Dennis Holliday

November 22, 1935 - March 18, 2021 Dennis Holliday passed away on March 18, 2021. He was predeceased by his wife, Pamela Dokken Holliday. He is survived by his sister, Martha Dickson, his two sons-Wilson Taylor Holliday and Wesley Halcrow Holliday-and two grandchildren-Eleanor Hadley Holliday and Everett King Holliday. Dennis was born Dennis Wesley Nevins on November 22, 1935 in San Francisco. During his childhood, his family lived in Berkeley, Portland, Rosemead, and Alhambra. He worked as a paperboy for Portland and Los Angeles newspapers and graduated from Rosemead High School in 1953. He took on the surname of his stepfather in 1954. In the mid-50s, he worked summer jobs as a night-shift glass grinder, an electrical draftsman, and an electronics engineer at a local radio company and at the Sandia Corporation in Albuquerque.Dennis graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. in Engineering Science in 1957, the year of Sputnik, and attended Princeton University for graduate school in Physics. After summers spent working at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and attending the first Latin American School of Physics in Mexico City, he earned a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Princeton in 1960. After a summer working at Hughes Aircraft Corporation, he was a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow in Theoretical Physics in Lund, Sweden from 1960 to 1961. This was the first of many international trips that Dennis took in the following decades for business and tourism throughout Scandinavia, Europe, and Mexico.Upon returning to the US from Sweden, Dennis became a research associate in Physics at the University of Oregon. From 1963 to 1971, he was a member of the Physics department of the RAND corporation in Santa Monica, and in 1971, he and other RAND colleagues formed R&D Associates, later purchased by Logicon and Northrop Grumman. Throughout his career as a physicist, he published many technical reports and scientific articles. He gave testimony to Congress and briefings at NSA, CIA, and other agencies.In Los Angeles, Dennis met Pamela Nan Dokken, whom he married in 1971. They moved with their two young sons to Sacramento in 1989, where Dennis worked remotely and served on the Sacramento Homelessness Board. In 2016, he and Pamela moved to Lafayette, CA to be close to their grown sons. Once a glider pilot in Southern California, Dennis became an avid cyclist in Northern California, where he enjoyed riding the American River bike trail. Above all, he was a loving husband and father who will be cherished in memory.