Today’s news of Les’ passing is both shocking and profoundly sad. He has worked so hard for so many years at Northwest, and it’s just terribly regretful that he won’t be here with us to see the fruits of his labor fully realized. I know that he enjoyed his work immensely; he was proud of his involvement in a company that he believed would have a keen and impactful effect on the future of treating cancer. He was always ready and willing to take a call from a shareholder unless he had an important deadline to meet, and even then, he’d sometimes take the call, if just to tell you he’d get back to you. He didn’t care if you had a few shares or millions of them… he was always willing to talk to (and sometimes yell at) you.
I was always fascinated and impressed at how Les would just let the insults that often came his way just roll off his back, and he’d keep marching along, usually with a very positive attitude. Those who knew him well agreed that Les always saw the glass as half full, or maybe even two thirds full. And of course, as many of us know, time had a slightly different meaning to Les, than it does to most of us. He’d came from Chicago, lived in Maryland, but time to him was always more like he lived in Hawaii. That’s not to say that he didn’t meet important deadlines, because he was good at meeting those. He just wasn’t impatient, and perhaps because he worked so hard and long, often just sleeping a few hours a night, time just had a different meaning to him.
And Les had so many interesting stories to share of people that he’d met, worked for and with, and fascinating things that he’d seen and done over the years. For him, life continued to be filled with amazing and important happenings right up, I’m sure, to the time he passed.
Some of us have talked in the past about the movie that will be made about the Northwest story, and Les’ part in that story thus far has been so huge, and now his parting, and the timing of his leaving, makes this story even more dramatic (and he’d like that, except that he died to make it even more so).
For my part, I will truly miss Les. I have spent many, many hours on the phone talking with him over the years, and although I never met him in person, I consider him to have been a good friend, and a very good person.
And while the world keeps right on spinning, for some of us, time slowed down long enough for us to recognize that a truly good and awesome person has just stepped off of it.
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