Issue link: http://www.wacmagazine.com/i/1504946
34 WAC Magazine | wac.net O ne of the first things you realize about Roger Wy- lie when you meet him at e Shop, a private garage based in a series of old warehous- es in SODO, is that he isn't from around here, at least not originally. "e southern roots are strong," he says in an accent that, although faded, hasn't disappeared during his three decades in Seattle. "I grew up in Georgia," he explains, carefully maneuvering his 1966 Ford Mustang onto a li before slowly raising it toward the warehouse's high wood- beamed ceiling. Albany, Georgia, to be specific, a town he says is "the same distance from Alabama and Florida and about 30 miles down the road from Jimmy Carter." Much like the former president's family, Roger's quite literally worked for peanuts. "e company where my dad worked made peanut cultivators," Roger says. "e machines that take peanuts out of the ground." Mechanically inclined, Roger's dad introduced him to building and fixing things at an early age—especially cars. Around the time Roger turned 14, he and his dad started working on a Volk- swagen Baja bug together. "We got it at a junkyard and took every bolt off of it and rebuilt it, and that was my first car," Roger says. "We thought it was going to take two years. I was still 14 when we finished." As it turns out, that's too young to get behind the wheel, even in Georgia. "He caught me driving it downtown," Roger recalls. "at night he came home for dinner and said, 'You know, I think we need to take the engine out again.' It stayed that way until a few weeks before I turned 16." Still, Roger was hooked. At Auburn University, he studied materials engi- neering, a field that includes metallur- gy and polymer science. "I wanted to become an automotive engineer because I wanted to design cars," he says. Back at e Shop, he steps around the Mustang's undercarriage and points out some recent work to 19-year-old son Aidan, to whom he is passing his passion. e Mustang was a "warehouse find" in Spokane, Roger says. e car's produc- tion date shows it came off the line six days aer Roger was born. "ey brought it over from Spokane on a trailer and dropped it off in the front yard, and we've been working on it ever since," he says. Aspirations and apiaries As for professional work, Roger's first engineering job as a college intern changed his vocational direction. "I spent the entire summer on a part about as big as an acorn," he says. "It was not as creative, interesting, or entrepreneurial as I thought it was going to be." He pivoted to law school, choosing Vanderbilt University largely because of a scholarship and the Nashville vibe of the late 1980s. From the start, there were strong suggestions to go into patent law. "I showed up on Day 1, and the first professor I met said, 'You have an engineering degree, and you're going to law school. You should become a patent attorney,'" Roger recalls. "I thought that sounded like the most boring thing I had ever heard." During law school, the same advice kept coming his way, and Roger final- ly spent a day with his father's patent attorney. "He had little inventions and contraptions on bookshelves all around his office," Roger says. "He talked about all the things he did for various clients. It sounded like fun." Fast-forward 35 years, and Roger has had a long career in patent law. "I get to learn about new technologies almost every day, which is a perfect fit for my strong interest in learning how things work," he says. Most recently, he has shied more to management and is now the Managing Partner of Kilpatrick Townsend, overseeing more than 600 lawyers and another 800 professional staff across 18 domestic and four inter- Roger and Aidan are working together to restore a 1966 Ford Mustang.