I first met Larry Hull 37 years ago, at a SACRS conference in Bakersfield, California.

I was only 33 at the time and working as a regional vice president for Equitec Institutional Realty Advisers, an emerging (at the time) real estate investment management concern.

After earnestly trying to sit through a rather tiring presentation by one of the 38 Act County funds’ actuaries, we decided to play hooky and go to dinner together at a local Basque restaurant.

Suffice it to say that Larry and I hit it off immediately, and he almost instantly became a mentor for me.  (Just three short years prior, I had lost both my parents to cancer, and Larry and his wife Connie stepped in to fill that void in my life.)

A few years later, after I left Equitec and was casting around to try to find a new direction in my life, Larry was there to help provide me with encouragement and direction.

When I finally decided I was going to start up a publishing enterprise focu