11 was a $15 million job with Wheeler Machinery; a really good job for our little firm — incredible clients. As a result of that job, we picked up a very similar project in Denver, Wagner Equipment — another great client. That’s when Bob decided to open an office in Denver doing interior finishes, largely. We picked up similar jobs. I ran projects. Abe ran the business and ran projects too. I started doing the marketing; I was the outside guy. Abe said, “You be AIA for the firm; I’ll take care of this. I’ll be the ballast.” Great person, great ballast. I can’t imagine having a better partner. A couple of years later, through AIA, I got to know David. I knew Steve before, a little bit; he was a neighbor of Abe’s. We brought our firms and talents together. By 1986, we got all the initials in there. Talk about some of the struggles. When you are starting your firm, having a strong financial basis is important. We mortgaged my house; we dipped into my savings to pay some bills. I had a lot of cold showers. It was the kind of “the-head-against-the-wall” thinking, “We gotta get through this.” But you still believe in yourself. And you believe in your partner. And my wife believed in me. She lived through that stuff; it was as tough a time for her as it was for me. But we knew we could do it. We never missed a payroll. Never. I am really proud of having done that. Never stepped on anyone to make that happen. No consultant ever went unpaid. The work was never too hard. It was grueling at times, trying to get work done, trying to figure out how to get the new job to keep a flow of projects into the office. Those are struggles, but those are all just meaningful moments in your career. You just find a way and make it happen. When you look at your career, what are you most proud of – both in the practice and portfolio? Recently, I tried to figure out how many jobs I had worked on. I had over 800 projects that I was responsible for. Now that’s a tenant finish, but it is also a big federal project. That is a pretty wide spectrum. When you do that, you meet those clients. Some of the joy of the projects was the clients, having a relationship with them, not necessarily the end result. People were always, to me, important. I am proud of the Museum of Natural History that the firm did, but I didn’t personally spend a lot of time on it. As a piece of architecture, it is unquestionably one of the best things our firm was involved in, teamed with Ennead. I like St. Thomas More. That was a big struggle to get that built. The building committee, people from the east, west, south – all had their backgrounds that they brought to the table. Sorting that out you would think is relatively easy (but not); this is only a couple of million bucks. I am incredibly proud of that project. I think it is a landmark project for the Catholic Church. It was an aggressive look at what a church could be, not the repeat of a church in Indiana, or Savannah, or Upstate New York, or Tucson. It is Salt Lake City, Utah; it is very contextual. I love the Public Safety Building. I think it was a progressive step for our firm, working with David and Kevin and Valerie and all of my great partners to get that done. I think we succeeded in a tremendous way. Abe said that you enjoy doing Maintenance Facilities because they are so technical and require so much thought. The first big job I worked on with Abe was Wheeler Machinery. I had just worked on the University Hospital for Don Panushka. All the details from the hospital — the radiation, the labs, the plumbing for gasses and air — everything was really technical, and I really got my head into that. Then it just fit it in to do Wheeler. There is infrastructure in there that I loved putting together, although the scale of that was monster, not microscopic. We grew that into doing work for the federal government, largely the Corps of Engineers in Sacramento. I did a lot of work with them. I sought those as hard as any other job that we sought. It was very successful work. The Consolidated Maintenance Facility we did at Tooele Army Depot was a $120 million fully rigged outbuilding for rehabbing military vehicles, engines. The heartbreaker was that within two years after that was finished, Tooele suffered from the base closures, and they sold it to a private client for ten cents on the dollar. But that’s politics. Tell us about the evolution of the industry from the late sixties till now. There were firms that were emerging. Many of the old firms went away. Only a few of them had transition plans that allowed them to continue until today. There are only three or four that proceeded us — MHTN, EDA, FFKR — Bob Fowler had his own firm, and the Enteleke guys came over. Most of the other firms went away; they didn’t put transition in place. I remember my boss Don Panushka, calling when he finally retired, and he had a bunch of drafting boards and asked if we needed any. But we were already on our second or third generation of computers. We embraced that from the very beginning, and there were a number of jobs we got because we could demonstrate we had that technology. We were then pressed with making it work, literally forced to make that technology work for us. When you are starting your firm, having a strong financial basis is important. We mortgaged my house; we dipped into my savings to pay some bills. — continued on page 12
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