David Charles Winn

David Charles Winn died peacefully at home in Gunnison, Colorado on Friday, August 9th, 2024 of ALS. He slipped away painlessly in his sleep, with all his children home. The last child arrived from Scotland the night before, and David shared a last evening with them all telling "Daddy stories."

David spent his first 15 years moving from place to place. He was born the second of seven children, in December 1949 on the US Army base of the Presidio, San Francisco. David was an army brat. His father was a career army officer and heart surgeon who served in a MASH unit in Korea and then in Aurora, Colorado; Landstuhl, Germany; and San Antonio, Texas, before retiring to a practice in the Central Valley of California. After raising seven kids, his mother became an accomplished pilot who was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame. From his father, David learned to be calm, competent, and loving, with a distinct tinge of quirkiness; from his mother, to be adventurous. As a child he filled a dresser drawer with snakes he found in the woods, to his mother's horror. (After his death, his wife found a realistic rubber snake at the bottom of his sock drawer.) He shot off rockets, worked in a tomato factory, and spent ten summers as a river guide in the Grand Canyon and the Middle Fork of the Salmon in Idaho, where as teens he and his brother once had to skip the state to avoid arrest for "guiding without a license." He played accordion, saxophone, recorder and piano, founded a chess team and became valedictorian at his high school. David then went to Yale, sight unseen, where he majored in English and got a black belt and a Yale letter in judo. He made lifelong friends and lost his army-base haircut. Once, after illegally hopping a freight train to get back to college, he walked up to the front to complain to the engineer that they had stopped for too long (he was immediately thrown off the train).

When he was a senior, one day he saw a freshman girl serving Brussel sprouts in the dining hall and went back four times, although he did not like Brussels sprouts. This was his future wife, Julie, who does not remember this episode.

After graduation, David saved up money each summer from rafting and went to Europe, learning Italian in Siena, German in Berlin, where he got a dangerous job dredging up unexploded World War II bombs, and French in Paris, where he worked as a messenger for Newsweek. After several years overseas, tired of being a starving would-be novelist living in a garret "like a mushroom," he moved to New York City and worked for three days as a taxi driver, a job extremely unsuitable for someone with David's nonexistent sense of direction. He was a literary agent for a year, representing the estate of P.G. Wodehouse, among others. Next he became a comic-book writer, writing African comic books and at least one Iron Man and a Jimmy Olson. Then, in a twist that stunned his friends, he applied to Harvard and Stanford business schools and got into both. At HBS, which to his surprise he greatly enjoyed, he sat in "Poets' Corner" at the top of the amphitheater, and legendarily once asked a marketing lecturer why on earth anyone would devote his life to selling peanut butter.

After getting his MBA, David went to Yemen to run a wadi (occasional river) with his brother, a photojournalist who had been commissioned to write a rafting piece for National Geographic. After examining the river from the put-in, the young men took a short tour and returned, only to find that in their absence the river had almost completely dried up. They attracted hordes of onlookers as they sometimes rowed, sometimes pushed the raft down the shrinking river. The area was so remote that many of the villagers they encountered did not know that any language but Arabic existed. Although the photographs were beautiful, the magazine decided not to publish this account. David continued his eclectic path by starting a movie production company with two HBS friends, making "literally hundreds of dollars" over its three-year lifespan. Their one success was an association with the hit Body Heat, but their minuscule share of the profits did not persuade them that they should stay in the entertainment business, which was "full of screamers and pounders," not at all David's style.

Now married to "Brussels sprouts" Julie, David moved on to a more traditional business career. In the next twenty years, he worked mainly in Europe, where his French, German and Italian finally came in handy as he worked as a consultant in Munich, head of a bank in Paris, then for IBM in Europe/Middle East/Africa. Unusually calm under stress, David became a "turnaround specialist" (as he explained, a crashing jet is a "turnaround situation") and worked for a web startup in London that briefly netted him a paper fortune before the internet bubble burst. He moved on to being a CEO of companies in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany; Paris, France; Los Angeles; and back to Paris. He also found time to row the Vogalonga, a 30-km-long boat marathon in Venice, three times with Venetian friends, compete in the Van Cliburn international amateur piano contest, and play Aaron Copland's Rodeo on Radio France.

David and Julie raised four children and moved 32 times, living in New York City, Connecticut, Boston, Los Angeles, Germany, the Netherlands, and England, but mainly in Paris, where they spent 25 years altogether. When David retired in 2017, they moved full-time to beautiful western Colorado, where David was involved in local organizations. He was a graceful skier, played hockey with the Never Evers one season despite being the oldest person on the team by more than 30 years, and was a passionate classical pianist, an enthusiastic but accident-prone mountain-biker, and a huge fan of Nordic detective novels. In retirement, David often wore his earbuds to talk for hours to his far-flung friends and family while rolling around the house on a hoverboard.

David was the kind of person everyone called for advice, even people who barely knew him. He would listen thoughtfully and give them excellent counsel: whether to take a new job, quit an old one, raise prices at their business, marry someone, buy a house. He called all his children every Sunday. Year after year, he put the same wish on his Christmas list:

"What I really want for Christmas is for my children (and grandchildren) to heed my advice to be morally courageous, honest, kind, and noble-minded; to strive unremittingly for generosity of spirit; and to be brimming over with filial piety. That encompasses really all I want for Christmas."

He is survived by his loving wife of 42 years, Julie; his four children and their spouses; six grandchildren; his five younger siblings; and many favorite cousins, in-laws and friends.

David will be greatly missed. He leaves you one last message: his chosen epitaph, "I wouldn't worry about it if I were you."