1st Job

The first job I had out of high school was working for Rap-in-Wax  Paper Company, "Home of Waxed and Laminated Papers", in Minneapolis, as a paper tester.  So I know all about testing paper.  It paid 75 cents an hour.  I received an increase to 85 cents an hour 10 months into the job, so I was really moving up the ladder!   It was a quality control job where you went out into the plant and collected paper.  Rap-in-Wax Paper Company made bread wrappers, as well as the common household wrapping paper.  It was my job to go out on the production floor and obtain samples from the various waxing machines and printing presses.  These samples I then tested, as part of the quality control program.  My girlfriend, Dodie, asked me, “So what do you do there?”  I told her that I was the Chief Paper Tester.  One day , she called at work and said “I want to talk to the Chief Paper Tester”.  Believe me, the following month, I took a lot of gas from everybody at work about that!   I had a lot of fun there.

My first boss was a chemical engineer named Marvin Engelsby.  He was the head of the quality control department and I thought he was the smartest person I had ever met.  First of all, I’d never met an engineer before and I thought a chemical engineer must be a very smart person.  I think he ended up being vice president or president of the company.  I thought he was super.

In fact, as a general comment, I would say that as to all of the supervisors and people I’ve worked with in my whole career, I don’t think I ever worked for anyone I didn’t respect or like.  I never had that problem.

I was always excited about electronics, and I knew that I wanted to do something in electronics.  I didn’t know what electronics really was, except I knew that it was a fascinating field and I wanted to do that.

Most of the decisions that I made in my early life were impulsive and not well thought out.  It was always whatever my excitement led me to.  My impulse led me to quit that first job at the waxed paper company, for no reason other than my buddy and I decided to drive to California.  When we returned to Minneapolis I got a new job at Western Electric as a technician installing telephone equipment at central telephone offices.  This was my first taste of electrical work.  Once again, my impulsive nature steered me into new adventures.  Three months after hiring in at Western Electric, I had an accident at work, in which my tool box fell off a ladder I was working on and spilled all over the floor.  In anger and frustration, I picked up my tool box, walked out the door, then down to the military recruiting office, and joined the Navy. Because I scored well on the enlistment entrance exam, I was given the opportunity to attend the Navy Aviation Electronics Technicians School in Memphis Tennessee.  It was a 28-week school, during which time Dodie and I were married in the Navy chapel.

California Dreaming

When I came out of the navy in 1955 I was an officially trained electronics technician.  I went to work in Minneapolis for one year.  I had still not learned to control my impulsiveness .  I’m not sure how familiar you are with the climate in Minneapolis, but there are two terrible times with the weather in Minneapolis.  One is summer and the other is  winter!  It turned out that the winter of 1955-56 was particularly miserable. 

Around that time Lockheed was going through the whole country hiring on a blanket basis: engineers, technicians, and unskilled people, and moving them at government expense out to California.  The Lockheed recruiter came to Minneapolis in early March 1955, and he put a big ad in the Minneapolis paper that said, “Tomorrow, it will be 73 degrees in Los Angeles.”  The next day I went down to the Hotel Nicolete, to a suite the recruiter had set up, and I interviewed for a job.   A month later I got an offer to go to California.  

This was 1956, and we had one child, our daughter Patti.  Lockheed paid us $25 per diem each for all the time it took us to travel to Los Angeles.  They paid $25 per day for me, $25 per day for Dorothy, and $10 a day for our daughter, and 8 cents a mile for automobile expenses, plus money for accommodations.  And when we got to Los Angeles, we were given one week in a motel while we looked for a place to stay.  I mean now here was a guy who just 3-4 years before was making 75 cents an hour!  We jumped on the bandwagon and went to work for Lockheed.  And that was the beginning of my career here in California (at first in Los Angeles).  One year later, Lockheed relocated to Sunnyvale.  So they moved us up here to Sunnyvale in 1957.  I worked at Lockheed, in the antenna group, for 3 years. I started in ’56 and left there in ’59. 

Almost all the successes I’ve had in my career have come from following people who got fired!  At Lockheed after being there for 3 and a half years, our department manager got fired.   And he went to Philco.  Now Philco at that time was in Mountain View.  My department manager called me and told me that he’d gotten a job there as a section manager.  He called me and I went after him there and worked at Philco for about 10 years.  Now I had never gotten my bachelor’s degree, however in 1960, just by virtue of experience, I was promoted to engineer.  Then I worked at Philco from engineer, to senior engineer, to project engineer.  This went for a period of about 10 years.

Then I followed another move by my section manager to a company by the name of Vector Industries, owned by Teledyne.  I went there and worked for about 2 years and then Teledyne decided to have a company down in Los Angeles merge with us.  That company made electromechanical switches.  Our president said "John, I want you to go down there and bring them up here".  So I was flying down to Los Angeles every Monday morning and coming back on Thursday night for about 3 months, and I moved that company up north.  During that time I was also operating as engineering manager for this switch company.  I didn’t really know anything about switches, but I brought them up here and we went to Sunnyvale.  We renamed the company Teledyne Microwave, and then I ran that switch group for about 3 or 4 years.

Then an old friend of mine that I worked with at Philco was running an antenna company in Milpitas, and the name of the company was Structural Technology.  They made big antenna dishes out of fiberglass.  He said he wanted me to come up and be his operations manager, and I ended up running his factory.  I went out there and ran the factory for about 2 years. 

Then the board of directors decided that this company was going to merge with another company, which was called Spectra Electronics.  Spectra Electronics made oscillators.  We all merged together in Milpitas, and I was running this antenna group, and this other guy was running the oscillator group.  The problem was that, as much money as we made in the antenna group, the oscillator group was losing it.  So the president said "John, I want you to quit the antennas and take over this oscillators group".  I said, “I don’t know anything about oscillators.”  He said, “OK, but go ahead and do whatever you can.”  And I went up there and it was really a bad experience for me.  For one year it was a mess.  First of all, I determined that they had about 5 design engineers and none of them was worth a darn!  But the second thing I learned was that they had a very high-end product that was solid state broad band varactor tuned oscillators.  It was a very nice niche in the oscillator business.

So after I had been there for about a year, and really suffering that whole period of time, the president got fired by the board of directors.  They fired him and the next day I resigned.  They asked me well why are you resigning and I said, “Well, you just fired the only guy who could keep this thing together.” So then, the president of Teledyne Microwave, where I had previously worked, heard about this mess.   And he called me and he said "John, I want you to come back".  I said, “What am I going to do over there.  I don’t want to run that switch group anymore.”  He said, “Why don’t you come back and set up a product line.”  And I said, “Yeah, do I get to choose what product we go after?”  And he said, “Do you have an idea?”  I said, “I just spent a year supervising a group of engineers who were in a high-end oscillator market who didn’t know their rear from a hole in the ground, and I have an idea that if that niche were covered properly and you really worked at it, we could really make a bundle on it.”  And he said, “Come on back.”  And so I went back and set up a new product line there.

There was one engineer at the previous company that I thought was worth his salt, and I said, I’m gonna get that guy and have him teach me how to make oscillators.  So I got him over and he taught me what these oscillators were about.  We got a contract with Westinghouse with a very high-end oscillator system.  It was the ALQ131 program.  Somehow or another, the president and I went back to Westinghouse and presented our case and they bought it.  They gave us an order.  From then I developed this oscillator product line which I did from 1974 to 1983.  We changed it from a discrete design to an "MIC" (microwave integrated circuit) design, and created a microwave integrated circuit line. 

And then my president, and friend, Jim Mongillo, got fired again!  The guy that was his group leader (we were a Teledyne company) walked into Jim’s office (he had the president’s replacement waiting in his car), and canned him.  He gave him 5 minutes to clean out his office and he walked-in his replacement.

About a month after he left, I called him on the phone to see how he was doing.  I said, “You know Jim, years ago when I left the company, I talked to you and I said that if there was any way for us to do something on our own, I wouldn’t be leaving.  And you tried back then, but Teledyne wouldn’t go for it.”  So then I said, “Is now the time?  Should we do it?”  And he said, “Yes, I think now is the time.”   And that’s when he and I and 2 other guys, Pat McLaughlin and Nam Han, got together and started Radian Technology, which was the company that I ended up with.  That’s basically the story of my working life.