It was one of those late-autumn mornings when the sun is at it’s most welcome and most benign. While it didn’t quite conquer the chill that crouched in the shadows, it bestowed along with it’s frail warmth a special feeling of well-being. Well-being that is to everyone but Ralph. Ralph was sitting in one of the boomerang-seat pedestrian laybys which border the Queen Street Auckland footpaths. Foot traffic, vehicle traffic, and every happening were normally theatre to him, profoundly interesting, but this morning the parade failed to lift his spirits.
Across the street, two men were preparing to abseil down the face of an older building and soon their purpose became clear. The building dated from before air-conditioning with windows that had once opened but no longer did so. Air-conditioning it now surely had but with no provision for external window cleaning. Ralph tried to point out their presence to the man who occupied the same seat and had been taking pulls at a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. A ‘Wino’, a derelict. The paper bag screamed that it wasn’t lemonade or ‘coke’ that he was drinking but Ralph, who was without side, was ready to engage anyone in conversation. The man grunted but made no effort to look in the direction indicated his attention remaining with the bottle that was now his life.
This was Ralph’s city. The ‘was’ indicating the past tense and the late forties. He had been brought up in George St. Kingsland. It was the back shed there that had been the key to his future. He had studied mechanical engineering at Auckland Uni and had to wonder now what had governed this choice. His passion at the time had been for electronics and Ham Radio. With the Second World War just concluded the market was flooded with surplus equipment and Ralph’s Mecca had been a shop near the top of Pitt Street. Radio gear that would have cost hundreds to manufacture was now at throw-away prices and within the reach of even the slimmest budget. True, it had needed some serious adapting for Ham use but that was what enthusiasts world-wide were doing and having to do. Commercial manufacture for Ham Radio had yet to gear up for the peace.
Ralph had seen this as an opportunity. The same gear, English and American, was readily available in many other parts of the world and hundreds, maybe thousands, of others would be
LOOCAL BOY. Page 2 wanting to adapt it. Why should they have to work from scratch? He enjoyed working on problems.
He had begun to write articles on the adaptation of popular pieces of gear and have a friend take photographs at each stage of the work. The articles were accepted by an American hobby magazine with distribution in most English speaking countries. They had their own staff writers but the articles were something that was needed at the time and Ralph had the happy knack of giving a coherent explanation of often-complex procedures within the restrictive compass of a magazine article.
The articles had brought him an undeserved reputation and the mail had begun to bring questions from various parts of the world on matters that were well outside his expertise. Had there been an internet in those days, he’d have been found out immediately but snail-mail gave him the time to do some research or at least ask someone who knew. It was fortunate that he was still at university. It had proved a great learning experience.
Then he had received mail of a different kind. A work offer from Anaheim. Harben Manuals provided instruction manuals for the manufacturers of the increasingly complex technical equipment. It required not only a good technical understanding but also the ability to explain things clearly yet concisely. The readers of these manuals were often non-technical people. Assistance with the boat fare had been offered and Ralph had taken the opportunity to move into the wider world.
It was at Harben’s that he had become friends with Matt and with Matt’s wife Marilyn. Matt was another electronics magazine contributer who had quarried away in what amounted to his own back shed, the back corner of an Anaheim three-car garage. His major was actually in chemistry. He was ten years older than Ralph but his current back shed became Ralph’s back shed. Their ideas and dreams became joint ideas and dreams.
Solid-state electronics was burgeoning and germanium had almost been abandoned for silicon. What was now required was a standard of elemental purity not previously attained and certainly not to be attained in a back shed. But the ideas that the two bounced off each other had developed into
LOCAL BOY. Page 3 something that seemed surely just as applicable to the P and N dopants as to the silicon itself. There was no way that they could try the idea but their faith in the idea had led to their scraping up enough to hire a patent attorney. The patent when granted lay fallow for several years but preying eyes carefully monitor each new patent application seeking for their own advantage. The friends were alerted by a trade magazine detailing the fight between two international corporations who were each claiming that the other was infringing on its refining patents. But if it came to that, each of them was actually infringing on Matt and Ralph’s basic patent even though they had improved on it. How, though, does one fight big multi-nationals who have endless amounts of money and teams of legal jackals skilled at making litigation run on for year after year. Each would have investigated at the very first sighting of the patent Matt and Ralph’s ability to defend it and decided that they could safely use it. ’ They’re nobody.’ ‘No money.’ Justice is anything but free.
Marilyn had fixed it. It was the old story of playing Mum off against Dad. She had contacted each legal department pointing out that being licensed to use the original patent would be a distinct advantage legally to the one so licensed, the other corporations additional patents built on the original being then arguably worthless. Both sides had seen her point and made generous offers for a sole license. But they had had to be satisfied with both being licensed. And it came to be that they saw the sense of combining their additional patents. From then on their legal departments had an interest in preventing the unauthorized use of the basic patent by others.
Matt and Ralph had decided to run with another idea, air filtering and clean rooms for the fabrication of integrated circuits. They had their own ideas on improved air-filtering. At that time, only tens of thousands of transistors were being fabricated on a die but even then extreme cleanliness was important. Today, when tens of millions of transistors can be fabricated on a die the size of a dime, the individual features have become so small that a single dust mote can destroy thousands of transistors making a die worthless.
They had had serious need for start-up capital. Just because Matt was raised Orange County did
LOCAL BOY. Page 4 not mean that he had money. His mother had been housekeeper not house owner and had struggled to see that her son got a good education. Start-up capital in what may be risky technical enterprises is usually sought from Venture Capitalists rather than banks.
The trade papers announced that one such. Herman Vranges, would shortly be flying west to consider the propositions of some much larger players than themselves. Marilyn with a mixture of charm and guile had managed to pierce his protective thicket of underlings and talk to the great man himself. He had probably been impressed by her cheek and had agreed to come for a meal and listen to their proposal on his one free evening. It would be their responsibility to pick him up from his hotel in the better part of town. For Herman this was akin to slumming and a real coup for them.
The saying that ‘if anything can go wrong it will’ proved to be true in their case. It had to be the day of the city-wide late-afternoon to early-evening power outage. Matt had gone across town to collect Herman while everything was still working. The trip back was just so much more difficult. Traffic lights were out. Police were proving that they had lost everything that they had once learned about traffic directing. Traffic was treacle-slow with tempers close to ignition. The usual idiots were taking impossible chances to create more blockages or at the very least scraped fenders. Twenty minutes it should have taken but it took two and a half hours and Herman and Martin had arrived scarcely in condition for serious business discussion.
Power resumed as they arrived at the door. Not that this was much help. The show-piece meal that Marilyn had been planning for weeks still needed some hours of preparation. So that was out. A restaurant was out too. Restaurants would be having their own problems. Visitors could not be fed out of cans and yet it was going to have to be quick and simple. It was fortunate that Marilyn had done some marketing earlier in the day.
Herman was seated at the kitchen table with a beer in front of him while the other three decided what they could do with what was available and distributed tasks. Soon, the kitchen was humming with a rush of work and with conversation. It was mostly Matt and Herman who led the
LOCAL BOY. Page 5 conversation. What had been a tiring and frustrating odyssey back across town was somehow transformed into a hilarious adventure. Herman had a way with a story and, his beer finished, he was set to stirring a sauce to keep it from going lumpy.
Herman had been surprised at the quality of this off-the-cuff meal. He had been born to money, to servants, and it was his first time of actually seeing what happened in a kitchen. Perhaps the fact that he had also had a small part in the preparation made the difference. He had been impressed by the quick organization and the team-work. He was used to being courted and was a hard nut but this was a different approach. He had listened carefully to their proposal and had become interested and involved to the point of making suggestions for improvements from the business aspect. He had also told them that they should be asking him for more money than they were asking. And he had offered to be their mentor. They obviously needed someone. They were babes in business with not the least idea of what they were letting themselves in for. He knew people and had influence. As it turned out, the people that he had mainly flown over to see got nothing at all.
The first ten years or so had been hard and they would never have survived without Herman behind them. Then Herman had died just as they were beginning to see dominance in their field but he had had an apt pupil in Marilyn. Ralph knew quite well that he had never been a businessman. Neither had Matt. They were ideas men, good at solving technical problems, but without the necessary hunger and spring steel for business. They had been glad to leave that part to Marilyn.
They had diversified with clothing for clean-room wear. A single shed skin cell could cause a lot of damage. From there it was sterile clothing for operating theatres and the food industry. Overalls, hairnets, gloves, boots, the lot. They had taken a wild jump into the field of X-ray lithography which had been coming into prominence as circuit features became ever smaller. They had bought a failing company in that field and turned it around. Whether this was due to Ralph and Matt’s process improvements or to Marilyn’s business acumen would be hard to say. Perhaps the honours were shared.
LOCAL BOY. Page 6
But then Matt had died and, eleven months later, Ralph and Marilyn married. They had always had a high opinion of each other but their relationship had been chaste with a carefully maintained distance. One of the trade papers had called it ‘a marriage made in Wall Street’ and it was true that it brought the ownership under one roof but it was far more than that. It had been a very successful marriage in every way and had lasted for decades until Marilyn’s recent death.
With her gone, Ralph had seen it as the time to get out. It had been a glorious game, the making things happen that had not happened before, making the seemingly impossible possible. Now it had palled. Accountants and lawyers back in California were working on breaking up the group and, if possible, making its units open to employee buy-out. There were any number who deserved this leg-up. He would leave money in to make it easier.
He had not realized how much he had related who he was with what he did. The question being, who was he now when divorced from the business? He felt hollow now. Why had he come back to Auckland? What had he expected to find here? The young man who left all those years ago?
This was not the Auckland that he had known. It was not just the newer buildings. There were still many that he remembered with affection. It was the whole ambient of the place that had changed. In the last few days, he had walked over every part of the central area. It just felt different. Wrong somehow!
He had walked over to George Street and had found that his old short-cut was blocked by a confusing tangle of motorways and off-ramps. He had had to go the long way round via Symmonds Street. Not that he had minded this. He had always been a walker. Neither he nor Marilyn had ever learned to drive. There had been cars and drivers at their immediate disposal but they had always preferred to walk if the distance was not too great. People had thought they were mad. The old George Street house and most of its neighbours had given way to commercial buildings. That had been another disappointment.
In the old days, the only time he had not walked was when he had some heavy new prize from
LOCAL BOY. Page 7 the Surplus Shop. Why carry it home when a tram could take him and it to New North Road and George Street for pence.
“Trams! Why did you ever get rid of the trams?” He was asking it of Auckland and, inadvertently, aloud. The ‘wino’ gave him a look that said ‘bloody dingbat’ and took off for somewhere safer.
It was time that he found a coffee somewhere after which he’d maybe wander up to Albert Park. There was really no maybe about it. It had been his lunch-time magnet every day while he’d been here. The university students would be there in force as they were on any fine day. In the late forties he would have been one of them. There at least, nothing seemed to have changed. Queen Victoria looked exactly as she had always looked. She was still the favoured place for pigeon droppings and it occurred to him that she was probably not amused.
He had thought that he might come home here in retirement but could see now that it wouldn’t work. The old gang was gone. No-one here knew him. Even the business pages had failed to notice a local boy’s return. He had no-one here. He didn’t belong.
But then, he had no-one anywhere. Acquaintances he had in plenty but acquaintances were not enough. Matt and Marilyn had had no children, Matt the problem apparently, and Marilyn had been somewhat beyond childbearing age when he had married her. He had no children, no step-children, and it was too late to rectify this. But a wife was possible.
Though even there, there were difficulties. Marriage-failure statistics suggested that a good wife was a rare thing and another Marilyn not to be thought of. There were any number of agencies claiming that their computers could come up with the perfect match. There were even many that catered for the older age group. But how could they–or you–know that she would love you for yourself alone? That she wasn’t bringing a load of emotional baggage with her! Trying to escape from something! Trailing a string of failed marriages! That she wasn’t just looking for a meal ticket!
This last was a very real problem for one with a net worth of close to a billion dollars.