Rotary 2017-2018 -- New Board, New Year

Walter Campbell was born in Wichita, Kansas, and grew up in Arizona and Texas.   His father played professional football (Chicago, now Arizona Cardinals) and worked in sales.  During WW II,  his mother at age 19 worked as an accounting manager at Boeing, managing some 40 female payroll clerks, all older than herself, some of which were the mothers of her high school girlfriends.  She was so glad the Americans won the war so she could leave Boeing and concentrate on raising 3 sons, even though only one of which, Walter, was especially well-behaved.  She later worked as a primary school office manager in Tulsa.

After Permian HIgh School in Odessa, Texas, the school made infamous via book, movie and TV show as “Friday Night Lights”,  and where he played football and basketball, Walter went east to Harvard College, studied psychology, sociology and economics, threw the javelin for Varsity Track, and graduated (AB ‘67).   He studied sociology in England on a Rotary scholarship and then worked for Merrill Lynch in NYC.  He then went to Harvard Business School, studied finance and graduated (MBA ‘71).   He worked as a management consultant at Cambridge Research Institute and then as an independent consultant in Boston focussing on strategy and finance.   He later joined Isys Corporation,  a small software and financial information company, as co-founder and Managing Director.   Isys was sold to Lotus Corp which was later bought by IBM.   After that, he partly owned and managed several small businesses, the only successful one being City Gardens, Inc., a horticulture company which was sold to Rentokil, a large UK building maintenance company.   He then joined with Forest Properties, Inc., in Cambridge,  and has spent the last 20 years or so investing in real estate, mainly in New England and New York.  He moved to California in 2006, motivated by the arrival of grandson Luke, a future Rotarian who was recently drafted to help with the backpacks project.

Along the way, Walter married and had three children (Jason, entrepreneur, martial arts teacher and musician; Kirsten, financial services executive; and Robin, Broadway dancer, actor and singer).  He has 6 grandchildren, Luke and Connor in Manhattan Beach, Jake in Wichita and Mary in Phoenix, and William and Henry in NYC.