It's a small office by any standard, but especially for the president of a multi-million dollar supplier-manufacturer to the RV industry. There's room for a desk, a rear computer desk unit, a couple of chairs for guests and a small round conference table that might seat six people if you squeezed them together real close. The desk has a few mementoes, one small, neatly stacked pile of papers and a sign in the form of a plaque that reads, "Let's Think of a Few Reasons Why it Can be Done." Many years ago, my good friend and former colleague John Stanton ­ probably the best salesman I'll ever know -- told me, and I believe its true, if you look closely around an office you can tell a lot about a person; you'll find out what their interests are without having to ask and often gain instantaneous rapport by mentioning for example some activity such as horseback riding, fishing or golf that you saw in one or more of the pictures on the wall that you may coincidentally know something about too.

In this executive's office you could quickly deduct that he's a family man, because there are about a dozen framed pictures of his wife Pam, who easily could have been a model had she not chosen to become a wife and mother.

And then in almost startling contrast to the apparent order everywhere else in the office, there above the computer on the backsplash of the unit is a collage of hundreds of 3 by 5, 4 by 6 and various other sizes of photographs randomly placed at various times that might well be a documentary of his life with family members and industry friends over the past 12 or more years.

But it was the wall above the conference table that fascinated me most. There are two large framed pictures, one, a copy of the front page of the Newark Evening News from January 31, 1957 and the other, the fading color pages of an article from an issue of RV News, a story I had written on my first visit to Broomfield, Colorado in 1989.

Frankly, I am humbled to have one of my articles included on this "wall of honor." You see, on closer inspection of the newspaper, you could see a man, a woman, a little girl and a young boy in a photo and a story about the family having just arrived in the United States after a dangerous and harrowing escape from communist Hungary. The boy in the photo was 10-year-old Tommy Faludy with his father Emery, mother Martha and younger sister Erika.

And the man featured in the 1989 RV News story was Tom Faludy, newly appointed president of Carefree of Colorado, and the title of the article was "Carefree of Colorado Launches a Come Back Plan."

Now the reason why a comeback plan was necessary is because in 1989 Carefree was in trouble. Their Carefree Deluxe awning, the flagship of the company's product line had faced serious engineering and quality problems a few years earlier. While that problem had been fixed, lingering doubt about Carefree's products was affecting overall sales. By then Carefree had already introduced the Spirit awning; however, many dealers and distributors were reluctant to come back to Carefree. And to make matters worse the awning business, which had up until then been almost exclusively an aftermarket enhancement, was experi  encing for the first time "packaging" ­ a euphemism for RV manufacturers installing awnings, air conditioners and other products at the factory and taking that business out of the aftermarket.