If At First You Don't Succeed

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As a small child, I lived in a world of continuous invention. Nothing my family ate, wore, read, thought, or slept in could be remotely described as "normal," "cookie cutter" or "readymade." We lived on a tugboat instead of in a house. My mother decorated the ship's head with a bolt of paisley cloth, laminating it over every square inch, including the inside of the claw-footed tub. There was some fabric left over, so we all ended up with clothes that matched the bathroom.

Shortly after my brother Din was born, my father was hired as the design director for Jack in the Box and we moved to San Diego for six months, where the paisley-clad four of us zoomed around town on a baby-blue Vespa. Gene Allen would have loved it. At night, we watched Star Trek in its original run, a program that excited my dad about the way the world was turning out, until the show was suddenly canceled. A lot of things my dad got excited about would be suddenly canceled.

My parents split up when I was five. We had come back from San Diego and settled again in Portland. My mother kept us kids, along with the graphic design business she and my dad started (and which she still runs today, 30-some years later), while my father abruptly moved to New York City with a modern dancer named Barbara.

I'm sure there was ill feeling around the fact that before the ink had dried on the divorce papers my father essentially ran off with a hoofer. But it wasn't an acrimonious divorce. My mother, one of the steadiest and calmest individuals I've ever met, seemed relieved to have gotten off the Morgan ride after the first couple of hair-raising loop-the-loops. "It's impossible to stay mad at Morgan," she says now. "Everything he does is well-meaning. It's just that he's -- " she throws up her hands -- "he's Morgan."

I know what she means: Complaining about my father's vagaries would be like complaining that Yogi Berra doesn't make sense when he talks. When someone's flaws are also their defining and most seductive characteristics, you just have to accept the consequences.

"He holds 11 patents and has burned through several million dollars of other people's money."

The futurist, universe-shaping elements of my father's creative output had been growing ever since he took a college class from a disciple of the iconoclastic futurist Buckminster Fuller. In the weeks before Barbara and Morgan blew out of Portland, they lived in a one-room apartment in a building slated for demolition. In a fit of creativity, he delineated the future of mankind and the universe on the apartment walls. "I drew a dome around the moon and began to map out the parsing and cutting up of the sun for energy extraction," he remembers. "I converted the sun into a combustion engine and the whole solar system into a vehicle, then spelled out the chain reaction of humans as they moved though the galaxy, eventually consuming it." He also included a detailed description of what is now called nanotechnology, based on self-modifying DNA. A few days later, he and Barbara were watching the Apollo astronauts land on the moon from a borrowed apartment in New York.

Broke, Morgan wangled a job at JFN, then one of the world's largest corporate planning firms. When you're in your early twenties and your secret goal is nothing less than the colonization of space, it's easy to exude more confidence in the corporate world than one's experience warrants. The president of JFN, Doug Nicholson, was impressed enough to take a huge chance on Morgan, making him lead designer on the firm's top project: the trading floors for Salomon Brothers' new offices at No. 1 New York Plaza. "I was terrified," my dad recalls.

Even now, when he speaks of his New York days he can't quite believe he pulled it off. But he did. At a time when interior design still meant specifying a desk, chair, and credenza out of a catalog, he designed what were probably the first true electronic work stations, modular units that integrated multiple phone lines and internal wiring for computer terminals. He was a phenom. In addition to designing futuristic furnishings, he was known around the office for hijacking meetings with his gripping monologues about the direction of technology. Buckminster Fuller himself once visited the office, and sat listening for over four hours to one of my father's visionary rants, from the miniaturization of electronics to noninvasive medical scanning devices.

Brimming with arrogance and charm, my dad left JFN, and with funding supplied by Nicholson, started a spinoff called Symmetry Inc., where he was president and CEO. Symmetry was responsible for the design of a significant number of trading rooms between 1969 and 1971, including those of Oppenheimer, Lehman Bros., Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch. In 1971 my dad received an award from Industrial Design Magazine for a fixed-base chair that could swivel in any direction.

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