Meet the Mister

There are new folks finding their way to the Front Porch each day, and we welcome them. To get a better understanding of our chats, a person could go back and read all the previous posts and all the archives. But who has time for that? I will occasionally reference a prior post (and provide a link so the reader can go back and read it), but I am also going to repeat myself on occasion, going over plowed ground, so to speak. So if you are a long-time reader, or you already know this, skip these posts, and hope for some more interesting data to show up. I thought I would put a spotlight on our office crew this week, and hopefully give you some idea of why we have such fun working together. Logically, I will start with the Mister.

The picture above shows the Mister as we usually see him: with a phone on one ear, and a computer nearby. Part of the third generation of the Morrison family, he is the middle son of Marvin and June, born and raised here in Gilbert. He spent 5 years in Tucson getting his degree (starting in Physics, ending in Agricultural Engineering), and about 2 years in Colorado mentoring military men and women, but all 43 other years were spent here, inhabiting the town of his youth. That is, in itself, quite extraordinary in today's mobile society.

Upon graduation from the U of A, he farmed with his brother, thinking to carry on the family's long tradition with the earth. We did that for 10 years, starting (and completing!) our family, spent the aforementioned 2 years in Colorado and then returned to Gilbert in the middle of a growth explosion. This was a difficult time of transition for the Mister; the old Gilbert of 2,000 souls had ballooned to about 24,000, and farmland was being eaten up by new development daily. I posted about this angst a little bit back in February, here, but the long and the short of it is that he decided to adapt to the inevitable change, and try to create a community reminiscent of his youth. Being a man of deep faith, he places a high value on people, and that figured strongly into his dreams, as he pondered how to proceed. He began educating himself, finding other folks to mentor him in what was a completely new career path, building a team, getting to know the town staff, serving on about a million boards (okay, that was from the viewpoint of the wife kissing her hubby goodbye every night on his way to another meeting), and all the while developing the conceptual plan for Morrison Ranch. His father and uncle had always been on the cutting edge of agriculture; he wanted to honor them by being on the cutting edge of forming a warm community, and he wanted to name it after them (we can't help it that it's our name as well, but WE know for whom it was named). Most folks aren't aware that Morrison Ranch took a long ten years of learning and planning to even get off the ground.

The Mister is a very gregarious guy, seemingly able to talk to anybody about anything. He is great at negotiating, whether it be land sale contracts or just getting a subcontractor to do what he contracted to do but failed to do, and I think the secret to his skills are that he truly wants to figure out how to make situations be win-win. He is not interested in being the winner, and someone else the loser; he is interested in seeing his vision, Morrison Ranch, come to reality. We in the office call his love for social interaction "schmoozing", for which I've heard several definitions, but in his case it just means relating with people. He is the visionary and the author of many of the creative solutions for the seemingly interminable problems that arise; he recognizes that details are not his strength, so he leaves most of those to others in the office.

Another hat he wears is the IT guy, the techno-geek. All computer, printer, fax machine, internet, and plotter problems go straight to him, and he is almost always successful. The love of variety is one of the attractive things about farming: a farmer moves from fixing a tractor to meeting with a banker to hiring employees to learning accounting to checking the irrigation water, and much, much more. This business of creating communities also has plenty of variety: negotiating contracts, to presenting plans to the extended family, to overseeing details like tree placement, to dealing with the town on a myriad of topics, and so on.

I realize this has turned into an adoring wife's assessment of her man, so I'll stop here. But if you see a guy walking around Morrison Ranch with a phone on his ear, and a computer under his arm, just holler, "Hey Mister!" I guarantee he'll stop and talk with you.