Person(s) of Interest: Richard and Jill Best

Looking Aft

PERSON(S) OF INTEREST From England to the U.S., to the Far East and back to the U.S., members Richard and Jill Best have lived there, done that.

By Past Commodore James L. Ramsey

Richard and Jill Best bring a touch of British charm to every room they enter. She is groomed, poised and polite; he is tall and stately with an undiminished crop of graying hair and a face unwrinkled by age. It isn’t hard to imagine him attired in the uniform of a spit-and-polish British military officer and she on his arm, strolling Hyde Park.

Richard was too young to remember the enemy bombers that rained havoc on his native England in World War II, but he vividly recalls the aftermath. He remembers standing on the steps of St. Paul Cathedral in London as a small boy, looking at the destruction surrounding the famed church and hearing his mother say, “Remember this day. Remember what you see here.” Richard did.

So did his wife, who is a year younger than he. She recalls making a trip to London as a little girl and seeing block after block of emptiness where homes and shops and apartment buildings once stood and families once lived. “Those are bomb sites,” her mother told her. “‘Bomb site’ was a familiar word back then,” she reflects. “There were a lot of them.”

Life in post-war England was fundamental for Richard and Jill. Rationing, which was instituted during the war, finally ended nine years after the conflict was over, which meant there were shortages of essentials like gasoline and tires, even food and clothing, well into the 1950s. Cheltenham in Southwest England where Richard

Jill and Richard Best in Ecuador

was born was not a military target, but privations lingered as a reminder of the struggle that had cost so many so much. As England recovered, young Richard Best’s future took shape. His parents placed a high value on education, largely because it was severely limited for his father, who had been pulled out of school at a young age to work the family clothing business. Free of such constraints, Richard was able to attend boarding school in Oxford. He went on to attain a college degree at the legendary university in the same town.

An important part of Richard’s life at this point was cricket, which he played at the national youth level. It is the thing he misses most about England, although he played for the Windsor (Ontario) Cricket Club. Meanwhile, Jill was growing up in Derbyshire, south of Manchester, also attending boarding school before studying a year at the Sorbonne in Paris. She graduated from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Degree in hand, Richard migrated to Chapel-enle-Frith, where he signed on as a trainee at Ferodo, an international manufacturer of friction materials (read: automotive brake linings). Shortly afterward, at a pub, he met Jill Pochin, who five years later became his wife of nearly 50 years. “People smile when I say we met in a pub,” notes Jill. “But back then, we didn’t have dance halls or gathering places where young people could congregate. The pub was our social center.”

After attending business school and working at Ferodo for several years, Richard looked for new opportunities and moved on. He joined GKN, based then in Birmingham, whose main business was automotive driveline parts, with special expertise in constant-velocity (C-V) joints, a vital component of front-wheel-drive cars. The company wanted to determine if there was a market for their products with U.S. carmakers and offered Richard the opportunity to find out. The newly married couple talked it over and decided they didn’t want to one day be sitting in a pub somewhere in England, wondering why they had passed up the opportunity for adventure. In 1973 Richard Best headed for Detroit on a two-year assignment. Jill followed two months later. The timing couldn’t have been better. The first Arab oil embargo forced U.S. automakers to lighten and downsize their vehicles, which in turn led to front-wheel drive. GM, Ford and Chrysler were all planning the change, but had little knowledge of C-V technology because they had traditionally built rear-wheel drive vehicles. Before long, Richard had willing customers at Ford and Chrysler. “I think my clients were amused by the sound of my voice, so they would return my calls,” he says with a smile. A two-year assignment turned into a 34-year career with GKN. Then, in 1997, GKN offered another challenge: How would the Bests like to move to Singapore, where he would develop GKN’s businesses in the Asia Pacific Region? With their two sons Tom and Mark away at work and college, he and Jill again decided on adventure. They spent five years in Singapore, and during that time Best successfully grew the company’s interests in China, Korea, Japan, India, Taiwan, Thailand, Australia, even South Africa.

The job had its perks, too. Living in Singapore, the Bests got to meet all kinds of new and interesting people from everywhere in the world. They also traveled extensively in the region, shunning swank hotels and touristy venues for undiscovered places where they could get to know the real people of whatever country they were in.

Richard Best in Spain

Then, in 2002, the call came again: to return to the U.S. as Managing Director of the operation Best had started many years ago.

Before the Bests moved to Singapore, U.S. immigration laws had changed, making it possible to hold dual British and U.S. citizenships. Work visas were becoming more difficult to obtain, and so, having lived and raised a family in Michigan, they decided to take U.S. citizenship, thus becoming dual citizens.

The Bests will never forget the day they became citizens of this country. It was a snowy, wet, dismal day in February at the Federal Building in downtown Detroit. There were 66 immigrants from countries all over the world crowded into the room. The judge was late. When he arrived, he veered from the traditional swearing-in procedure, saying “Each one of you has a story about what brought you here, and I would like them to be shared. You will probably never see each other again, but I want you to remember this important day together.” The court clerk proceeded to read a short synopsis of each candidate’s life as they received their citizenship papers. Each story was shared, many in very broken English, until it came down to the last person, an 86-year-old woman from Cuba, who rose and declared quietly through floods of tears, “I have been waiting for this day my entire life.” Those words still send a wave of emotion through Richard Best, in part because being an American citizen means something different to those who were not born here than it does to us who were. We tend to take it for granted. They do not. Being an American does matter. Being in America does make a difference. Ask Richard and Jill Best. Becoming Americans was one of the most important days of their lives.

After retiring from GKN in 2006, Richard embarked on an 11-year career with the Vistage Organization where he served as an executive coach and mentor to CEOs of Michigan businesses. Meanwhile, Jill did not return to her career in real estate, which she left when they moved to Singapore. Over there she had been involved with the Singapore Cultural Museum, and on returning to Michigan Jill began her deep involvement as a docent at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

They both share an interest in motor racing going back to their childhoods. Jill remembers as a young girl being taken by her father, who was Competitions Manager of Ferodo, to races at LeMans, Silverstone, Monza and various Formula One events. “Sit on the pit counter and do not move!” she was told. Richard recalls interviewing Jim Clark, who went on to become twotime World Champion, for his university newspaper. Richard and Jill, who are Social members of the Club, are avid boaters in their trusty 30-year-old Tiara, Victory, named after the flagship in one of the most important naval battles in British history. Unfortunately, their favorite vacation -- cruising the North Channel -- was cancelled this year because of the U.S./Canada border closing. Hopefully, next year that will change.

Jill Best in Central Park, New York City