14 saint francis magazine | spring 2024 Let’s go underwater with Jim “Gunner” Bolint (BS ’99). He’s a professional diver, adept at exploring marine life 125 feet or more below the surface. He has explored as deep as 3,000 feet below in a submarine. The experiences, always exhilarating, occasionally become more than he bargains for. “I’ve had the great fortune to travel throughout the world and see many things most people only see on the Discovery Channel,” Bolint said. Bolint has encountered—up close and personal— a giant isopod, a jumbo octopus and too many other species of fish to count. Those encounters are fascinating and memorable, and generally without any extreme danger. Tiger sharks are a different story. Tiger sharks of 14 or 15 feet in length have charged Bolint twice—once off Andros Island, Bahamas, and once in Kona, Hawaii. “It really just shows you how out of your element you are; you’re basically a primate in the water and you just have to sit there and take it,” Bolint said. “I don’t have the ability to defend myself or escape. I just have to play it out and remove myself from the situation.” Bolint finds few places where he’s out of his element. He’s comfortable as an environmental consultant, inventor, biologist, adventurer and family man. Bolint works as principal scientist at Environmental Works, Inc., in Indianapolis. He and his fiancée Amanda “Mandy” Gruesbeck have two daughters, Kelsey and Cameron, and live in Zionsville, Indiana. Bolint traveled a circuitous path to environmental science. Coming out of Portage High School, he planned to play soccer collegiately and study commercial art. After considering Ohio State University, Manchester University and the Art Institute in Chicago, he chose Saint Francis. His friend and fellow player Mike Samaniego from “The Region” kept his Gunner nickname alive as teammates at Saint Francis. (The nickname came from Bolint’s knack for long-range goals as a teenager.) Bolint’s career path changed course after a course with Saint Francis professor Larry “Doc” Wiedman. “Doc Wiedman got me into the sciences,” Bolint said. “I went from commercial art to biology to environmental science. I was grateful to him for introducing me to a whole new realm.” After graduation, Bolint worked at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, and carries a particularly vivid memory of guiding rock star Rod Stewart and his supermodel wife Rachel Hunter during a visit. The $20,000-a-year salary didn’t cut it, even with celebrity encounters, so he moved on to work at SECOR International, Inc., launching a career which took him to a variety of companies, studies and adventures. Among many fascinating experiences, Bolint worked at the site of the Selendang Ayu oil spill in western Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, the second-largest spill to the Exxon Valdez. That assignment took 12 hours a day. One memorable anecdote: “Going back to the command center one day, there was all this ruckus going on, people saying, ‘We need a biologist!’ Technically, that was me. There was a beached whale on the north side of the Dutch harbor,” Bolint said. The whale, an 8-foot juvenile, weighed just shy of a ton. Bolint and his coworkers managed to ease her back out to sea. A few years later, Bolint spent three months “hopping around Central America.” He even bought a bungalow. “I was going to live down there, be a scuba bum, basically. Then I met Mandy.” Love pulled him back to Indiana, and he resumed his environmental consulting career. Gruesbeck is also an environmental consultant. The couple JIM BOLINT’S LOVE OF SCIENCE AND PASSION FOR DIVING HAVE TAKEN HIM ON UNENDING ADVENTURES AROUND THE WORLD Photography by Tim Brumbeloe
