Allan Hale Jr.

This morning I learned from an old friend that one of our dear and mutual friends has passed away, Feb 3, after a battle with cancer.

Last July, when I was living in NH for the summer, Allan Hale emailed me:
""Hi Kevin,
So you're in Groton? I'd like to meet you sometime for a beer! I live in Laconia now. I haven't been on email lately, I was out the last several work days . . . Just got back to work today. Let me know when a good time for you is.
Allan"

We didn't get that beer. Now, we won't.

Allan was one of the good ones. Brilliant, kind, an extremely dry wit, and a worker. Intellectually curious and seemed to know something about everything. When Allan knew more about something than you did, you could never tell. He wouldn't tell you. He'd just smile and nod and let you share what you knew.

We two were the young-ins for several years of hunting parties. We'd go to camp with his dad Allan Sr. and his peers, funny guys like Bill Harris and others, and Al and I would listen to the stories and laugh at the "team" who slept in instead of hunting. And then we'd laugh again when those back in the camp would play the sound of sizzling bacon over the walkie-talkies while we were out freezing in the woods far up north by 3rd Connecticut Lake in NH.

We worked at a software company together, we started in the software training dept on the same day. The company was a spinoff from Cabletron called Aprisma, and we'd leave at lunch to go target practice at a range in South Berwick, ME. We'd smoke cigars and laugh. We rewrote coursework together. We once worked as a team to convince the state of West Virginia to buy the software by teaching them about it for 3 long days. When Aprisma began to build a new building for itself, we were put in temp work spaces. Al and I SHARED a cubicle. He talked often back then about learning to fly a helicopter and getting his license. He never did. We laughed a lot. It was in that cubicle, Al and I sitting shoulder to shoulder designing new course material, that we both learned of the 9/11 attacks in progress.

We went golfing on Waukewan, the course his veterinarian grandfather owned and built (well, he built the front 9, the back 9 he brought a firm in) and Al was so patient with my terrible play. His maternal grandfather, if I remember right, had been the police chief in Meredith, NH. So rooted in NH he was, but funny too. We once stumbled upon a tiny cemetery in the woods, one of those you really only find in NH, and by coincidence everyone in it was a Hale. No matter how I tried to make him excited about the chance find, he just shrugged it off.

While we worked full-time together, including at least 25% of each month on the road flying across the country and around the world, he earned his MBA at night. He was a worker.

Smart, driven, kind, funny, generous. How better to be remembered?
I'll miss him. I wish we had gotten that beer.