After a career in finance and accounting, Gary “Buck” Dales says he’s now “dedicating myself to Rotary.” On July 1, he began a two-year term as Treasurer on the Board of the Rotary Club of San Francisco.
A native of Bishop, CA, Gary grew up in Bakersfield and graduated from the University of California Santa Barbara, then moved to San Francisco, where he worked for 11 years at Arthur Andersen, then for 13 years at PG&E.
In 2007, Gary moved to Dublin, Ireland, where he spent ten years as chief financial officer with Fly Leasing, a publicly-traded aircraft leasing company (NYSE symbol FLY) that leases passenger jet aircraft to airlines. According to Gary, “About 40% of (airlines’) aircraft are leased; Virgin Atlantic are 100% leased.” He returned to San Francisco in 2017 and currently does strategic consulting on an ad hoc basis in the aircraft leasing and utility fields, as well as forensic accounting.
Gary’s father was in Rotary, and he has a number of Rotarian friends, so when he moved to Ireland, he joined the Rotary Club of Dun Laoghaire in Dublin, a small Club whose members were mostly retirees; he served the Club as president in 2012-13.
When he returned to the Bay Area in 2017, Gary was looking for a bigger and younger club and joined the Rotary Club of San Francisco, attracted in part by the cachet of the second-oldest Rotary Club in the world. He was pleased to discover that he already knew several members of the Club. His goal as Treasurer is “to keep the Club on a sound financial footing.”