Eight Quarters in Her Pocket

 FAWN ALVAREZ

Less than five miles from Ampex’s Sunnyvale offices, twelve-year-old Fawn Alvarez was in Cupertino, California. She was folding papers and stuffing them into envelopes, sealing each one with a swipe of a dampened sponge. She had come in to make a bit of money—$1.65 an hour, minimum wage—in an ongoing effort to grow her stack of 45 rpm records. The Beatles, Supremes, and Peter, Paul and Mary were battling for the top spot on the charts as 1969 drew to a close.

Fawn was working in a strip mall that also housed a dentist’s office and Myberg’s Deli. The small space was the one and only office of her mother’s new employer, ROLM Corporation. The company, which had begun life two months earlier in an abandoned shed once used for drying prunes, had plans to build a computer for the military. The word “computer” meant nothing to Fawn. It conjured up no image at all.

Fawn was a fifth-generation Californian on her father’s side, the family’s roots stretching back to the time when California had belonged to Mexico. Her mother, Vineta Alvarez, had moved the family from Los Angeles to the Santa Clara Valley six years before, in 1963, when Fawn was six. Vineta, then twenty-six years old, had four daughters and an ex-husband who had stayed in Los Angeles. She had moved the family “to the country,” as her daughters put it, because her maternal grandparents lived there and promised that there were plenty of jobs.

The grandparents worked in a Del Monte plant, canning food. They came from Shawnee, Oklahoma, during the Dust Bowl—just pointed the pickup truck, its bed stuffed with everything the family owned, due west on Route 66 and began driving. Sunnyvale, the town where they stopped in about 1933, was not the land of orange groves and palm trees that they had imagined. But there were jobs, and the ground didn’t look like it would dry up and blow away any time soon, so they stayed. They bought a house close enough to the cannery that if the wind was right, they could stand in the front yard and smell peaches.

Shortly after coming to the Peninsula, Fawn’s mother had found an assembly job at Lockheed, the aerospace giant and defense contractor. With 17,000 employees, Lockheed was the largest employer in the Valley. Vineta Alvarez told her daughters that there were so many employees that the city of Sunnyvale had asked the company to stagger its quitting times so it would not disrupt the evening commute for everyone else.

Vineta Alvarez had not attended school beyond the tenth grade, and her assembly experience consisted of two years working as a riveter in a stroller factory in Los Angeles. But Lockheed, always looking for employees, had a two-week in-house training program. There she learned how to solder and how to read build plans, prints, and color codes. Like thousands of others in the Valley, she would one day put this experience gained at a large, established employer into service at a small startup.

After roughly a year, Vineta Alvarez left Lockheed for the production line at Fairchild Semiconductor, the microchip company launched by eight former employees of Nobel Prize–winner William Shockley. She assembled printed circuit boards, but no one told her what they were for—and she did not care enough to ask.¹ Six months after joining Fairchild, she moved on to Sylvania, a military contractor and electronics manufacturer.

With every move, she received a small pay increase, but it was never enough to cover her $130 monthly rent plus food and clothes for Fawn and her three sisters. Vineta Alvarez worked second jobs on the side, often assembling at home, where she could spread out her soldering gun and all the parts she needed on the kitchen table. She would have preferred overtime at time-and-a-half pay, but California law forbade women to work more than eight hours each day.² “They said it was so people wouldn’t take advantage of women,” Vineta Alvarez says today. “Bullshit. They wanted overtime for the men.”³

In 1966, when Fawn was in third grade, her family moved to Rancho Rinconada, a neighborhood in Cupertino, where the schools were supposed to be the best in the state. Rancho Rinconada was a new development, close enough to a public elementary school, middle school, and high school that the girls walked by themselves every morning.

While her mother worked, Fawn and her sisters did the family shopping. They did the laundry. They did the cleaning. They mowed the lawn, sometimes two sisters together pushing the heavy mower down the slope of grass and then dragging it back up behind them so they could mow down again. There was no “girls don’t do this kind of work” talk in Vineta Alvarez’s house. The only thing Fawn’s mom ever said the girls could not do was sit with their knees apart. Fawn was the only kid she knew with a mom who was gone all day. Most of her friends had dads who lived with them and worked good enough jobs in factories or the service sector that moms worked only part-time or not at all.⁴

Stone-fruit orchards surrounded Fawn’s Rancho Rinconada neighborhood. The kids used them as landmarks (“Meet me at the tall post in front of the prune orchard where the guy shoots you with a salt gun if he catches you”), as playgrounds (dilapidating sheds and storage rooms made wonderful hideouts), and as always-open markets with merchandise that was free, sweet, and hanging low.

The kids all knew, too, that some days, especially in the winter, the orchards were scary. An orchard was its own silent, filmy, cloud-cooled world, with yellow mustard grass as high as a child’s waist and fog so dense that it was hard to see from one knotty tree to the next.

The orchards had been Fawn’s primary source of pocket money before her job stuffing envelopes at ROLM. Rancho Rinconada kids knew that when the fruits grew heavy, it was time to watch for bright orange triangular flags strung in front of an orchard. That meant the harvest was under way and the orchardist would pay for help bringing in the fruit, usually plums. The going rate was fifty cents per crate. On a good day, Fawn could come home with eight quarters in her pocket.

But this new weekend job at ROLM was better—more money, and she got to work inside.

Fawn’s mother, Vineta Alvarez, had started at ROLM in November 1969. She had first learned of the company several weeks earlier. She had been working on the manufacturing line at Sylvania when her boss came over. “You have a call.”

Alvarez stood up. The only phone for the manufacturing area was in the boss’s office, and in the five years Alvarez had worked at Sylvania, women on the production line had received calls only for bad news. A husband in a car accident. A kid with a broken arm.

In this case, the caller was Ron Diehl, a technician Alvarez had worked with and who had recently left Sylvania. He wanted Alvarez to join him at his new employer, ROLM. He told her that four Sylvania engineers (Eugene Richeson, Ken Oshman, Walter Loewenstern, and Bob Maxfield) had started the company the month before, naming it by combining the first initials of their last names. They had asked Diehl to find someone with excellent manufacturing skills.

By this point, Alvarez had been working in electronics manufacturing for seven years. She had become expert in many skills, from soldering leads so tiny that she had to work through a microscope, to building circuit boards, to breadboarding, which required a person to build larger, hand-wired prototypes of the printed circuit boards that would later be mass-produced as the guts of electronic devices. She had supervised a group of fifty assemblers, and she even had a security clearance, since Diehl, before he left, had selected her to be part of a team building a sensitive product for Sylvania.

Vineta Alvarez liked Diehl, and she was happy to hear that he enjoyed his new job. Alvarez, however, had four girls at home and no husband. She could not risk going to a company that had nine employees and no products. She needed the stability of a big company like Sylvania. She thanked Diehl but declined his offer. She returned to work, assuring her coworkers that everything was fine.

A few days later, Diehl called again. And after that, again—and then again. Alvarez estimates that he called twice each week for a month. Now when the boss said she had a call, Alvarez was nonplussed. She admired Diehl’s guts, using her boss’s phone to try to recruit her away. With every call, Diehl offered another reason to join ROLM. They would pay her more money than she was currently making. She would be able to buy stock at 50 cents per share. ROLM’s strip-mall office was only a few blocks from her house. The founders were brilliant. The product was revolutionary.

Still she said no. She had been fighting to support her girls ever since the years in the stroller factory, when at the end of every month she would threaten to quit if she didn’t receive a nickel-per-hour raise. She could not risk her daughters’ future by joining this little startup operation.

Diehl then told her that she would be in charge of all production at ROLM. That was something new for Alvarez. In the five years that she had worked at Sylvania, she had never seen a woman in charge of production, even though some women had been in the department for fifteen years. Women could be supervisors, but when a manager left, he was always replaced by another man—usually from outside the company. It had been the same at Lockheed and Fairchild. “All of the assemblers were women, and nobody was higher than ‘just an assembler’ except men,” she says.

In November 1969, Alvarez told her fiancé that she was beginning to think she might want to take a chance on ROLM, but she worried about what would happen if the upstart company failed. How would she take care of the girls? He assured her that if something happened, he would help with money until she found a new job.

The next time Diehl called, she said yes.

Twelve-year-old Fawn did not know it when she sat near the ROLM secretary’s desk sealing envelopes, but everyone at the company was learning on the fly. With seed money of $75,000 ($15,000 from each founder and the same from investor Jack Melchor), ROLM was planning to turn off-the-shelf Data General minicomputers into battlefield-ready machines that could withstand extreme heat and cold, as well as hours of strenuous jostling and vibration. The plan was to sell these “ruggedized” computers to the military for data gathering and missile and radar systems. ROLM estimated the market to be $100 million.

But only one ROLM employee, Bob Maxfield, had any real experience with computers. Maxfield, who had worked at IBM, felt that the entire ROLM operation depended on him. (“And I knew how little I knew,” he would admit years later.)⁵ After Vineta Alvarez joined, she began building the electronics the company needed. Every evening, Diehl, Maxfield, or an engineer would test the board, array, or device Alvarez had built. By the next morning, Alvarez would have a new design to build in time for another round of testing that evening.

Meanwhile, she volunteered Fawn or Fawn’s older sister Bobby any time there were menial jobs to be done at ROLM. Over the days making copies or organizing papers, Fawn met almost everyone who worked at the little company. She was especially fond of Ken Oshman, who she knew was in charge but who always stopped to ask how she was doing. Fawn found it hard to believe that this twenty-nine-year-old man she had once seen in Bermuda shorts had made it possible for her mother to quit her second job.

Fawn was almost a teenager. Soon there would be times when she wished her mother still had to be gone nights and weekends. In not too many years, the kids who had played in the orchards would be teens smoking pot in abandoned farmhouses. But she would always be grateful to ROLM for lightening her mother’s load.