aircraft, which caused some raised eyebrows. He was working on a King Air 200 when the owner asked his mechanic to clarify his work experience. Genteman answered that he had mostly worked on rotorcraft throughout his career. The incredulous owner exclaimed, “You’re one of those helo guys and you’re working on my aircraft??”
“Yes sir,” answered Genteman, “but it’s a lot easier now because there are much fewer moving parts.” The reassured owner laughed and proclaimed, “You’ll do.”
Growing Manager
Yet Genteman didn’t do for long in California’s capitol city. He received news one sad day that his father-in-law in Arizona had been diagnosed with cancer. In what would become a pattern, Genteman firmly put family first. He found work close to his ill family member with the startup Arizona Rotorcraft. “It was an interesting transition, but the good outweighed the bad,” he says with hindsight. Yet to reach the good, Genteman had to climb an unexpected but beneficial learning curve. He and his five fellow mechanics were surprisingly slammed with work in the new shop. “We were tripping over one another trying to get the work done,” he says. The business was owned by a savvy woman and Genteman went to her to complain. “We’ve got to reorganize this shop and do better at prioritizing jobs,” he told the owner. “I went through all the issues and she replied, ‘You know, you’re absolutely right. We do need to do all that.’” Genteman was ecstatic that he won his case with her. But then she said, “You’re it.”
“I went into her office as a mechanic and left it as a maintenance production manager,” he ruefully recalls. “I went from being another peer on the maintenance team to managing my former peers, and that was a difficult transition for me.”
That managerial experience would open new opportunities when an executive back at Aviall, Ron Marrou, asked Genteman if
he could put the now managing
mechanic’s name on his recruiting list for the position of Rolls Royce product line manager. Genteman reluctantly agreed,
not thinking he was really qualified. In fact, he told his current boss Anita Goodwin at Arizona Rotorcraft (named AeroMaritime after aquisition) that he’d agreed to be recruited by Aviall. “She leaned on me for a lot of responsibilities,” says Genteman, “but she encouraged me to pursue the position and put me above the company and her business needs. You don’t run across people in your life often that put your interest above theirs, so I have a ton of respect for her.” When Genteman, to his surprise, was awarded the Aviall job, the knowing Goodwin simply said, “I knew they would pick you. I love you here, but you need to take that job for your next step in your growth.” It was difficult to depart from such a classy superior, but Genteman plunged into the new opportunity that Aviall presented.
It turned out that Genteman’s superiors foresaw his potential more clearly than he saw it himself. He excelled at product line management and after four years felt he could handle even more responsibility. He climbed through the ‘90s and ‘00s decades from product line manager to senior product line manager to senior manager.
Connor
Genteman’s career continued its fast-track trajectory in the beginning of the 21st century. It was also a decade of family growth, as he and Lydia anticipated welcoming their newborn son into their home. The boy would not move in quickly. A pregnancy sonogram revealed the fetal boy had a trisomy 21 genetic defect. Not only would their son enter the world with Down Syndrome, but his young heart had three harmful holes that would require surgery soon after birth. Their medical team during the pregnancy
frequently asked the expecting parents if they considered aborting the pregnancy. “It was something we would never do,” says Genteman. “It became so frequent that I had to ask the medical staff to put in our records to never ask us that again.” Connor Calvin Genteman was born in April 2008 to two loving, scared, nervous and anxious parents. He was delivered early at 37 weeks and the little fighter weighed in at 6 pounds, 9 ounces. “Little did we know the journey that we were about to embark on, and the decisions we were going to have to make,” says Genteman. The infant spent the first two months of that journey in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). “He had a tube down his nose to feed him, oxygen pumped into his nose to help him breathe, and (he was) constantly out of breath due to his blood mixing in his heart through the holes,” recalls Genteman. “Our schedule was all focused on Connor and trying to figure out and make decisions on how to keep him alive.”
One of those decisions was to undertake the
anticipated open-heart surgery to repair those threatening ventricular holes. The initial surgery was a success and smaller surgeries ensued. Then there were ongoing doctor appointments and weekly meetings with therapists and consultants. The stressful situation into which the new parents and infant had been thrown was at times overwhelming. Yet Genteman and his wife raised their heads above their own challenges to see how they could help others in similar situations. While trying to relax at a classic car show, Genteman had an inspiring idea: he and his wife could create a non-profit foundation to host a classic car event to raise money and awareness for families in their community with special-needs members!
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