What brought you to KUUF?
Hobie: It was just a continuation of my spiritual growth and I’d read something about unitarian universalist thing and I came here to check it out and see what was going on. It stuck.
Do you have a favorite memory of your life?
Hobie: Oh I guess, one of my favorite memories would be when I was keeping my son in hospice care and I spent ten weeks with him. He was dying of AIDS and he’s my oldest son. There wasn’t anybody else that could take care of him so I was with him. I remember after he passed away of going home and I got this golden glow over me saying to me “You’re the right person, at the right place, at the right time to take care of me.” And it just felt good knowing I was there for him.
Why do you think you’ve lived to this age?
Hobie: Well, I can tell you without any equivocation it has nothing to do with good clean living because I have abused myself over the years in terms of drinking a lot and working hard and losing sleep, a lot of pressure and anxiety and raising four children so, I really don’t know what to attribute it to. It’s not genetic because my parents died and my brothers died at relatively young ages. But for whatever reason, I’ve lived this long and continue to live well and be healthy.
What did you do for a career?
Hobie: I call myself a tin can peddler. When I got out of college I joined Continental Can Company, which was a huge multi-national corporation and they made tin cans of all kinds, beer cans, soft drinks, aerosol, paint, motor oil- you name it they made the cans. So I went into work with them right in 1951 and became a sales man and worked in Indiana and Wisconsin. Later on in my career I was in the marketing department and Product development. And my big claim to fame is making the- no, not making but bringing the steel easy-open can to the market place. It was easy to have the aluminum easy-open because they tear, but nobody had the technology to do it with steel. The reason Steel was important, a lot of things like Chili and canned foods, vending machine kind of foods, you can’t use aluminum because they have salt that eats up the tin. So my company developed the can and I was the facilitator. We had people from research, engineering, manufacturing, sales, food technology working with me to bring that to the marketplace. So now you see them all over the place. It was important early on because hot vended foods you needed a can opener around to open them and that was complicated, so we developed the easy open can and it became a big thing.
What are now or have been some of your best talents or achievements?
Hobie: I think my best talent, which led to my best achievement is being a facilitator of getting other people to work with me in a group organization to get things done and one of the examples is I started a fellowship in Gig Harbor, a UU fellowship and got a group of people around me that took care of writing a constitution, the finances, programs, all that kind of stuff. And basically what I was, was a facilitator to help them get together and do the job of starting a new fellowship. One of the things we did was an Empty Bowl project where we sold bowls that were made by the potters in Gig Harbor and we sold at the blue grass festivals in Olalla and we made $10,000 for the food banks. I was really proud of that but I had six people working with me on the organization of it, so my job was getting it together and making it work. So facilitating is my strength.
What's the most surprising change in our country's history that has occurred in your lifetime?
Hobie: I’m not sure that it started in my lifetime but the most amazing thing that happened was the electrification of our communities. The reason I bring this up is because my grandparents lived on a farm down on the hills of Kentucky and I used to go visit them as a child and they had no electricity so anything to do with pumping water, refrigeration, radios, lighting. It was all kerosene, coal water kind of situation so I think, if you just think about it, the advent of electricity in our homes has made such a huge change in the quality of our life. I was as I’ve grown, I guess the nearest thing next to that is the cellphone. And I think that instrument has replaced so many other instruments in your house and I just think it’s awesome what I can do now with my cellphone.
What events or projects at KUUF do you like to take part in?
Hobie: I like greeting people and once I meet them kind of adopt them into the community and try to find out what their interests are and what their strengths are and how they fit in and make them feel welcome because quite often in UU fellowships, they’re not as welcoming as you might expect, partly because a lot of people when they come to the fellowship services, they do committee work, they see their fellow committee people in the lobby and start talking about the projects they’re working on and they have a tendency not to look to the new people. So my mission is to get to know them and find out what they’re interested in and help them integrate into the situation. Just the recent occurrence of Robin Sing. She came in and she was quote “a lost soul” drifting around to see what’s going on and I worked with her and since I’ve become close to her as a friend kind of situation and now she’s become involved in our community with the meditation part.
Who or what has had the biggest impact on your life?
Hobie: There’s so many people but I would say probably my second son, his name is Bob, Robert, and he’s not just my son, he’s my best friend. Over the years he’s just been so supportive of me and caring and he keeps in touch with me. He calls me once a week. Which is unusual in my family because we’re the kind of family that if you have a problem, we’re there to help you but we don’t keep on top of each other all the time. But my son Bob, he helped me be a good father and he certainly helped me be a friend.
What is one piece of knowledge that you would consider indispensable?
Hobie: I think the most significant that has helped me is about is about 20 – 25 years ago I came to the conclusion that I was okay. That I was a decent person. I was raised in a Christian environment that taught you about guilt trips. I was growing up in an era of being a hillbilly, so I had an inferiority complex, which incidentally helped me in my business career because overcoming my inferiority complex made me much more competitive in the business world. And Competitive not getting hit working hard and getting the job done, But once I learned to accept myself without all the guilt trips and the negative feelings my life became much more pleasant and much happier and the real benefit to it beside loving myself, accepting myself, was that I could extend that to other people. Changed my life.