I was Vice President of School Services of California for all the years that Bob Blattner worked for the firm.

For a number of those years, Bob and I hosted a session at the annual conference for school business officials. Many of the other sessions at this conference were very technical and detailed. Or, to put it simply, boring. What I loved about working with Bob is that nothing that we did together was ever boring.

The first time we signed up for this, we were asked what the title of our session would be. Bob's response to me was - how do we know what we want to talk about four months from now? So we chose a pretty flexible title like, "10 Things You Should Know About the State Budget." While many other presenters had pages of handouts for their sessions, we had a single sheet of paper with the numbers 1-10 on it.

One year we incorporated song titles into our presentation. I started things off by saying our first song title has to be, "Let's Get Fiscal." Bob interrupted me by saying, "Paul. Paul. Paul. It's 'Let's Get Physical.'" Clearly we had fun working together.

Our sessions always had great attendance. For me it was certainly one of the highlights of my year.

One day Bob came into the office and started talking about non-ductile reinforced concrete. He said that many school buildings had this issue and might collapse during an earthquake. After talking to various players in the State Capitol, Bob came to realize that this was a multi-billion dollar issue and nobody was willing to take it on.

Just a few weeks ago, in the wake of the earthquake damage in Turkey and Syria due to collapsed buildings, the local newspaper had an article about non-ductile reinforced concrete. How Bob first heard about this issue I'll never know, but I do know that Bob must have had his news reporter ears to the ground way back then.

When I think of Bob, the first thing that comes to mind is his big smile. It lit up his whole face and invariably lit up the room.

Like all of you, I will miss him.