Today, August 15th, would have been Jack Murdock’s 107th birthday. While we seek to keep the memory of Jack in front of us year-round, today offers a timely moment to remember who Jack was and what he did. It is a chance to reflect on the impact he made on those around him, and the legacy he has left in the years since.
While I never knew Jack, I recently had the opportunity to sit with our three Trustees and discuss Jack’s life and how we honor his legacy by ensuring his donor intent is evergreen. This means ensuring we appropriately apply his values in our context today and wisely discern how someone so focused on growth and innovation may have evolved in his thinking. The conversation is recorded and available here, and I’d encourage anyone who wasn’t able to attend our virtual Founder’s Day to watch it and learn more about Jack as he is known by our Trustees. What you’ll find in that conversation is a message that has been a consistent drumbeat in the Murdock Trust’s work over the last 49 years: that Jack Murdock was a humble and generous man, intent on enabling the people around him to be their best selves for the sake of individual flourishing and the common good. In a sense, everything we do at the Murdock Trust today derives from those characteristics of Jack’s.
But one of the great joys of that conversation to me was that beyond Jack’s professional legacy, he left a personal one too, and Trustees shared some details of his personal life that I, and likely many of you, had never heard. I learned that in addition to Jack’s love of swimming and flying, he loved ice skating. I learned that he loved to take friends fishing, flying them to his favorite streams around the Pacific Northwest and Canada. Perhaps most delightful of all, I learned that come Halloween, Jack’s house was the place to be! Vancouver locals, including one of our Trustees’ wives, reported that Jack was known for giving out king-sized candy bars. This speaks to a generosity not just to those he knew well, but to anyone who might knock on his door. Generosity not just at a philanthropic level, but also in his neighborhood and to his neighbors, known or unknown.
I know that I personally benefit from taking a step back from the bustle of daily life to remember that these small acts matter as much as the big ones. As CEO of the Murdock Trust, I value remembering how we honor Jack’s donor intent in an evergreen fashion throughout our work year-round. Thinking about Jack the person, not just Jack the entrepreneur or Jack the philanthropist, renews my conviction that how we do our work matters as much as what we do. At the Murdock Trust, we have been in a season of improving our how so that our what can be stronger. I think Jack would be proud that we are investing not only in the impact our work has, but in the way it gets done. You can learn more about some of these changes in our Project Phoenix Fireside Chat session, or in past CEO updates.
In closing, I hope remembering Jack’s life is a chance for us all to reflect on the legacies we leave behind. Certainly not all can be as notable as a philanthropist like Jack, but we can all be as impactful.
Happy birthday, Jack! Your legacy lives on.
