Friday, October 17, 2008

Connie Marie (Hammond) Hausman

From Connie Hausman

Ten years ago today, Connie and Lee died in a light plane accident at Shelter Cove on the Northern California Coast.

From December of 1988 to September of 1995, I worked with Connie Hausman at the Western Farm Credit Bank. She was Assistant Vice President in charge of Applications. In this role, she was instrumental in a wholesale overhaul of the Western Farm Credit District's Information Systems environment. We replaced a porfolio of home grown applications with a general accounting and human resource systems from M&D and commercial and real estate accounting systems from Systematics. At same time, we worked to install personal computers, WANs, LANs, windows based electronic mail and PC distributed applications across more than an a 100 offices across seven western states.

She and I had a number of misadventures during this seven year period; two of these stick in my head. While she was pregnant with Tyler, we attended a Software AG conference in San Antonio. After dinner on the Riverwalk, she followed me as I staggered through a number of jazz bars, while I harrangued her about getting married to Lee. On another occasion, I had been working extremely long hours on a commercial loan implementation. I took her with me to Utah to troubleshoot a problem. I did not trust myself to stay awake trying to get to the office and as an executive she was someone I could pull off the implementation team to go along. She spent much of the trip telling me her life story while I tried to keep from falling asleep...

Connie left the Bank in late 1995 when we outsourced the data center operations and mainframe programming to Alltel. We remained friends and got together for lunch on a regular basis. She and her oldest daughter Jody came to our wedding in September of 1996. Connie helped me prepare when I interviewed with the Money Store in 1997; she was already working there as a Director.

First Union bought the Money Store in June of 1998. Over the next couple of months, Connie and I had some conversations about her coming to work with me as the implementation manager. She, Jo Hunt and I had lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe in late September about three weeks before the accident. I was recruiting both of them.

Connie was a wonderful and unique soul. She taught me a number of IS lessons that have been instrumental to my success over the last twenty years.

From Connie Hausman

1 comment:

  1. What a lovely rememberance to some special people. Nancy and I were at Salt Point State Park a couple of weeks ago, and I couldn't help but travel that coast and think of Connie and that tragic day. Her memory will live on...for her spirit was every bit as beautiful as that rugged coastline.

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