Unpacking What It Means To Be An Innovator

I’ve never been one to take compliments very well, a combination of being overwhelmed when lavished by a half dozen crazy (effusive) aunts and a mother who was determined to instill humility into me.

In my now concluded career, I didn’t set out to be an innovator, but when tagged with that attribute while serving three different communities and asked how it might be adopted elsewhere; I began to study what it means.

Fortunately, a new discipline began to emerge early in my now-concluded four-decade career called behavioral economics.  It has been just as important as organizational behavior in helping unwrap the 70% of our decision making that is emotional and seemingly innate vs. rational.

Gallup applies behavioral economics in its relentless study of individuals’ strengths and how some can make such a difference in the productivity of some organizations over others.

In Durham, where I live, we have had a head start.  One of the discipline's “rock stars,” Dr. Dan Ariely is one of our own.

Dr. Roland Fryer at Harvard has use behavioral economics to analyze how impoverished societies around the world, including African Americans and Hispanics in the U.S., often work to hold peer members back from doing what it takes to lift themselves out of poverty.

But I’ve learned the most about what makes some people innovators from a trio of researchers with connections to BYU, my alma mater, who authored a book based on their study entitled, The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators.

The book is jam-packed, but in addition to outlining what makes innovators different, the authors note studies showing that “roughly 25 percent to 40 percent of what we do innovatively stems from genetics.”

“Two-thirds of our innovation skills, they continue, “still come through learning-first from understanding the skill, then practicing it, and ultimately gaining confidence in our capacity to create.”

They also put their finger on why people thought I was somehow innovative.  One of the “discovery skills” they identify as central to being innovative is “association thinking.”

This is the ability to “discover new directions by making connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas.”

This is why I preferred to think of myself as maybe an “early-adopter” or “fast follower,” because it was somehow easy for me to see those unrelated connections to our work.

I won’t get into the other “discovery skills” they found, which differ from associational thinking because they are behavioral, but one is questioning everything, especially the status quo.  Innovators see things as broken.

I was also an entrepreneur in my field of community marketing because I was always involved with startups.  Not all innovators are entrepreneurs but I’m not sure you can truly be an entrepreneur without being innovative.

But all innovative entrepreneurs score very high in two areas, associational thinking and questioning.

In contrast, CEOs who are not innovators focus almost solely on “delivering,” what I affectionately call list-checking while innovative CEOs spend at least 50% of their time on “discovery.”

This is why I was always at my best and able to sustain innovation well in the corporate cultures I led well beyond the startup and growth stages.  I tried to surround myself with people who shared innovation as a skill at some level but who were also skilled deliverers.

Most organizations are not innovative because they don’t foster it as part of their organizational culture, leaving them top heavy at delivering but vulnerable to stagnation.

If an organization can sustain an innovative culture and innovative leadership well past the growth stage, the study found they outperform their peers.

Unfortunately, as the authors who are all business professors note, Business schools teach people how to be deliverers, not discoverers.

Rarely do I see a resume these days that isn’t salt and peppered with self-identified attributes such as strategic, innovative, entrepreneurial and growth-oriented.

Applicants would be better off explaining how eager they are to be in and learn from a culture with those attributes because the process is continuous and never-ending.

If you truly aspire to be innovative, read the book The Innovators DNA and take the assessment at its website.  It will identify your strengths in that regard and where you need to focus on building that skill.

The business professors behind this work are Drs. Clayton Christensen at Harvard, Jeff Dyer at BYU and Hal Gregersen at MIT and INSTEAD, who have also developed the Innovator’s Accelerator, an intensive online learning experience.

Today, organizations that don’t perpetually innovate are doomed to stagnation.

Unfortunately, unless governing boards, which constantly rotate members, are firmly committed to innovative leadership during CEO succession, even cultures where innovation is firmly entrenched can begin to stagnate in a matter of weeks and months.

It is possible to reignite innovation but it is rare.  Being innovative requires a certain nimbleness, what Dr. Christensen calls the ability to pivot strategy.

He often cites research by a Harvard college that found that 93% of successful innovators had pivoted to a strategy different than the one adopted at startup.

Experts at McKinsey & Company recently published a list of factors that distinguish innovative organizations.  Note what the high performers do right.  When it comes to a culture of discovery, high performers in the first quartile outperform those in the next one down by nearly 3 to 1.

Christensen, et al. have documented what they call an “innovation premium” of more than 20 percentage points.  For those able to sustain and institutionalize an innovation culture through all phases of  an organization’s lifecycle, it is 40%.

There is even a bigger dividend for analytical innovators.  As analytics are embraced more and more, the competitive advantage they provide will wane unless organizations are among the 12% an MIT Sloan study found to be analytical innovators.

Being a good manager means minimizing surprises and uncertainty.  It is why “being a good manager can make you a bad innovator.”  An innovation culture “savors surprises.”

The secret is finding and sustaining the right balance between execution and exploration.

Are you sure you want to warrant “innovator” on your resume?

Then roll up your sleeves and start reading for understanding and then begin practicing.  Don’t skim looking for thunderbolts, look for unrelated associations.

Not your cup of tea or strength?  Then hire people who are innovators with an appreciation for execution and build it into your organizational culture and values.

In the words of marketer Tom Martin, seek out “explorers, not experts.”  Resist peer pressure trying to pull you back into the status quo.  Get used to being different.

Savor surprises.  Embrace uncertainty.  Question everything.  Hang on tight.

Family History’s Link to Civic Engagement & Tourism

Only 47% of Southerners know what both of their grandfathers did for a living, more than twice the percentage nationwide and astonishing given that 3-out-of-4 Americans express interest in knowing their roots.

But only a small percentage are what are called family history enthusiasts, people who have done at least 40 hours of research on their family roots.

A study published last year by The Odum Institute at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, just south of Durham where I live, found some significant correlations to family history enthusiasm.

It found that “higher levels of involvement in family history research positively correlated with self-reported volunteerism, civic engagement, charitable giving and community involvement.”

My interest in family history dates to my earliest memories of being lifted over the fence from the ancestral ranch where I was born to explore the headstones in a small cemetery in view of the Tetons where generations of ancestors had been buried.

A generation ago, the average family history stretched back 149 years but thanks to the ability to mine records online, it has grown in the U.S. to 184 years.

On both sides, mine now goes back now much further, in some cases more than 1,500 years.  I’ve been fascinated with a new interface that compares your family tree looking for any links to those of famous inventors, writers, athletes, clergy, even U.S. Presidents.

Relative Finder shows me my distant familial connect to Henry David Thoreau, Samuel Clemmons, Walter Chrysler, the Wright Brothers, Bing Crosby and Hall of Fame Quarterback Steve Young.

It also shows connections, long before they were Mormon leaders, to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and a hand full of others, including David O. McKay, who was the leader as I grew up.

I am also distantly related to Alexander Hamilton, 5th cousin 9 times removed to George Washington, as well as a distant relative to Jefferson, Adams and 15 other Presidents before I lost count including 7th cousin 5 times removed to Ulysses S. Grant.

Others included both Roosevelts, Truman, Nixon, Ford and President Obama through his mother’s side, 12th cousin 1 time removed.  Of course, most of these relationships relate to common ancestors long before those who who would immigrate here.

Obviously I am an underachiever.

Last year, a separate study reported that online family history research has grown in the United States by 14 times over the past decade.

Today, my alma mater BYU is known for its acclaimed Family History Technology Lab in the Computer Sciences Department, where students developed the now certified Relative Finder.

But it was two students earning degrees in public policy and mechanical engineering who first laid the groundwork in 1986 for what is now online genealogy.  It was a computer program intended to index text information in publications.

But it was soon integrated by Novell into its then dominant network operating system. Soon, two other BYU students used this technology as the backbone for what became Ancestry.com.

It was started as a publishing company in 1983 to aid people doing family history the old fashioned way.

But by 1996, two students with degrees in Russian and International Relations leveraged a start up in electronic publishing into what is now a huge subscription repository of records used to build family trees.

I mentioned the majors of these pioneers at the forefront of online genealogy to make the point that they didn’t have degrees in science or technology, something often lost on policy makers today obsessed with STEM.

According to the Ancestry Global Family History Report, interest in family history has doubled since 2008 and will again by 2025.

More than half of us (54%) were drawn to family history from looking through old photographs, letters or documents that our parents kept. 

Nearly a third of us (29%) have been to visit places where our ancestors lived while 14% have visited a museum, library or archive to conduct family history research.

In the U.S., 81% of those of us researching family history have come across old photos and two-thirds have come across birth, marriage or death records other than church records and 47% of have discovered old letters.

Only 10% of Americans trace to those who arrived on the Mayflower, but a quarter of those of us researching family history have used other passenger lists and immigrations records.

The report also provides a typology based on how close or distant families are in each nation.

Many times, I come across distant relatives who have chosen to share their DNA results on various websites including Ancestry.com.  Researchers are also now able to use DNA results to unwrap the composition of entire countries.

Ancestry.com has digitalized or obtained 15 billion digitalized records to date including 3 billion uploaded by users.

It is just one of several online family research sites, some of which such as Familysearch.com are now allowing an interface.

Significant is that across the six countries studied in the Ancestry Global Family History Report is that 60% people “feel a personal responsibility to act as a guardian of their family history.”

Possibly more important is that 62% of younger people ages 18-24 are being inspired to learn more through talking to older family members.

Just remember to capture every bit on a digital recorder or smart device.

My mother died in January at age 86 but my sisters and I were astonished at how much information she would share in her last few years that we had never heard before.

It was priceless.

The Significance of Understanding Your Natural Rhythm

I am what researchers call a “lark,” someone who, because of the way their circadian rhythms shifts, is genetically a “morning person.”

This is why I still get up around 6 a.m. even though I am retired.  It is why I work out and write these posts early in the morning.  Other people are genetically night “owls” or what researchers call “undifferentiated.”

A researcher at BYU, my alma mater, found in a study that 44% of people are “larks” like me, another 32% are “owls” and 24% are undifferentiated.

Dr. Jeffry H. Larson, who graduated a year before I did, also found that people whose rhythms are mismatched are far more likely to argue and to do so more often.

Researchers at Harvard and the University of Utah found that this can also impact when people are most likely to lie.

Further, researchers at the University of Washington, Johns Hopkins and Georgetown have found that when energy wanes, as it does later in the day for “larks” and earlier for “owls,” is also the time of day overall when people are more likely to be unethical.

For some time now, researchers have studied what they call “social jetlag” and found correlations to our chronology.  This is what some people feel when they go back to work on Monday or after a vacation.

It is also something that many college graduates are about to experience as they shift into the workforce.

Studies of “presenteeism” (present in body but not in mind,) note that it costs nearly $80 billion in annual lost productivity.

Human performance decreases at night by 5%-15%.  Interestingly, turnover drops by more than half when employees are able to modify a select a schedule compared to when mandated.

Some research has found links between “owls” and smoking and obesity.  Other research has found that “owls” are also potentially more creative and possibly have slightly higher IQs.

It isn’t likely that a person can change their chronology, and there are some well documented health reasons for why we sleep and fast at night.

Flex time is a solution but so is encouraging people in the workforce to be more conscious and respectful of the ebb and flow of their own energy as well as that of others so that they take on big projects when they are operating with high energy.

It may be that teams should be assembled, in part, using compatibility in this regard as criteria.

Years ago, during my four-decade career as a community marketing executive, I set a rule that people who helped me protect my calendar could set no more than one meeting for me in the morning and one in the afternoon without first clearing an exception.

This is what Dr. Christine Carter at UC-Berkley, the author of the new book The Sweet Spot: How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work, calls the “minimum effective dose” strategy.

For me, that rule about meetings was one of those “micro-habits” she writes about which, to paraphrase, channel our brain’s natural ability to run on “autopilot” so our habits can “relieve overreliance on willpower.”

I can also see in hindsight, how some people who are unethical and savvy at manipulation, probably took care to select meeting times where the potential for unethical outcomes was most probable.

They may have innately understood what researchers have observed.  Due to the “psychological depletion” people experience as the days wear on, “in the afternoon, the moral slope gets slipperier.”

Shuffling Ideas Into New Combinations

Something with which I am often credited in my former profession of community marketing needs clarification.

I was only among the first DMO executives to deploy technology across all office applications when we did that in Anchorage in the mid-1980s.

From there, when we started the DMO in Durham in 1989, we just stumbled into being the first to make technology a core strategy - a form of differentiation - that let us leapfrog far more established competitors.

Stumbled is the word I use when asked how and why, because back then we didn’t know we were the first to do so.

I’ve tried to unearth influences but as Brown University Taubman Center fellow Marc Dunkelman wrote yesterday in the Harvard Business Review,

“As most corporate executives know, good ideas don’t strike like bolts of lightning.  Quite the opposite: They are unearthed when existing concepts are shuffled and combined in new ways.”

What we had done back then began to make sense to me in retrospect, a few years later, when I read a 1997 article written by someone who nearly thirty years earlier happened to be a classmate of mine at BYU.

In 1970, I sat behind Clay Christensen in an Introduction to Economic Principles and Problems class.

He was in his first year and I was in my second, after a more than two year hiatus, but it became his major while I was the one to go on to make a career in visitor-centric economic and cultural development.

By the way, if anyone is wondering because I wrote about grades earlier this week, I got a B both semesters for that course.

While I am name dropping, Mitt Romney was also in that class, who I had come to know in a group called Cougar Club, as was Kim Clark, who I had known playing church ball while growing up in the Pacific Northwest before he went on to start for a rival high school.

I was the over-achiever of the four (smile,) meaning I was always in over my head, while they were each destined for greatness, Romney in private equity and politics and Clark first as head of Harvard Business School and now BYU-Idaho where my nephew attends.

Now sitting behind Clay was a bit of a challenge because he is 6’8.”  In fact, his son Matt came to Duke, which is based in Durham where I live, five or six years into our community marketing start-up here, and played on the 2001 national championship basketball team (#41.)

Matt may not have started much but the way he was treated by Coach K and his assistant coaches back then played a significant role in why Jabari Parker attended and played at Duke last year before becoming the NBA’s overall #2 draft pick a few months ago by the Milwaukee Bucks.

Matt is now CEO of Rose Park Advisors in Boston, a firm that invests in disruptive innovation (named after the Salt Lake neighborhood where his grandparents lived and his father grew up.)

I remember how bright his father was, but he seemed very quiet in that economics class.  Now I know it wasn’t because he was in his first year.

You know how some of us ask questions to get answers, but there are always a few who ask them just to show off and then continue the practice later in life to get free publicity?

Well Clay was different.  I know now that instead of listening to the answers he was listening to the questions asked and analyzing what made some questions so great.

It an idea that dates back to management guru Peter Drucker.

I didn’t know Clay that well back then but I often drew attention because of another friend who was even taller, the late Krešimir Ćosić who had enrolled that year at BYU after playing for KK Zadar in his hometown along the Adriatic Sea in what is now Croatia.

We struck up a friendship while cooling down one day from a run around the Smith Center track.

Ćosić revolutionized college basketball at the time because, at 6’11” he was a “big” who could also shoot from outside and play three different positions when needed.  This was very unique at the time.

He was also the first foreign player here to be inducted into the Hall of Fame.

But it was his unbridled enthusiasm, even when opposing players did well that made him truly unique.  He had already won an Olympic medal when he enrolled at BYU that year.  Kreso never met a stranger but at barely 6 feet I may have been among his shortest friends.

So what does this walk down memory lane have to do with unwrapping the influences that led me to stumble on making technology a core strategy for DMOs?

I read many articles he authored in Harvard Business Review including one in 1997 when he coined the term disruptive innovation but it wasn’t until I read Clay Christensen’s paper and subsequent book The Innovator’s Dilemma that I began to understand how I may have stumbled on that strategy so early in DMO circles at least.

When I was completing the Anchorage DMO start up in the 1980s and jumpstarting one from scratch in Durham in the 1990s, as most still do today, most DMOs tried to perform by merely emulating others.

Dr. Christensen would explain that this occurs in any business where there is no technological core.  The same is true of front-line DMO beneficiaries such as hotels, retail stores, performing arts centers etc.

For any eye-rollers who made it this far and think this is only about ancient history, the guy has been named the #1 management thinker in the world for two years.

It is why so many of these stakeholders objected when Durham’s DMO jumped out in front with a website in 1995, thanks to Vicki Isley who got her start in community marketing in Durham before heading marketing for Tampa, Washington DC and now Bermuda, after a stint as an executive with Destination Marketing Association International.

It is why even today, many visitor related businesses try to pull their DMO back into the dark ages of traditional advertising even when those community marketing organizations are generating exponentially better results from things like search optimization, responsive design and Google Ad Words.

At the foundation of what we did in Anchorage and then Durham was create a culture of innovation and continuing and never-ending improvement and that led naturally to making technology a core strategy in community marketing.

There was nothing genius about it and definitely no lightning bolt.  We just kept reshuffling the deck into new ways of thinking.  I can see all of that looking back now from retirement.

But, believe me, it wasn’t nearly that clear when we were shuffling those existing ideas into new ones in an attempt to leapfrog more established competitors.

My advice to anyone stuck in the emulation mode or struggling to keep from being pulled back into the dark ages by stakeholders, is to keep shuffling and be open to new combinations.

Oh, and pay attention to the people sitting next to you in class (smile.)

An Archaeology of Connections

While nosing around in my own history, I ran into some interesting connections that also relate to others.

In college at BYU I was named a Hinckley Scholar during my junior and senior years.  The private scholarship recognized a 3.8 grade point and “service to community.”

Many sought it for prestige, others such as me out of need.  Each grant was around $1,500 which in today’s dollars would be more than $8,000.

Among the 1,300 students the fund has recognized to date are Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a Supreme Court clerk and law school dean and three college presidents (no humblebrag intended – smile.)

But then there are a whole lot of folks like me, who also devoted their lives to community service.

Robert, the Hinckley son who, with his brothers, endowed the scholarship in 1954 in honor of their father, college professor Edwin S. Hinckley, was a “New Deal” FDR-Democrat.

What makes that particularly interesting is that Robert H. Hinckley also endowed the first of its kind bipartisan Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah where conservative-Republican-guru Karl Rove cut his teeth.

Rove is the operative currently floating rumors about Hillary Clinton’s health (one of his trademarks…remember swiftboating?)  At the Hinckley Institute he was taught to participate in politics and do it “in a decent and honorable way.”

As his mentor once lamented, Rove apparently only learned the first of those two lessons.

Bob Hinckley was a Mormon, who in his 20s cut his teeth in public service as a state legislator representing the overwhelmingly Republican Sanpete County which had been settled by my great-great-great grandparents in 1849.

Like his father, he was a liberal Democrat, but married into the family of a wealthy Republican rancher who grew Marino wool and bred Rambouillet sheep for export.

Then came the Great Depression and Bob Hinckley soon found himself appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to oversee all New Deal programs in Utah.

This was at the time that some Mormon leaders, egged on by an influential former official in the ousted Hoover Administration, were bent on undermining the New Deal.

Fear-mongering about putting people on “the dole” reached such a fevered pitch in that state that Mormons eventually created their own “dole,” but during the Great Depression, it didn’t come anywhere close to relieving the need, including those of 75% of Mormons.

While Mormons are notoriously resilient and self-sufficient, Utah back then had the highest per capita use of federal welfare programs in the nation.

While Utah is about 40% active Mormon today, in the 1930s it was 65-70% Mormon.

For every tax dollar Utahans transferred up to the federal government during the New Deal, they received seven in return.

Another way to view it is that Utahans received ten times as much from federal programs between 1936 and 1940 as they did from Mormon Church welfare.

In actuality, Roosevelt's federal administrators such as Harry Hopkins hated “the dole” too, preferring work relief programs instead, according to Hinckley’s papers.

In 1934, for instance, Utah was hit by a devastating drought.  Ranchers turned stock loose and thousands of families were drinking from irrigation ditches.

Hinckley implemented a $600,000 Water Conservation and Development Program, putting Utahans to work drilling 276 wells, developing 118 springs, lining 118 miles of irrigation ditches and laying 98 miles of pipeline.

As Hinckley predicted, this saved the government several millions of dollars in relief.

It was also a year later that U.S. Forest Service research led to conversion of an old mining site into Alta Ski Area and the foundation of Utah’s reputation for snow skiing.

Robert H. Hinckley went on to serve as U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce and chaired the aviation administration during the construction of Washington’s National Airport and oversaw pilot training for WWII.

He was a driving force behind formation of the “Tuskegee Airmen.”

He also led a war effort to build strategic airfields around the United States.  This, along with aircraft technology fueled during the war effort, laid the groundwork for the subsequent explosion in air travel during the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

Taking his first flight in 1913 with famed female aviator Mellie Beese, he acquired a Dodge Brothers dealership in 1915 (touring car shown) which his descendants owned for four generations.

He founded Pacific Airways in 1927 and invested early in radio. Hinckley obviously had an eye for useful technology, innovation and entrepreneurship.

D.C.’s airport is now ironically renamed for conservative Republican President Ronald Reagan.

Even more ironic is that both Hinckley and Reagan would be considered moderates today while Mormons have become the most conservative faith in America.

Still more than 1-in-3 are moderate or liberal, more than 1-in-5 are Democrats or lean Democratic and 36% overall would like to see a bigger role for government while nearly 60% of Mormons overall believe environmental laws are worth the cost.

Hmm, so much for stereotypes I guess.  Why is this news to many Mormons?  Perhaps many are just softer spoken.

It was a Hinckley Institute Fellow and resident scholar at a conservative think tank who co-authored the recent bestseller entitled, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the Politics of Extremism.

A quick read of this book will reveal why many otherwise reasonable people, when grouped together in control of the North Carolina General Assembly, have turned zany, mean and vindictive.

But the book’s author Dr. Jay Ornstein apparently did pay attention to the Institute’s full curriculum.

One of the easiest ways to spot today’s extremists anywhere is not only by their lack of empathy but by their serious deficit when it comes to ethics.

Two years before I was born, Bob Hinckley teamed with Ed Noble (of Lifesavers fame) in 1946 to found the American Broadcast Company, building it into what it is today, merging with Paramount and taking a 35% stake in Disneyland along the way.

Some of that ABC stock found its way into the scholarship fund from which I benefited in college.

I hope I’m able to repay that scholarship one day.  At one time it was the largest private scholarship endowment at BYU.  To return the irony, maybe Mitt would consider making it even larger, if he hasn’t already.

I have two other connections to Edwin S. Hinckley in whose name the fund was created by his sons.  He was born in Cove Fort, down by what is now Fish Lake National Forest in 1868, a contemporary of my great-grandfather Hyrum Edward Bowman.

His father Ira knew many of my earlier Mormon ancestors very well.  Those who created settlements south (most headed north where I was born) such as the Shumways and Sheltons, would have seen young Edwin playing as they repeatedly traveled through the fort.

Edwin graduated from BYU back when it was a combined high school/college academy and then took his family to Ann Arbor for graduate work in geology at the University of Michigan before returning to teach at BYU.  He retired after twenty years in 1915.

He then took charge of reforming the State Industrial Reform School for several years before returning to Provo to put his stamp on economic development.

Juvenile delinquency had reared its head among Mormons as early as 1868.  Gangs had formed by the 1870s including the “Squirter’s Squad” known for spitting tobacco juice on goods put out for sale resulting in creation of the territorial reform school in 1888.

Edwin S. Hinckley died on the eve of the Great Depression and didn’t witness his son’s role in the nation’s recovery.

He is famous for saying, "When one man says something can't be done, he is usually interrupted by someone else doing it."

His son Bob is famous for saying, “Democrats are for the people,” and “Republicans are for things…they favor property over people every time.”

A contemporary of my grandparents, he was also famous for saying, “I was just born lucky.”

Before I could say thank you, Robert H. Hinckley died just prior to beginning my final stint leading the DMO for Durham, but I’ve read and occasionally reread his autobiography, an oral history monograph.

Entitled I’d Rather Be Born Lucky Than Rich, it was published about the time I headed from Spokane to Anchorage to lead my second DMO and long before I made any connection.

I agree, and part of my luck was paid forward by him.

My 1966 Destiny And The Friend I Left Behind!

Maybe I was destined to attend the huge Idaho Falls High School my senior year. I had been born seventeen years earlier in that city of then 34,000 after my Mom went into labor and my Dad had to whisk her 50 miles south from our Henry’s Fork ranch on an extremely hot July afternoon because there was no hospital in nearby Ashton at that time.

I think I was meant to attend IFHS that year to prepare me for college the following year in many ways other than academics. That’s where I first took typing class to give me a way around the essential tremor that was already degrading my ability to handwrite.

I expanded beyond sports to hone a skill in forensics and I don’t mean the CSI kind. I mean the forensic art of competitive individual and team debate. Some call it advocacy forensics because you must learn to debate and refute both sides of an issue.

By the way, the debate topic nationwide in 1966 was:

Resolved: That the federal government should adopt a program of compulsory arbitration in labor management disputes in basic industries.

I think I may have also been destined to go to IFHS that last year to learn better how to deal with the large student body I was to encounter in college the next year. At well more than a thousand students, IF as it’s known was many times larger than any school I had previously attended and larger than the entire town near where I spent my early years.

But I’m sure I was also meant to go there to connect with Ronnie Park and we instantly became best friends. Ronnie was “cool” but not as in the typical “cool cliques” that had already hardened to much for anyone to crack in only a year.

We both drove old Chevy’s, mine a ‘57 and Ronnie’s a ‘55. When his ‘55 blew up, he was one of the first people in Idaho with a Datsun (today called Nissan.) That’s Ronnie in the photo to the left standing next to that car, which seemed pretty exotic at the time.

We both liked girls and rock and roll. I liked one girl in particular but Ron was more elusive. We traveled two hundred miles south to Farmington, Utah that summer to see The Rolling Stones and The Animals perform live at the Lagoon Amusement Park Patio Gardens to an audience of only a few thousand people.

We were Beatles and Beach Boys fans but the edginess of The Stones and The Animals formed the perfect soundtrack to a year when war and protest filled our living rooms and the draft loomed ahead.

Ronnie and I made several college visits together including the University of Idaho, Utah State University and Idaho State University. We had planned to visit the University of Wyoming over in Laramie but the engine in my ‘57 Chevy blew up and we had to be towed home.

That summer before college we worked together up in the 3-million-acre Caribou-Targhee National Forest, near my birthplace and ancestral ranch, fighting that year’s huge outbreak of Mountain Pine Beetles by spraying the soon-to-be banned DDT straight up into huge Lodgepole Pines in that nook between Yellowstone Park and the Idaho side of the Teton Mountains.

When we got back to IF, our paths parted as suddenly as they had crossed when I was lucky enough to get into Brigham Young University down in Provo, Utah where I wouldn’t be admitted by today’s academic standards, but managed to graduate magna cum laude. Ronnie headed to ISU in Pocatello.

I probably wouldn’t have adjusted to going to school with 20,000 other students at BYU had it not been for that year at IFHS. A lot of kids had difficulty making the adjustment to schools that large including one of my much brighter cousins. Enrollment at BYU had doubled in size over the six years prior to my freshman year and continued to rapidly grow before leveling out a little more than 20 years later at 32,000+.

Ten years after Ronnie and I parted ways, I was living and working in Spokane, Washington when I received a clipping from the Idaho Falls Post-Register anonymously in the mail, maybe from that former girl friend. Under what seemed like a huge headline, “Ronnie Park Found Dead,” the article reported that he had been living in Ucon, a little town north of Idaho Falls on US 20 leading back north to our ranch, and working nearby.

He had killed himself with a 20-gauge shotgun, leaving a widow named Dianna. It confirmed he had attended ISU and served four and half years in the Idaho National Guard.

It hit me hard and still does with more than a little guilt that we hadn’t stayed in touch, that I wasn’t there to dissipate the unfathomable anger and despair that can motivate suicide.

I passed on the 10-year reunion for the IF Class of ‘66 held a few months later and I have not attended any since.

Last week marked the anniversary of when I received that clipping the week after Ronnie’s death.

R.I.P my friend.