David Pearl – ALF Volunteer (Board member since 2023

In the fall of 2022, my wife Cheryl encouraged me to join her as an ALF volunteer. I started helping with the Tuesday afternoon crew. A year or so later, I was asked to join the Board. My focus has been somewhat varied. I help oversee our insurance policies, review contracts and handle minor repairs and other facility issues.

My wife and I are both from Delaware. We met in college, graduating from Duke University in 1975. I attended on a NROTC scholarship and was commissioned as an Ensign in the U.S. Navy. I reported to Pensacola, Florida a few weeks later to begin Pilot training, which I completed just over a year later. I spent the next 7 years on active duty with tours all over the western Pacific as well as an assignment as a pilot instructor. Cheryl and I got married about five months after I got my wings.

I left the Navy in 1982 just after our first child was born and went to Law School at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. After graduation, I took the California Bar Exam and started work at a law firm in San Jose, Ca. Our second son was born around this time. Eventually, I moved to a firm in San Francisco that specialized in aviation cases where I had the opportunity to represent airlines, aircraft manufactures, fixed base operators and individual pilots in a wide range of lawsuits, several of which went to trial.

We returned to the east coast after our sons were grown because our parents were in failing health. In three years, we lost both of Cheryl’s parents and my mother. We lived back there until my younger son and his wife announced that we were about to become grandparents. They were living in San Luis Obispo, so that became our destination as well. Ultimately, we decided on Atascadero, and we moved here in October 2017.

We’ve been blessed with two more grandchildren since we moved back, bringing the total to three. They moved to Atascadero as well and live less than a mile from us. Life is good indeed! Cheryl and I like to travel, I enjoy working with the local Boy Scout Troop and I write for a couple aviation publications.