Donald C. Brooks was born in Santa Barbara, California in 1922 and died in Los Osos, California in 1992. He graduated from John H. Frances Polytechnic High School in Los Angeles, and from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, with a BS in Electrical Engineering. Earlier, during World War II, he had studied Civil Engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia. He was a Registered Civil Engineer in the State of California, and was a member of several professional societies (AAAS, IEEE, ASCE, AWWA).

During World War II, he was in the Army for four years, attached to the 30th Engineers Photographic Mapping Battalion at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, before being sent to Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Later, he was assigned to the Judge Advocate General’s Division in France for two years. He lived in Paris for a year, where he played jazz.

Mr. Brooks had a 46-year career in public utility engineering, being involved with electric power distribution for 13 years with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and then with water distribution for 33 years with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. He was Director of Planning of this organization for the last 20 years of his career. In 1960 and following years, he had a key role in planning the California State Water Project, and later in the expansion of Metropolitan’s aqueduct system to distribute the water from that project throughout Southern California.

In addition to studying engineering, Mr. Brooks studied art at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles; animation, architecture and music at Los Angeles City College, where he was a clarinetist with the symphonic band; and writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was a member of writers’ workshops in Los Angeles and San Luis Obispo for many years, and wrote stories throughout his adult life. His extensive collection of science fiction, started by his father, is now part of the Eaton Collection in the library of the University of California, Riverside.