I worked in the R & D community at AT&T and then Lucent for many years. I was part of a group whose job was to make products and services easy to use. There was another organization at AT&T that had the complementary task of enriching the jobs of people such as telephone operators. That organization was under Bob Ford and was informally known as Bob Ford's organization. That was the way it was always known and it was several years before I learned that Bob Ford had retired long before I came to AT&T. He cast a long shadow.

Now move ahead several more years. My mother had moved into a retirement community in Florida and every day at the front desk there would be a bucket of roses and people could take one or maybe a few. This was provided by the "rose guy." I was curious and asked who the rose guy was. It was Bob Ford.

Bob and I got to be friends and enjoyed swapping stories about work life at AT&T. He had a rose garden at the retirement center so he was easy to find out there among his flowers. He was in his 90s and his vision was failing so badly he had to move into assisted living and give up his roses. He invited friends to dig up his plants. The rose you see here was among the very last blooms from his garden.