Remembering Charlie Raymond | As I was saying …Bill Good
The roofing industry lost one of its great leaders—and
great characters—when Charlie Raymond passed away in
September.
His 87 years of enthusiastic living finally caught up with him,
and he died exactly as he wanted to: quickly, with no time for
people to feel sorry for him.
Charlie's great passion was for the industry's associations (or,
as only he could say it, "associAAAtions," as in "you need to
belong to all these associAAAtions").
When he started his NRCA
involvement in the 1960s, NRCA
had 320 members. Charlie understood the huge need and potential for
a strong national association, and he set out convincing people
that membership ought always to be an association's top priority.
Not all of his colleagues agreed, but Charlie was, to understate it
enormously, persistent. By the time he became NRCA president in 1974, NRCA had reached the 1,000-member mark.
Charlie, naturally, recruited...
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