Fritz Domann
Platteville, Wisconsin
 

Take it from Fritz Domann, inspiration really works. And, he notes, hard work and a dose of maturity helps a lot too. Put them all together and with a little luck you just might end up with a satisfying career as a distinguished professor of physics and what amounts to a second career as a respected craftsman and teacher of wood art.

 Frederick Domann is refreshingly blunt about his youth in rural Sheboygan, Wisconsin. It was a struggle. His father died five months before he was born and the Domann family depended heavily on public assistance. He has vivid memories of his mother detailing the family¹s expenditures for examination by “a guy from the county” who came by each month to check up on things.

As a youth, Domann had limited ambitions. He was an indifferent student at Kewaskum High School. Then, the U.S. Air Force introduced him to a wider world. His Air Force job was keeping track of aircraft, as a member of a direction-finding crew in South Carolina.

 In cramped quarters, Domann recalls sitting before a panel of electronic gear, his back to other members of the team. Two of them were officers, ­ “college men,” whose world views were a lot different than his.

 “We¹d talk about my life, my plans, and theirs,” he says. “They challenged me to shoot for a little more out of life.”

The experience broadened his horizons and, after he completed his hitch, the encouragement offered by those “officers,” gradually took hold and he decided to return to school. The first was the Milwaukee Institute of Technology. He aced every course.

Then came the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where the going was tougher but Domann persevered. And he began to see even broader horizons. He and his wife, Lou Anna, talked about it and she agreed to support the family and allow him to pursue an undergraduate degree.

Domann saw a future for himself in the aerospace industry. But by the time he had earned his doctorate from the University of Vermont the moon landing had been accomplished and the job market for young physicists was collapsing. He set out in a new direction, academia.

He was offered several positions, but attracted by its well-regarded engineering department, Domann accepted a teaching position at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville in 1976 and remained for 23 years, the last several as chair of the department of physics.

The Domanns live in a beautiful log home Fritz built himself on a 108-acre farm in rural Platteville, which they have worked to reforest, and which they hope to preserve by donating an easement to the Mississippi Valley Conservancy. That decision was endorsed by their two children who now have careers of their own. Rick is a professor, specializing in cancer research at the University of Iowa medical school and Katie is a veterinarian in Salt Lake City.

So what does a physicist and hobby forester, whose been building things all his life, do in retirement? Domann turned to wood turning. He started by offering to rebuild the wood art room on the Platteville campus and restored its wood lathe. And then helped raise the money to purchase a second lathe, bought his own tools and began experimenting with it.

 He discovered he had a flair for turning wooden bowls with woods found in abundance in this Driftless area of Southwestern Wisconsin ­ black walnut, cherry, red elm, hard maple as well as some softer varieties too. And the veteran teacher began teaching others the elements of wood art as well.

His inspiration at this point in his life became the late Harry Nohr, the fabled retired postmaster of nearby Mineral Point who, after his retirement, won wide renown for his bowls. And since there are only so many wooden bowls that one house can hold, Domann began offering samples of his work for sale at local art festivals.