- Published by David F. Maune, PhD, Colonel (Ret.), Alexandria,
Virginia, 2024 - 229 x 153 mm, x + 294 pp,
numerous color and black
and white illustrations - Paperback, ISBN 979-8-218-54226-9, $24.95 from Amazon in US
David Maune is an American lidar hero well known to readers of LIDAR Magazine, which had the honor in 2018 of presenting him with the Lidar Leader Award for Outstanding Personal Achievement. The author holds this in high regard and devotes chapter 22 of this autobiography to the topic.
This is not a lidar book. It’s a personal account of a life well lived, of family, of sadness, of remarkable achievements. Yet amongst Maune’s numerous accomplishments, surely his studies of the return on investment of national elevation data in the US must rank high. As he shows in chapter 18, the 3DEP program is almost complete and the US is blessed with an enviable, authoritative elevation dataset that is available free-of-charge to the multiplicity of users who are thereby enabled to develop science, protect and empower the citizenry, and refine the remarkable technology that made it all possible – lidar.
The book is easy reading, with short chapters, and is lavishly illustrated, mainly from the author’s personal photo albums. It is divided into four parts: “My Early Years” (5 chapters), “My Army Years” (9), “My Dewberry Years” (9) and “Count My Blessings” (7).
Maune was born in 1939 in Washington, Missouri, a river-crossing town. His father’s grandparents had emigrated from Germany in the 1840s. Maune grew up in a family of very modest means, but not in hunger or grinding poverty. Nevertheless, his parents had to scrape to afford the piano lessons they gave him in 1947, which are memorialized in the title of the book. He practiced on a piano that was a gift from another family. Maune returns to these lessons in the final chapter of the book and expresses his gratitude that they not only engendered his love of music, but helped him meet his wife and find his way into a military career.
After high school, Maune embarked on the path that would shape his life. For those of us mollycoddled by European socialist paraphernalia such as low-cost or free higher education, this is an inspiring, curiously American episode. Eschewing the offer of a Catholic seminary, Maune opted for the Missouri School of Mines, following his brother there. He carried out minutely detailed budgeting in advance, as part of which he committed to the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and the career of an Army officer, in order to enhance the income side.
Maune married Mary Ellen Hill in 1961. His honesty is astonishing and leads to tough reading as he described an “unromantic” honeymoon owing to religious convictions. This led to a pragmatic change of denomination. Meanwhile Maune graduated, became an Army officer and carried out duties around the world for 30 years. His daughters were born in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri and Heidelberg. Travel and living conditions were of variable quality – indeed, the Army’s HR side hardly emerges from this book with flying colors – yet Maune’s realism and energy triumphed and life was interesting and productive. Military duties gave rise to two life-changing episodes in Maune’s colorful life. In 1966, while serving with the 569th Engineer Company (Topographic) near Saigon, he was wounded in a Viet Cong grenade attack and attributes his survival (after extensive medical treatment) to God as his guardian angel. This gave his life purpose – something to which he returns frequently throughout the book.
Maune’s military career continued on an upward path, including further tours plus MSc and PhD degrees from The Ohio State University. He moved to the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA), as NGA was then, working on satellite imagery, and was assigned to the Mapping and Charting Establishment in the London suburbs. This led to the second trauma. Work went well, but the children had to attend public school in a deprived area of London, while the British officers’ offspring enjoyed private schools. The experience was desperate, with bullying rife and sympathy all but absent. The Maune family beat an urgent retreat to the US – and indeed one of his successors did the same. The whole episode makes for harrowing reading, but worse was to come. The distress from the children’s ordeals triggered his wife’s mental illness, paranoid schizophrenia manifested by the hearing of voices, because of which Maune became her selfless carer for 46 years.
These occurrences, early in Maune’s career and revealed in the first third of the book, linger in the reader’s mind, but underline Maune’s courage, resourcefulness and resilience, helped by his religious convictions, themselves crystallized by the attack in Vietnam. There is no space here to document Maune’s achievements during his Army years: LIDAR Magazine folk will want to read these for themselves.
Maune left the Army and, after unsuccessful attempts to secure employment at DMA or The Ohio State University, joined Dewberry in 1992, where he toiled for long hours for 26 years. Like Maune’s accounts of his Army years, those of his Dewberry years include fascinating insights into the history of surveying and mapping. Your reviewer was pleased to read about its use of BAE Systems’ SOCET SET software. Once again, readers will want to peruse this for themselves. Maune’s Dewberry years are perhaps best known for his authorship or co-authorship of many major government reports. The most familiar ones led to nationwide elevation data, most recently in the almost complete 3DEP program, but there were many others. These are not easy to write and often involved preparing, circulating and analyzing questionnaires about user requirements. Maune’s account of the justification, preparation and influence of these documents is unexpectedly engaging. He comes over as someone who would go into the office, immerse himself at his desk and on the telephone for 12 hours and be endlessly productive. No doubt he was!
During the Dewberry years, his elder daughter Cherie died of cancer in 2005 at age 41. Again, Maune drew on his resources and fought on. Throughout the book he is generous in his praise of colleagues – supervisors, equals and subordinates alike. He and his family have given generously of both time and funds in volunteer and charity work. Then, well into the autumn of his years, he met Jewel McKee, a friend through church, and commenced a second marriage in April 2022 at the age of 83. His accounts of their relationship and times together are heartwarming. He retired from Dewberry at the end of that year, though he remains on call. One feels that he deserves happiness after a life of hills and valleys.
The book is enhanced by two useful appendices. The first summarizes technology changes during Maune’s mapping career and consists of quick summaries of what has changed in ten different areas, for example cartography, photogrammetry and accuracy standards. For readers not well versed in geospatial history, this is a useful starting point, even if it is from the perspective of the author. The second appendix covers business uses and benefits of DEMs, no less than 30 of them, ending with a tabulation of annual dollar benefits. This sort of analysis is at the center of Maune’s expertise.
The book ends with seven pages of acronyms and initialisms. These would have been less had Maune not been in military service for many years!
Maune has produced a successful autobiography. Your reviewer’s copy was received directly from the author and is inscribed with Maune’s adage, “May all your DEMs come true.” It’s not easy to combine the details of a personal life with accounts of complex technologies with which many readers may be unfamiliar. But as long as the reader has at least a passing interest in the world of surveying and mapping, then the formula works. Some of the many personal photos, especially those of Maune’s relatives, may be of limited interest to most readers, but they do convey a flavor of the author’s life. And those parts of the book where Maune described the difficulties that he and his family encountered are hard to read yet riveting. Most readers of LIDAR Magazine will be aware of Maune’s more recent achievements and contributions; now they know the man behind them and can understand and admire the full and faithful life that he has enjoyed. He has had 86 remarkable years. May he have many more.