Bob Jensen's Tribute to Will Yancey

In 2017 Bob Jensen's Website was migrated to the clouds and reduced in size.
Hence some links below are broken.
One thing to try if a “www” link is broken is to substitute “faculty” for “www”
For example a broken link http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
can be changed to corrected link http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
However in some cases files had to be removed to reduce the size of my Website
Contact me at rjensen@trinity.edu if you really need to file that is missing

I'm happy to learn that Will Yancey's widow is still making Will's great open sharing site available to the public ---
http://www.willyancey.com/

Also see Steve Blow's article in the Dallas Morning News, December 18, 2010 ---
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/columnists/steve-blow/20101218-dallas-resident_s-brave-christmas-letter-addresses-irreversible-mistake_of-suicide.ece

or Click Here

My own tribute to Will is still available at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Yancey.htm

Although some of us learned that Will died by suicide, it appears that Carol is now willing to let that cause of his death be made public. In her 2010 Christmas letter she reveals that in January 2010 his depression became so serious that Will sought out medical treatment. But the medications and the counseling seem to have failed him early on and he unexpectedly took his own life on February 11, 2010.

Carol writes that Will was "a good man with strong values and impeccable character who made an irreversible mistake."
One reason I greatly respected Will was his dedication to open sharing of knowledge on the Web including many of the secrets to his noteworthy success as a compliance analyst and auditor.

He spent some time in our home in October 2009 and appeared to be very happy in life. Here's a listing of the pictures he took during his visit at our cottage ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/2009Yancey/
Note that the larger pictures can be a bit slow when downloading.

To my knowledge this had nothing to do with financial problems since Will's consulting practice by all accounts was a resounding success to a point where he had a wonderful home in Dallas and a really beautiful new shore front home on Hancock Point looking out toward Bar Harbor in Maine. His son is a second year student at Trinity University.

If any of you know somebody who might make a similar "irreversible mistake" you might tell them how devastating this is was to his family, friends, and the world that badly misses his continued open sharing.

Will Yancey passed over to the other side on February 11, 2010.
Although he had visited our cottage, we were closest via email with messages about every other day.
I will miss him a whole lot and hope that he's found peace and harmony.
I wrote the tribute below while Will was very much alive and sending me lots of stuff

Now that Will Yancey has passed on, we don’t have any idea what will become of his very, very open sharing Website at
http://www.willyancey.com/

It might be worth your while to scan over the above site and jot down the links that might be important in your life. For example, Will made a lot of money in compliance testing and his expertise on stratified sampling. If those topics interest you or are of possible interest to your students, I suggest you look carefully at all the important material (including hot links) shared by Will.

Will also consulted heavily in law and litigation support. You might also note those topics.

I really, really, really hope that Will’s valuable open sharing page will be carried on by somebody somehow. But in case it is taken down, you may not want to overlook this chance to record what is most of interest to you.

Questions
Why is so very, very much given away for free on the Web, blogs, social networks, and listservs?
How can you seriously study and share your own ancestry?

Answer
The question about free sharing is a complicated question that has many complicated answers. Many, many people and companies and other organizations are truly being benevolent without any intention other than to do good things for the world. In some of those instances they do so as anonymously as possible. In other instances they get non-monetary rewards for recognitions and honors received for their efforts to do good things in the world. Sometimes the open sharing is from wealthy people, large companies, or prestigious universities feeling a need to share for reasons other than added wealth or recognitions --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

In some instances they eventually hope to make money for themselves and to maintain the often high costs of giving things away for free on the Web, with Google being the poster child of a company that started giving things away that turned the free things into billions upon billions of revenue (that among other things helps maintain the costs of over a million Web servers giving away free searches).

It often, very often, pays more to give than to receive
In many instances sharing expertise for free on the Web is the key to financial success, although not all successful open sharing Web sites were created initially with the intention of making profits. Neither Will Yancey nor Bob Jensen created enormous Websites with the original intent of making a dime from our efforts, and neither of us make any sales pitch whatsoever on our open sharing sites. We both will continue to open share if we never make another dollar from open sharing.

A Tribute to former tax professor and Eagle Scout Will Yancey --- http://www.willyancey.com/vita.htm
This is a huge success story about a professor of taxation who left academe to build a tremendously successful consulting business (surprisingly not in tax accounting) which he operates mostly out of his home via telephone and the Internet. Among other things he's building a fortune on, among other things, stratified sampling expertise and compliance.

In many instances sharing expertise for free on the Web is the key to financial success
Some successful professor consultants do so on the basis of their degrees and or current employment at prestigious universities like Harvard, Wharton, MIT, Stanford, Chicago, etc. More often than not these professors do not share freely on the Internet. I call these halo consultants living under the halos of affiliations with prestigious universities.

What makes the Will Yancey story interesting is that Will, like me, attributes much of his success to open-sharing (free) in the Internet ---
http://www.willyancey.com/
In a much more successful way than me, however, corporations seek out Will Yancey for lucrative consulting based often on finding his free Website material via Web crawlers like Google, Yahoo, and Bing --- http://www.willyancey.com/
And he makes a fortune barefooted while looking out from his ocean-front office. Mostly he consults on the Telephone and via email and, of course, writing reports and doing statistical analysis in his home offices in Maine and Texas.

On October 25, 2009 Will Yancey was an overnight guest in our cottage on his return to Maine from a homecoming weekend at Dartmouth College. Will and his wife, Carol, have two beautiful homes, one in Dallas and the other fantastic home is a new place about ten miles north of Bar Harbor (by boat) on Lemoines Point ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hancock_County,_Maine

Turning Lemons into Lemonade Consulting --- http://www.willyancey.com/vita.htm
Will Yancey earned an accountancy PhD at the University of Texas and then served on the faculty at TCU for six years as a tax professor. While at he was at TCU and I was still slaving away at Trinity University, I was impressed by his early-on free Web site of taxation helpers. His Web site was recognized in The CPA Journal, Technology Section, "Website of the Month: WillYancey.com", December 2004, page 60. Will's site was recognized by Forbes as one of the top eight web sites for tax planning (Forbes Interactive Money Guide, Fall 1999, page 77, www.forbes.com/bow/b2c/review.jhtml?id=497).

Will Yancey no longer maintains the detailed taxation part of his huge Web site but links to a tremendous taxation helper site started by an avid hunter and professor at the University of Northern Iowa, Dennis Schmidt, that was later sold for big bucks to a commercial outfit --- http://www.taxsites.com/help.html (another story of free sharing turned into financial success).

It is difficult to pigeon hole the expertise of Will Yancey that is now the basis of his consulting practice. You get clues by scanning the various categories and extensive referencing of literature available at http://www.willyancey.com/

At dinner Sunday evening, Will brought up a puzzle about how best to very precisely estimate the weight of a catch of over ten tons of fish catch comprised of fish of various sizes from minnows to large Blue Fin Tuna. The added catch is that your scale is limited to weighing 100 lbs at a time.

A Will Yancey Puzzle for You to Figure Out
Will Yancey does not fish or weigh fish, but the above puzzle is a key to much of his success in consulting in health care compliance, legal ruling and government regulation compliance, and other types of categories shown at http://www.willyancey.com/

If you want to study your own genealogy, Will Yancey's site provides many helpful links on how to go about doing so --- http://willyancey.com/finding.htm#family-history
An added thing that impressed me about Will Yancey is his dedication to his Jewish and Lutheran family ancestry. Will's family is rooted in a large and wealthy Lutheran estate owners in Poland and Germany --- http://willyancey.com/famhist.htm
Some of his ancestors were murdered in Hitler's death camps.
Especially note the Jewish history links at http://willyancey.com/sources.htm

A truly fascinating story is the history of Will's mother who was sent alone as a very small child first to England (to escape being murdered by the Nazi regime) and then on to America. She lived in the home of a British diplomat in London who later moved his family to the country to protected them from the Blitzkrieg. She was a brilliant master of seven languages and attended prestigious universities to become a chemist before giving birth to Will Yancey. Will's father was also a chemist.

This report is about the trip by Will Yancey and his mother, Marianne Yancey, in May 1997 to southern England and Wroclaw, Poland --- http://willyancey.com/europe97.htm

Will Yancey found a small piece of the old house while walking about on the grounds in 1997.
Especially note all the links and old photographs and the evacuation link, in the left-side column.
Here's the estate house where she was born that was later destroyed by partying Russian soldiers:

While listening to Will Yancey talk about his family roots, Erika was especially fascinated because she too was a refuge forced to as a small child to be a refuge on the road, only in her case she was forced out of Czechoslovakia by communists at the end of World War II who forced her family off the farm in front of gun barrels. Erika and her mother were eventually smuggled into Germany by an American soldier in a Jeep who picked them up on the side of the road --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/erika/xmas00.htm
Erika spent part of her early life living in an unheated garden shack on the outskirts of Munich and attended her first years of school in a school building with bomb holes in the roof. Some nights she helped crawl in the dark to steal a few survival potatoes in nearby fields.