Candace, Me, and Glass Spider Tour

Each child is unique. That, certainly, is not breaking news for anybody who has known two or more children.

Candace’s uniqueness showed up in several ways. She was beautiful beyond belief, and I don’t say that just because she is beautiful to me. People would often comment how she reminded them of the Gerber baby or Shirley Temple. Her mother entered her picture in a beautiful baby contest at the local mall, and she won. She was simply stunning!

She also learned to speak at a very young age. Adults were able to have conversations with her at two years old beyond the typical two year old conversations. She could speak in coherent, complete sentences at that age. I remember the time she brought me the phone. The person on the other end told me how darling my child was and asked her age. When I told him she was two, he said he meant the one who answered the phone. I told him she is my only child, and that she is two. His comment was "I cannot believe I just had an intelligent conversation with a two year old!"

The Family Finale

This was originally published on May 14, 2020.

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One of the things that Dad was most proud of showing off to people was how quickly he could muster the family to gather. He has been dead now for nearly twenty-eight years, and so has the family unity that died with him. It didn't have to die, but it did.

I think the erosion of the family was mostly due to regret. I cannot get into the heads of people, but I can listen to what they say and observe what they do to figure out if they are being honest. If they say one thing, and then do another thing, they aren't being honest. It isn't rocket science; it's human behavior. Actions generally reveal more about people's motives than do words.

Remembering Dad: His Newsletter Obituary

December 1992 
Issue 237 

WAYNE C. KOECKE 
1932-1992

With much of his family and several friends at his side, Wayne Koecke died at his home on December 16th. His vigil for life, and battle against cancer, ended on a snowy evening in a room by a window that several of his grandkids had built a snowman just outside of in hopes of raising his spirits just one more time. Somehow, we think it did. 

Remembering Dad: Thirty Years Ago Tonight

This was originally written on December 16, 2022.

* * * * * 

It was a snowy Wednesday evening when Dad took his last breath thirty years ago tonight. Though it was the most significant loss I had suffered in my first thirty-four years, my initial feeling was relief. We had pulled off Dad's wishes despite it being a harrowing six weeks since he suffered the stroke that really was the lung cancer metastasizing in his brain. He wanted to die at home, and he did.

It was my night to stay with him and my brother's night off. Our godfather, Loren, and godbrother, Tim, also rotated staying with us. There is no way that we could have pulled it off without them, and neither of them ever complained about the help he needed. After all, he was their loved one, also. 

Saving CUPS Part 3: Slaying the Dragon

There were many changes in the first part of 1988. The regulatory agency had a new Supervisor. John had been Betty's attorney assigned to her as counsel in the pursuit of the accounting problem. Obviously, I was not privy to their discussions on how to attack the problem created by the managers whose plan to correct a problem with GAAP would serve as a textbook example for the rule. However, John was much more vicious than Betty was. 

He went after the jobs of these four managers. His tactic was to attend a board meeting and have the manager excused. He would then present his case for dismissing the manager to the board. In the case of Jim Whyte, one of the founding fathers of the local credit union movement, he was called back in to learn he was being fired.

Saving CUPS Part 2: Explaining Contra Accounts to CPA's

One of the most difficult aspects of consulting is that people often don't want advice; they want advocacy. Certainly, consultants can never ethically accept jobs that require advocacy over sound operation. That is the function of marketing departments.

The state had imposed an accounting principle known as "lower of cost or market" (LOCOM) because of the nature of the problem the credit unions had created. Though Bert would have preferred me to figure out a way that LOCOM accounting was unreasonable, he accepted the fact that there was nothing we could do about it. 

Saving CUPS Part 1: Trapping the Moles

In a matter of two months, I left Telco Credit Union to open up a consulting business, and then closed the consulting business because Credit Union of Puget Sound (CUPS) was using me full time. I was settled into my new position as Administrative Assistant to Bert Noel when he called me into his office. 

He put a memo from the state examiners in front of me and asked me if I had ever heard of a minor infraction cited in detail. It was some really minor error in the way the credit union accounted for something. I had not ever seen such a write up before, but I also had to admit that I wasn't an accountant. I asked him what Chet or Kenny had said about it. He hadn't talked to them. He had just received the memo from the state examiner who was posted in the accounting department since the credit union had been put on the watch list for an investment and accounting problem.

Pondering Death and Its Options

Intellectually, I know that I will eventually die. However, there is this little part of me that wonders if I might be that special someone who somehow defies death. If you will excuse the source if it bothers you, Woody Allen said it best: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying." It is natural to feel that way because of our basic instinct for survival, but it is also intellectually dishonest to hold onto the thought for anything other than fantasy.

While we hold onto those thoughts in one part of our minds, another part of us wants to be adventurous and to live life to the fullest. James Dean's self-fulfilling quote, "Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse," takes the idea to the opposite end of the spectrum of life and death from immortality. While most of us don't go anywhere near that far in our pursuit of adventure, we tend to tie the will to live to having a life worth living.

I Met a Man Named John (Newsletter published January 1999)

I have been going through boxes and stored items so that I can get rid of things that I've saved over the years that I will never need. One of the benefits of doing this is that I am also finding things that I've saved because I wanted to keep them, like old Newsletter publications in which I wrote articles about things other than industry topics and our company's services. 

Several of the articles had to do with my life as a single, custodial father of two daughters. This particular article got more positive comments when I wrote it than any other article I wrote for the Newsletter. With that introduction, here is "I Met a Man Named John," which is most likely slightly edited because I don't have to make it fit and also because I'm anal like that. 

(The thing that seems most funny in rewriting this article is that I am now about the age of the "elderly, well-dressed Black man." As I look back on things, I seem to have learned a lesson from my encounter with the man who had the riches that money cannot buy.)

Fuel Filter Fun

Kathy and Richard lived in many different places while Richard was in the military. Of course, that meant their children also moved around a lot.

Richard got stationed in North Carolina the year Tony turned eighteen. He decided to stay here in Washington rather than relocate back east with his family. Kathy and Richard gave him their 1987 Chevy Celebrity to help him with his independence, and he took a job in the family business to earn his own way.

Three Songs About Richard Nixon

Many people regard Nixon as nothing but evil. I don't go along with that belief. I think he was only eighty-five to ninety percent evil. However, when it comes to music, I cannot think of any popular song that praised him. The best I can come up with are the rather neutral comments in Lynard Skynard's song Sweet Home Alabama: "Watergate does not bother me. Does your conscience bother you?" Those don't really address Nixon so much as the Nixon era.

My Apology to Walmart

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" - John Maynard Keynes 

For decades, Walmart has stood as the symbol of capitalism gone awry. For some time, it earned the symbolic relationship by manipulating markets and cutting out competition for market share.

However, the facts have changed. It is time for me to not only change my mind, but to offer Walmart my sincere apology for not recognizing how far the company has come in producing a marketplace that competes with Amazon, and is greener and less greedy than what Bezos has set up, exploiting everyone from consumers to partners to employees.

Remembering Mom: Her Trips to the Cemetery

There was no pain that Mom carried in her heart greater than the pain of losing David, her youngest child. He was born in early December 1964 and died the next March at three-and-a-half months old. 

I was seven when David died. Mom and Dad let us view his body lying in state, which is the most vivid image of David that I retain, but we weren't allowed to go to his funeral. He spent so little time at home that we never got to know or play with him. 

More vivid than the image of David in his coffin are the images of the many times Mom walked across the uneven ground of Lullaby Land to put flowers on his grave. Her regular trips to the cemetery began on her birthday in 1965. Her birthday, and David's birthday and date of death, became ritualistic for her and Dad to visit David's grave. In 1993, she added Dad's dates of birth and death, and we children became her support system accompanying her to our brother's grave and our father's crypt. 

Remembering Dad: Was it a Prank?

I don’t remember the date, but the year was 1980. I know that because it was election season, and Governor Ray was running for re-election, which made this the perfect time for someone to pull this prank.

We were in his office discussing some business when the phone rang. He answered it.

"I wouldn’t pay fifty dollars to spend the whole night with her," he said just before he slammed the phone down!

Is Not Caring Anymore a Mental Health Issue?

We can all try to hide from it, but there are things we used to care about that we no longer care about. Each person is unique in how this applies personally to them. Some people quit caring if other people judge them, while other people might quit caring about whether they are fully made-up before going into public. We might even think that not caring about those things is mentally healthy.

The problem with drawing a conclusion with that little information is that we are really projecting an answer to what we imagine those general statements mean to us. We imagine that not caring if other people judge us means we are retaining control of our lives. We imagine that not caring if we are fully made-up for the day before going in public is part of maturing. To some degree, perhaps even in most cases, those would likely be correct conclusions.