[00:00:16] Speaker A: Welcome to We Are Chaffey Looking Upstream.
[00:00:17] Speaker B: A conversational podcast of humanness, community and well being rooted in Chaffee County, Colorado. I'm Adam Williams. Today I'm talking with Keith Baker, Chaffee county commissioner, retired naval commander, and former owner of the Trailhead, a local retail shop for outdoor equipment, to name just a few chapters in Keith's story. With Keith being an elected official, I suspect it's easy for many of us to think that we know the man without really getting to know the man, the human behind the public facing roles that he's known for. So I used this opportunity to learn more about Keith as an individual. We talk about his country roots in Georgia and his perception of life as a child in the 60s, a decade that had its challenges for sure, but Keith was formed as an optimist from his early years on, and overall, he saw it as a golden era of possibility and progress, like with spaceflight and the moon landing in the summer of 69. We talk about Keith's ambitions to be a naval aviator, though he ultimately would become a career surface warfare officer instead and would serve closely with General Colin Powell and other top leaders at the Pentagon.
Leadership is always a topic of interest to me, whether that's in the public or private sector. I've talked about it a few times on this podcast and with someone sitting in front of me who has such rare credentials in the subject, I asked Keith for his insights. He shares his thoughts on what he's observed are the hallmarks of great leaders and what it was like to work with a consummate leader like Colin Powell, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time. We talk about plenty of things in this conversation with family, strong work ethic, public service, and that ever present sense of optimism at the heart of it. But I also found out only after we'd stopped recording and I took out a camera to photograph him, that there was a time in Keith's 40s when he did some modeling work, too. A man of many talents.
Here we go with Keith Baker.
[00:02:24] Speaker A: Keith, welcome to Looking Upstream. I'm honored to have you here and thank you for being here.
[00:02:28] Speaker C: Well, you're welcome. Thank you for having me. It's a real opportunity.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: I hardly know where to start with you, Keith, because your background, your experience, all of these things, they run so deep. There's such a rich, rich resume, so to speak, out there for your life experience, your professional experience, and I suspect that all of these extraordinary things that are in your background, you walk down the street, the average person has no idea. Right. They don't know what you're carrying, the experience and wisdom and all these things. I am grateful to you that you're sitting here now and that I get the opportunity to ask about it. I want to get to know who you are behind some of the more public facing, you know, labels or what have you.
[00:03:09] Speaker C: Well, I appreciate the opportunity to share some of my experiences because you're right there. Lots of people have no idea about my life's background. You know, I've only been here maybe approaching 30% of my life, and people just know I showed up one day and that's about it. They weren't there, you know, through first grade and all the way up through school. The way that some people back where I grew up knew me, they weren't there during my 23 years in the Navy to get to know me. And truthfully, the way the Navy operates, I was only around an individual person, maybe three years, although I did develop a lot of friendships, which have lasted many years and all the way back to first grade, in fact.
But it's just an opportunity to share my story, which I don't think many people around here really know.
[00:04:04] Speaker A: The military experience is an interesting one in that regard, is that you might be around someone for a little bit of time and then you might see them again around the world at some other point in your experience. And so there ends up being this familiarity with a lot of people, but you're never with the same person or people all the time, for sure. But I want to start with the start. I definitely want to get to your Navy experience. I'm really interested in that. I'm interested as a veteran and just as a curious person. But I want to start at the start, where you grew up, what was going on with your family, the environment around you. If you can just kind of paint that picture for us and let us know, you know, first grade. Who was first grade? Keith, you know, and whatever else.
[00:04:48] Speaker C: Well, I was born in Rome, Georgia, which at that time was a small town, probably still a small town. The whole world has grown and Rome has not grown quite as much as the rest of the world has. But at that time the town was about 30,000. But I grew up out in the country. That was where I was born because that was where the hospital was.
And I grew up in a small country community and hard working people. My family, previous generations had been farmers and my mother's side of the family had been tenant farmers or sharecroppers or something. A couple of times and then, of course, they were all impacted by the Great Depression. My great grandfathers had been relatively successful, but one of them just about lost everything. The other one was able to hold on to the farm and everything. But that greatly affected my experience because I was one generation removed from all that.
And most of my aunts and uncles, my parents were hourly workers. My dad worked in a cotton mill.
Most of my family worked in the same cotton mill. My mom became an lpn. I had a sister who was born with some severe challenges, and she passed away when she was 14. I was 10. And my mom went to a local vocational school and became an LPN and continued to work there. So, you know, just a simple rural existence and life, it was more than an existence. It was a great place to grow up and a great way to grow up out in the country and having the woods and the streams. And I grew up right next to a lake, a freshwater lake. Did a lot of fishing, a lot of hunting, bird hunting, small game hunting. There weren't much, many deer around at that time. So I wasn't, you know, didn't do a lot of hoof hunting. But it was a lot of fun and it was good, and it was a great time to grow up. I think it was a golden era of public education in the US Teachers were well respected, and I mean respected by the community in general. It was a position and a job which people held in high regard. And I remember how my teachers were treated and how the parents treated them and how the PTA operated and how it worked and everything. And it was a tremendous era of optimism and opportunity. The space program was beginning. I know some people look back and think about the Cuban Missile crisis and everything. And I do remember in first grade doing the drills where we would get under our desks and everything as if they were going to be much protection.
But at the same time, a lot of the African colonies and Asian colonies were gaining their independence from Britain and France and Belgium and Portugal and Spain and their other colonial countries. The United nations was still young, and people held it in high regard, and it was very viable. And so it was just a great time to be a kid. It was wonderful. I grew up. I was formed as an optimist, and I still am.
[00:08:05] Speaker A: I want to ask about your sister because that's a very significant experience for your family to go through. So she was your older sister. It sounds like you had known of whatever these birth defects were your entire life, right?
[00:08:19] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: So you were aware of something, I imagine, in the house. But Then when she dies and she's no longer part of the family, do you remember how that affected you? Like how.
[00:08:28] Speaker B: How did you process it?
[00:08:29] Speaker A: How aware of what all that meant? Were you, do you think, at 10 years old?
[00:08:35] Speaker C: Well, it was tough. It was my first close experience with death. I had had my father's father, my grandfather had passed away when I was very young. And then, you know, I'd known of other people dying, but I didn't really have to comprehend it as carefully and closely as I did with Karen, my sister, and my dad. You know, I lost him just over a year ago.
And I delivered the eulogy. And he had been interviewed by a guy who wrote a book about 25 years ago called Wisdom of Our Fathers. And I saw this in Men's Health magazine. It was just a little kind of a byline or a sidebar. And it said, one of our writers, Joe Kita, is working on this book, and he wants to interview people's fathers and everything. And I thought, well, he's probably wanting to speak with bank presidents and CEOs and people like that. But I thought, my dad has some things worth hearing and has some lived experience that he should share and people should hear. And so I submitted my dad's name, and he contacted my father and talked with him on the phone and interviewed him. But in the course of the eulogy, I shared some of the things that my dad said in that book. And one of them was on grief and suffering from my sister's passing. And see, my dad was in the army when she was born. He was at Fort Benning, and she was born, and my mom was in our hometown of Rome. And so I just makes me shudder to think the challenges that they went through at that time, being a young family, I think dad would have been 22, mom was 19.
And fortunately, my mom's family, my dad's family, were all there to support when she was born. But she had to have some fairly major surgery within about a month or six weeks after she was born. And then there were things like the cerebral palsy that she just. She never recovered from. She could never walk and talk.
But I think she had a much higher level of awareness than most people would have thought. She could make shadow puppets and would entertain herself. She could find a sunny spot in the house somewhere where the light was coming in, and she would laugh, and she was just a real sunny spirit.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: Do you remember how the grief in the house was processed by your parents with you? Did it change anything about their. The relationships as you understood them with you and your parents. I mean, did that leave you an only sibling? You know, an only child?
[00:11:22] Speaker C: Yes, it left me an only sibling.
I'd say that perhaps we never really actively processed it. We didn't sit down as a family and say, okay, this has happened, or anything like that. And is that unhealthy or is it healthy? I don't know. I'm not a psychologist or I'm not a grief counselor or anything like that. But we dealt with it in our own way. I don't think it put a.
It didn't cast a cloud over us. Now, on her tombstone, it says, she was the sunshine of our home. And I picked that out. They had some, you know, sample things when we went to select her marker.
[00:12:09] Speaker A: So you remember that?
[00:12:10] Speaker C: Yeah, you were part of that process.
[00:12:11] Speaker A: Why?
[00:12:12] Speaker C: And so, you know, I selected that because it was true. She was. It didn't mean that there was never any sunshine after that, but it was just that she had a unique spirit, that it did bring something to our home. And while.
Well, back to what my dad had said in the book, he said that initially he felt some misgivings because he didn't think he felt sad enough or sorry enough. But after a few months had passed, he came to realize that it was just relief. He felt that her suffering was over.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: It sounds like you're an optimistic person and that your family was a family of optimists that believed in that positive energy.
[00:13:01] Speaker C: Well, we had to be. And that was kind of the era that it was like. I was reading an article recently about a couple who had faced some. They were an interracial couple in the early 1960s, and eventually, I think they became somewhat disillusioned. But it was talking about their early 1960s experience, and it was that time of optimism. You thought that with hard work and with rational dialogue and thoughtful decision making and trusting in science and others and having a reasonably shared system of values that, you know, a better day lay ahead, that we were on a progressive course and we were making progress. I mean, look at all the medical advances that have been made. Just a tremendous world of opportunity was unfolding. And that was kind of the world that they had grown up in. They didn't raise children during the Depression. They were children during the Depression. And they were too, I think, too young to really realize, you know, they didn't have the mouths to feed and the feet to shot and everything else, but they had been through that. They had been through World War II. They had been through the New Deal and they had seen what could happen and that there could be a better day ahead, no matter how dark it may seem at the present time, and.
[00:14:33] Speaker A: Would have learned resilience. And that we are capable of not only experiencing those dark things, but we have the capacity to rise and move forward from them.
[00:14:42] Speaker C: Exactly. Absolutely. So that was kind of my imprint, I guess, you know, is that that's the way we look forward. And so back to my sister. There's not a day goes by that I don't think of her many times a day, and I'm sure my mom does.
You know, as I mentioned, Dad's gone now, but, yeah, she was a tremendous influence on us all.
[00:15:08] Speaker B: Something else about your childhood before we.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: Move on and we get into this Navy experience that I'm excited to hear about.
You were. Well, you celebrated your 16th birthday by going to the mill to work.
[00:15:20] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:15:21] Speaker A: But to start your job.
[00:15:22] Speaker C: That was my birthday, yeah.
[00:15:24] Speaker B: Why.
[00:15:25] Speaker A: Why there? What was it about that? Had you been just waiting for that day, that moment to join, you know, people you knew, your family members and whatnot at the mill, or what was it about working there that that either was necessary or appealed to you?
[00:15:40] Speaker C: Well, I had worked, you know, a few odd jobs around before. I had helped cut hay and haul hay, and I had worked on a couple of construction sites. And I'd helped my uncle, who had gotten out of the brick laying business. He had been a brick mason, and he got into welding, and he opened a machine shop. And I kind of jokingly called it a mobile implement repair service. He had a truck set up with an arc welder in the back. And if somebody's tractor broke or a plow broke or something, he could drive out in the middle of the. And fix it right there, which was big. But a lot of people brought things over to him. And this was out in the country, too. It was on our old home place, as we called it. It was on the Baker farm. And he had converted one of the barns into his machine shop and everything. So I just always wanted to, I don't know, kind of have my own money, I guess. And it wasn't a lot, but what was the wage? I started out at $2 an hour, and then after about a month, it went to 222. And then it never did go up a lot after that. Because I was a gopher. I wasn't really a skilled worker, although I did develop some skills. And there was.
They would occasionally entrust me to a small work group, you know, like three or four of us or Something that were doing something it wasn't, didn't require a whole lot of skill, like wash down, you know, one of the back lots or something, or maybe where we were dismantling some machinery to scrap it or something like that, I'd be in charge of that. But if it was anything that required a lot of precision and a lot of fine tuning and adjustments or anything, I was never. I was never the guy in charge of that. But it was a. You know, it was good to have some responsibility. And the mill, it was a convenient, steady job. And what I'd really wanted to do was to take flying lessons with my money. But also, you know, like any kid, I wanted a motorcycle and I wanted a car and some other stuff, so. And clothes have always been semi important to me. So it was just having my own disposable income and, you know, record albums and everything that a teenager did in the 70s.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Yeah, we're talking early 70s, right.
[00:17:55] Speaker C: That was 1972. June 13, 1972, my 16th birthday.
[00:17:59] Speaker A: So did you get those flying lessons?
[00:18:02] Speaker C: I didn't get to take any. I went flying a couple of times, like just, you know, riding in the airplane and occasionally getting to take the yoke and everything, but not. I didn't get to solo or anything like that at the time.
[00:18:14] Speaker A: Your dad was a veteran?
[00:18:15] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:18:16] Speaker A: But army, what drew you to the Navy? And did his experience, whatever that might have been, influence your decision to want to go into the military in general?
[00:18:26] Speaker C: It wasn't so much my dad's experience because he had been drafted and everything, and that was during the Korean era. He talked about it, and I mean, I got to look at his, you know, books and everything, and he had some of his uniform items still around the house, and we had photos of him and everything, of course. But all of my uncles and my grandfather on my dad's side had been in the army, and one of my uncles got killed right after World War II began in a B17 crash in Natal, Brazil. That was on a ferry flight and there was some fuel contamination or something, and the plane went down pretty soon, but they were headed from Brazil. They would have flown over to near Dakar, Senegal, and then they were headed on to the Middle east after that. But then two of my other uncles, the one I mentioned earlier, who was a brick mason, he was severely wounded at Normandy. He didn't go ashore in the first wave or anything like that. I think he went ashore, like on the second day, but he was severely wounded. And then he got evacuated in England, healed up and he sent back and he got wounded again. And that time they sent him back to the US but they'd all been in the army on my mom's side. All my uncles had been in the Navy. And so somebody said, why didn't you split the difference and join the Marine Corps?
[00:19:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:51] Speaker C: Which I would have been a Naval aviator in the Marine Corps if. If everything had worked out. But there was just something about the Navy that captured the young boy's heart. I think it was when.
Well, one of the things that made me want to be a Navy pilot early on was one morning and I think it had to have been Alan Shepard suborbital flight that my mom got me up early and said, there's something I want you to see. And she took me in and sat me down in front of the tv. And it was one of the early space flights. And I think it was Alan Shepard because I know it wouldn't have been John Glenn because he did the orbital flight and that was in February of 62. So it had to have been Alan Shepard. I was mesmerized. I was. That was everything and everything to me, like through my adolescence.
And most of the Mercury astronauts, the original seven, were naval aviators. There were three Navy and one Marine. John Glenn was a Marine.
But then the influence from my uncles and I guess the space program and my grandfather, my mother's father, subscribed to National Geographic and National Geographic, for some reason they seemed to be very much infatuated with the Navy also. So they had frequent Navy articles or articles about the Navy. I remember when Enterprise, Long beach and Brain and Bainbridge. I almost called it Brain Damage because that was the sailor's nickname for the Bainbridge.
All ships have a nickname, just like all planes. Yeah, all planes have nicknames. And everybody has a call sign and everything. So that was what they call Bainbridge. But when they did the around the world nuclear task force crews where the famous picture of Enterprise and Long beach and Bainbridge and they've got the E equals MC squared on the flight deck of Enterprise and everything. That was a big article in National Geographic. And of course they covered the space program. So there was just that co mingling of the space program and the Navy and naval aviation that. And I do remember as I was going through the recruiting process, we were sitting in the den, I was home from school or something. I asked Dad, I said, will it bother you, me going in the Navy? And he looked at me and he said, gosh, no, because I won't feel offended or Anything about you going into the Navy, maybe?
[00:22:23] Speaker A: He didn't have a particular affinity for the army necessarily. It's where he was drafted.
[00:22:27] Speaker C: Right. Right. Yeah. And he wasn't a career guy or anything. And I don't think it was one of those things that he had grown up, you know, his entire life wanting to be and in his blood and.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: Passing on to you.
[00:22:39] Speaker C: Right.
[00:22:41] Speaker A: Well, while we're talking about space flight, it's not really occurred to me before to ask anyone about the moon landing. Well, you were old enough that I assume you recall then that happening almost.
[00:22:52] Speaker C: Every minute of that day.
[00:22:54] Speaker A: Tell me about it.
[00:22:55] Speaker C: We were going to Florida. The mill closed down around July 4th every year. But my dad had been there long enough that I don't remember why we didn't go to Florida around July 4th that year. But we went see one of my uncles who had been In World War II, one of the Navy guys worked for Eastern Airlines, and they had moved to Miami in the late 50s. And we had been to visit them one time not long after they had moved down there. And this was the summer of 69, and we left, gosh, I think it would have been on Friday, 18 July, because Apollo 11 launched on Wednesday, July 16, drove to Florida. We got there on Sunday, which was the day they landed, and we were listening to the news or listening to the radio. And I remember one of the hourly news broadcasts that they used to have on AM radio all the time. They said, you know, Apollo 11 has landed on the moon. And so we got to my aunt and uncle's and cousin's house late that afternoon or early evening, and about 9pm Eastern time, they came on. You know, they were preparing to walk and everything. And then, I don't know, it may have been. Seems like it was about 10:30 Eastern Time that Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder and stepped off. And that's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. He and Buzz Aldrin, you know, did a short walkabout.
[00:24:28] Speaker A: I don't know an equivalent. In my lifetime and experience, I haven't sat and thought about this.
[00:24:34] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:24:35] Speaker A: And so I don't know if one comes to mind for you, but this idea of reaching this kind of milestone experience as, you know, a nation, as a world, you know, to have to see men go out there and bounce around and walk on the moon must have been just amazing, right?
[00:24:54] Speaker C: And it was socially, it was tremendous because President Kennedy was the one who had established that goal. And then, of course, he was assassinated, which was a Tremendous blow. And Vietnam was going on.
But it was one of those things that in essence, kind of unified the world.
I think it was. Jon Stewart wrote a song. Not Jon Stewart from.
[00:25:23] Speaker A: Yeah, sure, the Daily show and all the things.
[00:25:25] Speaker C: Yeah, but Jon Stewart, that was a member of one of the folk groups and he wrote a song called Armstrong. And part of the lyrics of that song is about how people in New Delhi and Johannesburg and Rio de Janeiro and everywhere, people worldwide were watching that at the time. And we all felt kinship as humans, not just Americans. But I do say there was a great deal of national pride there because it was as if. Well, it was like the little plaque on the leg there that they uncovered and left there.
Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on the Earth's moon. 20 July 1969.
Something like that. That may not be verbatim accurate, but this part is we came in peace for all mankind.
[00:26:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It was a big, big experience, Big moment in time.
[00:26:29] Speaker C: And that was us carrying the flag for everybody.
[00:26:33] Speaker A: When we talk about, you know, you're talking about National Geographic, you're talking about all these influences, both for flight, for Navy, what comes to my mind, and it factored into my deciding to enlist in the Army.
There is a level of romanticism that was in my mind, an appreciation for history and appreciation and curiosity for things like articles that are showing me what's around the world, military and. And otherwise.
I considered going into the Navy as well. And for whatever reason didn't walk down the hall and go through the door and talk to a Navy recruiter after having talked with the army recruiter. My dad had been drafted and he was in the Army. I was just curious about this. And it's our longest standing force, so history. I wonder what I missed by not going into the Navy. And you had 23 years there. Do you have a way to describe that experience, being at sea, being part of what is, I think, what, the second oldest force in our country? Right.
[00:27:35] Speaker C: Well, it's actually, I think the Marine Corps is older than the army if you trace it back. But I know army and Marine Corps nip and tuck there. So the Navy is the third.
[00:27:48] Speaker A: But the Marines come under the Naval Department. That's interesting.
[00:27:51] Speaker C: They're in the department of the Navy. But see, the Navy wasn't. The Navy's origins are a little bit, you know, the Continental Congress passed a bill to procure three frigates or something like that. And that's where we trace our origins back to that. October 13th, 1775. Okay, so the army predates that. But now, here's something that's kind of interesting, is that the Constitution says, maintain a navy. It says, raise an army. So the Navy, we always pat ourselves on the back and say we are permanently authorized. The army is temporarily authorized, but the Army's been around forever. And, you know, it's probably not going anywhere soon. But back to your original question in there.
You know, some people like being at sea, and some people can't stand it.
I enjoyed it. It was, you know, on a bright, sunny day like this, being out there and the signal flags flapping in the breeze and the bosun's pipe and just the daily routine of being at sea, it appealed to me, I'll admit it. Some people say, you know, you have to be crazy. But Hayes gray and underway, you know, that was our job. That was our mission. And I didn't think that.
You know, I remember one of my. The first farewell thing that we had. I said, you know, to the. To my junior counterparts, you know, at times if you're sitting down and you're doing some of your paperwork or you're doing something, it might seem like a drudge. But you have to remember your doing something far greater than that.
That's like laying one brick. It's the old story about, you know, somebody walked up on a work site and asked three guys, well, what are you doing? One said, I'm mixing mortar. And the other one said, I'm laying brick. And the third one said, I'm building a cathedral. That was the way I always looked at things. I was. When I was standing at the centerline Polaris on the bridge at midnight, I didn't think, like, I'm standing here at the centerline Pelorus at midnight. And, boy, this is a drag. I thought, I'm doing my little part to build a better world to, you know, when the Berlin Wall came down, when all that happened in 91, when Mandela got his freedom, those were things that I had worked for. That was what was in my mind that I was doing. I'm working to defend freedom, to spread democracy, to make the world safe for democracy, and to do all those. Those higher things. That was the vision and that was what motivated me.
[00:30:36] Speaker A: While I did not make a career of it, I was in for four years. I did like to look at what I felt like was the specialness of some of those experiences, even in the little things. So, for example, I was in Korea for a year, and our barracks were right across a road from the edge of an airfield. And we had Chinook helicopters and some others out there, but they're the ones that stand out in my mind because they would fly over to that edge of the airfield. I could have hit a golf ball, maybe thrown a baseball and hit one of these things. And when they would practice their elevator raises and different skills over there, and it would be rattling the windows of our barracks. And of course that is going to annoy some people. But I preferred to look at it as this is the only time in my life, most likely I'm ever going to have this experience with that helicopter feet away and I can just watch them do their thing.
[00:31:29] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:31:29] Speaker A: And it was for a limited amount of time.
[00:31:31] Speaker C: Right. Well, there's so many experiences like that that I can think of that, you know, are meaningless to most people and.
[00:31:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:39] Speaker C: Be meaningless to a lot of people that had served in the Navy that I can remember and remember fondly.
You know, some of my favorite stories are, you know, still from my days in the Navy, things that I remember. Eisenhower published a book, I think, in 1964, and it was called At Ease Stories I Tell to Friends. And the stories that I share with people, there's still a large number of them that come from my Navy experience because it was a, you know, it was a unique experience. People were very team oriented and team motivated.
And, you know, occasionally you had somebody that know, didn't adapt very well, but they sort themselves out one way or another. And, you know, there are people that I'm in touch with on a daily basis, not everyone. Every day.
[00:32:35] Speaker A: I got you.
[00:32:35] Speaker C: There's. There's not a day goes by that I don't have some correspondence or phone conversation or something with someone that I serve with.
[00:32:44] Speaker A: It's an extraordinary thing that I think there, you know, the majority of our population is not aware of. And I think it's one of those experiences that if you have not done it, you don't understand it.
[00:32:54] Speaker C: Right. Yeah.
[00:32:55] Speaker A: It's a special thing to have experienced all the ins and outs of a military life for whatever length of time.
[00:33:01] Speaker C: Yeah. Yes. It's a unique existence. And I really.
I think it's something that most people would benefit from having some level of experience that way. If it's a military. I don't know if it's a Coast Guard. You know, Coast Guard's good service too, and other things like that. But I think that, you know, there are people that never get the benefit of learning how to work in a team. Now, of course, it generates a lot of frustrations too.
I don't think it's a. I don't think the military is a better world than a civilian world, but there are things that I miss about it. But the number one thing that I miss about is the people. It's just like having owning the trailhead. You know, I got into the business because I like the outdoors. I love outdoors activities. I like the gear. I was very much a gearhead and still am. But what I really miss about the store is that contact with customers and helping customers meet their needs, solve a problem, answer their questions. That's what I really miss, is the people.
[00:34:13] Speaker A: I think there's something to be said for learning maybe in a deeper way than we have in our just typical civilian experience in our society, to learn how to care together and invest ourselves together towards something that is for the greater good. You know, I don't know that we have an equal understanding of that across the board.
And to be able to pull together, like you've described some of the things in history when. I mean, if we think of World War II, there was a unity around that landing on the moon, there was a global unity around what was just accomplished.
And I think some of that goes missing across society, certainly maybe now more than the optimistic times you described when you were a child. And being in the military is one way to learn how to at least participate in that, maybe in a more direct way and in a bigger way, and have that just be part of the ongoing, I don't know, training. It's. It's just inherent in it.
[00:35:07] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:35:07] Speaker A: We're pulling for something bigger, better.
[00:35:09] Speaker C: Right.
[00:35:09] Speaker A: Mandela's freedom, you know, whatever it is.
[00:35:11] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:35:12] Speaker A: Even if you weren't the one there to open the door for him.
[00:35:14] Speaker C: Right.
[00:35:14] Speaker A: You know.
[00:35:15] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:35:16] Speaker A: I want to ask you about a particular time in your career. When you were in Washington, D.C. you were at the Pentagon. Yes.
And so your role at this point as an officer was to. I'll use the word advise. I don't know if that's a word you would use, but it was to assist in some way. Top brass. Colin Powell is a name that stands out to me. That is someone that you worked with.
[00:35:40] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:35:41] Speaker A: Closely.
[00:35:42] Speaker C: Right.
[00:35:43] Speaker A: There were many reasons that I went into the army, but I read his autobiography, My American Journey, and I know that that was a positive influence in that list of reasons, too, because I appreciated his experience. I appreciated a lot of things about him as my perception from afar. I never met him. I heard him speak once, and then I read his biography. Can you tell me something about your experience in working with General Powell, the.
[00:36:07] Speaker C: Thing that I share with most people that I think says the most about him is that you could be in a room alone with your back to the door and the door open so you wouldn't hear the door open and he could step into the room and you'd know he was there. You just feel him and then you turn and there he was. That only happened once with me. But, but that's the kind of power he had. And he was a, he wasn't a small guy. He was probably 6, 2 by that time. By the time he was a four star general, you know, he had, he had grown, he had filled out and he was a big guy.
He could have played linebacker somewhere and made a difference. But it was more than just his physical presence. He had a tremendous moral stature that few people I've ever been around have. And it wasn't just because he was the chairman. It wasn't. I mean, he was the chairman because of that.
[00:37:11] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:37:11] Speaker C: Yeah. It wasn't just his rank. It wasn't just those four stars on each shoulder and all his ribbons and badges and everything else. He just had a tremendous moral stature.
[00:37:24] Speaker A: I think there's something I learned in my experience, which was that there was a distinction between showing respect for the collar or showing respect for the human that was wearing it.
[00:37:35] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:37:36] Speaker A: Those come with different feels. And you know, the system requires that you salute someone of higher rank, that you know, an officer of higher rank. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they have that moral stature you're talking about, that you feel the leadership, you feel what you need to feel to truly respect them. Human to human.
[00:37:58] Speaker C: Yeah. There some people, you wonder how they ever got to where they are. And then there are others that you say, well, you know, like when in 1996 and 2000, people were wishing that General Powell would run for president and you knew how he got where he was. It wasn't a, you know, you never question like, gosh, how did this guy get here?
[00:38:25] Speaker A: And he didn't want to. Right?
[00:38:27] Speaker C: No, no, he did not run for.
[00:38:28] Speaker A: President, which is who you want for president. As far as I'm concerned. Somebody who has that moral character, has the leadership that he had, had all these positive qualities and was willing to say, I'm, I don't want that role. Rather than somebody who's power hungry and is ego driven and greed driven and all the things. Right. That can end up in that seat, I would want to vote for somebody like Colin Powell, along with a lot of other reasons, because he wasn't hungry for that power.
[00:38:58] Speaker C: Yeah. He wasn't trying to compensate or fill a void or something. And, you know, if you look back the early days of the nation, that was kind of the way it was service. Yeah. You didn't want somebody who was actively seeking the job. Actively seeking the job was the first disqualification, you know, like Aaron Burr or somebody like that, who had that. And probably Hamilton, they had that obvious ambition. Yeah, yeah. Uncloaked ambition.
Whereas somebody like Washington and even Jefferson and Adams, they. I'm sure they were ambitious, but they had to restrain it. They didn't make a big to do of things.
[00:39:42] Speaker A: I want to talk about leadership. It's something that I've brought up a few times on this podcast with people, and I can't think of anybody who I've had sitting across from me on this podcast who is better equipped to talk about this, whether it's the 23 years in the Navy you retired as a commander, which is.05 equivalent to lieutenant colonels across the other main branches, the Air Force, Army, Marines, let alone then, you know, in all the years since then, since you retired from the Navy, eight years on, you know, the town trustees, which for people who aren't from here, the equivalent of city council. And you will be by the time you're done with your second term as county commissioner. Eight years of that service, too, is that correct?
[00:40:22] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:40:23] Speaker A: This is a lot.
[00:40:24] Speaker C: And I.
[00:40:24] Speaker A: And I haven't even accounted for all of it. You mentioned the trailhead that was a retail shop for outdoor gear that you owned for nearly a decade. I mean, there's all kinds of facets of leadership that you have experience with, public service, all of these things. So again, I can't think of anybody else sitting across from me to be more qualified to talk about leadership. What is your concept of leadership and what makes good leadership?
[00:40:50] Speaker C: Well, I subscribe to the concept that leaders are made, not born. People are born with certain attributes and talents and everything. It's how are those developed and how do they develop over time?
Among the things that I was blessed with was early on I had experience where leadership was fostered and nurtured and trained.
If there's one thing that I wish I had had in my life throughout, it's a strong mentor. I've never really had what you would think of as a true mentor. I have people that I can pick up the phone and call and ask for advice, but I've never really had anybody that calls me and checks in with me and asks me how it's.
[00:41:39] Speaker A: Going from the mentor position.
[00:41:40] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:41:41] Speaker A: To offer counsel or anything.
[00:41:44] Speaker C: Right. And I know people that do. And it's always something that I'll use a word I've envied, I've said, gosh, I wish I had somebody like that. But yeah, I've had the benefit of those experiences. And the Navy and my fraternity when I was in college, Sigma Nu, even at that time, they took a very strong approach to nurturing leaders and developing leaders. And now even more so.
And Sigma Nu was a unique fraternity. Its whole founding principle was anti hazing. And I mean that was just verboten. And we were founded at VMI by Confederate veterans at the time. And the reason they started it was anti hazing because there was a very bad hazing culture, VMI at that time anyway. Even my fraternity helped develop leadership. But the Navy did take a very methodical approach to developing leadership. And we had a program at that at that time called Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness. And it was kind of an internal program and going through your earliest training division officer courses and so forth. There was a two week course in leadership management education and training and there was a lot of scenario driven things and role plays and stuff. And I think that helped develop it a great deal as well. But leadership, to me, I guess people are trying to hang it on a hook.
My inner thinking is servant leadership. If you read a lot of histories and biographies and things that the thing that really is kind of the hallmark of great leaders are they take care of their people, whatever that means. If it means making sure that they're adequately equipped, if they get adequate rest time, if they get good food, if they have the tools necessary to do their job, if they have a good working environment, if their direct supervisors treat them well, all those sorts of things that, you know, sad to say, many times it's just eliminating the dissatisfiers to try to make sure that you're taking care of your people. And they know that they're valued not just as a tool, not as just somebody to do work, but as a human being. And that's not becoming their best friend. Because there are times that being trying to be their best friend just is inconvenient. It doesn't work. You have to have a professional relationship, but it can still be cordial and you truly care about them because those factors are going to affect their performance.
[00:44:40] Speaker A: I think service is the word that comes to my mind with it. So you said servant leadership.
[00:44:44] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:44:45] Speaker A: If I picture a pyramid of. Here's the one person on top of whatever the organization is. And then there's all these layers of people reporting up the chain and doing the various, you know, jobs. They're not there to serve the person on top so much as the person on top is there to clear the way, I feel like, and empower the best to come out of all of those people.
[00:45:08] Speaker C: Sure, yeah. It's. Remove those impediments, remove those things. I think it's back to that optimistic personality. I think most people, the vast majority of people, get up every day and they want to do the best possible job they can, wherever, whatever it is. You know, I hear that all the time tossed around about these mindless, brainless bureaucrats in Washington. Well, when I went to the Pentagon, everybody there, everybody that I worked with wanted to do the best job they could. Well, I'm sure there are people I could probably think of, maybe a handful that were just kind of skating along, but that's probably. I could count them on one hand.
Among a leader's key functions is to remove obstacles and remove barriers and lower the hurdles for their people to do a good job. Because I genuinely believe that the vast majority of people want to do a good job. That when they get up every day, they want to do the best possible job they can. If it's assembling an airplane, thank God, they want to do the best job they can. If it's performing surgery.
[00:46:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:25] Speaker C: If it's mounting a new set of tires on a car, if it's processing the payroll for somebody, if it's preparing food, whatever it is. I genuinely believe most people want to do the best possible job they can. And my role as a leader, as an elected official, is to create the conditions to help them do that.
[00:46:50] Speaker A: I think people want to contribute and they want to feel supported and maybe permitted to do that, rather than having to look at a boss as being an obstacle who is in their way. Because so often you're talking about removing obstacles, so often it's the person in charge who becomes an obstacle. And that can happen for various reasons. But if there's ego or there's insecurities or there's their own ambitions that supersede whatever the actual leadership is, I think is when we get into trouble, whether that's politics or business or anything.
[00:47:19] Speaker C: Right? Yeah. If you look at what the attributes of a. A good leader are, you know, and unfortunately, and I say good leader as opposed to strong leader, because a lot of times they'll say, what makes a strong leader? And people focus on that. Strong. I got to be strong, strong, strong. And I think that leads to micromanagement, which some of us used to joke around. Yeah, it's that control motive. And I was listening to something a few days ago where somebody mentioned, you know, it's the flavor of the month and the leadership and management processes. And, you know, you had total quality management about 30 years ago. You had Dr. Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And some of those are still valid and they're still great and they're good touchstones, just like, you know, people still read the Bible. But I think generating trust and instilling confidence in people are key. And this kind of gets back to a term that you used to hear called empowerment. And I think people misunderstand what empowerment was and is. I think too many people understood empowerment to be totally hands off, no guidance given. And that morphed on into no nurturing, no training. And it doesn't work because you're just letting people run hog wild. That's not what empowerment was. Not what empowerment is. This is something we're working with in county government now because we're updating our land use code, which the old one was largely silent on so many things that the staff wasn't empowered to make decisions. This time we're going to try to be somewhat descriptive and prescriptive so that a staff member, when somebody comes in and asks if they can do something or wants to fill out an application or submit a project, that staff has the guidelines, has the policy there, that they're empowered to start making some decisions and speed up the process. So it isn't that everything, almost everything, had to rise up to the planning commission and fence onward to the county commissioners. And it took months and months to get a decision.
Let's be pretty clear about what the standards are so that not only does the citizen understand them, that staff can understand them and in many cases approve things that are right now taking far longer than they should to be approved. That's what empowerment is. And I believe in. In empowering people to the extent possible.
[00:50:03] Speaker A: It leads me to this line that I use and think of often with leadership, and that is that people lead from where they are. I think it shouldn't just be the person who has title of boss, whatever form that might take. I feel like we all have the capacity that when we are permitted and empowered to make decisions, to take actions, to move the ball forward, you can lead from wherever you are in the hierarchy. In a sense, leadership is not just people. Leadership is what I'm saying.
[00:50:30] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:50:30] Speaker A: It's stepping up as a confident, empowered, skilled, thoughtful leader who's contributing to the, you know, the overall improvement of whatever we're talking about.
[00:50:41] Speaker C: Yeah. And this gets back to your question from a few minutes ago or your observation from a few minutes ago about there are few people who have served in the military these days, and I think that helps foster this, what I regard as a pervasive misconception about the military and how we operated.
People say, well, you just want to bark orders and give orders and stuff like that. And it's like, well, you know, if you'd have been there, you know, that's not the way it is now. It isn't asking or requesting things. I mean, you. You are clear. But that eliminates ambiguity. You say, this is what I want you to do.
You don't say, I don't need you to do it, because people don't care if that's an inner need that you have. Really. I mean, let's just be clear about it. Let's say, this is what I want you to do, or this is your task, and these are the standards and everything. And that way there's not a lot of misunderstanding. And when the sergeant or the petty officer walks away, people are going like, what am I supposed to be doing? And how am I supposed to be. You know, you don't tell people how they're supposed to be doing it so much, but you tell them what to do and. And give them some guidelines, give them some guardrails. So that's something that I think people have a total lack of understanding about how things really work in the military, because you're going to be living with those people. You don't want to invite yourself to a blanket party.
[00:52:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:52:13] Speaker C: You know, you have to be personable, and you have to be respectful. You don't, you know, drop down and give me 20. That's after, you know, that's boot camp.
[00:52:22] Speaker A: Yeah. There's a cliche around how all of that works, I think, and it goes back to the fact that 98% of the population has never had the experience.
[00:52:29] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:52:30] Speaker A: So it is carried out in myth of movies and books and misunderstandings about what the experience is.
[00:52:37] Speaker C: But I think people assume that when they hear that someone's been in a service.
You know, I've always wanted to have it two ways. Being a Gemini.
I've always wanted. And I. And I enjoy it. I enjoy it when people say, I would have never suspected you were in the service. But I like it when people can say, you know, I kind of thought you may have been in the military sometime. What I don't like is if somebody, if I do something, I don't know what, like I put pepper on my eggs or something and somebody goes, aha, I knew it. That's your military shining through. Or that you, that you're, you know, it's like, okay, don't blame everything I do on, try to look through that lens. Yeah, yeah.
Don't attribute everything I do to my military.
[00:53:28] Speaker A: Trying to fit it into that box. I gotcha.
[00:53:31] Speaker C: And that's one of those things that people say, does the military attract people who are a certain way? Does military make people a certain way? I think it's like anything else. It reinforces pre existing tendencies that you have. But you know, it's just like the people that I think are, that many folks think of when they think of classical military people, they, they quickly get purged or they modify their behavior one way or another. They don't, they don't last long.
[00:54:00] Speaker A: I think there's a perception of rigidity, that command and control idea, it's, it's almost robotic and instead it's actually all humans. Yeah, you know, we're all humans and still functioning in a very similar way, but maybe with a little more structure and discipline that gets brought into it that is beneficial a lot of times.
[00:54:19] Speaker C: And this reminds me of that lost thought from a few minutes ago. General Powell, the most able person I've ever personally worked with. And then, don't get me wrong, there were probably half a dozen other people that none of us ever really heard of who could have done the job of chairman at least as effectively as he did. And I mean, that's the beauty of our system. That was back about D Day, Stephen Ambrose's book, really the whole point of that book, one of the big themes of his book was about how soldiers who've grown up in a democracy are superior soldiers to those who've grown up under an autocracy. Because you have a degree of freedom, you have a degree of decision making and when one person falls, somebody else steps up. There isn't an omnipotent power that everything is vested in and everybody else is too ill informed to do anything. And that was one of the things about that. But with General Powell, the most able person that I ever personally worked for, the Joint Staff at that time, I don't know, was roughly 1300 people, commissioned officers, enlisted and civilians. And they were all highly talented. You did not get there. And all wildly motivated. You didn't get there. Being a no load. You didn't get there being a substandard performer. And that's across the board, civilians, military, you know, enlisted officers, everybody, 1300 people, you boil it down, had one job support, the chairman. And if the chairman, if Colin Powell could rely on 1300 people and trust 1300 people to help him, I've always thought, who am I to try to be the head boss, the big boss, the, you know, I've said it, therefore it is so kind of person that's, that's not in my makeup. So it might be me seeing what I want to see. But I do think that's a valuable lesson for people. And Nimitz was one of the things that I took from reading the best biography of him was he never really did anything unless he was the only person who could do it because he wasn't developing his subordinates. He wasn't allowing his time to do what he was supposed to do. He could have, you know, he could have been down on the deck somewhere chipping paint if he wanted to. But that's not what a fleet admiral's job was, right?
[00:56:58] Speaker A: Keith, I appreciate what you've had to share here today. I know that we could have talked about so much more and you have just, you know, I started off with saying what an extraordinary and fascinating and rich and layered history of personal experience. And you're using that to serve our community and serve our county. Thank you.
[00:57:17] Speaker C: You're welcome. I'd love to come back. It's a great conversation.
[00:57:20] Speaker A: Oh, we could have kept going. Yeah, that would be great. Thank you very much for sharing what you did.
[00:57:25] Speaker C: You're welcome. Thank you.
[00:57:35] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the We Are Chaffey Looking Upstream podcast.
[00:57:38] Speaker B: If our conversation here today sparks curiosity.
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[00:57:42] Speaker B: This episode's show notes at we are chafee.org if you have comments or know.
[00:57:47] Speaker A: Someone in Chaffee County, Colorado who I.
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[00:58:15] Speaker A: John Pray is engineer and producer.
[00:58:17] Speaker B: Thank you to CAHIN 106.9 FM, our community radio partner in Salida, Colorado. To Heather Gorby for graphic and web design to Andrea Carlstrom, director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment and to Lisa Martin, Community Advocacy Coordinator for the.
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