After serving as superintendent of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore for nearly 24 years, Dale Engquist plans to retire at the end of January.

Engquist, who has already announced his upcoming retirement to park staff, will retire after 42 1/2 years with the National Park Service, more than half of which have been at the Indiana Dunes. He first came to the Indiana Dunes as assistant superintendent in 1978.

Engquist said he decided to wait to retire until after this year, which is the 40th anniversary of the National Lakeshore and which is expected to culminate in the opening of a new Dorothy Buell Memorial Visitors Center in conjunction with the Porter County Convention, Recreation and Visitors Commission.

Engquist said he does not yet know, and won’t know for some time, who his replacement will be.

Born and raised in Chicago, Engquist attended the University of Illinois at its Navy Pier and Champaign/Urbana campuses. He received a master’s degree with a major in botany and a minor in zoology and planned to pursue a PhD at the University of California. But that ended, he said, when a summer park ranger job in 1964 at Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota convinced him that he’d prefer a career in parks.

He assumed his first permanent position with the National Park Service later that year at the National Capital Parks in Washington, D.C. He also served as chief park naturalist at Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas and as assistant chief naturalist at the Everglades National Park in Florida.

His first superintendency was in 1971 at the new Biscayne National Monument (now a national park) in Florida. He also managed the Sandy Hook unit of Gateway National Recreation Area in New Jersey and attended the year-long Departmental Manager Training Program in Washington.

He came to the National Lakeshore in 1978 as assistant superintendent, then was named superintendent in 1983. Since 1977, he has led a cooperative program between the National Park Service and the National Parks of Poland, and to this day, the National Lakeshore maintains a sister park relationship with Kampinoski National Park near Warsaw.

Engquist said upon retiring, he will remain living in the area; he and his wife, Jo Ann, the education director at the Boys & Girls Club of Michigan City, live in Michigan City.

He said he expects to stay involved in environmental work in some capacity, including as a volunteer at the National Lakeshore and working with park partners in education, resource management and science. He said he has no other retirement plans except to make his first trip to his ancestral roots in Scandinavia.

Among his many awards, Engquist was awarded the Sagamore of the Wabash by former Indiana Governor Evan Bayh in 1992, the Meritorious Service Award by then-Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt in 1995, the 1991 Superintendent of the Year & Resource Stewardship Award, and the Richard G. Lugar Award for Outstanding Federal Employee in 1987.

Posted 8/14/2006