We lost Ron to a heart attack day before yesterday. He was one of my Kodak heroes, and an all-around fantastic person.
Ron and his significant other, Linda
My earliest memories of Ron were of him as Photo Specialist – a correspondent who wrote letters to customers on all topics photographic. His tool in those days of Wang word processors and secretarial pools was a handheld dictaphone- which he used to crank out more letters than anyone else. I admired him for his soft-spoken focus. I was one of the rabble rousers – in the program services group – a road warrior not bound by desk or office. Some of us roadies thought of the office as prison. But Ron saw it differently and I noticed. He loved his work, and applied himself to it – and it showed. He wasn’t doing chores. He was helping friends. And he did so without fanfare, without posturing, day after day, like the energizer bunny.
Ron on his 60th birthday
I remember hearing one day that “OMG Ron Baird got a big suggestion award.” Kodak used to solicit ideas from employees – with drop boxes, like little mail boxes all over the place. People would write up ideas and some infrastructure team would go through them and decide if they were implementation-worthy. Ideas that resulted in profitable innovation were rewarded. Ron had made a suggestion years earlier associated with the recycling/reuse of motion picture cores (my memory cannot be trusted). His suggestion passed into the big machine (Kodak was like a small country at the time) and was adopted. Years later the evaluated impact proved to be very valuable in cost aversion – and Ron got a check for ten grand! It was legendary!
Doesn't he look like Rod Serling or Steve Jobs?
We had a good time on the road together. That didn’t happen much because no customer service manager would want the best correspondent out on the road when he could be helping a hundred people a day from his desk… But we did get to roll a bit in the heady days of the eighties. Ron to me at that time was “the guy who works and only works, and the guy who speaks only into a dictaphone.” He didn’t fool around. I was a cool young guy and he was a square. Not so – he told me he’d had a corvette and that his wife made him get rid of his Harley when he got married. On the trip I saw other facets of the one who became “Ronnie Baby” to me over the years.
He loved to laugh – and I cherish those moments we laughed together – many too few. He and Joseph Janowicz co-hosted a department party – they were incredibly funny. Joseph got Ron to wear the flashest sport coat I ever saw on anyone beside Liberace. He also appeared in a conehead. A far, far cry from the guy with the dictaphone pressed to his face!
Ron was the leader in moving customer service to electronic media. He was a prolific and highly famed Kodak representative on bulletin boards like Compuserve and, later, AOL- he did this for Kodak but on his own time – for the love of the game so to speak. He coached me in these matters, helping me get connected with my 9.6 modem and Macintosh SE. He excitedly told me when AOL went public. He whispered words in my ear like “internet” and as the early nineties played out he rose to legend status in my eyes…
He came for an evening with our family one night, bearing gifts for the kids. He brought the Rubix cube and chocolate oranges. Melanie went on to become a rubix speed solver, and Corinne still digs in her Christmas stocking with anticipation – looking for the chocolate orange that she’s never wanted to go without since Ron’s gift that night…
Ron and Orrie at the reunion lunch
I last saw Ron at the Photo Info/Kodak Ambassadors reunion lunch in December 2011. I promised to find him a slide projector. While sorting some stuff I located it, but darn it, never got it to him. We can’t live in our best intentions. We have to live in the moment.
What are we going to do without Ron?
We will plod on, but the world has a little less laughter in it, a little less kindness, a little less beauty. Those many of us who knew Ron will have to step up and keep his memory alive, and get things back in balance.
Here’s a post in honor of Ron’s retirement some years ago:
A web Ron made (from which I have stolen photos): http://ronbaird.com
) I walk in that theater I am stunned by how beautiful it is. And I sat next to Kelly – which doesn’t happen very often either. So it was a fine night.
