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"I Ordered an HP Missile Test System and Got a New Wife"

Larry Johnson, December, 2011

After graduating from Carnegie Tech in 1948, I spent a few years as a Research Assistant in the Carnegie Nuclear Center. Then in 1952, I went to work at the Bendix York (PA) Division in their Talos surface-to-air missile division. I was assigned to the radar simulator project which is where I worked on electronic test. After extended negotiations, I was able to talk HP into building a custom radar test system. In connection with that rather large project, I got to meet and know quite a range of HP people, from Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett, onward through Ralph Lee, Pete Lacy, George Mathers, and Howard Poulter. Needless to say, I was very impressed. And Bendix York Division was very fortunate that HP - whose lifeblood was a standard off-the-shelf line of electronic test equipment - was willing to undertake a serious deviation in the form of a fairly large complicated custom microwave test system.

So it happened that I met and got to know lots of very sharp HP guys, and they got to know me. Around the time when the project was nearly finished, my dear first wife Isabel - a Pennsylvania girl whom I had met and married when she was secretary to Dr. Ed Creutz, boss of Carnegie Tech's cyclotron project - died from the after-effects of cancer surgery. So there I was - heart-broken and kind of foot-loose, and looking for a change. Why not ask Dave Packard for a job? I said to myself, he must have a fair idea of what kind of guy I am - and I knew that California was a great place based on the WWII military service time I spent at the Presidio 6^th Army Headquarters. My Army tour interrupted the Carnegie BSEE and MSEE degrees. That Army time also included six months at Stanford studying electrical engineering. So one thing led to another; letters were exchanged, and I made an interview trip to Palo Alto over the Thanksgiving weekend of 1956.

After the interview there came a job offer, and by the middle of January I was on my way to Palo Alto. For about a year I worked in the engineering lab on microwave and oscilloscope stuff (my first workbench was in 8U right across the aisle from Russ Riley's). After a bit of work under Norm Schrock on one of HP's first oscilloscopes - the HP 150A - I was put in charge of the Bldg 8 plant's test department. One of my first chores was to recruit technically smart guys for that test group - the idea being that the about-to-be-introduced oscilloscope product line was going to necessitate expansion in the test area. I was told, "OK, Johnson, go out and recruit some guys. We'll place ads in the Denver and Chicago newspapers, and you'll go out and interview the promising responders."

We got responses, and I said, "OK, I can type so I'll do the letters to the guys I want to interview." "No way, just have that new gal who works for Eileen Dugan do the letters." "OK", I said, and it worked out just fine. Well the interviews worked, the job offers worked, and I took that new gal out to lunch. One thing led to another, and pretty soon we were planning a wedding and buying our first house.

And that's how Esther and I got together. We had 50+ wonderful years together, lived in three houses while we produced two wonderful children, who in turn have produced five wonderful grandkids (one of whom is now wearing funny white clothes in his Plebe year at Annapolis). Esther died in Oct, 2011.

Larry Johnson,
December 2011

Larry Johnson