How I connected with John B. Cardwell, a fellow member of our class, who I never really knew in High School.
Years later, in Maryland, for over three decades he was one of my best friends. I knew him until the day he passed away.
In the early 1980's I was hired by the Board of Directors to be the Director of Quality Assurance at Peterson, Howell & Heather (PHH), located in Hunt Valley, MD, then the largest automotive contract leasing firm in the world.
So I am walking down an aisle in a sea of open plan office cubes and I hear a voice in the Used Car Department...."where do I know that voice from."
Didn't think much of it, at the time. Well, almost every day, I'd hear that voice on the phone as I passed that area on the way to my office. The voice was interesting, it got into convoluted and sometimes heated discussions involving selling packages of used, off lease automobiles with some car dealership. All in all a very important job as that is where PHH recovered significant economic value.
So one day, I hear the voice talking about "Upper Darby this and Upper Darby that." and the "Philadelphia iggles" (note the phonetic spelling of Eagles). So I went over to that voice and he looked sort of familiar, and it was John Cardwell member of our Class of 1966. So we became friends, first at work, then later hung out at football and baseball games, and after that were fast friends .
Years later, before I started a technology firm, when he went into the leasing business, on his own, myself and two others helped him found Bay Capital Financial Services of Towson, MD
I still miss him, because he was one of those guys you could always count on. Not just for a laugh, but also support, if you needed a hand, such as when one of my daughters got really ill, for a long time with Lyme Disease.
And on better days, when he came up to help me, as a single parent of two daughters, he was a big teddy bear of a game player, who taught my daughters Averill and Eleanor, how to play soccer as well as teaching them a variety of board games on rainy days..
John had a certain kindness and grace about him, even years later in the very hard driving big size truck leasing business.
One of the things that surprised me was the day, John tells me that we are driving to Pittsburgh "tomorrow morning, early."
A mutual friend, a well known CPA, Dave Richards, had died after a long battle with lung cancer. We had known Dave, the CPA for years and John and I would work with him both as his clients, (John had introduced us) and as a friend, trying to help our CPA, Dave kick a three pack a day habit, he had picked up in Vietnam.
Dave's entire family was back in a very rural area of Pittsburgh, and that is where Dave was to be buried.
John tells me that "we have to go," because we have to tell the family what kind of a man Dave was.
Dave helped all manner of very successful and very well known businesses in the Baltimore - Washington area as a CPA. But then, on the side, and very little known, Dave used his skills, at no charge, to help any poor and needy person do all the paperwork to navigate things like the Maryland Public Assistance System.
So off we go on the Pennsylvania Turnpike to a somewhere place we would normally just drive past.
We end up in tiny little chapel in a tiny little town up on a hill overlooking the Monongahela River.
Then as part of the service, John gets up to speak, and he spends 45 minutes explaining that Dave was a hard driving CPA to owners of restaurants and pro sports teams, in the Baltimore- Washington Area. But there was something else to Dave, and that it was a side to David Arundel Richards, that the Pittsburgh relatives who knew him, didn't know.
And so John proceeded to tell stories about the real poor people Dave helped. As Dave was dying, John actually went out and found those poor people and learned how Dave had helped them and so he could tell real stories about the poor people that Dave had helped. Including how John and Dave worked together to help the Maryland Attorney General break up a mortgage loan scam that preyed on elderly homeowners and shady contractors.
Note it was John who discovered that scam one day when he was ministering to the poor as part of his church work among the elderly and infirm and one of them asked John for help..
Dave's realtives started to cry.
They never knew that their Dave Richards, who went away to the "big city," was more than the CPA to the rich and famous.
Arthur Aubrey
How I connected with John B. Cardwell, a fellow member of our class, who I never really knew in High School.
Years later, in Maryland, for over three decades he was one of my best friends. I knew him until the day he passed away.
In the early 1980's I was hired by the Board of Directors to be the Director of Quality Assurance at Peterson, Howell & Heather (PHH), located in Hunt Valley, MD, then the largest automotive contract leasing firm in the world.
So I am walking down an aisle in a sea of open plan office cubes and I hear a voice in the Used Car Department...."where do I know that voice from."
Didn't think much of it, at the time. Well, almost every day, I'd hear that voice on the phone as I passed that area on the way to my office. The voice was interesting, it got into convoluted and sometimes heated discussions involving selling packages of used, off lease automobiles with some car dealership. All in all a very important job as that is where PHH recovered significant economic value.
So one day, I hear the voice talking about "Upper Darby this and Upper Darby that." and the "Philadelphia iggles" (note the phonetic spelling of Eagles). So I went over to that voice and he looked sort of familiar, and it was John Cardwell member of our Class of 1966. So we became friends, first at work, then later hung out at football and baseball games, and after that were fast friends .
Years later, before I started a technology firm, when he went into the leasing business, on his own, myself and two others helped him found Bay Capital Financial Services of Towson, MD
I still miss him, because he was one of those guys you could always count on. Not just for a laugh, but also support, if you needed a hand, such as when one of my daughters got really ill, for a long time with Lyme Disease.
And on better days, when he came up to help me, as a single parent of two daughters, he was a big teddy bear of a game player, who taught my daughters Averill and Eleanor, how to play soccer as well as teaching them a variety of board games on rainy days..
John had a certain kindness and grace about him, even years later in the very hard driving big size truck leasing business.
One of the things that surprised me was the day, John tells me that we are driving to Pittsburgh "tomorrow morning, early."
A mutual friend, a well known CPA, Dave Richards, had died after a long battle with lung cancer. We had known Dave, the CPA for years and John and I would work with him both as his clients, (John had introduced us) and as a friend, trying to help our CPA, Dave kick a three pack a day habit, he had picked up in Vietnam.
Dave's entire family was back in a very rural area of Pittsburgh, and that is where Dave was to be buried.
John tells me that "we have to go," because we have to tell the family what kind of a man Dave was.
Dave helped all manner of very successful and very well known businesses in the Baltimore - Washington area as a CPA. But then, on the side, and very little known, Dave used his skills, at no charge, to help any poor and needy person do all the paperwork to navigate things like the Maryland Public Assistance System.
So off we go on the Pennsylvania Turnpike to a somewhere place we would normally just drive past.
We end up in tiny little chapel in a tiny little town up on a hill overlooking the Monongahela River.
Then as part of the service, John gets up to speak, and he spends 45 minutes explaining that Dave was a hard driving CPA to owners of restaurants and pro sports teams, in the Baltimore- Washington Area. But there was something else to Dave, and that it was a side to David Arundel Richards, that the Pittsburgh relatives who knew him, didn't know.
And so John proceeded to tell stories about the real poor people Dave helped. As Dave was dying, John actually went out and found those poor people and learned how Dave had helped them and so he could tell real stories about the poor people that Dave had helped. Including how John and Dave worked together to help the Maryland Attorney General break up a mortgage loan scam that preyed on elderly homeowners and shady contractors.
Note it was John who discovered that scam one day when he was ministering to the poor as part of his church work among the elderly and infirm and one of them asked John for help..
Dave's realtives started to cry.
They never knew that their Dave Richards, who went away to the "big city," was more than the CPA to the rich and famous.
Thanks to John Cardwell.