Dick Wolfe is a nuclear engineer, a vintner and a dreamer who makes his dreams come true.
Born in Sophia, West Virginia, the son of a coal miner who died of the effects of black lung, Dick Wolfe developed a passion for clean coal technology. Dr. Wolfe earned his BS degree at Virginia Tech in Chemical Engineering and MS and Ph.D. degrees in Nuclear Engineering at the University of Cincinnati. He has spent over 50 years in the energy business: first working with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission on the energy supply system for the Apollo Moon Mission and secondly, working in nuclear waste management and clean coal technology with the US Department of Energy in Washington, D.C. He is the founder and president of his own clean coal technology company for the past 20 years, and recently patented a new process to remove 100 percent of the mercury pollutants from coal.
Dick Wolfe learned wine-making from Italian immigrants as a boy in West Virginia. He is a vintner who traveled the world to vineyards at the same altitude as his home in Banner Elk, North Carolina, (4000-5000 ft.) to bring back grape vines to create a wine industry in the high country of North Carolina. He established the first commercial winery in this region of the Appalachian Mountains, the Banner Elk Winery. At present, 35 vineyards owe their genesis to his work.
This memoir touches on both these passions. However the focus is the fulfillment of a long-standing dream of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. Like his other passions, this one comes from boyhood experience. Wolfe was the projectionist in the small-town movie theater, and as a teenager in 1957, showed the movie The Snows of Kilimanjaro (and watched it "about 40 times.) He vowed them, to someday "climb that mountain." Little did he realize that "someday" would be when he was seventy years old.
Indeed, Dick Wolfe celebrated his 70th birthday on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, January 11, 2010 - on the way to the top.
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