May 2026 Newsletter

May 1, 2026    News   

“Everybody Wants to Stay Here”

A Visit with Mike Hacker

By Dale Dauten

“How you do anything is how you do everything.”

 Harv Eker
We recently had the chance to sit down with Mike Hacker, the head of the maintenance teams for sister parks, The Resort and Silveridge. When we asked Mike how things were going at the parks, he smiled and said, “The residents are great.” And that’s how Mike judges his work – how residents are feeling. This echoed what he’d told us the last time we sat down with him, as this is how he assesses his team’s work:

 

“We want to take care of the residents, and we want the property to look so good that everybody wants to stay here.”

 

That attitude creates a dynamic where the crews and the residents care about one another. Mike told us this, “The residents do such nice things for us. They’ll get everybody lunch, or then I’ll go to the shop, and they’ll have dropped off water or Gatorade, or somebody will drop off cookies or bring doughnuts. Everyone is just so nice.”

 

Still, as anyone who’s taken care of any property knows, problems inevitably crop up. Despite that, Mike tells us that their number of urgent issues has gone down: “We’re just getting so much better – when we get a problem like a water main leak, we fix it and improve it — and we fixed them all. It’s the same with the cable and internet – Jesse and his team at Freedom are great. I used to hear complaints about cable, but they keep upgrading and now I never hear about problems.”

 

So, does that mean that there were no maintenance crises over the most recent season? Mike replied, “Nothing crazy. But there was something sad: one of our crew members, Chon, passed away. He was older, but it wasn’t like he had any problems that we knew of. Then one day he told me he had to go to the doctor. That was on a Wednesday, and he passed on Friday. That was the low point of the season. But for the parks themselves, everything was smooth.”

 

One specific maintenance challenge has always been the softball field at The Resort. So much so that the head of the parks’ management company, George Igualt, went to what he calls “Dirt School,” put on by the company that supplies professional sports teams, to try to improve conditions at the park’s ballfield. That caused us to ask Mike for an update on this past season. “The grass looked really good,” Mike told us, adding, “it looked a lot better this year than it did last year because last year was so hot for so long that we almost didn’t put the grass seed down in time. But since it was cooler this year, we were able to put it in two weeks earlier, so it had plenty of time to grow. There are always some problems, and they have a wish list for during the summer, but it looked good.”

 

(Speaking of wish lists, the off-season is when the parks’ ownership/management team schedules the biggest maintenance items and undertakes upgrades. We’ll get a report on those plans later this summer, when we sit down for our annual visit with George Igualt.)

 

While meeting with Mike, we asked about his mother, who became one of the park residents a while back. Mike offered to introduce us and so we gladly the opportunity to meet with her and her dog, CeeCee.
Mike’s mother, Janet Paul, moved into The Resort three years ago, after her husband, Mike’s stepdad, died and Janet sold their house in Ontario, California. We asked how things are working out and she replied, “There’s so much to do here. Everybody in the park says, ‘if you’re bored, it’s your own fault.’” Indeed, for Janet, there is no off-season. She’s a year-round resident and says, “You have what we call your winter friends and your summer friends. I play pickleball a lot, so I’m more with that group in the season. But then in the winter we get back into our line dancing and our potlucks and our crafts. We stay busy.”

 

We asked Janet about Mike’s growing up, wondering if she had stories we might pass along. She recalled that he was an athlete in school, how he was on the varsity baseball every year, that he broke his collarbone while on the track team, and that “he tried wrestling but didn’t like the little outfit they wore.” She also went on to recall that “The pastor’s name at the church was Hacker — no relation – but people thought Michael was his grandson, so he probably got away with some stuff.” Then again, she tells us that Mike has always the sort who couldn’t tell a lie, so no memorable misadventures.

 

As for having his mother living where he works, Mike, an only child, says that he doesn’t “have to worry about her as much” now that he “sees her most every day.”

 

Janet also showed us some of the handmade joke-gifts that Mike had given her since moving in: There’s what might appear to be a pickleball racket, although it is actually a toilet seat lid, and there’s the Pool Survival Kit where the “suntan lotion” turns out to be a can of Crisco.
These days, Janet has become so immersed in the social life at the park that Mike explained that his biggest problem now is finding her: “She always tells me that, oh, I’m gonna go play pickleball or I’m going line dancing. Then I have to cruise around the park to find her golf cart. I’m like, OK, my mom’s around here somewhere. Then I hear that she’s on H Street. Okay, I go over there and ask, Where’s my mom? She’s on J Street. Where the heck is my mom?”

 

 

Here’s a look back at the biographical article about Mike

From August, 2020

The People of the Park:

Meet Mike Hacker

By Dale Dauten

 

“Mike is a quiet, soft-spoken guy, but I soon realized that he knows a lot.

Every time I talk to him, I learn something new – and it’s all positive.

He’s just what we need, a great fit.”

 

That’s head of the parks’ management team, George Igualt, talking about Mike Hacker, who George recently named as the new Maintenance Manager. We managed to get Mike to talk about himself and we’re glad we did – he’s had quite a life – and he even came through with some great photos from the 1980s that will make you smile.
Although he was born in Southern California and spent his early years there, Mike moved with his father to Southern Illinois at age 13, and went to Carterville High, where he blossomed into a three-sport athlete: football, baseball and wrestling.
While he was the halfback on the Carterville Lions football team that won their conference his senior year, it was baseball that won him over – he made the varsity even as a freshman, played centerfield all four years and kept at it, playing in baseball and softball leagues into his forties.

 

His high school sweetheart back then – this was the 1980s — was a girl with the interesting name of Manissa. Remember that name – we’re going to encounter her again.

 

Meanwhile, Mike finished high school and gave ITT tech school a try, but at age 21 joined the Army, serving for nearly a decade. His specialty ended up being Stinger missiles, the surface-to-air missiles that can be shot by troops or mounted on vehicles. Mike served in the Gulf War in Iraq and spent time on the DMZ in South Korea, but his favorite assignment was as in Instructor for NATO, stationed in Germany. For three years he taught classes to soldiers from around NATO, certifying them in the use of the Stinger.
(For Mike, the highpoint of the NATO training was working with a simulator. Trainees would see a pinpoint appear on a screen, along with sound effects to match, and there came incoming planes, any one of 35 aircraft. The trainee had to decide which was friend and which foe, and then “shoot” with a laser beam and watch the plane blow up on the screen. Among Mike’s trainees were regulars like the British Special Forces, along with the occasional dignitary, like the time the Prime Minister of Ukraine, contemplating a purchase of Stingers, stopped in to check out Mike’s operation.)

 

After Germany, the Army wanted Mike to “go ride on tanks” and that’s when he decided it was time to try civilian life. He had a sweet assignment lined up, working for a military contractor in El Paso, but abrupt changes in the company’s fortunes put an end to that plan and instead he went to school to become a truck driver. He drove semis for four years but, as Mike explained, “by then I was married and had babies and my wife said, ‘You need to come home.’”

 

Mike’s uncle, who lived in Phoenix, offered him a job, doing maintenance work for apartment complexes, but insisted he need to start on the upcoming Monday. So Mike and the family made an instant move to the Valley and settled in Phoenix. It turned out that Mike had a knack for the job – he was nominated five times for Maintenance Supervisor of the Year by the Arizona Multifamily Association.

 

Despite devoting himself to his job, he ended up starting a business of his own, cleaning offices at night. While Mike eventually moved to Mesa and ended up getting divorced, his business has been a constant for ten years now. Even with his fulltime job at The Resort and Silveridge, he still spends three evenings a week and Sundays on his cleaning company. He says of holding two jobs, “I start at five in the mornings at the parks, and I’m done in the early afternoon. Then I go into the cleaning business in the evening.” Mike shrugged, smiled and said simply, “I work a lot.”

 

And now, as promised, we can get back to that high school sweetheart, Manissa…

She recently found Mike on social media and the two renewed their friendship. I’d asked Mike if he had any photos from his football days or time in the military, and no, he didn’t, but he said his old girlfriend had sent photos from high school. He passed along one of him and a classic one from the school prom: