Jack and I
by Roger Lyons
At one point during that difficult week when we all gathered in Fremont, I was reminded of some of the conversations I had with Jack. Sid called me on his way to Fremont asking for directions. I gave him very accurate and concise directions to Fremont from San Francisco airport. What I didn’t know at the time and didn’t put together until about three phone calls later was that Sid had landed in San Jose. If you’re completely unfamiliar with the Bay Area, you won’t be able to fully appreciate the implications of that. I know Jack would get it because he had some conversations like that with me. So, you can see the challenge he faced, day to day.
And keep in mind, Jack and I worked together for 18 years. We developed a lot of products together, and we had a certain creative process. Now, that process often started off looking less like an exchange of ideas and more like a head-on collision. We both had the unfortunate tendency, whenever we put our heads together, to get a running start. But don’t waste your time looking for the wreckage. All you’ll find is a long line of accomplishments that memorialize my relationship with Jack more than anything else could, at least on the surface.
But, as Jack liked to say, here’s the rest of the story. He’d call me with a really good idea, and anyone who knew him well had seen how exuberant he could be. Then the debate would begin, with Jack on the affirmative and me on the negative. As a formal matter, my role was to try to talk him out of it, and whatever survived that process is what we went with. That’s where Jack’s receptive qualities kicked in–tolerance, flexibiltiy, attentiveness, and I’ve been thinking about those qualities recently, I suppose, because the last things you learn to appreciate about somebody are the things you’ve always taken for granted. I remember times when–maybe I interrupted him a little too soon, or maybe I stayed on the wrong track a little too long–Jack would say in his patient, soft-spoken, non-confrontational way, for which he was so famous, “Wait a minute, Roger. Just listen to me for a minute,” and what else could I do? I’d shut up and listen.
That happened less and less in the later years because, little by little, it was in ways like that, over the years, that I think Jack rubbed off on me. It couldn’t have been easy for him, but I’d like to think–I think it’s true–that maybe I’m a more tolerant, flexible, and attentive person, not just for having known Jack, but for his having made an extraordinary effort to understand me. One of Jack’s closest friends said it best: “Jack made me a better person.” There’s no accounting that can put a value on that.