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Volume 54, Number 22   February 19, 2007         

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People on Campus

Bud Shearer -- no stranger to danger
Photo of Bud Shearer
Robert "Bud" Shearer has been a firefighter, a military helicopter door gunner and an SF State student during the tumultuous '60s. As SF State's director of environmental health and occupational safety since 1994, he continues to utilize a lifetime of experience to plan and implement safety standards, and respond to the unexpected.

In addition to serving on the campus-wide emergency operations team and the CSU-wide preparedness and disaster response, safety and security committees, Shearer consults on safety and disaster preparedness internationally, largely in Asia. He has measured urban and industrial pollution in China and South Korea and was summoned to Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami. He returned to Vietnam in recent years with a team that measured soil and water for contamination left by the U.S. military defoliation chemicals.

Shearer has taught disaster preparedness and written extensively about workplace health and safety for a variety of publications. In 1991 he was recognized by the American Society of Safety Engineers at a ceremony where Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. presented the honor.

"Bud is valued and respected for his expertise and experience and admired and loved for his dedication," said Denise Fox Needleman, the recently retired associate vice president of human resources, safety and risk management. "He safeguards the campus 24-7 and even sleeps here when he has to. In any kind of disaster, Bud is who you want at your back."

Shearer, who holds a master's degree in public administration from CSU East Bay and a doctorate in the same discipline from Golden Gate University, received a teaching credential and bachelor's degree in sociology from SF State in 1972. Prior, he attended community colleges near his native Roseville and joined the U.S. Air Force Reserve in 1966. A staff sergeant in the 940th Military Airlift Group specializing in search and rescue, he served until 1971. Having escaped capture three times when shot down behind enemy lines in Vietnam, he is a recipient of the Medal of Valor with the Oak Leaf Cluster and Purple Heart.

As a reservist, Shearer never expected to wind up in Vietnam. "Our unit was activated because we had C-124 cargo planes," he said. He was stationed in Da Nang and found the work "boring" so he volunteered for "flight status."

"I just wanted to fly," Shearer said. "I was too young at the time to even imagine that I would wind up standing at the open door to an army helicopter in flight with a machine gun in my hands."

Shearer had never been to a large college campus when he arrived at SF State in the late 1960s. He recalls that there was almost as much tumult on campus as there was in Vietnam.

"At first, I just thought that people going through the buildings and setting off the fire alarms was a normal thing," he said. Shearer also remembers when then SF State President Samuel Hayakawa climbed up on a van supporting loudspeakers and literally pulled the plug on a student rally.

After graduation, the fourth generation Californian found that fighting fires paid better than teaching so he joined the Belmont Fire Department. He was deputy chief in 1977 when he was recruited to become the fire chief in Corte Madera in Marin County. There he responded to massive land slides and flooding in violent winter storms and wrote the ordinances requiring home fire sprinkling systems and the discontinuation of hazardous shake roofs in Corte Madera.

Shearer made lifetime friends while serving in Marin, two who are also on staff at SF State. His wife Julie was with the Twin Cities Police Department when they met. She is now the records and dispatch supervisor for the SF State Department of Public Safety. SF State Police Chief Kirk Gaston was on the Sausalito Police Force.

Shearer and his wife of 21 years have lived for two decades in Fremont where they raised sons, Justin and Cameron. Shearer has another son, Kevin, from a previous marriage. The household is also home to seven cats and a bulldog named Lars. But the man who once stood at the open door of a military copter in flight doesn't seem to have had his fill of excitement. Shearer said he has no plans to retire. "I like what I do, where I go and the folks I work with."

-- Denize Springer

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Last modified February 19, 2007, by the Office of Public Affairs & Publications