A Tribute to Jack Arnet Hancock, 1921-2020

They make the oddest of couples.

That was the first line of a company profile about Arnet Corporation, an engineering firm that Jack Hancock and I started together in 1983, and it was a sentence I’ve never forgotten. The writer went on to describe the two of us as complete opposites—me, young and brash, a risk taker, and Jack, older, solid and conservative.

These differences were certainly true, especially from a visual standpoint. On a typical day at the office, I would wear my trendy, youthful clothes, with a pair of loafers, and Jack would be in his white shirt, striped tie, and plain, black-framed glasses, with his black, steel-tipped, DuPont-spec safety shoes adorning his feet. He even wore one of those plastic fabric protectors in his shirt pocket.

When we started the business together, I was 27 and Jack was 61. He had been employed by the DuPont plant in Old Hickory, Tennessee as mechanical engineer for thirty-five years, and because they were downsizing, they were encouraging him to take early retirement. As for me, I was spinning my wheels at that time, having quit my previous job and gone back to Vanderbilt to finish my Ph.D. in electrical engineering, something I was not all that excited about.

It was actually my mom’s idea for Jack and me start the company as partners—Jack was my stepfather, who my mother married when I was 16. “You’re both engineers,” she told me one day, when she’d dropped by my apartment for a visit. “Why don’t you two start an engineering consulting business together?”

Honestly, I had my doubts that a man with his experience would want to start a company with a young, relative greenhorn like me, but my mom assured me that she’d talked to him about it, and that he did.

It was funny—I remember going over to their house a few days later and, after making a lot of uneasy small talk, saying, “Jack, Mom says you want to start a business with me.” He frowned, giving my mother a dirty look. “She said you wanted to start a business with me.”

Anyway, after the two of us circled each other warily for a few minutes, like a couple of dogs trying to establish which one was the alpha male, we finally agreed to start the company and shook hands on it.

“But I don’t want to make junk,” Jack said, before he withdrew his hand from mine.

“Neither do I,” I assured him.

That was our only guiding tenet. As much as I hate to admit it, it was also our entire business plan. Yet, that off-the-cuff, mutual commitment to quality, agreed to in a matter of seconds during a handshake, was the underlying commercial principle that eventually made us millions.

Even though “Arnet” was Jack’s middle name, it was my idea to use it as the name of our company. Jack was “not too wild” about the idea, as he put it, having endured a lot of teasing about the name as a child. Let’s face it—for a person’s name, even a middle name, Arnet is pretty geeky. But I thought it fit our company perfectly. It started with an ‘A’ so that our name would appear first in the Yellow Pages’ alphabetical listing under Consulting Engineers. The ‘net’ part sounded technical, as in computer network. He eventually went along with it.

We rented a little office in the 1717 building on West End Avenue and opened our doors for business. I won’t bore you with the details of our early trials and tribulations as fledgling entrepreneurs—suffice it to say that it was extremely difficult, and it took us a couple of years to figure out how to make any money at all.

By the time we began to grow, and we had a staff of about a dozen people, Jack was beginning to establish himself as quite a character. One of the things he became known for were what we called his Seemingly Stupid Questions.

Personal computers were the hottest industry at that time (the mid-1980’s), and, naturally, our product development moved in that direction. But being a mechanical engineer, Jack’s computer background was a bit weak. Typically, his Seemingly Stupid Questions would start out, “Well, I don’t know that much about computers, but…”

One example happened early on, when we were moving from the 1717 office into our own little building, so we could set up circuit board manufacturing. I had determined that we needed to buy two new computers—one for product development, and one for accounting. And there it went: “Well, I don’t know that much about computers, but I don’t see why we need two expensive computers,” Jack told me in frustration. “Isn’t a computer a computer?”

I began explaining to him why a computer wasn’t a computer, that an accounting computer could not double as a product development computer…but I found that I was a little confused about the ‘why’ myself. Upon further investigation, I found that we actually could get away with buying only one computer, which would save us about $5,000 (about $10,000 in today’s dollars). That was cash we badly needed for other uses.

Another thing which impressed us all about Jack was his tenacious ability to tackle any problem, no matter how complicated, and patiently hammer away at it, relentlessly, day after day, until he found a solution. He often gave the impression of being a very slow worker, whistling casually while working at his desk, as he sketched or made notes on his yellow pad, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. But that was an illusion.

The phrase, “Give it to Jack” became a cliché around our office. Whenever we encountered a tough problem that seemed utterly unsolvable, we always turned it over to him. Jack always found a solution, sometimes after the problem had been deemed a “royal pain in the rear end,” as he would put it, and one that we would just have to live with. After some time passed, as sure as summer follows spring, he would casually walk into a meeting and humbly say, “You know that problem you gave me to solve? I think I have an answer, but it’s probably not too good.” Then he would lay out an elegant solution that would almost make you cry, usually with several variations, and he would outline the advantages and disadvantages of each one.

I think patience was Jack’s greatest virtue, and that tied into this amazing ability. He was patient with himself. Unlike most people, he did not become frustrated when he tried idea after idea, only to find all of them failing to solve the problem. He just kept plugging and plugging away until he nailed it.

His patience and relaxed manner also paid off during business crises, and we endured many.

He never panicked, no matter how bad things got.

Once, during our most intense cashflow problems, our bank sent a couple of guys over to assess our financial situation, and they told us that we were bankrupt, had been bankrupt for three months, and advised us to file Chapter 7 immediately to liquidate all the assets “while there were still some to save.”

That evening was one the worst nights of my life—I didn’t sleep even one minute—but when I came into the office the next morning, I was surprised to find Jack already at his desk, working as usual, looking relatively unfazed.

“I say we just keep on going,” he muttered. “We didn’t know we were bankrupt before those two guys came over, and it hasn’t been so bad.”

I agreed.

It proved to be a very wise decision.

Jack was a funny guy to be around. Hilarious at times—he made us all laugh.

He would often use archaic, completely out-of-date words, yet the way he said them, they almost seemed cool, in a retro kind of way. Some of my favorites have become active parts of my vocabulary, such as pizazz and balderdash. A week doesn’t go by without me saying to my wife, “As Jack would put it…” and then phrasing something using his unique lexicon, which always puts a different spin on things.

Moving at his own, steady, relaxed pace was entertaining in and of itself, and he knew it. Riding as a passenger in his car was an experience to remember. He would slowly settle into the driver’s seat and then adjust the forward position, so that it was the right distance from the steering wheel (my mother often drove the same car, which made this necessary).

Then came the side mirrors—he carefully adjusted the one on the left, then on the right, so that he could see properly.

Then he moved to the rearview and got that one right.

Next came the seat belt—he would snap it into place, then check the tension and make sure it caught properly when yanked suddenly forward…

Finally, he would insert the key into the ignition and actually start the car, letting the engine idle for a few seconds and checking the dashboard to make sure no warning lights were on.

I remember the first time my wife rode with him—when he was about halfway through this tedious process, she leaned over and subtly whispered in my ear, “Are we riding in a car or the Space Shuttle?”

Jack always drove slowly, never above the speed limit and usually about five mph below. On two-lane roads, traffic would build up behind him, of course, with drivers often blaring their horns at him in frustration, even yelling obscenities as they overtook him.

Once, I said, “Jack, don’t all those people honking their horns behind you bother you?”

He glanced up at the rearview mirror as if he hadn’t even noticed. “Nope—let ‘em honk.”

You have to admire that level of confidence. Jack Hancock did things his way, and nobody, by gum, was going to interfere.

In the profile piece I mentioned at the beginning of this tribute, the writer suggested that the differences in ages and personalities created a creative clashing of styles that was the secret behind our business success. She implied that we were kind of a Lennon & McCartney team, fraught with conflict and disagreement, yet the friction producing sublime results.

I didn’t think much about it at the time, but as the years rolled by and I reflected on that notion—especially after we sold the business and split up as partners—I realized that it was absolutely true.

We had many heated arguments about how to best manage the company, which sometimes turned into shouting matches and even resulted in us hurling office supplies at each other.

During one particularly nasty conflict, I shouted, “You know what working with you is like, Jack? It’s like dragging a two hundred pound slab of concrete behind me!”

He shouted back, “You know what working with you is like, Mike? It’s like trying to hold back a two-ton cruise missile that’s trying to fly off in all directions and self-destruct!”

That gave me food for thought—I knew very well how I felt working with him, but it had never occurred to me how Jack might feel working with me.

This led me to understand, and painfully admit to myself, that if I were left to run the company without his grounding, conservative counterbalance, I would certainly have bankrupted it. By the same token, had Jack run the company without my gung-ho, let’s-take-the-risk influence, we probably would have remained a two-man consulting firm in the little office on West End Avenue.

It truly was a synergetic partnership in which the whole was much greater than the sum of its parts.

Which brings me to my last point. There is no way that you can spend so many years living and working with someone and not be influenced by that person on a very deep level. As different and opposite as the two of us were from each other, Jack’s relaxed, methodological, and forever patient attitude towards life eventually became a part of me. He is part of me now—Jack Arnet Hanock lives on, through me, and through many other people that he knew and influenced—I’m absolutely sure of that.

We all miss you, Jack.