Mr. Enthusiasm - Bob Brunner

I don't remember ANY employee in all of HP who was more upbeat and enthusiastic than Bob Brunner. Even when his job assignment was Sales Manager of oscilloscopes, with the competitive mountain of Tektronix to climb, he approached his task with his typical positive attitude. We are indebted to Bob's daughter, Nancy Grove, to Paul Carlson, of the Tennessee Land Trust, and to Cort van Rensselaer, who was a contemporary of Bob's in those early HP years, for some remembrances in contributing to this HP People Story. He achieved a 34-year career with the company he loved.

Bob was a true "old-timer," having joining HP in 1950, after obtaining his MS degree at the University of Illinois. Annual revenues were $2 million dollars. There were only 146 employees, and HP was breaking out from the WWII era, with a flurry of new high-tech products, and a fledgling organization that was just learning how to be an intermediate sized company, and to get organized.

Born in Seattle in 1921, Bob was 15 when his father died. He and his sisters went to work to support the family. His first jobs were as a paperboy, at the Seattle Public Library, and as a radio repairman. Always a tinkerer, Mr. Brunner showed his mechanical aptitude at an early age when his church needed some chimes for a pageant it was hosting. His solution was to dismantle his mother's grandfather clock, take out the chimes and deliver them to the church. As the hours passed, his mother noticed her clock wasn't chiming and confronted her son, who admitted he had borrowed them for the church. Today, Nancy notes that the grandfather clock with the chimes - is in perfect working condition in the Brunner/Groves' Atherton home.

He started his undergraduate work at the University of Washington but was interrupted by World War II, joining the Navy as an enlisted man and later was commissioned as an officer. He worked on early radar devices in Cosco, Maine, establishing himself as an expert and winning a scholarship at the University of Illinois. After the war, he enrolled at the University of Illinois, earning his bachelor's degree and a master's degree in electrical engineering. Upon graduating, Mr. Brunner had several offers from major companies. He chose HP, despite more lucrative offers from several others. "My mom asked him why he accepted the HP offer when he could have made more money elsewhere," Nancy remembers, "He said, 'Because I have used their instruments and they are of the highest quality. I want to work for that company.' "

Bob joined HP as a development engineer, when that was a very close knit group, who not only worked together but they and their wives socialized together. Bob and Virginia (Gini) quickly established friendships that have lasted more than half a century. Cort remembers being treated to gourmet meals in their small College Terrace home.

HP 202A Oscillator developed. As his first HP project, Bob developed a unique ultra low frequency function generator (HP202A) which was highly-innovative, and the first of its kind. It cleverly depended on generating a square wave that was as low as 0.08 Hz. He then integrated the square wave, to form a triangular wave, and then diode-shaped that into a sine wave, all of which waveforms, were individually-selectable for output. This instrument was used in mechanical testing, such as earthquake simulation. The oscillator was a great commercial success, due in a large part to Bob's efforts in making field trips to customer sites to promote it. It endured for decades.

Corporate Engineering Manager. In this job, Bob kept track of hundreds of HP development projects in product divisions throughout the world. One of the key HP management processes was an annual visitation by top management to each product division, with the objective of reviewing the progress of all the new product design projects. Making this diverse effort understandable was a major chore, so Bob invented a unique review chart which showed graphically the progress of each project and its contribution to HP goals. These charts resembled crawling insects, so Bob called them "Beetlegrams." Everyone else called them "Brunnergrams."

The example shown above is not a real Brunnergram, just a diagram showing its elements; the 4 phase checkpoints (Investigation, Prototype, Pilot, Production). Time estimates plot on the horizontal axis as dates. On the vertical axis, those checkpoints are indicated by the budget burn rate. In this example, everything was going well through the prototype checkpoint, shown with an "o." The lines are perpendicular, meeting both the time and the budget estimates, at the completion line. But then something went wrong and both the time schedule and the budget estimates got pushed out, and the connecting lines began to go parallel to the project centerline, and finally closed both over financial budget as well as 8 months late on the schedule. This concept was an extremely useful project tool which gave the status in one glance for those important meetings.

In 1969, Bob became International Marketing Manager for the Instrument Group. This was a perfect assignment because it gave Bob and Gini (who often accompanied him) the opportunity for extensive worldwide travel which they loved. It also created another group of HP friends for Bob - the HP international marketing managers.

When Bob found that most of these managers shared his love of skiing, he organized group ski trips to coordinate with the time of their annual US sales meeting visits. This group had continued meeting annually, mainly for socializing, now that they are retired. Another convivial event Bob participated in was the annual houseboat expedition. A number of HP old timers take a long-weekend cruise on the San Joaquin Delta each fall. There is a lot of camaraderie. It is rumored that Bill and Dave stories are told, with many suggestions to reinvent the company and solve some of the recent negative organizational developments. Bob's special contribution was a gourmet multi-course dinner which he prepared ceremoniously, wearing a chef outfit with a big white hat, embroidered with the title, "The Floating Gourmet.".

Retirement. After his retirement in 1984, Bob continued his active life style and travel, turning his attention to world affairs and supporting the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Paul Carlson of the Little Tennessee Land Trust recalls the generous side of Bob and Gini as they concentrated their attention on developing her family's North Carolina property. The land trust was established to protect the banks and watersheds of the Little Tennessee River. But the land trust itself, near the family farm on which Gini was raised, is in Western North Carolina. Bob and Virginia were always keenly interested in and supportive of the progress in the Land Trust, and late in 1999 they stepped forward with an unexpectedly large donation to the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy which allowed LTLT to grow into the strong organization that it has become over the past year.

They traveled extensively, ultimately visiting every continent, even taking their granddaughters on a trip to Ant­arctica. The Brunners were thoughtful travelers who es­chewed tour guides, preferring to experience the country on their own. "They made friends all over the world, because they never had that sense that Americans are always right," Nancy said. Her father, she said, "always was able to learn from people when he was traveling."

Kaleioscope, by Gini. In 1997, Gini published a remarkable book, with that title, which chronicled their numerous travel adventures. It records their amazing experiences around the world. The Table of Contents alone lists 30 chapters, each representing one extensively-described trip. She notes that they have circumnavigated the globe SEVEN times. Their last global trip was in a specially chartered 757 which carried 86 like-minded folks on a 28 day excursion, stopping at places like Easter Island. It landed in every continent, except for skimming close-by Australia.

You can infer that they were enthused for exotic travel. Perhaps the best illustration of that shows in this picture, which literally places them at the VERY TOP of the world, the North Pole. How do you get to the North Pole in reasonable comfort? Well it seems that the Russian Polar maritime technology has conquered the ice cover of the Arctic Ocean with a massive ice-breaker ship that is 500 feet long, powered by two atomic reactors, provisioned for 8 months at sea, with fuel good for 4 years. It can break across ice 15 feet thick, more if they back up and hit it twice.

The ice-breaker, Sovetskiy Soyuz, is the orange object in the background, which navigated to 90N latitude. Some 100+ intrepid adults and a sprinkling of children were in the tour group. It is surprising to me that their maritime service offers these open civilian tours, providing this remarkable opportunity to adventurous people. The occasion was beautiful clear weather, travelers had time to hit golf balls, get tethered with a rope around the waist and jump into the freezing water, momentarily. For further interest, an automobile was lowered onto the ice, driven around a bit, and later auctioned to the highest bidder. Two on-board helicopters were available for air observations.

Nancy relates that Bob took this tour with one of the VERY early Trimble Navigation Devices, way before the GPS was ever on the market. He kept taking readings, but the readings kept changing. When he finally felt confident that he had identified the North Pole with the GPS, he showed the captain, who disagreed. They apparently had quite a lengthy discussion over exactly where the North Pole was. (No doubt the photo was taken at the captain's choice of 90N!)

-- John Minck