1998 Annual Report
Art and Mary Fong
The arrival of springtime each year has a special meaning for Art and Mary Fong of Palo Alto--their wedding anniversary often lands on the first day of spring.
"We just celebrated our 56th," Mary says in the living room of their comfortable Parkinson Avenue home, next door to where they moved in 1947.
"It rained on our wedding," Art recalls. "That's a bad omen in Chinese culture, but it has never come true except--for my prostate cancer" in 1989.
Along the way they picked up four children (Sheryl, Wendy, Kevin and Darice), five grandchildren and a lifetime of experience--some of the quiet family and community kind and some of broad historical significance because of Art's distinguished career as a key engineer at Hewlett-Packard Corporation during its formative years. Art holds "professional badge" number 5019 at HP (David Packard had badge 5000, and William Hewlett had badge 5001), and joined the firm when it had fewer than 100 employees. Products he developed accounted for nearly 30 percent of HP's annual revenues by the mid-1960s.
The Fongs met at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was studying electrical engineering and she was studying journalism--"But I never worked as a journalist," she says. He was from Sacramento and she was a native of San Francisco. After graduation, Fong was drawn into World War II by way of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where there was a secret war laboratory. They moved to Boston after they were married in the war-clouded spring of 1943.
"For awhile she didn't know what I was doing at MIT," Art recalls. "I was supposed to keep my mouth shut when I went home. It was all secret and confidential." But she soon got a job working in a library document room at MIT, "and she had access to more classified documents than I ever had," he recalls.
"We were working on radar," he says of his then-secret duties. "One of our primary objectives was to develop a radar so we could bomb at night," when the Germans would move most of their war supplies to avoid daylight raids. "After the first (night) raid, there was a big celebration at the lab. We just went wild because we did it, and the Germans didn't know what hit them because we could see them in the dark. The planes were able to see the trucks on the roads, and where the factories were. That was sort of the beginning of the end." After the war, Fong remained at MIT to complete a summary report.
One day he got a telephone call from William Hewlett, who had served in the Army Signal Corps (Packard stayed in Palo Alto) and was then recruiting bright engineers for the fledgling firm.
"He just called on the phone and said, 'I would like to talk to you.' So I invited him to dinner that evening--I committed Mary to cooking dinner for us. He loved children and the first thing he did was bounce Sheryl, not quite a year old, on his knees. But we mostly talked shop."
"He was still in uniform when he came over," Mary recalls.
"We chatted all evening about how we would do things--some new ways, and some ways I thought of, and some of the ways he had thought of. It was a one-uppance kind of thing," he recalls, noting he had developed a volt-meter that was more powerful than HP's (see photo).
"Finally, at the end of the evening, he said, 'Art, we would like very much to have you come join our company.' And I looked over at Mary and said, 'Sure.'" Fong forgot to ask about salary until the HP treasurer asked him what he wanted. "So I gave him a big number--about $350 a month," Fong recalls. "My paycheck that afternoon was $420, a 20 percent raise to start with."
They moved to Palo Alto at a time when Asians weren't welcome in many neighborhoods, but they located one with congenial neighbors, purchased a lot and built their first home in 1947--and became Palo Alto Clinic patients. "Dr. Richard Cutter was the children's doctor, and Sid Mitchell was our physician. When Sid retired, I latched onto Dr. (Calvin) Brenneman and have been with him ever since. He was just a young fellow then, of course that's the advantage of choosing a young fellow for a doctor. When I had my prostate cancer, Dr. (James) Bassett did the surgery, but Dr. Brenneman showed up almost every day, even though he didn't have to."
At HP, the engineers were allowed some time to pursue their own interests. "I had always wanted to build a police radar," Fong recalls. The result was a unit that resembled a small satellite TV dish of today, and they tested it successfully on unpaved Ash Avenue just south of Oregon Avenue. But HP never put it into production for a simple reason: "Hewlett came out and looked at one and says, 'This is a lot of fun, Art, but I don't think we want to be in the business of measuring the speed of a car.' He was a fast driver," Fong recalls from personal experience.
The Fongs spent 1970-72 in Japan, a rewarding experience during which Art--having just returned to school at Stanford to study the emerging field of digital technology--began to digitize impedance-measuring devices, creating an instant "touch and read" measurement to replace cumbersome, temperamental older systems. The technology has been instrumental in the success of Silicon Valley manufacturing of computer chips.
Back in Palo Alto, he worked on satellite receivers for television, which became a staple for educational programs beamed to remote regions of the world: "They would present a program showing how a tree grew, and some Eskimo kid probably had never seen a tree," he chuckles. But the technology only began to flower in the early 1990s, more than 20 years later"--It usually takes about 20 years," Fong says.
Fong's 1989 surgery focused his and Mary's attention on health care. They earlier had given to Stanford and UC Berkeley, but "we decided we would help with the building program for the Medical Foundation's new campus," Fong recalls. "So I walked into Dr. Jamplis' office and said, 'Here's some Hewlett-Packard stock,' and every year we've been giving HP stock. It's payback time," in a way that will benefit the community for many years, he says. They also serve on a PAMF planning committee for a community open house for the new campus.