Farmer-by-default found a sculptor inside himself
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Except for several billion dollars and their attendant problems and perks, Bill Gates and Gary Dolan are a lot alike - two entrepreneurs who single-mindedly pursued their dreams and came up trumps. But unlike Gates, Dolan got sidetracked for three decades before his dream could come true.
Gates was still in junior high when Dolan came of age smack in the middle of the Vietnam War. Like millions of Americans, he set aside his personal goals for duty. He went to war, survived and came home with an old man's head on a young man's body.
His spirit was battered. He saw no way out of taking over the family farm, so he harnessed himself to plows, combines and tractors, believing that a window of opportunity to pursue his own passions had closed forever.
Throughout middle age, Dolan faithfully did what was expected of him. Inside, he nurtured a private creative spark. Sometimes it surfaced, as in the elegant symmetry of his corn rows or the county-fair arrangements of his prize-winning tomatoes. Often his penchant for beauty showed up in the care he lavished on old equipment his less sentimental peers kept urging him to trade for new.
In the 1980s farm crisis that swept the heartland, the bank foreclosed on most of Gary Dolan's land. Mounting a 1948 tractor - the only one the bank let him keep - he dug. And dug. And dug some more. Talk of Dolan's obsessive building of a pond behind his house swept the county. When he finally stopped there were acres of water. Cattails, lilies and algae flourished. Ducks and geese arrived. Catfish grew three feet long, and bullfrogs serenaded them at night. Creating the pond, Dolan said, helped save his sanity.
Just as Bill Gates and his teenage pals were starting Microsoft after inventing the first software program for the world's first personal computer, Gary Dolan began Act II of his professional life. Gates and Co. were leading the world into the future; Dolan was just trying to figure out where he was going. He knew the only way was up.
At first, he dabbled. Threw pretty pots, designed a dream house, read books on subjects other than soil erosion. Tentatively, he started to farm again. He dared to revisit his old dream of making art.
Casting about his cluttered barn, he found scraps of metal and a welding torch long accustomed to fixing John Deere combines. With it he connected cylinders and rods together in elongated linear shapes. He soldered globes and spheres. One day somebody called him a sculptor, and Gary Dolan realized he was.
Today, in a tongue-and-cheek takeoff on "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince," Dolan's wife calls her husband "The Artist Formerly Known as Farmer." The couple's Landscape Sculpture company can barely keep up with requests for Dolan's off-kilter kinetic lawn art. Orders for metal trellises, gates, spheres and "spinners" are pouring in.
Said Ellen Dolan: "The added cash flow has been helpful, but the true benefits have been the experience of `The Deal,' the generosity of the public and the irregularities of the characters we've met. We have yet to meet a dullard!"
Dolan is sanguine about his late-bloomer success.
"Aging has few strong points, but one of them is the lesson in fearlessness," he said. "At midlife, you realize just how short life is, that you have nothing to lose and all to gain by charging forward."
Bill Gates and Gary Dolan each had great ideas they turned into great products. Dolan figures that, except for Gates' numbers, they're fellow travelers.
"I use his computer programs, maybe he needs an iron whirligig for Microsoft's lawn," said Dolan. "He can e-mail me his order."
Tad Bartimus' column runs Sundays in the Scene section of The Seattle Times. You can write to her care of Scene, P.O. Box 1845, Seattle, WA 98111. Her e-mail address is tadfriends@yahoo.com.