To Tony

A personal note here.

Received word today that my Father in Law, Antony Romao, whose comments have been cited on this blog in the past, has been admitted to a hospice here in Tampa Bay — what some are calling the end game in a battle with a cancer that was supposed to kill him about 20 years ago. I’m not sure that the end is near, and I hope it isn’t. The world would be a much less interesting place without Tony.

No, Antony Romao isn’t someone whose name you are supposed to know. The son of Portuguese immigrants, he was never president, or a key inventor of some important technology. Nonetheless, he was — and is — a pretty important guy.

I bring him up here, not just because his situation is weighing heavy on my mind, but because it means something to me. Something more than how efficiently we can draw bits on spinning rusty platters. Much more than whether SNIA’s latest pass at defining ILM is any more or any less silly than their previous attempts.

Somehow, somewhere along the way in the 13 years that I have known him, this combative, opinionated, conservative, big hearted, pain in the ass, father-in-law became my friend. His passing will represent the end of an era to me in a very meaningful and poignant way.

Tony is the last manifestation of a kind of person we don’t see much anymore. He was a labor guy who became a suit. A suit that became a C-level player at a corporation that, in the 70s and 80s, was a real mover and shaker. How he got there is a fascinating story that would take too long to tell. Hell, I wouldn’t do it justice anyway.

He has every reason to be proud of his accomplishments after 70+ years of walking the planet. From his humble beginnings, he first became an accomplished tool and die guy, working with his father at Winchester Firearms. He did a stint in the Army in the 50s. He married a wonderful woman, and they had two fine daughters — one of whom I claimed.

Along the way, he took a degree in industrial engineering that moved him into Corporate America at a time when we were building most of our goods ourselves. It didn’t take long before his aptitude was recognized by a mentor (remember those?) who packed him off to Harvard under a special program for promising business leaders.

You would think Tony did the whole MBA schtick…and he might as well have, for the intensity he brought to studying the details of everything that interested him.

Afterwards, he built businesses. Lots of them. To my way of thinking, he represents the heart and soul of the Silent Generation. Not as blindly optimistic as the Boomers, but possessed of a hard nosed anything-is-possible-with-enough-hard-work attitude that rewarded him with a tidy bit of wealth at the end of his career.

In truth, his corporate life wasn’t all roses. His mentor made him the troubleshooter. He sent in Tony to fix things, to put things right, or shut them down — on his personal authority. The mission would tear into anyone’s soul over time.

He shut down more than a few businesses. He once told me that shuttering a business was only personally painful when a lot of rank and file went unemployed.

In one instance, he was given a gold-gilded hatchet mounted on a wooden plack by the workers in a company who knew that he had done everything in his power to keep their shop viable — until it was clear that nothing could be done. Despite this fact, I think he was always plagued by the faces of the little guys whose lives were impacted in significant ways by a closure decision.

On balance, he probably put more people into productive livelihoods than he ever released from employment. But, he still remembers the faces of the small guys: everyone has their demons.

One story he is fond of telling: he was handed the responsibility for fixing the company’s huge IT operation. He assessed the situation, then fired everyone in the IT shop. A radical step in those days, he pushed centralized IT out into the trenches, under the aegis of all of the lines of business managers directly. To hear him tell it, the centralized IT group was completely out of sync with the business, draining precious resources in a huge way. They had to be disbanded.

Before you get the idea that he was anti-tech, I will argue that he was prophetic. This decision came on the dawn of what would eventually be hailed as the distributed computing revolution. He reviewed the situation with the dispassionate view of an economist and concluded that IT had to become more decentralized. Any other strategy made absolutely no business sense. The way he told the story always struck me as profound for some reason.

You might be interested to know that Tony was one of the first guys in Corporate America to use a PC. He was fascinated by the empowerment represented by the technology. A decade later, he became the technology maven for his entire retirement condominum complex — at first, teaching classes in the basics of computing and the Internet so the retirees could use email and share digital pics of their grandkids, then instructing them in the complexities of on-line trading (a subject with which he was very familiar).

He organized networks, wired and wireless, throughout his complex to enable folks who had never touched a computer before, and bragged about how he could share his broadband connection via wireless with a few of his cronies on other floors of the building.

Sensing his inner geek early on, I took him with me, as an “advisor,” to many technology tradeshows in Vegas and Atlanta in the 90s. Little did I suspect how important his advice would be.

He would sit with me in the press room and listen as one vendor after another gave their pitch. Afterwards, he would tell me who would succeed and who wouldn’t. An inside joke, Margaret (his daughter, my wife) took to collecting the giveaway polo shirts of the companies he panned. She has a closet today full of shirts from companies that no longer exist, occasionally wearing one at a trade show where the newbies with short memories don’t remember the previous occupants of their booth space.

He respected powerful companies: Microsoft, EMC, and others whose stock performance reflected good business execution, regardless of technical excellence. I remember clearly the somber way he shook his head as we watched Cabletron, an important up-and-comer at the time much loved by analysts, launch a marketing campaign villainizing Cisco Systems. We were guests at a Networld+Interop party at Hard Rock in Atlanta hosted by the Cabletron, a client of mine at the time. He whispered to me that I should dump their stock, if I had any; their CEO was an ass and they wouldn’t be around much longer. He was right on the money, of course: that little bit of marketing hubris cost them market share that they could never recover.

The party ended on 9/11. I remember sitting with Tony and Margaret at Jock & Jills, a bar in the CNN building near the Georgia World Congress Center (at another N+I, in fact). It was the evening following the World Trade Center attack. Looking at Tony’s face, it seemed that everything had changed for him. Tech was no longer a meaningful distraction: the world had changed overnight.

Shortly, I would soon be heading to New York to support my clients there, and he would return to Tampa Bay with Margaret to fight the fight his way, digging heavily into on-line reportage of the attack and its causes, then sharing his political views and insights with his expansive circle of friends.

He often remarked afterwards that he didn’t envy me the world in which I will now need to make my way. At the same time, he seemed to focus on teaching myself and Margaret some coping strategies: the ingredients of smart investment strategies, how to evaluate corporate financial statements and reports, dispassionate analysis of business matters. These were his coping tools in another era.

Along the way, I also picked up a bit of his sometimes caustic, take-no-bullshit, attitude.

In the last couple of years, I have watched with delight the relationships Tony established with the kids — first, Alex and Max, then Mercedes, Vincent, Carrie and Isabella: his direct descendents. There has been absolutely nothing he would not do for them — and he has done a lot.

The last couple of years have been borrowed time for him. He has made every day count. Little consolation though it may be, I can’t think of anything to say but, if this is the time, then it is the time.

You’ve done your job, Tony, and well. Maybe now its time to rest.