Foreword

Mr. Santa Rosa Artistic Creativity-Jeff Thomas

In any industrial organization, especially one with a huge workforce, like HP; and an employee work-friendly environment, like HP, and a creative work culture, like HP, and dedicated and loyal employees who spend upwards of one-third of their waking hours at work, common interests will just naturally shake out to develop non-work recreation groups and exceptional hobby interests.

Bill and Dave recognized that project teams and all support groups, with stressful time schedules and technology breakthroughs, required to gain competitive product lines, still needed more human recreational avenues to balance the minds at work. And they lent their full support and often participation to the development of hobby interests.

In the earliest years of the company, employees established such a variety of extracurricular activities that it amazes one to even recount their interests. There was much sports interest, so HP bowling teams played in local industrial leagues. Outdoor interests were met with groups who teamed for hunting missions. Dave Packard himself was a member of an elk-hunting expedition to Montana in the winters. Duck hunting interests were actually aided by HP purchasing some large tracts of marsh-like properties in the Central Valley, for the annual duck migrations which dropped into those lakes on their flyaways twice a year. Fishing enthusiasts chartered ocean going boats out of San Francisco.

Music aficionados set up a singing hobby gathering, and as often enacted, chose their title to play on the HP icon, Harmony Plotters. In Ken Jessen's HPMemoir here in the archive, he reports that as the two new Hewlett Packard production facilities were running in Loveland and Colorado Springs, that a spirited rivalry was set up between the two with sport teams competing, baseball or softball perhaps. Since most of our HP company existed in wonderful natural environments, California and Colorado, and in most of the places on the globe, hiking clubs abounded.

There were public service clubs too. I heard of at least one Habitat for Humanity group. In the Bay Area, there still is an HP Retiree group which works in the Second Harvest Food distribution warehouse. Often these jobs are driven by one of Dave and Bill's HP Objectives: To contribute to our local communities. One man I know accepted chairmanship of the United Way organization for a few years, a major financial drive and distribution of help to the needy of our area.

Of course, personal hobbies were everywhere, with creative people at home from their HP dayjobs. Jeff Thomas is one of those artists. His work is a lifetime of sculptures, which often carry a theme of re-use of discards of metal and plastic and such. They range from political messages, such as the "Natural Selection" theme, based on an automatic weapon, AR-15, with a 180 degree bend to shoot the shooter; to the Rube Goldberg contraption which is an elevator/rolling-marble-driven clock which keeps perfect time. If my memory serves, Jeff rolled out this gem about the time HP was announcing the Cesium Beam atomic clock of world standards accuracy.

John Minck

HP Memories

This memory of Jef Thomas's career at hp results from the work of the www.hpmemoryproject.org website of Marc Mislanghe, who with John Minck edited and published the original archive of Memoirs. After Marc's untimely death in 2014, Ken Kuhn has now assumed the custodianship with John, and together they will continue to expand the Memoirs section.

One of the main objectives in starting this website in 2011 was (and still is today) to get in touch with people who have worked at hp from the birth of the company up to today. We are interested in hearing your memories no matter what division or country you worked in, or whether you were in engineering, marketing, finance, administration, or worked in a factory. This is because all of you have contributed to the story of this unique and successful enterprise.

Your memories are treasure for this website. While product and technology are our main concern, other writings related to the company life are highly welcome, as far as they stay inside the hp Way guidelines.

Anybody Else? Please get in touch by emailing the webmaster on the Contact US link at http://www.hpmemoryproject.org