CHAPTER 2
In the 1940 Darkonian, two quarter-page portraits mark the top student honors at Anadarko High School in central Oklahoma. “All-Around Boy” Kenneth Allen, his blond hair slicked back, meets the camera with a square jaw and a confident smile. Edna Faye Gardner, “All-Around Girl,” has her hair curled above a heart-shaped face. Even in black and white, her eyes shine.
I know that look well. My mother is eighty-eight now, and not what she was, but you can still feel the positive energy in those eyes.
My parents grew up in hard times and came of age as the world went to war; they had smarts and ambition, but little was given to them. In Anadarko (population 5,579), a small county seat seventy miles southwest of Oklahoma City, they moved in different spheres. Bubbly and petite, a star student who sang in all the music groups, my mother worked nights in the local library, a job tailored to her teenage goal: to read at least one novel from every great author in the world. “Sam” Allen, the student-council president, played center on the varsity football team and excelled at track. (His nickname came from a famous high hurdler of the day, “Sailing Sam.”) He moved with the popular crowd, at least until he began showing up at the library. My father liked adventure stories and Westerns, but his interests weren’t strictly literary. One day he came to my mother’s front door, aiming to ask her to the senior prom.
He never got the chance. As he stood there, turning his hat in his big hands, my mother chatted about the latest book she’d enjoyed. She had grown up with four older brothers and wasn’t shy around boys. It just never occurred to her to ask why my father might have come to call. Flustered and red-faced, he left and stalked home. He should have known better.
None the wiser, my mother went to the prom with her friends, without a date. She had a wonderful time.
Three years later, my parents were engaged.
THE FIRST TIME I visited my relatives in Anadarko, I was startled by their accents. My parents were in their late twenties before they left Oklahoma for good, yet I’d never heard a trace of a twang or drawl from either one of them. As my mother told me, “We just decided we were going to speak good English, and that’s what we did.” When they joined the postwar exodus and made their way to California and then to Seattle, they were leaving their old lives behind. I think they wanted something more, something bigger for themselves and their children to come.
After I was born, in 1953, my mother went back to teaching fourth grade at Ravenna School in north Seattle. Curious and friendly, with an easy laugh, Faye Allen was the kind of teacher whose former students stopped her in the street ten years later for a hug. She read aloud with perfect diction, pausing dramatically at points of maximum suspense to leave the children panting for the next day’s installment. I’d feel the same way at bedtime, when I’d beg for one more chapter of The Swiss Family Robinson. My mother stopped working after my sister, Jody, was born, five years after me, and I think it was hard for her. “I loved teaching,” she’d say. “It’s not like work. It’s like living.”
MY FATHER BOUGHT a house on a GI loan and we moved to Wedgwood, a newly developed area north of the University of Washington. It was a typical Seattle neighborhood: hilly and green, with mature cherry trees and wood-frame homes on quarter-acre lots. There wasn’t much traffic, and fathers and sons could toss a football in the street after dinner. Our neighbors included a truck driver and a French couple who owned a restaurant. Our two-story, three-bedroom house had dark gray shingles, a peaked roof, a small front lawn, and a fair-size backyard.
We also had a basement that said a lot about us. On one side sat the laundry machines; on another, when I got older, my chemistry lab; along a third, my dad’s workshop, with tools hung on a pegboard. My mother’s mountains of literature were stacked two volumes deep on surplus university bookshelves and spilled onto the floor alongside piles of the New Yorker. It got worse after she volunteered to price books at the Wise Penny thrift shop and came home each time with a share of the inventory.
My mother read everything, from the classics to the latest novels: Bellow and Balzac, Jane Austen and Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer and Lin Yü-t’ang. That basement jumble was the exception to her otherwise thorough housekeeping. She kept promising to straighten it up but couldn’t bear to throw away so much as a National Geographic. My father did win one concession, however. After my mother woke him one night because she was too scared to head to the bathroom by herself, he laid down the law: no more ghost stories.
I was reading on my own well before kindergarten. I can remember leafing through some illustrated primer when the page clicked into focus and the words suddenly made sense. Not long after that, for Christmas, I was given an oversize picture book with everything a four-year-old could want to know about steam shovels, tractors, backhoes, and fire engines. I read that book every day. Seeing my interest, my mother had a friend give me a tutorial on steam engines. It wasn’t very technical, but I got my first inkling about the gears and belts and all the other hidden things that make a machine come alive.
That book opened a new world to me. Soon I was pleading for one on gasoline engines. Later I progressed to steam turbines and eventually to atomic power plants and rocket engines. I’d pore over each volume, not getting all the details but grasping enough to satisfy me. On some elemental level, the magical became logical. I began to understand how these things worked.
AT AGE THREE, I went to Mrs. Perkins’s musical preschool down the hill and made her life miserable. I detested standing in line. If I found a good picture book, I would not eat my soup when it was time to eat soup. I moved on to Ravenna School as a self-taught child who was stubbornly unregimented. In kindergarten, according to my progress report, I needed “greater effort” in observing school rules and complying with the fire drills. In first grade, a few other boys and I found a big metal ring in the cloakroom. We had no idea what it was for, and we dared each other to turn it, a little further each day. One morning I said, “What the heck,” and turned it all the way.
That was a dark day for Ravenna School. The sinks wouldn’t work; the toilets didn’t flush; drinking fountains ran dry. Dishes piled up in the cafeteria, unwashed. I had shut off the building’s main water valve, and no one could find the plan for the circa-1920 plumbing. They had to let school out early.
The next morning the assistant principal came to my classroom and said, “Who turned off the valve in the coatroom?”
I slowly raised my hand and said, “I did it.” I think he was surprised that anyone would confess.
Sometimes I could get absentminded. One afternoon I set a book down before a dodgeball match and then straggled home without it. The principal summoned me the next day and asked, “Paul, why did you set your math book on fire?” It wasn’t me, of course; it was another kid who’d found the book and probably hated long division. Despite my denials, the principal insisted on calling my mother.
She came in with a stern look and declared, “In our family we love books. My son would never burn one.” Case closed. I knew that I could always count on my mother’s support. Each morning she would send me into the world with a paraphrase of the Spartan mothers’ farewell to their sons marching off to war: “Go forth bearing your shield!” I walked out the door a little straighter when I heard that.
MY FATHER WAS like a John Wayne character: big and strong at six foot three, a man of few words but with a huge heart and a strict code of honor. He was serious, direct, and deliberate, with a reason for everything he did. “A gentle bear of a man for all his gruffness,” I’d write in a high-school-era journal. “He believes in a good solid purpose in life.” He could surprise us, though. One Halloween, as my sister and I came home from trick-or-treating, a menacing figure in a white sheet and an African mask jumped out at us with a terrible yell. We ran into the house shrieking, totally petrified. I was stunned two days later when my mother told me who it was.
In a portrait in crayon, at age eight, I drew my father with a wrench in one hand and a screwdriver in his shirt pocket: a doer, not a talker. When you live with someone who doesn’t say much, you come to rely on intuition and body language. I could always tell when my father was displeased about something.
We had dinner together at six sharp. For a while, we brought books to the table, but then they were banned because three of us would read while my father sat silently with his steak. (After growing up in the Depression, he loved having sirloin at least twice a week.) Generally soft-spoken, he’d resolve any issue in what I called his “command voice.” He wasn’t flexible or tolerant of easy excuses; if you’d agreed to be home by a certain hour, there was no grace period. He quietly held us to high standards, to treat people honorably and stand by our word.
My father never spanked us. He motioned to take off his belt once or twice, but I’d escape with a fervent promise to do better. It could be different with my mother, a softhearted but more emotional soul. One evening I asked her to make popcorn, and she agreed on the condition that I’d clean my messy room, an oft-broken promise of mine. The next morning, the room still in disarray, she burst in with an open can of Jolly Time Pop Corn, flung the raw kernels at me, and cried, “These are your broken words!” Which made me feel terrible, though I didn’t much improve in the cleaning department.
Another time, when I came home two hours after my curfew, she was furious. I was small enough that she could yank me up by the legs and dangle me upside down: “Don’t you ever stay out without telling us where you are!” I can still see the nickels and pennies falling from my pockets and past my head to the floor.
My mother was a naturally gregarious woman who could strike up a ten-minute conversation with the grocery checkout lady. But she had a husband who didn’t like to socialize, and I can count on my fingers the number of times my parents had other couples to our house. I remember one party, and a second one, and then they tailed off. My mother made the best of it by inviting women friends for afternoon tea and leading a book club, when she could listen and talk to her heart’s content.
IN 1960, my father became associate director of the University of Washington’s library complex, the number-two job in the largest system in the Northwest. When it came time to name a new director, the UW search committee passed him over for someone from the University of Texas with more degrees. When he got home at 5:30 and I’d ask about his day, his answer never varied: “Fine.”
Then he was off to his garden; he was a great relaxer. He seemed happiest amid his bonsai pines and rhododendrons and the live Christmas tree he’d transplanted, which today stands sixty feet high. He’d begun gardening in the backyard and progressed to the front, until there was hardly a patch of lawn left to mow—a happy development for me, as I was allergic to grass pollen. Sunday mornings he’d take me to the nursery, and we’d return with yet another Japanese maple and a fresh-baked apple pie.
Our closest connection came when we fished together. On one Pacific Coast trip, my father had to hold me on board after I hooked a twenty-five-pound king salmon. Every summer the family went for a week to Twin Lakes Resort, where my job was to clean the trout before it hit the pan on the wood-burning stove. Then we’d all play pinochle into the night.
My father was selectively eclectic; he delved deeply into half a dozen pastimes over the course of his life, but no more. He introduced me to Stan Getz and Andrés Segovia, and to Indian art at the Burke Museum. He befriended a local modern artist, and his favorite living room chair sat under a framed Rouault print of a king holding a flower. In midlife he became a connoisseur of Japanese prints and Chinese celadon pottery. You’d see him linger in a store, turning some delicate vase over and over and murmuring, “That’s really beautiful.” He’d give it back to the proprietor and return six months later to buy it if it wasn’t too expensive.
While my mother zipped through five books at once from four different continents, my father took months to digest The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich or The Guns of August. He kept reading about World War II as though trying to puzzle it out. He’d been in the thick of it as a lieutenant with the 501st Quartermaster Railhead Company in France and Germany, and it still tore at him. He’d been a lot livelier and more talkative, my mother said, before he came back from overseas with a Bronze Star and memories of a dead friend.
I was still young when my father first asked me what I wanted to do with my life. It was his way of imparting his laconic wisdom: “When you grow up and have a job, do something you love. Whatever you do, you should love it.” He’d repeat this to me over the years with conviction. Later I’d figure out what he meant: Do as I say, not as I’ve done. Much later, my mother told me that my father had wrestled with his career choice. He suspected he might be happier coaching football than managing libraries, but he finally chose the safe and practical route, a nine-to-five life under fluorescent lights. Lots of men from his generation did the same.
But he wanted me to choose better.
THE OFFICIAL GOAL of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair was to inspire young people to pursue careers in science. The unofficial goal was to show that the United States had caught up to the Soviet Union in technology and the space race. But for me, a nine-year-old who’d just discovered science fiction, the Century 21 Exposition (as it was officially titled) revolved around my favorite thing: the future. It was like waking up to find my most outlandish ideas made real, just four miles from my house.
As I watched the fairgrounds take shape, the anticipation felt like Christmas squared. I beheld the transportation of the future, the gleaming white monorail gliding along its mile-long track. And the architecture of the future, the Space Needle, then the highest building west of the Mississippi, with a rotating restaurant on top that looked just like a flying saucer. Soon after the fair opened, my mother took Jody and me for our first visit. There’s a picture of me that day in my beloved synthetic rubber hat with earflaps, the one I wore for two years until it melted on a radiator. I look as though I’m jumping out of my skin with excitement.
We were there from nine to nine, plenty of time for my mother and sister to roam the sprawling grounds. But I wouldn’t budge from the science pavilion. I ran around like a kid on a sugar high—what to see next? After the Spacearium took me through the Milky Way, I found NASA’s Project Mercury capsule, the one that had carried Alan Shepard, the first American in space. I watched up close as a Tesla coil threw off twenty-foot-long purple sparks. Before a crowd of thousands, a jet-belted “astronaut” took off with a loud hissing noise and flew forty feet high for what had to be a hundred yards, like a character out of Robert Heinlein. The line between present and future felt very permeable that day. It was only a matter of when.
My mother finally came back for me and took us to the World of Tomorrow and the Bubbleator, a transparent, spherical elevator. (I loved the Bubbleator, just the idea of the Bubbleator.) At the Food Circus, I tried tempura prawns, basically shrimp on a stick with a tangy sauce, plus my first Belgian waffle, which seemed like the most exotic and delicious thing I’d ever eaten. You can catch a close-up of that waffle in an Elvis Presley movie called It Happened at the World’s Fair: an oversize, crispy square slathered with whipped cream and topped with sliced strawberries and powdered sugar. I’ve been to Belgium more than once since then, but I’ve never again had one so good.
On our way out that night, with me wide-awake and starry-eyed, we had more excitement in the parking lot. A Volkswagen had parked behind our Buick, hemming us in. My mother was getting flustered when two hulking lumberjacks materialized to come to her aid with some nineteenth-century manpower. They picked up the little Bug and slid it aside, and we drove home.
LOOKING BACK, I had remarkable exposure to science when I was young. I could go to weekend open houses at the university’s labs, where professors and students showed off their latest experiments. On a family visit to UCLA, where my aunt worked, I learned how they made synthetic diamonds and how seismometers recorded earthquakes. Willard Libby, the inventor of carbon dating, poured liquid nitrogen over my hand. I didn’t get frost-burned, Libby explained, because a thin layer of vaporized gas cushioned each drop on my skin.
For a time, around fourth grade, chemistry became my number-one hobby. At St. Vincent de Paul, a thrift-shop gold mine, I picked up secondhand sets for fifty cents apiece. Soon the shelves of my basement lab were chockablock with beakers and test tubes and containers of brightly colored chemicals. It was all good, educational fun. Until, that is, I nearly killed the family pet.
Jett Black Allen was a frisky Manchester terrier, a prince of dogs: intelligent, sensitive, eager to please. My father couldn’t resist sharing dinner from the table, carefully cutting steak into bitesize pieces. Bred as rat catchers back in England, Manchesters are highly athletic; once my father stopped feeding him, Jett would leap into the air to beg for more. At first it was funny to see his head bobbing up above the tabletop, but after a while it got tiresome, and Jett was exiled to the basement at mealtimes.
One day I’d been working on a chlorine gas generator, using Clorox bleach, when I got called up to dinner. Midway through the meal, we heard a strange noise, somewhere between a wheeze and a choking rasp. What was that? Back to our food and talk, we heard it again, louder this time, clearly coming from downstairs. I trailed behind Dad, who pushed open the basement door. There was Jett, quivering at the top of the stairs. At the bottom it looked like a foggy morning on the Okefenokee, with two feet of yellow-green chlorine gas blanketing the floor. Jett had made the smart move to get as far as possible from the toxic fumes.
As my father raised the basement windows to clear out the gas, he said, “You’ve got to be more careful with your experiments, Paul.”
But I also heard what he didn’t say: He never told me to stop. In the Allen household, children were treated like grown-ups. Our parents encouraged us at whatever we tried, and exposed us to Bach and jazz and flamenco, but it was more than that. They respected us as individuals who needed to find our own place in the world.
SOON I WAS buying books on how to build small circuits: amplifiers, radio receivers, blinkers. I’d cart around a shoebox with batteries and lights and switches, the bits and pieces of my half-completed projects. In fifth grade, I read every science book I could find, along with bound issues of Popular Mechanics that were hauled home from the university library, to be devoured ten or twelve at a gulp. The magazines commonly had futuristic cars or robots on the cover. The whole culture back then was charged with schemes and speculation about technology, some of which wound up coming true.
By sixth grade, I’d taken up electronics, which became even more fun when I found my first real partner. Doug Fullmer was a classmate who wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses and lived a block and a half up the hill. We were the kind of boys who could talk for hours about physics or astronomy. Living at the cusp between the analog world around us and the digital age about to engulf it, we couldn’t learn enough about either one.
Later an electrical engineer at Raytheon, Doug shared my excitement when my dad bought me a Van de Graaff generator kit. It had a belt-driven motor that built up static electricity on an aluminum ball, enough for a two-inch spark. Or you could put your hand over it to make your hair stand on end. I suffered through my share of trial and error; once I nearly electrocuted myself when I grabbed both leads of a transformer at the same time. My muscles clamped up for ten interminable seconds before I could let go, my first near-death experience. But I liked electronics because its applications were open-ended, and you didn’t need an instruction book to create something new. Soon my jars of chemicals were collecting dust.
I was the top boy in my class, but I couldn’t keep up with Stephanie Hazle because I got B’s in phys ed and spelling, and she got straight A’s. I was third-chair violin and Stephanie was first chair, and she was smug about it. She was smart and superconfident, but I just thought she was mean.
One day I came to school with a jerry-rigged step-up transformer. The whole class lined up to hold the bare wire contacts, and kids giggled when they felt the tingle of electricity. But when Stephanie’s turn came, I moved a wire that raised the voltage from one battery to five. I knew it was harmless, because the current would last only a split second. But it was strong enough to make Stephanie scream and get reprimanded by the teacher. All the other kids had liked it, after all. Why was she making such a fuss?
Almost instantly, my guilt overwhelmed my sense of satisfaction and lasted a lot longer. I still cringe when I think about it.
THE FORCE OF nature always intrigued me. I was spellbound when my mother told us about the time she and my father outran a cluster of tornados at the University of Oklahoma, where my father got his undergraduate degree after the war. My mother wanted him to park beside a ditch under a big tree, but my father gunned the car and kept driving until he got to Anadarko. Later they went back to the university, and that big tree was just gone.
One day in sixth grade, I was sitting in a temporary classroom for orchestra practice when I noticed something odd. The nested rings of light fixtures, hung by cables from the ceiling, were swaying like pendulums. Our teacher stayed focused on the score until she finally looked up and shouted, “Everybody out of the portable!” I ran onto the playground, my violin still in my hands, and found the asphalt rippling like waves in the ocean. That’s really strange, I thought. Later I heard that the earthquake measured over 6.5 on the Richter scale. Rumor had it that the top of the Space Needle swung more than fifteen feet side to side, far enough for water to slosh out of the restaurant’s toilets.
I have a copy of the Sears Christmas catalog from 1960, when I was about to turn eight. It’s filled with items to quicken a boy’s pulse: a set of bongo drums; a student microscope to “reveal the invisible world”; a seven-unit Lionel electric train, complete with “guided missile” for blowing up the boxcar. For $17.98, you could purchase a kit for the Brainiac K-30, a “mechanical brain” that “computes, reasons, does arithmetical and logical problems … solves puzzles … plays games … works out codes—and more.”
I knew from science fiction about big machines called computers that did wondrous things. But it was all vague until I turned eleven, when my mother took me for an after-the-dentist treat, a trip to the university bookstore. Passing the adventure section, where I’d already polished off the likes of Tom Swift and His Flying Lab, I chose a beginner’s volume about computers. In the simplest terms, it explained the fundamental bi-stable circuit, with an illustration of a flip-flop toggling between two transistors. In analog technology, boosting the input amplified output, much like increasing the flow of water from a faucet. But as a true digital device, the flip-flop circuit’s state was either one or zero, on or off. That book stripped the haze from computers and began to teach me how they really worked.
Years later, I went with Doug to a science workshop at the Seattle Center, the former site of the world’s fair, and helped him build a light-activated robot on wheels that we called the Electronic Paramecium. Long before Star Wars, it resembled a scaled-down R2-D2. Although the robot never quite came together, the idea that we might do something so sophisticated was almost more exciting than the work itself. It was one more exercise that expanded my sense of the possible.
BACK AT ST. VINCENT DE PAUL, Doug and I trolled for perfectly good televisions with blown vacuum tubes. We’d extract the tubes one by one and plug in spares that we’d bought for a dollar. When a set was beyond repair, I used a soldering iron to cannibalize the parts. (The work could be hazardous. One time I heard a sizzling sound, looked down, and found a glob of solder drilling a hole into my knee.) We also got some toaster-size tube radio sets up and running, and I’d tune into local stations for rock ’n’ roll or R & B. Those late-forties radios became my gateway into popular music.
For Christmas in 1964, my parents gave me a three-transistor Sony, my first solid-state device—impossibly small, no larger than a pack of cigarettes. I was the kind of kid who liked to take things apart to see how they worked. When I removed the radio’s back panel to install the battery, I stared at those tiny resistors and capacitors, and I thought, Wow, I need to learn about this. There was mystery inside there; I felt as though I’d embarked on a quest. If I could just get enough of the details, I was sure I could figure it out.
Sometime after that, Doug introduced me to integrated circuits, where transistors were embedded in the chip. I’d read about the new semiconductor industry, and how Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments had demonstrated the first working integrated circuit in 1958. Even so, it was something to hold one in your hand, all that electronic capacity encased in one miniaturized container.
While I didn’t realize it at the time, I’d begun to follow the path foretold by Moore’s law.