HP Memories

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My Years in HP Corporate PR, by Dave Kirby

- Part 1 -

My Early Years

Part I - Table of Contents:

1. My Early Years

Introduction

I have a British lineage on my paternal side. I know my family history from a comprehensive genealogy written by a Melatiah Everett Dwight in 1898, entitled The Kirbys of New England. Remarkably, it is still available on Amazon for $35, and also has been scanned so it is readable on the Internet. The story goes back to the Kirby family in a little village named Rowington, in Warwickshire, England. Dwight was married to a Kirby and was enamored with the Kirby family, prompting him to gather all that genealogy. I am fascinated by this detailed piece of work because without computers or anything else he was able to trace the whole lines of the family.

That Kirby family had two sons, one named Joseph, who in 1635, came with his brother to pre-colonial America. I don't think he was much more than the teenager. He settled in Hartford, Connecticut and later in Litchfield, which was a noteworthy town in those pre-Revolutionary years.

The Kirbys in the Revolutionary War

Go West Young Man

Uncle Eddie convinced my father that he ought to come out. This was long after the gold rush and things were still booming. He met my mother about the time of the Golden Gate Panama-Pacific Exposition, which would have been about 1915. My mother's Alma Murray, was a native born San Franciscan, one of three daughters, who came from Irish and French-Canadian heritage. They took up married life in San Francisco. This was after the big earthquake and the Exposition which included a mile of amazing temporary exhibit buildings, including the Palace of Fine Arts, on the West end of the city. My parents loved that exposition.

Dad had a younger brother, my Uncle Wayt, who also moved to San Francisco. Wayt was the hero of the family and a very charming guy. He played the piano and had a lot of talents. Unfortunately, he died of pneumonia fairly young. He had only been San Francisco for a short time.

My father was an accountant, working in the financial district. They had an interest in Marin County, although I'm not sure what caused this, because it was only accessible by ferry. But some friends, the Fergusons, in San Francisco, had bought a piece of land in the tiny city of Ross about 20 miles north over in Marin County. It was wilderness in those days, no Golden Gate Bridge. Of course there was ferry service across the strait to the Sausalito waterfront. The Fergusons bought an acre of land in Ross way up the hill looking westward. They encouraged my folks to buy some adjoining land which my Dad did. This was 1923.

Since there was no bridge, the main mode of public transit was an electric train, probably what we would call today, a light rail. It started in Sausalito and ran up through all those little towns of San Anselmo, Fairfax, San Rafael. My dad continued to work in the city, taking the train to the ferry to work. Considering the time it took his commute into the financial district, one might wonder why they didn't buy a place down the peninsula? The Southern Pacific commute line had been in operation, from San Jose, going right up into the heart of San Francisco. I'll never know why. Anyway, he bought the land and the contractor built a little house for a cost of $5000. It had two bedrooms and one bath, on the side of a hill which was pretty steep. There were two or three other families who lived alongside on the same land. It was right on the outskirts of Ross. Ross became very popular and later populated with wealthy people (not us).

Hello World, Here I Come

I was born Sunday, June 15, 1924, at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco. My Mother's doctor was Reginald Knight Smith, a popular obstetrician located in San Francisco, and well known in society. When you think about it, expecting a child and having to undergo a one-hour commute to get downtown, that must've been quite a worry for my mother. Scary. Not only that, our family never had a car, for all those years. Here we were up on the Hill about 15 minutes. from downtown Ross, which was on the electric train route. So I don't know how she got to the train to the ferry to the ferry building in San Francisco and then to her doctor? But I suppose there were cabs or street cars that did the trick.

I had one sibling, Joe. He was born in 1919. Joe became a very successful banker in San Jose. I grew up in Ross and went to elementary school there. My grade school was relatively small with about 200 kids. I rode my bike to school even though the hill home was tough-going to climb. There were only two high schools in the entire Marin County, San Rafael and Tamalpais High, in Mill Valley, which is where I went. I used to take the train to school. In the late 1920s, my dad's employer, a rice company laid him off. He soon found another accounting job in San Diego, so he moved our family down there for about a year. At that point, the rice business recovered and we came back to Ross.

When I think about it the fact that our family never had a car during my whole growing-up, this is quite remarkable. Of course, the Great Depression was in full swing. With my dad commuting every day it took him about 15 minutes. to get to the train to get to Sausalito to the ferry so even a one-way commute was between 1 to 1 1/2 hours. We became the greatest walkers of all time. The train went through all of these towns Kentfield, Ross, San Anselmo and as far as San Rafael. At San Anselmo, it split, with one line going to San Rafael and the other went westward to Fairfax. When I was in high school, I would walk down to Ross and catch the train down to Sausalito. There was a special train that veered off into Mill Valley, instead of the ferry dock at Sausalito.

Those years, of course, were the disastrous years of the Great Depression. I was just starting elementary school as the depression got underway in 1930. I entered high school in 1938, after the depression was under recovery. Our family was very fortunate that my Dad held a job in the financial district, and was able to maintain his salary and the job through that awful period. We weren't rich but we weren't hurting all that much either. He certainly had enough money to buy a car, but he just didn't do it. At the end of his office day at 5:15, there was a famous ferryboat that took all the wealthy commuters back home over to Marin County.

In those days every company worked half-day Saturdays. This was goofy, my Dad would get up Saturday, put on a coat and tie, walk down to the train in Ross, down to the ferry in Sausalito and over to San Francisco for three hours. And then reverse that to get home. It seemed strange to me, but that is the way the work culture was those years.

My Life Work is Discovered

I loved school, and many of my fond memories can be attributed to those years. Though my family lived comfortably, we had limited means. The community was quite wealthy, and the school reflected this atmosphere. For example, growing up I was a stutterer, although it lessened later in life. But at school, my fourth grade teacher worked with me to cure the problem. It always gave me some fear that I would have to make speeches. As I grew, and took on school publication roles, my confidence grew. I was a good student and got virtually straight A's throughout.

I Go to War

Any wartime mobilization is uneven and often unfair. One young man might be drafted, get 12 weeks of basic training and weapons familiarization and be in mortal combat in less than 6 months. Another young man might spend the entire war period farming or in a war industry like the Marinship shipyards, building Liberty Ships or tankers. Our WWII military leaders reasoned that the war would be won with science and technology, so they set up a number of educational programs to exploit the national brainpower. Colleges and Universities trained young people in accelerated programs like the Navy V-12 Officer Training efforts. In my case, I became aware of the Army's ASTP, Advanced Specialized Training Program, a schooling effort to utilize additional expertise before going to combat. So I enlisted into that group.

With our advanced training shut down, our company had all bright kids who were now riflemen and ready to go into battle as common infantry. I had buddies from Oregon State, Colgate and Yale and other similar schools, so these were really bright people. In the US, each company had two clerks because there was much more administrative activity with soldiers right in close quarters. I was the assistant clerk but once overseas there's only one company clerk, partly because most of the soldiers are away fighting and just don't need much daily paperwork help. At that time I was worried that the previous clerk would get recuperated and come back, but the clerk himself told me not to worry, because apparently he knew he wasn't coming back. He said I was going to be OK. I remember his name, Bill Fales, from Massachusetts.

By this time it's late 1944, and Eisenhower had invaded France and they had made good progress into Germany.  Our division was attached to the Third Army. Each company has about 187 troops. There might be three companies in a battalion and there would be about eight or 10 companies in a regiment. My company was then moved to North Carolina, possibly because they understood that with the invasion of Europe, they might still need more troops to complete the final push to Berlin. So we got orders to join 89th Division of the Third Army. In January of 1945 we left Boston on a troopship, bound for battle. When we landed in Europe at Le Havre, the 89th Division was already in Luxembourg.

The harbor had been bombed and the docks were still in terrible condition. So many ships were unloading that we had to come ashore in landing craft. So each soldier had a backpack and a duffel bag. But as company clerk, I also had a typewriter and a heavy box containing all the military records of 187 men in my company. Luckily my Top Sergeant, Charles DeWitt, came up and helped me get the stuff ashore. Trucks took us to a staging camp, 30 miles inland. It was bitterly cold, and no tents had been set up yet. Lucky for me, I shared a tent with the Top Sergeant, so we even got a wood stove for a few days.

The 89th Division had 15,000 people. We got into combat at the end of February, 1945. Recall that this was the time of the Battle of the Bulge, which took place over the period of Christmas, 1944, with the most significant battle being the siege of Bastogne. American air power was grounded due to several weeks of extremely bad weather. By the beginning of February, the front lines were roughly back where they were before the German offensive, although the Allies suffered serious casualties.  I remember that I've never been so cold in my life, and I was in a tent office.

The Battle of the Bulge

In operation up in the combat area, the other company clerks and I would get together every morning for a communications conference.  Since our related companies were spread out over a fair mileage of the battlefront, those distances sort of determined how many clerks made the meetings. It might typically be five company clerks at those meetings. It was a time when we exchanged information and helpful ideas. In a way, it was kind of like going to a regular day job, except we knew that our men were fighting in serious combat, and serious casualties were happening. Mine was company L and we had to handle all of the daily happenings. For example, there was something called a morning report, which was produced by the top Sergeant. This would include action occurrences such as one KIA, for killed in action, or one of WIA, wounded in action. The morning report was very brief. I also had to do all of the insurance reports after a soldier's death so that the family could receive the benefits.

In combat, there is just always a serious chaos going on, a lack of information, difficult communications, personnel being injured and killed and documentation required to keep the legal part of the Army running. Being in the company headquarters it was interesting to watch our officer corps in action. Of course the Third Army was under the leadership of General George Patton the well-known hard-nosed driving general who refused to order his troops to "dig in." His attitude was that if you keep moving, this denies the Germans the ability to dig in and cause even more losses. This was in contrast to Field Marshal Montgomery of the British forces who tended to take the cautious route. But by digging in he would lose the initiative to keep pushing the Germans back since their reserves and equipment and mostly their fuel supplies were causing their forces to more or less whither and fail.

Patton had this reputation, which we, his troops, all loved. The Germans were really afraid of him. They thought he was another Rommel and, in a real sense, he was. His commander, Omar Bradley, tolerated Patton's aggressive command, and his unit officers responded well to his leadership style. The head of my division was Maj. Gen. Finley. As our forces advanced, we would take over buildings like schools or auditoriums or industrial buildings for our offices. And we would occupy regular homes for billeting our officers.

Our occupying soldiers were ordered not to break anything in occupied buildings, but it's hard to control soldiers in the in a war situation. Some German families were really grateful to have us arrive and yet there were others who hated us. Which was pretty natural. We destroyed their cities and pounded them into smithereens. From our entry to battle to VE Day, I think in my company's 187-man roster, we had seven men killed and about 25 injured or wounded. Our company felt pretty good about our successes and experiences of combat.

Hitler ended up personally screwing up the Battle of the Bulge. He had hoarded his resources to make that big push, which he thought would demoralize our US troops. But then he ordered his German forces to advance too far forward such that the Americans were able to attack on his flanks and the surround very large numbers of his troops and crucial equipment. These losses just accelerated their failures on other battlefronts, and the Bulge loss was essentially the death knell of the German Western front.

The Germans had destroyed almost all the bridges across the Rhine River, but in an amazing move, Patton's troops saved the railroad bridge at Remagen. Its story became famous after the war. The Third Army flooded into Germany. Our headquarters would move up behind the front, but the army was moving fast, and we office guys had to keep up. At the end of April, 1945, our division had reached the Elbe River, near Chemnitz, and was ordered to advance no further. The Russian army had reached the other side of the river. When VE Day came on May 8, my regiment was in a pretty, undamaged town named Zwickau. We partied all night and could hear the Russians on the other side doing the same.

After VE Day, which was May, 1945, everybody expected that we now were headed to Japan. None of us were looking forward to that. But then the Hiroshima bomb went off and they didn't know what to do with our division. With VJ Day on August 15, and the end of both wars, they could not demobilize all at once, so they installed a "point system" for mustering out. You gained a certain number of points for time in uniform, for time in foreign country, time in combat, and those sorts of considerations. Most of us in my company had enlisted fairly late, and certainly came to battle late. The magic number for mustering out at that time was 44. I had 43, which seems like a pretty good number, but it seems that there were a million of us stuck at 43. In retrospect, it seems they might have picked the number 44 as the threshold to just keep the outflow to civilian life controlled to a manageable surge.

Several of us managed to get furloughs to visit England. We left on a ship from Le Havre, and arrived at Southampton, where a Liaison Officer told us that London would be a madhouse, but we decided to go anyway, and take a chance on hotels. London was delirious with celebration. We wandered among the crowds, and went over to Buckingham Palace. There were literally hundreds of thousands of people everywhere. The King and Queen and Winston Churchill were up on the balcony, waving to the crowds. and included two little girls, one of whom would become Queen Elizabeth. We spent several days in Scotland, before returning to duty.

The First Time I Saw Paris

You won't believe this, but because of my typing skill, I was sent to Paris. WOW! Paris, as a conquering "hero." The American government had made the decision that they were not going to repatriate all this war equipment back to the US. So the plan was to get rid of it here in Europe, however they could get it done. They set up a Foreign Liquidation Commission in Paris, which went looking for a large number of office clerks to handle the enormous administration. No computers in those days, everything was handled with manual forms and ledgers. I remember there were something like 300,000 condoms that we sold to Denmark. It was incredible. We were liquidating everything, from vehicles to all sorts of logistics supplies that a huge fighting army uses. There were no viable industrial companies to buy this stuff so we were selling mostly to governments and most often essentially just giving it away and documenting all those transactions.

I didn't come home until April of 1946, so I was in Paris about a half year. My job in Paris was rather remarkable, I used to walk to work every day under the Arc de Triomphe. We were in really upscale Paris territory. Paris had a museum called "Le Petit Palais." The American Army made a deal with the French for the Palais to become our barracks. If you could see these double bunks extended for a block inside the museum, it was incredible. Just to organize that kind of personal operation was remarkable since this required food operations, housing services, entertainment and the continuing discipline of soldiers who probably weren't all that happy to be in Paris, when they thought they deserved to be home. There were many other administrative operations required for an occupying army, in addition to the equipment liquidation. My best buddy in the 89th division did marry a French girl, as did other thousands who brought home such war brides.

I felt the German soldier was a first-class fighter. His training and his equipment were superior, in some ways, even compared to us Americans, and certainly to any other nation. The Russians depended on sheer numbers of troops, although by the end of the war they had produced some outstanding equipment like the T-34 tank. Some of their aircraft were extremely durable and well armed. Ultimately it speeded up the Russian drive west to take Berlin. The German soldier morale was excellent, probably driven by the fact that some of that their training started even back in the 1930s as Hitler took over and initiated cult-like programs like the German youth organizations. The marches and banners and propaganda was inculcated for years, and showed on the battlefield.

As far as a company clerk like me was concerned, we furnished a sort of centralized information center. The army had a general newspaper like the Stars and Stripes. Andy Rooney was a personality on the Stars and Stripes staff. We had teletypes that kept our company in the information and command loop. So we felt that we were performing a useful service for our own troops, who were carrying the brunt of the battle.

Back in the US, we entered a troop train for the 5-day trip across the country. One notable stop was North Platte, Nebraska, which had become famous for their little town hospitality. Every troop train that stopped there, day or night, for years, was met by local people, bearing pies, cakes, cookies and drinks. I mustered out at Camp Beale, near Marysville, California. I had been promoted from Private, First Class, to Tech Sergeant in just 2+ years, which was the rank between Staff Sergeant and Master Sergeant. I was proud of that.

Home from the War--to UC/Berkeley

All of my buddies and I arrived back in California about the same time, which was kind of neat. It was the spring and summer of 1946. We used to hang around Marin County bars and just enjoy our brand new civilian life. It was wonderful. Most of us talked about whether we were going to college. The brand new GI Bill concept was amazing, and aided our decision to head to college. It paid tuition, room and board, and a comfortable amount extra for books and supplies and just ordinary living expenses. More for married vets and yet more for children.

My brother ended up going to University of California, Berkeley. He was four years older than I so I decided that was a good thing to do too. I entered Berkeley in the fall of 1946. It was quite remarkable, with a huge number of young vets going back to college. In my fraternity, Sigma Nu, we had 70 members and only two were nonveterans. So the college acceptance decisions had really swung toward veterans, which of course, it should have.

At Cal, I joined the Journalism School. Surprisingly, back then, it was an undergraduate-only. At the time it was unfortunate that the reputation of the Journalism School was very weak. The rumor was that the English Department tended to dominate them to keep the journalism community less influential. I never understood that attitude or power grab. Looking back, I probably should have majored in political science or history. The journalism school was not very challenging, and a lot of what we did learn was the process of how governments operated. In other words, if you were a reporter on a daily newspaper, you would have to know about the local Departments of Justice and the State government and City Hall processes in order to make sense out of who was critical to know. So Cal Journalism was not a big learning experience of how to write but it was more directed to making sense of the key-people interview processes. They assumed you could already write well. By now, in 2014, the Graduate School of Journalism is very, very highly rated.

The postwar period was a unique time at Cal. With a high percentage of returning veterans you might guess that they were ready to grind out the academics and not spent much time with beer busts and chasing girls. To some extent this was true but in a real sense many of these ex-soldiers sort of felt that they deserved a break from the dangerous wartime experiences that they had survived. This was an important time in the life of the University as it began the massive facilities and staff buildups, which hadn't happened before and won't happen again. Cal was just swamped with veterans.

I essentially entered Berkeley as a sophomore, because recall that I had taken a year at Marin Junior College before getting drafted. I was delighted to find out that Berkeley accepted that as my freshman year. An academic advisor told me that I had gone to one of the best junior colleges is the whole country, which was Marin Junior College.

I was kind of a sports nut at Berkeley. I joined the Daily Californian, which was the legendary student newspaper on campus. I went to talk with the sports editor, Paul Lazarus, (who I just had lunch with in Jan, 2014). Paul let me join the newspaper staff, and my high school newspaper experience was extremely valuable to my new position. If you were new to the Daily Cal you joined on the bottom rung. You were given a secondary sports beat to cover, like soccer or boxing, which were pretty low-level sports. But that was your fate as a brand-new reporter, and was the only fair way to integrate newcomers. You had to pay your dues before you ever got a chance to do the varsity football or basketball or crew.

The varsity sports teams of that period were exceptional, probably due to the presence of ex-servicemen that could be recruited for those sports. Those years of the late 1940s were remarkable in Cal athletic history, probably the best in over 50 years. We had a Rose Bowl football team; our baseball team won the national championship. Our crew team won the Olympic Games. In those days the Olympic crew teams were not recruited from multiple colleges but were required to come from a single college. In this case, the Berkeley crew won the preliminaries to attend the Olympics and then won the Olympics.

Since I only needed three years, I graduated in 1949. I was president of my fraternity and that was fun, and good experience in organizing and leading some pretty casual personalities. Academically I was almost born to compete, I always did very well. At the Daily Californian I moved up the ladder, so in my senior year I was sports editor. I used to write a column every day, and then I would come back to the fraternity house for dinner. Thus my senior year was jam-packed with activities. About every third or fourth weekend I would go home to Marin County for a visit. Our graduation ceremony in 1949 was distinctive because the keynote speaker was President Harry Truman.

San Francisco News--1949

When I graduated it was probably logical that I would work on a newspaper. I went to work for the San Francisco News. I didn't know what to do and was sort of flailing around. I visited the newspapers and at the San Francisco News I met a gentleman named Charlie Massey. In our interview, he put a lot of prominence on the fact that he and I were fraternity brothers. So he hired me to be a copy editor, which is kind of an entry level position. The other copy editors were all old-timers and were really down on the newspaper business. Their attitude was, "Kid you need to get out of this job as soon as you can." That was surprising to me because one would think that the newspaper management would want more upbeat team morale and would fire such negative people, unless their talent outweighed their attitudes.

The working environment looked just like the movies. As copyeditor, I sat on the rim of a large rounded table, like a horseshoe, with the Chief Copy Editor sitting in the slot. As written stories came in, he would parcel out each job. The draft stories would either come from reporters or off the teletype machines of Associated Press or United Press. This work culture was chaotic, and deadlines were particularly stressful. I found I didn't really handle that kind of pressure well, and wasn't enjoying it at all. San Francisco News was a Scripps Howard publication and later went out of business. At the time, there were four dailies in San Francisco: the Chronicle, the Examiner in the morning and the Call Bulletin and the San Francisco News in the afternoon. I had to be at work at six in the morning and also had to work Saturdays. Illogically I got Wednesdays off, and the pay was terrible. I put in a year at that job and got good experience. It involved big city news in a big city culture, and I learned a lot about this terrific city, as it grew up from its pivotal role in the West Coast WWII mobilization. Hundreds of thousands of sailors and soldiers came through here on their way to war, its industries were vital to shipping, and they came back to live their lives here.

I had a buddy from Cal, Bob Rubin, and we found an apartment together. I did not have any serious girlfriends in college since I was sort of shy. If there was a big event coming along sometimes I would get a friend to find me a date. Nor did I date much in this early period of my first jobs.

Bechtel Corporation--1951

The Wine Institute--1953

It wasn't long until I thought to myself, I just need a new experience. So I ended up taking a job with the California Wine Institute. I got the job by noticing an ad for a PR person. This was a national trade association with membership of all the high quality North Bay vineyards as well as the mega wine firms like Gallo and Mondavi. The most prestigious name was Louis Martini, whose wines were well known in the Napa Valley. Also Petri, which was a quality wine. The Institute's purpose of course was to promote the culture and glamour of wine drinking and the aura of good living through drinking wine.

Naturally the Institute was organized to promote primarily California wines. We had events like a National Wine Queen. We would take her up to the wine country and shoot glamour shots that could be used in promoting California wines. I was in charge of that promotion, I would hire the photographers, and organize the shoots. One of the first Wine Queens I shepherded around was Carol King, even dated her a few years later. Another queen was Joanne Copeland, during my second year there. Joanne achieved some fame later by becoming Johnny Carson's third wife.

In this job I wrote articles for the Beverage Institute of America. They had magazines like Wines and Vines. The Wine Institute acted nationally but it was headquartered in San Francisco. Actually the wine PR job was a step down from Bechtel in terms of the importance of the writing that I did. When you think about the scope of Bechtel's massive projects, it hardly compares with a bottle of wine and that kind of an elitist industry.

I was with the Wine Institute for about two years. They were nice people, and I spent a lot of time in meetings with their top principals to try to understand the culture and financial operations of their industry. If Gallo didn't like something, he would just get up and leave and that would break up the meeting. He really had that power. So that job at the Wine Institute was the beginning of my writing PR for the media, as opposed to internal publications for employees.

One other significant problem was that I didn't like drinking wine. This became obvious pretty quickly. I went to some function at the Fairmont Hotel, and my boss Roy Taylor was there. I went and ordered a martini, and rejoined my colleagues, who looked at my drink like it was a snake, and I couldn't hide it. Although no one really complained, I knew it was time to leave.

Kaiser Aluminum--1955

In my continuing search for job fulfillment, I came up with Kaiser Aluminum. Headquartered in Oakland, Kaiser was a huge conglomerate consisting of many divisions; Kaiser Steel, Kaiser Shipyards, Permanente Medical, Permanente Cement and Kaiser Aluminum. Henry J. Kaiser was famous for his bidding on Shasta Dam in Northern California, because his concrete and sand business gave him a considerable cost advantage of the main ingredient for that enormous dam project. I don't remember the interview contact, but I suppose I saw another job advertisement for PR. I then found myself commuting to Oakland, with all of the different divisions in their headquarters building. Kaiser Aluminum was quite the largest. It was large enough that the public relations department had about 15 people on the staff.

So there I was writing articles about the use of aluminum, trying to become an expert. I had been working there about a year when they came to me and asked if I would like to go to West Virginia? Kaiser was building a brand-new plant on the Ohio River, and just getting started in a little town called Ravenswood. They wanted somebody from the staff to go back and live there for a while and become the voice of Kaiser Aluminum in the Ohio River Valley. They wanted publicity for the surrounding area to justify this large industrial intrusion and also to teach people about the widespread uses of aluminum. As you can imagine this was a pretty unsophisticated geography, it was coal country.

I've got say that I was not very confident about the fact that I was going to be the only resident PR person on that site. This was an important industrial project and there would be political and economic and social aspects to what I had to do. On the other hand, I was footloose and fancy free, and it seemed like I could dedicate a little time to such an assignment. They didn't pay me a bonus or anything, but it was a chance for a new experience. I decided that I should go partly because they agreed to a limited time window on how long I would be there. Ravenswood was a little town of about 2000 people south of Wheeling.

At the construction site, there was a divorced man on the local staff.  He and I became good buddies. It was kind of a nutty situation, in a tiny town, with this major construction project going on. Then I roll in, as the "sophisticated" San Franciscan. My boss back at Oakland was constantly after me to create major publicity in the key media about the plant. That was to be in addition to the sales job I was doing on the local population. In those days, I wasn't all that familiar with national media, although in San Francisco I was beginning to make contacts with some of the national technical trade magazines. There were specialized publications like Chemical Week and Metallurgy Age. These were McGraw-Hill publications, with sales reps and reporters in San Francisco. I had gotten to know Don Hoefler at Electronics magazine.

I finally realized that my move put me out of the mainstream and probably was a bit ill advised. On one occasion, I contacted the New York Times and got them interested in our West Virginia plant expansion. They sent a guy and a photographer down for two days. My boss in Oakland was really excited, because the New York Times was about the top-of-the-line, although the Wall Street Journal would have been just as good. So this guy shows up with his photographer, a very sophisticated man, especially in this backwards location. My situation got his interest up. The plant was still in the foundation stages so there wasn't much to see physically. Eventually I called my boss and told him that the Times was running a huge story the next Sunday. I was pretty excited about that. So the story comes out and it was quite good, all about aluminum and the general plan. But the title lead was--ready for this? "Gay Blade Turns to Rust in Ravenswood, West Virginia." It turned out the story was about me, this gay blade from San Francisco. Now realize that in those years the word gay simply meant an active, personable guy.

It was a fantastic story because even though the title focused on me, as a portion of the content, it really did cover the strategy of Kaiser Aluminum putting a major plant into an economically challenged area. So the story had the kicker, that if this guy Dave wants a martini instead of a beer, he has to go to a town like Marietta, Ohio, 35 miles away. It was a terrific experience for me because the writer and I got to be really good friends in just several days. It also taught me a few things about how to look at a story from the reporter's standpoint. To give him a payoff that he might not have thought much about. My situation in that case was so unique that it became his story lead and no doubt a very catchy title for any Times reader scanning down the page. The assignment in West Virginia lasted about nine months and I was certainly ready to come back to San Francisco. I made some good friends there and the corporate guys liked what I did. But by that time I was about 36, not married yet, just bouncing around with this checkered career history.

There was still one more job in my ceaseless quest for fulfillment. And yet every one of those experiences was useful in one way or another in building my confidence for my ultimate Hewlett-Packard job. When I came back to Oakland, I was still the bottom guy in the Kaiser PR department. At that time the whole economy and industry had a big slump, actually part of the recession of 1957. So there were some of us that got laid off and I was the first. I was called into the boss' office and he said he had two things to tell me. One was that he had some good news for me. He told me they were going to give me a raise, and make it retroactive for about a half year. Then came the second thing, I was fired. It was a strange day, after my good work in West Virginia. In a way, I was glad to be first, because the layoffs from Kaiser went on for more than six months. Those that remained they were just sitting there, waiting for a call to leave, which had to be pretty stressful for that period.

During those years since Cal graduation, my good friend Bob Rubin and I had rented a 5-bedroom home in the Oakland foothills above Piedmont. I decided not to join the Army reserve, which proved smart a few years later as the Korean War started. Three other friends from Cal joined the house, and several were good cooks. They moved in and out as they got married, and situations changed. I worked in San Francisco much of the time and commuted. I had good times in those years as a single guy. I was able to satisfy my love of music when big bands played at the Golden Gate Theatre. Through that I became friends of musician Cal Tjader, and we stayed friends for life.

L. C. Cole Advertising--1956

That's about the time when I first heard about L.C. Cole. Even though I knew some of the PR professionals around the city, I had not heard of L.C. Cole, probably because they were an advertising agency and I was doing PR. They were fairly small, but they wanted to start a public relations office to go along with their advertising expertise. There really was an L.C. Cole, Charlie Cole by name. The more important manager at Cole was Bill Haberman. Bill was a wonderful man but unfortunately got cancer later and died. Bob Orr was the Cole advertising account executive for HP, and he dealt almost exclusively with Noel Eldred for magazine ads.

They had already hired a guy to start the publicity office, but he quit for some reason. Haberman hired me and I did have some industrial experience, so I'm sure that helped with their decision. Their clients were Schlage Lock, Oronite Chemical Company, a division of Chevron; Soule Steel; and Hewlett-Packard. I remember thinking, I wonder who or what Hewlett-Packard is? I drove down to Palo Alto to meet Peter Sherrill, who ran Marketing Services, so I could get an introduction to what HP was and what they did. I also met Noel Eldred, the Marketing Manager, who was Peter's boss. Peter was an arrogant, imperious personality who was not very likable. I think he was an ex-Navy officer. The group that was reporting to Peter included Ron Whitburn who did some sales publications, and Steve Duer who managed the general catalog, among others.

At the time, HP was just one Cole client but I got to know both Sherrill and Eldred, as we worked on some writing projects. Bob Orr really had an easy job on the product advertising creation. He would come down and Eldred would hand him some spec sheets and some photographs. HP advertisements in those days were a pretty simple formula, a headline banner that said NEW!, a picture of the product, and a listing of the key specifications. And price. One of Eldred's guiding principles was that every data sheet and product advertisement must publish a price so that a customer would not have to call in a field engineer or call the local HP office. It was an uncommon industry practice.

I was supposed to write technical articles about products. I was not a engineer, and yet they figured I could write technical articles for electronic trade magazines. To say this was intimidating was a serious understatement. But I figured a way to get it done. I would go to the engineer of the product. He would normally have written some material, already prepared for the instruction manual theory section. He also often would have other material on project descriptions and how the product performed, sometimes intended for the test technicians. I would also ask for some help by asking him on the weekend to elaborate on material from an applications standpoint, using considerable flattery. If one of my articles were published, of course it would have his name on it as the author, which was a nice ego inducement, and the magazines usually paid a modest honorarium.

I can remember I did a lengthy article for Electronics magazine with Phil Hand. It was on microwave power. Phil had invented several instruments that were called microwave power meters. It was a beautiful article, that he basically wrote and I polished up. This was around 1958.

During this writing period, I became aware of the size of HP and concluded that this company was really going to go places. What happened was that L.C. Cole was assigned the task to write the 1957 HP annual report. So they gave the job to Bob Orr in advertising. Bob just didn't understand the purpose of an annual report and he wrote a strictly marketing piece. Naturally an annual report is supposed to be primarily a financial document with the products and company purpose in the background. What he came up with was incredibly bad. It was about 10 pages. It was all selling, and when the project was reviewed, Frank Cavier the financial guy, said they were not going to have that job published. It was assigned to me, to modify. I got to know Frank, and submitted an improved version. This was an important project for me because I not only got to know Cavier but I also got to know Packard.

Packard said that from then on, Kirby was doing the annual reports, so I then was assigned to create the the 1958 annual report. When the time came for the 1959 edition, we structured it around the large acquisition of the Sanborn Company, a large, prominent medical instrument company in Waltham, MA. I was still at Cole, but once I hired in at HP, my department always got the annual report job. I worked with Eldred on the marketing side of the report presentation and since they had substantial financial content with the statements and auditing, all that came from van Bronkhorst.

So, had it not been for that annual report, I might  still be back at L.C. Cole working on minor PR jobs or ghosting technical articles.

I Take You, Anne--1960

HP's NY Stock Exchange Listing Opening--1961

My Years in HP Corporate PR, by Dave Kirby

- End of Part 1 -

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