Robert Jerry Falkner

Married three times before I "got it right" when I met Mary Kay Freeman, daughter of fifth-generation Katy, Texas rice-farming family. We met in 1988 and married 1993. Mary Kay has two daughters and they have given us four wonderful grandchildren who llive in Katy, TX and Flagstaff, AZ.

After I graduated U of H, I spent one year in accounting department at Southwester Bell Telephone and the next 20 years as a research analyst with various investment banking firms in Houston, Atlanta, and Boca Raton.

By 1990, I was living on a boat in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, when I struck out on my own and founded RJ Falkner & Company, which at the time was essentially myself, an old DOS computer, a telephone and a fax machine set up at the galley table in the salon of the boat I was living on.

Moved back to Texas in 1991 (Clear Lake, south of Houston), got my "land legs" back, and then Mary Kay and I moved to the little ski town of Crested Butte, Colorado for the next 12 years. Damn, it gets cold up there (down to 30 below zero sometimes in winter). We loved the summers, but the cold finally got to us, so we moved back to Texas (Spicewood....about 30 miles west of Austin on Lake Travis) in 2004. As the years went by, we decided that we needed to "downsize", and wanted to move to a city that was less "hectic" than the Austin area. In 2019, we moved to Bellville, TX (15 miles south of Brenham), with a population of about 5,000. Much quieter and safer for us retired folks.

We have a second home in Sedona, Arizona, which allows us to see the grandkids in Flagstaff more often. Moving to Bellville has brought us closer to the other grandkids in Katy, Texas.

Mary Kay and I are both pilots, and flying is my favorite hobby (been flying for 30 years). Also photography (got that from my Dad) and reading (probably got that from my Mom). Used to scuba dive, but no more.

The Lord has truly blessed us. I have been fortunate to "walk like a man", "fly like a bird", and "swim like a fish". To experience the world from all three perspectives has been phenomenal. However, I broke my back in 2015 and broke my left hip in 2017. So, no more flying, no more scuba diving, and I think I walk like a cross between a bird and a fish. Sold the planes and boat, and took up RV-ing.

Politically, I am a conservative, and I'm very worried about the future of America. They are arresting first-grade kids for bringing Cub Scout cooking kits to school because there was a knife among the cooking utensils (remember when we'd go out to the parking lot at JTHS during lunch, open the car trunks, and compare our hunting rifles?), yet they are "stealing" our children's and grandchildren's futures via deficit spending........and nobody seems to care. If we could afford it (which we can't) and didn't have grandkids, would probably move to New Zealand.

Left for the big city of Houston after graduating Tyler Junior College in 1966. Graduated summa cum laude (Economics/Finance) from University of Houston in 1968.