The thing about Don Munro was that he always made everybody around him feel better. At work, he knew his employees by their first names and treated them like family. At dinner parties he would often take his guests aside to assure them privately that they were his favorite at table that evening. Nobody minded when they discovered that every guest had been Don’s favorite that night. Donald Frederick Munro truly had hundreds of best friends, all of whom are grieving today following his death April 27 – his birthday --at his home on Vashon. He was 72. The cause of death was prostate cancer. An avid reader with interests that ranged widely from the arts to history, politics and current affairs, Mr. Munro enjoyed nothing more than the camaraderie of good conversation over a glass of wine and a Cuban cigar. His philosophy of life, he once said, was to constantly strive to be at the nexus of beauty and absurdity. To that end, he identified with the Toucan and regretted that he had not been a part of Dorothy Parker’s Algonquin Hotel salons. He was fun-loving, irreverent, and ever ready to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. He was committed to social justice and to skewering pomposity and shallow thinking. Mr. Munro had retired last year after a 30-year business career as co-founder and CEO of Coastal Environmental Systems, a company that he built into the world’s leading manufacturer of air traffic control meteorological instrumentation. Before starting the firm with a $500 investment, Mr. Munro had worked as a land surveyor, civil engineer, transit planner, and policy advisor to Seattle Mayor Wes Uhlman. As director of the mayor’s Office of Executive Policy, he was instrumental in planning and implementation of the fare-free transit zone in downtown Seattle. Among many achievements as Metro’s manager of transit planning in the late 1970s, Mr. Munro led planning for the Metro bus tunnel and renumbered Metro’s bus routes based on the system used in Paris. In the early 1980s he built the Tri-Cities’ Ben Franklin Transit system from scratch in three years, including running the election that established the system, buying the buses and hiring the drivers. A University of Washington engineering grad and licensed civil engineer, Mr. Munro worked as an associate engineer with Lewis Redford Engineers from 1964-’72. He was quite pleased that an I-5 overpass that he engineered in the 1960s is still standing. Mr. Munro was a former board member of Vashon Allied Arts, and had also served as president of Seattle’s Skid Road Theater. He was an art collector with a particular fondness for the work of contemporary Northwest artists, a number of whom he counted as friends. His interests also included making furniture and pottery, playing poker and writing. Don Munro was born April 27, 1940 in Newport, Vermont and grew up in Yakima. He graduated from the UW in 1967. He leaves behind Carolyn, his wife of nearly 50 years; daughter Kelley and son Ted; and three grandchildren, Jon Munro-Kerr, and Caitlin and Tom Munro. (something here from don re: life with Carolyn, or something from Carolyn re: life w/don). Passing with Mr. Munro were several legendary alter egos, including the annoyingly pompous Charles T. (Cheeks) Firbolg Esq. and the notorious cross-dressing Dawnie. Firbolg emerged more than 30 years ago, and was the longest surviving and most prolific of Mr. Munro’s alternate personas. Firbolg was immoral and unethical, and an inveterate writer of letters and screeds. His correspondence files include a letter to the late Kim Jong Il, asking the North Korean dictator for the words and music to “Song of Comradeship,” which reportedly was one of Kim’s favorite tunes. Dawnie sprang to life fully formed – resplendent in gender-appropriate undergarments, wig, makeup and special-order size 12 heels – for the sole purpose of crashing a meeting of his wife’s breakfast club, an all-women’s group that barred men. Mr. Munro attributed his success in business to a willingness to take big risks, and to “finding great people, staying out of their way and treating them fairly.” His company’s motto was “Do something, even if it’s wrong.” Headquartered in Seattle’s Pioneer Square, Coastal Environmental Systems is one of only four firms to make the Deloitte & Touche “FAST 50” list of fastest-growing Northwest tech companies for seven years in a row. Coastal also won Ernst and Young’s regional “Entrepreneur of the Year” award in 2004 for innovative and creative use of computer technology. During the last months of his life, Mr. Munro’s former employees presented him with a plaque that praises him for bringing them together “from all over the world” and lauds his fairness and generosity “regardless of faith, color or nationality. “You will be remembered,” their tribute says, as “the guy who…gave practical meaning to the words ‘He’s not heavy, he’s my brother.’” Memorial to be held June 2 at 3pm at Camp Burton, Vashon Island