If At First You Don't Succeed

I decided to finish college in San Francisco, in part to be closer to my dad. I wrote my first novel that year, and when it was roundly rejected, I felt more depressed than I ever had in life. On Morgan's recommendation I moved to New York -- "Everyone should live in New York at some point in their lives" -- where I wrote another novel and another. After three years working as a legal secretary, it occurred to me that I might never be anything else.

I tried to discuss this with my dad, but he was recently divorced from Carol, and in a state of frozen panic over the imminent demise of Laserpath. When Laserpath folded in 1987, the company was shipping product successfully to clients like Intel, IBM, Rockwell, Hughes, Honeywell, and Compaq. It also had an enormous marketing staff and a burn rate of $550,000 a month. According to Don Burke, the former teenage photographer who had joined my father at Symmetry and later at Laserpath, the company had tried to grow into a $100 million company way too fast. Or as Morgan put it, "We simply ran off the end of the runway."

When laserpath went under, my dad again retreated to Portland. He patented a new series of inventions, and set up a stripped-down company called Prototype Solutions, focusing on rapid chip prototyping and emulation. But I noticed a marked shift in his personality. His creative output remained at full throttle, but his running dialogue no longer referred to the big picture. The level of intensity with which he lived remained undampened, but his sense of scale had changed. It was as if he could no longer look the infinite in the eye.

The new company obtained a $1.5 million government DARPA grant and began developing a quick-turn, multichip module for the NSA. But again, the company was dogged by fundamental disagreements between Morgan and management. The real root of the problem was probably that my father's way of inventing things, which was to work on the fly, sometimes scrapping months' worth of work at a moment's notice, even changing the company's core product for another if that seemed to make sense during the course of a meeting -- frustrated his CEO, Stewart Elder, a brilliant ex-IBM lab director who was also one of Prototype Solutions' primary investors. Elder felt strongly that the company should stick to its guns. Period. To my father, the idea was always to change the world, not to start a company.

"The problem Morgan has always had," Don Burke says, "is that he's too good a salesman for his own good. His presentations are visionary, but they're also incomplete. And the people who respond to that tend to be incomplete themselves. He attracts people who are receptive to the cultlike aspect of his personality, the very thing that scares away the green-eyeshade guys, the get-things-done types."

The end of Prototype Solutions was less dramatic than the end of Symmetry or Laserpath, but it took far longer. The company still exists and holds a license on the original technology and is currently looking for funding. When Morgan finally walked away from Prototype Solutions the '90s were over and my dad was facing his 60th birthday.

By this time Morgan was married to wife No. 4. He had always been smitten with Judy, a former Yell Queen at Klamath Falls High School, but to me the two of them seemed to have nothing in common except the fact that they'd known each other all their lives. I felt that, by marrying a fourth time and starting and leaving yet another narrowly focused technology company, my father had turned into nothing more than a wind-up toy marching dumbly in place against a wall.

I also had married and divorced, and I did finally publish a novel. But the life of literary adventure I'd imagined for myself never materialized. I spent the majority of my waking hours struggling to make a living. And I had somehow become obsessed with failure: my own and my father's.

"I was given a million dollars within 20 minutes of walking in the door."

One day three years ago, my dad flew to Los Angeles, where I lived, so we could attend a microwave electronics convention at the Anaheim Convention Center. I didn't understand anything I saw or heard at the various booths; microwave electronics is one of the more abstruse branches of technology, and its denizens are wonky in the extreme. But my ears pricked up when I overheard two guys discussing the actress Hedy Lamarr -- not her role as the native temptress in White Cargo, but as a respected colleague.

My dad and I horned in immediately. "Didn't you know?" said wonk No. 1. "Hedy Lamarr holds the original patent on spread spectrum frequency hopping." In response to my blank stare the other wonk explained kindly, "You know, cell phones?"

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6  NEXT