#123: The Letters

I wrote a postcard to a friend from London the other week and noted how much I love the art of letter writing and how I am actively trying to preserve it in an age where email and FaceTime prevail. Digging through emails in an inbox wouldn’t have quite the same effect as finding the handwritten letters that Pip found in this piece. Pip – how special to learn about your dad through this discovery.

- Lauren

Pip Coburn    pcoburn@coburnventures.com

The Letters

 A couple years ago when going through old letters from our attic, I found a letter my dad had written to his mom in the early 1980s. He shared with her his deep deep sense of complete failure, financially and in his career. He pondered what he felt like was his inability to keep a job.

It was so hard to read, but I also felt grateful to learn about what his life really was like at that time. It began to add up in my head and it occurred to me that maybe my dad had already had it all beaten out of him by the time I was picking him up at the train station on Long Island. 

As the youngest child by six years, I think my experience with my dad was different from my brothers and sisters. My experience was underweighted with the great times on Battersea Boulevard in Rocky River, Ohio, where our family had lived for a gazillion years before the business collapse… and where I lived for only my first three…

“Battersea Boulevard” in our family was code for “awesome happy times”.

…and my experience was likely over-weighted by how slow he walked from the train to the car and maybe what it really meant – that perhaps his passion for his work had been mostly extinguished.   

There is home video footage from our family days on Battersea Boulevard I have seen many times that shows him as passionate… loving kids… leading kids… if I had to put it together I would say he was a gentle, kind, steward who could make things happen and happen in his way. Loads of energy. A great, kind energized smile. He coached little league baseball back then, though he knew SO LITTLE of sports other than to effortlessly rejoice with children in their glorious moments…

He loved construction projects around our home, like the legendary project to create (I think) Teddy’s bedroom out of what was an attic…I think… probably a year before we moved from Battersea Boulevard.

My sister, Diane, remembers my dad as a “great conversationalist”… I don’t have that impression at all. But I do remember that he would come to life talking with my way cool girlfriend Kelly (THE very same “Kelly” you may indeed know), -- otherwise, he was largely quiet and slow in my recollection. 

I would have said he kept to himself. I am glad I don’t have any film footage of him at his workplace those last 15 years. I think it would make me really sad.

But I read another letter from the attic as well.

This was from a man who wrote to thank my dad for visiting him in the hospital a day before Christmas – the man had been hurt on a construction site. 

In THAT letter from the attic, this man spoke about who my dad was as a human…who he really was.

Pip's first-person bio: 

More than anything I suspect I am driven by “community”.   Across the past 15in years, I have grown to realize that most any success or fortune I have had in the work I do I have re-invested back into my activities such that I spend more and more of my life with people I adore and admire and just loving being around and working on a whole bunch of things that I am incredibly excited about.   I like to study monumental change at the levels of society, marketplaces, organizations and most significantly… people.  I like to study culture deeply. I like to attempt to create culture. I like processes and helping others advances their processes and being trusted deeply.   My wife Kelly is both supportive and probably confused by what I do for a living which makes two of us.  My greatest joy in my work is when I have the chance to draw from two decades of intense work in order to perhaps help someone have a break through.