My friend Mike Katke was killed in a motorcycle accident last week. He had finished up a sales meeting in Denver and rented a Harley to relax, unwind and enjoy a beautiful summer ride with his girlfriend Angel. I don’t know for sure, but I assume he intended to find some winding mountain roads and feel the wind in his face. In any case, on a flat, open stretch of road near Boulder (2 lanes in both directions with a median strip between) a driver in a Jeep going the opposite direction apparently didn’t see Mike coming and turned left in front of him. Mike hit his car on the passenger side, killing both Mike and Angel. The driver of the Jeep was unharmed (at least physically).
I first met Mike nearly 40 years ago. I was on my way to Minneapolis to meet with my friends and colleagues Greg Peterson and Jeff Katke (we were all sales reps for Greg’s brother Dave, who owned the distributorship for Nutri-Dyn) and we stopped in Eau Claire, Wisconsin to have dinner with Jeff’s brother Mike. He was a Witness and built garages for a living, which made him a kindred soul on two levels (I had worked in construction to support myself as a full-time minister, the same as Mike was doing). Anyhow, we had dinner in Eau Claire and then went on to our Minneapolis meeting.
Not too many years later, Jeff had moved to California after purchasing the Nutri-Dyn Distributorship there, and Mike had followed to join the business as a sales rep in the Los Angeles territory. So we would connect at sales meetings and the like, but it wasn’t until Jeff founded Metagenics with his family and Lyra Heller, I sold my Nutri-Dyn distributorship and moved to California that Mike and I became real friends. The company didn’t have a marketing department, so we all worked together to develop the sales tools we needed. I always felt like I was tagging along rather than truly contributing, because Mike, Chris and Lyra were such creative geniuses. It’s hard to imagine a Metagenics today without the products, programs and services that Mike contributed to.
Mike left the company a year or two after Jeff sold to Alticor. He had developed our FLT (First Line Therapy) program for doctors, which was (and still is) a major component of our marketing effort, but I think the new management felt that he represented too much of a connection to the “old Metagenics” and there was no real place for him any more so he left. He took a year off, then joined a different company where he was working as VP of Marketing when he was killed last week.
In the three or so years that intervened, Mike and I drifted apart. We would text or talk occasionally on the phone, and of course see each other at conferences and such, but busy schedules and differing priorities led to longer and longer gaps between contacts. Each time we connected we promised that we would call each other soon and get together for a beer.
And now we’ll never have that beer and that makes me very sad. I’m going to miss Mike.
About BigBill
Stats: Married male boomer.
Hobbies: Hiking, woodworking, reading, philosophy, good conversation.
Drifting apart
My friend Mike Katke was killed in a motorcycle accident last week. He had finished up a sales meeting in Denver and rented a Harley to relax, unwind and enjoy a beautiful summer ride with his girlfriend Angel. I don’t know for sure, but I assume he intended to find some winding mountain roads and feel the wind in his face. In any case, on a flat, open stretch of road near Boulder (2 lanes in both directions with a median strip between) a driver in a Jeep going the opposite direction apparently didn’t see Mike coming and turned left in front of him. Mike hit his car on the passenger side, killing both Mike and Angel. The driver of the Jeep was unharmed (at least physically).
I first met Mike nearly 40 years ago. I was on my way to Minneapolis to meet with my friends and colleagues Greg Peterson and Jeff Katke (we were all sales reps for Greg’s brother Dave, who owned the distributorship for Nutri-Dyn) and we stopped in Eau Claire, Wisconsin to have dinner with Jeff’s brother Mike. He was a Witness and built garages for a living, which made him a kindred soul on two levels (I had worked in construction to support myself as a full-time minister, the same as Mike was doing). Anyhow, we had dinner in Eau Claire and then went on to our Minneapolis meeting.
Not too many years later, Jeff had moved to California after purchasing the Nutri-Dyn Distributorship there, and Mike had followed to join the business as a sales rep in the Los Angeles territory. So we would connect at sales meetings and the like, but it wasn’t until Jeff founded Metagenics with his family and Lyra Heller, I sold my Nutri-Dyn distributorship and moved to California that Mike and I became real friends. The company didn’t have a marketing department, so we all worked together to develop the sales tools we needed. I always felt like I was tagging along rather than truly contributing, because Mike, Chris and Lyra were such creative geniuses. It’s hard to imagine a Metagenics today without the products, programs and services that Mike contributed to.
Mike left the company a year or two after Jeff sold to Alticor. He had developed our FLT (First Line Therapy) program for doctors, which was (and still is) a major component of our marketing effort, but I think the new management felt that he represented too much of a connection to the “old Metagenics” and there was no real place for him any more so he left. He took a year off, then joined a different company where he was working as VP of Marketing when he was killed last week.
In the three or so years that intervened, Mike and I drifted apart. We would text or talk occasionally on the phone, and of course see each other at conferences and such, but busy schedules and differing priorities led to longer and longer gaps between contacts. Each time we connected we promised that we would call each other soon and get together for a beer.
And now we’ll never have that beer and that makes me very sad. I’m going to miss Mike.
About BigBill
Stats: Married male boomer. Hobbies: Hiking, woodworking, reading, philosophy, good conversation.