Gaye LeBaron: The man behind Sonoma County’s first tech company

We eagerly await the publication of Don Green’s memoir. The man widely regarded as the founding father of Telecom Valley (as well as the Green Music Center) tells of his remarkable life in a soon-to-be-published book. I got a sneak peek at a part of it last week. In many ways, it is an adventure story.

No surprise. When you think about it, the lives of these high-tech wizards that surround us are all adventure stories.

High-tech is an omnibus term for a multitude of abrupt changes in our culture over the past 75 years.

For Sonoma County, tech is one of the “big three” - the other two being wine and tourism - which keeps the money rolling in and the unemployment rate below average.

Rolf Illsley, the one who started all the tech talk around here more than 60 years ago, certainly has an adventure story.

Illsley, who will be 95 next month, started the county’s march toward technology in 1951 when he rode his motorcycle across the United States, aiming to find a place to relocate his company.

Illsley has told me the OCLI story before, about 20 years ago, and he came to visit me again last week to talk about his life. He should have written a book.

OCLI stands for Optical Coating Laboratory Inc., a four-partner startup in Washington, D.C., that manufactured thin magnesium fluoride coating for military lenses. And, in Illsley’s estimation, a myriad of other uses still to be explored.

But the company lost its capital investment in the first year of business and three of the partners opted out, leaving Illsley as sole owner. So he made a bold move. (Bold moves, you will find, are common in the stories of these tech adventurers.)

He climbed on his Velocette motorcycle and headed west. He was 30 years old, a Navy veteran with a degree in - not engineering, not even close - agricultural economics.

“I headed for the California coast,” he told me last week, with a trademark grin, “because the ground didn’t freeze, so I could always dig for roots if all else failed.”

He had no specific destination in mind. He was just “looking around.”

Destiny overtook him in a motorcycle shop in Oakland, where he had stopped for an oil change. Making conversation, he told the shop owner what he was looking for. He had been to California during the war, he said, and he knew the coastal climate was mild, that there were a lot of small towns with friendly people - “Not New Yorkers, I knew the difference.”

“I also told him I wanted to be close enough to a large city for cultural advantages,” he told me. “The oil-changer listened to all this and then he said, ‘Sounds like you’re talking about Santa Rosa.’?”

“And I asked him “?‘Where’s that?’ I had a map of California taped to my gas tank and he walked over to it and pointed. And said, ‘There.’?”

HHHHHH

SO ILLSLEY headed his Velocette northward to what was then a town of some 18,000 souls. He rented a room in a boarding house near Ursuline High School, which was on B Street, next to St. Rose.

He went to the old stone Carnegie Library and read weather reports and rainfall figures and The Press Democrat, where he found the cost of land “was about $600 per acre.”

And he talked to people. “To everybody I met, waitresses, everybody. And they were all friendly,” he told me.

After two days of sociological exploration, he said, “I went to the Chamber of Commerce and told them, ‘Don’t try to sell me on Santa Rosa, I’ve already made up my mind. Just help me find a building to rent.’?”

He found one on Sebastopol Road, took his motorcycle to Ang Rossi’s shop on Davis Street for safekeeping and went back to D.C.

There he and his younger brother found a discarded Maryland state forestry fire truck. They loaded it and a pickup with the coating equipment and headed for Santa Rosa.

The die was cast.

HHHHHH

What happened in the decades after that old fire truck hit town is difficult to summarize in the space allotted.

The OCLI saga played out over the next 45 years, starting modestly enough with military contracts based on the D.C. model.

The company’s public profile was raised to a new level in 1962 when John Glenn orbited the earth, looking out through windows coated by OCLI.

Sonoma County neighbors paid more attention, and eagerly invested in the first public stock offering.

The company subcontracted for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory’s laser project and navigation optics for Honeywell and Boeing, as well as air-to-surface missiles for Hughes. (The missiles put OCLI on the peace demonstration radar and raised Illsley’s ire, resulting in his first public statements about the prospective damage to the county’s economy by the anti-nuclear initiatives.)

By 1984 the company was installed in a sprawling campus off Stony Point Road and was tagged by a PD business writer as “the largest company of its kind in the world.” Its 1,100 employees made it the second-largest private employer in the county, behind Hewlett-Packard, which came in the 1970s.

OCLI produced spinoffs in the ’70s and ’80s, some successful, some not so much. Work was done on coatings used on everything from space shuttle windows to glare-reducing screens on computers. And, lest we forget an important moment, a technical Oscar for the multi-layer anti-reflective coating for movie cameras.

In 1985, OCLI began development of an anti-counterfeiting coating for the Federal Reserve Bank, to be used when new currency was introduced.

On the road to success, the stock had its ups and downs. When the 1984 story was written shares were selling for somewhere around $1.25. You might want to keep that number in mind.

An ’80s story that Illsley still tells with obvious pride is the tale of what John McCullough, who was OCLI’s executive vice president, calls “The Alpine Invasion.”

In the takeover-happy business climate of the decade, OCLI became a target of a New Jersey firm called Alpine Group with insurance company backing.

“We had $50 million in cash and no debt, so we were a target,” McCullough recalls. “Rolf liked to keep money on hand for research and development. We used that money to buy back stock very quickly. That, plus an appreciable one-day dip in the market - you could call it a one-day crash - affected the big insurance company that was funding Alpine and the takeover collapsed.”

For Illsley, it was a matter of facing down Wall Street. It’s clear that he still enjoys telling that story.

HHHHHH

Illsley retired in 1991 and Herb Dwight, a Silicon Valley exec, was hired to guide OCLI into a brave new tech world. (It should be noted that the Dwight family became an important part of our landscape, as creators of the Pepperwood Preserve.)

It was a fiber-optic company called JDS Uniphase that stepped up in 1999 with an offer for OCLI, one of three companies JDSU acquired by 2000.

OCLI’s slow-moving stock soared, rising as high as $153 before the tech bubble burst.

For OCLI employees who had benefited from Illsley’s extremely liberal stock plans (and who moved quickly to sell the new company’s stock) it was a bonanza - another source of pride for Illsley, who talks about “our telephone receptionist who became a millionaire.”

But JDSU’s acquisitions and mergers ended abruptly with the telecom meltdown and its stock dropped from the $150s to less than $2. The company split last summer into two companies. One of them, Viavi Solutions, still in the old OCLI quarters but headquartered in Milpitas, supplies the anti-counterfeiting coating for currency that Illsley’s firm developed in 1985.

A “child of my idea,” he told me last week, pulling out a new $100 bill to show me how it works.

HHHHHH

One of the things I find most interesting about this story is that Illsley was not even remotely a scientist. But he was gifted with the good sense to know what he did not know.

The technical knowledge in the company had gone with the partners who had dropped out. He knew he couldn’t hire a headhunter or pay big money, so he set his sights on the young and promising.

The three he spoke of admiringly last week, who came to him fairly soon after their college years, were John McCullough and Gene Michel on the business side and Joe Apfel in research and development.

Michel hands credit back to Illsley.

“Rolf somehow got the people together who knew how to do it, and marshaled the authority to lead them, which was not an easy task.

“He liked to be out in the plant, where the work was being done. He didn’t call people to his office. He went to them. He liked to say he was ‘carrying the matchbook’ looking to light a fire where necessary, metaphorically speaking, of course.”

HHHHHH

These tech leaders like Illsley and Green and his partners (including John Webley, who is now with Green in a worldwide venture to desalinate sea water) are not a fraternity. Many have never met. Their science, their products, their business interests are so diverse. But the benefits from their creativity stretch far beyond personal wealth.

Illsley is justifiably proud of what he wrought - not only for industry but for “OCLI family.”

Green’s soon-to-be published memoir reveals his pride in the Green Center.

Meanwhile we Luddites stand in awe of their adventures and accomplishments and regard them as an algorithm for change.