Out On A Limb

Thirty years in the logging business taught Bob Praegitzer all he needed to know to launch his technology company.

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It all ended one day, with no fanfare. The trailers laden with Douglas firs that had rumbled past Bob Praegitzer's office stopped coming. There were no more lumberjacks swearing in their cabs, no more power saws buzzing in the yard.

Praegitzer, one of the most successful loggers in western Oregon, moved into a new building 1,000 feet down the road -- and, in effect, into a new century as well. After 30 years of felling huge trees, he was jumping into the high-technology business of printed circuit boards. It is an industry in which success depends on an exquisitely fine touch: Hundreds of circuit lines, each thinner than a human hair, must be etched onto a glass board. Instead of cumbersome axes and power saws, his instruments would be drilling machines accurate to within one-thousandth of an inch.

To his shocked bankers, who knew Praegitzer as a tough logging man, it seemed that the moon had reversed its orbit around the earth. It was one thing, they felt, to lend him money for timbering the mountain slopes. It was quite another to finance him in a business that they knew nothing about. "My banker," Praegitzer says now, "couldn't understand any business proposal that reached his desk without tree bark on it." His banker might have returned the barb. Unlike hundreds of other high-tech entrepreneurs, whose pedigrees reach back to the computer labs of Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Stanford University, Praegitzer knew almost nothing about the technology of his new venture.

Indeed, only a dizzying boom-and-bust cycle seemed to link logging and circuit boards. Fortunes in logging are made and lost on movements of the housing market. Makers of circuit boards, poised on the fringe of the electronics industry, are even more vulnerable. In the two years since he opened his new plant, Bob Praegitzer has learned much about this similarity -- the hard way.

Praegitzer, who is 53, prospered from the ups and downs of the logging business; he says that logging made him financially secure 20 years ago. Even so, he is not a man given to show. His only displays of wealth are his brown Porsche and the recreational vehicle that he drives to Palm Springs, Calif., or to the Oregon coast to angle for salmon. And although he employs three of his four children, giving them a start in manufacturing and custodial jobs, they labor under his expectation that they, like him, will be self-made.

Dallas, Ore., where Praegitzer grew up, is a universe removed from the high-tech whirlwind of Silicon Valley. Nestled against the Coastal Range 60 miles south of Portland, it is a rural community in which cows sometimes graze on front lawns. In the fall, one of Praegitzer's associates takes afternoons off to drive a combine.

Praegitzer's first job as a boy was on a local farm, where he earned the $70 he needed in 1944 to buy a green Model A Ford. Only 13, he fibbed about his age to obtain a driver's license. During the war, even a vintage Model A was impressive. "Anybody who drove his own car to school was a pretty big wheel," says Praegitzer with a chuckle. A school buddy, Vern Perry, remembers how they used their cars: "We chased girls and drank booze." But Praegitzer had a serious side, too. "When we were kids, there wasn't a lot of money around. Bob always wanted a better life, and he started working for it," says Perry, who now owns his own logging company in Dallas.

Bored by school and fired up by the idea of earning a living, Praegitzer dropped out at age 14, after the ninth grade. In those glory days of Oregon logging, sawmills hugged the road almost every mile, welcoming burly young men who could handle the huge logs in the yard. Again lying about his age -- this time to obtain a work permit -- Praegitzer got a job in a sawmill working on the "green chain," pulling cut timber off the line and stacking it.

Praegitzer became a boss at 18, and he has never forgotten the experience. Promoted to foreman of a mill work crew despite being the youngest of the group, he found that the men laughed at him when he gave orders. Frustrated, he went to the mill owner, intending to quit. "He said I should go out and fire someone, that if I wanted to be boss I should go fire George," says Praegitzer. "Well, it was a tough thing to do. I went out and told George that we didn't need him any more. From then on I was boss. It was a helluva good lesson in my life."

In 1951, at the age of 20, Praegitzer quit his job. "I decided that I couldn't stand to work like my father, going to work at the same place at the same time every day for 40 years," he says. "I needed a challenge." At the time, two uncles were cutting timber from a 450-acre tract near Dallas, and Praegitzer asked them for the rights to mill the logs. Commitment in hand, he and a partner from school days bought a small portable mill on credit for $1,500.

The partner sold out six months later to Vern Perry, Praegitzer's old buddy; together they borrowed another $8,000 to buy a much larger, stationary sawmill. The new mill was their entry into the big-time logging business, and the two men, still in their early twenties, invested all they had to increase their capacity by 40% in only two years. "We just worked hard and didn't spend much money on booze," says Perry.

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