In loving memory of an amazing man
My memory of George is simply that he was my mentor, rather than my boss. It was the luckiest day of my life when I joined his company. Thank you, George (and Jane) for the many years of happiness you gave me.
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That was all I could think of, to say when I learnt that George had passed away in December, at the age of 93. Pure emotion. I contributed those words to his section on the website legacy.com. (Some very moving tributes from others who worked at Russell Investments.) A better appreciation of all that he did and achieved in his life is contained in an article in The Tacoma News Tribune, the local paper in his town, Tacoma, WA, where I spent many years. Clearly he enhanced the lives of many thousands of people. I couldn’t think of any of it when I got the news. Thoughts and words failed me. Pure emotion.
Since then I’ve had time to think back of what he meant to me, and the kind of person he was. And none of it comes from our professional relationship, even though he enabled me to find professional fulfillment. It’s just our personal interaction. So often. Some of the memorable ones …
In the early days of establishing the Toronto office for his firm, George would visit us every few months to see how we were doing and to exchange thoughts on our interaction with the head office. On one of these visits, my son had been suddenly hospitalized with a severe asthma attack. I wouldn’t be able to have my usual dinner with George. Not a problem. George came to the hospital to offer his support to my wife Susan and me, and our dinner consisted of a hospital sandwich.
When our family moved to Tacoma, so that I could join the senior team, we planned it well in advance. I arranged for a house to be built by a local builder, to have a nice place to move into. But it wasn’t completed when we moved. George to the rescue. He made an apartment available to us, at no cost, until the house was ready.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, George started to organize trips to emerging markets so that clients could get a feeling for themselves as to the investment opportunities. These turned out to be popular and useful for the clients. One trip was to India, and he invited Susan and me to join the group, as his personal guests. And that was how we found ourselves, on Valentine’s Day 1995, at the Taj Mahal on a side jaunt. I cherish the photo of Susan and me with George and his wife Jane (a gem in her own right, who helped establish such a wonderful corporate culture that those of us lucky enough to work there found that our colleagues became our friends, and we felt like one large family).
Thank you, George. God bless you.
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I have written about retirement planning before and some of that material also relates to topics or issues that are being discussed here. Where relevant I draw on material from three sources: The Retirement Plan Solution (co-authored with Bob Collie and Matt Smith, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009), my foreword to Someday Rich (by Timothy Noonan and Matt Smith, also published by Wiley, 2012), and my occasional column The Art of Investment in the FT Money supplement of The Financial Times, published in the UK. I am grateful to the other authors and to The Financial Times for permission to use the material here.