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When JR Murphy asked me to write a story about Anne Benedetto, I thought to myself how can I possibly write a story about Anne, the greatest story teller of all time! And wow, did she have some good ones about our colleagues at Cahners which, of course, I could never repeat in print!

I could tell stories like our whorl-wind trip through Switzerland as the guests of Swiss Air, (a freebee because of my position as the Director of Events), or celebrating my 50th Birthday in San Francisco during a Wescon with a trip through Marin County with Anne driving, white knuckled along the roads perched against the side of cliffs, or Anne being taken to the office on rainy days by Norman Cahner’s driver when she lived in Boston, lunches at Jason’s in the Back Bay that ended at dinner….so many wild and crazy times. But those stories wouldn’t capture the real essence of Anne.

Anne had the uncanny ability to recognize when anyone was in trouble, either personally or professionally. She’d zero in on you, whether you were sitting behind a mahogany desk in a professionally decorated office or in a cubicle in the back row against a wall. In her eyes, we were all equal. Without hesitation she would tell us exactly what we could or couldn’t do and when and how to do it. Without fail her advice and direction were absolutely correct and I finally figured out why…her moral compass was unimpeachable. The year that Anne was a recipient of the Climate of Excellence Award, I had the responsibility of organizing the awards event at the Ritz Carlton in Boston. There were a few very deserving recipients over the years at Cahners, yet Anne was singularly the most representative of the excellence created and fostered by Norman Cahners and Saul Goldweitz, our founding fathers. For Anne, failure was not an option and she made sure that none us failed. I can still picture her, usually a pen grasped in her hand, either in the elevator or marching down a corridor in the building with that look on her face and saying to myself, oh boy, someone is in trouble! The wrath of Anne – no one was immune! If you screwed up, she’d be right there telling you how and why and then set to work to get it fixed. And she did this because she loved us.

I can never look at a bag of M&Ms, a Diet Coke or a package of Parliaments without thinking of her. Yes, that was Anne’s normal diet. When Kathy Leonard and I visited her just a couple of weeks before she passed away, she was still smoking! By then she was on oxygen, but she turned it off and lit up the cigarette! I asked her why?!! She claimed that her type of cancer was definitely not caused by smoking. Who knows? Cancer sucks.

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