If At First You Don't Succeed
How my father tried to reconcile his big ideas with a small-minded world.
Published July 2003
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLEThree years ago my father, Morgan Johnson, called me up cell phone to cell phone, in a state of feverish agitation. At the time he was in the process of dissolving yet another frustrated start-up company based on technology he had invented while drawing on a napkin at Starbucks. He had been keeping me posted on the debacle long distance, but this call had a different quality to it, and in one long rush he told me a story from his high school days, an incident he'd just unearthed from memory:
"I was in the hallway one morning, standing at my locker," my dad said, "when this kid named Gene Allen walked in the front door. Gene was a really quiet kid from the wrong side of town, a guy nobody thought much about. But he came to school that day in the most incredible garment I've ever seen in my life -- then or since. It was this black leather motorcycle jacket absolutely covered in zippers. And dangling on a chain from each zipper tab was a pair of dice. You couldn't buy anything like it, he had to have sewn the whole thing himself. You have to remember," my father continued, "the '50s weren't really like Happy Days. Guys who looked like Fonzie weren't cool at my school, they were outcasts."
High school for my father was in the southern Oregon town of Klamath Falls, a place where the teenagers could be as mean as the rattlesnakes they blasted out of the surrounding hills with homemade cannons on weekends. In K Falls, there was a "right" and a "wrong" side of town; even though my father wasn't an especially popular kid and showed no remarkable talents (in his senior year he was runner-up to "Most Typical"), his parents owned a chain of grocery stores and belonged to the country club and he had a hot rod, all of which put him on the right side. Not so Gene Allen. He came from a poorer family and had wisely managed to stay all but invisible until the day he wore the jacket to school.
"That's why it was so startling," my dad went on. "I remember looking at him and thinking, this is the most original act I've ever seen -- in fact, it might have been the only original act I'd ever seen. My next feeling was terror -- I was as afraid of the reaction he'd suffer, as if I were standing there in that jacket."
As Gene Allen walked into his first class that day, my dad fled, deciding to go home sick, he said, rather than witness the brutal scene that would surely take place. "I didn't want to be associated with the derision Gene was about to suffer...." His voice trailed off in unspeakable regret. The jacket, of course, was never seen again; Gene Allen's daring bid for recognition had been as viciously put down as my father had predicted.
My father left Klamath Falls and became an inventor, a life that can be explained almost entirely by this particular bit of personal history. It was as if, at that critical moment, Gene Allen's soul had been blown right out of his body by a hot gust of failure and humiliation, and had flown across Klamath Falls and lodged in my father. "It was my first experience of innovation," my dad said. "And the same thing that happened to Gene Allen that day has been happening to me ever since, over and over again."
Most people hold idealized images of the entrepreneurial version of the American dream: a moment of inspiration in an unfinished garage in California or basement in the Midwest that translates into a rich trajectory of 20,000-square-foot homes, generous donations to local hospitals, and a brilliant career. But the real story of an all-American entrepreneur is more checkered and haphazard than people who use zippers and spray pumps and integrated circuit boards on a daily basis dare to imagine.
The empty mediocrity Jack Nicholson embodied in About Schmidt is the dark side of the corporate, commuter paradise: a place where iron-clad job security and family harmony can be expected to sour. But the independent entrepreneur's dream of immense risk followed by equally immense reward has its shadow side, too, one that my dad and I have lived under for the past 40 years.
My father has all the elements of the wildly successful entrepreneur: a concoction of exuberance, irreverence, cockiness, and brilliance. All his life he's angered and annoyed people with his eccentric, impulsive behavior, yet kept them hooked by his talent, and even more so, by his brazen optimism. He holds 11 patents and has burned through several million dollars' worth of other people's money in a series of start-up ventures. But so far, large-scale commercial success has eluded him. Now in his sixties, he's banded together with a bunch of other old guys and mounted a last ditch campaign that seems, miracle of miracles, to be working. He's also started wondering about why it never worked before. So have I. And the answers we each came up with are a lot more disturbing than you might think.
