“You can always win. Even when you do not appear to have won, another kind of victory may still be waiting for you.”
Introduction
Dr. Corey has the kind of presence people notice before they know what to make of it. He is a large man, accustomed to responsibility and direct speech, and strangers can initially read that size as severity. The impression rarely survives the encounter. A joke arrives. A door is held open. A small task that somebody else might ignore is quietly taken over. Before long, the formidable figure has revealed the warmth beneath it, and the word people reach for is not intimidating at all. It is “teddy bear.”
That gentleness does not come from softness of purpose. It comes from attention. He believes a life can change in the few seconds it takes to notice what another person needs. At Lowe’s, when he saw a woman struggling to lift something, he did not calculate whether helping would matter. He simply stepped in. He did not know her, and he did not need to. The action belonged to the same everyday code as opening a door, making someone laugh, or easing a burden without asking for recognition. In his view, the world would be kinder if fewer people walked past the moment in which they could be useful.
Humor is part of that code. He looks for a way to make people laugh each day, not because life has spared him from solemnity, but because it has not. Laughter, like service, keeps heaviness from becoming the only atmosphere in a room. It gives people somewhere to breathe. His optimism is therefore neither casual nor untested. It is a practiced refusal to let suffering dictate the entire meaning of an experience.
The same refusal can be heard in the language he uses about fear. He calls fear “false evidence appearing real.” He draws a distinction between those who face everything and run and those whose faith helps them face everything and resolve. The phrase is characteristically direct. It does not pretend that danger, loss, or uncertainty disappear. It places the emphasis on response. A person may be shaken, but still decide what to do next.
His emotional life is just as immediate. The names of people he loves can alter his voice. Memories of his parents, his brothers, his sons, and the family built around them do not stay at a safe intellectual distance. Tears come, sometimes more than once in the same telling. He does not treat those moments as failures of composure. Feeling is part of fidelity. People matter enough to leave a mark, and love matters enough to hurt when it is separated from the person who inspired it.
That openness sits beside a stubborn capacity to rise. He can be melancholic without becoming resigned. He can be wounded without agreeing to remain where the wound left him. When an experience breaks something open, his instinct is eventually to ask what it can teach and whose burden might be made lighter by the lesson. He does not tolerate helplessness for long, especially in himself. The next act may be work, study, prayer, a difficult conversation, or the decision to bring a scattered family back under one roof. Whatever form it takes, movement follows.
There is an unmistakable firmness in him, but it is not the firmness of indifference. It is the resolve of a man who has learned that care sometimes requires uncomfortable clarity. Listening matters more than talking. Patience is a virtue. Experience cannot be replaced by theory alone. Love is not merely what a person feels; it is what he does when somebody else is frightened, injured, grieving, or close to giving up.
“Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.”
Phase 1: A Childhood Framed by Love and Survival
Corey Goodwin Rose was born in California on July 19, 1960, into a family whose warmth would remain one of the clearest measures of happiness in his mind. His father, Walter Thomas Rose, known as “Blackie,” had served in the Coast Guard. His mother, Geraldine Ann Farnum Rose, had been an actress before marriage and then devoted herself to raising her children. Around them were brothers older and younger, a household joined by affection, shared outings, and the easy certainty children feel when the people they trust are near.
His earliest survival belonged to family memory rather than his own. At about one year old, while his parents were at work, his oldest brother was watching him with a friend. At some point, the small child disappeared from their sight. His brother asked the question that changed the afternoon: “Where’s Corey?” Neither boy knew. They searched the backyard and found him at the bottom of the swimming pool.
He was pulled from the water without breath. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation followed, and life returned. Long before he could understand danger, his existence had already depended on somebody noticing that he was missing, somebody searching instead of assuming, and somebody acting before time ran out. The incident became what he later called his first survival. It was an origin marked not only by peril, but by rescue.
The childhood he remembered personally was gentler. One of its most enduring pictures placed him on the wall in the backyard, waiting for his father to come home from work. The purpose of the wait mattered greatly: Blackie was going to take him to a Los Angeles Dodgers game. Those games became part of the private language between father and son. The ballpark was important, but the deeper memory was anticipation, the pleasure of knowing that his father would return and that they would go together.
Camping offered another version of belonging. He remembered trips with his mother and father, his younger brother, and at times his older brothers. What remained was not a catalog of destinations. It was the family itself, gathered away from ordinary routines, the boys held within the companionship of their parents. Years later, when Dr. Corey described those early years, he did so without qualification. He had possessed a wonderful family and, within it, a wonderful life.
His admiration for his father grew through small, decisive encounters. Blackie’s time in the Coast Guard gave the boy a model of service, but the lessons that stayed closest were personal. His father could turn a moment of disappointment into a truth large enough to last for decades. That happened at an all-state swimming final, where the young competitor raced in a 50-meter freestyle event. At the finish, he believed the swimmer beside him had been placed first. He went to the fence where his father stood and apologized. He had wanted badly to win for him.
Blackie placed his hand against the fence opposite his son’s and answered, “Son, you always win for me.” Then the official decision was posted. Despite the faster recorded time beside the other swimmer, the judge awarded Corey first place. The result delighted him, but his father’s sentence mattered more than the medal. It detached victory from a number on a board and joined it to love, effort, and the refusal to let one result define the person who had tried. In later years, he would interpret the moment as proof that even when a person appears not to have won, another kind of victory may still be waiting to be understood.
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
Phase 2 : Eleven Years Old and Growing Up Overnight
Late in November 1971, when Dr. Corey was eleven, the shape of his family changed with terrifying speed. His father was in Chicago when news came that he had cancer. Geraldine went to bring him home. In early December, father and son met in the family kitchen, and the boy held him in his arms. Blackie was then taken to the hospital. That embrace became their last.
Walter Thomas “Blackie” Rose died on December 7, 1971. The fact was final, but the words first given to his children were not. When Geraldine gathered them, she did not say that their father had died. She told them they were never going to see him again. For an adult, the meaning might have been clear. For an eleven-year old, it left room for a hope that had nowhere to go. Dr. Corey continued to think that perhaps his father would return. Only much later, within the following year, did he fully understand what had happened.
The delay complicated grief. He had the absence before he had the language for it. The father who had always come home from work did not come through the door, yet the boy had not been given the word that could begin to explain why. Confusion sat beside sorrow, and both had to be carried while the household confronted immediate needs.
Geraldine tried to remain strong for her children. She concealed much of what she was enduring because the boys were her first concern. One night, however, Dr. Corey heard her crying in her bedroom. He went to her, embraced her, and asked whether she was all right. She answered that she missed his father. Mother and son then allowed their emotions to come out together for the first time.
The moment was quiet, but it altered his understanding of strength. The woman who was holding the family together could also weep. The son who was becoming responsible could still need his mother and comfort her in return. Grief did not make either of them weak. It revealed how deeply the missing man remained part of them.
There was little time for sorrow to remain separate from work. Geraldine took three jobs to support her children. Her effort placed a practical question before her eleven-year-old son: what could he do to make the load lighter? He began assuming responsibility for his younger brother, who was about a year and a half behind him. He learned to cook at an unusually young age. He made sure his brother was prepared for school. Caregiving entered his life not as a profession, but as the ordinary duty of one brother toward another when their mother had to be away earning a living.
The younger boy found direction in horseback riding. Dr. Corey and his mother kept him involved, and he became highly successful with horses. The activity gave him purpose and kept him occupied through years in which the family was still adjusting. For the older brother, standing beside him was part of the same promise enacted in the kitchen and before school: no one in the family would be left to manage alone if the others could help.
Dr. Corey also looked beyond the house for ways to contribute. Before he was even a teenager, he mowed lawns, picked up trash for people in the neighborhood, and took whatever odd jobs were available. The money was modest, but its meaning was not. Every dollar he earned was one less expense his mother had to meet by herself. Work became a language of love, stripped of ceremony and measured by usefulness.
“I can do all things through Christ which strengthened me.”
Phase 3 : Faith, Water, and a Father’s Promise
After his father’s death, Dr. Corey began walking down the street to church by himself. No one in the family instructed him to go. At first, they did not even know he was going. Something in the child who had been left with grief and unanswered questions drew him toward a place where faith offered both company and direction.
The walk was simple, but the decision was profound. He did not wait for the whole household to move with him. He went alone, then watched as other children eventually joined him. In that pattern lay an early form of leadership: he followed the conviction in front of him, and companionship gathered around the action.
His parents had taken him to church when he was very young, though he could not remember those visits. What began after the loss felt more personal. During his teenage years, Christian fellowship became a chosen path rather than a family custom. He became involved with Young Life, attended a Christian camp on Catalina Island, and joined Bible studies. In his senior year of high school, he formally accepted the Lord and was baptized.
The commitment gave continuity to a life that had already been altered by sudden absence. Dr. Corey could not restore what had been lost, but he could choose the ground on which he would stand. He remained on that Christian path, returning to its language whenever sorrow, responsibility, or danger demanded more than confidence in himself.
Faith did not remove ambition from him. It gave ambition a center. He learned to play the guitar and began leading music and Bible study for junior high school students. The physically powerful athlete found another way to lead, one that required him to stand before younger people and help make belief accessible. Music softened instruction. Scripture gave language to endurance. Service to children allowed him to pass forward the reassurance he had gone looking for on his solitary walks to church.
The water remained another important arena of growth. Dr. Corey swam and played water polo with exceptional speed and strength. He won numerous gold medals, became a national All-American in both swimming and water polo during high school, and earned All-State recognition in his first year of college. Competition demanded discipline, but it also kept alive the confidence his father had placed in him.
Blackie’s promise at the fence was never reduced to the first-place decision that followed it. “You always win for me” became a way of meeting outcomes beyond his control. The sentence did not guarantee an easy result. It reminded him that worth could survive disappointment, and that effort offered a form of victory even before a judge confirmed it. After his father was gone, those words became an inheritance he could still hear.
Note of Thanks
Gratitude in Dr. Corey’s life begins with the Lord, whose presence has carried him through danger, loss, responsibility, and renewal. Every capacity he has used in service, every lesson drawn from hardship, and every relationship that has held him steady is received as a gift rather than a possession.
His thanks extend to family and friends, the people who have stood near enough to share both the weight and the joy of his journey. He remains grateful to his parents, Walter Thomas “Blackie” Rose and Geraldine Ann Farnum Rose, whose love established the values he has tried to pass forward. Though neither is physically present, his gratitude continues in the life he lives.
He gives particular thanks for his sons, Nick, John, and Anthony, whose brotherhood, perseverance, and individual paths have made fatherhood one of his deepest sources of meaning. He is equally thankful for his wife, Victoria, whose faith, warmth, strength, and independence have brought companionship and a wider family into his life.
Professional gratitude belongs to the Los Angeles City Fire Department, which gave him a home for forty one years, along with work that tested his abilities and allowed him to serve. It also belongs to Federal Incident Management Team 5, whose members offered friendship, kindness, trust, and two decades of shared purpose.
His thanks are not separated into public and private debts. Faith, family, friendship, and service have continually strengthened one another. Each person and institution named here gave him something he could not have supplied alone. In acknowledging them, Dr. Corey recognizes a truth that has followed him throughout his life: even the strongest person is sustained by grace, loyalty, and the hands that stand beside his own.
thanks,
– Dr. (H.C.) Corey Goodwin Rose