DONALD FREDOLIN ALLEN

Sept. 10, 1935 – Oct. 6, 2012

Donald Fredolin Allen (Fred), died Saturday at a retirement home on Mercer Island. He was 77.

Born Sept. 10, 1935, in Valley Falls, Kansas, Fred was the son of Kansas State Senator Donald Chester Allen and Rosemary Carver Allen. He graduated Wichita High School North in 1953. He married Kathleen Kay from Heber City, Utah, on Dec. 16, 1960, and earned his B.S. in computer science in 1973 from Washington University.

Fred transferred with Boeing from Wichita to Seattle in 1977, shortly after which he started Level II, a software firm that created computer dispatch police systems throughout America and parts of Europe. He presided as the company’s president until his retirement in 2009.

Fred delighted in word play, spinning prose that very nearly required a Ph.D. in linguistics to decipher. When writing about his wife taking her dog, Arthur, for a walk: Kathy said that her gorge had risen beyond the bearable and, fearing Arthur’s would have done, took him out for some fresh air, noting that she was herself near overcome by the sulfurous whiff of duplicity.

Bach, Beethoven and Mendellsohn he adored. But just to prove he appreciated pop culture, he listened to the occasional sea shanty, Carmina Burana or Tubular Bells. Elvis? The Rolling Stones? Not so much. For Fred, these artists were evidence of “the decline of the Western Civilization.”

Fred was a man of great appetite, mostly for blue steak, penury (“Look it up!”), motorcycles, history and math. He had a deep, sonorous voice and prided in singing when goaded (very lightly goaded). He was proud of his pioneering family in Kansas, who stood up to the KKK, fought for freedom in many wars, farmed the land, shod many horses, and wrote many, many letters.

Fred was a great personality. He will be dearly missed.

Preceded in death by his parents and brother, Richard Legler Allen, Fred is survived by his wife, Kathleen Kay Allen, his sons, Donald Fredolin Allen II, Samuel Kay Allen, his daughter, Deirdre Allen Timmons, his niece, Adabel Loretta Allen, his grandchildren, Mary Jane Tatoy, Kimberly Ann Allen-Baldwin, Christopher Richard Allen, Rosemary Elizabeth Timmons, and his great-grandchildren, Carmen Gonzales and River Gene Baldwin.

Private services will be held. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you put that money in your own savings account. Fred would approve of that.