STILL HARD TO FIND THE WORDS

It has been a few years since we lost James, and it is still hard to find the words.

That part is changing. The shock has eased, and what came up behind it were the memories — which is the part we can actually share. Some of the best ones were never ours to begin with. They came from you: notes, calls, stories we had never heard, arriving on no particular occasion and landing on exactly the right day more often than chance allows.

We are a small family and a small company, and those two things have never sat very far apart. The people we work with knew James. Clients asked after him. For a long stretch, the work was the thing that got the day started. We want to say plainly that we noticed who carried us, and that it mattered.

So this is where we are. Still missing him every day — and no longer only that.

WHO HE WAS

James was Vice President and Director of Digital Marketing at GCAi, which undersells how early he got there. He was working in social media back when it was still MySpace, and he never stopped being the person in the room who had already tried the thing everyone else was debating. Google Ads certified. A Facebook Marketing Partner. A seat on Facebook’s Business Insights Panel. He and a client won a national award for social media marketing.

What he actually did was harder to fit on a business card. He didn’t sell advertising. He worked out what a client was really trying to move, built the creative that would move it, and then held himself to the number.

He gave a lot of that away. He donated his expertise to startups — KloudPages, Worksafe Technologies, Bon Hiver — and served on the board of the Advertising Club of Western Massachusetts. He and John spent years together in startup accelerators. He trained with Jesse Baker at Grit 24 for years, which anyone who trained beside him will tell you was not a casual arrangement.

And when he was living and working in Western Mass, he believed in The Gray House — their mission, their values, their annual spaghetti supper.

THE GRAY HOUSE

James believed in what The Gray House does. It is a small operation in Springfield’s North End doing unglamorous, necessary work, and he showed up for it.

Bringing more meaning to his life is something we can still do. Please consider a donation to keep that work going.