It is with a heavy heart that I share the loss of Jim Bass with all of our extended NTCA family. Many of you had the privilege of knowing and working with Mr. Bass during his many decades of leadership and support of NTCA.
His involvement started back in the days when NTCA was a telephone committee within NRECA and his leadership was pivotal in the creation of NTCA where he served as one of our earliest Presidents. He then spent many years – until relatively recently (2013, but in “Mr. Bass years, that was very recent) as the General Counsel for NTCA and guided us through many challenges and opportunities, including the unification with OPASTCO.
Mr. Bass was also the founder of our political action committee – then known as TECO – and I will always treasure the stories he told of the origins of the PAC. While at an early NTCA annual meeting, a local congressman from Tennessee passed away and Jim and others on the board thought that Ed Jones, a fellow Tennessean would be the perfect candidate. So they literally passed the hat around the board table to support his campaign and the PAC was born. Jim was passionate about using the resources to support those congressional candidates who were supportive of the deployment of communications networks for rural Americans.
He has left us many gifts including “NTCA: A History” that can be found in our offices and is often a “must read” for our new staff. He was passionate about many things including his wife Erma, his two children – David and Jane, his community and our industry. He continued to practice law until the day he fell on his front porch in early May that set about his rapid decline…two weeks shy of his 99th birthday.
And a few personal reflections about Mr. Bass. He was one of the kindest, most compassionate person I had the pleasure and honor of working with. He never started a conversation without first inquiring about my family and developed a friendship with my husband bonding over legal matters that they compared notes on. Even when he disagreed on a matter, he had the intuitive strength to look at issues from all sides and understand where the other party was coming from. I loved the note from one of our staff who said “He had a lasting affect on all the employees at NTCA who met and knew him. When the rest of us were tired from working the long days at a conference, he’d walk into the staff room, with his genuine smile, his chipper attitude and full of energy. I can say that we were all in awe of him.”
This was a man who still worked 5 days a week at his legal practice and took work home with him on the weekend. Two weeks shy of his 99th birthday.
Here is an interview he did last year with The Tennessean.
Jim believed in service – to his community, to his family, to his interests that he was passionate about, to the rural communications industry and certainly to his country with his extensive military service prior to his legal career. As staff noted, maybe it is fitting that he passed so close to Memorial Day when his life was filled with service to others.