A Good Garage Is Hard To Find

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Be it ever so humble,there is no place like a garage. One-car or two, attached or detached, shingled or clapboard, the garage houses a panoply of objects that define mainstream American life: lawnmowers and ladders, bicycles and barbecues, even the occasional car.

To hear public relations people describe their business clients, the garage is also the wellspring of American enterprise; every great business endeavor, we are told, had its modest origins in a garage where the lone entrepreneur tinkered and dreamed.

Yet beneath the surface of this bit of business lore, a company's "garage" may turn out to have been a kitchen or den, an attic or basement, a barn or a tooished. A good garage, it seems, is hard to find.

But find them we did -- in a snow-covered suburb of Minneapolis and on the fringes of the Arizona desert, in the mountains of Oregon and on the Palisades of New Jersey. Stained with oil and laced with cobwebs, the humble structures on the following pages were incubators of companies large and small, public and private, producing everything from computers to cosmetics. This is the stuff that myths are made of.