It just doesn’t seem real. One of my first mentors, my longest boss, and a friend, Rex Hammock, died this week.
I went to work for Rex in 1994, my second “real job” after college. Hammock Publishing found me by a series of coincidences that I’ll sum up with: Tell your kids that internships and volunteer jobs can and do lead to the work you were meant to do in this world, so network and be nice to everyone along the way.
It was obvious from the get-go that I had lucked into one of the best jobs a 22-year-old could get: Surrounded by smart, smart people who cared about their clients, understood how marketing worked, and wanted to grow the young people they hired.
Hammock Publishing created magazines and newsletters to connect associations and companies with their audiences. We did a lot of work in healthcare and with national associations. One of my first customers was a nationwide chain of truckstops, and we worked with NFIB, the small business lobbying organization, for many years.
Here’s the thing. Rex was a true visionary. I don’t use the word lightly. He knew innately how to use technology to communicate effectively. He saw and understood where things were going, usually long before other people did. It wasn’t always an easy role, and it didn’t always guarantee success. But he created a magical place to work, and nothing in my career would have happened in the same way if I hadn’t lucked into that associate publisher job in 1994.
Within a year, the Houston Oilers were coming to Nashville. Rex decided the referendum to build a stadium needed a website, so we built one. Then he decided the internet was really going to turn into something, and we needed to figure out how to use it to help our customers reach their audiences, just like we already did with newsletters and magazines.
So Will Weaver and I started staying late after work to teach ourselves HTML. We built the first website for NFIB in early 1996. It won national awards. I sold ads for crazy prices to advertisers desperate to connect with small business owners. I learned how to structure content to create engaging experiences online. We were part of the internet revolution, right here in Nashville, Tennessee. Because of Rex.
In the mid-1990s, we had a lot of fun thinking of the best URLs to buy, back when the sky was the limit. One of the first ones Rex bought was smallbusiness.com. He sat on it for a couple of years, but in 1999, we got serious about figuring out how to use it to help other small businesses. Rex, Will, Lewis Pennock and I worked on the smallbusiness.com project for a year at Hammock, then we left to start a separate company to focus on that effort.
One of my clearest memories from that time is going to the Personalization Conference in San Francisco in October 1999. I had a 5 month old, and I was nursing. I remember when we first started talking about the conference, the guys I think assumed I wouldn’t go, but they weren’t going to say that. I assured them that I’d be going anywhere we needed to be to make our project successful. I talked my sister into taking a few days off, and she flew to San Fran to babysit while I was at the conference. Rex, Will, Lewis and I had a connecting flight through Dallas, and my sister was flying in from Minneapolis. So there we went through DFW: Me, with a baby in a Baby Bjorn, my breast pump, the guys trading off her car seat as we made our way through the terminal, and all of us with our laptops in backpacks. It was very internet 1.0. Heady stuff for some 20-some-odds, and Rex.
Our .com adventure was an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime experience. I’ve never learned more in a year and a half. The good, the bad, the ugly. In the end, the lack of a viable business model will get you every time, but I continue to think our timing was just off a bit. The ensuing years taught me quickly that our work itself was just a little before its time.
I ended up taking other children to other internet conferences with Rex over the next few years, back at Hammock. My mom went to SXSW with us at least once. The year I adopted my son, I had to miss SXSW because I was in Guatemala at the same time — but I was still IMing Rex from my hotel in Guatemala City, seeing how the conference was going.
When you went to a conference with Rex, you quickly learned that it was best just to hang around with him all day. His blog, the Rexblog, was widely read by other internet pioneers, and to be honest, people would seek him out all day long. So if you wanted to meet interesting [and often famous] folks, you just stuck with Rex.
Rex believed in us. He hired great people, and then he gave them the room and the encouragement to be their best selves. When our time working together came to an end in 2008, I could thank Rex for all the tools I’d built over the years, and they served me well when I built my own content strategy consulting practice. Rex was the person who pushed me into learning taxonomy and information architecture, back when the first polar bear book came out, years before I’d meet Lou or Peter [or Jorge!]. That skillset has defined my career ever since.
So much of that is just work though, and it doesn’t nearly give you the full picture of the kind, gentle, curious man. He was always learning something new. He always cared about you, and your family. He loved his family — his wife Ann, and his children, and oh my goodness, he loved his dogs. Several of them were regulars in the Hammock office for years. He cared A LOT about how good the work was. And he built great teams, who created great work, and made great things happen.
I’m going to be sad about this one for a long time, but in the end, I remain as I have been for a very long time: Just so grateful to have worked with Rex for so long. I couldn’t have been luckier than to work with him for 15 years, and to see the way my life has grown since then, still inspired by everything he gave me in that time.