Robert W. Galvin, Who Led Motorola Into the Modern Age, Dies at 89

When I was in high school, I took a summer job setting up large canopy tents. One of our regular customers was Galvin (or his various philanthropic organizations, etc). I only met him once, but I was a young nerd, a bit starstruck, but he had some words of encouragement when he found out I was saving up for an engineering degree. He was pretty respectful of our set-up crew, asking our opinions about how to place stuff rather than just ordering us around, and offered us sodas and sandwiches. In contrast, most customers just ordered us around and were sort of rude to us. Maybe I was just at a particularly impressionable point in life, but I took a lesson from that -- I mean a guy like that probably had better things to be doing than chatting up some guys hammering stakes into the ground -- I decided that no matter how successful, I should probably be having real interaction with people doing the actual work, even if it doesn't have an impact on the end result. Applying this to my life I certainly have gotten unexpected and pleasant results in a variety of situations.

RIP Mr. Galvin - thanks.

Bob Galvin deserves a lot of credit for pioneering the mobile phone industry, and for propelling Motorola to be one of the most successful tech companies of its day. He was also a major philanthropist, and along with Bob Pritzker was a major contributor to the scholarship fund that paid for my college education. Thank you sir, rest in peace.

I can't say Galvin's name was a familiar one to me, but I'm surprised I didn't know it given his role in the history of the mobile phone. Perhaps it's that personal mobile phones were such a slower revolution to start than personal computers, that his name isn't as well-known as some of the big names in personal computing's formative years.

Galvin is/was a household name in Chicagoland. RIP.

Hopefully the sale of his baby to Google isn't what killed him. My 1st gen Motorola flip phone was oh-so-cool! RIP