A Life of Engineering, Flight, Water, Wine, and Stories

Donald E. Carter has spent most of his life asking the same basic question:

How do all the pieces fit together?

Sometimes the question involved an electronic system aboard a military aircraft. Sometimes it involved the development of a complex commercial product, the behavior of trout in a mountain lake, the chemistry of a Pinot Noir, the restoration of a wooden boat, the planning of a cross-country flight, or the structure of a book.

The subject changed.

The curiosity never did.

That curiosity has carried Don through a remarkable life as a U.S. Navy veteran, engineer, business executive, educator, private pilot, author, publisher, winemaker, fly fisherman, and lifelong problem-solver.

It has also shaped the philosophy behind much of his work:

Complex subjects do not have to feel complicated.

The Navy Years

Don’s technical career began with the United States Navy.

He enlisted in 1967 and completed Navy electronics training before specializing as an Aviation Fire Control Technician. His work eventually placed him with Attack Squadron VA-22, the “Fighting Redcocks,” at Naval Air Station Lemoore, California.

As an AQ technician, Don worked with the sophisticated radar, navigation, fire-control, weapons, and electronic systems of the A-4 Skyhawk.

His responsibilities extended far beyond replacing components. Aviation electronics demanded disciplined troubleshooting, careful analysis, and the ability to understand how multiple systems interacted under real operating conditions.

During 1968 and 1969, Don deployed aboard the aircraft carrier USS Bon Homme Richard (CVA-31) with VA-22.

It was an experience that would shape him in ways he could not have understood at the time.

The Navy gave him technical training, discipline, responsibility, and an appreciation for systems thinking.

It also exposed him to conditions that would become important decades later, including asbestos, aviation fuels and exhaust, industrial cleaning chemicals, and other hazardous materials common to military aviation and shipboard environments of the era.

When Don left the Navy, he carried forward more than technical skills.

He had learned how to solve problems when the answer was not obvious.

That ability became one of the defining characteristics of his professional life.

From Electronics to the Computer Revolution

In 1974, Don joined GENRAD as an Applications Engineer during the early transformation of electronics manufacturing from conventional testing to computer-aided testing.

His work placed him directly inside another technological revolution.

Printed-circuit boards were becoming increasingly sophisticated, and manufacturers needed new ways to test them efficiently and reliably. Don worked with companies implementing computer-controlled testing systems, learning not only the technology but also the organizational challenges that accompanied major technological change.

That experience taught him something important:

The hardest part of introducing new technology was often not the technology itself.

It was helping people understand how their work needed to change around it.

That insight would become increasingly important as his career progressed.

Mentor Graphics and the Birth of Concurrent Engineering

Don joined Mentor Graphics during the company's early years and became deeply involved in the emerging world of computer-aided engineering and electronic design automation.

His responsibilities expanded rapidly.

He worked as an Applications Engineer, Technical Director, Marketing Director, and eventually Managing Director for the Asia-Pacific region.

During those years, Don traveled extensively—more than 200,000 miles annually at times—and worked with hundreds of companies, universities, government organizations, and engineering teams around the world.

He became increasingly interested in a fundamental problem:

Why did highly capable organizations still struggle to develop products efficiently?

The answer, he discovered, was rarely a lack of technical talent.

The problem was fragmentation.

Design engineering worked separately from manufacturing.

Manufacturing worked separately from testing.

Testing worked separately from service.

Marketing entered too late.

Suppliers entered too late.

Decisions made early in a product's life created consequences that were not discovered until much later.

Don began organizing these relationships into a more complete way of thinking about product development.

That work became part of the emerging field known as Concurrent Engineering.

Together with Barbara Stillwell Baker, Don co-authored:

Concurrent Engineering: The Product Development Environment for the 90’s

The work examined how organizations could bring disciplines together earlier in the product-development process and consider the entire lifecycle of a product rather than allowing departments to operate independently.

Don developed and presented concepts involving the nine influencing factors, four levels of complexity, implementation characteristics, and organizational attributes necessary to create effective Concurrent Engineering environments.

He presented these ideas to companies, universities, government organizations, and engineering groups throughout the world.

His work helped universities develop Concurrent Engineering curricula and helped companies rethink how products moved from concept through development, manufacturing, testing, support, and eventual retirement.

In 1994, Don was awarded a Doctor of Science degree from Nottingham Trent University in recognition of his work and contributions to the field of Concurrent Engineering.

For Don, however, the work was never simply academic.

It was about making complexity understandable.

That same philosophy would eventually reappear in a very different place:

A trout stream.

A Life in the Air

Running parallel to Don’s engineering career was another lifelong passion:

Flying.

Don became a private pilot and earned single-engine land, multi-engine land, and instrument airplane ratings.

For approximately two decades, he owned a beautiful Piper Twin Comanche, an aircraft that became far more than transportation.

It represented freedom.

Adventure.

Independence.

And the ability to turn a weekend idea into a destination.

Over the years, Don flew a wide variety of aircraft, ranging from conventional general-aviation airplanes to considerably more powerful machines, including the T-28 Trojan, Cessna T303 Crusader, and Cessna 421 Golden Eagle.

Flying also became another way for Don to explore the world.

His aviation adventures carried him throughout the United States and Canada and into places including the Bahamas, Hong Kong, Singapore, Finland, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy.

Sometimes the destination was connected to business.

Sometimes it was connected to fly fishing.

Sometimes vineyards.

And occasionally, as pilots everywhere understand, the mission was simply the pursuit of the legendary:

$100 hamburger.

Aviation also led to one of the important friendships in Don’s life.

Through an invitation from the Oregon Air National Guard, Don and others attended the prestigious William Tell air-to-air weapons competition at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida.

It was an extraordinary event—a gathering of elite military aviators competing at the highest levels of skill.

It was there that Don met Tom Tutt.

Tom and his teammate, Larry Kemp, went on to win the competition's Top Gun honors.

That meeting began a friendship that eventually reached far beyond aviation.

Years later, Tom Tutt would become one of the authors published through Walker Carter Publishing, bringing another circle of Don’s life back together.

Searching for Rivers, Vineyards, and the Next Adventure

Flying also allowed Don to combine several of his great interests.

A flight might lead toward a promising fishing destination.

Another might end near a vineyard.

Another might simply be an excuse to explore somewhere new.

Fly fishing and wine, surprisingly, share something important:

Both reward curiosity.

Both are influenced by environment.

Both require observation.

And both seem simple until you begin to understand how many variables are involved.

Those similarities appealed naturally to Don.

Villa Mariposa Vineyards

Don’s interest in winemaking began while he was working at Mentor Graphics.

In the mid-1980s, a group of colleagues began making wine together. Don learned from Oregon winemakers and gradually became fascinated not simply with drinking wine but with understanding how it was made.

That interest became much deeper after Don moved to Paris in 1991.

Weekends offered opportunities to travel south into Burgundy, one of the world's great wine regions.

There Don became fascinated with Pinot Noir.

At Domaine Comtesse de Loisy, his interest evolved from visitor to participant. The Countess eventually invited him to work alongside those tending the vineyard and making the wine.

Don learned vineyard practices, pruning, tying vines, harvesting, and a low-intervention approach to winemaking that respected what the vineyard itself produced.

The experience stayed with him.

Years later, near West Linn, Oregon, Don created Villa Mariposa Vineyards.

He planted Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris and even modified the vineyard soil in an effort to reproduce some of the characteristics he had admired in Burgundy.

Villa Mariposa eventually became part of the emerging wine culture of Clackamas County.

A November 6, 2008 feature in The Oregonian/OregonLive profiled Don and Villa Mariposa as part of the county's growing wine industry.

Don’s 2007 Villa Mariposa Pinot Noir received a Silver Medal at the International Amateur Wine Maker Competition.

But the vineyard had another meaning beyond wine.

“Mariposa” means butterfly.

The labels featured butterflies painted by Don’s father, Thurl Carter, creating a family connection that made every bottle personal.

The butterfly itself carried still deeper meaning within the Carter family, connected to Don’s mother, Virginia, and his brother, Thurl Jr., who was killed in Vietnam in 1968.

Villa Mariposa became something more than a vineyard.

It became a combination of family, memory, craftsmanship, and place.

Today, Don continues that tradition on a smaller scale at his Northern California home, where Pinot Noir remains his favorite wine to make.

The Acorn Skiff

Some of Don and Carole’s happiest adventures required no airplane at all.

Only a small wooden boat.

After finding one another again after forty years apart, Don and Carole rescued an old Acorn Skiff, the elegant lapstrake rowing design created by renowned boat designer Iain Oughtred.

They rebuilt it.

Don made a pair of wooden oars.

Then they did what restored boats are meant to do.

They used it.

For years, Don and Carole spent hundreds of hours rowing and fishing the alpine lakes around Bend and Sisters, Oregon.

The little Acorn became part of their life together.

Clear mountain lakes.

Wooden oars dipping quietly into the water.

Fly rods aboard.

Trout somewhere below.

And enough time to figure out what the fish were doing.

Places such as Three Creeks Alpine Lake, high above Sisters, became part of those memories.

Don approached fishing the same way he approached engineering.

He researched.

Weather.

Water.

Fish species.

Season.

Time of day.

Hatches.

Rigging.

Flies.

Carole generally had a simpler role.

She caught the fish.

Usually the first fish.

Frequently the biggest fish.

It became a running joke between them, but it also became part of the philosophy that eventually helped shape Riverbound Waters™.

Riverbound Waters™

Fly fishing had been part of Don’s life for decades, but over time he became increasingly interested in something beyond simply catching fish.

He wanted to understand the complete system.

The river.

The weather.

The insects.

The fish.

The fly.

The rig.

The presentation.

The season.

The things that change.

The things that connect.

Don realized that fly fishing had exactly the kind of multidimensional structure he had spent much of his professional career studying.

There was valuable information everywhere—but it was often fragmented.

One book covered insects.

Another covered knots.

Another covered fly patterns.

Another covered a river.

Fishing reports described current conditions.

Regulation books covered laws.

Fly-tying manuals explained patterns.

But an angler standing beside a river had to bring all of those pieces together.

Don began asking a familiar question:

How do all these pieces fit together?

That question became Riverbound Waters™.

The project grew into collections designed to help anglers understand not simply where to fish or which fly to use, but how the entire system connects.

Don describes fly fishing through multiple dimensions:

Hydrology.

Weather.

Fish biology.

Casting.

Knots.

Equipment.

Observation.

Fly tying.

Presentation.

Each skill matters.

But the real understanding comes from recognizing how they influence one another.

That led to one of the central ideas behind the project:

Fly fishing is multidimensional.

Fly tying does not have to feel multidimensional.

For the fly-tying collections, Don developed another simple structure:

START → REAR → BODY → THORAX → WING/LEGS → FINISH

The intention is not to remove expertise.

It is to remove intimidation.

Don describes the goal as:

Expert Depth Without Expert Intimidation.

Riverbound Waters™ represents perhaps the clearest connection between Don’s engineering career and his life outdoors.

It is Concurrent Engineering translated to the river:

Understand the pieces.

Understand the relationships.

Then understand the system.

Teaching

A consistent thread throughout Don’s life has been teaching.

Whether introducing engineers to new technology, helping universities build Concurrent Engineering curricula, teaching small-engine students, explaining winemaking, or helping anglers understand fly fishing, Don has repeatedly found himself translating complicated subjects into something other people can use.

After leaving the corporate world, he spent time as an Assistant Teacher in an automotive and small-gas-engine shop, where he developed curriculum and helped students learn through hands-on work.

The subject may have changed from sophisticated computer-aided engineering systems to a small gasoline engine sitting on a workbench.

The basic philosophy did not.

Understand how the pieces work.

Understand how they connect.

Then you can solve the problem yourself.

Walker Carter Publishing

Books eventually became another way of preserving and sharing those ideas.

Together, Don and Carole created Walker Carter Publishing, LLC.

The company became a home not only for Don’s business and outdoor books but also for Carole’s remarkable range of fiction, including children's fantasy, mystery, science fiction, suspense, and family history.

Walker Carter Publishing also became home to the work of Don’s longtime friend Tom Tutt, bringing their friendship from aviation into publishing decades after they first met.

For Don, publishing is another form of teaching.

A good book allows knowledge or imagination to outlive the conversation that created it.

Carole

None of Don’s later story can be separated from Carole Walker Carter.

They were high school sweethearts.

Then Don joined the Navy without telling her.

Life took them in different directions.

Forty years passed.

Then they found one another again.

Their second chance became one of the great gifts of both their lives.

Together they built another life filled with family, books, fly fishing, the Acorn Skiff, vineyards, publishing, projects, and the simple pleasure of asking each other:

“What if we tried this?”

When Don first read Carole’s early manuscript of Aztara, A Galactic Love Story, he immediately recognized something familiar in its central relationship.

It reminded him of the two of them when they were young.

Perhaps that was one of the reasons the story meant so much.

The Difficult Decade

Beginning in 2014, Don entered one of the most difficult periods of his life after being diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer with bone involvement.

What followed was approximately a decade of treatment, uncertainty, medical procedures, radiation, medications, side effects, setbacks, and continual adjustment.

Carole remained beside him throughout it.

Caregiver.

Advocate.

Partner.

Companion.

The experience changed both of them.

It also changed Don’s understanding of time.

Projects that might once have been postponed became worth doing now.

Ideas worth preserving became worth writing down.

Places worth seeing became worth visiting.

Knowledge worth sharing became worth organizing.

Riverbound Waters™ grew through much of this period.

In that sense, the project became more than fishing.

Creating it gave Don something constructive to build, organize, study, and share during years when much of life was being dictated by illness.

The project helped him heal in ways that had little to do with medicine.

Family

Family remains at the center of Don and Carole’s world.

Carole’s daughter, Jen, and her wife, Lisa, along with grandchildren Alex and Nixon, are a constant source of pride, energy, laughter, and occasionally amazement at how much two children can manage to accomplish.

Don has also learned one of the important privileges that comes with being a grandfather:

You can encourage the adventure.

Then send them home.

Always Another Project

Retirement never suited Don particularly well.

There is usually another book.

Another fly.

Another river.

Another engineering idea.

Another vineyard question.

Another publishing project.

Another piece of research.

Another problem that looks interesting enough to solve.

And that may be the simplest way to understand him.

He has never been particularly interested in accepting something simply because that is how it has always been done.

He wants to know why.

How it works.

How the pieces relate.

Whether there is a better way.

That curiosity carried him from Navy electronics to computer-aided testing, from Concurrent Engineering to universities around the world, from the cockpit of a Twin Comanche to vineyards in Burgundy, from an Acorn Skiff on an alpine lake to a fly-tying vise, and eventually to the pages of Riverbound Waters™.

Different worlds.

The same question.

How do all the pieces fit together?

And once Don understands the answer, his next instinct is usually the same:

Find a way to share it with someone else.

I think this gives Don the same depth and humanity as the long Carole story, while making his defining thread very clear: systems thinking, curiosity, adventure, and teaching.