Tom Ten Eyck, a civil engineer and former director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, died at his Westminster home May 13 from lung and liver ailments. He was 87.
A service is planned June 27 at 1:30 p.m. at Mile Hi Church of Religious Science, 9700 W. Alameda Ave. in Lakewood.
Ten Eyck was chairman of the Colorado Energy Task Force and the Water Quality Control Commission and served on the Colorado Environmental Commission and the four-state committee concerned with Arkansas River basin development.
“Tom was at Natural Resources when it was the biggest state government reorganization we’d ever had,” said Harris Sherman, the department’s current director.
“He was a thoughtful, wise leader who had good insights into resource issues,” said Sherman, who is serving his second stint at the department.
Sherman had succeeded Ten Eyck the first time, in 1974. “He was an excellent communicator and facilitator with a thoughtful and gentle style,” Sherman said.
“He taught us that everyone, whatever their social status, deserved respect,” said his son Gregg Ten Eyck of Boulder.
As an engineer, Tom Ten Eyck specialized in earthen dam construction, said another son, Thomas Ten Eyck of Golden.
Ten Eyck supervised the construction of a dam in southern Spain, a project that took nearly two years.
He also worked for the Bureau of Reclamation and the Colorado Department of Highways, now the Department of Transportation.
Ten Eyck was on the Jefferson County Public Schools board and the State Board of Community Colleges and Occupational Education.
When he left the Department of Natural Resources more than three decades ago, Ten Eyck predicted energy problems.
“Sooner or later everybody is going to get squeezed,” he said in a Denver Post story. “We can’t stop pouring money out the door for oil.”
He said the U.S. had to develop its own resources.
Ten Eyck also said there was a need for stronger rules for mine-land reclamation and oil-shale development.
Thomas Willard Ten Eyck was born in Denver on June 26, 1920, graduated from Manual High School and earned a civil engineering degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
During World War II, he was in the Navy, serving on a destroyer in the South Pacific and later as a bomber pilot. He also served in the Korean War for two years.
He married Myran Mignon Russell on June 13, 1942.
In addition to her and his sons, he is survived by a daughter, Doyen Ten Eyck Mitchell of Boulder, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Paula Ten Eyck, died in 1957.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
