Robert Dietz and Eric Knorr

[00:03] ROBERT DIETZ: Good afternoon. My name is Bob. I am going to be 78 years old in December, but my odometer has been over about six times. I am here at the Andover Public Library on the 22nd of August, 2024. I'm here for my one step conversation with my partner Eric.

[00:24] ERIC KNORR: Okay. And. Hi, Bob. Even though I go by my name is Eric, my name is nickname is Rick, Rick Nor. And so most people call me Rick except my mother. When she was upset with me, she called me Eric. And the date is the 22nd of August. I'm at the Andover Public Library. I'm here with my one step conversation partner, Bob.

[00:55] ROBERT DIETZ: Okay. Eric's bio says almost too many. I remarried 48 years ago. We have lost four of our eight children. Gee whiz, gosh. All of mine are still living, thank God. One career lasted over 30 years, another 10 graduated from college, then served four years on active duty in the United States Air Force. Volunteered in many capacities during those 30 years. Great. Interesting.

[01:24] ERIC KNORR: Okay, this is Bob's bio. Grew up in a family funeral home back when funeral directors did ambulance service and started building ambulances for my father's funeral homes in Kansas. And it became a lifetime business and fire apparatus rescue mesh rescue and EMS vehicle builder as well for over 50 years. Quite a while. Grew pretty fast when I started building ambulances for my father's five funeral homes and ambulance services. And that led to later building fire and rescue apparatus, police cars and funeral cars and limos. Over 5,200 employee owners. So it must have been an esop.

[02:04] ROBERT DIETZ: Yes.

[02:05] ERIC KNORR: So this I find really interesting because I thought thinking back, a company in Hutchinson started out as Collins.

[02:17] ROBERT DIETZ: Yes. He was an assembly God preacher. Lost that position and ended up building buses and ambulances.

[02:22] ERIC KNORR: Okay. I didn't.

[02:23] ROBERT DIETZ: My competitor, but a friend.

[02:24] ERIC KNORR: Ah, I didn't. Okay, that's good to know. Good to know. Well, Collins Industries, I think is a name now that comes to mind.

[02:32] ROBERT DIETZ: Yes.

[02:33] ERIC KNORR: And you, you were doing the same thing.

[02:35] ROBERT DIETZ: Yes.

[02:36] ERIC KNORR: So how did. Well, I think of funeral homes. I think of furniture.

[02:40] ROBERT DIETZ: Yes.

[02:41] ERIC KNORR: You all sell furniture too?

[02:42] ROBERT DIETZ: We started out in 1888 in the furniture and undertaking business. You made furniture and you made coffins. And you usually had a showroom window you could curtain off and use as a funeral parlor when they didn't have a church or a large home to have their funerals at home in those days. And then you had a covered wagon to deliver the furniture and that could pick up remains. And you had a funeral coach. And then the doctors would say, well, you've Got a wagon with a covert and dad's buckboard makes a terrible ambulance. Go pick up this person, take them to the hospital. And that's how we got stuck with the ambulance business.

[03:15] ERIC KNORR: Interesting.

[03:16] ROBERT DIETZ: For over 100 years.

[03:18] ERIC KNORR: Interesting. My firm in one of my careers, a 30 year career, was with an insurance agency here in Wichita. Delaney, Johnston and priest started in 1902. And when I retired in 1999, you know, we were right at 100 years old. Subsequent to that, the folks that followed me eventually sold it to a regional broker. It no longer exists in that form. But it was really a challenge to keep the business going, to perpetuate itself.

[03:51] ROBERT DIETZ: I can imagine.

[03:52] ERIC KNORR: Interesting that you all could do that with your company.

[03:56] ROBERT DIETZ: I was very fortunate. I, as I say, grew up in a family business. I had a father who was the best friend I could ever have and wisely told me when I was in second grade to hold out my right hand. And I did. And he said, now you see that hand of yours, it can fit every tool in this funeral home. See to it you learn how to use them. And then he later told me, he says, I don't care what you want to be, you can be anything you want in life. Just promise me one thing. If you want to be a ditch digger, be the best darn ditch digger there ever was. And that together with his dictum for business, if you give service, real service, the bottom line takes care of itself. And it has blessed me a thousand times over.

[04:35] ERIC KNORR: Yeah, so what you've just said really resonates with me because that philosophy was very similar. I always felt the time that I was spending in the business, if I did a good job, took care of my accounts, gave them the service they needed and required the bottom line to take care of itself.

[04:55] ROBERT DIETZ: It always does.

[04:56] ERIC KNORR: Thirty years later it had. Now I look back because I have insurance needs today and the service isn't what it was when I was involved. And I don't believe I felt on a still feel today, could I have survived giving the kind of service that folks give today. But maybe the kids and young people don't care about service, you know.

[05:21] ROBERT DIETZ: Well, a friend and I saw the need. He lived in Pennsylvania and lived at York, Pennsylvania and was involved in volunteer fire company up there. And he was in the insurance business. And we saw the need to build a company just to insure volunteer fire departments and EMS organizations. And together he and I formed along with some good other people, Volunteer Firemen's Insurance Services, VFIs. And now it's the largest volunteer Fire and Fire Service Insurance company around. And Art Gladfelter was a prince among men and was on our board of my nonprofit foundation for years before his passing. And he gave us a marvelous gift for that foundation and we use that foundation today and the income from the factories that we gave to our employees which they still pay rent on to refurbish and remanufacture emergency vehicles for small towns that haven't got $2 million for new aerial. But with no aerial you're not getting a Walmart or a grocery store because you can't get fire insurance and the town dies. Our job is to try now to run this little 197 man foundation and build a new fire apparatus refurbishing plant here and recycle these trucks that we built years ago that are rustless. I never would build steel trucks because they rust out in 20 years. And ours can be recycled and put in a smaller community and get their fire insurance rating down to the point where they can, they can keep that town growing. And that's our mission now. Same way with building their EMS and the rest. It all ties together.

[06:56] ERIC KNORR: And so would you say you're retired.

[06:59] ROBERT DIETZ: With a haha right behind it. I went from running a 5200 man company which basically ran itself because I always start anytime I start a new business, I start training my replacement the next day. And then you have a manager who can take that over and you can go to the next one. Art Gladfelter was the same way. My other partners were the same way. And I confess, I'm a polymath. I'm interested in everything. And if I see a need for something, I assume that other people have that need and if nobody else will do it, I'll go build it. And it's been fun. It's been great fun. But now I don't have to travel all over the world trying to export our trucks and all that kind of thing and worry about all that stuff. Now I'm just dealing with 197 person foundation and working for a massive salary of a dollar a year. Yes, I got the same salary when I founded Butler County EMS and later Sedgwick County EMS here in this county and the next one. But the newspaper reported I was making $25,000 a year back in 74 and there are people in this town still think I cut a fat hog on that deal. And I didn't make a dime. I got the dollar a year but I never actually got the check.

[08:18] ERIC KNORR: Oh yeah, it's Really, I mean, it is interesting. The thing I loved in a sense about the insurance business was the number of different customers you had, from a manufacturing business to an accountant to an attorney to a doctor and a malpractice problems to people and their homeowners and automobile insurance. And I can recall my dad had been in the business before me, and I inherited, when he retired, some of his customers and my wife getting a call at midnight or one in the morning when someone returned home to find their house burglarized, you know, and they were in a panic. Meanwhile, I was in a car driving kids back from Colorado on a ski trip. You know, there wasn't much I could do for them at that time. And I'm sure he called my dad and said, I can't get ahold of your boy, but you do meet a lot of interesting people.

[09:16] ROBERT DIETZ: Well, even in the process of insuring fire departments, particularly volunteer organizations, we just became like a automobile company. We had our own finance program, our own municipal lease program. We had our own insurance in house insurance, F and I department in all of our dealerships. And the bane of our existence was the insurance adjuster. And he would come in and appraise a fire truck that had a building fall on it or something and say, oh, well, that's a nice old fire truck. You bought it 15 years ago and it's only got 9,000 miles on it, but it's 15 years old. And I know you gave a million one for it, but here's $50,000. Have a nice day. And Art and I would just throw our hands up in the air because we knew that truck was worth 350 grand because it had stainless steel body and it was fine, it could recircle. And an aluminum aerial didn't have to be painted. We recycle it and use it. And so we formed 10 years ago a crazy little thing called apparatus appraisers. And we go around with off duty firefighters and paramedics and police officers, and they take so many counties and visit every fire, police, EMS and any of their big specialty vehicles, even funeral homes, hearses and limousines. Terribly expensive. And when one of them gets clobbered, the insurance adjuster doesn't know Hearst from station wagon. So we go in and say, now look, we've seen this truck or vehicle every two years for the past six to eight, 10 years. We've recorded the mileage, we got the original specs, therefore we can prove that this vehicle is worth X dollars. And in the first 10 years, we got sued by 10 major insurance companies. The companies that insured those industries never quibbled. They accepted our figures. We won every case. So now we're taking it national and we accidentally became the Carfax of the industry. And we're catching some of these brokers and dealers that deal in used municipal vehicles rolling odometers back. Because the feds don't enforce odometer laws on anything over 10,000 GVWR because they assume it's a big truck, it's got a million miles on it. A fire truck doesn't get but tens of thousands of miles at the most in a big city. So we've accidentally become a carfax.

[11:37] ERIC KNORR: Interesting, interesting. If I change this up in just a second. You mentioned that you were flying around in Florida and were you visiting? I've had for some reason, prisons in my mind.

[11:49] ROBERT DIETZ: I visit prisons all over the world for Prison Fellowship and other organizations because we've hired our employees for our factories out of the prisons. When I started building ambulances in El dorado back in 63, built the first three ambulances in my senior year in high school. One for my dad, one for the funeral director over here at Augusta, and one for his cousin out at Dodge City. And we had nine mortars because in the funeral industry, like many industries, we have our own grapevine called the casket salesman. And everybody knew about this because these guys were showing pictures of this converted Suburban that was everything that a high top Cadillac was, except half the money. And when you're charging five and ten dollars for an ambulance call, that's appreciated, you know, by the user. So we couldn't get. I was offering four 10 hour days so that farmers could work and then have three days a week to farm and we'd just shut down wearing wheat harvest. But I still couldn't get people fast enough. So I went to the closest prison, which at that time was Hutch, and said, I'll set up a training program and I'll teach these guys to weld stainless and weld aluminum and do this and do that and build cabinets for us and so forth. Pay a minimum wage, the state can have part of that for room and board and security. But they'll have money in their pocket when they get out. If they don't go to where my plant is, they'll have skills and they can get a job and they got money so they don't starve. The reason most people go back to prison is called a friction fire between their tailbone and their wallet. When it gets intolerable, they go out and do something stupid to make money quickly. We train them, we put them to work. And the difficult part, you can get people out of prison with a good job. The difficult part is getting the prison out of him. And that's a challenge. But fortunately, there was a little tiny instruction book that was written 10 years before Christ or 1000 years before Christ was born. And nobody read the instructions back then, they don't read them now. But if people will read that little 35 page instruction book, one chapter every day for 31 days of the month. And there's 31 chapters. It says right in the first chapter, wisdom is the most important thing any man can find. And if he finds wisdom and does what wisdom says, he will live in safety and free from fear of all harm. That don't sound like going back to prison. A potato chip manufacturer in Nottingham, pennsyiavan, taught me that, and I applied it. And out of over 6,000 people we hired, I don't even know how I made over 6,000. None went back to prison except those that quit us and didn't stay on the program. Not one. And you just don't hear recidivism statistics like that anywhere in the world. And I had partners who fully agreed with me at each plant.

[14:40] ERIC KNORR: So how do we apply that in your opinion in today? Because I think the problems we have today, finding folks to work. I spent 10 years in the Pizza Hut business outside of Kansas and trying to get kids to come to work, teach them, train them. We had some of the same issues in the insurance business, but not like in the pizza business too.

[15:05] ROBERT DIETZ: Right. We don't teach work anymore. Kids sit around and use their thumbs and they don't know how to work. My father told me when I was in second grade, I bought an electric lawnmower. You can't cut your foot off with it. Get out there and mow that funeral home yard, which was a quarter of a city block. I had to drag a cord around with me, you know, in the 50s, but I could do it. And he told me, I don't care what you do, but I would like to win the garden club award every year for the best business in town. If you put in nice flowers and this wins, half the winnings go to you, the other half to your college fund. The other half goes to a charity of your choice. So I won every year.

[15:50] ERIC KNORR: And what town was that?

[15:52] ROBERT DIETZ: Well, we were. We were stationed at erie, Kansas, from 51 to 56. And then my uncle, Clarence Wilkie in El Dorado found out that his Son Dick was not going to come back and take over those funeral homes. Instead, he was going to stay in the Methodist ministry. He wound up pastor First United Methodist down here in Wichita. And I came along, the next generation. And dad was told, you're moving back to el Dorado in 56. And at Christmas time in 56, we moved back to El Dorado and dad took over the chain from there. And that's where I was born. And we returned there. I had lived upstairs over that funeral home in El Dorado from the time I was a baby, an infant, and was back home. Though I didn't remember that much of that first four years of my life. I had some good memories, but Scatty, you know, scarce at 4 years old, but came home. And every time I go somewhere else and build another home or whatever, I still wind up back here in El Dorado or Wichita. But I keep homes at least two cities, they always have.

[16:56] ERIC KNORR: And so, being from El Dorado, did you ever know the name Lively?

[17:00] ROBERT DIETZ: Of course. The Lively family was one of the most distinguished and best athletes in town, along with the Garlands and the Rice family. And they were black families, the finest folks in town you could imagine, like the Tomlins and the rest. And our funeral home would accept black cases. The other one refused them. And I personally loved working with those people because they took care of the families and the best businesses in town. And I didn't care if that funeral was four hours long. When you go to a black funeral, it's usually two hours, three or four preachers, church choirs, everything else. But at the end of that funeral, you know who died. And it's a celebration of their life and their home going, and the other guy. There's a funny law in El Dorado, they passed in the horse drawn days. You cannot build a new structure for a slaughterhouse or a funeral home in El Dorado, Kansas. And it's still on the books.

[17:57] ERIC KNORR: No kidding.

[17:58] ROBERT DIETZ: So the two funeral homes wound up back to back across the alley downtown in the commercial fire zone, right across from the courthouse. And we would talk over the back fence, you know. And Mr. Kirby's embalmer, Lyle Schmaus, was a doctor's kid from Iola, Kansas, redheaded kid. And he was teasing me one day when I'm in high school and my ambulance partner, Dale Van Campen, is already a practicing embalmer. And he'd driven ambulance in Dallas during mortuary school. And he's teasing me about these black funerals. And he was going on about the two hour Funerals. And I said, well, at least you know who died at the end of the service. And he said, well, you just must like those pretty black girls. I said, I like girls. I don't care what color they are. And he teased me a little more. And finally I said, listen, what you don't understand is at the end of One of those two hour funerals, there is Mrs. Lively's potato salad, Mrs. Garland's chicken and Rosa Epperson's chocolate cake. And I'll sit through a five hour funeral for that, thank you very much. And that shut them up.

[19:02] ERIC KNORR: I competed just a little bit in Wichita High School east and against the Lively's. But I also was in business with a guy, Dave Calloway, for a while. Billowy.

[19:14] ROBERT DIETZ: Bill Calloway was my insurance agent when I started in business.

[19:17] ERIC KNORR: Okay, so that's kind of my prince.

[19:20] ROBERT DIETZ: Of a guy, too.

[19:22] ERIC KNORR: Yes. And Dave died young, but yeah. And I think of his wife, whom I knew very briefly, and I think she was involved with the hospital right over there in El Dorado.

[19:38] ROBERT DIETZ: And that's still an independent hospital and a darn good one that is named for the mother of the man who started the abstract company in Butler County. Butler County Abstract. His mother died on a boat coming over here from Europe. He was an immigrant and they buried her at sea just off the coast of America because she sickened and died on the. On the boat. And he became successful in the real estate industry as a. What do they call those people? Title company, you know.

[20:11] ERIC KNORR: Okay.

[20:12] ROBERT DIETZ: And abstract company. And made a lot of money in the oil field, in the oil boom over there. And he built this hospital in memory of his mother. And that is why it's called Susan B. Allen Hospital. When he passed away back in the 30s, he wanted cremation. And that wasn't done anywhere in this part of this country. He had taken clear Kansas City and the ashes were brought back and kept at the funeral home on the mantel inside a Chinese urn that had been taken in a funeral account in the 30s. Uncle Clarence had taken in. And we kept it there for several years until someone agreed to take it offshore and drop it at the approximate coordinates of where she was buried at sea. And they did that ultimately for him. And that happened all before I was born. But Uncle Clarence and Dick Wilkie would tell those stories often. Dick's still living.

[21:04] ERIC KNORR: Okay.

[21:05] ROBERT DIETZ: He's written a wonderful book called Everybody Ought to Grow up in a Funeral Home. But he won't let me publish it or add my chapters and publish it until he dies. He says, there's things I'm telling in there I can't tell and still live as a Methodist minister. He's a great guy. He's been my cousin, and he changed my diapers when I was a kid, and so did his sister. Just great people.

[21:26] ERIC KNORR: Yeah. I think back to these stories as I think I told Karen earlier. You know, we can think back 60, 70 years of things that have happened. And I don't know what's happened to our country here. Let's say in the last 20, 30 years that I hate to say things have gone downhill. My goal in life was always very simple, and I thought it was. Had people tell, oh, that's too simple. All I want to do is leave the earth a better place than when I was born. And I think I'm going to be able to see that happening. Eric, I think you can keep going.

[22:06] ROBERT DIETZ: I really think you can leave the world better than you found it. John Kennedy said, and he was so right. I mean, his death impacted you and I tremendously. I mean, the world changed the day he died. I was at a debate tournament, D'Alberine High School. And when that came over the PA, my world changed from that day forward. And people say how terrible things are politically right now. It's just like it was before the Civil War. We have virtual assault between both parties and physical assault on the halls of Congress. We have a situation just as bad as when Lyndon Johnson said, I'm not running again at the last minute, and allowed Richard Nixon to get the presidency. And we had the Vietnam War. That was terrible. It was going on at that time. We had all these deaths overseas from that. We had civil rights problems and people marching in the street. And I was down with an old ambulance in Alabama transferring people that got clubbed at Selma into the hospitals in major cities. Because if a black ambulance took them in there, that black ambulance couldn't get in the parking lot of that major medical center. So they'd take them out to cemetery tents we set up outside of those towns. Doctors from New York would triage them and patch them together. We'd put them in the white ambulances that came down from Kansas and Iowa and so forth. Dick Dunsford's son had one down there, a 52 Packard. I had a 53 Cadillac down there. And we'd load them up with our tenant and head for the major medical center. And coming in that way we could get in. And those folks from New York or whatever, they wouldn't turn them away because they didn't know what they had. They just saw a white ambulance showing up with a patient, and it worked. So I got worked over and got my car destroyed and called my dad from the closest funeral home. And he says, where's the bus station? And told me. He says, fine. He's sending another used car that we weren't going. We aren't going to trade off. I'll send it to you, you use it. Put my driver on the bus and send him home. And I was back doing the same thing a week later. I wear those cars pretty proudly. But, you know, with. No matter how bad it was, if we learn from history, we are not doomed to repeat it, and we are going to survive. Our constitution will survive, and our people will eventually wake up to the fact that sitting on your rear punching something with your thumbs does not educate you. And they will learn that the use of these hands and the use of that brain is the only thing that's going to change the world. It is not sitting around playing video games. It's not sitting around finding new forms to relax. Rocking chairs. Kill people.

[24:55] ERIC KNORR: Yeah, we agree.

[24:57] ROBERT DIETZ: Amen.

[24:57] ERIC KNORR: We agree.

[24:58] ROBERT DIETZ: And we saw that. We saw that in the funeral home. My dad would say, see that guy there? He just retired from the oil field, worked hard all his life, or retired from beach. You watch, he's going to sit on that porch for two years and we're going to bury him within three. We did. The guys who stayed active, the women who stayed active, they're hale and Hardy at 90. And I took from that. And he, of course, also told me, son, there is no retirement in the Bible anywhere. And he's right. If you stay active. He did. He was hail and hearty until his 90th year. And he would have lived 10 years longer if he hadn't had malaria in Burma, North China. As a Navy medic living with the Kachin tribe, my mother didn't hear from him for two years. He was Seabee but they wanted Navy medics, while Bill Donovan, who set up the oss, wanted Navy medics because they could do minor surgery and stuff on a. On a boat that wasn't big enough to have a doctor. They're out there by themselves. And most of them were former funeral directors who knew how to keep their mouth shut. And my mother didn't know where he was.

[26:06] ERIC KNORR: And when was that?

[26:08] ROBERT DIETZ: That was in World War II.

[26:09] ERIC KNORR: World War II, we were.

[26:11] ROBERT DIETZ: He was 500 miles the wrong side of the Japanese lines. And the oss, which is called the CIA today, was running an insurgency operation against the Japanese who were in the valley. So they were living up in the mountains with various tribes. He was with the Kachins, who were wonderful people and they loved him and they really appreciated him. And when he got malaria, they put him on a stretcher and hand carried him 500 miles to Calcutta, put him in a British hospital. He had two ways back in. He could fly in and jump out over a green mat and hope he landed in our territory, or he could walk in. He walked 500 miles back in.

[26:50] ERIC KNORR: Amazing.

[26:51] ROBERT DIETZ: I sent a 76, 76 or 78 RPM record to my mother and couldn't tell where it was, but he sent her this record and walked back in. I could never have done that.

[27:05] ERIC KNORR: History. I'm just trying to think, where can we go from here? Well, we got these political politics and parents, I guess.

[27:16] ROBERT DIETZ: Oh, yeah, that's good.

[27:16] ERIC KNORR: One of the suggestions, my dad, I would say, was Republican at that era. My mother was a Democrat. I guess they did vote, but they talked about, well, we think our votes canceled one another, but yet, I believe, at least this is my belief, that the Democratic Party that she was familiar with and my grandfather is not the same Democratic Party today.

[27:43] ROBERT DIETZ: Those parties have actually done a 180. The Nixon strategy, Southern strategy was to get the old Dixiecrats into the Republican Party. He succeeded. And the parties have literally done a 180. They're the exact opposite of what they were when we were growing up as kids. My father was a Democrat for a while and he liked Franklin Roosevelt and he liked Harry Truman, but he loved Dwight Eisenhower. So he considered himself a Republican, but he always voted his conscience. I've always voted my conscience. People would get real difficult with me in the last few years because I was still registered as a Republican for a while because I'm kind of business prone, but I'm also very social conscious and I'm really a middle of the roader. And they would call me rino, Republican in name only. And I said, well, I go, just so there's a voice for the devil, an advocate, you know, at county political meetings. But finally I just registered as an independent because it's gotten far too polarized. And all they're doing is sitting back in their corners in Congress and throwing rocks at each other. They're not getting together and solving anything. Bob Dole was a great man. People didn't realize he had a terrible television presence, but he was a brilliant guy. I knew him as county attorney out at Russell. We set up Russell County EMS together and he would sit in those meetings when he had what is now Mitch McConnell's position, head of the Republican Senate, and he would say, now you guys on the right can't have everything you want. You guys on the left can't have everything you want. What can we get together and accomplish that we can both live with? And legislation would happen. Now they just sit back and throw rocks at each other. I said the other day, if pro is the opposite of con, then Congress is the opposite of progress. But that's the way it is.

[29:37] ERIC KNORR: It's a mess.

[29:39] ROBERT DIETZ: But our Constitution will survive.

[29:42] ERIC KNORR: Well, I hope so.

[29:43] ROBERT DIETZ: Oh, it always does. Right before Mr. Trump was elected, the pastor at First United Methodist spoke and I happened to be there that Sunday. It's a lady now and she's on television worldwide. That church downtown is round. It was built by Ollie Van Beach's money to be a television studio from the day it was made. A fire truck can go right by the street. You don't hear it on TV. And every morning at 11 they have an hour service on Channel 10, but it goes worldwide. And she stood up there and she said, people, it doesn't make any difference who wins this election because tomorrow morning the sun's going to come up, God's going to be in his heaven and everything's going to work out if we choose to make it work out. And we've had some good presidents in the last 200 plus years. We've had some bad ones, but the government, the ship of state, always rectifies itself and that's the genius of the Constitution. And we have had demagogues and we have had problem makers. And quite frankly, Richard Nixon destroyed the Republican Party that you and I knew growing up. It's now what the Democrats used to be. The old segregationist Dixiecrats have become. Strom Thurmonds have become the new ultra right and the ultra liberals have become the opposite. It's just, they've just reversed positions. They just have the same name, that's all. You're always going to have a left and a right in anything and you don't function real well with one hand or just the other hand. You can make do. But when the two get together and apply themselves to some work, it can accomplish great things. And the answer is usually not at the extreme left or to stream right of anything. It's down the middle to serve everybody and make the world better. You can change the world today, Eric. All you have to do is make a commitment that you're going to do something today. To make the world better for somebody else. And tomorrow you do the same thing and you read that little book. One chapter takes four minutes. There's 31 chapters. There's 31 days in most months. You read that chapter every morning and it will change your life and you will change the world.

[32:00] ERIC KNORR: So have you been in politics?

[32:03] ROBERT DIETZ: As much as I could avoid at all costs, probably. But as a fire chief and paramedic chief and acting fire chief in some big towns when they needed somebody to fill in, I've been right in the middle of politics and I avoid it like the plague. I am there to fight fire. I'm there to enact laws that Kansas won't enact. Every town I've ever been acting chief or assistant chief or battalion chief now has a residential sprinkler ordinance. You can't build an apartment or a house without plastic pipe sprinklers in it. And we just don't have fire deaths either families or firefighters. But out here, oh, no, we can't do that. That'd add $1,800 to price of an apartment. Give me a break. The insurance company should be screaming for that, but the big developers don't want to spend that money. Exeter Pennsylvania has had a residential sprinkler ordinance for 40, 50 years. They haven't had fire death in that time period. We lost a firefighter here three weeks ago. Smoke in a modern house contains over 1800 known poisons that'll kill you because that would easily. Oh, yeah. They say they think they don't know. Nobody's going to say yet. They think his regulator on his air pack failed. He couldn't breathe. He ripped the mask off and he was dead before they could drag him out of there because plastics and all the rest burn into horrible compounds. And it's just plain dangerous to fight fire. And you go in there without breathing equipment, just bend over and kiss your rear goodbye on the way in because it's gone before you can get out. And air packs are not supposed to fail, but they're mechanical and it can happen. And they believe he was well dead before they drug him out. And of course, the minute he laid down his body, alarm went off and they first grabbed him and drug him out. But by the time they got him out of the building, he was gone. 27 years old. Five. Five, I think five years on the department and young family man. Heartbreaking, Just heartbreaking. Totally unnecessary. We've got a paid fire department. We need a paid fire department. Yes, all paid. No, it takes five people On a fire truck to make an interior attack, you got to have two men on two hoses. So that's four and one to stand outside and operate the pump and the radio and call for help if needed before you can make an interior attack. We don't have the money to put five people on every truck. What we need is a part paid, part volunteer department. And if you and I are capable, we take the training, we go serve for 20 years as a volunteer, we might do Tuesday night and go, if need be, fill those other two slots. And if we've got a VFIs type program, we can quit the day we turn 65. If we didn't use our malpractice insurance, we draw an extra 5, $600 a month. That's pretty good. Thank you for doing that. And it's a fraction of what it would cost to have those people paid. And with a bunch of volunteers, you take the young ones that are well trained and got a couple, three years experience. You don't have to have an academy class to get more firefighters. Just tap the best two you got and say you want to go full time. You got them. And all firefighters are going to work the other two days. Another job anyway. So fine.

[35:23] ERIC KNORR: Well, I mean, ideas like that, I'm jumping the bureaucrats or the like, who kind of keeps those things from happening. Those ideas being tried, if you will.

[35:36] ROBERT DIETZ: I'm going to get in trouble when I answer this question. We have some people who think they own this town and they've got lots and lots of money and they want the way it is because when they work for the city and their leasing company owns all the city vehicles of every type and their municipal leasing company, which is tax free income to them like a municipal bond, they want to make sure those paid city employees are voting and tacking up posters for who they want. And I can take you to towns in Kansas, little bitty towns that voted for Mr. Biden in the last election. And their fire truck got pulled out of their town and moved 22 miles away to the county seat while they were still making payments on it to teach them they would vote for who they were told to vote for. I loaned one of them a truck for a dollar a year and got sued by that leasing company, said that's under FTC rules, you can't price that that low under whatever. And we ended up going in court and the judge said after we hired an attorney to represent us because we're a nonprofit foundation, couldn't represent myself even though I'm a lawyer. And he. The judge says, I want to talk to you. Do you own that truck? Yes. You owe any money against it? No. You're renting it for a dollar a year? Yes. Because they're still making payments on the other one, hoping to get it back when they pay it off in four years. Well, I reckon if you want to lease it for 50 cents a year, it's nobody else's business. Get out of my courtroom. Another guy. His lawyers went off like a rocket. They sued us, too. When we wanted to give our factories to our employees, they said, you can't give factories that build national security vehicles, police, fire, EMS, armored limousines, SWAT team vehicles to accompany us. 81% former inmates can't do it. We spent three and a half million dollars, but we got the right to do it.

[37:34] ERIC KNORR: Yeah. Going to court is not cheap.

[37:37] ROBERT DIETZ: There's only two things come out of court, and they're both losers. The only winners are the attorneys. You just come out varying degrees of losers. Nobody. And the Good Book says, don't go to court. If you're a Christian, work it out on the way there, but don't go in that court because you're gonna. You're. You're in the devil's court. Not. Not the court of heaven where everything's fair. Thank God. At least that court's fair. We have about 10 minutes left. Great.

[38:03] ERIC KNORR: Okay.

[38:04] ROBERT DIETZ: Here he come. Enjoying the heck out of talking to you.

[38:06] ERIC KNORR: Well, I am. I'm enjoying it as well.

[38:09] ROBERT DIETZ: We're supposed to be opposites. What's so opposite about us?

[38:12] ERIC KNORR: Well, I kind of wonder, you know, how, you know, they make their matches. I didn't know if I'd find somebody that was 18, you know, 25. What age? And you get to be our ages. I don't make you. Want to make you as old as I am. But, you know, we've grown up through the same things. We've seen improvements come along. While I was at East High School, we had an area where, you know, all the black kids hung out. I don't know if that still exists, but it was fine. Everybody got along okay. We didn't have any riots or fights or problems. And what is it today? Why? It seems to me as if there's an element in our society that wants to pit people against one another.

[38:57] ROBERT DIETZ: Exactly.

[38:58] ERIC KNORR: They just want to stir it up.

[38:59] ROBERT DIETZ: And they profit by it. They profit by it. These people are the people who are screaming against immigrants right now, and yet they employ immigrants who are illegal in their businesses and pay them under Minimum wage and call it good business. When these wealthy people wanted to buy my factories in 96 and I refused, one of the brothers told me, I can make your factories three times more profitable overnight. And that intrigued me. How are you going to do that? He said, well, first thing I'm going to do is fire all those former inmates that work for you. Nobody who's ever been in prison deserves to make 35, $40 an hour. They can reapply for their job next day at minimum wage or less. And I said, no, that's not going to happen because we're not going to sell to you.

[39:48] ERIC KNORR: That's another thing that in just a second, I think of, let's say, minimum wages. And my business was in Illinois. And the governor at the time said, we're going to have the highest minimum wage in the state, in the country. And I hear that. Listen to that. But okay. And you as a business person have to deal with that. And you've got to try to stay in business. And so we have people making minimum wage, and a lot of them, you know, plus or tips. And I'm thinking of the delivery drivers that did very well. And so the minimum wage comes in. And so we've got people we just hired that are on minimum wage, but we've got people making. At that time, it was like 7 or 750. We've got people making that money. Well, gee whiz, they shouldn't be making minimum wage any more because they have experience and the like, Right? So we need to bump them up. And then we needed to bump up the shift supervisor, the assistant, a manager, and then the manager. And then that just escalated to the point where, how do we stay in business?

[40:49] ROBERT DIETZ: The real. The real trick is finding balance. You can't be totally left or totally right on any issue and expect progress to happen. There's times that I feel real strongly about something, but do I have the right to impose my will on other people? I agonize over the abortion thing, and I don't like the idea of abortion, but at the same time, I. I grew up in what was the abortion capital of Kansas for decades. And we had doctors in that town. They were not MDs. One was an osteopath in the years before the osteopaths were allowed to do surgery. And they were basically manipulative doctors in those days until they came into the medical profession. And when he got out, his nurse continued the practice and took it to a chiropractor over there, and he made himself a multimillionaire doing abortions and he did his lab work. And people would come from little communities in western Kansas. 16 year old, pregnant, didn't even know how they got that way. I mean, just totally lost. And he would do the lab work and say, sorry, hon, you're too far along, you know, can't help you. And my father and I would go out and take him out of the Blue Spruce Motel the next morning in a puddle of blood, dead. And they're buried over there in that cemetery in El Dorado under their mother's maiden name because they can't go back to that rural community because the priest won't let them be buried in that church cemetery. And every Memorial Day I would have to stand out there with my books and people would come and say, where's so and so? And I'd point them to the right part of the cemetery. And I would see this one woman over there crying over the tombstone of her daughter. And I remember having to minister to her and help her. I remember that the local priest in El Dorado wouldn't say mass for her or let her in the church. And I went and got a retired priest out of the Catholic center for the Aging in one of our company cars, funeral home cars. He said mass in the funeral home. We took her out and buried her. And the woman says, I don't know how I'm going to pay you. Her husband was home drunk. He wouldn't even come down and help. Dad just said, don't worry about it, it's taken care of. And I think abortion ought to be legal, but rare. But when you criminalize something, that sometimes is necessary, if that child has no brain, hopelessly deformed, what's the point? I don't like killing anything. God cares when a sparrow falls to the ground. I would have a hard time torturing an animal. But I don't have God's wisdom. I got a finite mind. He's got an infinite mind. How can my little finite mind, packed in a brain box big enough to carry not much more than a softball, comprehend an infinite God that can speak world into existence? I can't. He's capable of forgiving us, and it's hard enough for us to believe that. But he's also capable of willfully forgetting our sins. And they are as far as the east is from the West. I can stand before God and know in that court I'll get a fair hearing. And the prosecutor is going to stand there and say, why that guy, I mean, he did this. He did that Bob did this, he did that. He belongs in hell with me. The defense attorney is going to be looked to by the judge, who's fair and honest. What about it? And that defense attorney who's his own son is going to stand there and say, well, yes, those things are true. However, he accepted me, he believed in me, therefore, my blood covers his sins. The court cannot see them. And the judge says, yes, you're right, I can't. And all I want to hear is, welcome, good and faithful servant. And I want to see my dad again. I want to see my good friend Vern Miller, our former super sheriff. Yeah, I want to see Sam Davison. I want to see a lot of people, and I've got about 100 million years to sit and talk. But you know something? I don't think we're going to sit around and play a harp. I think God's got something for us to do up there. Vern Miller told me he and I called each other every year on our birthday till he died. And right before he died, he told me in a phone call, we were, you know, we were born two days before Christmas, so there's nothing else going on for birthdays. So we just talked to each other for three or four hours wherever we were. And he says, I don't know about this heaven business. And he was a Christian man. He says, ah, it's not going to be very exciting. That'll be very interesting. I said, now, Vern, think a minute. The Good Book says that Satan walks in and out of there, walks in and talks to God once in a while. And I'm sure his demons walk along too. Those streets are paved with gold. It's so pure you can see through it. Do you not suppose that maybe those demons might want to swipe a few of those bricks? They're going to need security up there. I got a feeling you and Sam Davidson and Johnny Darr are all going to be busy and have work to do. And he went silent for 30 seconds, and I heard him kind of snort like he was choked up. And he says, bob, you've given me hope for the first time in two years. And he was gone six months later or a year later.

[46:24] ERIC KNORR: Well, the thing Jonathan may not know is airplanes that used to fly across Kansas to get back to our very beginning. Couldn't serve alcohol over Kansas Exactly.

[46:35] ROBERT DIETZ: Because Vern believed in. And even when he was Attorney general in enforcing the law, he didn't like.

[46:40] ERIC KNORR: Long was the law, enforced the law.

[46:43] ROBERT DIETZ: But that embarrassed the legislature into cleaning it up and Fixing it. And now they don't arrest train crews going across the state anymore serving alcohol. You enforce it and people see how ridiculous it is. And then change happens.

[46:55] ERIC KNORR: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's the way I believe. The law is the law. If you don't like the law, change the law. But the laws need to be enforced as long as you have the law. And that's one of the things that disturbs me about the illegal immigration. And I can hear Chuck schumer saying in 1986, we've changed the law. We fixed the law. We won't have this problem again. Here we are, what, 30 years later, plus, and we've got this problem. We did not enforce the laws we had on the books.

[47:28] ROBERT DIETZ: We don't remember the days when my family came here from Ireland on my mother's side, and there were signs in the 1840s in business windows in New York City. No Irish need apply. We've forgotten when the Italians came here and were treated the same way. But the Irish were ultimately vindicated when one of their own became President John Kennedy. But they were the lowest of the low. The New York City Fire Department to this day is still strongly Irish because they would take those jobs in one of the first paid fire departments in a country where they would work 28 days straight and get a couple days off to go home. And they took those low paying fire and police jobs. So they're still strongly Irish to this day. I'm going to nudge you to the first question, the last section. Trust me, it brings me no joy to cut this and you guys all day. Final questions. First question. What is something that is bringing you joy lately? Oh, yeah, that's the last question. Okay, Eric, I'd love to hear that.

[48:34] ERIC KNORR: Well, I'm. I'm struggling for joy at this moment because my first wife was killed in an automobile accident out on Rock Road.

[48:44] ROBERT DIETZ: Oh, my God.

[48:44] ERIC KNORR: Guy going 93 miles an hour hits her car, kills her.

[48:48] ROBERT DIETZ: How bad?

[48:49] ERIC KNORR: So, and our daughter, our grandchildren and all were are dealing with that. Not only is there the emotional drain, there's also some financial drain involved. She was in the hospital a couple of weeks. And so how do you pay the hospital bill? And so they'll have to, you know, figure that out, plus deal with her estate or home or belongings and things of that nature. But I think that, Bob, you've given me encouragement. So where do you find joy? I gotta say, I found some joy being here. I find joy being here this afternoon with you, having the conversation we've had And I think I can learn from you and our discussion today. So I have to say, today was a good day.

[49:38] ROBERT DIETZ: Good. What's bringing me joy right now is the prospect of new ventures, new employees, new things that need to be done. And it's not just tilting at windmills, it's needs. We need to change the fire service and EMS west of the Mississippi 180 degrees back east. All the communities the size of Wichita have volunteer fire, neighborhood volunteer fire companies, nonprofit companies that Benjamin Franklin set up so that he could get insurance on the print shops he was setting up in all 30 or all 13 colonies. And he could not invest and partner with. Somebody invented franchising. I'm going to send you an expensive press and type that Made in England costs a lot of money. You don't have a volunteer fire company to fight those fires and contract with insurance companies. I can't make the investment. Of course, we turned them into post offices after the revolution because we needed them. But he invented all these things. He invented franchising, but his idea was to make sure it was nonprofit. There's a direct comparison between Wilmington, Delaware and Wichita. Kansas County's about the same size, about the same population, but New castle County has 60 volunteer fire companies. Like if Wichita were sitting there, we would have an old town volunteer fire company, a Delano volunteer fire company, a College Hill volunteer fire company, et cetera. And these are block big facilities, take up a city block and there's rooms for wedding receptions and dances and bingo and all this kind of thing. And these departments can buy nice equipment because they don't have tons of overhead in today's day. They have paid paramedics and paid drivers who can respond quickly. But it's largely volunteer. It costs money for people to sit there. We got a great fire department. City and county both keep those people, fill the positions with volunteers and get fully staffed and get that cost down. And then we've got paid people to manage and they'll work their way up to the ranks. But if we can institute independent nonprofit volunteer firefighters in EMT and prayer makes associations that will take over those departments where they're having to go beg money from these rural commissioners to put gas in a fire truck. And gas fire trucks went out of fashion 30 years ago. They're still running them out there. Can't even get parts for them. We can then give them their financial resources. A town the size of Tawanda with a bingo game with a $20 loss limit, so nobody loses much money Tuesday night and Saturday night can bring in a few other little things and some fundraising can bring in two and a half million dollars a year. You can run one mighty fine fire and rescue service and have a community facility to end all communities facilities for that kind of money. I want to see that happen. And there's people telling me no way. And I'm saying, well you told me that when I rode an ambulance ordinance and we got the only one in the country that requires paramedic ambulance service to be available in every county and we're paying for it. You know, out of 50 states I still think I got a little fight left in me and I got a bunch of people behind me and we're going to try to make it happen.

[53:00] ERIC KNORR: That's the key.

[53:01] ROBERT DIETZ: You know, the only reason I succeed in business is because I was too young and too stupid and those things were impossible.

[53:08] ERIC KNORR: Yep.

[53:09] ROBERT DIETZ: You can accomplish anything if you don't know that. And secondly, if you don't care who gets the credit.