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Bill Looney by Bill Looney
A Short Story on a Long Life…So Far July 1, 2008

William Clark Looney was born 1939 in SW Idaho. He remembers blackouts and sirens, and horrible pictures of the Holocaust he saw before Grandma took the Life Magazine away. His dad came back from the Navy at the end of WWII and worked for Safeway. His boss at the Emmett store was Joe Albertson, yes, that Albertson! Bill’s dad eventually started his own grocery store in SE Oregon along the Snake River at a hamlet about 24 miles South of Ontario.

Oregon was home since Bill’s great-great grandad tended fire and helped herd his cousins, Jesse & Ruby Looney’s children on the first Oregon Trail wagon train in 1843. John Clinton Looney then settled to farm near Brownsville, Oregon. His son, Walter William came back to Eastern Oregon to ranch and run various businesses. Grandfather, Harry was born at Granite, in the hills west of Baker City. Bill’s dad was born in Jordan Valley in SE Oregon ranching country.

Bill was more dreamer than student. But FFA and sports kept him enough interested that he still managed to rank second in his graduation class scholastically. 4-H & FFA drew Bill’s interest into people and other growing things, and he did well with life sciences and practical business math.

Oregon State University (it was Oregon State College until 1961, the year Bill graduated) was a continuation of dreaming, but Bill managed a respectable 3.24 while piling on agriculture and life science, leadership training & activities, ROTC, and was chosen to attend as the Oregon ag kid for a summer Danforth Foundation fellowship with ag guys from across the nation.

Two years of Army Infantry at Fort Hood, Texas with the 2nd Armored Division was followed by two more years of graduate school. The dreaming had to stop when Bill decided that chasing mitochondria was not his life direction. More by luck than good sense, Bill went back to his roots and used his second year to prepare to teach Vocational Agriculture.

He met his Love, Teri, on one of his last classes at University of California/Davis. He talked her into coming back to Eastern Oregon to teach at Ontario Junior High School. After a year, she gave up and married him. Their oldest son, Craig was born there in 1968.

Bill taught in Ontario four years and then felt the tug to work with business without the day-today foxhole routine of secondary education. The year with First National Bank of Oregon as an agribusiness representative was educational. Bill was interested but still dreaming rather than focused.

To shorten the story, Bill found the job that really found him. Bill started the Farm Management program at Big Bend Community College in September 1970 with a handful of farm families. The farm prices made for slim pickins and the technology was BC, not just before computers, but before those in hand calculators that have now evolved into fruit and floorshows to communicate, calculate and see and hear the world.

Next year, Texas Instrument put the power to add, subtract, multiply, and divide into the hairy palms of farmers and family businesses. No longer did instant accuracy abide only in vast humming rooms owned by mega-businesses. This ability to calculate decision material beat the tar out of using a broken pencil and a used envelope you found on the floorboard of your pickup. What confidence would you have those decisions! Next stop, square root!

Mother Necessity of pinched farming profits married Father Emerging Technology and gave birth to both potential prosperity to farmers, and opportunity for Bill to focus on working with farm families. Business is what Love does for a Living. Say again…

Business is what Love does for a Living. It took many years for those farm families to stomp such obvious Simple understanding into Professor Bill. But when has Simple ever been easy? We came to understand that there were really three reasons to keep records (collect business data):

Stay out of jail What you do for your CPA and the IRS
Stay in control What you do for your lender and your bank account
Stay in business What you do for your family

The Benevolent Almighty, Who has mercy on the clueless drifting dreamers as well as the Brokenhearted, managed to get Bill with some of the greatest minds and inspirational hearts in Farm Management.. At OSU, Bill had a rogue farm management economist (Economics is called the dismal science because of the dismal minds who teach and propagate such) who taught management based on simple working principles that focused on prosperity. Manning Becker was anything but dismal. Manning never got a doctorate, but taught sense to many that did. He taught me while I was still a sophomore and I was excited, but I lost my focus after taking finals and remembering girls. Manning Becker taught Gayle Willett, who became a world class Farm Management Economist with Washington State University. World wide, Gayle was respected for his teaching and expertise. But back home at WSU, as is the case with most ivory towers, he was just another dot in the budget that cost dollars.

While Gayle Willett and his worthy associates in Farm Management Economics around the nation were sharing how to prosper farm families with my fellow farm management instructors, those fellow community college associates were also teaching and inspiring me. The NW Farm Management Instructors, though small in number, became the front line helping farm families to prosper in times no matter how tough.

Just an observation from that slice of history….

Have you ever experience a Food Outage? When Mt. St. Helens fell on us May 18, 1980, we found what happens. The food in stores disappeared…fast! There was no way to get it in until roads were cleared and air was clear enough to keep from freezing engines. We had a lesson we need to remember: Depending on outsiders for food does not work. Ignore your teeth and they go away. Ignore your spouse, families, and food sources….guess what? Appreciate locally and keep what you got!
Back on the trail…..
I was great working with farm families at their kitchen tables or whatever they managed to squeeze out as an office. But I was a lousy classroom instructor with a group. Gayle Willett came to my rescue when I talked him into team teaching my gatherings, and he taught how to be a somewhat engaging group learning leader, I am proud to admit, before he left WSU.

Together with my farm families we went beyond grist for tax returns, balance sheets and other generic financial statements to Enterprise Analysis. We wanted to know what parts and decisions were causing prosperity. Using first the hand calculators, lots of yellow paper, erasers, and hard thinking, we devised a simple cycle of P-M-A: Plan, Measure, Analysis for cause and effect, then do it over.
To verify our method, two veteran lenders helped me trace the first 15 years of our program.

To summarize the “Success Score”:

Those who completed NO enterprise analysis (no matter how many years they kep their CPAs happy with tax info, and lenders happy with balance sheets and cash flow requests)

= 40 % still farming (I found only 67 of the 109 of which only 27 were still farming)

Those who completed AT LEAST one or two years of enterprise analysis:

= 89 % still farming (Found 45 of the 53 at this completion level)

Those farm families completing three or more years of enterprise analysis:

= 100 % and I was able to find ALL 32 of them…is that a clue?

So we three looked in amazement at the simplicity of how to cut to the chase to learn business success. That assumes that you use keeping the family farm as your definition of success.

This survey of the 1971-85 years was done in 1989. That was before there were many computers on farms. In fact, many “experts’ of the time were saying that it did not pay for farm families to invest their hard-earned dollars in computers.

True, our families were grinding out decision data with that yellow paper and those hand held calculators (that now cost $ 5 instead of $ 125 as in 1971), and many hours of skull work. But the experts did not deter our incorporation of computers. My farmers almost always bought better computers than I managed to convince the college to buy for me.

The big break was the original electronic spreadsheet, Visicalc. It was never copywrited or patented. But it became the foundation tool for evolving spreadsheets that we turned into profit planners and analyzers. My farm families and I invented tools that are beyond what the market has today. We used a one page summary to project profit comparisons of enterprise combinations. From this we often made decisions that paid hundreds of thousands of dollars difference above what other choices would have yielded. When we calculated what all those extra hours invested in enterprise analysis gave us we came up with over $ hundreds and often $ thousands per hour.

The bonds between those families and myself for all those hours season with tears and fears are much more than any dollar amount could buy. They forgave my mistakes and faults, shared their meals and heartfelt dreams, I gave what I had wits and strength to give and grew with their help.

They were in business to buy a way of life. They cared about their families, communities, and nation…and world.

We sometime talk or email when we are not so blessed busy.

Business is what Love does for a Living. Amen.

Epilogue:

In July 2000, Bill received an award for Outstanding Extension Program In Agricultural Economics for his role as part of a NW Risk Management outreach team made up OSU, WSU, and University of Idaho farm management and marketing experts. They presented to farmers, ranchers, lenders, and others in Spokane, Pocatello, Boise, and Pendleton. Bart Eleveld and Bill did the decision-making tools section which received the highest score from participants for usefulness and presentation.

In 2002, Bill & Teri moved to Silverdale to be close to their disabled daughter, Erin, their youngest.
Craig, our oldest, and Gwen live near Boston where Craig teaches physics at Merrimack College and Gwen works in technology recovery for Harvard. They have our fabulous grandchildren.
Matt, our second son, has some great art showing and lives in Moses Lake.

Teri & Bill put first efforts into LifeSpan, an organization helping families plan for hope and peace of mind after they can no longer care for their loved ones with disabilities.

Both Teri & Bill are involved with other organizations for a more just and joyfilled world. Bill is now treasurer for Kitsap Community & Agricultural Alliance.