Obituary of Warren A. Church

Warren Church, of Cincinnati Ohio, passed away suddenly on Monday, May 13. Warren is survived by his daughter Sydney, wife Silva, sister Debbie, brother Rob, and his partner, Miki Reilly-Howe. Warren was a loving and involved father, a loyal partner, an inspiring friend, a doting dog owner, and a brilliant creative thinker. A man of countless talents, he was equally comfortable rebuilding an old car, talking strategy with Fortune 500 executives, or inventing a new recipe. It seemed like there was nothing he didn’t know or couldn’t do. In the lives of those he loved, he was a fixer and real-life superhero. Warren was born on October 2, 1957, in Grosse Point, Michigan. He grew up in rural Ontario, the youngest of five. It wasn’t an easy childhood. His siblings and parents expected him to grow up fast and pull his weight. He learned a range of wilderness survival and construction skills, and he developed bottomless resilience and an ability to figure out just about anything. Between 1980-1985, Warren earned a bachelor's and a master's degree in economics from the University of Cincinnati. He started his PhD at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, but realized his mind was happier focused on broad questions rather than narrow ones. He began consulting for corporations like Starbucks, P&G, HP, and Fifth Third Bank. Warren was unique in the world of business. He didn’t care about money, although he wanted his work to be fairly valued. He was in it for the intellectual challenge. He loved to think. He wanted to discover. He lived to create. Warren’s mind seemed to constantly generate inspirational sayings that reflected his philosophical worldview. Some of these he wrote on his walls. Some he printed on T-shirts or the cover of notebooks to give to friends. One of them was “Change favors the prepared mind.” Warren’s mind was prepared for everything. He taught himself how to do electrical work, he studied neuroscience in his free time, he mastered the art of making bread. He worshiped music. When he started doing more film work, he loved going to the film sets and talking to each technician to learn what they did. Warren looked at the world with a childlike wonder. “Curiosity is the mother of intelligence,” it says on the cover of one of the notebooks that Warren printed. When you had dinner and a drink with Warren (and he loved fine food and bourbon and wine), the most striking thing was his curiosity. He asked questions. He listened. He yearned to understand. Another of his favorite phrases was “Be aware of everything and certain of nothing.” He tried to cultivate what he called “a beginner’s mind,” wanting to approach the world fresh so that he could learn everything. He had the kind of creative mind that made unconnected ideas meld together. One of his favorite things to do was to lead a brainstorm, scribbling words and arrows on the walls as concepts connected like a map of neurons… one of his great joys was the satisfaction of a new idea created from shared words. Warren loved words. The company that he founded in 2011 with long-time collaborator Miki Reilly-Howe was called Department 26, and it was named for the infinite possibilities that the alphabet can create. As much as he loved to write, he really didn’t like computers. He was good with technology, creating beautiful presentation designs and setting up his own email servers. But he much preferred the flow of writing by hand. He would sometimes send emails that were just an attached scan of handwritten pages. Warren was an outlier. Most people in the corporate world look for a safe solution, an idea with no risk, a copy of what was done before. Corporations aren’t known for tossing out conventional wisdom or approaching a problem from wildly different directions. That’s why they needed Warren. He would listen to the goals of a project, and he would find the most entertaining and wildly creative solutions. Neurology and grocery shopping? Bank divisions and a nightmarish hotel stay? Computer printers and a late-night talk show? These are some of the anomalous creative nuggets behind his most successful projects. Doing things the same way they’d been done before bored Warren painfully. If a project was similar to something he’d already done, he’d want to skip it, even if clients were throwing money at him. But when he could create something new or communicate a fresh idea, he overflowed with energy. The wilder the idea — the more it made the people uncomfortable — the better. Warren was a rebel in a blue button-down. He expanded what was possible in the world. He sometimes poured his profits into whimsical creations. He made T-shirts that said “I Make Stuff Up,” and gave them away to anyone who would wear one. He loved the idea of a distributed network of people proudly proclaiming their creativity. Warren’s personal projects energized him just as much as his work. He lovingly restored old typewriters and gave them away. He produced a documentary about an artist who created wild art on antique printing presses. He appreciated the craftsmanship of old houses, old machines. He played his music on vinyl records. He loved fine French paper, and good Japanese pens. Maybe that’s one of the reasons he loved bicycles so much. The elegant engineering, the way the parts fit. The way the machine melded to his body. For several years he took photos of pigeons and captioned their photos with what he imagined their inner thoughts to be. He compiled these into a book he called The Pigeon Monologues. In their monologues, Warren imagines his pigeons as clever observers of the world. But they’re also outsiders, seeing things differently than the strange humans around them. The pigeons are Warren. On one page, a pigeon says, “I have tried to persuade the others that being is better than having.” Warren understood this. A loaf of homemade bread rising in the oven, coffee snuggle time with his dog, the wind whipping past as he went down a hill on his bike — he could access a zen appreciation of being in the moment. On another page, one of Warren's pigeons says, “The fact that I will die soon doesn’t matter. The fact that you have never lived does.” He had so much life left in him. He was getting ready to walk his daughter down the aisle. He was in the middle of fixing an old boat. He was in the middle of a new film project. He was starting a new chapter of his life with Miki. There are still so many abandoned typewriters out there without a caretaker. There are so many roads and restaurants left to explore. There are so many human puzzles that still need to be put together. There are so many creative connections that now will never be made without him. It’s devastating for so many of us that Warren is gone. But, if we’re willing to pay attention, maybe he taught us how to live. Services will be Monday, May 20th at 2pm at home: 6708 Rollaway Road, Cincinnati, OH 45236. Parking will be very limited, so please consider carpooling or using a rideshare service. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in Warren’s name to the Hamilton County Public Library (supportchpl.org/memorial) and the non-profit PeopleForBikes Foundation (peopleforbikes.org/giving).