Before I found the programming job there was another business I was reluctantly drawn into considering, and it started with a customer named Lamar.

Lamar was a character. He was middle-aged, with a daughter around 20 and a teenage son. He and his daughter came to the station regularly for gas and repairs. He did not appear to have a steady job but always seemed to have enough money. He looked like a hippie — long hair, casual about everything — and he hung around with younger guys who owned a Lotus race car that we worked on occasionally. He was active in the dating scene, either divorced or widowed, and it turned out we were frequenting some of the same places. After separating from Jeanne I had started going to a disco in Brookline called Zelda, and Lamar showed up there regularly too. He had met a girlfriend there who was not much older than his own daughter, and she was living with him at his house in Natick. I also went every Thursday night to the Sticky Wicket Pub in Hopkinton, since the Black Eagles Jazz Band played there every week, and Lamar would join me there once in a while.

Then one day he showed up at the station completely transformed — clean cut, well dressed, looking like a businessman. He explained that Mormon missionaries had come to his house, and that he, his girlfriend, and his whole family had joined the Mormon church. Through church contacts he landed a job at MIT as the head of the MIT Innovation Center — a natural fit, since before his hippie years he had worked at MIT in fundraising. He thought highly of me, partly because I had attended MIT, and he was openly disappointed that his own son was not, in his view, at that level. He wanted me to go into business with him. I told him that if I went into another business it would have to be something worth millions. The risk and effort of running a small business like the gas station was the same as running a large one, and I had spent 5 years barely making a living. If I was going to take that kind of risk again, the potential had to match it.

Lamar’s friend was an engineer with a background in miniaturizing circuits, and since both of them had institutional connections they could not be officially associated with a private business. I was the perfect front — someone with an MIT background, business experience, and no institutional ties. The first idea was a contract from a Canadian space company looking for a subcontractor to manufacture power supplies for satellites — specifically supplies designed to survive space radiation. I needed to learn the technical requirements before I could present myself credibly. A Czech professor who taught electrical engineering at Northeastern University’s graduate school — one of the older wave of Czech immigrants, who lived in Weston and came to the station regularly — found and gave me books to study on designing circuits for space applications. Lamar also called a former MIT student who ran a power supply manufacturing company and asked him to meet with me as someone from MIT interested in starting his own company, just to give me some guidance. I dressed up and went. He was generous with his time and spent half a day sharing what he had learned. I felt like an imposter the whole time, since I was not permitted to tell him what we were actually planning. Then nothing happened with the Canadian contract and the idea quietly died.

The next scheme was different. Some company was successfully selling devices that claimed to lower electricity consumption by 20 to 30 percent for homes and businesses. Depending on the model, the device connected to an individual circuit breaker or to the main breaker, and the claim was that it prevented incoming voltage spikes from speeding up the electric meter. Lamar’s friend obtained several of these products, used specialized X-ray equipment and chemicals to image exactly what was inside and how the circuits were wired, and handed everything to me with instructions to duplicate the device and produce 10 samples. This kind of circuitry is widely available today as surge protectors, but at the time it was a very new concept. I built the 10 devices at my apartment in Framingham — my rent included electricity so manufacturing costs were low — and cured the epoxy encapsulation in my kitchen oven. Lamar and his friend knew an electrical inspector in a coastal town north of Boston who agreed to test them. One weekend we drove up and installed the devices in a couple of local businesses. The inspector said that as soon as we obtained UL approval he could sell many of them.

Lamar and his friend also took me to meet with a town official in another community who was prepared to offer free rent, tax incentives, and loans to attract a new employer to lease factory space there. And then, once again, everyone went quiet. I told Lamar I was close to getting a programming job and that there was a limited time I could wait. I laid out the numbers for him: based on material costs and what the devices could sell for, I could generate $50,000 a month in gross profit for all of us, and I could reinvest fast enough that we would not need any outside loans or factory subsidies at all. To discuss this further, I was invited to a large MIT faculty and staff party — clearly intended to impress me and keep me engaged while they worked out how to structure a corporation in which I would be the named owner and their involvement would stay hidden. I told them they had one week, after which I expected to have a job and would no longer be available. I never heard back. I took the job at Modcomp.

About 6 months later Lamar called and asked me to come to a meeting at MIT with his friend and a new person, introduced as an MIT electrical engineering graduate who would be taking the surge protection business forward. They asked me to explain to this engineer the circuits and techniques I had used to produce the 10 samples. I explained everything I knew, though I was surprised that someone with an MIT engineering background could not figure it out on his own. After about another year I ran into Lamar and he told me that none of their business ideas had gone anywhere, and that he was sorry they had not moved when I proposed it.