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.)
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: