On Friday, the 20th of July, 2018, we gathered for John Jayne’s celebration of life. He had been my boss at Disdero Lumber from 1986 to 1997, and a good chunk of who I am in this business came from those years standing next to him.
Tumac ran deep in my family before I ever showed up to work. My grandfather, one of the two Macs, founded it in 1959, and my mom was the first employee Tumac ever hired. First one through the door. Disdero was a Tumac company, so when I came on full time in 1986, after a summer there in ’85 and my senior year at Oregon State University, I was already inside the house my family helped build. John was the man who ran it.
He was about the most personable guy I knew in the business, and that was no small thing in a trade that lives and dies on relationships. People liked being around John, and so did I. He was also a tremendous golfer. He carried a 2 handicap. Dave Menkens and I would pair with John and a fourth in the industry tournaments, and we cleaned up. There was a ten year stretch where we brought home at least one trophy every single year. A lot of good times on that course, and a lot of business done between the tee box and the green.
Under John, Disdero grew from a Northwest outfit into something a lot bigger. He brought in Lockdeck with Gunnar Brink, opened distribution yards in Washington and California, and found the profitable lines and pushed them. When it came time to divide up the pie, he was generous about it. Upright and fair, every time. He gave me a long leash too, at a younger age than I should. When he made general manager he put me on his quasi executive committee alongside Perry, Loren, and Coop. Those were good years. We worked hard, we had fun, and I figured it would just keep going like that.
It didn’t. My run at Disdero ended in 1997. I had been pushing too hard for quantitative compensation for some of our people, the kind of defined structure that pays a person for what they actually bring in. The final straw was a book. I had shared it with our Seattle branch manager. Gunnar told the story his own way years later, in a speech in December of 2017, and he embellished it the way a good storyteller will:
“He was also strong willed, confident, and didn’t always agree with management. Young, aggressive, and not yet politically savvy, he pushed things a little too far. He loved books, and he loved to share them with others, but when he gave the president of the company a book titled ‘How to Fire Your Boss,’ one chapter ended and another was about to begin.”
Mike Blanchet was the Tumac president, and he was the one calling the shots. Paul McCracken, the chairman, let him run the company with plenty of rope. So the decision came down from up top, and John was the one who had to carry it to me. I have never held that against him. I was thirty three, very aggressive, not very political. I rubbed some people the wrong way and it came back to bite me. I didn’t leave. I was let go.
It was tough. I thought hard about getting out of lumber for good and going to do ceramics instead. But here is the part I couldn’t see, standing in that room in 1997. I think John knew, in his heart, that I would be better off out of there. The man who handed me the worst news of my career may have understood, before I did, that he was opening a door instead of closing one.
I started making phone calls. Three out of the first ten turned into job offers. One of them was to Jim Rodway at Patrick Lumber.
Sometimes life works out in the hardest of times, and you don’t get to know it while it’s happening. There’s a kind of knowing that runs out ahead of the facts. You feel it in someone before they say it, and you only recognize it later, looking back from the far side. Faith is believing in that. The unknown, the unseen, the sense that the thing breaking your heart today is pointing you somewhere you couldn’t have walked to on your own.
Standing at his celebration of life, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was thinking about the long leash, the trophies, the good name he kept. I will always remember John for his good nature and his golf game, and for being the man who let me go and, somehow, set me free.