Don’t Look Behind You

sea in Alaska.
    In the off-season, he spent time in the Seattle area. Bob was thirty-two before he married for the first time. He was certainly as attracted to women as they were to him—at first. But for some reason, most of his romantic relationships ended suddenly and permanently.
    Even her best friends don’t know exactly where Bob Hansen met Joann Cooper Morrison. But they began to date in the midfifties.
    Bob seemed to be a good catch for a divorced woman with a small son. He was definitely single, he was tall andgood-looking, and he obviously made a good living. He wasn’t the most sentimental guy in the world, however. His view of women resembled attitudes held by men generations earlier. He saw them as less intelligent than men and felt their place was to be obedient and subservient.
    At some point, Bob proposed to Joann and they got married. Just
when
their wedding took place is a matter of conjecture. Some legal papers set the date as April 13, 1956. It’s more likely that they married on April 13,
1957.
Patricia Martin recalls that Joann was pregnant when they got married; Joann gave birth to her oldest child with Bob, Nick, in November 1957.
    Whatever their legal status was, in the beginning the Hansens lived in one of the first homes Bob owned—in Des Moines, Washington. It was a small white house, located behind a veterinarian’s clinic, and it had a bird’s-eye view of Puget Sound three blocks west.
    Joann spent fishing seasons alone with Bobby and the baby, Nick. Bob was still spending months away, fishing and crabbing in Alaska. But when Joann became pregnant with their second child—Ty—Bob realized that his Alaskan adventures were coming to a close. Despite its hardships, he had enjoyed the challenge of fighting the angry, freezing sea that gave up salmon, crab, and bottom fish only grudgingly.
    Since his days on the Stump Farm, Bob Hansen had been interested in construction, and he began as an apprentice carpenter in the South King County area.
    He had native intelligence and he was as strong as an ox. He set his sights on a career as a contractor. Gradually,he learned how to build almost anything, and he soon had all the good jobs he wanted with construction firms.
    Bob had planned to build his family another—larger—home in the near future.
    And he did.
    He also began to look for cheap houses to buy where he could leverage his investments with low down payments and long-term contracts. As soon as he bought property, he found renters, and their monthly payments took care of his mortgages.
    Former tenants recall that he wasn’t an understanding landlord—to say the least. If they failed to pay the rent on time and were even a few days late, he banged on their front doors and told them to get out—at once. He wasn’t concerned with thirty-day notices, or interested in their excuses. He was such a large man, and he intimidated most people.
    Surprisingly, Bob Hansen couldn’t understand why his evacuated renters left his apartments and houses in bad shape. His friends who were landlords—and who followed rental statutes dictated by the state—never had that much damage. Bob, along with his sons Nick and Ty, spent a lot of time painting and repairing empty rentals.
    It was during this period in the sixties that Hansen was approached by a man named Milosevich who wanted to hire him to build a spec house. Bob agreed to the project, but he said he would need a helper.
    That was when the elder Milosevich suggested that his son, Marv, who was about twenty, would make a good assistant in building the spec house.
    “Bob Hansen was a nonunion employer,” Marv remembers, “and I got paid a dollar fifty an hour when the union rate was three fifty, but he was a good teacher, and I learned everything there was to know about the construction business. My wife, LaVonne, would ask me why I kept working for Bob when I could get so much more money from a union contractor, and I explained that nobody else could train me to be a contractor myself the way Bob did. I was getting an education, even while I was losing money.”
    LaVonne agrees, after almost fifty years of marriage, that Marv’s success in building and real estate started with his working with Bob Hansen. That is not to say, however, that LaVonne liked Bob. She tolerated him because Marv liked him.
    Privately, LaVonne felt, “He was the poorest excuse for a human being I ever knew!”
    Bob Hansen was a fishing and hunting fanatic.