before he developed his lifelong interest in metal. He began by collecting scrap lead which he melted down and poured into toy soldier molds, then hung the finished soldiers from his bedroom ceiling. When his collection became too large, he discovered he could make money from his hobby by selling them through the local drug store.
During those early years, Dan also tried many other jobs: he had a paper route, hawked soda at the Cardinal’s baseball games, mowed lawns, swept out a drug store, worked as a soda jerk, was a golf caddie; when asked he needed both hands and his toes to keep track of all of them. Most of his earnings helped pay for his education. In 1950 he graduated from the all-male St. Louis University High School, where he had written for the school paper. Dan then enrolled in the University of Missouri, Rolla, School of Engineering. While working for his degree, he also honed his writing skills by again working for the school paper, first as a sports columnist but taking on bigger assignments until, as a senior, he became its editor in chief. He joined the TKE (Tau Kappa Epsilon) fraternity, working there as a dishwasher to help pay for his room and board. He supplemented his earnings one summer by working in a copper mine and another summer flew to Alaska, taking a job with a construction crew digging a tunnel to bring water out of the mountains to a power plant. He was laid off because a west coast longshoreman's strike in California halted the shipment of all construction materials to Alaska. Unable to find another job and running out of money, Dan made his way home by hitchhiking all the way down the Alaskan highway, living on bananas on the way.
After graduating in 1954 with a BS in Metallurgy, Dan took a job as a trainee metallurgist with Allis Chalmers in Milwaukee, WI, later transferring to Norwood, OH, but within a year he was drafted into the US Army. After finishing his basic training, he was assigned to an Ordinance Company at the Frankfort Arsenal in Philadelphia, PA, where he was able to use his metallurgical training to good advantage. His two-year enlistment complete, Dan immediately returned to civilian life. He worked for several companies, and in various capacities, perhaps the most notable being Chief Metallurgist at American Standard (bathroom tubs and fixtures) and Quality Assurance Manager at Reliable Castings (valves for, among other uses, the Nuclear power industry). Dan’s name is associated with several patents developed during this period; the most recognizable may be for the non-skid bathtub.
In 1981 Dan decided to try working for himself as a consultant and he had an idea for filtering molten aluminum as it was being poured to create better quality castings; his first companies, Q. C. Designs and Metcast, were born. In 1987 he left Metcast in the able hands of his daughter Terri, and took a position as quality controller at a brass foundry in Pennsylvania but returned to working with aluminum a year later as Quality Assurance Manager at Alreco Industries in Benton Harbor, MI. “Retiring” five years after that, he revived Q. C. Designs in order to resume consulting. His earnings allowed him to design and build two machines to help evaluate the quality of aluminum before it was poured into a mold. Their sales in turn funded experimentation with a method for in-shop recovery of good aluminum from the dross (think flotsam washing up on a beach or the foam on a beer mug) which inevitably floated to the top in an aluminum melting furnace. Dan had a total of 12 patents for his inventions in the metal casting industry when he truly retired in 2022 and his son, Mark took over Q. C. Designs.
While still in school, Dan had joined the American Society of Metals and the American Foundry Society; it was the latter in which he became most active, serving several divisions and committees, often as chairman. He was the guest speaker at many local monthly chapter meetings as well as a regular presenter of papers at AFS annual congresses, and also contributed regularly to various industry publications. In 1984 he was invited to join a group of 22 other experts on a “People to People Metallurgical and Mining Delegation to the People’s Republic of China”. In 12 days they visited 4 major industrial sites where they toured research institutes, mines, and large manufacturing installations in exchange for presenting status reports to Chinese leaders on industry developments and trends in the US. But it was Dan’s role as AFS chair of a research group formed to identify and solve gating system (the method of pouring hot metal into a mold) problems which earned him the 1994 annual award for Scientific Merit from both the Society as well as its Aluminum Division. Dan was a member of the AFS for seventy years.
Despite an obvious dedication to his profession, Dan did have other interests. As a caddie he learned to play golf and played on many leagues over the years.. In 1959, while working in Lake City, MN, Dan met Rita Wilkes, an English radiology technician working at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. They journeyed back to her home in England to marry but then returned to Lake City and soon started a family. Teresa was born in 1960, and Mark in 1961. Meanwhile Dan had accepted a job with American Standard, and they moved to Louisville, KY, where his other two children were born, Regina in 1963 and Michael in 1966. Among other tasks, Dan was experimenting with bronze alloys, altering the ratio of tin to copper to change the color (of interest if designing a new bathroom fixture). One weekend the family was touring Louisville’s summer art show and Dan got an idea. Back in his lab, he started by collecting his multi colored bronze scraps but he soon discovered he could create more interesting shapes by dribbling or splashing hot metal onto flat sheets of sand, (rather like creating ink blots). These he affixed to a velvet background, framed the whole, and voila, an alloyed wall sculpture. The next several years, until taking a new position in Cincinnati, Dan and his family could be found in a booth at the fair, selling his creations.
In Cincinnati, Dan used his spare time to renovate their home with the help of his children and in turn, took them to the local country club and taught them to play golf. In fact, he was very proud of becoming a member of the “hole in one” club while in Cincinnati. Eventually, he renewed another childhood interest: airplanes and flying. With earnings from all those early odd jobs, he had paid for cross-town streetcar rides to the local airport, where he hung out, watching, sometimes helping to clean up a plane, very occasionally persuading someone to give him a ride. In 1979 he earned a private pilot’s license and later obtained his instrument rating. In partnership with two other men, he bought his first plane, a Piper Arrow. Over the years his logbooks document over 3300 hours of flight time, flying in club, his own and in rented planes of at least 10 different types, sometimes at night or in bad weather, both for business and for pleasure.
Dan and Rita separated in 1984 and later divorced. In 1986, at a Unitarian church camp out, Dan met Patricia ‘Pat’ Taplick; they married five years later in the back yard of the home they were renovating together in St. Joseph, MI. They continued to work and play together for almost 33 more years. In the early years their “playing” usually involved an airplane. Dan had joined the “Tail Dragger Flyers”, a local flying club and they used the club plane for several years, but in 1997 they purchased their own, a Piper Lance. It was big enough to hold luggage for a 3 day, or a 3-month trip, plus two sets of golf clubs. Staying east of the Rockies, they flew north into Canada, South to Texas and Florida, and to many states between, sometimes for the fun of it, but as often to visit members of their far flung families. They also made “island hopping” fights to many isles in the Caribbean, having met and joined a loosely organized group called the West Indies Fliers—pilots and their wives who gathered each January to escape the states’ winter weather.
In the days before GPS, a pilot relied on being able to triangulate between special beacons, but the islands of the Caribbean often line up in a straight line thus giving Dan a lot of practice in using all manner of navigation aids in order to safely reach his next stop. He gained enough confidence to sign on for more challenging trips. In 1999, after qualifying for an African pilot’s license, he and Pat flew alone on a circular route out of Johannesburg, Republic of South Africa, to safari game camps in Botswana, Zimbabwe and back to Johannesburg with stop overs at Victoria Falls and a farm/B & B in the foothills of the Drachenburg Mountains in the RSA. In 2004 they made a similar trip, this time in Australia with 3 other WIFer couples. They met in Sydney and boarded a train for the 3 day cross country ride to Perth, where they met three other pilot couples and a guide. After the pilots qualified for their Australian licenses, they took off on a 14 day route which circumnavigated half of the continent: north along the coast as far as Broome, then east, remaining inland until reaching the east coast, then south to their final destination of Brisbane. Dan continued to fly but less frequently until he began to feel he was no longer making good flight decisions; he hung up his wings in 2007.
Dan is survived by his wife Pat, three children, 10 grandchildren—Melissa (Mike) Brand, Andrew (Chelsie) Mitchell and Brooke (Jake) Davenport, and Michael, Alison, Abigail, Adison, Mitchell, Abriana, and Matthew Groteke-- and 8 great grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his son Michael, his parents, and his sister Barbara Ann.
In lieu of flowers donations can be made in Dan’s honor to the Alzheimer’s Association or the Foundry Educational Foundation, Scholarship fund c/o Brian Lewis, 1695 N. Penny Lane, Schaumburg, IL 60173. A celebration of life service will be held Saturday, August 31, at 2 P.M., at the First Unitarian Church, 801 E. Washington St., South Bend, IN. Those wishing to leave an online condolence may do so at www.starks-menchinger.com. Arrangements have been entrusted to Starks & Menchinger Chapel & Cremation Services, 269-556-9450.
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