From Left: Superintendent Mark Dowling, President Dan Dowling, Financial Advisor George Rix.

hroughout high school and college, Dowling was driven to follow his instincts and his dreams. He'd listened to the kids on the phone in his Harvard Yard dorm talking to their parents. "Okay Dad, I'll go Pre-Med", when what they really wanted to do was join the Peace Corps.

"My father always told me that whatever I did, 'do the best you can', and he expected a lot. He taught me the Greek myth of Phaethon." A son of the sun god, Helios, Phaethon had prematurely usurped the job of driving the chariot of the sun. Phaethon could not control the chariot's course and was killed by a bolt from Zeus.

"At that point in my life, I really identified with that image of Phaethon being struck down. It never mattered to my dad so much what I did, as how I did it. In my studies, I found some great role models who had risen up through the building trades. People don't realize that George Washington was a land surveyor. Jefferson was a great farmer, as well as a great builder. Aaron Burr was a mason. These guys were always talking about building something."

Attracted by a romantic notion of purity in the building trades, Dowling found work as an apprentice carpenter for a fast-growing contractor during his college summers. "If it hadn't been a Friday, " Dowling remembers, "I don't know if I would have survived my first day in this business." He was 18, hungry for $6 an hour, and in the best shape of his life. An accomplished athlete, he was dog-tired and ready to collapse after six and a half hours of digging a foundation. But just when he raised his head to cry 'uncle,' the foreman said it was time to sweep up. Befriended by the sympathetic foreman who saw potential in him, he fast learned to nail, cut straight and run labor crews. He saw the impact a leader could have in the field and yearned for responsibility.

Upon graduation, Dowling turned his back on Wall Street and law school, although he had the offers, and still these days he gets the offers. Instead, he found work as a supervisor with a subdivision builder.

Dowling was hardly the only one caught by the abrupt recession in 1990. Despite an excellent record of on-time, high-quality projects, he found his management skills in little demand in the moribund economic environment. Broke, unemployed, and frustrated, he began to apply to law school. But despite high test scores, he withdrew from the process. "The application to Berkeley required a one-page statement on why I wanted to be a lawyer. I stared at that page for days. I just wanted to be a builder."

From this position of vulnerability, Dowling decided to forge ahead with his own construction business. "I decided I was willing to accept responsibility for my own chariot. I could only improve on the abilities I had developed. I felt that if I took a secure corporate job I could probably never go back." So he returned to his tools and sought work as an independent contractor.