ONE-ON-ONE
Meet Joe Long, staying busy in retirement
Joe Long has a funny way with retirement.
He gave it a whirl in 2011, albeit briefly. As someone whose Marine Corps career began with a tour in Vietnam — for which he earned a Purple Heart — and ended as a colonel and project manager on the Marines’ $100 million national museum, Long does not do “idle” particularly well.
So when a New Mexico state official approached him seven months into retirement with a new opportunity, Long says his wife happily ushered him back out the door.
“Gloria said ‘Yes, he’ll take it,’” Long recalls.
Long directs the Veterans Business Outreach Center in Albuquerque. Funded by a Small Business Administration grant, the office provides one-on-one business counseling and conducts seminars around the state. Long, also a former full-time minister and onetime small-town Texas radio station operator, has now spent four years shepherding other veterans on their entrepreneurial journeys. The center saw 15 clients launch businesses in 2015. It is on pace for another 21 this year.
Now 71, Long says he is finally preparing to “hang ’em up” and leave the center at the end of this year. But is his work really done? Not even he is willing to say for sure.
“I have just created a new LLC for myself as a consultant, so we’ll see what I do,” he says. “I don’t see myself sitting down, and watching TV and reading a book all the time.”
Q: Describe yourself as a teenager.
I lived in Gallup my early teenage years and we moved to Roswell when I was 16. I absolutely loved my years in Roswell. Roswell High School was great. I enjoyed vocal music an awful lot and Roswell had a wonderful vocal music program; they had a barbershop quartet that had won a national competition and sung on “The Ed Sullivan Show” the year before I moved there. I won a competition and got to be part of that quartet. It was called the Roadrunners. For two years, I sang in the Roadrunners and that was great . ... I had a girlfriend the whole time I was there. I had jobs and so was always busy (and also) involved in extracurricular activities at the school.
Q: It sounds like you moved around quite a bit.
We did. My dad was a preacher, so we moved from town to town — always in New Mexico. He would pastor a church for three, four years and then we’d move onto another town.
Q: What was your first job?
Delivering the Albuquerque Tribune in Mountainair at 9 years old. At 12, we moved to Gallup and I delivered the Albuquerque Journal for three years. We moved to Roswell when I was 16 and I got a job in a meat market. I always had my own money and have been responsible for buying my own clothes since I was 12.
Q: Did you go directly to the military after high school?
From high school, I went to one year of Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene . ... Then I went to Eastern (New Mexico University) and went a year there, and was just enjoying the social life more than I should have. (laughs) I received a letter inviting me not to come back. Those days, if you didn’t have a deferment, you were drafted. I was about to be drafted into the Army, so I went to join the Navy. The Navy recruiter told me to be back at his office at 1 p.m. and I was there, and he wasn’t, so I went around the corner and there was the Marines recruiter. The rest is history, as we say. I ended up going to the Marine Corps. for a two-year enlistment. The recruiter had actually encouraged me — because I had been a disc jockey while I was in college — to join the Marines
because I could become a radio announcer with the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. He said, “All you have to do is go to boot camp, and let them know what you’ve done and you’re a shoo-in to be one of those guys.” (laughs) I wrote in all my tests all about my radio experience and I ended up carrying a radio on my back with an infantry unit, as we say, with an antenna that went up 10 feet and said “Shoot here.”
Q: You didn’t think this was a career?
No. During that time when I was in Vietnam, there was a lot of combat and I hated it. I thought that I would get home and get out, and I would go probably into the ministry. I always had an entrepreneurial bent, but I figured I would go into the ministry and maybe the radio business at some point. But I certainly didn’t figure I’d make a career of the Marine Corps. But things change.
Q: While you were in the Marines, you were still able to work in the church and have a radio station?
I was a reservist (for many of the 37 years with the Marines). I pastored that church full time for seven years and then, in ’99, the Marine Corps was looking for a reserve colonel to head up the creation of the National Museum, so they asked me if I would apply for that, which I did, and I was the one selected. I went on active duty and went to Quantico,Va., and headed up that program. I was in uniform for three years. And then they created a government service job to keep me on for another five years . ... After the Marine Corps Museum opened in 2006, I stayed on there as the deputy director for six more months. Then the architect that designed it, Fentress Architects out of Denver, asked me if I would create a consulting company so that they would hire me back to be a consultant on all their museum projects, so I did (until attempting retirement).
Q: What’s your favorite part of the National Museum of the Marine Corps?
I think the Vietnam gallery, because it’s got so much of my ideas in it . ... (One of them was) we cut a helicopter in half ... . (Museum visitors) can come off the back of a CH-46 helicopter into a hot landing zone. So many of us in Vietnam did that. They changed my idea some . ... We call these immersion experiences in the museum — where you find yourself in a place and time, and we had told the exhibit designer we wanted to do an immersion experience in each era . ... When you come off (in the Vietnam era exhibit), you can actually hear the pilot talking to you, you can feel the helicopter shake, you can smell the hydraulic fluids — and that’s just natural because you can’t ever get that smell out of a helicopter. But we also have a little bit of the prop wash hit you as you come off. We raised the temperature there (to replicate the area near Khe Sanh). We had casualties on the ground and around you, sandbags and all of that. I have had people who were in Vietnam get on that helicopter and say, “I just can’t do this,” so we fix a bypass for people who have that kind of experience. That’s a lot of what that museum is about. It’s to help people understand what those of us who did it went through.
Q: Are there certain challenges that veterans face when starting a business that others wouldn’t?
They’re not so much challenges as benefits. One of the things we do in our Boots to Business seminar during the first module is I go to a white board and say, “Alright, you all, help me list the qualities that the military helps develop in a person. For example, leadership.” And all of a sudden, they’ll start popping up: time management, discipline, motivation, and we’ll come out with 25 or 30, just one right after another. And after we’ve listed all those qualities the military helps develop in a person, then I will be able to point and say, “Look: all of this stuff you just listed fits perfectly with being a good entrepreneur.” They’ve really got a tremendous advantage before they go into entrepreneurship.
Q: Do you sing anymore?
Not much. I recorded a couple of albums when I was younger, gospel music. Now I listen back to myself (and) my vibrato has
gotten really wide. (laughs) It’s just not as good as it used to be.
Q: What’s the best compliment you’ve ever received?
When Gloria said “yes” (to a marriage proposal). Also, being called “friend” by my three Marines buddies and knowing that it was true.
Q: What was your last splurge?
Fifteen dollars at a garage sale on a 1993 room humidifier.
Q: Do you have any guilty pleasures?
Brownies, especially with chopped pecans and chocolate frosting.
Q: What’s one food you can’t live without?
Chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes and gravy.
Q: What are your pet peeves?
People who exaggerate. Just be yourself; you’re just fine the way you are.
Q: Describe yourself in three words.
Dependable, loyal and optimistic.