Return to the Little Kingdom

by Michael Moritz

  BOOMTOWN BY THE BAY

  Bulldozers and steam shovels lurched about the quarry, tearing tawny scars across a cheek of the hillside. The machines sent plumes of dust into the air above the southern end of San Francisco Bay. Large wooden placards declared that the equipment and quarry belonged to the Kaiser Cement Company. The earth in the dumpsters was going to form the substance of the towns that were being built on the plain that spread below the quarry. The trucks rumbled by rolls of barbed wire, coasted past signs that warned of a steep incline, tested their brakes, rolled onto a country lane, and negotiated the thin bends and chuckholes that led toward Cupertino, a village that was trying hard not to become a town. From the quarry gates, on those weekday mornings in the mid-fifties, the position of the crossroads that formed the center of Cupertino was revealed by the cylindrical shapes of some clay-colored feed and grain silos.

  In the fifties the Santa Clara Valley was still predominantly rural. In places the greenery was broken by splotches of buildings. From a distance it looked as if someone had spilled small loads of garbage that had then been smeared and raked across parts of the valley floor to form a string of small towns that worked along the plain between San Jose and San Francisco: Los Gatos, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Los Altos, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Redwood City, San Carlos, Hillsborough, Burlingame, and South San Francisco.

  Most of the towns still had the manners and style of the thirties. The buildings rarely rose over two stories. The automobiles could park at raked angles on Main Street. Corners were frequently decorated with a State Farm Insurance office, a gas station, a branch of the Bank of America, and an International Harvester franchise, and in towns like Cupertino there had been, not so long before, concerted campaigns to lure a permanent dentist and doctor. The center of the world was immediate: a town hall built with terra-cotta tiles in Spanish mission style and flanked by a library, police department, fire station, courthouse, and stumpy palm trees.

  But the towns were separated by all sorts of differences. Each had its own climate which grew warmer the farther away a town was from the San Francisco fog. At the southern end of the Peninsula the summer climate was positively Mediterranean and a little seminary that overlooked Cupertino could easily have been set on a quiet hillside in Tuscany. The towns had their own councils and taxes, their own ordinances and quirks, their newspapers and habits. There were mayoral elections brimming with the rumors and innuendo stirred by a community where people, if they did not know the mayor, at least knew someone who did. And the towns were, of course, separated by jealousy and snobbery.

  The lawyers and doctors who built homes in the hills of Los Gatos said to themselves—with not a touch of jest—that the brains of San Jose slept in Los Gatos. The people who lived in Los Altos Hills looked down on the Los Altos folk who lived in the flatlands. Palo Alto with its gracious trees and Stanford University had an airy feel and a few electronic businesses started by former students. Towns like Woodside and Burlingame, set above the plain, had the tony touch of horses, polo games, and rigidly exclusive golf clubs. Burlingame had been home to the first country club on the West Coast. But the people who lived in nearby Hillsborough often gave their addresses as Burlingame for fear of being mistaken as parvenus. And beyond San Carlos, San Bruno, and Redwood City there was windy South San Francisco—an industrial footnote to the city itself—sited below the approach and takeoff paths to the San Francisco airport. Here was a clump of steel mills, foundries, smelters, refineries, machine shops, and lumberyards where the City Fathers had advertised their muscular temperament when they had authorized bulldozers to scrape in giant letters on the hill behind the town the slogan SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, THE INDUSTRIAL CITY.

  But now, right across the valley and especially around Sunnyvale, there were gaps in the orchards and signs of a new world moving in. Most of the trucks from the Kaiser Cement quarry were making for Sunnyvale. Draglines, cranes, and road scrapers were waiting for the concrete and steel that was being used to build the quarters for Lockheed Corporation’s new Missile Systems Division. By 1957 Sunnyvale was six times larger than it had been at the end of World War II and was beginning to qualify for inclusion in national almanacs. The municipal chatter had an energetic ring of tax bases, assessed valuation, building permits, zoning requirements, sewer lines, and water power. There were rumors of new businesses, speculation that one of the major automobile companies would decide to build a factory in Sunnyvale. As the fifties drew to a close, Sunnyvale’s Chamber of Commerce gleefully reported that the town’s statistics were hourly becoming obsolete and that a new worker was arriving in Sunnyvale every sixteen minutes of the working day. The publicity pamphlets said it was “The City with the built-in future” and “Boomtown by the Bay.”

  The newcomers to the city that was “reaching high” and “pacing the future” were part and parcel of America’s push toward a suburban way of life. The homes were insulated from the bustle of a community and a store was a car-drive away. The houses themselves had an unmistakable Bay Area look. They were low-slung, single-story homes with roofs that were either flat or tilted slightly like those of a garden shed. (The real-estate salesmen said that young boys found it easy to recover their model airplanes from the roofs.) But from the outside it was the garages that dominated the facades, making the rooms look as if they were tacked on as after-thoughts. The large metal garage doors seemed like the obvious entrance.

  Brochures told of radiant heat, “the modern and healthy way to heat a house,” of wood-paneled walls, cork and asphalt tiles, hardwood kitchen cabinets, and large closets with glide-in doors that “swing with the greatest of ease.” What the pamphlets didn’t say was that the local fire departments joked that these combinations of posts and beams would burn to the ground within seven minutes—and that the black community was isolated on the wrong side of the Southern Pacific railroad tracks and the wrong side of the freeway.

  Most of the families who moved to Sunnyvale were lured by the prospect of jobs at Lockheed. Many were careful and studious. They asked the real-estate agents where the rumored freeway—Interstate 280—might run and checked the projected route on maps at the Sunnyvale City Hall. They asked friends for recommendations on schools and were told that Palo Alto and Cupertino had the best reputations along the entire peninsula. There was talk of enterprising teachers, federal grants, experiments with new math, and open classrooms.

  They visited the school district and found a map that pinpointed the existing schools and revealed where future schools might be built. Then they discovered the eccentric nature of the boundaries of the Cupertino School District: They didn’t have to live in Cupertino for their children to attend the Cupertino city schools. The school district included parts of San Jose, Los Altos, and Sunnyvale, and the fortunate houses sold at a premium. In a few places the boundary even divided houses.

  Jerry Wozniak, an engineer in his mid-thirties, was one of thousands to be recruited by Lockheed at the end of the fifties. He, his wife, Margaret, and their three young children, Stephen, Leslie and Mark, settled in a home in a quiet Sunnyvale subdivision that lay in the catchment area of the Cupertino School District.

  At the other end of the Peninsula, in the Sunset District of San Francisco, Paul and Clara Jobs adopted their first child, Steven. Often during the first five months of his life they wheeled their baby under the imitation nineteenth-century streetlamps, over the tram tracks, and across the beach in the shadow of the damp sea wall, the fog, the pewter skies, and the gray gulls.

  SUPER SECRET SKY SPIES

  Hush-hush, super-super, top-secret Lockheed became synonymous with Sunnyvale. As the missile division grew during the late fifties it changed the scale of business in the Santa Clara Valley, more or less turned Sunnyvale into a company town, and helped propel the community toward the fringes of mystery. Lockheed came to be talked about as a place where the subjects of science fiction had been reduced to everyday occupations. Lockheed was woven into the weft of the na
tional space program and, in Sunnyvale, aspects of Discoverer, Explorer, Mercury, and Gemini came to be as familiar as the names of some of the astronauts. It would have been easy to believe that H.G. Wells worked in Lockheed’s public-relations department, batting out bulletins on a never-ending source of marvels.

  There were rumors of a laboratory that would simulate conditions in space, of a tape recorder small enough to be held in the palm of the hand, and of “Hotshot,” the strongest wind tunnel in private industry. Teams of Lockheed engineers were investigating a special fuel cell to power spacecraft, and were drawing up plans for a prefabricated, four-hundred-ton manned space platform shaped like the wheel of fortune. There were also more sinister rumors. Some Lockheed engineers were known to be working on an intermediate-range ballistic missile known as the “super-secret Polaris” and a “sky spy,” a “super-super” secret earth satellite armed with a television camera that could peep at the Russians. The company proudly disclosed that its space-communications laboratory picked up seven minutes of the first journey of an Explorer satellite and also boasted that its dish-shaped radio telescope could monitor twenty satellites simultaneously. There were other reports of an astonishing electronic computer installed at Lockheed that was supposed to have the intelligence of a human but could also play a sly game of tic-tac-toe.

  So when in 1958 Jerry Wozniak began working at Lockheed, he was joining a company that, at least so it seemed to the outside world, had large ideas. A meaty man with a thick neck and large forearms, Wozniak had been strong enough to play offensive tailback on the football team at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena where he studied electrical engineering. After about a year working as a junior engineer at a small company in San Francisco he had quit and together with a partner spent twelve months designing a stacking, packing, and counting machine for raw materials like asbestos sheeting. But the pair had run out of money before completing a prototype, leading Wozniak to conclude: “It was probably a good technical idea but we didn’t understand what it took to put a business together.”

  After graduating from Cal Tech, Wozniak had married. His wife, Margaret, had grown up on a small farm in Washington State and had spent a college vacation working as a journeyman electrician during World War II at the Kaiser shipyards in Vancouver, Washington, installing wiring on baby flattops as they rose on the ways. Eventually her parents had sold their spread and moved to the warmth of Los Angeles. “California,” Margaret Wozniak had thought. “That was the greatest place in the world.” But with the failure of Jerry’s business fling and the arrival of their first son, Stephen, in August 1950, the Wozniaks were drawn back into the grip of corporations. For several years they traveled around the Southern California aerospace industry, which had been grafted onto the tumbling tricks of the early aviators. And like thousands of other families, the Wozniaks soon associated towns like Burbank, Culver City, and San Diego with companies like Lockheed, Hughes Aircraft, Northrop, and McDonnell Douglas. For a time Jerry Wozniak worked as a weapons designer in San Diego, later helped build autopilots for Lear in Santa Monica, and bought his first house in the San Fernando Valley before the guiding lights at Lockheed decided to form a division in Sunnyvale.

  While his children spent months playing in cardboard houses made out of Bekins moving cartons, Jerry Wozniak grew accustomed to the rhythm of the short commute that took him to Lockheed. “I never intended to stay at Lockheed very long. I intended to move to the area first and settle down later.” The company kept its distance from family affairs. Lockheed was hidden behind shields of security clearances, special passes, uniformed guards, and barbed-wire fences. About the only time children glided through the company gates was when the general public was invited to watch the aerobatic stunts of the Blue Angels over the Independence Day weekend. When Jerry Wozniak had to collect work from his office on Saturday mornings, his children stayed in the car surrounded by the vast parking lots painted in flat, herringbone patterns. Lockheed was like an elderly aunt who wanted children to appear only for dinner.

  When Jerry Wozniak brought his work home in the evenings and over the weekends and settled down in the family room with sheets of blue-lined grid paper and drafting pencils, he was usually concerned with designs that took full advantage of the miniaturization of electronic components. Inside the Missile Systems Division Wozniak worked on the attitude-control system of Polaris and slightly later on a proposed scheme for using computers to design integrated circuits. Later still he worked in an area known as Special Projects which, he told his children, had something to do with satellites. So Jerry Wozniak was in a position where it became part and parcel of his job to read trade journals, plow through conference proceedings, flip through monographs, and generally keep abreast of developments in the world of electronics.

  While the satellites designed at Lockheed were engineered to travel millions of miles, the orbits of Lockheed families were more circumscribed. The Wozniaks never took long vacations. A holiday was usually a Christmas or Easter trip to visit grandparents in Southern California. There was the occasional dinner out, a trip for brunch to Sausalito, an outing to a San Francisco Giants baseball game, but for the most part the center of their world was Sunnyvale.

  Jerry Wozniak was as keen about war games and sports as he was about electronics. He spent hours in the backyard tossing baseballs with his sons and became a coach for The Braves, a Sunnyvale Little League team. But most of all he looked forward to the Saturday morning golf foursome he played with neighbors at the nearby Cherry Chase Country Club—a grand name for a club where, to play eighteen holes, golfers circled the same course twice. Here, too, Wozniak senior and Wozniak junior won a father-and-son golf tournament. Sunday afternoons were devoted to televised football games.

  And for the Wozniaks, as for thousands of other California families who raised their children in the sixties, swimming was the sport of primary interest. The nearby Santa Clara swim team earned a national reputation and swimming quickly turned into something more than a pastime. It was a sport, the elder Wozniaks thought, that could be used to instill a sense of team spirit, of competitiveness, and individual achievement. They enrolled their children in the Mountain View Dolphins.

  Margaret Wozniak was a woman with very definite ideas who didn’t hesitate to let her children know what was on her mind. When she lectured them about austerity they sometimes harked back to her wartime occupation and called her Rosie the Riveter, but Margaret Wozniak was something of a feminist before the term became fashionable. (“When I realized I wasn’t a person anymore I started to branch out.”) She became president of the Republican women in Sunnyvale—“I liked having friends on the city council”—and occasionally enlisted the help of her children for humdrum precinct work.

  The Wozniaks played classical records in the background, hoping that their children would be attracted to the subliminal levels of the music. But Leslie preferred teen pop magazines and the San Francisco radio shows she could hear on her transistor radio while her brothers preferred television programs with an element of intrigue like The Man from U.N.C.L.E.and I Spy and horror shows like Creature Features, The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits. The sci-fi rubbed off, along perhaps with traces of Lockheed’s secrecy and the staunch podium-pounding speeches of local worthies worried about the Communist threat. Stephen Wozniak wanted to start a top-secret spy agency at junior high school. “We were going to be so secret that we couldn’t even feel anybody else.” The Wozniak children kept an eye on a suspicious neighbor they were convinced was employed by the Russians.

  In Sunnyvale in the mid-sixties electronics was like hay fever: It was in the air and the allergic caught it. In the Wozniak household the older son had a weak immune system. When Stephen was in fifth grade he was given a kit for a voltmeter. He followed the instructions, used a soldering iron to fasten the wires, and successfully assembled the device. Stephen showed more interest in electronics than either his sister or his younger brother, Mark, who obs
erved, “My father started him very early. I didn’t get any of that kind of support.”

  Most of the neighbors on the Wozniak block were engineers. One neighbor who bought a home on the tract the same year as the Wozniaks never bothered to have his yard landscaped, but some of the local children discovered that he had run a surplus electronics store and would trade odd jobs for electronic parts. They weeded or scraped down some paintwork, kept note of the hours, and swapped their labor for parts. A couple of houses in the other direction was someone who specialized in radios, transceivers, and direction finders left over from World War II and the Korean conflict. One of Stephen Wozniak’s neighborhood friends, Bill Fernandez, said, “There was always somebody around who could answer questions about electronics.” The children learned to discriminate between the men’s specialties. Some were good on theory, some favored explaining things in math, while others had a practical bent and relied on rules of thumb.

  One man offered lessons to people who wanted to obtain ham-radio licenses. When Stephen Wozniak was in sixth grade he took the operator’s exam, built a 100-watt ham radio, and began tapping out his code letters. At one point electronics and politics merged. For when Richard Nixon was engaged in his 1962 California gubernatorial race Margaret Wozniak arranged for her son to offer Nixon the support of all the ham-radio operators at Cupertino’s Serra School. Even though Stephen was the school’s only bona fide operator, the ploy worked. Nixon and a stubby, crewcut. Wozniak appeared together in a photograph on the front page of the San Jose Mercury.

  Wozniak found ham radios more entertaining when they were modified and connected to friends’ houses. He rigged up wires attached to speakers to send Morse code from one house to another and discovered with his friends that if they talked into the speakers they could hear each other: “We didn’t know why but from that day we were into house-to-house intercoms.”