HE WOULD NOT REHEARSE

Not once. Not for us, not for anyone.

So, we started slipping random slides into his deck and then sitting in the back of the room to watch. Which is how we came to see James look up mid-sentence at a photograph of a beaver in the middle of his Effective Google Ads workshop, take it in for exactly one beat, and fold it into the point he was already making. The room never knew. We knew. He never asked us to stop.

That is what makes holding him gently the easy part. The memories that arrive first are not the sad ones. They are the ones where somebody is laughing, usually at him, usually with his full cooperation.

We miss him every day. But the missing is not what carries us. What carries us is the difference he made, to this company, to clients, to people who met him once.

A lot of the best of it was never ours to begin with. It came from you: notes, calls, stories we had never heard, arriving on no occasion and landing on exactly the right day more often than chance allows. We are a small company inside a small family, and those two things have never sat far apart. The people we work with knew James. Clients still ask after him. We noticed who carried us, and it mattered.

So here he is, as we keep him.

BEFORE THE MARKETING, THERE WERE CARS

James went to the Porter and Chester Institute and then into BMW North America’s STEP program in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey. In short order he held the highest level of technical training BMW, Porsche and Mercedes-Benz offer, and he worked for all three around New York and Boston. Mercedes put him on the Maybach line.

Then he worked out something important, which he would happily tell you himself: he liked driving these cars considerably more than he liked working on them. So he stopped working on them. Several BMWs and a Porsche 911 later, nobody could argue the logic.

The BMW graduation is one of the good days. A building so clean and so white it did not look like anywhere anyone had ever touched an engine, families standing around bursting with pride, and James crossing the floor naming every expensive car in the room from a distance, like the back of his hand. He had put everything into that program. It showed, he knew it, and he was happy.

THE 24TH FLOOR

James joined GCAi in 2013, and his appearance on the 24th floor was timed just right.

He changed this company. He propelled us into digital while a good part of the industry was still deciding whether digital was a phase — he had been working in social media back when social media was MySpace, and he was permanently the person in the room who had already tried the thing everyone else was debating.

He was certified on Google Ads, Meta and LinkedIn, and built campaigns on all three that worked embarrassingly well. He studied his art through online coursework at Harvard and Cornell and then made the rest of us keep up: copy written for each platform on its own terms, video cut to match how people actually watch. He rose to Vice President and Director of Digital Marketing, and handled clients in transportation, grocery, financial services and automotive.

What he actually did is harder to fit on a business card. He did not 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.

MAKING IT MAKE SENSE

Explaining campaign strategy to a client is, for most clients, roughly as interesting as reading the Dead Sea Scrolls. James made it understandable and — this is the part we still cannot teach anyone — he made it fun. Humor and empathy, in a discipline that otherwise runs on acronyms.

So people asked him to speak and kept asking. He presented to MassChallenge startups from around the world. He sat on a panel at Harvard on social media marketing in higher education. He turned up at Digital Innovation conferences more than once. He mentored for MassChallenge and Valley Venture Mentors, gave his expertise away to startups and volunteered for the Advertising Club of Western Massachusetts. He trained with Jesse Baker at 180 Fitness for years, which anyone who trained beside him will tell you was not a casual arrangement.

THE GUY WITH THE PINK PAPER

The work is measurable by design, which is exactly what makes it tempting to stop there. It is also only scratching the surface.

When he left for Phoenix, we walked his Triumph through the snow and up onto a trailer so it could follow him west. Later came Malibu, where he lived with Quinn, and then Beverly Hills. He rode the canyon roads outside Los Angeles, the Santa Monica mountains, on his two Triumph Thruxtons — which tells you two true things about him at the same time: real skill, and a real love of speed. He had taken racing courses at the Skip Barber school at Lime Rock Park, so the skill was not an accident. The Motoring Club was his coworking spot.

And every good coffee shop in the area knew him as the guy with the pink paper. The Financial Times, on the table, most mornings.

That was the pattern everywhere he lived. Coffee and breakfast places from East Longmeadow to Hardwick, Vermont, to Phoenix, to Los Angeles knew James as a regular — a quiet, friendly presence at roughly the same hour. What came back to us from those places afterward has been amazing. He had a whole set of people who knew him by his order, and they wanted us to know they had liked him.

JAMES AND QUINN

This should have been first, so here it is: his relationship with his sister is the thing that really defined him.

Quinn introduced James to Malibu. This is a fact he was never once going to say out loud, because big brothers do not concede that their little sisters introduced them to anything. He simply began behaving as though he had found the whole place himself — Point Dume, Topanga, the canyons, groceries at Vintage, breakfast at The Old Place, Christmas with Santa down at the Malibu Pier. He also established, through what he considered rigorous and repeated testing, that sushi at Nobu tastes appreciably better when his father picks up the check. Within a year he was giving other people directions.

He was also, improbably, the favorite of her cats. Dot bit everyone she ever met and made exactly one exception, and the exception was James. Crooked Normie, a rescue, took to him early. And OJ, a recluse on principle who did not come out for visitors, came out for James. We are not going to claim the man had a gift. We are only reporting what three cats independently concluded.

They lived together in Malibu until James got a place of his own, a studio apartment in Beverly Hills. He had it to himself for one day. Then the fires came, and Quinn moved in — with a boyfriend, a German Shepherd, and Dot, Crooked Normie and OJ. Into a studio. Nobody debated it for a second, and as far as we know nobody complained either.

That was simply the answer, and it stayed the answer: whatever the hour, they were there for each other, right to the end.

Days after he died, the Financial Times — his paper, the pink one on the table every morning — ran a story quoting Quinn on her work.

He would have been blown away. He would also have made sure everyone in the coffee shop knew.

READ INTO THE RECORD

On January 7, 2025, in downtown Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors took a moment for him. Supervisor Lindsey P. Horvath — whose Third District takes in Malibu and the canyon roads he rode — read this into the record:

James brought light and laughter to all who knew him, whether leading digital marketing efforts in the family business, mentoring through MassChallenge, or riding the canyons of the Santa Monica mountains on his beloved motorcycles. James lived his life with passion and purpose.

— Supervisor Lindsey P. Horvath, Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, January 7, 2025

“James brought light and laughter to all who knew him,” was entered into the public record of Los Angeles County. That is the whole span of him in a single sentence — and it will live in the record forever.

THE GRAY HOUSE

James believed in The Gray House. It is a small nonprofit in Springfield’s North End that helps neighbors through a hard stretch — groceries from The Market, clothing, adult education classes, and a Kids’ Club for the children of the neighborhood. None of that is glamorous work. All of it is the difference between a bad month and a much worse one. While he was living and working in Western Massachusetts, James showed up for it, annual spaghetti supper included.

Bringing more meaning to his life is one of the few things we can still do for him. If you have been looking for somewhere to make it, please consider a donation to grayhouse.org.