Like Father, Like Son

When Texas A&M annexed the mothballed Bryan Air Force Base site, the university was required to make "good use" of the property and its facilities to execute a 20-year "lease-to-own" arrangement with the federal government.

As a military installation, both during World War II as Bryan Army Air Field and during and after the Korean War as Bryan Air force Base, the locale was one of the biggest drivers of the local area's economic engine. Thousands worked at the installation.

One of A&M's most productive uses of the venue after annexation was in bringing the Texas Engineering Extension Service onto the site. TEEX provided a number of vocational-training programs which helped local residents find meaningful work.

Dennis Allen spent more than 30 years working within the College of Engineering at Texas A&M. He retired as a facilities manager.

Before that, he was employed at the A&M Nuclear Science Center. Before that, he worked for the Bryan Public Schools as an electronics technician. And, before that, he worked for a year as an electro-mechanical technician for Texas Instruments.

The building blocks for Allen's entire career came thanks to the TEEX Institute of Electronic Science, a program located at what was then called the Research Annex.

Allen graduated from his TEEX training in February of 1974.

Dennis Allen is a lifelong resident of the Bryan-College Station area. After successfully completing his TEEX Institute of Electronic Science program, Allen began working at Texas A&M in 1977. He was an electronic technician at the Nuclear Science Center before transferring in 1980.to the Industrial Engineering Department to work with computers, advancing to computer systems manager, and finally, to facilities manager before retiring from the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department in 2013. He is a past secretary of The Brazos Valley Service Rifle Association and past vice president of the Brazos Valley Radio Controlled Modelers.