By Joni Johnson

The depth of background of so many of our residents never ceases to amaze me.  Ray Trombley is another example.  When I first met him, he mentioned that he had been a customs officer for the Air Force in Korea.  But actually, that is just the tiny tip of the iceberg.

Ray joined the Air Force (AF) just out of high school.  So, this story is really about the evolution of a teenager growing into a law enforcement career and ending up as the head of the disaster preparedness program (now called “business continuity”) for a $20 Billion bank in Hawaii, with operations from New York City to Singapore.

Although Ray started his AF career as a high school graduate, he had earned an Associates Degree in the Administration of Justice and a Bachelors Degree in Behavioral Psychology before his seventh year of service; and then six years later, a Masters Degree in Public Administration, and somewhere in that 25-year career, he was selected to attend the FBI National Academy in Quantico, VA.

Ray was born and raised in Northern Maine – only the St. John River lay between his house and Canada.  Being the youngest and the first in his family to attend college, his parents were very disappointed when after one week into his freshman year at the University of Maine, he decided he needed to see more of the world. He quit school and called the Air Force Recruiter.  His AF career began with an assignment to the Philippines as a Military Working Dog Handler.  During his tour, he was promoted to Staff Sergeant and became the Kennel Support Supervisor for the largest MWD Kennels in the Air Force.

In his follow-on Stateside assignment, he was the on-the-job training administrator for security police squadron at Loring Air Force Base in Maine.  While there he went back to U of M (night school) and got his bachelors degree and was subsequently accepted for the Air Force Officer Training School.  He was now a Mustang (military slang for an enlisted person who becomes a commissioned officer).  Because of his experience, he was reassigned to the Philippines  as a Law Enforcement Watch Commander with 350 security police officers under his supervision.  One year later, he was assigned as the liaison officer helping to solve problems between the military airfield and the local government and citizenry During this tenure, he responded to several military aircraft crashes within 50 miles of Clark Air Base, often being the first on scene.  He also responded to three major pipeline fuel spills, and coordinated relief supplies for hurricane and flood victims.

In Korea he was the US Forces Customs Officer supporting the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the Republic of Korea.  There, the US military and UN Forces were (are) bound by the SOFA to abide by Korean customs laws, but it was the US military’s responsibility to enforce those laws. This was his responsibility.

After Korea, Ray was assigned to the Pacific Air Forces Command (PACAF) in Hawaii..  There, he was head of training for the security police throughout the Pacific, including Hawaii, the Philippines, Japan, Korea and Alaska.  This job included managing the only Stinger missile program in the Air Force.  After the training gig, he  became the PACAF Security Police Inspector General for four years.  His last assignment was in Guam as an International Geopolitical affairs officer. The four officers assigned to that office monitored events in South Asia, East Asia, Oceania and Australia and speculated on the impact of events for the AirForce commander. He and his two office mates gathered evidence and exposed a spy – their boss.

After Guam, he returned to Hawaii in 1995 to retire.  His first civilian job was as the Director of Safety and Security for a 100 bed hospital with 17 satellite clinics. There, he developed a number of emergency response plans over the two years he worked at the hospital. And finally, in 1998, his career path took him to a Hawaiian bank that had offices in New York, and subsidiary banks in Arizona and throughout the Pacific.  He was the Disaster Preparedness Manager and the first order of business was to prepare for Y2K.  The goal was to be able to continue banking operations without computers.  While a tech team worked on the computers, Ray and his team worked with people developing manual banking procedures.  Together, over $40 Million was spent on mitigation and planning.

After dealing with potential fallout from Y2K (which if you remember, never happened, primarily because of the mitigation efforts around the globe), Ray continued in his job developing disaster plans for all of the bank’s 504 operating locations.  The plans prepared them for hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, fires, mass shootings, and political unrest in third world countries where they had operations.  This could require the evacuation of expats using mercenaries they had on retainer.  When the Department of Homeland Security was created after 9/11, FDIC and FRB Bank examiners requested Ray send his best practices  to them for their use. And believe it or not, he developed a Pandemic Response and Recovery Operations Plan in 2006. His CEO at the time encouraged the sharing of their plan templates with competitors. His edict was “shame on us if we gain an advantage over our competitors because of a disaster.”  Ray was certified a Business Continuity Professional by the Disaster Recovery Institute International in 2002, and then as a Master Business Continuity Professional in 2006.  He currently maintains that certification.

Early in his tenure at the bank (2000-2001), Ray was the founder of two not-for-profit professional associations in Hawaii. One was the Contingency Planners of the Pacific, which included planners from government agencies, businesses, public and private schools, and religious and cultural organizations.  The second was the Financial Industry Liaison Team, which focused on mutual support agreements between banks in Hawaii during disasters.  The FILT concept was adopted by the FDIC and FRB and became known as the Financial Industry Resilience, Security & Teamwork (FIRST) plans in 2003, i.e. ChicagoFIRST and 11 others throughout the country.

Ray’s opinion is that there are really only two serious disaster concerns here at the Manor.  The first is fire and the second is earthquakes.  But then, Ray adds that we are in the airport’s flight path.  In a major earthquake, people might be caught in buildings and with the fire department responsible for the city, it might have trouble reaching us for a while.  One option might be to provide selected staff member with special training for emergency response.  Another idea would be for PRS to provide Emergency Planning services to all of its CCRC’s by hiring a certified planner to work with each CCRC for a month on a rotating basis to develop contingency plans   Once the plans are in place, the PRS Planner could conduct refresher training, annual reviews and facilitate exercises for RVM and PRS properties.

Ray is impressed with our READY group and the interest of our community to learn more and be more involved.  While it is each resident’s responsibility to be prepared for emergencies, the role of READY resident coordinators is limited to providing  communications to their assigned apartments and cottages. Right now, many floors/neighborhoods have only one coordinator.   He would love to see two coordinators per floor/neighborhood.  Having two would increase the likelihood of at least one being on campus during an emergency.

Totally aside from his involvement with our community in a number of ways, how lucky we are to have Ray’s expertise here at RVM.

by Bob Buddemeier

On November 1st, the RVM van, with Drew Gilliland at the helm, set out through the rain for Portland. Aboard were executive director Dave Keaton, Gini Armstrong (the chair of the RVM Green team), Alysse Furukawa, and Bob Buddemeier. The destination: a meeting at the Rose Villa Senior Living Community, entitled “Climate Resilience Summit.”

The conference was sponsored by a consortium of Green Teams from six Portland-Area CCRCs (including two PRS facilities) that have been working together for over five years.  We’ve described RVM’s discovery of this group before (https://thecomplement.info/2024/08/13/climate-resilience/) – starting out to collaborate on sustainability-oriented projects, they shifted their focus to Climate Resilience when the expanding threats posed by Climate Change made it clear that sustainability was not a realistic goal.

Climate Resilience is the capacity of individuals and institutions to resist and recover from damages inflicted by changing climate. Ideally, it includes both mitigation of and adaptation to the effects of climate change.

The consortium has identified, and is in the process of implementing, a wide range of Resilience-building practices.  Their Best Practices document contains multiple recommendations and examples of actual accomplishments in several categories:

• Energy Source and Use
• Food
• Transportation
• Land and Water Use & Biodiversity
• Waste Reduction and Recycling

These goals and suggested methods provided the background and organizing themes for the meeting, which consisted of:

• A keynote lecture on “Housing, Health and Heat”
• An interview with two CCRC CEOs about innovations on their campuses
• Breakout Sessions where mixed CCRC residents exchanged ideas
• Wrap-up session: each campus administrator presented two top take-aways.

The RVM group was uniformly impressed with the attendance and organization of the meeting, and the enthusiasm and diversity of participants. Particularly noteworthy was the atmosphere of cooperation; even when asked specifically about conflicts, the participants uniformly described amicable collaboration and mutual support among residents, and between residents and administration

To solidify the contacts and progress made, a follow-up Zoom meeting was held on November 18, with Gini Armstrong, Laura Monczynski, and Bob Buddemeier participating along with members of the Consortium Executive Board. Possibilities for future meetings and expanded collaborations were discussed.  Following discussion of communication needs, Gini, Bob Buddemeier, David Rikert (Terwilliger Plaza), Gary Smith (Willamette View) and Steve Higgs (SAGE) were appointed to discuss the possibility of establishing a Consortium website; they will report to the January Zoom meeting of the Consortium Executive Board.

Overall the Summit meeting and contacts before and afterward have stimulated a rapid growth in information exchange and cooperation with other CCRCs that will strengthen and influence local Green Team initiatives that are currently being developed and refined.  As a result of RVM Administration input to the Green team and these growing external connections, a revised description of the Green Team and its activities has been prepared for posting on MyRVM in the Activities & Amenities menu section.

By Bob Buddemeier

As a retirement community FHC (Frequently Heard Complaint), it’s right up there with mental or physical disability and the quality of the food.  After a lifetime of collecting really cool stuff, people find out that their offspring have zero interest in inheriting it. It’s bad enough when the “it” is Grandma’s set of crystal goblets or Uncle Milt’s collection of lapel pins.  It’s when the ungrateful wretches don’t give a rat’s patootie about family history and connections that it really gets personal.

If you are like most RVMers, you have several shoeboxes of family memorabilia that you have somehow been unable to downsize.  With the recent birth of a great-grandson came the realization that I am an ancestor.  And the realization I was the last family member alive to have known my father’s parents and all of his siblings and their families. And further, I had the part realization, part assumption that nobody cared.

BUT!! Lo and behold, there appeared granddaughter Remy, encouraging me to donate a tube full of spit because she wanted to find out about my/her DNA. It turned out that she had become intrigued by family history because of her other grandfather, who had, shall we say, been cast in a different mold.

Hoo Boy, I thought, here’s a live one – package those papers!  But then the laggard but logical part of my brain perked up and said:  “Waitaminute.  What is Remy going to make of a bunch of unlabeled photos and letters signed with initials?  It needs context and organization.”  Oh, yeah.

So, I found myself enrolled in 3 online genealogy sites, and struggling to crawl up the trunk of my beetle-infested family tree. It was surprisingly hard going – but I was not alone.  To my wonder and amazement, Rita Derbas appeared, riding out of the west and wearing the hat (she has many) of the lead sprout of the RVM genealogical tree (a.k.a. the Trace Your Ancestors Genealogy Group (TYAGG) – see the activities and Amenities page in MyRVM, or Bits & Pieces).  Rita has been digging into her roots for over 40 years, and is part of the group that started TYAGG back in the pre-covid days.

Rita pointed out some tree-climbing residents to consult, and invited me to the meetings of TYAGG – 4^th Monday of the month, 2:00 p.m. in the Cascade Room. She also urged me to join the Rogue Valley Genealogical Society (RVGS). [3405 S Pacific Hwy, Medford, OR 97501; 541-512-2340; https://rvgslibrary.org]

Relevant Digression:  The RVGS sets aside time once a month for TYAGG to visit with their genealogists. RVGS membership is a Good Deal for individuals if you are going to pursue the hobby actively.  Membership is not particularly costly, and it carries with it access to a library of national as well as local information, one-on-one tutorials, lectures, and access to most of the online genealogy programs – including some that have pretty high charges for private memberships. Rita has accompanied me there twice – for a tutorial and a tour, and then for a lecture/demo on website use.

About the RVM aborists, or arboreals.  Because of Monday conflicts I’ve only been able to attend one meeting, but I learned quite a bit.  Including the taxonomy of genealogists: there are the deep time types who want to push further and further back in their lineages,  and there are the lets-get-acquainted folks more interested in fleshing out details about recent antecedents.  In terms of research style, there are the hard-core purists (nothing used without seeing and documenting the original source) and the good-until-disqualified people.

My meeting with the group –  there were 9 people (total membership is about 20), which was a good size for conversation. We traded information on what we were trying to do, how we were going about it, and the problems being encountered (and sometimes solved).  And, of course we talked story about the interesting family members, which leads me to conclude with the following HINT:

If you want to pique the interest of your children, or especially the grandchildren, find a relative who was notorious, scandalous, or just plain peculiar. My daughter got into a discussion with a co-worker about who had the most interesting family.  She appealed for help, and I sent her information on my father’s cousin who had been a soldier of fortune; among other exploits he had flown a fighter for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War.  That was good enough to beat out her colleague’s uncle, a former gun-runner for the IRA.

Give it a try – find out what might be nesting in your tree.