Eugene Lang
A stranger’s guidance helped Eugene Lang find his path in life, and later on, after he had become a wealthy industrialist, Lang repaid the debt many times over.
Lang died on April 8 at age 98, having donated more than US$150 million to charities and institutions over the decades. But his famous moment came in June of 1981 when he had been invited to speak to a class of 61 pupils in Grade 6 at New York’s Public School 121.
As The New York Times reported in its obituary, Lang "had intended to tell them, their families and their teachers that he had attended PS 121 more than a half-century earlier, that he had worked hard and made a lot of money and that if they worked hard, maybe they could be successful, too."
But as he looked out at the youngsters, he realised that his words were platitudes.
"So I began by telling them that one of my most memorable experiences was Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech, and that everyone should have a dream," he told the Times. "Then I decided to tell them I'd give a scholarship to every member of the class admitted to a four-year college."
He promised to provide each of the youngsters with $2,000 a year to cover university tuition fees, adding another $2,000 for each year they continued their studies. The gesture received wide attention. Ronald Reagan invited Lang to the White House.
Lang followed through on his promise to the class. He “adopted” the students and helped them overcome hurdles on their path to university. He also persuaded other prominent people to do likewise with other classrooms.
In the end most of the kids from that class at PS 121 went to university.
Mr Lang had made much of his money with a patent-licensing company that filed many lawsuits for patent infringement.
When he was in his teens, he was working part-time at a restaurant in the city when he got to chatting with a customer. Lang had been planning to attend New York’s City College, but the customer urged him to be more ambitious and consider Swarthmore College. The customer also lined up his admissions interview with the college.
Arnold Clark
He joined the ranks of the world’s billionaires in March and died in April. Arnold Clark, who died on April 10 at age 89, had begun from humble roots and became Britain’s first billionaire car dealer.
Clark was known for having a strong work ethic and financing expansion from profits rather than bank loans. Thanks to this approach during industry slumps, unlike many of his rivals, he was able to snap up bargains.
Clark was born in the Scottish city of Glasgow in 1927. He quit school at age 14. His early experiences in the workforce including going door to door to sell vegetables that his father had grown on an allotment of land, according to an obituary in The Telegraph.
He was conscripted into the Royal Air Force and was trained to be an instructor in motor mechanics. After being demobilised he could not find a job and used part of his “demob” money to buy a 1933 Morris Ten Four for £70. He fixed it up and sold it for a profit.
Before long he had opened his first showroom, on Glasgow’s Park Road.
As per the Telegraph obituary, he "was a bluff hands-on manager who believed in treating the customer right and 'keeping my books in apple-pie order'."
Clark made his first appearance on the Forbes real-time billionaire rankings in March with estimated wealth of $1.1 billion. His company now has 200-plus outlets and sells upwards of 200,000 cars a year. Its current promotions include "Buy a Tyre, Win £1,000."
Harry Huskey
One of the last surviving members of the team that created the pioneering Eniac computer in the 1940s died on April 9. Harry Huskey was 101, and is one of the fathers of the personal computer.
He taught at the University of California from 1954 to his retirement in 1986 at the age of 70.
Huskey was an American farm boy who had a knack for maths and became the first person in his family to attend university. Then when he was in the working world as a professor of the University of Pennsylvania, and wanting to earn an extra income for his family, he joined the team that was building the famed Eniac (Eniac stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, obviously).
Eniac made its public debut in Philadelphia in 1946 as one of the world’s first electronic computers. It weighed 60,000 pounds and was 150 feet long.
After a stint working alongside Alan Turing in England, Huskey returned to America and began work at Bendix Corp. It was there that in the 1950s he designed the Bendix G-15, which is sometimes considered the first personal computer. Designed to be used by one person rather than a team of techies, it was a wee thing at 450 kilograms and about the size of a couple of fridges.
The $50,000 price tag was about a twentieth of the cost of other computers of its time.
The G in G-15 stood for general purpose; the company "tacked on the 15 to make customers think there were a lot more of them around," according to an interview that Huskey gave to the San Jose Mercury News in 1988. That was the year when he gave one of the 400 or so G-15s ever made to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He had been keeping it in his barn.
Huskey later taught at the University of California at Berkeley, from 1954 to 1967, and later at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he was among the founding faculty of the computer and information science programme, and whence he retired in 1986.
Ikutaro Kakehashi
Ikutaro Kakehashi, the Japanese engineer who pioneered digital music and founded the Roland synthesiser company, died on April 1. He was 87.
He founded Roland in 1972, and the company’s first product was the rhythm machine. Since then, Roland instruments have graced the stage of top artists from Lady Gaga to Omar Hakim.
Kakehashi received a Grammy in 2013 for developing Midi, or Musical Instrument Digital Interface, which digitally connects instruments.
“Music literally would not be what it is today without Mr Kakehashi,” said Steven Fisher, now at Yamaha and a former employee at Roland, who worked with Kakehashi on electronic percussion and drum products.
Kakehashi taught him not to plan for something perfect, instead advising him to “take action, follow your passion and respect your competition,” Mr Fisher wrote on his Facebook page.
Kakehashi always stressed that the advent of electronic music was not at odds with acoustic instruments, or that it was trying to undermine the rich legacy of music. But amplification held great potential, including the possibility to create various speakers as well as present music to far larger audiences, like the hundreds at concert halls, not the previous dozens in old-style chamber settings, he said.
One Roland product he liked to show off was a guitar that was a collaboration with Fender. It could not only play Stratocaster riffs but also the sounds of an acoustic guitar, sitar and 12-string acoustic guitar, as well as instantly drop octaves and distort notes.
“The options have widened,” Kakehashi said of electronic music at a Roland seminar in 2012. “I believe the ways of musical expression have expanded.”
Dorrance Hill Hamilton
Dorrance Hill Hamilton, whose grandfather invented the process used to make Campbell’s condensed soups and who used her inherited fortune for philanthropy, died on April 18. She was 88.
Hamilton, who embraced the nickname “Dodo,” was an avid gardener and tended to thousands of plants on her 10-acre estate just west of Philadelphia. She also had a home in Newport, Rhode Island.
She was the granddaughter of Campbell Souppioneer John Dorrance and had been a longtime fixture on Forbes' list of America's 400 richest people. The magazine estimated her net worth at $1.1bn in 2006 but she dropped off the list in subsequent years.
She gave away millions of dollars to Philadelphia educational and cultural institutions, including $25 million to Thomas Jefferson University, a medical school; $25m to The University of the Arts; $5m to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; and at least $10m to The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts.
Hamilton was a fixture at the Philadelphia Flower Show, winning countless ribbons over three decades before retiring from competition in 2014. She had many full-time gardeners working in the greenhouses around her red brick Georgian mansion.
Her long-time support of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, which sponsors the flower show, allowed the organisation to redesign and maintain civic landscapes around the city.
She and her husband established the Hamilton Family Foundation in 1992. It provides funding for literacy-based educational projects in underserved schools in Philadelphia; Camden, New Jersey; and Chester, Pennsylvania.
In 1999, she founded the Newport-based SVF Foundation, a nonprofit that works to preserve endangered breeds of food and livestock. She also helped develop Forty 1 North, a hotel marina resort in the city.
Born in New York on August 16, 1928, Hamilton grew up on Park Avenue in Manhattan and in Newport.
By the way the process that John Dorrance, a chemist who had studied in the US and Germany, invented to condense soup involved squeezing most of the water out while retaining most of the flavour. The first five varieties of his soup were tomato, consomme, vegetable, chicken, and oxtail.
Truly Nolen
Truly Nolen, the founder of a pest control company known for its fleet of yellow “mouse cars,” died on April 18. He was 89.
Nolen opened his first pest control business in 1955 in Tucson, Arizona. The company, which bears his name, grew over the years to 320 offices in 63 countries including the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Originally antique cars were used for advertising beginning in the 1950s, including a red “ant truck” that looked like an insect. In the 1960s the first yellow “mouse car” with fanciful ears and tail on a Volkswagen Beetle was deployed.
"He made pest control seem cute," the Miami Herald noted in its obituary.
Nolen’s father had founded a pest control company in Miami in 1938. Nolen, who battled polio as a young adult, had his own ideas about how to run the business.
So in 1955 he moved west to Arizona to start his own company. He merged it with his father’s company after the latter man died in 1966.
By Nolen’s own admission, his company was not an overnight success.
“I was in this business for three years before business got good enough so that I could stop kiting checks,” he told the Herald in 1986.
* Agencies and The National
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