Chris Good was many things. Loving husband, proud father, dedicated pilot, brilliant engineer, athlete, and friend. My best friend.
Hectic travel, business, and family schedules over the last few days kept me from talking to more of you who knew him about thoughts I might include in this remembrance. I knew him very well, better than most, but no one knew every nook and cranny of his existence. I hope you’ll forgive however myopic my tribute to Chris might seem.
He loved life and everything it brought him. A family gathering last night was very somber until we started talking about the cars he drove and the things he ate. He loved computers, good beer, gadgets, and travel. Most of all, he loved being in the sky.
Steve McQueen, an avid auto racer once said, “Racing is living. Everything else is just waiting around.” That’s how Chris Good felt about his flying. All you need to do is to visit his website, Chrisjgood.com, to understand the spirit this man had for sailing through the skies in his airship. That would also give you a chance to read the wonderful article about Chris Zak Mazur wrote for yesterday’s West Bend paper.
Chris has been a passionate flyer as long as I’ve known him – nearly 30 years. Shortly after I met him, Chris rented a plane and flew his girl friend, Susan May, to France for a romantic weekend. Over an elegant dinner, Chris asked the other love of his life to marry him and Sue’s been his co-pilot in the air and in life ever since.
For the first five years I knew him, Chris’s company in England was one of our top customers. After he and his partners sold their business in 1982, I began talking to Chris about joining our company. In July of 1983 he did, spending that month in Wisconsin becoming versed in our technology during his days and learning to windsurf on Big Cedar Lake, the place that would become his home, with his afternoons. At the end of his stay, he wanted to attend “that Experimental Aircraft Association thing” going on in Oshkosh.
During the next decade, Chris researched and studied home built aircraft of all kinds, but until it would become practical for him to really pursue, he put his fire into other things like golf and skiing. Chris became proficient in both as he seemed to do with everything he aspired to. I rapidly found myself going from beating him almost always to never on the links. He played some of the finest courses in the UK and he skied some of the most renowned slopes in Europe with family and friends.
Throughout the 80’s and early 90’s, Chris and I traveled the world, working and playing. We sold our computer products everywhere from Boston to Beijing. We windsurfed in Maui and dined on crispy baby squid in Singapore. We golfed at Royal Troon in Scotland, Dorado in Puerto Rico, and even Hon E Kor in Kewaskum, not to mention his own, beloved club, St. Pierre, in Wales. We water skied on Cedar Lake and began going to Packer games. We saw the Packers play in eight stadiums, including their last Super Bowl. And along the way, we had more than our share of oysters, sashimi, and other little “slimy sachets of nastiness” as Chris used to call that sort of stuff. During those days, I couldn’t wait to be on the road with him. Every outing was an adventure.
After many terrific years at the helm of our operations in Britain, Chris concluded that it would be better for him, his family, and the company if he moved to Wisconsin. In June of 1994 he and Sue and Tom did just that, buying a home on Big Cedar Lake and adding his wit and charm to our daily lives. His impact was immediate on our success as he helped us begin a run that lasted until the tech bubble burst in 2000. He was a major factor in the evolution of our company from storage and networking to digital video. At Tom’s wedding last summer, I realized how fortuitous his move had been. How else would hundreds of people from all over the world gather in the Midwestern US to see a kid from the English countryside get hitched to a young lovely from Annandale, MN.
It was a little less cheery stretch for me, because for the next three and a half years, Chris spent most of his free time working on that machine and we had little opportunity for our extracurricular activities and adventures. But, he and his family were getting great joy out of the project, so I was happy that they were happy. And we still had our travels to venues like Japan and Switzerland. In 1998, we circumnavigated the globe together.
Finally, on June 3rd, 2000 he took his first flight. I don’t think we ever saw him so ecstatic. I was pretty delighted too. Life started to return to normal. Thanks in part to Chris’ sacrifices, ideas, and hard work, our business started to recover. In 2004, Chris and Sue felt bullish enough to buy a retreat in Georgia built around a landing strip. Since then, they’ve migrated south with the other birds whenever they could. I can tell you that the first time Chris landed his plane and taxied into his hanger next to his airpark home was one of the high points in his life. He was now really living his dream.
I had my last adventure with Chris a month ago. We journeyed together to Shanghai and Beijing to see customers we had met in at a trade show in Amsterdam last September. Crossing the Pacific, Chris was lucky enough to be on a plane equipped with wireless Internet. He watched a few of his favorite TV shows using his Slingbox – an internet broadcasting device he had connected to his Tivo in Wisconsin. I got to Seoul before he did and we had a videoconference between his computer in the plane and mine in the airport lounge. He thought that was great!
Chris hadn’t been to China for twenty years, so he was thrilled to see how much it had changed. He said Shanghai had gone from being a third world city to something that looked like a combination of Paris, Tokyo, and New York. Besides the enjoyment of being back on the road with him, his presence proved to be crucial to one of the deals I was working on. I couldn’t figure out what the customer was trying to do. Chris not only established that they were trying to build test instruments for the digital television manufacturing industry, but designed a solution that excited them right on the spot. It wasn’t the first time he had done something like that. In Beijing, we had another eating adventure. We took a customer to dinner at the place where Peking Duck originated. Chris got a duck certificate with a seven digit serial number that I’m sure he planned to hang on his wall. After the trip, we met our wives in Hawaii and talked and laughed about the times we’d had and those to come that now never will.
Chris lived a full life, but kept making it fuller. He was just getting into fishing, country and western music, and making concoctions with his Magic Bullet blender. He had so many plans and ideas. I’m sad that they won’t be realized the way so many of his dreams were. I’m happy I got to share so much with him. One thing is for sure. He now has a set of wings he can use for eternity.