Charlie and Brenda...Part 1: Meeting Charlie Stroud

Charlie Stroud
1926-2019

How it all happened -- In May of 1984 my employer, John Cockerham & Associates, sent me to California on a job.  I was to work with a senior Vice President of our firm named Charles D. "Charlie" Stroud.  I'd only been working for Cockerham for about a month, so I knew very little about my new workmate.  I learned quickly that I was among the chosen who got to share their life experiences with Charlie.  We ended up becoming lifelong friends.

As a way to save money for the customer, Charlie and I were housed together in a two-story apartment in Inglewood, about 7 miles from our place of work, the Hughes Electronics facility on El Segundo Boulevard.  Initially, I was not crazy about living with this "old guy."  I rather enjoyed my privacy when I had to travel on business.  Also, I was newly sober and treasured the independence of having my own rental car to get to AA meetings a couple times a day.  It turned out that my concerns were needless.  Our apartment was big enough that neither Charlie nor I ever lacked for privacy, and the company provided me with my own personal rental car to get to my meetings.  I ended up loving the living arrangement.

The job --Our company had a contract supporting an Army Project Office at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, AL.  This office managed a program at Hughes that was developing an improved optical sight for the M1 Abrams tank.  The program was nearly a year behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget.  The Army wanted our company to put some people on site to do a bottom-up analysis to determine if the program management could be improved.  Needless to say, the good folks at Hughes did not exactly welcome us with open arms. 

The Hughes building where Charlie and I worked

The Charlie I got to know -- For the first few days, we had not been issued our Hughes ID badges and were restricted to a tiny, windowless office.  We needed an escort to leave our office to go to the bathroom, the cafeteria, other people's offices, or the exit.  Charlie only put up with this situation for about 3 or 4 days, at which point he demanded to talk to the Vice President of the Division in which our program was being managed.  He made clear to this individual that whether or not Hughes liked having us on site, we happened to be working for the customer who was paying the bills.  Charlie suggested that if we didn't have our free-access badges by the end of the day, he would find it necessary to involve the Colonel for whom we were working.  Our badges showed up within an hour and we were given a slightly larger, although not extravagant, office.

I quickly learned that Charles Dow Stroud II did not tolerate incompetence or needless bureaucracy.  He was extremely self-confident without being arrogant.  On more than one occasion while at Hughes, Charlie would call a vice-president or director-level manager and "educate" them with the certainty that he knew what he was talking about.  Most of them had the highest respect for this outsider, especially when they learned a little bit about his background..

Having been born and raised on a hardscrabble ranch outside of Boerne, Texas, Charlie was a proud graduate of the Texas A&M University in an engineering discipline.  He had worked at Boeing for many, many years, culminating in becoming their Director of Operations at Cape Canaveral in the heyday of the Apollo program.  I would describe him as a very temperate, methodical, analytical manager with a remarkable ability to synthesize diverse information.  And he carried himself with what the Navy used to refer to as "Command Presence."  When Charlie Stroud spoke, people listened.  He was the perfect mentor for me as I made the transition into the world of management consulting.

He frequently made the point to me that as companies grow larger, they also grow less efficient.  He believed that as things got more bureaucratic, they were more prone to broken communications.  He demonstrated how to take advantage of this communication paralysis.  And this story also reveals Charlie's mischievous side.

As I mentioned, our office left a lot to be desired.  We had only one desk and our requests for a larger office with two desks and a whiteboard had gone unanswered.  One day, while prowling the halls, Charlie noticed a couple of gentlemen in a large office with multiple desks and a huge whiteboard.  The sign adjacent to their door stated "Army Audit Team."  Charlie introduced himself, explaining our mission, and asked how long they planned to be on site.  It turned out they were leaving the next day.  Charlie came back to our office, which happened to be on the same corridor and suggested we pack up our stuff and get ready to move.  The next day we watched until the auditors had left their office (It was really two normal offices combined.) and we made our move.  Within fifteen minutes, we had relocated.

The next morning, a crew from the facilities department came by to remove the desks and other office furnishings.  All Charlie said was, "We're going to be here longer than expected.  Now, they're telling us we might be here a few more weeks."  He never actually said we were the Army auditors, but the crew must have assumed that.  We occupied that office for the remainder of our stay.  And somehow, Charlie figured out the phone extensions so we could notify our contacts of our new numbers.  Charlie had correctly surmised that in such a gigantic organization, it would take months for anyone to figure out that we were professional squatters.

Our work at Hughes turned out to be very beneficial to the Army and to the program.  Because of Charlie's extensive Boeing experience, he was acutely sensitive to scheduling bottlenecks.  I would conduct interviews with Hughes personnel to discern the details of their processes and convert these to logic diagrams.  We still drew these by hand rather than having a computer graphics program generate the diagrams.  After I would complete modeling part of their system, Charlie and I would go over the flow diagram and discuss alternatives and options that might be beneficial.  As a team, he and I pointed out several areas in which the schedule could be compressed without impacting quality.  I think by the end of our stay, the Hughes Program Manager hated to see us leave.

A Fiat like Charlie bought in L.A.

The car -- One week while we were at Hughes, John Cockerham joined us to contribute to our work and become personally acquainted with the senior Hughes staff.  Charlie complained to John that if he was going to be stuck in southern California for several months, he needed a proper car.  John and Charlie left early one afternoon in the quest for a "proper car."  By the time I arrived at the apartment that evening, Charlie not only had acquired the car, but had turned in his rental car and was now washing and waxing his new pride and joy -- a very tired and much used bright red Fiat 124 Spyder convertible.  Within the first week it died in the apartment parking garage.  Charlie was not about to let this car get the best of him.  We went to a Western Auto store and bought a small basic tool kit.  That evening, in the dim light of the garage, we determined that the fuel pump had given up the ghost.  We called a foreign car parts store and found that the replacement pump cost close to one hundred dollars.  The next day, Charlie took the day off, dropped me off at Hughes, found a foreign car salvage yard, removed a serviceable fuel pump from a wreck ($20.00), put it on his car where it checked out, and came back to Hughes to pick me up.  He looked like Joe Shit the Rag Man, completely covered in grime, but he was beaming.  "We're back on the road, and it only cost twenty bucks!" he exclaimed.  He had enjoyed a fabulous Charlie adventure.  The car ran for several more months, and when we finally left California, he proudly sold it at a profit.

Charlie's beloved Brenda

Personal life -- On the personal front, I learned that Charlie was madly in love with a lady named Brenda, who was employed by Boeing in the Washington, D.C. area.  Most weekends that we were on our L.A. job, Charlie flew to Washington to be with Brenda.  And nearly every Friday, the script went like this:  I had found a Friday evening  AA meeting that I was particularly fond of.  It was held in the back room of a beauty salon not far from our apartment.  In those days, there was a prominent AA speaker named Alabam Carrothers.  This was her AA home group.  As I recall, that meeting started at 7:30 PM.  I rarely missed it.  Before I'd leave the apartment I'd ask Charlie if he wanted a ride to LAX to go see Brenda.  "No, I've decided to stay here this weekend.  I'm just too darned tired to go all the way back East."  I'd go to my meeting, returning about 9:00 PM.  Charlie would be waiting in the parking garage with a small suitcase.  "C'mon, we gotta get to LAX!  I got a seat on the Red Eye.  I think we can still make it."  We'd make the mad dash to LAX in Friday night traffic.  I'd drop him off in front of some terminal.  Amazingly, he always made it on time.  Remember, this was long before security checkpoints and restricted gate areas.  Charlie simply ran to his gate and caught his flight.

The Gentleman -- He was a gentleman's gentleman.  When my wife, Margo, came out to visit for a long weekend, Charlie simply moved out of our apartment.  He wanted us to have our privacy.  And when we arrived at the apartment from the airport, there was a beautiful bouquet of roses with a welcoming greeting to Margo from Charles D. Stroud.  That same weekend, an old friend, Ritas Smith, whom I had known in Oklahoma and who had settled in L.A. invited Margo, me and Charlie to join her for dinner and a live performance of La Cage aux Folles at Hollywood's Pantages theater.  Ritas wanted to meet Margo and properly welcome her to California.  Charlie graciously had accepted and he wanted to "do it up right."  He rented a Cadillac for the night and showed up in a tuxedo with corsages for the ladies!  We all rode in style to a fabulous restaurant followed by a most memorable Broadway musical in Hollywood.  Charlie had figured out how to make the very most of an already great evening.

The hunting club -- Somewhere during Charlie's travels, he had befriended Norm Augustine, a former CEO of both Lockheed and Martin Marietta corporations who had served as Under Secretary of the Army, and later Acting Secretary of the Army.  Through Mr. Augustine, Charlie had gained access to and befriended many, many of the big operators in the 1980's defense and aerospace industries.  One day, he mentioned that he was taking a few days off to go dove hunting in northern Mexico with a small group of these aerospace industry elites.  He said that basically, it was a wealthy gentlemen's club for eating fine food, playing very competitive poker, smoking fine cigars, drinking the very best scotch and bourbon whiskey, and maybe even getting a little hunting in.  For Charlie, during the mid-1980's, it was an annual trek.

The weekend excursions -- There were some weekends that for various reasons, Charlie couldn't fly East to visit Brenda.  If we didn't have to report to work on Saturday, Charlie would inevitably suggest breakfast at the Farmers Market.  We'd get into our casual riding attire, put the top down on the Fiat and head downtown.  The Original Los Angeles Farmers Market is located on West 3rd Street in Downtown L.A.  It's a sprawling affair with a montage of snack bars and specialty vendors, florists, clothiers, butcher shops, fish peddlers, small restaurants, artists, gourmet gift shops, jewelers and the like.  We'd park the Fiat, sometimes several blocks away, stop by a tobacco shop to get two fine cigars, and head for the market.  For reasons I will never understand, Charlie Stroud loved smoked, salted whitefish as a breakfast delicacy.  It was available at a Jewish delicatessen in the Market.  I'd find a booth delivering fresh bacon and eggs and biscuits, and by the time I'd spot Charlie (identifiable by his Greek fisherman's cap), he'd already be diving into a plate of smelly fish, usually accompanied by a cream cheese covered bagel.  After breakfast, we'd get tall mugs of gourmet coffee, sit and read the Los Angeles Times while enjoying our cigars.  We solved many of the world's problems at those weekend breakfasts.  I will cherish them forever, whitefish be damned.

The L.A. Farmers Market

The reason I'm writing this Blog entry at this time is that I learned this week of Charlie's passing.  There will be two more entries following this one -- the story of Charlie and his son in the Great Race, and the moving love story of Charlie and Brenda in the years following his aneurism.  I need to share with my readers, the wonderful people that he and Brenda were and why I treasured our friendship.  The words of his beloved granddaughter, Elizabeth Cosser, brought his passing to my attention on Facebook:

Elizabeth Cosser - Spring Break. Tomorrow is the last day before Spring Break, so it’s only fitting that I’m lying here soaking up the memories of truly the most amazing man I’ve ever known. I can’t think of Spring Break without thinking of my granddad. My sister, Ashley, and I spent every spring break with him from when I was 9 until after graduation from college. People used to tell us how sweet it was for us to give up our spring break to spend time with our grandparents, but he was not your ordinary granddad. Caving, hiking, dirt biking, horse riding, zip lining from the 40 foot treehouse he built by himself when he turned 70, sailing, dancing, eating, gaming, and so much laughing. He bought me my first car, a ‘94 gray Isuzu manual pick up with no power steering, and made me learn to drive it in the winding, hilly roads of the Smoky Mountains. Ashley and I were his only granddaughters, and we were also his grandsons. Granddad, life, for you, was nothing if it wasn’t an adventure, and most of my greatest adventures so far have been with and because of you, Charles D Stroud. I wish I could have been there to see the look on B’s face when you joined her in eternity. I love you so.

Charlie's other granddaughter, Ashley, also posted a beautiful eulogy on Facebook:

Ashley Stroud Phillips - Charles Dow Stroud, Jr., (Charlie) 1926-2019

My Grandad
Carefree and adventuresome
Namesake of my daughter Charlie
Taught my sister, Elizabeth, & I to repel, go spelunking & ride dirt bikes
Veteran
Loved working on old cars
Won the "great race" in 2002 in a 1937 Packard w/ my Dad
Survived a brain aneurysm at age 75
Loved to garden & eating tomatoes & avocados
Became softer and quieter
Took pilates twice a week til he was 90
Played bridge
Sang too loud in church
Didn't get it all right...but who does?
Paul Newman look alike
Worked with NASA on Apollo 11 and 13
Would always dance when invited

I will always and forever be so grateful for the gift of being next to him when he took a breath and then never took another one. I also can't be more grateful for my sister for caring for him day to day in the final days.

Grief, you are demanding.